Litost

Talk openly about how much you hate your phone...

The idea of modelling the behaviour you're trying to teach your kids seems to be a key one as mentioned in this interview with Zak Stein [1]. Obviously the general tone might be a bit too much anti-tech for this forum, but he certainly seems to have some well reasoned points to make and obviously the genie isn't going back in the bottle so working with tech whilst being aware of it's dangers as mentioned in the original article might be the best compromise for now?

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HpHuK4f7Mw4

Much as I love Glastonbury festival, even though I stopped going a few years back, the amount of waste generated definitely seems problematic. I think the festival does a great job of trying to deal with this problem, from the large number of lovingly decorated bins, through to all the site clearup teams both during and after and all the messaging.

But as highlighted elsewhere, it's definitely more of a cultural problem than anything. It's always depressing just casually observing the amount of abandoned tents on the way out and the amount of litter either put in the wrong recycling bins or just discarded less than yards from them. And the problems isn't just the cost which could be spent on good causes - £750,000+ [0] but the accidental effect of say a cow eating a tent peg (it's a working farm).

As someone who litter picks and talks to litter picking groups it's definitely a big problem nationwide sadly.

Probably unsurprisngly this always seems to be much worse in the higher traffic areas with the main stages than it is in say the Green or Healing field areas though their might be demographic and contextual reasons for that also. I've not been to any of the other main UK festivals in a long time, e.g. Reading, V Festival etc. but I'm guessing they aren't going to be any better?

[0] https://www.somersetlive.co.uk/whats-on/music-nightlife/glas...

Here's a story in the Guardian about a women who was visited by local police in New York after her family searched for pressure cookers and backpacks.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/aug/01/new-york-polic...

Though it turns out the truth might be more complicated and it may have been her husbands employer triggering the search, not the FBI? https://www.darkreading.com/cyber-risk/pressure-cooker-flap-...

I use iNaturalist semi-regularly and was about to start using it for a rewilding project I'm involved in, so looked into that and some of the alternatives.

I really like how easy it is to use, the various views on the data (incl. geofenced projects and places), the fact you can export it all back out again, the volunteer and "AI" assist on IDing stuff etc.

But I guess the main other pro for me was that, in the UK at least, most of the data I've put into iNaturalist that's made Research Grade has also been imported into iRecord and NBNAtlas which wouldn't happen the other way round, so 3 for the price of 1. See https://nbn.org.uk/inaturalistuk/inaturalistuk-and-its-place...

I know there's various grumblings about observation quality from iRecord users relating to iNaturalist records, but I'm assuming this is people just not following the published guidance???

I had the misfortunate of needing to hire a car in the UK last year. Ended up with an entry level 2025 Kia (Ceed Estate). Compared with the 2012 Audi A4 I'm used to driving it was a nightmare.

Similar experience, lots of flashing and beeping which is just distracting whilst also being wrong often enough to be really annoying (this is a known problem with speed limits).

Exceeding the speed limit, needing to change gear and by far the worst, active lane assist which pushes you back into your lane if you cross the white line without indicating (I only found this out afterwards as the hire place didn't mention it or leave a manual) and something which can happen frequently if you're driving down narrow country roads where indicating wouldn't have seemed appropriate and may just confuse others.

I spoke to one of the mechanics at my local garage who said you can't permanently turn these features off as they turn back on when you start the car.

I wonder if anyone has who's had an accident caused by being distracted by all these alarms has successfully sued?

Do you mean the Andromeda Strain by Michael Crichton [1] (also a movie) and I seem to remember it being a good watch when I last watched though that might be a good 15 years ago. The idea was novel enough it's stuck with me since and I do often joke with people about it, especially given from what I gather that certain types of funghi can now digest certain types of plastic [2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Andromeda_Strain

[2] https://www.shroomer.com/mycoremediation-plastic-eating-mush...

Thanks, that's good to know.

And I've just seen that you CAN get The Guardian Weekly digital subscription here, free if you've got a print subscription? Though obviously I'm wondering why the Guardian don't advertise this?

https://theguardianweekly.pressreader.com/

Similarly The Guardian has a weekly publication - https://support.theguardian.com/uk/subscribe/weekly

Unfortunately it doesn't appear to have a digital option?

Thanks for adding to this.

Not an expert on this by any means, but I always found this short series [1] quite fascinating on how cyanobacteria over a period of 200-300 million years coverted the planet from being methane based to being oxygen based, created the ozone layer and paved the way for photosynthesis, oxygen and life as we know it. I can't remember if I'm being too optimistic when I'm recalling bacteria doing something similar for the mass extinctions?

See also [2]

[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p09xj73n

[2] https://asm.org/Articles/2022/February/The-Great-Oxidation-E...

I'm not sure of the licence specifics related to downstream water, but in general:

The impact on downstream water is almost entirely positive, the leaky dams they build filter sediment and excess nutrients (often from fertiliser run off).

They also smooth out peak water flow to help alleviate downstream flooding. Obviously this comes at the cost of flooding areas behind their dams, but this can also be positive, because in the increasingly dry summers, the ponds they create help keep the land upstream cooler and wetter.

The beaver site in Ealing, London was mostly funded because it was a cheaper solution to help with downstream flooding than equivalent hard infrastructure and a significant cost of that project was the fence to keep them in.

Even fish which need to navigate upstream, can leap these dams because they have co-evolved with the beaver, and also beavers are vegetarian so don't predate the fish.

Obviously the main problem, is because in the UK we wiped them out, we've not co-evolved with them, hence the problems of them flooding land that would regularly have flooded, but we have decided to use for other purposes.

I highly recommend anyone who's interested in ecosystems go visit an established beaver site, the mosaic of habitats they create can support large amounts of biodiversity.

Do you have any further info on this "one of the complaints of the Roman empire in its twilight years was that everyone wanted to write a book".

I'm curious about some of the seemingly slightly oddball signs of late stage civilisation collapse and I'd not seen this one mentioned before?

I suspect burning $1 notes one at a time might take a very long time (it takes longer than you might expect burning bundles of £50 notes [1]) and as you say "What this guy is missing is creativity", just burning $1m dollars just for the sake of it, unless you're making some creative comment some would probably see as pointless/divisive.

[1] See here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K_Foundation_Burn_a_Million_Qu...

There's been numerous attempts at removing invasives, as you point out some successful, some not.

I found this one of New Zealand, which has particularly unique habitats, trying to remove rats (and others) to save 200 bird species to be particularly mind blowing [1].

Having just done a Rewilding course, my position has shifted a bit and I'm now in two minds about both the NZ experiment and ones like you mention. Much as yours and the other comments say lazy people spreading accidently, or historically, more deliberately non-native species at face value seems really destructive.

But as the Rewilding course pointed out, weeds generally thrive in areas of bare earth and similar niches where ecosystems are degraded and often then are outcompeted as part of succession, but during that time can often provide great food sources for say pollinators (e.g. ragwort).

I'm going to make a bit of an uncomfortable leap here and say, does a similar argument apply to invasives? Nature is nothing if not both resourceful and determined and it also (for better or worse) created us. I've yet to see many compelling reasons as for why that happended (from a design perspective), but it has to be said we're nothing if not the ultimate (so far) extension to that, hopping around the planet spreading species everywhere.

Is this, ironically, how nature "addresses" climate change by having the same actors that helped create it, also be the best actors to mitigate it. If climate change is going to cause such massive disruption to ecosystems, is the human quick spreading of invasives much better at bringing species to places they might now thrive and build future resilience than the slower method non-human forces can manage?

I have to say I don't feel comfortable saying that and I'm not an ecologist, but maybe, bringing this back to the main topic, that's part of a wider Rewilding discussion?

[1] https://www.science.org/content/article/new-zealand-s-mind-b...

The Rewilding term is definitely mercurial, Isabella Tree (Knepp) in this talk [1] sums this quite poetically by saying it's a term that "rewilds itself".

Alastair Driver (Director of Rewilding Britain) in the same talk summarises it as "The large scale restoration of ecosystems to the point where nature is allowed to take care of itself" though there's obviously many other definitions and perspectives.

I think part of the charm of the term, is the ability to apply it in many contexts, e.g. Rewilding people which would be harder if we narrowed the scope to say just natural habitats and landscapes.

This would also allow me to drag in one of my favourite short pieces on Rewilding - Thinking Like a Mountain by Aldo Leopold. "The cowman who cleans his range of wolves does not realize that he is taking over the wolfs job of trimming the herd to fit the range. He has not learned to think like a mountain. Hence we have dustbowls, and rivers washing the future into the sea." [2]

[1] https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/what-is-rewilding-with... original source (which didn't work for me) https://www.buzzsprout.com/2156617/episodes/13299588

[2] https://ia600707.us.archive.org/6/items/ThinkingLikeAMountai...

Yes, as you both mention, great prose and great insight.

One of my favourite pieces of nature writing as it succinctly cuts through what seems to be the modern disease of problem creation masquerading as problem solving so elequoently and hard hitting. Obviously because we so often seem to fail at taking the long term and/or ecological and/or interconnected system view.

It's worth remebering this last phrase "In that simple fashion does the man who outwitted the cleverest of animal criminals tell his story."

whilst reading Aldo Leopold famous short piece from A Sand County Almanac, Thinking Like a Mountain:

https://ia600707.us.archive.org/6/items/ThinkingLikeAMountai...

For any Slay the Spire fans, the Downfall fan expansion is well worth playing. The ability to go backwards through the game as some of the various bosses challenging the normal characters alone makes it a great variant. https://store.steampowered.com/app/1865780/Downfall__A_Slay_...

Similarly I have fond memories of the last.fm era, discovering new music via people with similar tastes who I might often end up chatting to. Wasn't it also around this time that Pandora (using the Music Genome project) was also more readily available, seem to remember that was also a good way to discover new music.

But then I'm old enough, pre internet, to also remember the days when people used to send each other mixtapes or you'd go round someone's house with a small selection of vinyl you'd play to each other.

And then there was the more recent (pre lockdown) era of going to see live bands and discovering new bands via the bands that were supporting or via conversations with other people at those gigs, who if you saw them enough times became your mates etc.

Nowadays I can spin up a program to generate a playlist of everyone playing the Great Escape or Glastonbury (assuming they haven't boycotted spotify) and listen to all of them before I even get there and because of the number of acts, given slightly different tastes, unless I make an effort I might not even see my mates....

It might be this [1] which says "According to the report, the decision was made by officials to continue to build the Birmingham Curzon Street Station to its full specification because it was cheaper than trying to cancel part of the scheme. "

"that the project will plough ahead with building a seven-platform station at Curzon Street, despite just three being required for the reduced HS2 line."

Unfortunately inews doesn't seem to quote the original NAO report, just linking to a list of NAO news items on inews :(?

[1] https://inews.co.uk/news/politics/hs2-waste-new-birmingham-s...

[EDIT] So the ft does actually link to the report [2] from this page [3] saying "The watchdog said scrapping the northern leg of the flagship high speed rail link would take three years and cost up to £100mn, and that some platforms would still be built even though they would never be used."

[2] https://www.nao.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/hs2-update...

[3] https://www.ft.com/content/ecde4265-0269-4169-ac0e-179938667...

There's a good documentary about the John Hopkins research on treating drug resistant depression with psilocybin which unfortunately isn't available any more via the BBC: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000w7bq

From my limited personal experience and having attended various psychedelic talks and integration workshops etc., set, setting and (post) support are all really key to help turn what can be a potentially life changing/affirming/challenging event into a beneficial one.

Not a carbon tax as such, but the supreme court in the UK recently ruled in favour of an activist lead challenge to stop Surrey County Council from ignoring the environmental cost, when granting permission to dig four new oil wells, in what is seen as a landmark case.

Emissions from burning the fuel had been ignored but will now need to be taken into account.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/article/2024/jun/2...

The full length video of his is definitely worth a watch, but if anyone's short on time, there's quite a good much shorter version focussing more on the hierarchy/alpha male side of it -

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A4UMyTnlaMY

Normalisation of Deviance? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ljzj9Msli5o

This drain, drain, faster faster is a question I've been keen to get to the bottom off as I live in an area covered by upcoming River Thames Scheme to help prevent flooding. As I'm doing a rewilding course I wanted to find out how much natural flood management techniques they were using as nature's solution is to generally hold water as long as possible in the landscape to slow down peak flow, as peak flow is generally what causes the worst flooding events. This also has knock on benefits helping mitigate pollution and soil erosion etc. I've been to two consultations and am still none the wiser, though I've another consultation to go to.

Whether this is tree/vegetation cover or beavers (despite being in the middle of surburban sprawl, Ealing have secured funding for beavers as a potentially cheaper solution than hard infrastructure for flood mitigation and a significant amount of the beaver costs were the fencing to keep them in despite England having some wild beavers).

Similarly I've seen the Pennine Way in the South Pennines turn into a fast flowing stream during one period of wet weather due to the inability of the land to hold all the water and houses there get flooded as well.

Obviously the clash here is between the human and natural ways of doing things, building static houses on floodplains doesn't fit with more chaotic natural solutions in a dynamicly changing landscape with increasingly erratic weather patterns...

Is this what happens nowadays when you sign up to a dating app? I mention this only slightly tongue in cheek:

a) Because it is being argued by some as a good thing that you have an AI do your flirting for you? "we can free people from writing a thousand introductory messages, giving them energy to focus on the humans on the other side." https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/jun/06/ai-bot...

b) As someone mentioned the turing test, as a comment on the Ashley Madison scandal someone did suggest the chatbots on there had passed it. "Claire Brownell suggested that the Turing test could possibly be passed by the women-imitating chatbots that fooled millions of men into buying special accounts" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashley_Madison_data_breach

There's an ongoing thread about Dragonfly here - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36018221

This would seem to be what might be variously called a Tragedy of the Commons [1], a Multi-Polar Trap [2] or similarly the Prisoner's Dilemma, but at scale [3].

Obviously in the original Tragedy of the Commons, farmers with sheep grazing the common land, the tragedy was that if you didn't try to graze as many sheep as possible, someone else would and so you'd lose out, but because everyone was doing that the commons died out and everyone lost out.

(Disclaimer Generalisation) but that would seem to be what's happening here, "everyone" trying to maximise their utility just eats the system and it becomes unsustainable (be that content viewers trying to get content for free, Youtube trying to maximise revenue via maximal advertising, advertisers producing shit ads that I hope nobody ever acts on but then how else does money enter the system?, content creators and AI coders trying to make the best living).

Though unlike the original Tragedy of the Commons where everyone suffered equally, there's an interesting irony that the (content creators) who produce the most value (without which nothing else exists) have the least (individual?) power in the relationship probably "die" out first.

You could equally point to a similar situation in the music industry or any industry for that matter that doesn't have a strong enough or fast enough feedback loop to detect that the system is eating itself, but also have some ability to act on it.

As DanielS points out in the video below it's a coordination problem. If enough individuals in any of the groups defect from maximising their utility the system is stable. Be that content providers providing free content, advertisers giving free money without making you watch adverts, content viewers paying for content so no advertising needed, AI coders not producing a mechanism that summarises videos so people don't watch the videos and hence the adverts so no-one gets paid, <Youtube something>). You can extend this to coordination outside the system, you could argue this is why governments exist to provide a meta-framework that makes it illegal to do something that undermines the system, e.g. by having laws that prevent watching content for free.

You could also coordinate this at the meta level, if everyone involved in the problem got together and made sure that everyone was being looked after or say the content creators got together and collectively refused to provide any free content...

But obviously in the current system none of this is really possible, the more things change the more they stay the same, this would seem to be the price of progress, the same problems arising over and over just at increasing scales (and stakes). Just see the problem of musicians now back to square one because of streaming...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dEcLXqwZJQw

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoner's_dilemma

EDIT: The Prisoner's Dilemma isn't the best example here as prisoner's escaping jail despite doing a crime does have a negative societal impact, just I'm not aware of a better example from Game Theory?

TODO: Find a better explanation of Multi-Polar Traps that doesn't refer to Israel or Russia...

I guess it's always worth having a Plan B, but Nate Hagens and Kim Stanley Robinson (sci-fi writer of the Mars Trilogy) discuss this and don't necessarily agree, obviously depending on what definition of "polluted beyond help" you're using etc. [1]

Nate Hagens (00:43:15):

"And to me it's very smart and famous people, Stephen Hawking, Elon Musk among them say, "We're screwing up Earth. Climate is going to be bad. We need to colonize outer space and head to Mars." And that makes just zero sense to me, because on the worst thermonuclear runaway-climate scenario, Earth is still going to be a paradise next to Mars. I mean-"

Kim Stanley Robinson (00:43:43):

"I agree with you completely. That is a case that has to be made. And the thing about people like Hawkings, the thing about people like Elon Musk is they're smart, they aren't that smart. They aren't wise, they aren't philosophers, and they're not ecologists. Very often physicists will assume that ecology is just physics in action, and that they've got it all sussed out because they know the rules of physics and they can do rocketry. But you can't do plant biology just knowing rocketry. It's more complex, it's more interconnected, it's a more-complex science. And many physicists will arrogantly say that, "Because I know the laws of physics, I know everything." But they don't know how a marsh works. They haven't studied biology enough to understand their own ignorance. So how smart are you if you don't know how ignorant you are?"

[1] https://www.thegreatsimplification.com/episode/66-kim-stanle...

Does this explain the plot to Independence Day ;)?

I was curious about this, my highest match was 0.47 and I have no alts, maybe I'm also a unique snowflake, or haven't said anything noteworthy enough to have been deepfaked yet ;).