Cyborg Ned Ludd

This has been true dozens of times over the history of computing. Right back to Blaise Pascal's mechanical calculator. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pascaline

Idea for #BikeTO: If Ford actually succeeds in ripping out any bike lanes, set up rolling ad-hoc bike buses on those routes during rush hour.

This would: a) Replace some of the safety for cyclists that the bike lanes provided b) Make it clear to people that cyclists are not going away, and that this is not a traffic congestion reducing measure c) Put political pressure on Ford

Idea for #BikeTO: If Ford actually succeeds in ripping out any bike lanes, set up rolling ad-hoc bike buses on those routes during rush hour.

I get that hippies are really annoying but some people make "not being a hippy" such a load-bearing element of their personality that they go and say stuff like "organic produce is bad for the environment".

IDGAF about the anti-GMO stuff but not using synthetic fertilizers reduces the need for synthetic fertilizer, which is extremely difficult to produce without huge amounts of natural gas. It's one of the hardest-to-decarbonize industries. Synthetic fertilizers also cause eutrophication.

I think I need to start a running thread where I track all the people who just randomly attach the word "degrowth" to a political, economic, or cultural opinion they don't like. Usually in a way that bears no relation whatsoever on what degrowth actually means. Here's the first one:

I'm mostly pretty blase about these and sometimes amused by them. But conflating #degrowth with Stephen Miller is genuinely gross. Degrowth is a shift from economic growth to human welfare as the goal of human societies. Miller is, obviously, anti-human-welfare. bsky.app/profile/tepi...

I think I need to start a running thread where I track all the people who just randomly attach the word "degrowth" to a political, economic, or cultural opinion they don't like. Usually in a way that bears no relation whatsoever on what degrowth actually means. Here's the first one:

Degrowth is anti-technology, according to this person. (no it isn't)

I am a degrowth YIMBY. These positions are not just compatible; they are actively complementary. I want us to build new housing and infrastructure that facilitates dense, car-free, zero-emission cities. Radically reducing the need for cars is a big component of degrowth!

Furthermore: I think NIMBYism is driven in large part by the financial incentives of homeowners to see their homes' values continue to increase indefinitely, due to artificial scarcity in the housing market. It's not hard to see how this springs out of a growth-dependent political economy.

I plan to support sustainable farming by buying a lot of sustainably-grown produce and setting it on fire. If you object to this then you don't understand basic economics.

More seriously: The issue that this take misses is TIME. We need to decarbonise our electricity supply for actually useful things as soon as humanly possible, and if we waste the available solar capacity on non-useful things, that slows us down. Meanwhile the sky in Toronto was yellow this summer.

This analogy between crime stats and economic stats is nonsense. Crime is a lot more straightforward to measure than the health of the economy. There are maybe a few dozen crimes that people really care about. Most of them can be simply counted. If that number is up then crime is up. Simple.

Even if good data exists for every one of those indicators, it's doubtful that Will Stancil or even any professional economist has personally looked at all that relevant data for every income bracket, state and city, etc. It would be thousands of separate data points at least.

This analogy between crime stats and economic stats is nonsense. Crime is a lot more straightforward to measure than the health of the economy. There are maybe a few dozen crimes that people really care about. Most of them can be simply counted. If that number is up then crime is up. Simple.

Years ago I imagined I'd probably reach this moment at some point in my life. When the climate apocalypse becomes physically, tangibly, obvious. When it starts to directly affect the place I live. I imagined it would be more dramatic than this. That people would panic. Or get violent. Or something.

I thought about which model of facemask would achieve the best version of apocalypse-chic for my daily bike ride to work. Might as well make it look cool I guess. Become a character from an apocalyptic movie in image if not in lifestyle.

Years ago I imagined I'd probably reach this moment at some point in my life. When the climate apocalypse becomes physically, tangibly, obvious. When it starts to directly affect the place I live. I imagined it would be more dramatic than this. That people would panic. Or get violent. Or something.