I think not violating people’s privacy with technological data collection is a technological issue, not a political one. Because you can have a society without capitalism or the state, you can have incredibly strong social norms governing privacy and the use of people’s data, but as long as that society is collecting and storing information about individual people, that information can still be leaked, stolen, or misused by whoever controls it.

(I mean, imagine somebody in smart city IT has some sort of personal issue or conflict with another citizen and decides to abuse their access to data collection to gather information about that citizen. Even in an anarchist utopia we’d still have stalkers, domestic violence, controlling partners, child custody disputes, and all the ways people in relationships hurt each other that come with humans being human.)

The only way to guarantee data collection doesn’t violate people’s privacy is to not collect data capable of violating people’s privacy - that is, don’t deploy systems that can collect that data at all.

And that restricts the type of data that can be collected so much that, I think, it rules out most of the benefits of a “smart city”.

Open source code for public infrastructure is extremely important, I agree. But it’s not sufficient. If data about individual people is collected by a smart city at all, or even capable of being collected by the hardware the smart city deploys, no matter what the laws are around it or how much you trust the current government, it could be exploited by a future, less ethical government, or stolen by third parties.

I think the examples you gave would be good ways to gather data for smart city management without collecting data about individual people that could be misused, but the way surveillance is implemented now, that sort of data collection is dangerous.

For example, a sensor that triggers a traffic light is great, but currently just about every major intersection in every major city in the US already has license plate cameras for traffic enforcement. So any smart city program is going to incorporate those license plate cameras, because why would they spend money installing new sensors when they already have perfectly good cameras? And then those cameras will be used for police and immigration enforcement and other privacy violating data collection even more efficiently than they’re already being used.

One aspect of a “smart city” is a system to constantly monitor a lot of data streams about its residents and use that data to allocate the city’s resources more efficiently in real time or better plan future upgrades to city infrastructure.

This obviously raises a lot of surveillance concerns. Some of it could be done in a manner that respected people’s privacy, with, for instance, extensive algorithmic anonymization of data and strict limits on what data is permanently recorded, but that requires a lot of trust and oversight and, I think, the benefits are likely not worth the risk of having that data collection system in place.

Another aspect of a smart city is enhanced local participation through e-governance, making it easier for people to know about, suggest, and weigh in on policies impacting their homes and communities. This aspect could be implemented without any kind of surveillance apparatus and has some appealing qualities imho.

So, you know, it depends on what benefit you’re talking about.

I’m not a big fan of leadcore, no.

A really simplified explanation: the wind pushes the kite, which unreels the kite string, which spins the generator shaft to generate electricity.

When the kite string runs out, the kite folds up or changes its orientation so the wind isn’t pushing it anymore, and the generator reels in the kite string. This takes less power than the kite previously generated because the kite isn’t pushing against the wind while it’s being reeled in.

When the kite string is reeled in far enough, the kite catches the wind again, the kite string starts unreeling again, repeat as long as there’s wind.

It’s actually, I think, a really creative implementation of wind power.

If you want to send a vehicle to Mars and then have it come back to planet earth, you have really have to take double the fuel on the trip.

I think the technofuturists most publicly masturbating about a manned Mars mission were openly talking about making it a one-way trip. They imagined there’d be no shortage of people willing to die on Mars - and had no qualms condemning people to certain death for what would have been the world’s most expensive publicity stunt.

One of the silver linings of the general collapse of, well, everything nowadays, is that the American public no longer cares about manned space travel. We have so many real problems on earth that pissing trillions into the void doesn’t catch the world’s imagination anymore.

And that’s the “no ethical consumption under capitalism” issue. Sure, you need a house to live in, and goods to purchase, and places to buy those goods (ie, malls and other commercial stuff). But how can you absolve yourself from blame for purchasing necessities and not offer that same grace to the companies that produce those necessities for you?

Pointing fingers and placing blame is a distraction. The right thing to do is for you to reduce your environmental impact where you can, purchase goods from the least bad producers, and encourage others to do the same.

Yes, and, who’s buying the products of those industries? The construction industry doesn’t build houses and tear them down again for no reason, you know? Consumers bear a share of the responsibility for the environmental impact of production.

Of course, in exploited colonized nations where products are extracted and shipped overseas and locals are left with nothing, the dynamic is different. But somehow I doubt this is happening in the EU.

I think “we” (secular Westerners) are more likely to appropriate spiritual indigenous narratives, take them out of context, and trivialize them into meaninglessness - as the article describes we did with the concept of mindfulness - than we are to erase them. And I think this will happen because we, secular Westerners, are living lives devoid of spiritual meaning, and it’s terribly tempting to steal other people’s beliefs in the hope we can find a fraction of their meaning in life.

And though I’m sure people online are going to go full Reddit atheist on me and tell me belief in a higher power is ignorant and primitive, every society in human history that we know anything about has either had some sort of belief in higher powers or has aggressively suppressed such belief, and that belief served a function of social cohesion that a lot of the left no longer have.

Honestly, I think part of the reason Trump won - and part of the reason populist, religious nationalism is surging worldwide, Trump being just one example - is that the secular West threw out its own spiritual narratives without replacing them with anything. We condemned Christianity as ignorant, bigoted, and repressive, but we didn’t create anything in its place to serve its role. We walked away from the churches, which were the “third places” of our towns, the centers of our social and cultural lives, and we replaced them with what? Coffee shops?

People need something to believe in, and we told them “do your jobs and vote blue, but it won’t matter anyway because the environment is fucked”.

The environmental left needs the warning not to engage in empty spirituality because so many people in it are desperate for the kind of meaning spirituality gives.

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Yeah. Two years ago, mainstream studies were estimating 3°C by 2100 - and it’s well documented at this point how climate scientists deliberately underestimate predicted rates of warning to avoid being seen as alarmist.

At this point I agree with 2°C by 2040 and bet on 3°C by 2050. 5°C by 2100, 10°C if some of the worst case feedback loops exist.

I think that was also why Qanon got so much play in the right-wing media ecosystem - getting conservatives comfortable with authoritarian big government conservatism.

Trump is going to declare martial law and have liberals killed or sent to camps? Qanon influencers have been telling conservatives that was the plan since 2017. And about 25% of the United States either believed it or thought “yeah, it’s crazy, but wouldn’t it be cool if it was real?”

This is so incredibly short-sighted. Support for solar energy really should be a Republican priority too - it’s business, it’s industry, it’s making money. China, India, the entire continent of Africa, are all going solar. The United States could be a world leader in this trillion-dollar industry - hell, there’s a national security argument that we need American scientists and workers to support the American solar industry.

Never mind the climate issue for now. Walking away from solar leaves billions on the table that other countries are going to snap up. Republicans love subsidizing industry. This is a braindead bipartisan opportunity.

But little Donnie hates solar energy personally, threw a tantrum about it, and no one in the 80-year-old boy king’s court dares to disagree with him.

Thank you!

BP coined the term “carbon footprint”. BP didn’t invent the idea of measuring or reducing individual consumption. Fossil fuel propaganda has very effectively promoted the idea that you can either reduce your individual consumption or fight for societal and governmental change, playing one off against the other. But it’s not either / or. It’s both.

I’ve been challenged in lectures I give, even by scientists, who said, “Ricardo, this cause of yours is minor. We’re discussing the survival of extremely important biomes.” And I said, “Buddy, who decides whether the biome will be preserved or not? Do you think the landowners in the Amazon live on their farms? They don’t. They live in rich neighborhoods in São Paulo.”

Most of the people who elect the politicians who will care about what’s left outside the cities are urban dwellers. If, since childhood, they saw (native) embaúbas and juçara palm trees, you create a bond between people and their territory.

If we don’t convince city dwellers that our biodiversity is incredible, wonderful, and worth preserving, it won’t be.

I think this is incredibly important to remember. It exemplifies two sayings that are not just advice for activism but antidotes to despair: the personal is political, and all politics are local. Your little pollinator garden, your plant-based meals, your creek cleanup project, will have ripple effects far beyond their immediate impact on the environment, because of how it impacts the social environment and the people around you.

And on a side note, using an AI generated TLDR is almost painfully ironic given the content. I’m not really a fan.

Very few western vegans want to imagine that, in a vegan world, domestic pets would go the way of domestic livestock. But a world that takes animal rights seriously is not a world that uses animals for human pleasure, whether that pleasure comes from food or companionship. Vegans aren’t “pet owners” because vegans don’t see animals as things to be owned.

Which is all to say, healthy plant based pet food may or may not be possible, but either way it’s not going to be vegan.

The CCP was founded in 1921 with less than fifty “thoughtful, committed citizens” as members.

Ralph Nader created modern automotive safety regulations practically single-handedly.

Hell, Jesus started with twelve apostles.

“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world: indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.” — Margaret Mead

To get systemic changes in any sort of representative government, you need a critical mass of people to support that systemic change. You don’t need “every single individual making the right choice”. But you need enough people to make the right choice that politicians can pass laws supporting that choice without getting kicked out of office and their laws revoked by the next administration.

I mean, how do you expect to pass laws that make meat more expensive when 90% of the people in your country eat meat and are worried about their budgets?

The idea that changing your diet won’t make a difference is, unironically, meat industry propaganda. We build the consensus for systemic change one meal at a time.

And you’re right to feel that way. Sharing dumpstered food with other dumpster divers who share your values is one thing - plenty of urban communes with shared kitchens do it. Sharing dumpstered food with random people on the street? I wouldn’t do that either 😆

Probably very few people will change their mind. It might sway a few Catholics who are on the fence about global climate change (somehow).

But what the Pope says will have an impact on young people from Catholic families who haven’t learned much about climate change. Especially in places like the Philippines where climate change is quite literally lapping at their shores.

The idea that all Catholics have to do what the Pope says, or even agree with the Pope, is, frankly, anti-Catholic bullcrap - back when I was a very very small child, John Birch Society bigots were passing out pamphlets claiming JFK would be taking his orders from the Vatican.

But what the Pope does have is moral and persuasive authority. And when teenagers are growing up and learning about the world, and TikTok and right wing news are spewing all sorts of climate denial garbage at them, and they’re being bombarded from all sides by the message that all politicians are liars and everybody’s out to take your money and trying to change anything is hopeless - don’t underestimate the influence of someone who’s respected as not just a world leader but a good man.