Podcast
The Government Broke Its Promise to Freed People. There’s a Price to Pay. – Mother Jones
Fourteen trillion dollars.
That’s the total amount of money that the federal government owes to Black people in America for the legacy of slavery, according to economist William Darity and his colleagues.
It’s not an abstract figure. As Darity explains in the final episode of our “40 Acres and a Lie” series.
An inspiring, somewhat comforting episode of The Great Simplification podcast: The Next Generation’s Dilemma: Confronting the Metacrisis.
As the human predicament continues to accelerate, the conversations regarding the future are still dominated by older generations - yet it is their younger successors who will face the brunt of these issues throughout their lives. Today’s Reality Roundtable with Priscilla Trịnh, James Branagan, and Natasha Linhart, focuses on Generation Z’s perspective of the metacrisis, how learning the reality of the human predicament has affected their worldview, and what they see as viable future paths for themselves and the world. How might we approach intergenerational relationships to encourage the transfer of knowledge in both directions, without blame or resentment? What are the unique challenges that young people face when addressing the layers of complexity and risk in the world, and thinking about how to respond? Could fostering community, empathy, and personal responsibility act as a bridge across generational divides, steering us towards a more unified and compassionate future?
The Guardian sent a survey to 843 of the world’s top climate scientists, these were lead authors and review editors of the IPCC reports since 2018. 380 replied. They don’t sleep at night and they are scared.
Hundreds of climate experts expect global temperatures to rise to at least 2.5C (4.5F) above preindustrial levels by 2100…
Reading the responses, he could feel this “overwhelming feeling of frustration and despair and unhappiness at being ignored for so many years, and the difficulty they’re having of living with this information”.
Fascinating.
A Clockwork Orange, White Supremacy, and Palestine by Politically Depressed
A Clockwork Orange is not about human nature, it’s about European fascism. This is at least my reading of it. I’ve been thinking a lot about it as we’re seeing the European centre shift drastically to the right in defence of the ongoing Israeli genocide in Palestine. In this episode I share my analysis and reading of A Clockwork Orange that I think illuminates some terrifying and bizarre aspects of the current moment.
The latest Team Human podcast is an excellent discussion with Carne Ross about democratic confederalism as a bottom-up form of human social organization. Put another way, community-based democracy and economics.
Fantastic.
If you’re concerned about energy and climate this is a fantastic podcast and this episode in particular is worth a listen.
With so many moving pieces, how can we begin to create a coherent story of the world around us and - even more difficult - start preparing responses to coming challenges? What should individuals aware of these converging crises be thinking about in order to prepare themselves, their families, and their communities for a materially smaller future?
Cofounder of Greenpeace and writer of the Deep Green column Rex Weyler helps us transcend the idea that we can fix the environment – or anything else – so we can finally learn to participate as members of a living world.
An excellent discussion between Rex Weyler and Douglass Rushkoff on the current episode of the Team Human Podcast.
From the Guardian podcast: The Cop15 conference brings together representatives from all over the world with an urgent mission: preventing the breakdown of Earth’s natural habitats and mass extinction.
The age of extinction: can we prevent an ecological collapse? | The Guardian
Tim Chaten invited me to join him on his podcast iPad Pros to talk about the new Affinity 2.0 creative suite. Affinity previously set a high bar for design apps on the iPad and Publisher raises it even higher. It was a fun conversation and my thanks to Tim for inviting me on!
The Lawfare Podcast has an excellent episode in which three well informed people have a coherent discussion contrasting centralized social media (Twitter) to the decentralized model that is Mastodon, Fediverse and ActivityPub.
On the other hand, The Context Machine offers Holy Crap Twittergeddon, yet another embarrassing example of a couple of tech guys who have obviously not taken the time to learn how Mastodon and the Fediverse actually work. Instead complain and offer numerous bits of misinformation.
Confused by @username@instancename? Confused by the idea that there are different instances? And yet, they’ve been using email for years? It’s really NOT that difficult to understand.
They come off as entitled old guys shaking their fists at the sky because they don’t want to learn something new. You’re embarrassing yourselves and doing your listeners a disservice.
Talia Stroud from the University of Texas joins us to talk about her project Civic Signals, a project reimagining the Internet as a public space.
Talia Stroud, Civic Signals - Initiative for Digital Public Infrastructure
Heartbreaking. I don’t know how to process the scope of this kind of suffering. Climate emergency future.
An interesting episode featuring a discussion on what a “truly public Internet would look like, from the fiber optic cables to the social media platforms.”
Ben Tarnoff Wants an Internet for the People - Initiative for Digital Public Infrastructure
Nate Hagens' podcast, The Great Simplification is always a deep, but very understandable and enjoyable dive into current, near and long term implications of how we’re living on the planet.
An excellent episode of one of my favorite podcasts, The Great Simplification: Kris De Decker: “Low Tech: What, Why and How”
How does low tech differ from high tech and what does it feel like to live a low tech lifestyle? Why do we assume high tech will always be the solution, and could low tech be a feasible path for a sustainable and fulfilling future?
An excellent and frightening episode of The Climavores Podcast: Today’s food crisis is a postcard from our warming future
I’m looking forward to exploring their other podcasts: Podcasts for a changing planet
A Sense of time
As is often the case I have a tendency to become less regular in my posting here. As I was writing up a description of a recent episode of the Discovery Podcast to share on a slack channel it occurred to me that this is exactly the sort of thing I should post here.
So, this was a fun podcast to listen to… about the perception of the passing of time in different animals. Basically, the perception of time is different based on sensory input, audio and visual, which varies. Flies, bats, and birds are discussed as examples of animals that have a higher frame rate of perception. In a sense, time seems slower for them or at least can be. For bats who can control their frame rate through clicks in the audio-echo based system, time can be slowed down as needed. So, when flying through an open space with little action they can conserve energy with fewer clicks but when hunting an insect they can speed it up from 1 click a second to 200 a second and slow their sense of time for accurate hunting. Kind of like increasing the resolution of what they hear/see as they need to.
TED Talk - Worker Co-ops
"Another economic reality is possible -- one that values community, sustainability and resiliency instead of profit by any means necessary. Niki Okuk shares her case for cooperative economics and a vision for how working-class people can organize and own the businesses they work for, making decisions for themselves and enjoying the fruits of their labor."
A good bit of my life has been dedicated to the creation of co-ops. Mostly volunteer co-ops but still, co-ops. I fully believe that this is a better way to do things.