I could make one of these, but first I’ll need to go to Tosche Station to pick up some power converters.

Beyond All Reason is my favorite RTS at the moment. I enjoyed Planetary Annihilation (despite its flaws), and BAR provides the same sense of exponential growth, escalation, and strategic pivots.

One of my favorite things about the game is that it’s not ridiculously APM-intensive. The controls have a learning curve, but they enable you to “fire and forget” most of your tasks.

If you want to get a sense for the game before diving in, Brightworks does some good casting for both competitive and community-level games. https://www.youtube.com/@BrightWorksTV

Kill Six Billion Demons.

For a spoiler-free sampling of why:

http://killsixbilliondemons.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/throne.jpg

https://killsixbilliondemons.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/WON10r.jpg

https://killsixbilliondemons.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/KSBD55color.jpg

https://killsixbilliondemons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/SOT32-33.jpg

The artist presumably survives on a diet consisting entirely of heavy metal and Adderall.

Nebula link, for those looking.

I also want to reiterate that this goes both ways. A blanket rejection of the legitimacy of disruptive action is every bit as counterproductive as the stance that violence is the only way to enact positive change.

Elected representatives will typically need to denounce any illegal acts to maintain plausible deniability, but that is in service of the “carrot” side of the equation, and shouldn’t be taken as a strategic stance against the movement.

(The interview is about whistleblowers and McCarthyism, so this is all a bit tangential.)

If a million people vote for Law A, but someone holds a gun to the representative’s head demanding Law B, how exactly has the will of the people been respected? The whole point of democracy is that all authority is derived from the consent of the governed, not from the barrel of a gun. Violence is not the realization of democracy. It is a rejection of it. It cannot be protected by law the way free speech is. But political violence as the sole means to its own end is worse than a crime – it is a mistake. When a large group of people use violence in this manner, nations call them terrorists, responding with force instead of hearing demands. (See also: outcomes of the Malheur Refuge Standoff.)

Use of direct action must be strategic, and it cannot be the only piece of the strategy.

There are three types of protest: the carrot, the stick, and the ultimatum. The carrot is meant to evangelize and raise awareness for a cause (MLK). The stick is direct intervention, sometimes violent (Malcolm X). The ultimatum is a demonstration of solidarity and conviction, an implicit show of how many people are willing to move from carrot to stick if they aren’t heard (the March on Washington).

A successful protest movement needs all three. Leave one out, or overemphasize another, and the movement is worthless.

Toyota’s been promising that solid state batteries are just around the corner for about 13 years now. They keep bumping the goalposts back every few years.

Mass transit is the only way that is sustainable

EVs cut lifecycle emissions to about 45%. [UCS][ANL][MIT][IEA]

Public transit cuts lifecycle emissions to… about 45%. [IEA][AFDC][USDOT]

Neither is a magic bullet. Both get their asses kicked by bicyles. Both get better with increased passengers per vehicle. Both can be fueled with renewable energy for additional reduction. Both can be manufactured with renewable energy for additional reduction. Both take surprisingly equivalent amounts of steel, aluminum, and glass.

Public transit offers unique advantages from an urbanist perspective and the liveability of cities, but that’s objectively different from sustainability.

Exactly. Hertz vocally blames higher repair costs and long repair times for the Teslas that make up the bulk of their EV fleet. Other EV manufacturers don’t share those problems.

I always like to say everyone should have a zombie survival plan. Is there any possibility of zombies? No. But there’s a lot of overlap between prepping for the exciting, fictional disaster and boring, real-world natural disasters.

• Having a fireaxe in your trunk might not let you chop off zombie heads, but it’ll sure be useful for clearing road debris after a hurricane.
• Having a bug-out-bag with important documents and bottled water is also great for wildfire preparedness, even if that bag also has a spiky leather jacket in it.

I encourage people to have a civil war plan. Do I expect we’ll have one? Not really, it wouldn’t be a two-sided conflict. But we can expect to see domestic terrorism (see also: insurrection) and potentially police riots (the police enacting organized violence as they did in 2020). If you’re ready for a civil war, you’re ready for the more mundane breakdowns we’re more likely to see.

• Knowing first aid and how to treat a gunshot wound might not find use on a battlefield, but it could easily save someone’s life in a mass shooting or isolated hate crime.
• Having ad-hoc or peer-to-peer communications is useful during riots and power outages.
• If you can move ordinance discreetly across state lines, you’ll probably find the skillset applies to moving red state refugees as well.
• Building a network of people you trust to band together when SHTF? Brother, you just invented a mutual aid network.

So yeah, if you feel anxious about the possibility of a civil war (or zombies), channel that energy into prepping for it, and you’ll find that even if your predictions were wrong, your effort will not go to waste.

So let me get this straight. VW’s US sales (EVs in particular) have failed to meet expectations because people don’t like their overdependence on buggy, outsourced software.

…and VW’s response is to outsource even more software while incorporating a technology base known for being unreliable.

We simply don’t have the time left anymore for any one solution to be expanded to the point it can solve the problem on its own, if that was ever possible to begin with.

This is such an important point. We are too late in the game to have the luxury of choosing a single sector or a single solution to pursue before the others. We need to hit all sectors with a diverse barrage of solutions, and we need to do it yesterday.

To quote UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres, “In short, our world needs climate action on all fronts – everything, everywhere, all at once.”

we don’t have the grid capacity

For those not in the industry, “grid capacity” here doesn’t refer to power generation, but power distribution. With renewables, generation is comparatively easy (storage notwithstanding). But getting the power where it needs to go is not. Right now, thanks to a grain-oriented steel squeeze, the lead time on transformers is longer than the commissioning time for an entire solar farm. Switchgear is also hard to get your hands on, especially with SF6 being phased out.

The good news is that these long lead times are caused by demand. Right now, utilities are racing to expand and reinforce the grid in preparation for the next 30 year’s worth of EV demand, renewable storage/transmission, and distributed generation. Utilities are risk-averse by nature, and do not move without conviction, so it’s rare and noteworthy to see this kind of industrial momentum.

Source: I design MV distribution equipment in the US.

In addition, while some companies try to blame workwrs for recordable incidents, safety is always ultimately management’s responsibility. Safety controls or procedures missing? That’s management’s fault. Workers disabling safety controls out of malice or hubris? Managment is at fault for hiring them. Workers so overworked and tired they don’t notice mistakes while operating lethal equipment? Management. Workers having to choose between having a job and doing it safely? Management. Lack of safety culture? Management.

With power comes responsibility, and in modern corporations, management has all the power.

I’m an engineer who works in an industrial environment, and I regularly have to repair or reprogram hazardous equipment. Here are a few takeaways I got from the descriptions of the Tesla incident:

• Lockout/tagout was not being respected. If you don’t have a lock, yank the fuse and stick it in your pocket. But whatever you do, when working on a machine, you must maintain exclusive control so nobody activates it while you’re inside the approach boundary.
• Why was the engineer in the approach boundary for a “software update?” I feel like I’m missing some important context there.
• Where were the hazard indicators? A hazardous device needs sound or light indicators, so nobody forgets they left it plugged in.
• Where was the machine guarding? If it can kill you, entering the hazardous area should shut the machine off with or without LOTO. I’m partial to interlocked gates, but cordons and light curtains are popular for a reason.
• If the machine guarding was disabled, where were the observers? The last time I activated a machine with the light curtains overriden, I had three other engineers on standby, one at the E-Stop, one with a rescue hook, and one just to watch.

Windows 11 needs Secure Boot and/or TPM workarounds, and while Linux is better than it used to be, but it still hates peripherals. Only 5% of Americans work in the tech industry. Fry cooks and forklift operators often lack the education needed to find these workarounds, and are too busy and tired making ends meet to seek out that education.

In the modern corporate environment, most companies would rather replace their machines wholesale than risk unplanned downtime due to unforeseen glitches. They apply the principles of preventative maintenance to IT.

I like Linux (Mint is good stuff), and I believe in what it stands for. But the human desire for simplicity, reliability, and familiarity should never be construed as a lack of virtue.

This.

Last month, I installed Mint, which is my first ever Linux install. I chose it because people said it would be the most hassle-free.

The bugs currently plaguing me include:

• Steam’s UI scaling is off, to the extent that I practically need a magnifying glass to read it.
• Bluetooth has now decided that it no longer wants to automatically connect to my speaker.
• Discord won’t share audio during screen sharing anymore.

But the big one, the one that made me stop and think, was the keyboard. Right out of the box, my function keys (brightness, airplane mode, etc) would not work. This turned out to be because the laptop was not recognizing its keyboard as a libinput device, but treating it as a HID sensor hub instead. To fix it, I had to:

• Find similar problems on the forums and recognize which were applicable to my case.
• Learn what the terminal was and how to copy code into it.
• Learn that the terminal can be opened from different folders, which alters the meaning of the commands.
• Learn the file system, including making how to make hidden files visible.
• Figure out that a bunch of steps in the forum were just creating a text file, and that any text editor would do.
• Figure out there were typos and missing steps in the forum solutions.
• Learn what a kernel is, figure out mine was out of date, and update it.
• Do it all over again a month later when for some reason my function keys stopped working again.

For me, this was not a big deal. It did take me two evenings to solve, but that’s mostly because I’m lazy. But for someone with low technical literacy (such as my mom, who barely grasps the concept of ad blockers in Google Chrome), every one of these bullet points would be a monumental accomplishment.

The FOSS crowd can be a bit insular, and they seem to regularly forget that about 95% of the people out there have such low technical literacy that they struggle to do anything more involved than turn on a lightbulb.

“Help, I can’t afford rent!” -> “Buy a house, stupid.”

“Help, this software is buggy and unintuitive!” -> “Try using buggier and more unintuitive software, stupid.”

Seems like a solid metaphor to me.

To answer the (probably rhetorical) question of what the hell the Biden administration is doing:

The good:

• The US is back in the Paris agreement.

• The IRA put $369b into renewables. While most people know about the individual tax credits for things like residential heat pumps, solar panels, and EVs, the bulk of this went into building the industry itself with ITC and PTC. For example, there are tax credits for everything from building solar inverters to hiring apprentices. There are also special allocations for underserved communities.

• The IIJA (formerly part of BBB, now in the BIL) put $1t into sustainability. Some highlights include $102b for passenger and freight rail, $91b for public transit, $38b for pedestrian/cyclist safety, and $7.5b for fleet EVs (school busses) and the charging for them. There are also allocations for underserved communities, particularly with local pollution cleanup.

• In late 2022, the EU commission president warned that the IRA and IIJA were not just effective, but so much more significant than any other nation’s incentives that they were diverting investment from around the globe. They warned that the US could soon have a monopoly on green tech.

• Anecdotally, I work in the energy infrastructure industry, and I’m seeing utilities and cities reinforce their grids at a staggering pace, preparing for the engineering challenges of renewables. It feels like we’re in the middle of something big, like people in charge are taking the problem seriously for the first time in my life and making concrete progress.

The bad:

• The Willow oil project. If fully utilized, this enormous drilling operation will increase US emissions by 4%. There is no reason for this move except a cynical vote grab.

• Lease Sale 259. These offshore drilling sites could increase US emissions by 0.7% to 8% depending who you ask. This is believed to be a deal made to secure sen. Mancin’s vote on the IRA.

• LNG and oil exports to Asia and the EU. This one’s hard for me to quantify.

• Mountain Valley Pipeline. This pipeline should increase emissions by 0.2%. MVP claims it will offset the carbon, but… nah, they won’t.

The ugly:

• Biden is all carrot, no stick. He believes that sustainable tech will naturally outcompete fossil fuels if provided enough of a head start. But you and I know fossil capital demands profit from the infrastructure it’s built, and there’s no way they’ll play fair once they start noticing they’re losing. We need to be prepared to make enemies.

• Getting leverage to force China to decarbonize is going to be an issue. The IRA and CHIPS act are repatriating industries specifically to reduce China’s geopolitical influence, but they’re also creating tension with US allies. Instead of focusing purely on domestic production, Biden needs to be building a trade alliance based on climate compliance. But that won’t score votes.

• The electoral outlook ain’t great. Only 31% of American adults think we should be phasing out fossil fuels completely. Only 37% think climate change should be a top priority. Fully 14% think climate change is a hoax, and another 26% think it’s mostly natural. Laws that treat climate change like the existential threat it is simply don’t have public support. I’d say this sounds like an outreach problem, but I’m absolutely the wrong person to ask about public outreach.

Correct, Kandi wasn’t involved in this article, it’s just another documented example of this kind of behavior.