Author: policywank

Climate Hope?

I read multiple things every day related to climate change. When I say “related to climate change”, they are often not about climate change directly, but are about technology that could help alleviate it. After five years of feeling absolute doom and gloom, I’ve actually started lately to have some hope. I’ve been worried about expressing it, worried that I don’t know enough and my bright-sider tendencies might be giving me false hope (denial). It’s nice to see this put into writing by someone else.

Dare we hope? Here’s my cautious case for climate optimism | Rebecca Solnit
The Green New Deal, formerly seen as radical, is now in mainstream debate. And renewable energy becomes more efficient every day

NextCloud Instead of Their Cloud

Over the last five years or so, I’ve really grown irked at a lot of the services provided to consumers by cloud vendors, particularly the two big ones in mobile: Google and Apple. I can’t say why, exactly, but something about that reached a head and I decided to do something about it in early this year. I started playing around with NextCloud in February. I liked what I saw, but decided that maintaining it 24/7 on janky, decade old hardware wasn’t a good idea. I wanted something much more reliable.

That’s when I discovered HomeDrive. For $299 they’ll sell you an Intel NUC box that’s preinstalled with their software. The specific box that they sell was retailing for between $250 and $325 in the online stores I checked. That’s just the hardware. It has a 1 TB SSD and 4GB of RAM. Everything is running in Docker. It is NextCloud hosted on your own hardware. They do light management of the NextCloud software (updates, additional features). They provide you a web endpoint, but I also mapped a subdomain on another domain I own to it. You can turn anything that has to do with them off and I may do that eventually.

I’m no longer putting any of my new files, photos, music, etc into either Google or Apple’s clouds. In the last month, I’ve migrated all of my photos out of Apple’s cloud except for a few that I chose to keep there. I copied all of the photos from my Google Pixel 2 & 3 days and early return to IOS into the NextCloud server via Google Takeout. I haven’t deleted it from Google yet (not that you can truly ever choose to delete anything). I will. But I need to do some additional work looking into indexing/searching the photos in NextCloud. I’ve done some of that research, but I’m not ready to execute changes yet.

I have my entire MP3 collection loaded, and am pretty much adding some new app and the data to power that app every week. I’ve got a bit over 250gb on that SSD.

Climate and Air Travel

I’ve seen a lot of attempts to rationalize air travel as not being as destructive as it really is. Possibly, at an “average human” level some of those rationalizations are true. Perhaps, as with so many other things, the problem is a few wealthy individuals and some corporations. The folks at Possible have a study on this. You can download it at the link below. Some highlights include:

In the USA just 12% of people take a massive 66% of flights.

In France 50% of flights are taken by a tiny 2% of the population.

And here in the UK, a mere 15% of the population take 70% of all flights.

Elite Status: How a small minority around the world take an unfair share of flights. — Possible
Emissions from flying are threatening to crash the climate – but not everyone is equally responsible. Our latest report, ‘Elite Status: global inequalities in flying’, reveals that in almost all of the countries with the highest aviation emissions, a small minority of people take up a huge share of

Ceremony, Peter Hook and the Light

This is my favorite song. There isn’t really a good recording of Joy Division doing it. I prefer the March 1981 New Order version to the September 1981 version. This is definitely the my favorite Peter Hook rendition. I’ve seen him live with The Light twice and have also seen damn near every live performance of this song from him or New Order that’s on YouTube. I think the only New Order performance of this that’s on par or maybe a little better is the November 1981 version from the live in New York concert that’s mostly known to people as Taras Shevchenko.

How the Democrats win in 2024

Joe Biden is bad for ratings. That will be a problem for him in subtle ways in 2024. I am not suggesting some stupid conspiracy wherein the media companies decide to help him get re-elected (not counting FoxNews, obviously). But they will chase Trump and hang on his every word because that gets eyeballs.

There are four things the Democrats should do if they want to hold onto the presidency. They must do a minimum of two of them. They need to do all four if they hope to mobilize voters in 2024 the way they did in 2020. If Trump runs again, they’ll need voters mobilized at that level. Those things are:

1. Pass a really substantial covid relief bill. That looks like it’s on track, though they should have done better than this.

2. Substantial student loan debt relief.

3. Pass the John Lewis Voter Rights Act

4. Raise the minimum wage to $15.

If they don’t do at least two of these things, they won’t beat Trump if he runs again. They need to do all four to be sure.

Marcus Flowers Debuts His Campaign With A Hot Commercial

This commercial is pretty hot. I think it’s well targeted to the district. I hope we get a respectful primary campaign that doesn’t leave the eventual nominee handicapped against the Q Lady.

I probably would have built at least the shell of a campaign website before launching. Right now, his twitter account links to an ActBlue donation site.

What Emoluments Clause?

Traitor
Trump reported making more than $1.6 billion while president – CREW | Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington
Donald Trump reported making more than $1.6 billion in outside revenue and income during his four years as President of the United States.

This motherfucker needs to end up in jail. I think that’s about all there is to say about this at this point. He took 399 trips to his own properties in 4 years. How much revenue did the cost of rooms for the secret service, his staff, etc bring in? We know the Pentagon was forcing air force crews to stop and stay at one of his resorts in Scotland. Would we even know it if that was happening elsewhere?

Covid Vaccine Uptake in the Military

Roughly one-third of troops on active duty or in the National Guard have declined to take the vaccine, military officials recently told Congress. In some places, such as Fort Bragg, N.C., the nation’s largest military installation, acceptance rates are below 50 percent.

NY Times
Younger Military Personnel Reject Vaccine, in Warning for Commanders and the Nation
About one-third of the troops have declined to take the vaccine. Many say they worry the vaccines are unsafe or were developed too quickly. Others want a sense of independence, even in uniform.

The Head Trip

I’m really enjoying this. I only discovered Jeff Warren a few weeks or months ago when he started doing a daily meditation on the Calm App, though I’d seen/heard his name before that, I hadn’t checked out any of his stuff. He has a sensibility that I think would appeal to a lot of people who have trouble with all the new age-y woo that goes along with meditation and investigations into consciousness, but that doesn’t denigrate that stuff.. My only small complaint is that the audio book isn’t read by the author, though the guy who does read it is fine.

The Head Trip
Check out this great listen on Audible.com. Few of us realize how many states of consciousness we pass through on a regular basis. In this entertaining guide, Jeff Warren explores 12 distinct, natural states we can experience in a 24-hour day, each offering its own kind of knowledge, insight, and ..…