Notices by Zane Selvans (zaneselvans@social.coop), page 4

Lonely boomer dude who just showed up in the AirBnB I share the patio with is having loud conference calls to talk about conspiracy theories. I should introduce him to my dad.

"Banned by Google, recommended by Firefox" is quite the tagline. Adnauseam is an online advertiser data obfuscation browser plugin:

https://adnauseam.io/

I guess if enough people install this kind of thing, it also poisons the economics of the current advertisement revenue model, at least for anyone who pays for clicks.

Who knew that public transit could be so cyberpunk.

A longer write-up of the Polish train manufacturer who pre-installed malware that caused its trains to fake breaking down as a punishment to their owners if they were ever serviced by a 3rd party shop... based on the GPS coordinates of known 3rd party shops.

https://badcyber.com/dieselgate-but-for-trains-some-heavyweight-hardware-hacking/

@ntnsndr White Sulfur Springs?

@ntnsndr Man, a Zeiss for public-interest AI would be amazeballs.

So much badness flows from the desire for massive up-front investment and rapid early growth.

Man why does it seem like every country has to elect their own right-wing nutjob to independently (re-)discover what a bad idea it is?

@ntnsndr Meanwhile... 😆

https://www.theverge.com/2023/11/18/23967199/breaking-openai-board-in-discussions-with-sam-altman-to-return-as-ceo

@ntnsndr I definitely did not have this on my bingo card.

@ntnsndr I think a policy like that of the German Feed in Tariff for solar PV might work. Meaning, something that starts small and seems innocuous, but grows exponentially, and by the time it's obviously a threat it has built its own durable constituency. A head-on conflict from the very beginning seems... not great.

@ntnsndr The system is constructed with a huge bias toward extraction and concentration now. I believe it could rebuilt with a bias towards recirculation and distribution instead. But it would be a very different system. With very different winners and losers relative to the status quo.

Meanwhile, the BHC has never been able to get a competitive loan from a credit union, and the IRS thinks worker co-op surplus should be taxed as wages at a higher rate than wealth concentrating business profits.

Still noodling on the dynamics of sustainable and distributive economies. When they shrivel up. When they would predominate.

Inspired by the Wealth Supremacy convo between Marjorie Kelly and @ntnsndr

https://amateurearthling.org/2023/11/04/the-math-of-ethical-growth/

If you like organizing your follows using lists, here are some Mastodon feature requests you might want to 👍 or comment on or contribute to:

* Add account to a list without following: https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/6982
* Publicly visible / sharable lists: https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/8208
* Collaborative curation of lists: https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/18292

Listening to this conversation between @ntnsndr and Marjorie Kelly about her new book "Wealth Supremacy" and why just trying to build more ethical economic entities is insufficient:

https://archive.org/details/kelly-wealthsupremacy-medlab-20231030

I need a more optimistic non-fiction interlude so I'm going to read Gregory Nemet's "How Solar Energy Became Cheap"

#solar #books #energy #economics

So far "How Solar Energy Became Cheap" and "Solar Power Finance Without the Jargon" by @solar_chase both kind of remind me of The Box, a history of how containerized shipping took over the world.

Solar PV and containerization have both been weirdly capitalist triumphs and investor catastrophes. Ultimately brutally competitive, low-margin industries littered with bankruptcies, even as they transform the world and enable other kinds of economic development.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Box_(Levinson_book)

I should put Rose George's Ninety Percent of Everything on my list:

https://www.rosegeorge.com/ninety-percent-of-everything

Has anybody made a world map where distance is proportional to the energy required to move a given mass of cargo between two points?

It's hard to get across to people just how energy efficient container and bulk carrier ships are. Energetically every port is kind of right next door to every other port, even if physically they're on opposite sides of the Pacific Ocean.

A mural celebrating #SciHub on the campus of @unam_mx in #CDMX. Reportedly painted by students without permission. 😲 #StreetArt

The more I learn about how the streaming and publishing industries currently work, the more I just want to pirate everything and send artists and authors tips directly.

Or alternatively... help crowdfund new works! Looking forward to hearing @pluralistic read the audiobook edition of "The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation" Only 13 hours left to become a backer:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/doctorow/the-internet-con-how-to-seize-the-means-of-computation