I agree with his larger point. Ambitious technocratic projects require statecraft and must be tied to nation building and geopolitical ambitions. This is opposite of most environmental politics, which actually mistrusts statecraft and attempts to shortcircuit with science.

— Ted Nordhaus (@TedNordhaus) March 18, 2019

Yes. And the left is giving up a lot by demonizing nationalism, effectively making most environmental projects impossible.

Look, I too like the kumbaya vision of a global and borderless world, where we all hold multi-hued hands on a verdant hillside and shit. But that’s not the world we have today or that we’ll have anytime soon. In the real world where we currently live, battling against corporations and seizing control of capitalism and fighting climate change all must be done at the national level.

And guess what? It requires a national purpose and unity…which is also called nationalism. There is no other countervailing force at the moment that will come close or has a chance of developing anytime soon. I get it, the kumbaya on a hillside dream is much more appealing, but that’ll get us right where neoliberal fluid capital wants us: precisely nowhere. Because it is, as mentioned, a dream.

By equating nationalism with racism and with it being evil and bad in all cases, the left is doing a huge disservice to history and to the future, and pretty much killing any possibility of fighting climate change. Good job.

if we want to reduce the amount of garbage in the world, we must work to address the root cause. this is why i have introduced legislation to make everyone’s garbage cans smaller https://t.co/NDHwKh6KXU

— Casey Johnston (@caseyjohnston) March 20, 2019

It’s even worse than that. It’s like if we made the solution to pedestrians being struck and killed by cars that the pedestrians had to wear huge flashing lights and have loud sirens going off all the time, that required carrying gigantic backpacks full of batteries.

Sen. Gillibrand’s proposal is evil and harmful, and will hurt the most the people who most require the medication. But that’s America — we throw those under the bus who don’t have the energy, time or social status to object effectively. As long as it scores political points or the prudes are happy it’s all good (see FOSTA/SESTA for another example).

Turns Out That Trillion-Dollar Bailout Was, in Fact, Real. A new Washington Post piece fudges the history of the 2008 financial crash.

The “who could have known?” and “there was no bailout” account almost won, and it’s still a battle that’s being fought over controlling that narrative. If it can be denied that the problems were not capable of being known and that there was no bailout, it’s much more likely that the banksters will get the same treatment again.

As a person with fiber to the home and the DSLAM just a few blocks away, Stadia actually has the ability to work extremely well for me.

I’m still curious to see how a home in the middle of nowhere with a frontier cable connection will fair.

— Daria (@imhkr) March 19, 2019

Fiber doesn’t use a DSLAM. That is only for DSL. Typically, fiber use an optical splitter in a fiber distribution hub at a neighborhood node that then gets aggregated into a multi-fiber cable that goes back to the central office. This is called a PON or Passive Optical Network. It’s vastly cheaper than having an active fiber switch in the local node that then goes back the CO that would then require much more cable. (The latter is often how business fiber with high SLAs and guaranteed bandwidth is configured, though.)

In fact, PONs often use multiple, tiered optical splitters to more cheaply get fiber to more homes. PONs do have advantages, though — it’s passive so requires no power along the signal path which makes it again cheaper and potentially more reliable.

But no DSLAM in sight.

People are always surprised and shocked when data is lost from some cloud service, either by negligence or intent.

And I’m like, motherfucker what did you think was going to happen?

They’re also thinking too small.

VHS was how we’d preserve memories forever.
Floppy disks were the gold standard.
Blockbuster was ubiquitous.
Sears invented shopping from home.
We were all friends with Tom.

Things that are too big to fail just do, eventually. Even great ones.

— Lesley Carhart (@hacks4pancakes) March 18, 2019

She understands. Most people do not. There are people who think (some in that very thread) that Google, Facebook and Amazon will be functionally eternal. They won’t be. I’d give Google maybe 20 years. Facebook perhaps 10-15. And Amazon 30 or so, and then they’ll be gone.