The Red Green Show

Easy-going comedy with minimal plot, mostly there to tie together an episode of shorter skits. Some Boomer humor, but not too cringe, I think.

Who set those rules? Is there standards body that promulgates them? I remember that social media emerged as a term to describe media on which the users provided the content, rather than traditional gatekeepers like newspapers and TV networks. Wikipedia agrees, using special jargon, distinguishing between monologic and dialogic media models.

Reddit is quintessential social media.

Sir Terry Pratchett tweeted his own meeting with Death.

I don’t think that that was the claim. We have car terrorism now, and since the 1980’s according to the Wikipedia list of incidents, and bollards can help protect potential victims. It’s not a new technology, they knew about them in 1931, so what’s our excuse for not installing them?

It feels like 5 years ago, but it was only back in January that a man used a truck to kill 14 people in a ramming attack on Bourbon Street in New Orleans, LA. The city had been warned, and knew of the need to have bollards installed, but cheaped out on temporary bollards, which were apparently malfunctioning at the time of the attack. There had been a vehicle-ramming attack at the Christmas market in Magdeburg in December, and an attack in Munich following in February.

I’d say that the title is right on. Car terrorism is a thing.

It’s even sillier when you realize (hah!) that -or came from Latin, and -our came from Old French, and both had been used interchangeably in English for at least a century when Samuel Johnson decided to use -our in his dictionary, and Noah Webster decided to use -or. So Britons and Yankees are equally (in)correct.

Milorganite is also organic, human-made content.

That just makes it worse! (From my point of view here.) People behaving reprehensibly because an authority figure asked them to do it? That’s just the Milgram experiment, but without any apparent hesitation!

It may not be the most poetic, but I’m partial to the word holdfast, which is a biological structure that anchors organisms to surfaces. “Hold fast” was an order given to sailors of yore, telling them to grab tightly onto the ship to avoid being washed overboard in storms. The word suggests images of kelp, mussels, or sponges doing the same, determinedly holding fast against the waves, figurative and literal.

The Milgram experiment. The Zimbardo prison experiment. The bystander effect. At the end of the day, humans are just monkeys with smart watches. As social primates, it’s really hard to be the one to stand up against the crowd. Our brains decide how to act based largely on the reactions of other humans around us.

It’s disheartening.

Yes, if Americans rise up, I think it’ll look a lot more like The Troubles than the first American Civil War. For one, because there aren’t clear, geographical divisions this time, and indeed, I would guess that guerilla tactics are going to be more effective than guns against a military with overwhelming conventional warfare capabilities.

Is it? That’s exactly the kind of rhetoric used to defend Israel, and bombing schools with kids in them is exactly what they do. American police train with the IDF. That kind of brutality we (ETA: as in “the U.S.” broadly) support abroad comes home eventually.

They’re called “snout houses,” because the garage makes them look like they have a big, ugly pig snout.

What the hell is it with the Sterling Archer window borders? Y’know, where the active window is black, and the inactive windows are slightly darker black?

Sort of meta, but: Alienation.

Buildings plopped down in a rectangle with a standard layout—boxy building with door facing parking lot—with no ornamentation, no contextual clues about what’s inside, and worst, no consideration or design dialogue whatsoever with the surroundings. It’s like a city as Lego set, each building on its own bar plate, and they can be shuffled around in any order. Designers talk about design language, and this style says, “fuck you.”

Food that just shows up at your door after ordering from an app, made by a “ghost kitchen.” Possibly located in one of those boxes-with-a-parking-lot. No connection to other humans. (Or is that a tire distributor’s headquarters? No way to tell.)

Company web sites with no information about who runs the company, or where it is, or much about its connection to the community. The product is probably made on spec by an anonymous Chinese factory, so even if you can talk to somebody, they’re either in a contract call center serving hundreds of companies, or somebody not paid enough to care.

Speaking of low-paid lackeys, the fast food-ification of the landscape. They’re getting rid of dining rooms, so your only human interaction is briefly through a window. If you’re lucky. They’re working on getting rid of that, too. Then, you’re sealed behind a windshield, in cars that get more fortress-like every year, never seeing another human face.

A lot of people say that they’re introverts and hate people and like it this way, but we also have a pandemic of loneliness and poor mental health , so…

EVs don’t put out tailpipe emissions while in operation, sure, but that’s an highly reductive view of the system. The latest numbers I’ve found show that an EV car has about 30% of the total lifecycle CO₂ emissions as an ICE vehicle. That’s production, operation, maintenance, and disposal. A lot better, so if we drastically cut back on the number of vehicle miles traveled, that’d be a win. But that’s not what’s happening. Instead, the profusion of cheap EVs in China means that more people can afford them, there will be more vehicles on the road, we double down on automobile infrastructure and lifestyles, and the environment, human health, and long-term sustainability will take a hit. It’s the Jevons Paradox, which says that if we find a way to use a resource more efficiently, we use more of it.

What’s more, the transition to EVs won’t even stop the CO₂ emissions. The emissions will just come from a new source. World-wide, we have a fully-functioning fossil fuel extraction industry. Petrochemicals are the energy and raw material input for so many industrial processes (including the production of EVs), it’s not going to shut down. If we stop using it for fuel in our vehicles, the law of supply and demand means it’ll get cheaper for other uses, which will ramp up. Indeed, our total global CO₂ emissions keep rising.

What’s necessary is to re-design our societal systems to solve a bunch of problems, like the ecological catastrophe of habitat destruction and collapsing insect and bird populations, or the looming fresh water shortages, which don’t get much press because of the climate change issue. Drastically reducing the number of vehicle miles traveled to 10% of the current level would have a much greater impact, even if all of those miles were all done in ICE vehicles, compared to maintaining the current VMT but doing them in EVs. That’s why I don’t agree that EVs are necessary to lower CO₂ emissions from ICE vehicles. It would be really great if we drastically reduced VMT, and did those miles in EVs, but that’s not at all what’s happening.

(I’ve ignored the last-mile logistics issue because it’s small potatoes by comparison.)

It’s a multi-generational problem, so we should start fixing it now. Why is it going to be easier to solve 30-50 years from now? Why should we wait until we’ve transitioned to EVs to start the process? What is it about EVs is going to make that easier?

Yeah, all those losers born in Soweto in 1971 who haven’t used their enormous wealth to fund a bunch of different business ventures. What are they even doing?

No, I really don’t agree. Like, at all. The problem is largely that geometry of vehicles creates those highly-destructive, resource-intensive, low-density population areas, and that’s the problem that we need to address. In that respect, EVs are just like any other vehicle. Same streets, same highways, same parking lots, same garages, same bi-weekly grocery runs to the store 5 miles away. We can start to address those problems (zoning, building codes, environmental regulations, land-use, tax structures, and such) now, and it won’t be any easier after 20 years of further automobile-oriented development while we transition the fleet to EVs. It’ll just be 20 years more entrenched. Yeah, EVs help somewhat, but the way we’re approaching them now, they’re like treating 10% of your cancer.

(I take that back if the EVs we’re talking about here are e-bikes and micromobility devices.)