pawsforthought

Agrivoltaics [1] has enormous potential.

[1]: https://www.ise.fraunhofer.de/content/dam/ise/en/documents/p...

It’s known as agrivoltaics [1]. It works especially well with highly shade-tolerant crops like leafy vegetables, stone fruits, berries, etc., but also works with grazing or arable cultivation.

There are various possible configurations of panels that still allow farm machinery to access the crop beneath, and the crop itself is protected from heat stress, wind, heavy rain, and hail. Shading reduces evaporative water loss, lessening the need for irrigation, and the crop has a local cooling effect for the PV panels, which improves their efficiency.

According to an extended report from the Fraunhofer Institute [2], the main challenges are regulatory – at least in Germany, but I imagine similar hurdles in the rest of the EU. Essentially, difficulties obtaining building permits; negation of farming subsidies from enclosure of land; and obstacles to connecting to the grid and receiving feed-in tariffs.

Those challenges all seem surmountable, and there’s surely huge promise in the vast amount of land that would be unlocked for energy generation, never mind the synergies favorable for horticulture in particular.

[1]: https://www.ise.fraunhofer.de/en/key-topics/integrated-photo...

[2]: https://www.ise.fraunhofer.de/content/dam/ise/en/documents/p...

That one image very powerfully captures the total and utter idiocy of car-centric development. Imagine if that thin sprinkling of actual buildings were reconfigured into one dense, car-free urban core…

Methane’s much higher global warming potential (versus carbon dioxide), implies that there’s a threshold of methane leaks above which the warming would be worse than if you did nothing at all.

Incidentally, do you have any advice or resources for assessing the credibility of carbon offsets (for purchase by individuals I suppose, not that it should make much difference)?

On the claim that it’s all just information, consider that a book represents a substantial portion of the life of the author(s) and editor(s). Contrast that to the cheapness of publishing online.

Of course, whatever works for you works for you.

Perhaps public health officials need to pay more attention to the iterated trolley problem. Difficult, for sure, when dealing with the pandemic in front of you, and not the next one that comes, but our encroachment on animal viral reservoirs and insistence on conducting hazardous gain-of-function research all but guarantees the next one will come sooner or later.

I can’t do as you ask, except to say that vaccine skeptics will point to any and every health problem in a vaccine recipient they know as having been caused by the vaccine. (I’ve found that) it’s very difficult to counter that anecdata.

Hold on a second. In no way did this person “cause” people to contract Alzheimer’s. Let’s remember that all of medicine is an intervention. There’s nothing to say that research going in a different direction would have lessened the suffering of people with the disease.

I’m not saying this person is faultless, but scapegoating is hardly a sound response to what is clearly a systemic issue of misaligned incentives.

What does this mean for the hordes of remote workers / digital nomads I wonder?

> The point is that society has decoupled wealth creation from mineral extraction to a large degree.

Have we really though, or is the coupling just obscured to the point of near invisibility?

Take software development. In a bounded context, a solo developer’s continued output of software looks quite clearly decoupled from material inputs. They may work essentially indefinitely, producing new wealth, powered only by renewable energy.

Step out of the bubble of the thought experiment, though, to look at the software development industry more broadly, and what do we see? A vast churn of new computing equipment in pockets, offices, unseen data centers, and embedded at every possible scale in between, with layer upon layer of software abstraction that chews up most of the increases in computing power anyhow.

This heatwave is nothing like that of 1976: https://mobile.twitter.com/scribblerlex/status/1548592171133...

I elided a whole lot of detail, but the claim is that exposure to sunlight is implicated not just in vitamin D production, but also in a whole raft of beneficial biochemical processes, including nitric oxide release from stores in the skin [1]. This promotes vasodilation, thereby lowering blood pressure (and indeed, all-cause mortality [2]).

The interventionist’s prescription, though, is to always wear sunscreen, to take vitamin D supplements, and to take statins to control blood pressure.

I suppose my original point was that this represents a perverse exercise in ditch digging and filling. Using one expensive product to block the sunlight we evolved under, then using yet more products to compensate for the disrupted natural functioning of our skin (which we likely don’t fully understand anyway, so the counter-interventions are a partial remedy at best).

[1]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6830553/ [2]: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26992108/

More absurdity:

Slap on sunscreen, then use statins to counter the high blood pressure (rather than get free exposure to the sunlight we all evolved to live under).

Have both parents in full-time employment, while kids get warehoused in daycare.

Overwork people to the point they have neither time nor inclination to cook for themselves from scratch, instead using meal kits, ready meals, takeout, restaurants.

Alienate people from their own bodies with manipulative marketing that weaponizes their insecurities against them, then patch up the self-esteem with totally unnecessary cosmetics, gyms, fashion, surgeries, etc.

All these activities fatten GDP, but which of them really represent human flourishing?

We measure the wrong things, at least in part because the right things so often cannot be measured. We need to trust in the unmeasurable, but that is antithetical to the technocrat.

Put another way, AC allows rampant population growth in places that are going to become otherwise uninhabitable to extreme heat (if they aren’t already). Swings and roundabouts.

Quite. When there’s a profit motive behind one of two things being compared, and the other is the way things have been for quite literally millions of years, skepticism towards the former should be turned up to full.

See also sunscreen [1].

[1]: https://www.outsideonline.com/health/wellness/sunscreen-sun-...

Cunningham’s Law in action (unintentional on my part) [1]. Thanks for the detailed response, that gives me plenty to read up on further.

Agrivoltaics looks like a very clear win, especially for shade-loving crops [2].

[1]: https://meta.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/Cunningham%27s_Law [2]: https://youtu.be/lgZBlD-TCFE

Indeed. It is a considerable oddity how very material the lives of us wealthy knowledge workers are, yet how immaterial our labor.

Such a shame that more is not available, that was an extremely enlightening work of history and analysis. Thanks for sharing.

I’m struck by his closing remarks:

> Today, the painting is housed in one of the two remnants of the 17th century Buen Retiro Palace, built by Philip IV. The other surviving building is the nearby army museum. It contains the mothballed relics of Spanish militarism, including the massacre at Paracuellos, and other paintings which glorify the Nationalist cause.

> The two museums, which represent conflicting but deeply entrenched ideological positions in Spain, are guarded in one form or another by the military.

> Guernica, however, is subject to stringent displays of security. Plate glass and steel girders reveal the state’s need to appear open to the emblems of dissent, whilst ensuring their cultural containment.

Is that really how the financing of these projects works, though, to say that dollars are simply diverted from renewables to fission? I think not. As a civilization, we surely have the capacity and the imperative to do both. (That said, we should absolutely stop giving trillions in subsidies and financing to fossil fuel projects.)

Not to mention, we have a land use problem. Far too much land is given over to grossly inefficient livestock rearing, but solar installations are hardly better in land use terms, much as I recognize their necessity.

In any case, sites for solar installations are hard to find. Same deal for fission plants, for obviously different reasons, and in spite of their impeccable safety record by the numbers.

Difference being, though, that for every fission plant that overcomes NIMBYism, you get a lot more generation, albeit with considerable delay before that generation comes online, as you note.

All of which is to say that, the realities are not straightforward, it is not a binary choice. We should build as much new, non-carbon-emitting generation as possible.

Energy is the principal civilizational force multiplier. Given the damage we’ve already done that we need to undo, we need as much energy as we can get.

While we’re on the subject, let’s drop the facile pretense that any of these generation technologies are actually clean. They all have environmental externalities. I think it’s incumbent upon us to fairly represent that, and to make a whole-system analysis of this problem.

The thought alone of playing Dark Side Of The Moon on shuffle makes me shudder. Why anyone would butcher albums that way is beyond me.

Even my own playlists (of electronic music, which doesn’t tend to be released as albums) very quickly attain a ‘canonical’ order to my own ear. It’s jarring when the anticipation of the next track is disrupted.

Active listening is a real pleasure. Qualitatively, it’s a very different experience to having music on in the background while doing some other activity, and it merits listening on repeat.

Mentally separating out the different voices in the composition, listening for how they enter and exit the soundstage, how that layering of sound builds up the texture of the music, not to mention melody, harmony, dynamics, pacing, phrasing, repetition, structure, timbre, rhythm, and the interplay of all these factors.

Notably, the supply of Bitcoin was supposedly calibrated such that dollar-parity would be relatively quickly achieved, and there were indeed headlines made, despite it being a totally arbitrary milestone.

Worth considering that OPEC members hold ~80% of known crude oil reserves.

Who even are the victims in the Ulbricht case?

Rejecting human exceptionalism is not the same as saying we are indistinguishable from non-human animals (which would be absurd to argue), rather that our distinguishing features do not make us inherently more worthy.

Indeed we should be paying attention to bees.

Wild pollinators are being assaulted by pesticides and by honey bees outcompeting them. This matters because honey bees do not pollinate all the plants we care about.

Whole regions of China have managed to exterminate their pollinator species, such that fruit trees must be pollinated by hand.

I think the answer lies in your question. We have not observed such behavior (conscious dietary preferences), but that says nothing of capability.

Opting out of meat is only really possible for us because of farming. Other species lack the physical capabilities to farm as we do. Nor can they communicate to us the depth of their cognitive capabilities.

Rejecting human exceptionalism is not the same as saying we are indistinguishable from non-human animals (which would be absurd to argue), rather that our distinctions do not make us inherently more worthy.

I think one extremely problematic part of this trend is that civic participation necessarily suffers when one’s life is in such close orbit around the workplace.

If one scarcely has the time to be informed about the state of the world, then forget being engaged or even organizing others.

Quite right, and you’ll find that Chen (the author and interviewee) is not really pointing to the aspect of adaptation as being problematic, more so the ends to which Buddhist practice is being repurposed.

A few relevant excerpts:

> The Dalai Lama was instrumental in advancing the secularization of meditation. For him it was in part a political calculation. He wanted to make Buddhism relevant and useful to the West.

> I think all the teachers had some qualms about being forced to leave the ethical aspects of Buddhism out of the workplace. They were not being hired to make the employees more ethical; they were being hired to make them more productive.

> Interestingly enough, I think that companies have been able to command great self-sacrifice from Americans in a way that no other institution can today. I would argue that companies or workplaces have become the new faith communities that are replacing organized religion.

> But there are downsides to this. We start to organize our selves, communities, and spiritualities around capitalism’s goals of efficiency and productivity, ignoring other possible ethics of justice, kinship, and beauty. Ultimately, companies, which are driven by the bottom line, cannot offer us a “solution” for a flourishing life.

When I think of the startup I left, and which took so much of my life, it’s easy to characterize it as a quasi cult.