40 million acres of lawns is about 1,041 times greater than the 38,400 acres of solar power needed to supply 100% of US *energy* needs. https://t.co/5MmEcjAKH6

— Commercial Solar Guy (@SolarInMASS) February 13, 2019

Much of what people confidently pronounce as impossible is easily possible, with the will. It wouldn’t even be that expensive. The reality is that if we don’t do something it’ll be done to us, and hard.

That’s why I classify nearly everyone as a climate change denier because if you “believe” it and think things are just going to be relatively normal in the future, you are absolutely 99% as delusional as some conservative doofus claiming that solar minima are responsible for altered climate. There is no important difference.

It’s now imperative if you live in the US to get as fit and as healthy as one possibly can because health care and pharmaceuticals are moving to a completely extractive model and soon only the top 1% will really be able to afford it. Oh yeah, it’s happening.

1. Some great reporting on the CVS-Aetna merger by the Capitol Forum. Documents the aggressive ‘squeeze and buy’ strategy by CVS to drive independent pharmacies out of business.

— Matt Stoller (@matthewstoller) January 12, 2018

I’m not saying it’s your fault if you get sick or injured, but really it’s worth doing just about anything to keep yourself out of the clutches of these thieves.

Going to go home tonight and work out like a madman again. Fuck those people stealing my money.

Containers and Kubernetes are 90% about raising the barriers of entry to IT (as all professions do) by making something so complex and abstract that only a small percentage of extant IT people can understand it all. Not personally complaining, because I can comprehend it all just fine.

This was inevitable and it really began when you saw helpdesk-level jobs requiring CS degrees which means they de facto required calculus. I don’t know about you but I never did even a little bit of calculus when I was working helpdesk. Or even arithmetic for that matter.

The other 10% is that containerization is the hot new tech that is going! To solve! All our problems! And of course it doesn’t and never will because though they do have their uses, I’ve been in IT a long time and no tech ever solves all of anyone’s problems and often, as containers do, they create loads more that then have to be solved with other tools.

Containers are really about the pseudo-professionalization of IT and wall-building, not about the tech itself. They are designed to keep IT white (or make it whiter), to corporatize it, and to make sure the non-college crowd has fewer paths of entry into the field. Sad to see but it was inevitable.

The first 10 on today’s playlist: