California Climate Credit #etc#gas#electricity#climatechange#california Why do I get a California Climate Credit? This is the worst possible way to fight climate change. Do something smarter California!
Updated on Sunday, November 20, 2022
Once in a while I'm stupid enough to read my email. This month I'm getting a climate credit! Must have done something right? No:
"The California Climate Credit is part of California’s efforts to fight climate change. This credit is from a state program that requires power plants, natural gas providers, and other large industries that emit greenhouse gases to buy carbon pollution permits. The credit on your bill is your share of the payments from the State’s program."
So... apparently part of fighting climate change is making my energy bill randomly cheaper?
It's hard to think of anything less likely to help. Just as I'm starting to feel the pain of winter bills I'm paying slightly less and so I'm slightly less inclined to turn down the heating or finally do something about my beautiful but effectively absent front windows.
A problem with carbon taxation is that it's regressive. So why not use this money to make the first $xx cheaper, and maybe even charge more at the high end of usage?
(Published to the Fediverse as:
California Climate Credit #etc#gas#electricity#climatechange#california Why do I get a California Climate Credit? This is the worst possible way to fight climate change. Do something smarter California!)
I Love Email #etc#email#productivity#gmail#slack#teams In the rush to Teams and Slack we're missing the advantages of email, including single inbox, state management and an open protocol.
Updated on Sunday, May 2, 2021
Everyone is always trying to kill email, and it's always because it's a supposed productivity villain and life will be so much easier when we can all live happily in some chat based universe. I've spent enough time in Slack and Teams and their predecessors to know that we should go back before it's too late.
Chat brings you infinite inboxes and no great way to tell which of them is important. Having looked away for a few minutes there are dozens of unread conversations. Some of them are people sharing a photo of their cat. One of them is an emergency requiring immediate attention but good luck finding it without wading through everything.
This brings me to a lack of useful state. I handle email in two quick passes - read everything (and discard anything that doesn't need further attention), deal with anything critical and then at some point go back and mop up the rest. In chat though you just blew past something that needs a response eventually and it fades from your mind as you fight the fire elsewhere. I never miss an email, I often miss a chat.
And good luck finding anything. Maybe a market leader or two will establish dominance for long enough but my experience so far has been lurching from one platform to the next, both professionally and personally, and having a hard time finding that one thing I know should be in there from the end of last year. My Gmail has emails going back to 1996, and yes that's almost a decade before Gmail existed. I can find anything.
On the subject of dominance, the real reason for all of the attempted email homicide is that it's one of the last open systems that everyone still uses. If only email would just die you'll be trapped forever in Messenger and Hangouts.
(Published to the Fediverse as:
I Love Email #etc#email#productivity#gmail#slack#teams In the rush to Teams and Slack we're missing the advantages of email, including single inbox, state management and an open protocol.)
Out of Office Hours #etc#meetings#productivity A critique of Reverse Meetings and a proposal for actually increasing efficiency with the concept of a meeting defragmenter.
Updated on Sunday, May 2, 2021
Inc has an article based on this blog suggesting that the solution to 'zoom fatigue' is reverse meetings.
I imagined that this was going to be a S03E01 of Red Dwarf type scenario where you get handed some notes and a few action items and then apologize for leaving early. But no, it's office hours.
""In a reverse meeting scenario, by contrast, I might take only 10 minutes from each colleague, taking up 50 minutes total of my time, and 50 minutes total of their time, for an overall demand of 100 minutes of attention, which is 3.6 times less cost," Newport writes. And voilà, he's just given your team back more than four hours of productive time a week."
Assuming that people manage to show up in perfect slots with no conflict and do so in a way that has perfect utilization for the victim and that there is no value in having someone point out that one of those 10 minute slots was full of incorrect information sending you down a two week rabbit hole that could have easily been avoided by having the right people spend some time together.
In a perfect world my ideal meeting situation is the meeting defragmenter. This involves software and cooperation unfortunately so the next best solution is out of office hours. I need focused time to get stuff done and blocking large chunks of meeting repelling time is really the only thing that works.
(Published to the Fediverse as:
Out of Office Hours #etc#meetings#productivity A critique of Reverse Meetings and a proposal for actually increasing efficiency with the concept of a meeting defragmenter.)
One Year of Tides Animated (with Sun and Moon) #etc#tides#sun#moon#sanfrancisco#video Animation showing four influences on the tide - the position of the sun and moon, and the distance of the sun and moon from the earth. Illustrates tide height and sun/moon position and distance as seen from San Francisco, California.
Updated on Saturday, February 19, 2022
This animation shows a year of tides in San Francisco with the sun and moon:
I was inspired to create this after adding a tide forecast to a personal weather dashboard I have running on an old Surface Pro. I realized I didn't understand tides that much. I still don't, but I know more than I did before.
The animation illustrates four components of the tide. The obvious ones are the position of the sun and moon. When the moon is new or full the Earth, sun and moon are all lined up leading to larger 'spring' tides, which happen twice a month just like spring doesn't. As the moon waxes or wanes and becomes half full the moon and sun are at right angles and partially cancel each other out resulting in lower highs and higher lows. This is the neap tide, almost as unhelpful as 'spring'.
As orbits are not circles the Earth is closer or further away from the sun over the course of a year and the moon behaves the same way. When it's close than usual we get super moons and king tides (finally a type of tide that does what it sounds like). In the animation the sun and moon actually grow and shrink in proportion to their distance from Earth.
Here's how to read the animation. The date and time at the bottom of the screen refers to the tide right in the middle. The full screen shows the forecast running from 12 hours before the current time to 12 hours later. The vertical range is from -4 feet to 10 feet, relative to mean lower low water (MLLW), the average lowest tide over 19 years. The sun and moon are on a different scale - 360 degrees horizontally and 90 degrees vertically.
The tide forecast is pulled from the NOAA Tides and Currents API. I used SunCalc-Net for the position of the sun and moon, and the phase of and distance to the moon. For the distance to the sun I used a formula I found on StackExchange.
I wanted to both fit in a full year and run slowly enough to see what's going on each month so the video is around 20 minutes long. I won't be offended if you don't finish it.
(Published to the Fediverse as:
One Year of Tides Animated (with Sun and Moon) #etc#tides#sun#moon#sanfrancisco#video Animation showing four influences on the tide - the position of the sun and moon, and the distance of the sun and moon from the earth. Illustrates tide height and sun/moon position and distance as seen from San Francisco, California.)
Software: Catfood Earth 4.10 updates to the latest National Weather Service "API" and also 2021a timezones. Photo Sorter 1.10 helps control the scourge of duplicate JPEGs.
Timelapse: Sunset #6, what would happen if you used a style transfer neural network on every frame of a timelapse? This (instructions).
How to Save a Planet (with an Infiniti QX55) #etc#climatechange#environmentalism#podcast You're not really helping to save the planet if you're helping Infinity to sell more QX55's.
Updated on Friday, February 17, 2023
I've been meaning to check out the new Gimlet/Spotify podcast, How to Save a Planet, and finally listened to the first episode about wind power last week.
It was sponsored by the Infiniti QX55.
This is not even a hybrid. It's a 268 horsepower SUV. Consumer Reports says:
"The company cited 26 mpg combined (city and highway) when the QX50 was introduced for 2019. We measured just 22 mpg overall in our tests, putting it on par with larger, more powerful SUVs. And it required premium fuel. Subsequently, the official EPA estimate was downgraded to 25 mpg."
It's not even a particularly efficient SUV. You are really unlikely to be saving a planet this way. I'm not sure I can bear to find out who sponsors the second episode. I'm imagining a subscription panda steak service or bitcoin.
I shouldn't throw stones. I bought into a Volkswagen clean diesel (which came with a green tax credit before they got busted). I currently drive a Land Rover that can only hit it's claimed mpg if the engine stop technology is working. That only happens for about twelve miles after it has been serviced, which feels like the same sort of scam as the Volkswagen frankly.
Or maybe the clue is in the indefinite article and they read my post about extreme environmentalism.
(Published to the Fediverse as:
How to Save a Planet (with an Infiniti QX55) #etc#climatechange#environmentalism#podcast You're not really helping to save the planet if you're helping Infinity to sell more QX55's.)
