I enjoy her writing too. Her piece on the threat of Facebook entering the Fediverse does a great job of making the case.

Congratulations!

Most of the darker skinned ones were already run over further back on the track.

It’s called Tractorbeam Earth because it’s a quarterly publication run as a sweepstakes by Tractor Beverages, Inc.

Tractor Beverages is a corporation in Coeur d’Alene, ID that sells canned beverages through Amazon and Walmart, correct?

PTFE and chemicals used in its production are some of the best-known and widely applied PFAS, which are persistent organic pollutants. PTFE occupies more than half of all fluoropolymer production, followed by polyvinylidene fluoride (PVdF).

– Polytetrafluoroethylene on Wikipedia

Great singing, coordination, and choreography.

Clean energy infrastructure is desperately needed, but capitalists don’t want to pay labor a fair wage.

The stories I hear from tradespeople in clean energy work is that entry level positions are paying less, and the bonuses they were seeing when they started are drying up. Many are looking to move away from clean-energy specific labor and into electrical or construction where unions are better established.

Improperly installed solar panels short out and fail early, carelessly sealed roof mountings leak and damage the dwelling, and most importantly, pressured novice workers make often fatal mistakes while working with electricity or at significant heights. To those with the experience of prison labor as a baseline, the risks and rewards of this kind of labor may be attractive. But most tradespeople know these jobs exist, and choose not to take them.

Instead of support for labor, you see state, provincial, and national incentives to recruit new workers into these fields, as well as articles like this one touting the potential of employment in the clean energy economy. But noticeably absent from the article is any mention of labor organization or workers protections for the people doing this work. If the state was serious about building this infrastructure, they would make these fields union jobs. That’s the only way to get quality renewable energy infrastructure built at scale.

Tom Nicholas is really great in this piece. SLRPNK link

People who get angry at Just Stop Oil tactics are just showing their ignorance of civil rights and protest history.

Alex de Vries predicted that current AI technology could be on track to annually consume as much electricity as the entire country of Ireland (29.3 terawatt-hours per year). For comparison, the Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index suggests Bitcoin uses 141-160 terawatt-hours (TWhs) of electricity annually. That’s ~0.7% of the world’s consumed electricity in 2022. The process of minting cryptocurrency is a very public activity, so the numbers are difficult to fudge. The cost of bringing extremely expensive nuclear reactors back online and driving demand for environmentally destructive Uranium mining and processing suggests de Vries’ guess was conservative.

I’m reminded of Jevon’s Paradox as applied to energy generation. I hope the AI bubble pops before much more investment goes into nuclear energy.

The petro-billionaire people who brought you “The Line” are joining up with the badly conceived Octopus Crane Tower idea people to bring you something that definitely will never be built and probably has deep conceptual flaws.

The important take away from this performance art is that the people causing global warming and who stand to benefit from pumping even more carbon into the air to are working on clever solutions to reverse it, and you can continue living your life as if things will eventually return to the pre-climate crisis status quo.

• Horrific scenes … an Israeli drone targeted 5 unarmed Palestinian civilians in Al Sikka area in Khan Younis city in the beginning of February 2024. (NSFL)
• Israel-Hamas war updates: Israeli strike hits Gaza medical convoy
• Israeli warplanes hit UNRWA schools in Gaza with white phosphorus
• The Protest Dispersed. Then an Israeli Sniper Shot a 9-year-old Palestinian Boy in the Head
• Israel attacked a UN-run school housing refugees in Gaza despite warnings that civilians were there, the UN has said.
• Initial IDF probe: Hostages were shirtless, waving white flag when soldiers opened fire
• Israel deliberately killed Al Jazeera reporter Shireen Abu Aqla, Palestinian report says - BBC News
• Chef Jose Andres says Israel targeted his aid workers ‘systematically, car by car’

Yeah, not a lot of discussion in the community :/

I can’t find !abc – I guess it overlaps with another community like !abolition so you can’t mouse-over it.

This distinction is important. I’ve seen a lot of greenwashing about hydrogen as a renewable energy source, but it is only a non-carbon producing form energy storage, and is almost entirely energy stored from processing fossil fuels.

The Democrat’s still haven’t updated their party platform on climate change since before Joe Biden was elected. It sits, frozen in time, with nuggets like “We will take immediate action to reverse the Trump Administration’s dangerous and destructive rollbacks of critical climate and environmental protections.” and “We will rejoin the Paris Climate Agreement” like those things are a step forward rather than a return to the catastrophic status quo.

Hopefully Camila Thorndike can change that.

Do you unironically believe Martin Luther King Jr. wanted Barry Goldwater to win when he increased his civil rights protest organizing in defiance of Lyndon B Johnson during the lead up to the 1964 presidential election?

[Image Description: Anakin Skywalker on Lava Planet, block-face text “If you’re not with me, then you’re my enemy”]

Fuck the Heritage Foundation.