#nuclear (given climate change its risks are minuscle compared to other means of electricity generation incl. renewables)
#peakrenewables (my hunch that, given supply issues, environmental impacts of mining and production, economic cost-benefit ratios, etc., we already face the peak of construction of renewables; idea: we're set to see a stagnation, even shrinking, not an increase in the construction of renewables)
#postdoom (not scientism nor blind faith in technical progress (which usually ignores the social fall-out) but the stance that the complexity of our world is the main source of hope and the main reason why the chatter of doom is less about reality but a psychology)
#rain (we have too little where I live; and I love its sound)
#renewables (mostly technical developments, liabilities, and economic viability)
#sources (instead of "bookmarks" a collection of info sources that caught my eyes)
#talkingtomyselflettingyoulisten (personal musings in which I develop (or rather: follow the trait of) thoughts and ideas; not to provoke, or troll, or to invite heated discussions)
I think you can learn more about a person when you listen to her tone of voice, her manners, and only to some extent via her interests. With regard to the latter, an annotated list of my tags may suffice.
#batteries (although in the context of infrastructure, energy, climate, less as hardware or essential building blocks but as objects on which people put their misguided hopes on)
#counterculture (I went along with it for many years, now I primarily think about its negative impacts; historical interest)
#ecocolonialism (from the perspective of how Greens and Progressives offset environmental costs on poor nations when trying to jump-start their green economies)
#energy (broad category, includes "renewables", "nuclear", often "infrasturcture")
#federation (how its technical aspects create the conversations-based foundation of the Fediverse)
#fediverse (history as well as present and future developments of something that is more than the Mastodon-network)
« Most fires are linked to batteries that don't meet safety standards, Lovell tells Axios. And many consumers don't distinguish between e-bikes and e-scooters and e-mopeds, which can be more likely to have dodgy batteries, she said. »
I felt this aspect missing in the various analyses of Putin's war against Ukraine in the works of Anne Applebaum, Timothy Snyder, Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Masha Gessen, and others, leaving their descriptions and inquiries kind of awry and missing he point.
But it seems there has been at least one author thinking along those lines I am pursuing: Bálint Magyar, in his work from 2016 on "Mafia State", taking Hungary as example. (Kudos to Masha Gessen for mentioning his work, although mentioning it only in passing, without taking it more seriously.)
I'm happy to see the Democrats holding the Senate. Now fingers crossed for them to keep the House. The U.S. needs to push back against the fascist GOP.
And before anybody raises his voive to lecture me: Forget it!
There is a profound difference between the Democrats and the Republicans in the U.S. To say they both are essentially the same, like most idiotic Lefties and Progressives worldwide say, is ignoring abortion rights, Supreme Court, labour rights, etc., not to mention foreign policies. The Trump years have made it blatantly clear that the Left's creed of Dems and GOP being the same is just factually wrong and smug bullshit, claimed by people who for reasons of ideological purity are indifferent to the plight and rights of working class people, of seniors, disabled people, migrants and refugess, women, minorities. Regardless what they profess to stand for.
The Left and Progressives gave the U.S. the Trump regime and the world a harsh turn to the right. Bernie Sanders hopefully burns in hell for that.
I second that wholeheartedly. It's never about "Have you read ALL these books?" or "How can you even think you can read all these books in your lifetime?" That shows that people don't understand what libraries (or vast book collections) are for (or: about): That, at least in priciple, you can go to the shelves and look up a book or a sequence in that book, whenever necessary or whenever its time has come. It's about preserving possibilities, not reducing or decreasing them (by counting down the books left to read). You never read all books in your book collection and then stop -- because you don't want your mind to be finite, but, if possible, infinite.
I'm not sure I understand the problem you are facing. Although I'm happy to help out any time, but in case you have technical problems with gnuscoail.net, I recommend you ask @administrator as well.
Well, yes. I'd add a specific feature of infrastructure: its resilience (even in its breakdown) and its tenacity vis-à-vis change and changeability. It has longterm impact which the discourse on technology rather leaves aside.
Your characterisation of technology as noun or process sounds too simple for me as it allows for products (results) and manufactoring (the processes that lead to the results) but levaes aside standardisation, scientific knowledge, paradigms, etc.
simsa04 (simsa04@gnusocial.net)'s status on Wednesday, 09-Nov-2022 06:45:02 JST
simsa04Game designers should keep in mind that their games are a major way how people experience and get a sense of nature. As people no longer stroll outside, their sense of place, of weather, of perspective become impacted by the game design.. Esp. as maps are more or less small, changes in the game environment don't follow people's usual sense of natural space, distance, and perspective. Overblown weather and lighting phenomena are to be added. I don't say that designers should stop their ways, but that they should keep in mind that they are training people's capacity to sense and orientate themselves in natural spaces. VR is the next step.
It's a bit difficult to unpack your question because so many different and divergent concepts and aspects are lumped into this word #technology. Its primary image, that of a #tool, is contrasted with the results of its application, and stuff (material or immaterial) that serves a #purpose. Also layers of generality: of practical knowledge; generalised procedures to effect impacts; strata of consequences that in themselves have such consequential "power" that people have only few ways to influence and change courses of events.
Thus to me two things turned out to be important over the years:
° thinking about technology via the image of "tools" is devastaingly inappropriate
° thinking about technology deflects from the perhaps more important topic of #infrastructure
To me, the history of infrastructure(s) began to replace questions about technology or its history.
With "infrastructure" I don't mean merely places, built environments, supply chains and innovations therein (e.g., the innovation of the shipping container in the 1930s and its standarisation in the 1960s which proved decisive in the Vietnam war). It entails concepts of #energy density, of market economies, of sustainibility...
But more to your point: I find the most fitting metaphor for technology to be that of a #game. Be it competitve games, be it solitary games, be it "new games". The aspect of playfullness is more important than earlier generations of tech critique may have acknowledged.
simsa04 (simsa04@gnusocial.net)'s status on Wednesday, 09-Nov-2022 05:42:27 JST
simsa04Strangely, I feel optimistic about the U.S. Midterms. True, the Trump fascists are on the rise, the GOP does everything it can to undermine due process and fair voting. Still. I think that Democrats will keep the Senate, many statehouses, and even the House. The wolves are out there, but people, although afraid, will chase them away.
« The center of the issue is Europe’s response to tightening fuel supplies and the war in Ukraine. Cut off from Russian gas, European countries have turned to the spot market, where energy that isn’t committed to buyers is made available for short-notice delivery. With prices soaring, some suppliers to South Asia have simply canceled long-scheduled deliveries in favor of better yields elsewhere, traders say.
“Suppliers don’t need to focus on securing their LNG to low affordability markets,” Raghav Mathur, an analyst at Wood Mackenzie Ltd. said. The higher prices they can get on the spot market more than make up for whatever penalties they might pay for shirking planned shipments. And that dynamic is likely to hold for years, Mathur says. [...]
Usually when there’s a short-term shortage, nations can sign long-term supply contracts, paying a fixed rate for the assurance of reliable deliveries for years. That hasn’t worked this time. Even bids for deliveries starting years into the future are being rejected. »
What do you mean by "the U.S. doesn't call Vietnam, Iraq, or Afghanistan (or wars sometimes)"?
Anyway, the U.S. glorifies its wars as Russia and the former USSR do/did. My point is that only when empires (or wannabe empires) were decisively beaten by foreign military forces did the megalomaniacal sense of destiny and superiority vanish. Japam, the UK, France, Spain, from its ambitions even Geermany, all turned "moderate" and gave up their sense of "being the fate of the world". The US has never been beaten that decisively. And Russia, although probably being beaten, will not be beaten on its own soil and will spin its defeat in the sense it always does: Being a grand nation, but always being subdued by foreign nations that want to prevent Russia from its place. It's a centuries-old paranoia.