ByronCinNZ @ByronCinNZ@mastodon.nzoss.nz
Joined Feb 2019
ByronCinNZ
boosted
Our government intends to solve NZ's CO2 problem largely by offshoring it as carbon credits. Do they not remember how well offshoring our plastic "recycling" worked out?
My point here is that the world isn't changing as fast as people said. It appears to me that the popularity of framing arguements with a "in an era of rapid change" is also declining
ByronCinNZ
boosted
@ByronCinNZ
Battery improvements
CRISPR
Quantum computing tech
ML
I don't have a 5
Quick quiz - Please name what you think are the five most world changing technologies that have appeared in the past ten years
Happy World Standards Day!
ByronCinNZ
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NZ beware!! "The MEPs also want tougher controls on wealthy individuals who move their wealth offshore...including special citizenship programmes that enable them to get passports, in exchange for a large investments in a country" https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/oct/07/european-parliament-approves-tougher-rules-on-offshore-wealth
"Facebook is like a spectacularly profitable nuclear energy company which is so profitable because it doesn’t build any of the big safety domes and dumps all the radioactive waste into the local river." https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/dont-be-surprised-about-facebook-and-teen-girls-thats-what-facebook-is
ByronCinNZ
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"However, promises by ministers in 2017 that foreign trusts would become subject to New Zealand tax have not been enacted"
Pandora Papers: Massive leak exposes offshore assets of world leaders, billionaires and other powerful figures, via @nzherald@twitter.com https://www.nzherald.co.nz/business/pandora-papers-massive-leak-exposes-offshore-assets-of-world-leaders-billionaires-and-other-powerful-figures/ZMPEWPFF3ZECEVHHEVHAZGH7DA/
ByronCinNZ
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Interestingly, this relevant looking thing just popped up in my feed: https://jacobinmag.com/2017/11/rich-people-wealth-inequality-anxiety
ByronCinNZ
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In fact this post is entirely germain and adds some rigour to my off-the-cuff reckonings...
"From one point of view, the whole open source “sustainability” problem boils down to one question: Who’s responsible for the open source, and how can we be sure they’ll take care of it?"
https://writing.kemitchell.com/2020/01/27/Killjoy-Warranties.html
ByronCinNZ
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Not all users of oen source or open data are equal. Those that rely on these for mission critical reasons should have more say than those who don't.
Three, these agencies need to know they have influence on the process and how to exercise it. For those for whom it is mission critical, it is worth paying for a seat at the project governance table
Two, the full business case, risks and benefits of opensource, needs to add up. Platitudes don't cut it. Agencies need concrete answers ti the what ifs. Solid well documented gornance models help.
A bit juvenile I know, but IMHO so is this new alliance
I cannot see the accronym AUKUS (pronounced au - kiss) and not want to pronounce it Ass-Kiss
ByronCinNZ
boosted
carbon pol, countering a meme that's meant to disclaim individual responsibility
Hey, you know that meme that "100 companies are responsible for over 70% of emissions" that's used to imply that individual action is useless against climate change?
It's worth taking a look at the actual report that that meme comes from - the CDP Carbon Majors Report 2017: https://b8f65cb373b1b7b15feb-c70d8ead6ced550b4d987d7c03fcdd1d.ssl.cf3.rackcdn.com/cms/reports/documents/000/002/327/original/Carbon-Majors-Report-2017.pdf
That report did state that, in the 1988-2015 period, 100 fossil fuel companies were responsible for 70.6% of global industrial GHG emissions... but what does "responsible" mean?
Turns out that their methodology looked at two things - "scope 1" (operational emissions - that is, their actual emissions) and "scope 3 category 11" (use of sold products).
In that period, 58,328 Mt of CO2 equivalents were actually emitted by the fossil fuel companies in question.
576,506 Mt of CO2 equivalents were emitted in the "use of sold products".
That is, *not* by the fossil fuel companies.
By their customers.
Fuck off entirely with the "100 companies emit >70% of CO2" meme.
It's worth taking a look at the actual report that that meme comes from - the CDP Carbon Majors Report 2017: https://b8f65cb373b1b7b15feb-c70d8ead6ced550b4d987d7c03fcdd1d.ssl.cf3.rackcdn.com/cms/reports/documents/000/002/327/original/Carbon-Majors-Report-2017.pdf
That report did state that, in the 1988-2015 period, 100 fossil fuel companies were responsible for 70.6% of global industrial GHG emissions... but what does "responsible" mean?
Turns out that their methodology looked at two things - "scope 1" (operational emissions - that is, their actual emissions) and "scope 3 category 11" (use of sold products).
In that period, 58,328 Mt of CO2 equivalents were actually emitted by the fossil fuel companies in question.
576,506 Mt of CO2 equivalents were emitted in the "use of sold products".
That is, *not* by the fossil fuel companies.
By their customers.
Fuck off entirely with the "100 companies emit >70% of CO2" meme.
ByronCinNZ
boosted
I'm really glad that Linked Data has got so big, but I still want a smaller, more tractable version of it that I can use in my own documents and can run on a desktop.
ie I don't wanna be hand-writing data tables in Turtle or coding UI widgets in SPARQL. But I'd like to be able to plug the small desktop space into the big LOD space.
if we can somehow find ways of unifying, eg, RDF graph semantics with "object" or "hash table" or "function" or "predicate" semantics...
Sometimes I think AI is nothing but confirmation bias in a high tech disquise. How would we know it isn't?
https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/flawed_data.png
Joined Feb 2019
