Notices by Kyle Taylor (kta@hostux.social)

(1/2) Happy Saturday. Two papers on #decarbonization and #economics. The first is a report from the #European Commission on strengths and weaknesses of the EU economy and how alternative #energy positions the EU for the next decade. Europe missed the train when it comes to computing, but sees itself as a leader on green energy.

[1] https://commission.europa.eu/topics/strengthening-european-competitiveness/eu-competitiveness-looking-ahead_en

(2/2) Cheap energy has the potential to drive growth in data centers and jobs in downstream industries (cars). The EU is ahead of the US on the infrastructure to deliver on this. But the US market economy is such that it's actually siphoned off business from the EU (fewer regulations). Regardless, Brookings Institute published a paper that argues the US economy could benefit (wage and GDP growth) from making progress on playing catch-up on green energy capacity.

[2] https://www.brookings.edu/articles/the-economic-impacts-of-clean-power

... California’s #agriculture sector uses about 40 percent of all the state’s water, or 80 percent of its consumed water. With less water available, agriculture must adjust... #groundwater #aquifers have more storage potential than surface water reservoirs. So, instead of devoting decades to build more dams and reservoirs that are subject to evaporation and overflow, water should be diverted into these depleted aquifers...

[1] https://www.wired.com/story/the-key-to-fix-californias-inadequate-water-storage-put-water-underground-scientists-say/
[2] https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2310079121

@BeAware Yeah, same. I use Teams as a PWA on Chromium for work. Most Google services have PWAs as well. I use them whenever I can. And then Firefox is my regular browser. I don't usually launch Chromium as a browser. I just run it through PWAs.

@BeAware It lags a behind regular chromium a little bit. At least I noticed this on FreeBSD which for security patches was a problem. I also found that I actually *needed* chromium with Google integration for Cloud and other services. Almost like Google planned it this way. Anyway, I found a happy medium. Use regular chromium with privacy extensions. Use it only for Google things (Gmail, Cloud, etc). And install Firefox/Tor with privacy extensions and use it for everything else.

The #Economics of #Drought

... In this review article, we focus on how economic institutions, the humanly devised constraints
that shape the allocation and use of #water impact the severity and incidence of droughts....Water property rights in developed countries encourage infrastructure investments and reallocations that mitigate
drought impacts, although such institutions may codify inequitable water access ...

[1] https://www.ericcedwards.com/_files/ugd/1110dc_2c64a36626434225812db5a80dac01d3.pdf

Insights from the authors of the IPCC 6th Assessment Report on knowledge gaps and priorities for research

#ClimateChange #economics #ecology

[1] https://mural.maynoothuniversity.ie/18180/1/the%20next%20frontier%20for%20climate%20change%20science-KI0923336ENN.pdf

@scottjenson Yeah. #i3 / #sway in the #Linux world. They are a totally different, keyboard driven, UX. Appeals to developers and people that want to multitask without using a mouse. Which takes some getting used to. IMO, the best things in free unix environments are on the command line. If you stick with it, the speed and performance gains are unparalleled.

On the GUI side, I think most other free desktops are different takes on windows / mac os. Which is fine. But not exciting.

@clacke @ExtinctionR CO2 emissions in the United States have been declining since 2000. This is great, but we need it to accelerate. "Degrowth" has been promoted as a way to speed this up. But that's a dangerous switch to flip. And even if we flip it, the data do not indicate that we'd actually lower emissions. I say all this to urge us to promote real solutions to lowering emissions. Not just philosophically wishing them away.

@ExtinctionR ...wealthy economies should abandon growth of gross domestic product (GDP) as a goal ...

Can't. Advocating for degrowth is a non-starter with economists. In the developing world and advanced economies. Also, the assumption that declining GDP growth will lead to declines in emissions is shaky at best. We don't see this play out in the data. It's possible to grow GDP responsibly, while making a concerted effort to lower emissions. Sweden is doing it.

@gnutelephony @solobsd @stefano -- yeah, absolutely. I was thinking of buying a stack of refurbished optiplex micro form factor machines and have them netboot off an image. And have them collaborate on CPU/RAM intensive work with Dask. Could do this with RPIs, but when buying in bulk, you might get more CPU/ram/$ with a bunch of micro form factor machines. https://www.freshports.org/devel/py-distributed/https://a.co/d/2AQfifg

@gnutelephony @solobsd @stefano may handle the heat generated a little better, too.

@stefano had to Google it. Wonder if this could be used for diskless setups or netboot-ing a cluster. https://github.com/mmatuska/mfsbsd