Lmst

Caesar

Geek, sailor, nature lover.
Struggling with solastalgia and trying to do my bit for the planet and our future.
🌳🌲🌴🍄

Oh FFS 🤦
https://mastodon.social/@ScienceScholar/114820386332309195

@box464 would that be John the Mastodon?

Caesar boosted:

My thanks to Sven – https://mathstodon.xyz/@SvenGeier/114819445178105464 – for reconnecting me with this which I saw a while ago but had been unable to rediscover.

I now know, courtesy of a post on @RichardJMurphy’s blog – https://www.taxresearch.org.uk/Blog/2025/03/26/from-centre-right-to-hard-left/ – that it was a letter to The New Statesman in 2023

#ukpol

“In 1962 I was a Conservative. I believed privilege could only be justified by service, high taxes on very high incomes were necessary to prevent an entrepreneurial economy becoming a rentier economy, and Keynesian growth would finance public service improvements and a welfare state that steadily reduced inequality. I was suspicious of ideologically driven, large-scale change. These were the mainstream policies of the Macmillan government at the time. In 60 years I have moved from centre right to hard left without changing my opinions.”

Dr Stephen Watkins, Oldham, Lancashire.

Caesar boosted:

This rules so hard ❤️
https://www.status.news/p/the-onion-ben-collins-interview

What has it been like shifting from reporter to media executive, managing a staff instead of filing stories yourself? And do you write any of the jokes at The Onion? Or are you strictly managing the business?

The Onion's process is deeply, beautifully inefficient. Every day, our writers take 150 headlines into a physical writers room in Chicago and whittle them down to maybe one or two. These people throw away the funniest sentence I will ever write in my life six times by noon every weekday.

The point of taking over this place was to preserve this process, which I learned this week is almost assuredly more rigorous than The New York Times.

That's why I don't touch any of it. I just try to get more people to pay attention to the output, and get our work into different mediums and new places. We brought back the paper, reinvested in the Onion News Network, bought a full page ad in The Times for something they were going to write anyway. The role is to make the world-class work they're already doing seep into everyday American life more frequently, and that's working.

You actually can do this, you know. You can just try to highlight the beauty of things you like and not try to vampirically extract value at every step.

If people get one thing out of this whole Q&A, I hope it's that. You do not have to make an A.I. version of your own employees that operate at 1.5x speed but produce purely iterative garbage, especially in media and journalism. People don't actually want that

Caesar boosted:

We’re pleased to announce Bonfire Social 1.0 Release Candidate 2! This update is all about refining and polishing the experience, fixing bugs, and making Bonfire more enjoyable and reliable for everyone. These improvements come directly from your feedback, bug reports, and real-world testing. Of course, we couldn’t help ourselves and also snuck in some exciting new features—like long-form article publishing and more feed customisations...

https://bonfire.cafe/post/01JZN4D3ZMADK2S1KQKW1WQ345?read

Caesar boosted:

McHimbo @tadprOle

Hey, remember when the Panama Papers were released and they showed how basically every wealthy person on the planet was avoiding taxes by offshoring their money and nothing was done about it except the reporter who broke the story was murdered with a car bomb? 10:13 PM - 27 Sep 20 Twitter for iPhone

Caesar boosted:

Firefox is fine. The people running it are not

Mozilla's management is a bug, not a feature Opinion Dominance does not equal importance, nor is dominance the same as relevance. The snag at Mozilla is a management layer that doesn't appear to understand what works for its product nor which parts of it matter most to users.…
#theregister #IT
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2025/07/08/firefox_isnt_dead/

Caesar boosted:

Digital Equity

I grew up in Wales during a time when our language and culture were under pressure. That experience shaped my belief in the importance of digital spaces where people can speak their own language, connect locally, and be truly seen. This is why I care so deeply about language and regional inclusion in the Fediverse. The tools we use shape the communities we build. If we want a more equitable, pluralistic digital future, we must design for it – starting with language, location, and the right to participate fully.

https://jaz.co.uk/2025/07/01/digital-equity/

Caesar boosted:

Ocean Acidification: Another Planetary Boundary Crossed (we're at 7 out of 9 now).
Researchers find damaging acidification in 40% of the ocean surface, and 60% at greater depth.
In hindsight, they conclude that the boundary should've been stricter, too.
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/gcb.70238

Caesar boosted:

New SpaceX report on Starlink conjunctions and deorbits (a.k.a. dumping tons of metal/plastic/solar panels/computers into the upper atmosphere) https://www.scribd.com/document/883045105/SpaceX-Gen1-Gen2-Semi-Annual-Report-7-1-25

Scariest part:
472 Starlinks were burned up in the atmosphere in Dec-May. Assuming each satellite is 800kg, and 50% aluminum by mass, that's 1 ton of aluminum PER DAY.

The natural infall rate of aluminum from meteoroids is 0.3 tons per day. Starlink has been ~3x that, for the last 6 months.

Painting a plane: terrorism.

Murdering tens of thousands of innocent men, women, and children: no problem.

The UK political establishment has some seriously warped morals.

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2025/jul/02/uk-mps-vote-to-proscribe-palestine-action-as-terrorist-group

Caesar boosted:

@integerpoet @luckytran Establishment figures need to understand it's not "uninterested in politics", but "uninterested in *your* politics." And as they've rigged system to benefit them, there's little to engage young people or even let them think that change is achievable at the ballot box.

Caesar boosted:

@cbzo

Most people don't know what "8 standard deviations" means, so to put that in perspective:

If things were normal (ie without global heating), these temperatures would occur one year in 803,734,397,655,348 years.

That's longer than the entire universe has existed.

This can *ONLY* happen with climate collapse.

#Climate #ClimateCrisis #ClimateCollapse

Caesar boosted:

Let that sink in:

“Parts of the Mediterranean are now running more than 5-6°C above their long-term average as well, or around eight standard deviations from the average. In statistics anything more than two standard deviations from the average is usually considered an extreme departure from normal.”

#ClimateChange #ClimateCrisis

https://www.intellinews.com/europe-swelters-in-historic-heatwave-388341/

Caesar boosted:

Next week, France is forced yet again to reduce output and in some cases completely shut down nuclear reactors as the high temperatures heats up the cooling water they take from rivers beyond acceptable limits. This is the new normal now and will only get worse over the following years as we collectively ignore #ClimateChange

Caesar boosted:

Fireside Fedi Episode 26 is LIVE! With me today is @Floppy with @manyfold !

Watch the show live:
#Owncast #Livestream - https://stream.firesidefedi.live

After the show:
#Peertube #VOD - https://video.firesidefedi.live
#Castopod #Fedicast - https://audio.firesidefedi.live
#Youtube - https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCaJ15PXgRihoPku7JMdDnsw

All #Links - https://firesidefedi.live

#stream #owncast #live #interview #firesideFedi #FsF #people #peopleOverPlatforms #protocolsOverPlatforms #fedi #fediverse #open #internet #openInternet #podcast #fedicast #livestream #show #episode #peertube #vod #castopod #writefreely #lemmy #boostplease #fedizen #btfree #bigTechFree #nonprofit #signup #tubeFree

If you're enjoying the show, please consider supporting our new nonprofit btfree.org at https://givebutter.com/btfree. We're currently running https://tubefree.org which is a moderated peertube open for signups right now!

Caesar boosted:

Every so often you see a letter in a local paper that just pisses you off so much - "climate is always changing" and "we have no idea about temperature" - that you feel forced to respond. And in this case, I was not alone. From the Islington Tribune, complete with both @ed_hawkins #WarmingStripes and a plot of temperature from Tamino's Open Mind. #climatechange (My letter, slightly shortened is in the Alt Text)

"It is sad to read Patrick Burke’s letter in which he takes the fatalistic view that “the climate always fluctuates”. He believes that past changes are utterly mysterious and that temperature records go back “only a few hundred years”.
Nothing is further from the truth. We have excellent records of both temperature and atmospheric composition from ice cores that go back 800,000 years. The role of the atmosphere in determining planetary temperature has been known since 1827, that of carbon dioxide since the late 1850s; our understanding has improved enormously in the time since.
The last few thousand years are the period in which human civilisations flourished, when natural variation in climate was extremely small - about half a degree (see attached picture). By contrast, since the end of the 19th century, temperatures have risen by about 1.5 ˚C and continue to head upwards.
The glaciers Mr Burke shrugs about are the source of stable year-round drinking and irrigation water for billions of people in Europe, South and East Asia. Aside from the disruption to food supplies if rivers start running dry for part of the year (the recent behaviour of the Po, the Rhone and the Rhine in Europe being cases in point), melting ice adds to sea level rise to which London is not immune.
None of us like the idea of climate change, but whether we like it or not, the climate of our youth is gone forever. It is a wise man that plans for the future. Mr Burke’s complacency is all too common.

Caesar boosted:

wanderer, a self hosted trail logging app, has added federation via ActivityPub. You can now follow, like and comment on trails shared from other instances.

https://wanderer.to/

#ActivityPub #Fediverse

Caesar boosted:

#solstice #humour #humor

It's the longest day today.
Please don't look at the Sun.
It's bad for you even if you briefly look at it.
The same goes for the Mail and the Express.

Caesar boosted:

if you went back to the time when the earliest recognizable horseshoe crabs appeared—much different from today's horseshoe crabs, but definitely something you would look at and be like, "that's a tiny horseshoe crab"—there wouldn't be a whole lot else you would recognize! some bivalves, maybe. (shout-out to @dantheclamman). our own ancestors would just be boring nondescript little worms. and i think that's beautiful :horseshoe_crab:

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