Michael T. Bacon, Ph.D. / is on Nostr

Day job: #geospatial #datascience
Academic research: #LandReform #STS #Scotland #Ecology #Landscape #CommunityOwnership

STS, planning geography, ecology, geospatial data, stuff.

I live and raise a fuss in #Durham #NC

MA Geography
Ph.D. Constructed Environment

He/him http://git.io/vxjC7

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/michael-bacon-a8b41b9/
Monastic order: Corbettite

Last Notes

2024-08-23 04:05:37

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Beto got within 2 points six years ago, and Cruz was more popular then. I'm not super optimistic but I think Allred's got a 1-in-3 shot.

2024-08-04 18:42:59

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I haven't read them in their entirety but I read several of the essays in Bad Feminist and Hunger and they hit hard.

2024-07-31 02:29:19

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social.coop is run on a co-op model of sorts. I really should know more about the governance model, but I do know it's run through https://opencollective.com/ .

2024-07-28 19:59:01

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Just taking a wild guess, but I'd guess it was lead acid batteries. The big downsides of them are their weight, which isn't as much of an issue with freight rail, and the spill potential, which I hope someone would manage.
But they're extremely well understood and proven.

2024-06-19 20:43:54

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I've been trying sporadically to use GNOME for "real work" for 25 years. It's still broken in the same frustrating ways it was broken 25 years ago. If I end up spending hours trying to figure out how to do basic tweaks or simple tasks, I'm don't use it.
I'll say again, there's already widely deployed Linux notebook and tablet adaptations. They're called Chromebook and Android. There are major lessons (good and bad) for Linux advocates therein.

2024-06-17 20:02:09

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Putting GNOME on a tablet seems like . . . a really bad idea.
Tablets are just screaming out for a for more restrictive, prescriptive UI framework. And GNOME is very much not that.

2024-05-23 20:43:37

Rant that's somewhat but not entirely related to a parallel thread:
Not every damn thing in the world needs to be new and original. Human society persisted for a hundred thousand years on re-performing the best works to each other, writing new ones all the time but not throwing everything old out. That's not a bad way for us to live.
A good retelling of an old story or a good performance of an old piece is still new art.

2024-05-03 15:29:48

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The issue at question in the protests is whether the the universities' endowments should be specifically benefiting from a select and specifically targeted group of defense manufacturers. The notion that a few dozen major universities divesting from a half dozen largely boutique defense contractors is going to break US military readiness is. . . tenuous . . .

2024-05-03 15:19:46

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The only caveat I have to this is that divestment from an endowment is often really complicated and not in the hands of University Presidents, but rather usually in the hands of trustees and even then it's complicated as they're often managed by hedge funds.
That said, an awful lot of protestors have specifically asked for *meetings* about divestment and financial transparency on the topic, which is 100% something that can be agreed to.