I agree on the point of not ignoring these feelings. It’s a tough question, how to change the culture to be more welcoming to immigration in the time of looming climate refugee crises. Just wanted to point out that Sweden has a lower population density (26 ppl/km2) than the US (38 ppl/km2). Density is probably not the issue, although how all that land is put to use might be one of them.

“as AI demand accelerates”. Right, the demand by billionare-shareholders and execs to push that shit everywhere at maximum volume and to blow all the world’s resources into the AI bubble.

Many good ideas there, but not much to get us closer to them. I feel like an essay like this should start from 10, how to make anything good happen, and then base the rest on that analysis. I feel like that’s what they did in Radical Abundance, and that’s what makes it so good.

While reforestation should indeed be encouraged, this is important to keep in mind. Even though monoculture “forests” or “tree farms” can be significant carbon storages, biodiversity is a totally different story. All tree covered land is not equal. Also the estimates on how much forest soil stores carbon vary a lot, and we’re pretty poor at modelling it. However, it seems clear enough that old forests store a lot more carbon in the soil.

You have a right to that opinion but Gnome 4(0) was released a year and a half ago, and we’re on 49 now. Also, I think it’s beautiful and elegant.

Same. I’ve used Gnome, KDE and XFCE (and OS X and Windows) and Gnome is my clear favourite. Claiming that their decisions don’t make sense is clearly false if it works so well for so many.

First three steps? Was “democratizing our economy” one step? No offense, I share a lot of the diagnosis, but calling something so big and so vague a solution or a step is not very productive imho.

Important discussion! Not sure whether the writer assumes too many degrees of freedom for American Imperialism, but in general this was a refreshing and balancing read in the leftist discussion. I do think American Empire needs to decline/disperse/break down for the world to have a chance at a less catastrophic future, but I nevertheless liked his providing an alternative view to “nothing can change unless everything changes”.

IIRC the thing is, you first present the key to the structure in some simple form, and then the rest of the data can be more complex.

Sincerely, great work there! Let’s all become leftists that do something.

I am also concerned of AI-slop, so thanks for sharing. However, I do not think the headline here does justice to the article. There is a more interesting message in there. First of all, the study concerned new content, not all of the internet. Second, and more important, the researchers seemed to have found some kind of a saturation point for AI slop, where it’s share of new content was not rising anymore. I think it would be crucial to understand the mechanisms behind this current limitation of AI slop, and whether they could be utilized to combat AI slop in the future.

Added another wordpress instance to our server (all docker-compose). The craziest thing happened where the second site was kind of working but broken in very strange ways. Well, turns out that for the second site Caddy was pointed to the files of the first instance while passing php_fastcgi to the new one 🤯 😵‍💫 What’s more, having different relative paths for the Caddy container and the wordpress container was not as simple as I thought it was. The devil (the hours of debugging) is always in the details. Managed to solve it in the end!

I think a useful way to frame the issue is Erik Olin Wright’s concept of eroding capitalism: We simultaneously need the insterstitial initiatives that build and prefigure a new logic of economic and communal organization, as we need to tame capitalism and create space for the new alternatives on the institutional level of regions, states and multinational institutions. In my view Hickel is predominantly focusing on the latter, while the authors are focusing on the first logic.

I’m not convinced there needs to be any conflict, as I argue both movements need each other, and both logics are needed to bring about a post-capitalist future as EOW visions. Without the institutionally oriented movement, the new initiatives will not have space to grow and scale, and will be crushed. Without the new interstitial initiatives, the institutionally oriented movement will not have anything to base it’s vision and argument on, to draw support from, to build on, and it will eventually be co-opted by capital interests. I think instead of a confrontation, a recognition of each actor’s place in the bigger strategy would be fruitful. Of course, if one completely disagrees with EOW’s framework then it’s another story.

I love to cheer for linux (Fedora user here 😎) but the math and logic in the blog post is off. Firstly, the linux desktop-share for US government websites is much higher, because to calculate it, you have to exclude iOS and Android. But then again, the data may be skewed and linux-users may just be much more prominent visitors of US government websites. I think this sounds credible as many linux users are technically apt and active citizens.

Nevertheless, if the trend is true it is encouraging! Cannot verify because analytics.usa.gov only provides data a calendar year into the past by default and I can’t be bothered to get an api key to see if more can be fetched.

The real desktop linux share for the last 30 days can be calculated:

windows = 33.2

macos = 11.6

linux = 6.9

linux / (windows + macos + linux) = 0.13346228

“Shell” in this case is somewhat misleading, since in Finland the local St1 energy company has bought the license to use the Shell brand for fuel stations ages ago, but there are no actual Shell stations. Thankfully, as Shell are some of the worst climate criminals, and in comparison St1 are not quite as bad. I would even change the headline, not to give Shell any undue credit.

Good comment. I think one potential audience would be people who (like myself) want to work in the intersections of activism, research and politics. It’s not a huge demographic, but I think it’s a demographic that should take it up as one of their tasks to create more popularized narratives based on this kind of research. Also a demographic that is likely overrepresented here. The abstraction is there, but I still think it’s one of the most motivating research papers I’ve read in a while.

Quick thoughts on this:

I would not equate degrowth and self-sufficiency. While it’s plausible and possibly even necessary to increase self-sufficiency in a successful degrowth scenario, there should still be abundant international trade on important sectors. Degrowth is not a turn away from technology in eg. low-carbon energy production, electrification and bioeconomy.

Ensuring defense capabilities is of course vital, especially in the short term, and can be achieved through prioritization of resource use. Notably, in the long term the turn away from geopolitical competition, weakening the influence of fossil and military-industrial capital, increased self-sufficiency in resource use and increased global solidarity (in eg. trade policy, climate policy, development policy) would all greatly serve to promote peace and the decrease of tensions. This is not to say one should be naive towards governments like Putin’s authoritarian Russia.

While this might sound like a lot of things lumped together, for example this research article is helpful in understanding how all these things relate: https://zenodo.org/records/15529759

Joplin is an awesome FOSS note app and alternative to Obsidian. Love it, I use WebDAV to link between devices. Lots of plugins for extra functionality as well.

Based on the text I would not consider it a functional degrowth economy. What they have so far is the payment system, and some promising emerging use for it. But a great initiative and a great read anyway.

I’d love to like Tuta but man was using their service a constant pain. The search is incredibly slow for any messages not downloaded and keyword matching is somehow weird, the spam filter fails terribly (my spam folder was always full of legitimate messages), assigning rules is clumsy, and you can’t even bulk export mail to switch services:((