Zane Selvans

I'm a data liberation engineer at Catalyst #Coop. We use #Python to support #climate activists, policymakers, and researchers accelerating the #EnergyTransition.

I grew up in rural spanglish California, explored Mars & Europa with robots, & fought for bright green cities in Colorado. Now I'm a wandering cybermonkey lost in the misty highlands of southern Mexico.

I ❤️ bikes, car-free cities, street food, & steward ownership. There is such a thing as enough.

🇺🇸/🇲🇽 English/Español he/él

Public Key

npub1fl7vsfrgljdywsynhu5zm9hdraf7wj8fuvycnutgd6nsfhm9vlwqey7vv3

NIP-05 Address

ZaneSelvans_at_social.coop@mostr.pub

Profile Code

nprofile1qqsyllxgy350exj8gzfm72pdjmk375l8fr57xzvf795xafcymajk0hq47sfue

Author Public Key

npub1fl7vsfrgljdywsynhu5zm9hdraf7wj8fuvycnutgd6nsfhm9vlwqey7vv3

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Last Notes

2024-10-21 05:28:44

Something that keeps coming up for me is the contrast between the collective sleepwalking we do to get ourselves into terrible situations, and the traumatizing mandatory attention those situations eventually demand. Fascism. Climate change. Whatever we want to look away from, but that won't go away.
You will experience the terrible situation through a series of increasingly wild videos, until one day it's you taking the video.

2024-10-09 05:08:51

Oh hey, it's one of my former co-op housemates giving a TED Talk about how maybe possibly we could collectively decide to eat somewhat less meat and it would be fine actually. Good even.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V3Cav6WhwZc

2024-10-04 21:26:18

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@npub1y4n…25mf God what a disaster. I guess I'm interested to try Ghost. But also, I don't really feel like futzing with CRMs and trying to migrate data right now.

2024-09-24 03:58:36

Some unplanned medical tourism including an emergency appendectomy:
"Our insurance doesn’t cover us when we’re overseas, so we ended up paying out of pocket for all of it. That thought scared me at first, but all told, our bill was, conservatively, about 1/30th what we would have paid out of pocket in the US. In fact it was considerably lower than what we would have paid in copays in the US even *with* insurance."
It doesn't have to be like this.
https://www.volts.wtf/p/dr-volts-and-the-terrible-horrible
#HealthCare

2024-09-08 15:48:34

#BikeTooter
https://social-coop-media.ams3.cdn.digitaloceanspaces.com/media_attachments/files/113/102/709/393/771/060/original/dc93f0355f65897e.png

2024-08-28 02:17:33

Dang, it took 50 years, but Caltech is finally graduating a class that's mostly women. It was about 4:1 when I was there in the 1990s. Which is now most of those 50 years ago.
https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2024-08-27/caltech-long-male-bastion-to-enroll-majority-women-for-first-time

2024-08-24 03:00:43

I went into this expecting a normal 4 minute video but nooooope.
A world class rant from Hank Green on Google using YouTube videos to train generative AI models.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JiMXb2NkAxQ

2024-08-10 16:32:48

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And the accompanying article:
https://www.propublica.org/article/inside-project-2025-secret-training-videos-trump-election

2024-07-26 23:34:05

Wait, what makes raising taxes on the childless different from offering a child tax credit to the breeders?

2024-07-07 02:58:10

In the Mad Max world I don't get how anybody still has any fuel left decades after the apparent collapse of civilization. I feel like this is kind of a central plot point I've missed.

2024-07-06 02:41:23

I know it's dumb but it feels like my visiting the US caused the election season to start and I'm so sorry.

2024-05-13 01:22:12

The idea that you could have a thinking talking relationship for decades with another being who used to literally be part of your own body is just wild. Totally normal but also bonkers.

2024-05-03 02:38:20

I love how China's like "Why don't you want to come work this out like adults at the WTO?" and the US is like "Shit, we're on the sharp end of the WTO now."

2024-03-12 23:06:41

I have all these vague memories of #Shogun from the 1980s TV series when I was a kid. I think I must have watched it multiple times, but before I really understood the story. And before I'd lived in Japan!
The new series is great so far, and I'm reading ahead in the book. The (book) writing is okay, but the story is great. It's an amazing contrast to what happened less than 100 years earlier in the New World -- a contrast both the Jesuits and Japanese were aware of at the time!

2024-03-03 01:57:49

Pro tip!
"Landlords and property managers can’t collude on rental pricing. Using new technology to do it doesn’t change that antitrust fundamental. Regardless of the industry you’re in, if your business uses an algorithm to determine prices, a brief filed by the FTC and the Department of Justice offers a helpful guideline for antitrust compliance: your algorithm can’t do anything that would be illegal if done by a real person."
https://www.ftc.gov/business-guidance/blog/2024/03/price-fixing-algorithm-still-price-fixing
#housing #economics #monopoly #regulation

2024-01-13 16:42:22

It Was Foretold! We knew what the consequences would be when we allowed cars to overrun North American cities in the 1920s.
For a detailed account of this history, check out Peter D. Norton's book "Fighting Traffic"
Ad via @npub10y2…9tyn
https://social-coop-media.ams3.cdn.digitaloceanspaces.com/media_attachments/files/111/749/608/156/472/139/original/de2b9d317eae1a92.png

2024-01-02 19:00:44

Maybe tech workers will take a hint from doctors and finally start unionizing?
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/doctors-unionize-as-healthcare-services-are-consolidated-into-corporate-systems

2023-12-23 19:12:42

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@npub1pdv…gqz2 @npub1xwc…ze8u Cool! I will give it a look.

2023-12-23 19:02:19

I think I read too many economics & policy #books in 2023 and I feel like it rotted my brain a little bit. So... I'm looking for #Science and #NaturalHistory reading recommendations for next year. Maybe especially outside of biology since a few of the books on the list so far are:
* Your Inner Fish (Neil Shubin)
* Kindred: Neaderthal Life, Love, Death, & Art (Rebecca Wragg Sykes)
* I Contain Multitudes (Ed Yong)
* A Planet of Viruses (Carl Zimmer)

2023-12-17 17:44:13

"Banned by Google, recommended by Firefox" is quite the tagline. Adnauseam is an online advertiser data obfuscation browser plugin:
https://adnauseam.io/

2023-12-08 13:30:19

Woke myself up this morning by laughing at a joke I made about bank regulation in a dream. It's gonna be a good day.

2023-12-05 17:55:51

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@npub16zx…xzxc I think the most likely way we end up devaluing this sunk capital is by electrifying transportation fast. And that'll make it possible for some new subset of the industry to walk away from oil, just because it'll change the relative importance of different parts of their balance sheets.
But for reserve-heavy companies (esp. the NOCs w/ low-cost production) it will still be very unattractive.

2023-11-26 21:11:41

I have a Docker container with curl installed via apt-get, and libcurl installed in a conda environment, and... this is breaking curl because libcurl.so.4 something something I hate computers.

2023-11-20 00:28:28

Man why does it seem like every country has to elect their own right-wing nutjob to independently (re-)discover what a bad idea it is?

2023-11-18 15:07:29

Another @npub16nx…rj8k piece looking at how US health insurance companies just... refuse to pay claims, even though it's illegal, because enforcement is lax and fines are small. So cheating is the more profitable choice!
https://www.propublica.org/article/health-insurance-denials-breaking-state-laws

2023-10-03 04:46:01

Hmm. Apparently serving SQLite DBs that are bigger than 10GB via @npub124h…hn64 on Google Cloud Run is... not recommended. 😬

2023-09-30 15:52:56

The fact that US people residing in Mexico usually refer to themselves as "expats" and never as "migrants" bothers me.
At the same time, people immigrate for many different reasons, and are treated very differently by immigration systems depending on their wealth and the relative powers of their old and new countries.
So it's not crazy to have different words that convey the range of different experiences people have moving from one country to another.
https://theconversation.com/whats-the-difference-between-a-migrant-and-an-expat-69265

2023-09-12 16:54:25

It seems like the growing trend of oil & gas companies doing share buybacks and dividends rather than investing in either new fossil fuel production or new low-carbon lines of business tracks with many resource extraction business models, where the goal is to end up bankrupt, so you can shed any remaining labor and environmental cleanup liabilities you might have without needing to pay for them out of profits.
https://mastodon.energy/@CarbonBubble/111051258207008346
https://social-coop-media.ams3.cdn.digitaloceanspaces.com/media_attachments/files/111/053/201/702/358/669/original/2fe5a3e971d0ca96.png

2023-09-05 14:19:48

If you ever find yourself looking at a potential energy policy and saying "Well that's obviously insane. We would never do that." just remember what the US has been doing with ethanol for the last 15 years, and the fact that it still has a powerful lobby, with no immediate signs of decline.
https://www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com/p/us-corn-biofuels

2023-08-20 23:14:49

The more I learn about how the streaming and publishing industries currently work, the more I just want to pirate everything and send artists and authors tips directly.
Or alternatively... help crowdfund new works! Looking forward to hearing @npub1hyk…3p33 read the audiobook edition of "The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation" Only 13 hours left to become a backer:
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/doctorow/the-internet-con-how-to-seize-the-means-of-computation

2023-08-20 21:11:12

I knew Taylor Swift had done some amazing negotiating with the record labels to retain ownership of her master recordings, and created new masters of her older catalog to undercut the power of her former label, but I didn't realize she also forced her new label, UMG, to agree to distribute the proceeds of its eventual sale of billions of dollars worth of Spotify stock to *all* of its artists without counting those revenues against their recording debts. From Chokepoint Capitalism / @npub1hyk…3p33

2023-08-14 18:52:52

@npub1fh6…zu76 Are you aware of any good #SciComm papers examining the effects of visualizations like the ones you produce on public or research community engagement? @npub1zuu…rpz7 is looking at doing something similar with our open energy system data and some cites would be helpful in justifying funding.

2023-08-05 23:35:33

The main "alignment problem" we face today doesn't have anything to do with #AI
"The paperclip-maximizing, grandparent-devouring transhuman colony organism that calls itself a Private Equity fund is endlessly inventive in finding ways to increase its profits by harming the rest of us. It's not just hospices – it's also palliative care."
via @npub1hyk…3p33
https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/05/any-metric-becomes-a-target/

2023-08-05 23:25:31

"Regulatory capture isn't automatic: it's what you get when companies are bigger than governments.
"If you want small governments, in other words, you need small companies. Even if you think the only role for the state is in enforcing contracts, the state needs to be more powerful than the companies issuing those contracts. The bigger the companies are, the bigger the government has to be."
from @npub1hyk…3p33
https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/05/any-metric-becomes-a-target/

2023-07-16 17:11:09

The internet is definitely flakier and slower in #Chiapas than #CDMX. My landlord periodically calls Megacable to complain, and they dutifully send out a technician, who has to make up some explanation and replace the router, when the real problem is clearly with the broader network, about which he can do nothing.
Today the router is mounted too close to the sun, and so is overheating.

2023-04-12 20:26:50

How difficult / expensive / useful would it be to download many millions of pages of PDFs from all the state utility commission websites and FERC's eLibrary into cloud storage and train an LLM on them? It seems like being able to conversationally query this kind of massive domain-specific corpus could be very valuable to climate & clean-energy advocates who can't pay an army of lawyers.
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