@ntnsndr@luis_in_brief@jalcine I imagine you're familiar with it already but Evgeny Morozov's The Net Delusion (2011) seems like it would be an interesting companion read.
One thing that makes me hella suspicious of the crypto and VC folks is having heard their leaders say things like "Why would I read books? They're so long and boring and inefficient." Just a huge screaming red flag. Any community where that's an acceptable take is cursed imho.
@ntnsndr@mozilla Do you feel like this is an unpopular opinion just because Firefox is unpopular and so people have no opinion on it? Or because they actively don't like it? (I absolutely love it.)
Having just read "The Price is Wrong: Why Capitalism Won't Save the Planet" and @akshatrathi's "Climate Capitalism" back to back I feel like one clear takeaway is "Capitalism" means too many different things to different people for it to be useful in discussion without a lot more context.
We're awash in capitalisms, mostly piled up in one little corner of the possibility space.
Thatcher's "There is no alternative" isn't just wrong in the simple way, it's also wrong because even within capitalism writ large there are a bunch of alternatives!
Does your capitalism concentrate or distribute wealth? Does it encourage or discourage monopolies? How does it account for the preexisting wealth of the natural world? How does it account for negative externalities? How does it treat material throughput vs. informational goods?
@luis_in_brief@ntnsndr Ehhh, they had some pretty big "autonomy and independence" violations, locking their members into multi-decade contracts that prohibited them from doing more than 5% self (distributed) generation, to the point where members were suing to defect and do their own renewable development -- which was at that point lower cost. TSGT needed financing to get out from under their big past fossil capital investments.
@luis_in_brief@ntnsndr But the trick of securitizing existing assets with very low cost (state backed) debt to get them off the balance sheet doesn't work for co-ops, because they're already ~100% debt financed, sometimes with below market rates from the USDA, which means there's much less in the way of savings to be had from refinancing.
@luis_in_brief@ntnsndr They also did this thing where the CO PUC was going to maybe let the member co-ops exit without paying the termination tariffs, so Tri-State begged FERC to be their regulator instead, and FERC agreed, and came to a different conclusion than the CO PUC:
I'm a data liberation engineer at Catalyst #Coop. We use #Python to support #climate activists, policymakers, and researchers accelerating the #EnergyTransition.I grew up in rural spanglish California, explored Mars & Europa with robots, & fought for bright green cities in Colorado. Now I'm a wandering cybermonkey lost in the misty highlands of southern Mexico.I ❤️ bikes, car-free cities, street food, & steward ownership. There is such a thing as enough.??/?? English/Español he/él