Energy Doc Brown needed to power his flux capacitor in Back to the Future: 1.21 gigawatts Energy needed to power a proposed OpenAI / Oracle data center in Saline, MI: 1.40 gigawatts

My first thought is a basic property of abundance is that it doesn’t require distribution

“In a world of widely distributed abundance”

Did a Private Equity Fire Truck Roll-Up Worsen the L.A. Fires? "During the LA fires, dozens of fire trucks sat... waiting for repairs the city couldn't afford. Why? A private equity roll-up made replacing and repairing those trucks much pricier." www.thebignewsletter.com/p/did-a-priv...

All of my parents cutlery is family made and easily into its second century of daily usage.

“DEI was a failure. It was a failure not because it wasn't implemented properly or because we didn't try hard enough. It was a failure because the civil rights movement wasn't about elite diversity in the first place -- it was about lifting up the poor.” www.theamericansaga.com/p/dei-is-a-f...

Like anything, context matters. Find common ground on the right stuff.

“This has got to be a society-wide cultural shift that we have to stop looking at this vital force of nature as something we can conquer or control, and learn how to live with it” 🔥

Dating from the 1050s, in the reign of Edward the Confessor, this is Britain’s oldest door, made from oak, in a passage leading to the Chapter House of Westminster Abbey www.westminster-abbey.org/history/expl...

+ for advocating for adaptation and resilience - for using the term “mindbomb”

They shouldn’t have to work in these conditions. Masks or no masks

Said goodbye to the sweetest chinchilla yesterday.

Trying to figure out whether “actual people” refers to everyone in red states or just those that vote blue.

'Thuya Burl Tripartite' ~ Wooden spoon carved in Thuya burl, Serviceberry and Ebony with Holly spacers. The bowl is Serviceberry wood... a favorite! An understory tree that is native to Canada and every U.S. state except Hawaii. #spoon #spoontaneous #art #craft #design #woodworking #carving 🥄

You know that screenshot is very old because Google is still showing the best result at the top.

Progress on the timber framing elements for our current project. #timberframing #architecture #design #home #vermont

I wonder how Arthur Schopenhauer (1766-1860) conceived of health. Probably very different than we do today

“Social science and medicine are not interested in discovering causation. They are looking for evidence to justify policies that will impact populations of people. And statistics has been one of the most powerful methods for population-level, bureaucratic assessment” www.argmin.net/p/bureaucrat...

“In our exuberance to find these cancers, we have basically turned a lot of healthy people who are not destined to die from the cancers into patients” www.carolynbarbermd.com/9242-2/

Most learning is not the result of instruction. It is rather the result of unhampered participation in a meaningful setting." Illich, Deschooling Society

I don't want my fridge to have a camera or Wi-Fi. I don't want my dishwasher to be smart. I don't want my washing machine to text me. In fact, I kinda miss knobs and dials and knowing big appliances would last 20 years and could still be repaired.

Just a reminder since it's garden-planning season for those in the northern hemisphere, that Permapeople has a free and non-commercial garden planner. More elaborate than a grid-based planner, and more suited for food foresters and homesteaders, but it's awesome! permapeople.org/plans/new

Michigan plans to clear 400+ acres of state forest near Gaylord for solar farm www.mlive.com/environment/...

“It’s one banana, Michael. What could it cost, $10?”

LotR, the cheap movie version.

Nice to see old Bernie resurfacing again

Do you like foam products? Can you see why we use straw as insulation? Air insulates. But the reason is not so much the hollow core. #strawbuilding #nonfossil

What’s new about this is not that you might be talking to a bot but that it’s clearly labeled as such

My wife is a willow weaver. Here’s a coffin she made (right) and a coffin base in progress (left). I made the “bodkins” (awls) for her with a blacksmith friend recently.

A well-written & thoughtful piece. Traditional small farms are widely abandoned - here in Spain very few remain, mostly farmed by older people with other sources of income (I.e pensions from work in the city). It should be possible to make small farms profitable but policy makers don’t care.

Ever since the class project on ancient Egypt, the children have taken to calling a particular grave 'the Moss Mummy'. They leave her all sorts of afterlife offerings. I'm told she is fond of sherbet dabs, rhubarb and custard chews as well as certain bubblegum cards. – Joanna Vickers, 1982 #VOH

I often browse the comments on articles like this because it is striking how little difference of opinion there is on this site. I’m always on the lookout for thoughtful disagreement. Frequently disappointed.

I agree with this article, and apparently disagree with like 99% of people on this site, judging by the comments.

My best lightning video of 2024. This slomo shot is insane. Really love how it disappates at the end

My 2nd most popular Substack essay detailed how and why knowledgeable and intelligent people are especially prone to bias, tribalism and extremism -- but are also especially likely to view ourselves as *less* susceptible than most to these very tendencies: musaalgharbi.substack.com/p/smart-peop...

My most popular Substack post came out right after the election. With tons of data, it debunked many popular narratives about why things shook out how they did, before advancing an alternative explanation that better fits with the evidence: musaalgharbi.substack.com/p/a-graveyar...

Cosmological wonder is at the root of all sacred wisdom. Maybe that’s how return home again to this world, with humility and open minds?

Illinois’s flag is fine leave it alone.

When the Great Lakes are the new Mediterranean, Rome will be in Michigan

"Reading can be slow. It can be quite challenging work – and not simply because our attention has been increasingly conditioned, fragmented with distractions and disruptions. ... So it isn’t simply that we no longer read at length or read deeply; we no longer value contemplation."

They’re not ripping each other to shreds, they’re debating. Internal debates are healthy, you guys should try it more often.

At risk of repeating myself: The Luddites weren’t against technology. They were against getting put out of work by a technology that did a version of their job faster but worse, in the service of increasing profits for their bosses.

Morning all☕ Have a wonderful Wednesday whatever your plans ☕💖xx

It must be so *satisfying* to be a beaver

Orwell wrote: So long as I remain alive and well I shall continue to feel strongly about prose style, to love the surface of the earth, and to take a pleasure in solid objects and scraps of useless information....

The reason we like to go fast is so we can pretend that what we’re passing doesn’t exist

Please don’t anthropomorphize computers; they find it very annoying.