Sylvain Miermont @miermont@qoto.org

There seems to be 3 types of studies on "sustainable" levels of material use :

• "There seems to be a consensus that this level of extraction is sustainable, I'll just use that"
• "Here are all the target proposals, I'll just choose that one for no reason at all"
• "Hey this target could be feasible because surely there will be some ENORMOUS MATERIAL EFFICIENCY GAINS in the decades to come. Let's also assume that it is desirable."

This is, once again, your reminder that declining birthrates is only a problem of you've built your economy to be a giant Ponzi scheme.

Rather than looking at historically low US birthrates as "the biggest danger civilization faces," maybe we make it the catalyst to charge away from the extractive #capitalism that is sucking the life out of the planet.

Families choosing to have fewer kids fits in really nicely with #degrowth. Just saying.

https://www.axios.com/2024/09/09/us-birth-rate-low-policy-solutions

#economics

Stockholm Resilience Centre "advances science for a liveable planet"

We are hiring

3 Postdocs
4 PhD positions
and 1 project manager

to work on:

+emerging pests and pathogens

+resilience and transformations in fragile contexts

+resilience and sustainability in food systems

+Building models of, with and for sustainability transformations

+financial risk analysis

+manager for Global Resilience Partnership

https://www.https://www.stockholmresilience.org/about-us/careers.html

There was a time when a boycot of Hachette, HarperCollins, Penguin Random House, and Wiley, would have seemed impossible. But we live in an internet age.

I spent most of my career around publishing. They like to see themselves as innovative custodians of knowledge, but they're not. Instead they're an industry of legal departments that happens to produce a few books, and their gravy train has been shunted into a siding.

Don't buy your information from them. It's all available elsewhere now.

When Don Joyce of Negativland died, Internet Archive took the back catalog items and band materials to house for nearly a decade. The tape materials are now out to get archival quality captures, and the archivist Taylor posted a cut tape track from Escape From Noise, "Gun and the Bible", being digitized.

You can see the cuts!

https://youtu.be/xML3I0j2nQM?si=kxUvIUJT_4FpWRtP

The Internet Archive losing its appeal means one thing: pirate stuff. Pirate brazenly. There’s no point trying to do it the nice way - you’ll get shut down anyway. Copy, share, and archive to your heart’s content. It’s the only way we’re keeping digital media and our cultural memory intact.

Others have said this, but the Internet Archive's appeals-court loss to Big Publishing is a disaster for everyone but the cartel of companies and a tiny number of A list authors.

The publishers will tolerate libraries only as long as they can control everything about how books can be loaned. If public libraries were being invented today, the cartel would make their core functions illegal.

https://www.theverge.com/2024/9/4/24235958/internet-archive-loses-appeal-ebook-lending

By popular demand, here is the same thing as text.
Phrack Inc
Breaking The Spell
It can feel like the world is in a dreamlike state; a hype-driven delirium, fueled by venture capital and the promises of untold riches and influence. Everyone seems to be rushing to implement the latest thing, hoping to find a magic bullet to solve problems they may not have, or even understand.
While hype has always been a thing, in the past few years (2020-2024), we have witnessed several large pushes to integrate untested, underdeveloped, and unsustainable technology into systems that were already Going Through It. Once the charm wears off, and all the problems did not just magically disappear, they drop these ideas and move on to the next, at the cost of everyone else.
Many of these New & Exciting ideas involve introducing increasingly opaque abstraction layers. They promise to push us towards The Future, yet only bring us further from understanding our own abilities and needs. It's easy to sell ideas like these. What isn't easy, is creating something both practical and sustainable. If we want to make the world more sustainable, we need to understand the inputs, outputs, dependencies, constraints, and implementation details of the systems we rely on. Whenever we make it more difficult to know something, we inch closer to an information dark age.
After the past several decades of humanity putting all of its collective knowledge online, we are seeing more ways to prevent us from accessing it. Not only is good information harder to find, bad information is drowning. it out. There are increasing incentives to gatekeep and collect rent on important resources, and to disseminate junk that is useless at best, and harmful at worst. In all of this chaos, the real threat is the loss of useful, verified, and trusted information, for the sake of monetizing the opposite.
Fortunately, there are still hackers. For every smokescreen that clouds our vision, hackers help to clear the air. For every new garden wall erected, hackers forge a path around it. For every lock placed on our own ideas and cultural artifacts, hackers craft durable picks to unshackle them. Hackers try to understand what lies beyond their perspective.
Hackers focus on what is real, and what is here.
We can move forward through this bullshit. We can work together to maintain
good information, and amplify the voices of those who are creating and
curating it. We can learn how things actually work, share the details,
and use these mechanisms to do some good. We can devise new methods of
communication and collaboration, and work both within and between our
communities to jam the trash compactor currently trying to crush us to death.
Hacking is both a coping mechanism and a survival skill. It represents the
pinnacle of our abilities as humans to figure out how to use whatever tools.
we may have, in whatever way we can, to do what we need to do. Hacking is a
great equalizer, a common dialect, a spirit that exists within all of us.
It has the power to shape the world into one we want to live in.
The hacker spirit breaks any spell.

A project to make it so you can fab chips in a hack space

https://hacker-fab.gitbook.io/hacker-fab-space

the history of using barbed wire to communicate is surprisingly long and almost entirely undocumented, even though barbed wire fence phones in particular were an essential part of early- to mid-twentieth century rural life in many parts of the U.S. and Canada! to that end, I've posted a brief history of barbed wire and barbed wire fence phones on my blog, excerpted from my book _Other Networks: A Radical Technology Sourcebook_. enjoy and please share! #othernetworks https://loriemerson.net/2024/08/31/a-brief-history-of-barbed-wire-fence-telephone-networks/

« You're not doomscrolling, you're hopequesting.

You need those tiny pieces of joy from seeing friends and strangers share their art, their good news, their wacky unique selves.

We need light to live.

And we find it in each other. »

@Ruth_Mottram Another dimension of the pristine myth is the idea of a “degraded” forest. This is a really dangerous and misleading category, as across the world many legislators protect only “intact” forests and allow plantations etc to be established in “degraded”forests. They are written off. But there is no such thing as a permanently degraded forest, they can and do recover quite quickly.

math youtuber: the Torment Nexus has gotten a lot of hype recently. But did you know there's some interesting math about how the nexus torments? In this video, we're going to show how the rendering of flesh is actually carried out by really cool applications of algebraic topology

2021:
— Come to Mastodon.
— No, It’s too complicated.

2022:
— Leave Twitter and come to Mastodon, it’s easy now.
— People I want to follow are not there.

2023:
— Leave X and come to Mastodon, here are the accounts you want to follow.
— They have less engagement.

2024:
— Leave X and come to Mastodon, here are the accounts you want to follow with more engagement than on X.
— I’m on Bluesky now. There’s not a lot of people nor engagement, it was a bit hard to sign up but I like it.

Suspect we're going to see ever more geoengineering /carbon sequestration schemes - generally inadequate, unlikely to work, and/or actively harmful. But at least this one on seaweed is beautifully illustrated.

https://www.science.org/content/article/can-dumping-seaweed-sea-floor-cool-planet-some-scientists-are-skeptical

Conversation I had recently:

him: my train was delayed for 15 minutes by a hobo.
me: how so?
him: the police had to come to get him off the train.
me: whoa, what did he do?
him: he was sleeping on the train.
me: and not bothering anyone?
him: no
me: so the police came to drag a sleeping man off the train, even though he wasn't bothering anyone, just sleeping?
him: yes
me: why?
him: we thought that he might not have a ticket.
me: So a man, who you thought may be experiencing homelessness, was sleeping on the train, other passengers thought that he might not have a ticket, and called the police, who dragged him off the train? And that caused a 15-minute delay? Seems to me like it wasn't the sleeping man who caused the 15-minute delay?
him: ???

Just now, the gates were broken, so I couldn't scan my public transport card. Went out of my way to scan it at a different station, almost missing my connection.

Train conductor just checked our tickets. Young white dude next to me hadn't scanned his card. Conductor tells him to "remember" next time, even though you have to practically break through the gate to get into the station without scanning your card.

Guess we have different rules for different people here. Also I'm low-key annoyed with my own honesty and integrity. Could've saved myself 8 euros and a sprint for the train today.

#treinleven #PublicTransportation

I have a #Kobo Aura one e-reader. I got it almost ten years ago. And it just got another software update.

It's a really good e-reader, and it's open enough that you can install your own software on it. But it also has a stellar support length. I can't recall another consumer product of mine that is still updated nine years after release.

I don't know when I will replace it. I do know I will get another Kobo when I do.

Anyone interested in the librarycloud.org domain name? I've had it since I was co-dir of Harvard #Library Lab. Free to a non-profit (at my discretion). Reply, or find me at weinberger.org

Great thread reminding you that the cloud is not just somebody else's computer.
It's a physical computer that probably won't be wiped when it is thrown away...
https://digipres.club/@foone/112990331505043510

"Rich kids would eat free too" is actually a good thing for the following reasons:

1. Reduces stigma for those who need the program.
2. Reduces cost and limits bureaucratic waste when the entry bar for the program is streamlined
3. There are very few actual rich kids; there are kids with rich parents. And not all of those are as loving and attentive as they should be.
4. Rich kids are still kids. All kids should eat.