Colby Brown @colby@transportation.social

🤣
https://www.etsy.com/listing/1792461897/i-have-a-concept-of-a-plan-presidential

No, school shootings do not have to be a "fact of life."

— Gun laws in other countries have stopped mass shootings

— More guns don't make us safer

— A majority of Americans want gun reform

We do not have to live like this. No other country does.

So apparently bitcoin miners who've gone big, buying defunct power generation plants to feed their mining gear, have found that they can make significantly more money simply selling that power into the grid.

https://www.economist.com/united-states/2024/08/27/why-texas-republicans-are-souring-on-crypto

In places where there's an actual market for electricity (unlike South Africa where the price is fixed by a state regulator, and is constant throughout the day and night), you can sell spare capacity back to the grid. If you've got rooftop solar, and your batteries are charged and are harvesting energy that you can't use, you can sell it back to your provider. And the power firms themselves are able to do something similar, and so wholesale prices fluctuate constantly as demand and supply shift. We all know this, from those amazing stories about electricity prices sometimes going negative in places like Germany.

So the bitcoin miners with their crappy old coal-burning generators have found they can play the market: when demand goes up because it's hot and everybody's running the AC, they can turn off all their mining rigs and sell the power to the grid for a pretty healthy profit - $32m compared to $8.6m in one example

In other words, bitcoin is a very inefficient use of power: The process of turning electricity into bitcoin caused an almost 75% loss in value, which is the opposite of how manufacturing usually works - you turn a thousand dollars worth of raw material into $5000 worth of refined material, into $10000 worth of manufactured goods (completely made up example numbers to illustrate the point).

Bitcoin gets it backwards!

The existence of libraries says, We want EVERYONE, to have access to information, entertainment, and services for free.

So, what are the people who want to defund and censor them saying to all of us?

{spanishoddata} is a new and in-progress #rstats package for importing large origin-destination (OD) datasets released by the Spanish Ministry of Transport by Egor Kotov, me + growing #opensource community. Thanks Eugeni Vidal-Tortosa for improved docs it's ready to share, feedback welcome 🙏 https://buff.ly/4fN4vsO

A friend just gave me this wonderful analogy about elections:

“Elections aren’t an uber taking you to exactly where you want to go, they’re a train carrying a mass of people to the station nearest your destination.

You have to board the train that’s going in the same direction you want to go, even if it doesn’t take you to the street, or even the town you’re wanting to reach.”

Edit: please don't @ me on this

#uspol #politics

*Taps mic*

As a lifelong teacher, homework should be abolished.

At every grade level.

No research we have supports homework as being effective, and most of it (like teaching grammar) *ACTIVELY HARMS STUDENTS*.

(Except maybe some very mild homework in math and a couple of highly specific sciences).

Being truly comfortable in your own masculinity looks like this 👇

IMPORTANT: This kind of small-scale retail, cafe/restaurant or service should be legal on every corner in cities/suburbs. A basic part of walkable communities. They aren’t easy financially, but at least they should be legal in policy and zoning. In plans I’m working on, I’m calling them “corner convenience.”

@TheWarOnCars As a kid (I am 16), getting around my own can be really hard with all the car-centric infrastructure. Having to bike along highways and stroads is a terrible experience with all the polluted air and constant noise. I mostly rely on trails through the woods to get around my city and often have to go the long way to avoid cars.

🚨 European countries will end up with the political regimes their digital spaces deserve.

In the first image below, on top, the social structure of climate change debates on Mastodon: a cohesive community that concentrates on climate science, the issues of governance and climate justice and energy. On the same image, bottom, the polarized social structure on X, with its bunch of deniers (see our study on http://climatoscope.org ).

Second image, the climate change topics on Mastodon. A healty landscape without toxic content from skeptics. Congrat Masto !