Good Morning. Hello. How are you? #669
Some fun kid stuff, Kate bush, a lot of depressing stuff about Jan 6, Ulvade, and the planet's addiction to Ammonia. A weak attempt to end on a happy note by resorting to a bland home IT adventure.
Good morning! Hello! How are you? Today looking good? Things going okay? I do hope so. Tough world to maintain a positive outlook in. I was proven correct in my prediction yesterday that work would be busy, and I had to use my brain a whole lot, which, you know, uses energy. God. Thinking really hard. It really takes a lot out of you, I’m not going to lie. I had one call with one of our senior engineers, and after the call he was like “wow yeah that was intense” and it was! Intense calls! All the time. Very exhausting. Also, a lot of out-of-org video calls with auditors, and other people I really do need to appear on camera to, which is somewhat stressful for me at the moment since, as you recall, I gave myself a terrible haircut.
One one call, which I had to schedule during Jane time, Jane kept interrupting to show me new pictures she drew, and the guy on the other end of the call was so nice about it, he’d pause our meeting and talk to Jane and talk about her pictures. It was really sweet. If the pandemic has done one thing, it’s let two dudes having a hard-core business meeting stop and smell the roses and chat with their kids in the middle of it. That is nice.
Pulled out my original grey/pink marbled vinyl pressing of Hounds of Love yesterday, first time I listened to the whole thing since the hubbub. Of course, Side B is where it’s at, but, man, what a great record. Emma got obsessed with the new Stranger Things trailer which does an expert job mixing “Running up That Hill” with the Stranger Things theme, and she dug up a few live clips on YouTube of the Before the Dawn Kate Bush shows in London. “Was that a concert or a play?” She asked. The whole thing was like a weird dream, with a funny barefoot man running around. A fawn, perhaps. Or just Kate’s weird son. I wish they would put out a live video of that. Wait, have they? [checks Discogs] Alas no, they have not.
(Rough transition here, apologies)
Wached the highlights to yesterday’s January 6th hearings yesterday. Didn’t watch live, but was keeping an eye on Twitter during work to see that things got pretty intense, so I caught up in the evening. Chris Hayes put it best, that he thought he knew all of the information they were presented, but even he was continually surprised by the depravity of the details. The panel is doing an excellent job, and it seems very clear Kevin McCarthy royally screwed up by boycotting them, because there’s no way this ever would have gone down like this if they had some Republican ladder-climber (since they couldn’t use Jim Jordan) spewing forth the stupidest, most mundane objections while simultaneously proving the thesis of the testimony by berating, belittling and mistreating these witnesses — the witnesses were predominantly Republicans, people who supported Trump — because they are not “playing ball” by being good little toadies. It is, of course, somewhat heartening to see Republicans talk about standing up to Trump, and gawd, I’m sure we all wish there were more of them, so, you know, they could successfully overturn Roe and establish a nationwide religion of guns without also mounting an insurrection. That would actually be an improvement over our current situation, help us all. IIRC there’s at least one more prime-time hearing, which I suspect will predominantly focus on Trump’s actions himself. It’s all just so well done. From here on out, any time someone cracks one of those dumb jokes about how Democrats can’t get anything done, point to these hearings which, not coincidentally, did not involve Joe Manchin or Krysten Sinema.
(lemme just put a kitty drawing between these two depressing topics)
It transpires that the Ulvade police did, in fact, fuck up as bad as everyone thinks. The door to the classroom wasn’t even locked. Several police milled about outside the door for more than fifty minutes while the shooter kept killing kids. A woman was dying inside, called her husband, and he showed up on the scene, with a gun, and tried to go in. The cops stopped him. This is all completely tragic, horrifying, too much to contemplate. It is also not the least bit surprising. America’s entire approach to the police is that first and foremost, the police protect themselves. This is why we have qualified immunity laws. This is why the police shoot anyone who might be the slightest threat, or perceived as the slightest threat, and get away with it. It encapsulates the entire mindset of our police: protect themselves. I’ve said this for a while now, the contrast between our police and our firefighters is instructive. Firefighters rush into burning buildings to save people. Police would never do the same thing. These police, while doing exactly what police everywhere have been trained to do, are going to get skewered for it, though, because they perfectly, simultaneously disproved two tentpole positions of the thin blue line crowd: that a good guy with a gun can stop anyone, and that our police keep us safe. They disproved both canards utterly, and under the massive glar of the national media. If ever a policeman might go to jail for this sort of thing, now is the moment. But even now, I give it maybe a 20% chance.
Finished the Vaclav Smil last night, it did not get magically any better in the last thirty pages. I started to tune out and just highlight the number of times he made predictions, while again, twice, pompously proclaiming he doesn’t do predictions. The whole book is such a logical fallacy at its core, it really is a shame, as the contents of the first four chapters are stellar. The ammonia chapter on its own was just eye opening. This planet uses so much ammonia. There is virtually no way to reduce it. Some four billion people on this planet are only alive because of the Haber-Bosch process of synthesizing ammonia. Eighty percent of Ammonia goes into making fertilizer. Ammonia is made, depressingly, from fossil fuels. Ammonia is made by combining Nitrogen and Hydrogen. The Hydrogen comes from natural gas.
This is the core of Smil’s really quite curmudgeonly, really quite depressing thesis: no matter what progress we make with electricity generation, with cars, we will never decarbonize until we solve the problem of ammonia, of fertilizers, of food. This is why he says de-urbanization would be necessary. Because the only way humanity knows, at this moment, how to do this, is to bring the people to the fields, and literally spend our lives spreading shit. And even then, it would feed four billion people.
There are flaws. Smil igores the possibility of decarbonizing food transport (most notably ships) and agricultural equiment (tractors and combines). The latter seems especially weird: how much harder can an electric tractor be than an electric F-150? He does not address this. It is weird. I’m actually going to go re-read the first few chapters of this book because even though he wiffs the end, the beginning is vital. A real shame. I forget some details, but this whole thesis around carbon and food: it is compelling, and it seems very true. There is not enough farm animal shit to offset the use of fertilizers for all of the farms we have. There is (currently) no practical way to harness animal feces from wild animals at scale. Man, that seems like a fun startup to figure out. Hi I am in the wild animal shit-gathering sector. Though of course, second-order unintended consequences of diverting all that rabbit and deer poop from the woods to farms, who knows.
We need a monklike obsession with ammonia, with fertilizer reduction. We need at least as much venture capital and big brains on solving this problem. I can only imagine that tractor, boat and train EV tech is a natural progression of what’s happening now, I assume someone is on that. But fertilizer replacement? More, we need more.
There are methods to use fertilizer more efficiently — the US is way more efficient with its fertilizer application than the Chinese, for example (the first thing Nixon and the Chinese agreed on when he opened up China was the sale of a shit ton of ammonia factories). Ideally there would be best practices applied worldwide. Perhaps even treaties. Reduction until we find better methods, sustainable methods at scale. Crop research. Alternatives to the Haber Bosch process.
Lol we are doing none of this. Sigh.
Okay! Good talk. Here we’ll finish on a happy ending, lol. I got Emma’s Time Machine volume working again, by the way. I’m sure you were worried. What was happening was that the QNAP had a recycling bin enabled on the Time Machine volume, which means that when Time Machine does it’s thing and deletes old backups, because it is running out of space, the drive does not actually get any new freed up space, because the deleted files went into a recycling bin with a one hundred and eighty day recycle time, which is just insane. In addition, there were no size limits on Emma’s Time Machine volume, which was one of two volumes (along with my Time Machine volume) on a QNAP storage pool, so theoretically, the volume can just grow in size as you fill it up, so it does not ever send the Time Machine app any “out of space” errors, it just makes a bigger volume, until the day the Storage Pool on which the volume resides runs out of space, at which point it is too late, because the Time Machine app will try and do its usual thing when a volume is full, which is delete the oldest files, which it would do by moving them to the recycling bin, which does not actually fill up any space, so Time Machine is stuck. This seems an inevetable result of QNAP’s Time Machine volume implementation, and yet they don’t even have a single, comprehensive tech note on this weird little logical gotcha, you gotta interpret the situation through a bunch of related, sometimes out-of-date tech notes, so, you know, took a while. It should be set for a while, now. Deleting both the contents of both Emma’s and my recycling bins freed up about 3TB of space, so, you know, good to go. I’m sure you were worried.
W Hotel Lobby mix today. All new. Oh except the Julee Cruise and DJ Dmitry. Still listening to the late-period Julee Cruise records I like them a lot. Very different vibe but solid. Love the new Shearwater it is soooo mellow just great. New Perfume Genius — only one listen so far but so good. Same the new Hercules & Love Affair I am really enjoying it.
Okay, today should be a bit more low-key and a normal work day. I have a bunch of “work product” to “create.” Though I don’t know exactly how to make either thing I need to make, so that’ll probably take most of the day woooo.