Posted on

Regression to the mean

Advertising can be rude, as well as prophetic. All the clean coal and fossil fuel wishcasting propaganda (Beyond Petroleum?) leads to complacency, inefficiency, more SUVs – at least in one country – and hence greater vulnerability, whereas crisis framing of responding to climate change leads to hard-won improvements. To wit:

[In June 2026] for the first time in the U.S., solar generated more electricity than coal, a reflection of both the rapid adoption of renewable power and the declining fortunes of America’s aging fleet of coal power plants.

Solar output reached an all-time high last month, supplying 12.8 percent of U.S. electricity, with coal supplying 12.2 percent, according to an analysis from energy think tank Ember. As a share of the power supply, solar typically reaches a high in May, when longer days spur greater generation, but mild weather keeps demand in check.

Coal output continued to slump last month, reaching a new record low, according to Ember. Its decline comes despite a push by the Trump administration to extend the lives of aging coal plants. Just this week, Energy Secretary Chris Wright issued an emergency order to keep a coal power plant in Orlando, Florida, online. The plant had been scheduled to be retired last year under a plan by the local public utility to shift to renewable energy.

Carbon emissions from power plants and vehicles , as well as methane emissions, will always and only produce more atmospheric warming. Active denial about the results of these activities belongs alongside every other institutional lie.

Do you need praise to make you do better? Or does a focus on shortcomings, mistakes, and wrong thinking begin to help turn things around?

A country named this one is stuck in a war it started, cannot end it, may escalate further for no reason or avail, has sundered its diplomatic mechanisms in favor of sycophancy, depleted its military and destroyed its credibility, all because we won’t call out an idiot’s historic strategic blunder.

The energy that has gone into denial has put off reckoning with the consequences for exactly as long as it will take to direct that energy elsewhere.

 

Posted on

Crowd Serfing

Was talking with a friend yesterday about an M. Gladwell article from the 2006. This piece in the current Harper’s seems to be in a similar vein:

The wave of financial calamities that took place in 2008 was cloud-based. No one in the pre–digital-cloud era had the mental capacity to lie to himself in the way we routinely are able to now. The limitations of organic human memory and calculation put a cap on the intricacies of self-delusion. In finance, the rise of computer-assisted hedge funds and similar operations has turned capitalism into a search engine. You tend the engine in the computing cloud, and it searches for money. In the past, an investor had to be able to understand at least something about what an investment would actually accomplish. No longer. There are now so many layers of abstraction between the elite investor and actual events that he no longer has any concept of what is actually being done as a result of his investments…

The Facebook Kid and the Cloud Lord are serf and king of the new order. In each case, human creativity and understanding, especially one’s own creativity and understanding, are treated as worthless. Instead, one trusts in the crowd, in the algorithms that remove the risks of creativity in ways too sophisticated for any mere person to understand. A hedge-fund manager might make money by using the computational power of the cloud to create fantastical financial instruments that make bets on derivatives in such a way as to invent the phony virtual collateral for stupendous risks. This is a subtle form of counterfeiting, and it is precisely the same maneuver a socially competitive teenager makes in accumulating fantastical numbers of “friends” through a service like Facebook. But let’s suppose you disagree that the idea of friendship is being reduced. Even then one must remember that the customers of social networks are not the members of those networks. The real customer is the advertiser of the future, but this creature has yet to appear in any significant way. The whole artifice, the whole idea of fake friendship, is just bait laid by the cloud lords to lure hypothetical advertisers—we might call them messianic advertisers—who could someday show up.

via Annie at Balloon Juice.