[interfluidity-main-mastonotify] New Post: Cold December, by Steve Randy Waldman https://www.interfluidity.com/v2/9926.html
[New Post] Cold December https://www.interfluidity.com/v2/9926.html
@phillmv Right! But then the politics gets really hard. "Everybody gets the same cheque" is a political Schelling point (in English, a natural focus for coordination). It's not perfect, but if the imperfections aren't too massive, people can mostly agree it meets a basic notion of "fair", and it seems "natural" rather than manipulatively contrived. As soon as we start trying to distinguish traditional indigenous communities from cheap-mcmansion-seeking exurbanites, though, that's gone.
[tech-mastonotify] New Post: Feedletter tutorial, by Steve Randy Waldman https://tech.interfluidity.com/2024/01/29/feedletter-tutorial/index.html
@phillmv that's the political-economic point! to flip the political incentives.
for the median household a carbon-tax-and-dividend should not be a burden but a source of net income, creating a constituency that seeks to maintain it and even to increase the rate.
(there is and will always be an influential counter constituency, the high-carbon-consumption wealthy, of course, and businesses that pay the tax but receive no rebate.)
@phillmv (the most compelling pushback comes from people who are not wealthy, but whose lifestyles are structurally more dependent on carbon use than others. the rural non-rich have to drive a lot, since they may live far from towns. one perspective is to say this is the carbon tax doing its work, that people should move to where they can live with a lower footprint until there are few enough ruralites they earn enough to overcome the tax.)
@phillmv (but an alternative perspective takes existing communities as having a moral right to survive, despite their high per-capita environmental weight. this is certainly the perspective of people living in those communities! if we want to accommodate that perspective, the policy becomes harder to design, because anything other than flat, per-person or tax-unit distribution invites all kinds of gaming.)
@phillmv one tremendous victory for the right-wing has been persuading governing elites that any effective marketing of government action amounts to propaganda no good liberal should support or assist.
@phillmv I don't know how it's arranged in Canada, but a carbon tax if fully and equally refunded should be a source of net income for most people! average carbon consumption is much, much higher than median.
TIL much of Canada has implemented something like carbon-tax-and-dividend! But apparently the dividend part has not been very clear, undermining much of the point of the plan. https://ici.radio-canada.ca/rci/en/news/2041709/millions-of-canadians-get-their-carbon-tax-rebates-today-so-why-do-many-not-believe-it
i’m not “getting old” i’m a gerontonaut.
"UNRWA is paid to support people in refugee camps as refugees, and the UNHCR is paid to get people out of refugee status and to become normal citizens. This, along with its focus on only one group of displaced people does not produce best outcomes for the people that they ostensibly support." @40Years https://40yrs.blogspot.com/2024/01/unrwa-is-problematic.html
is the ad industry going to morph into selling manipulations of AI weights that make your thing more likely to come up in response to related prompts?
will AI come to stand for “Artificial Influencer”?
Not the greatest vocabulary lesson for the kids.
An image of a tornado, captioned “Can you survive hurricane?”
Image of a “Ride the Hurricane” booth from a distance, for context.
Sometimes I think the main role of tech figures who now weigh in loudly and proudly on public policy (Musk, Sacks, etc etc) is to make traditional policy elites — as compromised and deeply flawed as they are — look sane and competent by comparison.
someday we will all wake up and realize that nowhere actually exists except Canada.
@akkartik rsync.net looks very interesting. thanks!
both too much and too little wealth are terrible for people. the very rich have it all, but most of them have completely lost it.
@realcaseyrollins I keep backups on local drives (I think I’d rsync rather than sftp), but I do want to “cloud sync” to know there are off-site copies of important things (if some disaster struck my home) and to be able to access documents on the go.
@akkartik I backup locally as well, but only to one drive so far. I’m feeling like I should oscillate between two, because who knows if the backup drive is good? But I basically like to know what’s essential to me is on my main machine, a local backup, and a cloud sync service. For the cloud piece, it’s really storage that’s the bottleneck. I could just rsync if the space weren’t so expensive. (It’s also helpful to be able to access documents from the phone when I’m out and about, though.)
I dropped dropbox for sync.com, but I’m having problems now with sync.com. Any other recommendations for this kind of service?
I’d think about self-hosting, but I don’t know an economical way of setting up a server with ~2TB of not-cold storage.
(I don’t want to physically self-host. I want sync and backup reliably available if my house burns down and when I travel.)