X : What do you think about outlawing wood burners?
Me : Domestic?
X : Yep.
Me : Burning wood kills some people. Burning fossil kills the planet. Come talk again when you've outlawed coal, gas and oil first.
X : Did you see the EC is talking about natural gas being green?
Me : The EC was always a shill for corporate lobbying. I'm surprised they're not arguing green coal as well - ipe.com/news/ec-drafts… ... on the upside nuclear is at least green in comparison to fossil fuels.
X : You don't like the EU?
Me : I like the EP (and representation by MEPs) but I've never liked the EC. Unfortunately the power to initiate law resides with the EC ... that was always wrong. It's why you have groups like DiEM25 trying to make the EU more democratic.
X : What about replacing coal with wood?
Me : Domestic?
X : Commercial power plants.
Me : Wood chip? How about not? Try solar / wind / tidal / wave / hydro plus a baseline of nuclear.
Gosh ... sudden flashbacks to 1991. This was exactly the same discussion thirty years ago. How little things have changed. Sure, there has been some progress but nowhere near what needs to have been done.
The whole "let omicron rip through the population" style argument starts to make a bit more sense if the play is a delta and other variant replacement by a more contagious but milder omicron which conveys wider immunity.
Except ,,, Deadly Omicron should not be called mild, warns WHO - bbc.co.uk/news/world-599… ... maybe not such a good idea after all.
What exactly was wrong with going for zero covid? I never understood why we didn't adopt that approach rather than pursue a path to endemic.
Maybe it's just me but I love the honesty in Matt Damon's advert on the future of Cryptoland and how misfortune favours those without privilege - "Earth will become a third world planet, everyone is hustling in some way to just get by" -
Obviously, it's very visionary because it's discussiing version 3.0 or crytpo3 because as we all know version 2.0 is an island -
- wth version 1.0 being a somewhat lame online experience.
Personally, I would have pushed it further and talked about Cryptoland 4.0 or Crypto4 where all future descendants of silicon valley VCs live on starships whilst the rest of the earth has undergone genocide but that was the plot of a truly vile film known as Wall-E
X : The car you drive is a deathtrap?Me : No. The car I used to drive had problems. I tend to use things, repair them and keep them going long beyond where they should. I'm not very good with cars, so I don't do that anymore. My car is 7 years old, so it's almost brand new.
X : Do you do that with everything?
Me : Three major decision points for me in buying any good are 1) environmental cost 2) how easy to repair 3) size and history of market in aftersales components.
X : What about extended warranty?
Me : I tend to look at the aftersales market.
X : What if it's something new?
Me : I look at the history of the company in providing aftersales components for repair.
X : If the company is new?
Me : Then I tend to assume it will break, I might not be able to repair it easily and the company will disappear.
X : Are you positive or negative about 2022?
Me : Hmmm ... depends upon what topic. I'm mostly neutral. Some good, some bad etc. Why?
X : You seem quite negative.
Me : No. As I said back in 2014, I'm mostly negative about 2025 to 2030. At this moment, I view things as manageable.
X : Peace, war and wonder?
Me : An old model, the original pre-dates my mapping work (2005) but I was only able to explain it once I had mapping in place - blog.gardeviance.org/2012/01/moving… ... it started as an observation that I couldn't explain but once I had context ... well.
X : Do you have other models?
Me : Lots. I'm very slow and cautious. It takes a long time to run experiments i.e. my population studies are paced a decade apart. It'll take another two before I'm truly confident. Bacteria are so much easier to work on compared to corporations.
What an effective zero covid policy looks like - aljazeera.com/news/2022/1/2/… and how you keep deaths to less than 5 per 1M rather than 2,000+ per 1M whilst recovering the economy and restoring "normality".
"Strict controls have been astonishingly effective so far" - theguardian.com/world/2022/jan… ... but the question is always how long can such a system be maintained? Long enough to create effective mitigation through vaccines? Longer?
In a country (UK) which seems to be aiming to be "the first major economy in the world to transition from pandemic to endemic" - standard.co.uk/news/uk/covid-… i.e. COVID to be a continual state of affair with re-occuring outbreaks of variants ...
"Public venues CO2 dashboards" ... that is excellent. We need more of this. Every shop, every venue, every office should have highly visible CO2 displays ->
- a consequence of a discussion with @ajbouh on particulates ...
... however, back in Jan 2021, @rleaverton pointed to me to this excellent discussion on COVID / ventilation and the use of CO2 as a proxy - ... it's a pity that a year later that CO2 monitors aren't already mandatory at any event.