Posts by graydon@canada.masto.host
(DIR) Post #AY9dKrXwVmykHdsmCu by graydon@canada.masto.host
2023-07-28T10:33:07Z
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@clacke @pezmico Nuclear waste doesn't need to be in gas-tight storage for ten million years; one thousand is excessive. Sequestration is the harder problem.Amazing how people are far more scared of spent reactor fuel than coal ash, isn't it? And how the "more radioactive" part of the coal ash has no cultural knowledge traction whatsoever.Fossil carbon companies have spent money like water for generations to create very specific fears of anything that might alter the status quo.
(DIR) Post #AY9eTDTUxzFQZ1LosS by graydon@canada.masto.host
2023-07-28T13:40:01Z
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@mansr @clacke @pezmico And here you would appear to make the same mistake those folks are making by using a moral frame of goodness.Materially measured tangible objectives turn out to work a whole lot better. (Look at how much mammonite rage there is at the US EPA, which exists to reduce pollutants to within measured limits. Versus a willingness to express all kinds of moral statements about carbon footprint.)
(DIR) Post #AaQ2URivohlkayYdDE by graydon@canada.masto.host
2023-09-30T10:00:22Z
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Free yourself from the burden of abstraction.Ours is an age greatly informed by computing machinery, information theory, and amplification. That doesn't change abstraction from a tool into a virtue, a necessity, or a fact. (Abstraction can get you to facts, but abstractions are not facts.)Yet here we are tangled up in abstractions.
(DIR) Post #AaQ2UTbunlLSRnI3YO by graydon@canada.masto.host
2023-09-30T10:01:28Z
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"What happens?" and "who does it happen to?" are more useful questions than "why does this happen?" "Why?", at scale, approximates theology; things cannot be known on human scales. Yet the events happen now, to specific people. Pay attention to the facts of events.
(DIR) Post #AaQ2UVQe2dWC5Q25GS by graydon@canada.masto.host
2023-09-30T10:03:11Z
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"Good" and "bad" are judgements, and they're the judgement of posterity, people with more knowledge in a future time.No one now alive will be judged good by whatever posterity may survive the ongoing end of the world. Free yourself from any need to think of yourself as good. All that's doing is obscuring right action.
(DIR) Post #AaQ2UXB7XKHxVqmiLQ by graydon@canada.masto.host
2023-09-30T10:06:07Z
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The idea of listening to someone because of who they are instead of what they have done or the responsibility collectively granted them is inherently anti-democratic. It's the appeal to authority made flesh.The media is mostly not about balance or clicks; it's about using balance and clicks as tools of establishing authoritarian norms where the only thing that matters is who you are, not what you've done nor what responsibility you've undertaken to whom.
(DIR) Post #AaQ2UYy4sn2n3yhKIC by graydon@canada.masto.host
2023-09-30T10:08:04Z
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Anyone who constructs authority as freedom, or as anything, really, other than a burden and a terror, is going to be a hazard with power.Power must exist (we're a band forming primate; if the band exists, there is power, and if the band doesn't exist, we don't, either). How authority works is going to matter, we can't abolish it. We can insist on creating it collectively.
(DIR) Post #AaQ2UamS8yvwgVH4S0 by graydon@canada.masto.host
2023-09-30T10:13:30Z
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"White supremacy" is a euphemism for "everything is mine" AND "I exist in perpetual sleepless terror".The attraction of piracy is sudden wealth; the detriments of piracy are the impossibility of stable community, because you mistook wealth for an outcome, rather than a side effect. (People do the same thing with happiness and love.)Addressing white supremacy has to start with the idea that it was always incompetence, it didn't magically become incompetence once the loot ran out.
(DIR) Post #AaQ2UcXdb2Gs98MGdU by graydon@canada.masto.host
2023-09-30T10:15:10Z
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One consequence of that ought to be that expressing supremacist ideas at all, ever, disqualifies you from any position of public trust whatsoever. It ought to be like getting up in public and insisting that innumeracy is no barrier to bookkeeping.
(DIR) Post #AcuqvRMk4ZT9EXRzJw by graydon@canada.masto.host
2023-12-17T23:39:24Z
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@grammargirl People are contagious with COVID before they have symptoms; they may never have symptoms and still be contagious. You can be infected, test negative, and become positive (and infectious) four hours later.If you're over 50, the protection provided by vaccination against severe outcomes is gone by about six months from the date of your last vaccination. Which is to say, it's fading out through that time and is never so strong as it was against the wild type.
(DIR) Post #Ad12gb8klyNrEAtnxA by graydon@canada.masto.host
2023-12-18T06:48:46Z
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A big chunk of PM2.5 pollution comes from internal combustion engines. Another big chunk comes from tyre wear particles. More comes from burning coal.The reason there's such utter opposition to any public notice of air quality is the same as there's such utter opposition to any actual reduction in fossil carbon extraction. Both would involve this one small group of people having less money and power.COVID and climate change turn out to be the same problem.
(DIR) Post #Ahj6iUZgjqIxXkjdx2 by graydon@canada.masto.host
2024-05-09T21:00:04Z
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@futurebird @henry It's also wretchedly probable; we know acute infection with SARS-CoV-2 makes existing dementias much worse, very fast, for pretty much all dementias.It's not likely that "one infection, certain fatal prions" will be factually well supported, but it's much too plausible that the 10 and 20 year fatality rates from COVID are way higher than the acute fatality rates.
(DIR) Post #AhqH2PZhOdnFTbb3HE by graydon@canada.masto.host
2024-05-05T19:44:04Z
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@cstross The Laundry needs some modicum of peace, government, and good order to exist as a thing in a context, and the Black Pharaoh does provide.The current crop of politicians aren't arguing about how to do the thing; they're arguing about what other thing should be done instead, if only people can be compelled to be good, righteous, moral people who understood their duty to die uncomplaining in specific ways with specific timing, lest the incumbents face alteration of circumstances.
(DIR) Post #Ahug6fWvIAgRbbGTVQ by graydon@canada.masto.host
2024-05-15T10:58:30Z
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@Wolven Time was, capitalists were for (some) facts.Facts are a process; process is other people. In a great many ways, facts are a tribe. (Well, coalition of tribes.)Facts are presently unbearable; the bill is due for the Carbon Binge. Embrace facts, and you'll never feel safe again.People prefer magic because it is more comfortable than facts, because it is easier to hope when you're deluded, and because they were raised to see the tribes of facts as outsiders full of bad people.
(DIR) Post #Ai1Z6uof7SoRRSS5Vg by graydon@canada.masto.host
2024-05-18T18:42:31Z
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@aral It's amazing how many people look at discussions of paperclip optimizers and don't make the connection that we already have money optimizers.
(DIR) Post #Ai2DU9jbobUMXOj1Qu by graydon@canada.masto.host
2024-05-18T20:58:33Z
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@remixtures The US is the Oil Empire. There will only ever be one.China wants to displace the US as the global hegemon. That requires displacing the Oil Empire, which at its most basic means domestic decarbonization in China. Hence EVs and solar are for-serious policy.In the US, cars exist to create a market for fossil fuels. (Suburbs exist to create a market for cars.) Incumbent power requires this; incumbent power rests on this.Incumbents refuse all change they have the power to refuse.
(DIR) Post #AiWSpeZBNRf1reFYYK by graydon@canada.masto.host
2024-06-02T06:27:02Z
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@bruces You'd think that, by now, they'd be building houses so they don't disintegrate when the tornado passes over.And yet.
(DIR) Post #AkAFu0H8bpRciMfoyO by graydon@canada.masto.host
2024-07-21T18:35:08Z
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@Remittancegirl You know "the Cossacks work for the Czar"?The media works for the money.
(DIR) Post #AkAFu0rIROMsWVahKi by graydon@canada.masto.host
2024-07-21T18:38:45Z
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@Remittancegirl It does clarify the terms of the election for the democratic candidate to be a woman of colour; is the United States going to be an autocracy who elects a President as CEO, or will it be a one person, one vote democracy with the rule of law and some notion of human rights?Not much wiggle left there.
(DIR) Post #AkC2zCvm4dRWKBkgbY by graydon@canada.masto.host
2024-07-22T15:48:08Z
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@foone Back in the 70s when spreadsheets were Research, people proposed cells you could rotate in at least three dimensions. So the cell you could see in the grid was the result of a whole other dimensional slice of spreadsheet, and you could select the cell and convolve the dimension that produced it into visibility.Given how spreadsheets are actually used (functional programming), I think that model would be a big help, but no one seems to have wanted to dig it out of the history of ideas.