machination dot org avatar

machination dot org

"Beef guzzlers: 12% of Americans eat half of the country’s cow meat"

A single cow can belch up to 264 pounds of methane in a year, the equivalent of burning almost 4,000 pounds of coal or driving a gas-powered car about 9,000 miles. That’s why climate advocates say people should eat less beef if they want to help ease climate change.

…

Who, exactly, comprises that group? “There’s some of everybody,” Rose said, but men and people between the ages of 50 and 65 are most likely to be big beef eaters, the study found.

I don't know what the carbon outlay of Ozempic is, but my overweight steak-and-burger-loving diabetic-amputee-Dad doesn't even feel like ordering a steak now that he doesn't have the appetite to finish more than a third of it.

First day of school blues

Today is the first day of school in Washington, D.C.

Every year this heralds a spike in traffic across our neighborhoods: School zones have an active impact on traffic flow again, more people walking and in crosswalks at intersections, parents who use cars to drop off kids and commute are suddenly out on the road at the same time, the few school buses D.C. uses for specific purposes are now on the road, etc. (I’ll save the digression on how the city’s public transportation doesn’t seem reliable for many or entirely safe for a lot of school students).

This is all as expected. It’d be great to get more of those cars off the road but in lieu of that…

How about not putting more road crews out this same morning? While the fairer months are the time for road improvements and projects that ultimately end with road repair, this actually seemed like an easily avoidable conflict for today.

I encountered more excavators, loaders, equipment trailers, traffic cones, closed-off streets and street sweepers this specific morning (not to mention, in our particular neighborhood it was also a trash collection day) than I have any morning in doing drop-offs and running errands all summer. As the “household majordomo” I’ve been making these runs frequently and with comparable timing — this was exceptional. It seemed as if all these crews were trying to get their summer homework done before homeroom after slacking off all summer.

The sudden burst in road work seemed to have a disproportionately powerful compounding effect and I think it would have made a notable positive difference (in chaos, safety, emissions, time saving) to pause or delay permits for all that activity by a day or two as the city settled back into its school year routine.

Or you know, make public transportation work (and in the long run, reduce how much that road work has to happen because of that too).

I couldn’t take much of the Republican debate (there was already bile pooling in my mouth just after it began) after I heard the sui-eco-cidal answers to the climate crisis question.

Watching the Republican debate… I don’t know for how long. DeSantis looks like he’s hanging on for dear life lest he fall over from on top of those lifts.

My own identity is federated (as well as idle or abandoned and isolated) across many networks and platforms. I feel like some sort of social web equivalent of a vector analysis diagram might reveal a true center, or destination I suppose. Some notional node between the nodes.

Feelings about the half-past dead

It had come to feel trite to, along with “everyone else,” stop and post something, conspicuously sharing that one was aware of and appreciated, ostensibly mourned, the passing of someone well known. I have stepped back on social media, so I didn’t say anything about Robbie Robertson as soon as I heard.

But I was listening to World Cafe (I happened to be listening to the WEXT stream, pretending I can feel my idealized version of optimal weather from Upstate NY wash over me with the music being broadcast out of the Mohawk Valley) and they rebroadcast an interview with Robertson.

This is what you do when anyone you care about passes. You stop, you appreciate them, you tell others about them, and maybe you make a little vow about how you’ll maintain their memory for yourself going forward.

And while I am not of that generation and other demographics for whom Robbie Robertson was a first-order cultural contemporary, maybe even hero, the tentacles of his and others' music and that counterculture have stretched out and touched my whole life in different ways through family and geography.

Good for him. Good for me.

RIP.

What the hell happened to printer friendly CSS‽

What the hell happened to printer friendly CSS‽ Especially you fucks publishing 4,000... 8,000 plus word essays. Jesus. I'm doing your work for you, but just for myself with dev tools or stop the madness, just so I don't go insane. Or maybe because you've already driven me there.

And, I see all your ridiculous libraries and frameworks which, even minified, add kilobytes (if not megabytes) of cruft. Maybe not the case when also compressed, but now you're just making me use cycles on my end to realize that "benefit." It goes somewhere kids. It goes somewhere. You shit it out, we have to eat it.

Fuckin' Christ.

A well-placed isolated thunderstorm seems like a good excuse to get the kiddo off the bike and into the brew pub for an unscheduled lunch out. Maybe an indictment will get beamed in as a certain grand jury comes back from their lunch break. 🚲⛈️🍺🥪📺🤷🏻‍♂️

Dave and Art did enough damage.

…the least we can do is take their money and run. Or something.

Today was the first day in a while without structured plans and without starting out with a steaming hot morning en route to a 90F high, only to feel even hotter.

So my son and I got on the bike and went to our town’s free museums… yes, the Smithsonian Institution. We’re lucky to have this and I try to remember that and make use of them, for my own benefit, but especially for my toddler’s. That said, I glaze over portions I think I know sometimes… and sometimes I discover something that might’ve been on display for years because I was finally paying attention. Among the nuggets today was a little bit of locking on to a couple of the big donor names behind some of the exhibits, and the politics of those names still being on plaques or carved in stone, despite disgrace or challenging content.

The Smithsonian Museum of Natural History (my son calls it the “Dinosaur Museum,") and its Hall of Fossils doesn’t seem to shy away from Climate Change education. I say that because it is the David H. Koch Hall of Fossils and that pig fucker spent a lot more of his money to stop society from understanding and confronting the climate crisis. Either the Smithsonian didn’t agree to any dictates on the substance of exhibits (Koch’s name is also all over a massive human evolution exhibit which seems both accessible and solid, as far as I can tell), or they said “fuck you, Dave,” after he died. I assume the former.

Meanwhile, across the Mall, at the National Museum of Asian Art, once more prominently known as the Freer & Sackler Galleries they’ve changed the emphasis, but have apologized for having to technically keep the Sackler name on the gallery. Apparently, they’d have to give up a bunch of their stuff.

I don’t know the true how and why behind all this, but it sure seems that one museum was better at negotiating a donation and its conditions than the other.

Over at the American History Museum, in General Motors Hall of Transportation, also paid for by ExxonMobil, among others, the electric car does get a mention, as does Ralph Nader… but you kind of have to know the current state of the art and some of the history to appreciate the effort made to get that technology (and its long history!) and, separately, Ralph (a friend, a former boss), included in this exhibit.

Gratitude in absence

My son is at his “Grammas’” (he intuitively started using a gender neutral plural diminutive colloquialism when he was about 1). I get an evening to myself. My wife gets an evening off with a girlfriend, before re-engaging in her 70+ hr per week job. I miss my son and I’m grateful for the break. I’ll also be better at making sure he knows how grateful we both are for him while keeping the guard rails up.

Watching Lewis Black’s beginning-of-pandemic stand-up special … there’s a duality to the experience now. “It’s been so long, wow” and “we never (or I, anyway) quite got back to normal.” Understandable this time. I’m still pissed at all the things lost from before 9/11 though.

Re-watching Slacker, for the first time in a long time, and it is kind of terrifying how relevant it is.

Regular programming will be interrupted

Just Stop Oil protesters interrupt opera at Glyndebourne festival (The Guardian):

“Our highest priority was the safety and security of everyone on site and we would like to thank our staff and performers, whose calm and professional response kept everyone safe, and disruption to a minimum.”

I’m with the demonstrators on this. I think everyone’s highest priority should be the climate crisis. This doesn’t mean one can’t wind down and go to an opera, but only if and until society actually realigns to this priority, expect the rest to be interrupted lest we keep thinking everything is fine.

Keep it dumb, dummy.

Will it be possible to buy a dumb electric car? No Internet Protocol dependence and certainly no fucking ChatGPT? I don’t mind contemporary local computer-driven safety features—not talking Model T dumb. I like the idea of bringing extra brains and network connectivity to the vehicle with me (e.g. via smartphone) but entirely optionally.

I’d still like to go for a drive without anyone but… the CCTV and imagery satellites and drones knowing where I am. 😮‍💨