Anthony

@[email protected] @[email protected] Sorry to dive in uninvited, but from a different angle I’d recommend reading Energy and Human Ambitions on a Finite Planet by Thomas Murphy ( https://staging.open.umn.edu/opentextbooks/textbooks/980 ). Murphy is an astrophysicist and the book is an entry-level introduction to energy, its use in human societies, and all the implications that flow from our energy use. It’s quite accessible if you’re comfortable reading STEM textbooks; it might be a bit tough if you find reading about physics and math boring or difficult. He does provide a lot of handholds and personally I think it’s worth the struggle.

The reason I suggest this book in this context is that I find a lot of people tend to be “energy blind”, meaning they don’t see the implications of human energy use and what it would actually mean to do something like reduce fossil fuel usage. Reducing fossil fuel usage would necessarily reduce quality of life for billions of people, for instance–there’s almost no way around it. The book goes into why. This simple fact is deeply relevant to any theory of change. How can you convince several billion people to purposely lower their quality of life or forego apparent opportunities to increase their quality of life in order to force the reduction in fossil fuel use that is necessary to keep human civilization from ending altogether? How do you do this without falling back on authoritarian structures, especially as the situation becomes increasingly desperate-looking?

I think another ideology we need to get past, one a lot of people seem to be deeply defensive about, is the one built on the belief that we can have large amounts of energy whenever we want it and the supply will continue to go up in perpetuity. This belief is false–it’s like believing the Earth is flat, or that your maladies are caused by unbalanced humors–but a large number of people in the so-called developed world take it as a fact or at least as an operating principle (before anyone dives down my throat about this: read Murphy’s book. Seriously. Read it with care). “The economy” is fundamentally grounded in this false ideology. “Car culture” in the US is grounded in it. What many of us think “work” and “a job” are/should be is grounded in it. What many of us think of as “fairness” and “equity” is grounded in it. Etc etc etc.

Yes.

Right! And the US Democratic party seems to be obsessed with means testing, so that many times when there is government assistance available people who need it are forced to subject themselves to intrusive surveillance, frequent paperwork and sometimes shifting requirements, etc. It’s rare (in my experience) to hear anyone critique this state of affairs, let alone make substantive moves to change it.

@[email protected] You don’t have any idea what I’m interested in.

I am definitely not interested in being condescended to, that’s for sure, so bye.

@[email protected] Thank you for supplying the “someone has to pay for it” canard, which is one of many reasons the US doesn’t have a functional left politics. Neoclassical economics brain poisoning.

@[email protected] I did not draw a dichotomy nor make a universal definition. I stated that the left is concerned with freedom from domination, which is undeniably true. What else do words like “equality” and “equity” mean? I did not state or suggest that this was the only concern, but it’s clearly an important one.

@[email protected] One way to think about “the left” is that it values freedom from domination. Who in the US is fighting to reduce the level of domination we experience in important areas of life (health care, education, food, housing to name a few)? Should we really have to pay and put ourselves into debt–thereby becoming dominated–to go to school, live somewhere, or maintain our health? Even the so-called left in the US supports this arrangement generally; at best they fight over the details, not the structure itself.

@[email protected] I know exactly one vi command. :q!

@[email protected] In 1995 I worked at a company with several active web sites. Early days of the web, very important to the company. I was hired to take care of the hardware and software running the existing web sites and help in developing new ones.

One day I walked into my office, which had the production web server in it, carrying a Diet Coke (I was young and inexperienced). I opened the Diet Coke and it spewed an epic fountain right onto the production server. It was as if that server had a gravitational pull that drew all liquid towards it. I panicked and started unplugging every cable in sight, thinking this was better than risking a hardware-destroying short.

Needless to say the web sites were down for awhile. I believe I managed to save the hardware from myself though.

What’s the point of writing software without users?

Software developers excel at creating ever-more-elaborate ways to heat up a CPU.

CC: @[email protected]