An article describing how the African continent now obtains 10% of its electric power from renewables, in a bottom-up movement of households and businesses away from utility-scale public power (coal-driven, unreliable,  scarce) to hyper local solar using Chinese tech.  As I’ve noted earlier, this end run around public utilities is the future.

In the same reading session, another article describing how the Bonneville Power Authority has successfully held up development of small- to large-scale power projects in Oregon and Washington because of grid limitations.  Washington, my home state, ranks 50 in the rate of change to renewables, while being one of the most progressive and climate-aware states in the country.  Plenty of noise, no action.

I remember talking to Douglas about the regulatory situation in NZ, and he said one of the most significant drivers was the division between power providers and power distributors (both private). This had enabled lots of competition in the power provider market; for example, his own household power came from rooftop solar, installed and managed by a business that used all such installations in Auckland to function as a virtual utility company.  The distribution companies were required to carry the power, regardless of how it was generated.

In New Zealand while I was growing up, the phone lines were administered by the state post office. Apart from the months-long delay to get a phone “installed”, there were numerous restrictions on non-phone equipment that was allowed to be plugged into a phone line. I built a 1200-baud modem for my boss’s minicomputer system that was illegal to connect; it might in some way damage the phone grid. Naturally, it wasn’t until the post office lost control of phone lines that we could move forward.

We were coming back to our apartment today and Shelley noticed the chap that’s been obsessively working on cleaning his car is gone.  He didn’t bother cleaning the sidewalk where his car had been parked, although he had a power washer out.

Is this a commons problem?  If it’s my resource, I’ll do what’s required to make it work.  If it’s a shared resource, it’s someone else’s problem. Is that why Africa is leapfrogging WA and OR, because they’ve converted a shared resource into lots of individual resources?  If it is, that suggests a way to fix the problem.

Martin Fowler learns the lesson that Dave Winer has been teaching:

https://martinfowler.com/articles/writing-fragments.html

“Trump's incontinent belligerence”

from https://pluralistic.net/2025/12/16/k-shaped-recovery/

https://www.openculture.com/2022/07/walter-benjamin-explains-how-fascism-uses-mass-media-to-turn-politics-into-spectacle-1935.html

In particular, using spectacle to give everyone a platform to sound off without any real ownership in the world.  Sort of bread and circuses, where everyone’s a critic with no skin the game but strongly felt opinions?

https://interconnected.org/home/2025/12/05/training

Some things I hadn’t thought about, re internet-based marketplaces and AI.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/dec/05/agriculture-revolution-soil-farming-earth-rover-program

The tech described takes advantage of a sensor developed for experimental music in Slovakia, along with banging a metal plate with a hammer, something I used to do daily 🙂

An informal survey of my recollections of gun incidents over the past decade makes me feel that the major dividing line between gun violence perpetrators and the general public is not ethnicity but gender.  Therefore, I propose that we immediately stop granting visas to men, and allow only women and minor children to come to the US.

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I had a similar experience my first day in Chiang Mai as I did in Dublin, overwhelmed by tourist tat.  It seemed like lots of tourists roaming around looking at each other. It wasn’t until day two that I started to see past it to the reality.

We were at a photo exhibit about a local area within the old city, and all the captions said the same thing: Chiang Mai is drastically different than it was, all the families have moved away and those remaining are aging.  For some, the tourist explosion is a plus, allowing them to, for example, change jobs to become a tour director or sell more of their art, but for many it’s felt as a loss.  The people we meet are lovely,  but they are very focused on serving us in their many roles.  It doesn’t feel like I’m making a connection.

cgi.csc.liv.ac.uk/~coopes/comp319/2016/papers/UbiquitousComputingAndInterfaceAgents-Weiser.pdf

yes! And from 1992.