Posts by kentpitman@climatejustice.social
(DIR) Post #AREZqFlgS8lrNelCzY by kentpitman@climatejustice.social
2023-01-01T19:38:52Z
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@augieray Twitter is very different depending on who you have subscribed to. Characterizing its general population from a particular set of anecdotes is perhaps not helpful.Certainly the mix at Twitter has changed, but some of us who remain are not "addicted to outrage". I generally eschew other than civil discussion, but the people I am subscribed to are civil.Moreover, among all the stupid changes at Twitter are the occasional good one. There's a "Community Notes" facility where corrective notes about misinformation can be attached to tweets that are otherwise spreading misinformation, provided the "community" agrees (there is some kind of consensus mechanism in play). I'm part of that, at least for now, to see what it does. It remains to be seen how helpful it will be, but it's a worthy experiment. And, oddly, a common thing is for people to want to attach such notes to Musk or MTG or a number of people who you'd think were the favored people at Twitter. In fact, though, the community is more varied.The thing about Twitter, and why I really stay, has nothing to do with a lust for trolls or trolling. It is that Twitter is connected to many news sources and allows direct access to people who affect the world. I learn about news before it happens on Twitter. Often by time I see it on TV, I've known it for a day or two. For all the civility on Mastodon, and I like that, it isn't really connected to news. As far as I have experienced here, time really doesn't matter here, nothing is urgent. It's like a continuous late-night coffee house chat with friends. And that's lovely. It's just not comparable to Twitter.The two communities have different goals and structures, so it's hardly surprising they attract different users. I empathize with the very good reasons why many have left, and I won't second guess them. Maybe at some point I'll leave there. But there ARE positive reasons why some might stay, so I would urge you not to disparage others just because you may feel a well-justified need to say it was right for yourself to break free. ... I voted on Musk stepping down, for example, because I was still there to do so. That was a positive. :)I hope this doesn't come across as a rebuke. I mean it more as a defense of people like me who are choosing to maintain a presence, and perhaps a way for you to see that maybe not everyone is as crazy as you might imagine. Best wishes for harmony in the coming year!#Twitter #Mastodon #SocialMedia #toxicity #media #community
(DIR) Post #ARkNqDL91kvOQrWfWC by kentpitman@climatejustice.social
2023-01-17T21:52:21Z
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@aljazeera Short answer: No. China is not heading for a demographic crisis. Or if it is, that crisis should be seen as an unambiguously good thing.Longer answer:Reporting is flawed if someone thinks an overcrowded, increasingly-automated planet needs or can support more people.However difficult this road is for China, it is WAY better than the alternative of growth.China took a lot of heat for its one-child program. I get why people were up in arms about that, but ethics does not exist in a vacuum. Faced with a likely soon-doubling of population, there was no choice but to do something and before anyone criticizes that from the too-comfortable position of "we're not in the crisis they were in", we should stand in their shoes. Maybe there was a better implementation of the policy, and if someone had advanced it, maybe I'd be championing that, but given what they were up against, I"m just not able to stand in their shoes and say nothing should have been done. Was there a perfect solution that pleased everyone? Was there a better one? I don't know. I did not see a credible alternative advanced.Climate poses similar problems. The path to sustainability is going to be hard and the status quo will be devastating to MANY people, so we cannot compare against no casualties or no angst or not societal discomfort. We must compare against what is realistically coming if we do nothing. And in that light, I don't think this talk of demographic balance is proportionate. To my ear it is the sound of utter climate denialism. Full stop.It is frankly a crying shame that other countries are not also finding ways to reduce population so they can compare notes on how to reduce size properly, but we need more of this not less. The US, sadly, thanks to GOP influence is doubling down on forced-birth. Of all the things we could be doing, voluntary non-having-of-kids is the least objectionable possible thing ethically, and there is no excuse for not allowing that.We need reporting to start taking sustainability seriously and to report this as something good.It's all about the framing. In general, I think Al Jazeera provides quality reporting, but this particular framing is seriously off-base and needs to result in some serious editorial reconsideration about how to cover stories like this. We will never solve climate if every inconvenience to the status quo is regarded as ill health. The status quo IS ill health and we have to know which changes are intensifying that ill health and which are improving it.Proper journalism must do more than pick up a press release and repackage it in readable form in the public. They must ask whose interests the press release is serving because all too often "bad for business" means "bad for established business" or "bad for the status quo".To quote the late Professor Amar Bose, founder of the Bose corporation from a lecture I saw him give one time "Better implies different." The feedbacks which lead us back to familiar equilibrium are leading us away from potential improvement. Thoughtful journalism cannot be one of those feedbacks.I'm not going to pull any punches on this. This brief summary ends with "What’s behind this downturn? And what will it take to reverse the trend?" That is, in my mind, absolute journalistic malpractice. No one should be advocating a return to growing population for any reason.I'm not even sure there will be future generations, the problem is that bad. But if there is, I hope attitudes like this are seen for the crimes against humanity they are because the direct result of this kind of thinking will be an overextension of resources at a time when we're about to see global droughts and famines and disasters that are materially due to population. Even just our over-reliance on oil is hampered because even with reduction strategies, we're adding more population.#population #overpopulation #journalism #deGrowth #society #economics #sustainability #FossilFuels #oil
(DIR) Post #ARkPUJnMXwfhzRPaKG by kentpitman@climatejustice.social
2023-01-17T22:11:29Z
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@evanwolf @aljazeera Phil, if I take your meaning, you're agreeing with me that this thing they're reporting on is the managed approach, and saying that an unmanaged approach is when we hit the famines and people just go away painfully. That seems a reasonable and concise way to sum it up.I've had discussions with people about the carrying capacity of the planet. People often tell me that technology can improve that a lot. I think the opposite. Technology can make us ever-more-fragile because each tech-engineered bit of our system that we depend on in order to support a too-large population is an opportunity to fail, affecting still more people than if that same part had failed if fewer depended on it. We're ratcheting up the stakes per acre even as we're avoiding addressing the basic threat to each square acre of food production. (Not even to mention that when it fails, there will be cascade effects beyond just some people not getting fed.)The carrying capacity of the planet is measured in how well we can carry people when things are NOT working, not how well you can construct a clever story about how when things are working great, everyone is doing fine. We do NOT want to test that bad case, but we are tempting fate.#population #overpopulation #journalism #deGrowth #society #economics #sustainability #FossilFuels #oil #technology #ethics #metrics #CarryingCapacity
(DIR) Post #ASRhyyl9xLVDiAHfnc by kentpitman@climatejustice.social
2023-02-07T18:40:05Z
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@brewsterkahle The danger aspect is an interesting twist. This, of course, presumes someone in reasonable physical health, so it only selects a part of the population. And it's probably lousy for a grocery run on the way home.I saw an interesting article at one point discussing how our mass transit system in the US is organized in a way that pessimizes utility for other activities than getting in and out of a center. I wonder if a properly designed mass transit system would do better for you and others, or at least be competitive. The article seems to lack pictures, but the words might be enough (and no, the Wayback Machine did not have the pictures, I checked):https://citymonitor.ai/transport/why-do-so-many-public-transport-networks-use-grid-systems-955
(DIR) Post #ASkaBm2bZxZiWoADtg by kentpitman@climatejustice.social
2023-02-16T16:51:17Z
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@noself @Dianora @rmkelly @philosophy My position is that even anarchy must be orderly. The rights of someone to do what they want must follow some variant of the Golden Rule (or one of its variants, usually also named by precious metals). It's one of those paradoxes like the idea that a tolerant society must not imply tolerance of intolerance.Often, of late, you hear "conservatives" talking about freedom when what they mean is the freedom to abuse others with impunity. That's really the opposite of freedom.One way I like to think of it is that the term "freedom" is dangerous to use as an unqualified term because we are conditioned to think all freedoms are good. But person A's freedom to beat up person B infringes a great number of freedoms of person B to do things that hurt no one. Those two freedoms cannot be peers of one another in any meaningful way.I usually sum it up this way: "Where there are no rules, bullies rule." If all anarchy aspires to is the creation of (for what of a better word) bullydoms, that's not exactly a shining achievement. Even Libertarianism often just degenerates into bullying because it rarely wants to admit new concepts, needs, or members. It is not a recipe for a full society and almost by definition rejects any metrics which would assess its goodness. I'm all for avoiding excess in government, but sometimes the minimal workable set of rules is nontrivially big. Minimal is not equivalent to minimum.#Freedom #Society #Anarchy #Paradox #Rules #Bullying #Politics #Government #Justice
(DIR) Post #ATkVdRyYtyJWmTSlBg by kentpitman@climatejustice.social
2023-03-18T06:24:31Z
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A recent unanimous ruling by the very-Republican North Dakota Supreme Court is a small victory for human rights and a welcome island of relief in a dismal sea of gleeful and too-often euphoric cruelty—the unifying theme of the "modern" GOP's activism."We will soon see if other states’ courts follow suit or if they agree with the now-mainstream Republican position that a fetus’ life simply matters more than the patient who is carrying it."This analysis piece in Slate by Mark Joseph Stern is thorough and interesting. It's worth a full read:https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2023/03/republican-north-dakota-supreme-court-finds-right-to-abortion.html#Abortion #Law #Court #Rights #WomensRights #HumanRights #HealthCare #AbortionIsHealthCare
(DIR) Post #ATkZ6e875lXMjiXmPQ by kentpitman@climatejustice.social
2023-03-15T15:03:59Z
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Snow, snow, snow, snow, snow.Nature's signs were spelling "spring".That's now whited out.#haiku #poem #winter #spring #photo
(DIR) Post #ATkZ6gyIWiT5Y8yU1g by kentpitman@climatejustice.social
2023-03-16T00:51:42Z
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My wife says it should've said:Snow, snow, snow, snow, snow.Nature's signs once spelling "spring"Liquid Papered o'er.#haiku #poem #spring #winter #snowWe were going to link the trademark but...https://trademarks.justia.com/724/13/liquid-paper-72413538.html
(DIR) Post #AU4u93cI9VFNfrIll2 by kentpitman@climatejustice.social
2023-03-28T15:12:41Z
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@brewsterkahle Good, if frustrating, thread. Thanks for the pointer.If we didn't have libraries, but we did have a fair society, we'd need to tax publishers at a rate that would allow us to instead buy the same resources for everyone that would need them. If they just think of it as saving all the messy taxation plus asking people to share so that we don't have to have every single person have their own copy, they'd realize what a bargain libraries are. (Probably, though, the same people who opposed libraries would reveal they also oppose any notion of a fair society.)In the end, you can't squeeze blood out of a stone, and it's not like libraries are actually costing them lost sales in most cases, since in a lot of cases it's serving people who haven't the disposable income to buy. And surely there are some cases where libraries are buying books no one uses, so publishers win there, too, possibly even increasing their sales over what those who can't afford books might be able to do.
(DIR) Post #AUz9RegWzQcPHoDaIy by kentpitman@climatejustice.social
2023-04-24T18:25:06Z
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@brewsterkahle I'm curious: Train the model for how to act on data, or how to manage controls for tools that algorithmically adjust data?
(DIR) Post #AYJQfhnyZMGoKSabuy by kentpitman@climatejustice.social
2023-08-02T04:07:24Z
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Seen from dining room,A deer passes through our yard.Or we're camped in hers.#haiku #senryu #poem #photo #image #deer #nature (I'm assuming it's a doe, given the lack of antlers, but am not an expert on that.)
(DIR) Post #AZlRxVQdoUXkZp6nho by kentpitman@climatejustice.social
2023-09-14T17:10:31Z
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@aljazeera Oddly, I see a Translate button for your English summary. Your English is fine. As is sadly usual when translating English to English, LibreTranslate does a minor change to destroy the meaning; the result is valid English, but doesn't mean what the original means. In this case, it offers: "US space agency official conversation around UFOs must move from 'sensationalism to science' to progress". I wish they'd do a better job of noticing that it's already English and leaving it alone. But it thinks you've marked the source language as German (Deutsch) so that's probably why it's trying.#LIbreTranslate #Mastodon