Posts by urlyman@mastodon.social
(DIR) Post #B1ygmbsQqDMIguH4JU by urlyman@mastodon.social
2026-01-05T14:47:02Z
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@lowqualityfacts Freddie has been gone a while. This explains a lot
(DIR) Post #B25owFd7FPajNjFoZ6 by urlyman@mastodon.social
2026-01-09T01:21:20Z
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@futurebird abandoned
(DIR) Post #B2Emrfuzd60nyowgcK by urlyman@mastodon.social
2026-01-13T08:17:49Z
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On the radio, Jeremy Bowen, describing where Iran’s theocracy seems to be at, reached for the well-known quote from Hemingway’s ‘The Sun Also Rises’:“‘How did you go bankrupt?’ Bill asked. ‘Two ways’, Mike said. ‘Gradually and then suddenly’.”Which is the nature of power relationships. Whenever there is a trajectory of extraction there’s a threshold beyond which it cannot stand up.Much of our era is in the ‘gradually’ phase with ‘suddenly’ inching ever closer…
(DIR) Post #B2EmrlUysilnHsozuC by urlyman@mastodon.social
2026-01-13T08:22:13Z
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…It’s always been that way. The thermodynamic pattern is everywhere.We’ve always been brewing storms. It’s just that fossil fuels have enabled us to brew storms of a scale never concocted before: Inequality, AI and tech in general, and disconnection from the natural world to name just three https://mastodon.green/@SusiArnott/115886788991246881
(DIR) Post #B2EmrqcbpmqJAzQezQ by urlyman@mastodon.social
2026-01-13T08:26:21Z
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…A species that discovers ways to tap millions of years of stored sunlight is bound to go mad with it. And we obviously have.Me in a rain-swept January UK eating a banana and some almonds with my oats for breakfast is functionally no different than getting on a plane. It’s just a different scale of madness
(DIR) Post #B2EmrveD9G5wlPDVgG by urlyman@mastodon.social
2026-01-13T08:39:38Z
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…The linked post above from @SusiArnott is from Marc Hudson. Marc and I had a good rapport on Twitter which led to us once chatting on video, until we both became emigres from Musk’s storm. I ended up here, and Marc ended up on BlueSky so now… the exchange has dwindled. Marc’s ‘All Our Yesterdays’ project is well worth your time. Here’s why he called it that https://allouryesterdays.info/about/why-all-our-yesterdays/
(DIR) Post #B2Ems0haM8lURJpm8O by urlyman@mastodon.social
2026-01-13T08:43:39Z
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…and here’s an extract from his latest post by Kevin Anderson, shared by Susi:1/2“Humanity has become extraordinarily adept at observing and quantifying the world it is reshaping. With increasing accuracy, we can measure, model, and project the climate system, supported by ever more sensitive instruments, richer datasets, and stronger scientific confidence. Yet this growing clarity has not led to restraint or correction…
(DIR) Post #B2Ems5M93HaMsGqDuS by urlyman@mastodon.social
2026-01-13T08:45:12Z
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…2/2“Instead, [our strong scientific confidence] has coincided with a profound inability to act on the damage we fully understand and knowingly accelerate, paralysed not by ignorance, but by convenience, power, and habit.”
(DIR) Post #B2Ix6GevbJa29qrsPY by urlyman@mastodon.social
2026-01-15T09:24:08Z
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@strypey does sound interesting. I’d have to use a VPN to view it:“To our valued users in the United Kingdom,After careful review and ongoing evaluation of the regulatory landscape in the United Kingdom, we regret to inform you that BitChute will be discontinuing its video sharing service for UK residents.”
(DIR) Post #B2NGWtnfNEaQqGCuZ6 by urlyman@mastodon.social
2026-01-17T10:17:50Z
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The asymmetry of representative democracy is obvious enough. In the UK, each MP represents around 70,000 registered voters.It’s inevitable that everyone’s MP is more likely to be swayed by colleagues they talk to everyday and lobbyists paying to talk to them in person.Most petition platforms collect ‘signatures’ from email addresses they don’t verify in any way. They don’t verify that the email address exists, or that it belongs to the person in question, or that the person is in the UK…
(DIR) Post #B2NGWv6UWjEssw1SXw by urlyman@mastodon.social
2026-01-17T10:22:50Z
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…or that the person is in a particular constituency.It is possible to see if a person is on the electoral register but having a full set of that data costs ~£69,000.And even where a petition platform does do some or all of those things, the signatories don’t get allocated to constituency level so a particular MP feels no pressure on them personally. And even if it did, that petition is just one of a great many, usually untethered to any legislative timetable…https://mastodon.social/@urlyman/115683505345430865
(DIR) Post #B2NGWwIa5GVIaigd1s by urlyman@mastodon.social
2026-01-17T10:28:55Z
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…We have all this tech churning out mass comms, and it’s not even structured to work the way that a parliamentary system works.No wonder petitions are signing into a void. If we wanted something that *could* be meaningful it would do the following…
(DIR) Post #B2NGWxNa4A65wW28Se by urlyman@mastodon.social
2026-01-17T10:31:37Z
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…1. Collect the *minimum* amount of data for it to be possible for a third party to verify that a signatory is *probably* in a particular constituency (wouldn’t have to be the signature collector themselves)2. Align the signature with a particular legal clause that is timetabled to be voted on *soon*, or to be fed into a committee process Make MPs feel actual pressure from their actual constituents on particular matters they are actually employed to vote on
(DIR) Post #B2NGWyP2GEr57JioMq by urlyman@mastodon.social
2026-01-17T10:40:08Z
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…What might be a sufficient minimum of data?Well I presume that the electoral roll knows my full name, full postal address and date of birth. Is there more than one Jonathan Schofield in PO4? Possible but not probable. Other names will have greater likelihoods. My point being that the signature collector could know my first and last name and the first half of my postcode only…
(DIR) Post #B2NGX4EGbBo3BejIPo by urlyman@mastodon.social
2026-01-17T10:43:17Z
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…That would not be sufficient to know that it’s me for sure but it would be sufficient to know that there is a considerable likelihood that it is me, in my constituency.Running it through an electoral roll API could score its likelihood. Yes, it could be gamed easily enough, yes it would be imprecise, but it would be a considerable step forward from a completely unverified and untargeted silo of ‘signatures’. Wouldn’t it?
(DIR) Post #B2NGXAFYDKOlrNNPFY by urlyman@mastodon.social
2026-01-17T11:05:05Z
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…Maybe something like I have outlined could be trialled at a constituency level, or a handful. Although buying the entire electoral roll costs enough to buy an expensive car, buying it for a single constituency would be about £125. Buying it for all of my city would be about £250 https://mastodon.social/@urlyman/115683505345430865
(DIR) Post #B2ZQjusNjlmR7PKPaK by urlyman@mastodon.social
2026-01-23T08:09:23Z
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@aral indeed @mbeddedDev
(DIR) Post #B2bbyoI5zUqWqma1Eu by urlyman@mastodon.social
2026-01-24T09:26:17Z
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@aral thanks https://mastodon.social/@urlyman/115949326682575405@Durrell
(DIR) Post #B2exFBmCpxvi9TjzPs by urlyman@mastodon.social
2026-01-06T15:32:46Z
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@malte thanks for the link. A quick look at page 3 of the source report (https://oxfamilibrary.openrepository.com/bitstream/handle/10546/621305/bn-carbon-inequality-2030-051121-en.pdf;jsessionid=A159EA1F6294BE9447493003B3F9F179?sequence=1 PDF) cites the “2.3” figure but doesn’t make clear how it’s arrived at. I presume theres’s a flawed and (as you say) out of date carbon budget being divvied up.I note that https://climate.mit.edu/ask-mit/how-much-carbon-dioxide-does-earth-naturally-absorb says there’s a ~100^9 tonne annual natural carbon cycle. Where to go from there I don’t know
(DIR) Post #B2exFEDvjrILk2j9uK by urlyman@mastodon.social
2026-01-06T15:36:52Z
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…presumably there needs to be a decent assessment of Earth’s total biomass and what our own mass represents of that as a subset, but I understand there are many large uncertainties there – e.g. vast volumes of bacteria living deep within rock. I’m aware of the picture below when it comes to mammals https://mastodon.social/@urlyman/113917611142953955