Today is Earth Day and I’m watching the We Don’t Have Time no-fly climate conference on YouTube. It’s compelling and I’m impressed by the participants so far.

Tim Winton calling bullshit on the last 15 years of political inaction:

It’s time to make sharp demands of our representatives, time to remove those who refuse to act in our common interest, time to elect people with courage, ingenuity and discipline, people who’ll sacrifice pride, privilege and even perks for the sake of something sacred. […] It’s the soil under our feet, the water we drink, the air we breathe.

If you haven’t seen it go by, Greta Thunberg’s speech at the European Parliament yesterday is well worth a listen. She drew comparisons between climate change and the attention we put on Notre-Dame de Paris and Brexit. Ultimately, seeing the state of the Earth through her eyes, the eyes of a child, reminds us that some things are way, way more important than buildings and political regions. Choose love, choose Earth.

One UX thing that’s bothered me about Mac OS X / macOS since pretty much the beginning is how starting an app will force its windows to the foreground even though you’ve clicked on another app while it was launching.

By clicking on another app, my feeling is I’ve signified my intent to use another app while the other one is launching in the background. Is it just me?

This phrase from Mike Monteiro expresses the general unease I’ve been having working in technology lately:

Silicon Valley has exhibited total comfort with destroying the social fabric of humanity to make a profit.

I just read that 74 BILLION animals were killed in 2016 for human consumption and I… I’m just feeling disgusted.

Destin at Smarter Every Day posted a very good video addressing how to be critical about what you read online.

If you’re a car salesman and you sell a gas vehicle to someone today, how do you sleep at night?

Jeremy Leggett today:

Many researchers of past human civilisations tell us that our globalised civilisation may well now be in the early stages of collapsing […] for a variety of reasons, but some recur, and three in particular: climatic change, environmental degradation, and inequality.

A UN report says that the Arctic is guaranteed at this point to warm up by 3–5º C by 2050. The Paris Agreement targeted 2050, but nobody is in line to achieve their Paris targets, so it’s likely to be even worse. Businesses and governments are not reacting nearly as fast as they need to, so tomorrow, March 15, I’m going to be in Toronto showing support for the worldwide youth climate strike. Check out fridaysforfuture.org to find a local event.

The idea that working is not a requirement for living is interesting. It really challenges my notions of how society works, in a good way. Capitalism is a human invention and it can be undone.

I was contacted by an MBA today. Looked up the company and found this obscure statement:

At [redacted] Financial we provide intentional advice to inspire clients to choose to do what they will wish they had done, especially when they are not inclined to do it.

The kids have had enough of the climate inaction bullshit and they have every right to call our generation on it: “We are going to change the fate of humanity, whether you like it or not.”

Please raise your hand if you regularly (or wish you could) speak aloud to your devices? Just wondering if voice recognition is a white male geek wet dream or if it’s actually useful.

To be fair, I sometimes dictate messages to my phone and use Siri to search movies on my Apple TV.

Four weeks ago at the World Economic Forum, Greta Thunberg told world leaders, “I want you to panic.”

This weekend in the New York Times, a piece by David Wallace-Wells is titled “Time to Panic”.

Associating the words “climate change” and “panic” was the realm of lunatics and extremists not very long ago. The social acceptability of panicking over the issue has now entered the world’s consciousness.

The price of MacBook Pros here in Canada has really gone overboard.

In 2012 I bought what was then a top of the line MacBook Pro 15-inch (2.6 GHz quad-core i7, 8 GB, 750 GB) for $2119.

Today just a base model with similar storage (2.2 GHz 6-core i7, 16 GB, 1 TB) sets you back $3919.

They are good computers but goodness, even as a business expense I think $4500 after tax is too much. I do want Apple to make quality computers but I don’t know how to justify these prices.

Maybe it’s because I grew up in Quebec where I still feel too many people think small, but I think that Trudeau, Trump, May et al have the same affliction. They are inherently unable to think about the big picture. Even at that level, the enormity of the fact that the house is on fire barely registers. I used to think an ant had no comprehension of the highway and cars going by. Now I’m convinced politics is closer to the ants than to the people who built the highway.

I posted a link to a video of the school walkouts in the UK today where the kids are chanting “fuck you May”. And the thing is, I feel this is exactly right. Fuck May, fuck Trudeau, fuck Trump. Because they have made it abundantly clear that they are not part of the solution. Brexit, border walls, whatever. It’s all a sideshow, a distraction from what’s really important. The fucking house is on fire and they are debating who gets the large bedroom. The kids are right.

I generally don’t think much of most news organizations but I started subscribing to The Guardian a year ago because they have a dedicated Environment section that has smart and extensive coverage of everything related to climate change. And after a year of it I’m about to renew it because it’s well deserved and there isn’t enough of it in the news media. Very recommended.

I read something today on TreeHugger that I never considered before:

Keeping people working all day is no cosmic good, it’s just a tradition that began a few hundred years ago and may be coming to an end

If capitalism is the enemy of good planet stewardship, that may be true. And somehow thinking about that makes me feel lighter.

I just finished re-reading Richard Feynman’s account of investigating the Challenger accident and the inner workings of NASA in “What Do You Care What Other People Think”. It’s remarkable how he valued the work of engineers and workers in getting a true understanding of how things went down, and enjoyable that he highlighted management’s ”fantastic faith in the machinery”. Good to read it again.

Nobody should drink beer from a can. The BPA lining the inside and leaching into the beer alone should give you pause. That’s not mentioning the giant waste aluminium is compared to glass bottles.

I’ve been noticing lately that more and more pop songs talk about the sad state of the world.

• World Gone Mad by Bastille
• Miracle by Chvrches
• Youth Without Youth by Metric

And many more. That makes me hopeful. Our outrage must be expressed through music, so more people can be outraged.

”If love is enough, could you let it show?”

Goodness her words make so much sense. I hope that Greta Thunberg will encourage more and more young people to do the same and call it the way they see it. Meanwhile our so-called leaders are busy making up bullshit and a mockery of people’s lives.

I’m on the Fediverse! Or rather, my microblog is. I installed the ActivityPub plugin and now my WordPress blog can be found from Mastodon by following steve@micro.steveroy.ca. Not much point for now since I’m already on Mastodon, but I find this kind of interoperability amazing. I hope the open web is coming back and will take over the Facebook/Twitters of this world.

David Heinemeier Hansson:

Traditional blogs might have swung out of favor, as we all discovered the benefits of social media and aggregating platforms, but we think they’re about to swing back in style, as we all discover the real costs and problems brought by such centralization.

One thing that’s happened since I got off Twitter and other centralized social media is that I went back to RSS. And I find that 1) I’m more in control of what I read, and 2) I read more long-form pieces (as opposed to wasting away reading my timeline).

I just heard that some airlines, if you buy more than one seat, don’t put them together by default and then charge you for sitting together… We don’t live in a civil world. Money and profit is taking over every single little bit of decency humans have.

Google search is overrated. Google surveillance is underrated.