Notices by Jonathan Schofield (urlyman@mastodon.social), page 5

Carbon is the base unit present in every form of life on Earth, “from the thin green smear covering the crust to the bottom of its deep blue oceans.

Money is an abstraction invented 5,000 years ago by a 300,000-year-old species.

…

Humans have created our pan, our hob and gas. We’re not drowning in money, but money is providing the gas that’s heating the pan.”

https://seethroughnews.org/money-its-a-gaslight-climate-change-finance

#climateCrisis

It’s pretty obvious our mainstream notions of the path to #netZero aren’t going to work.

They’ve been very much not working nearly* all my life and I’m 60 next month.

So the question is, when do we start behaving more intelligently than frogs?
https://mastodon.social/@urlyman/111764803381513650

…* The “nearly” bit derives from The Limits to Growth report being published in 1972: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Limits_to_Growth

I’d just turned 8 years old and so was not on top of it.

Although I’d still not heard of that report, I had an inkling when I read Small is Beautiful just over a decade later.

But the pull of bullshit was too strong for the next 2 decades. After that, I started making tokenistic changes, but here I am still doing a bullshit job in a bullshit society.

I’m stupider than a frog

On mobile, Meetup\.com greets you with

1. an almost full viewport overlay with *no close box* asking if you’d like to use the browser *you are already using* or use the app instead

on top of a…

2. “accept our cookies mofo” full viewport overlay

dismissing both (after you’ve figured you can tap the tiny bit of left over screen real estate to put overlay 1 away) leaves you with a semi-sticky “open in the app mofo” banner cluttering the event you are interested in :/

#ui

What are the chances that most of the things I’ve been affording all my life will turn out to have been unaffordable all along?

#climateDiary

@peterdutoit @pvonhellermannn
I can see the near time reaction coming: “You lot said the world would end at 1.5 and here we are at 1.6 and we’re all fine.”

We’re in a special kind of cognitive hell

“If you electrified everything in an American household, when you buy solar cells and put them on your roof, you’re paying for 20 years of energy upfront, and so then you’re paying a *fixed interest* payment.

So you’ve inflation proofed your energy inputs.

You’re depreciating the electric vehicle, stove and water heater, and in fact your cost of energy stays dead flat at your price of finance.

The #energyTransition is the substitution of finance for fuel”

https://overcast.fm/+oT_mRhNf0/10:42

@pvonhellermannn @EmmaBirkett @peterdutoit @AlaskaWx @kathhayhoe

Re my football comments in another branch of this thread: part of the problem I feel is that so much of the discourse is in the abstract when what is needed are practical changes that begin to dissolve the antipathy

@annika that’s kind Annika. If you have time, go for it

…As for ‘Followers’ counts, its proxy for the ‘value’ of a person is so vastly overrated it borders on the toxic

I’m still failing at the game of Mastodon.

One of the things I greatly appreciated about Twitter was the ability to see who someone is following. It was one of the best ways to find interesting people.

The second image here is the “computer says no” reveal behind the first. In this case, I kinda understand the Fediverse reasons. But because of my conditioning, it feels kind of stupidly counter-productive

“Nothing happens by accident,” said another source. “When a 3-year-old girl is killed in a home in Gaza, it’s because someone in the army decided it wasn’t a big deal for her to be killed — that it was a price worth paying in order to hit [another] target. We are not Hamas. These are not random rockets. Everything is intentional. We know exactly how much collateral damage there is in every home.” https://www.972mag.com/mass-assassination-factory-israel-calculated-bombing-gaza/

“So when we encounter a tech company boss who takes in a nationwide movement of organized protest against police brutalization and systemic racism, led by black activists, and amplifies the rare incidents of violence, much of it instigated by the police or right-wing counter protestors, using the mendacious language of extremists to refer to it as ‘riots,’ we have a good idea what we’re looking at.”

Why We're Dropping Basecamp - Duke University Libraries Blogs https://blogs.library.duke.edu/blog/2023/11/30/why-were-dropping-basecamp/

“…on an individual basis today’s tech billionaires are not any wealthier than their early 20th-century counterparts. Adjusted for inflation, John Rockefeller’s fortune of $336bn and Andrew Carnegie’s $309bn exceed Musk’s $231bn, Bezos’s $165bn and Gates’s $114bn.

But, as chronicled by Peter Turchin in End Times, his book on elite excess and what it portends, today there are far more centimillionaires and billionaires than there were in the gilded age”

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/nov/25/we-will-coup-whoever-we-want-the-unbearable-hubris-of-musk-and-the-billionaire-tech-bros

@Brendanjones so they should *say so*. They should name it.

@oxfam

@oxfam the blog article ought to frame what Oxfam think the threshold for the top 1% is, otherwise people will reach for tools to find that answer (as I did above).

There seems a fundamental mismatch with what language like “yachts, private jets and lavish lifestyles” implies. My presumption is that those are people in the top less than 0.1%.

If people less than 3x a G7 median income are the problem then say so. Be consistent

Oxfam@earthstream.social’s latest report on inequality, timed for #COP28, effectively says the wealthiest 1% globally each have an average footprint of over 67 people: https://www.oxfam.org.uk/oxfam-in-action/oxfam-blog/climate-equality-a-planet-for-the-99/

According to https://howrichami.givingwhatwecan.org/how-rich-am-i, someone with no dependents earning £40k or more in the UK, or $60k or more in the US, is on average in that 1%.

But the language of the report seems to be focused on people earning much more than that 🤔

🚴🏻When I’m out biking I can usually tell whether the car that’s about to overtake me is an SUV or not. It’s not the engine noise, it’s the tyre noise and, sometimes, the vibrations coming up from the road.

e.g. a Range Rover weighs 2.7 times more than a Toyota Aygo.

That cars have been getting heavier is a marker of how deeply stupid and unserious we are about the #climateCrisis

@jackofalltrades @CelloMomOnCars according to my maths and some digging, US energy consumption per capita is 1.76x that of Germany and 3.8x that of the UK.

US:
energy demand: 100.41 quadrillion Btu (2022)
population: 333 million

Germany:
energy demand: 14.29 qn Btu (2021)
population: 83 million

UK:
energy demand: 5.32 qn Btu (2021)
population: 67 million

@jackofalltrades @CelloMomOnCars 215/3 = 72 ish, so am laughing in *UK abject failure* where we have 14.4 GW installed and a population only 20% smaller 🤦♂️