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mostlysignssomeportents · 8 months ago

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Cleantech has an enshittification problem

On July 14, I'm giving the closing keynote for the fifteenth HACKERS ON PLANET EARTH, in QUEENS, NY. Happy Bastille Day! On July 20, I'm appearing in CHICAGO at Exile in Bookville.

EVs won't save the planet. Ultimately, the material bill for billions of individual vehicles and the unavoidable geometry of more cars-more traffic-more roads-greater distances-more cars dictate that the future of our cities and planet requires public transit – lots of it.

But no matter how much public transit we install, there's always going to be some personal vehicles on the road, and not just bikes, ebikes and scooters. Between deliveries, accessibility, and stubbornly low-density regions, there's going to be a lot of cars, vans and trucks on the road for the foreseeable future, and these should be electric.

Beyond that irreducible minimum of personal vehicles, there's the fact that individuals can't install their own public transit system; in places that lack the political will or means to create working transit, EVs are a way for people to significantly reduce their personal emissions.

In policy circles, EV adoption is treated as a logistical and financial issue, so governments have focused on making EVs affordable and increasing the density of charging stations. As an EV owner, I can affirm that affordability and logistics were important concerns when we were shopping for a car.

But there's a third EV problem that is almost entirely off policy radar: enshittification.

An EV is a rolling computer in a fancy case with a squishy person inside of it. While this can sound scary, there are lots of cool implications for this. For example, your EV could download your local power company's tariff schedule and preferentially charge itself when the rates are lowest; they could also coordinate with the utility to reduce charging when loads are peaking. You can start them with your phone. Your repair technician can run extensive remote diagnostics on them and help you solve many problems from the road. New features can be delivered over the air.

That's just for starters, but there's so much more in the future. After all, the signal virtue of a digital computer is its flexibility. The only computer we know how to make is the Turing complete, universal, Von Neumann machine, which can run every valid program. If a feature is computationally tractable – from automated parallel parking to advanced collision prevention – it can run on a car.

The problem is that this digital flexibility presents a moral hazard to EV manufacturers. EVs are designed to make any kind of unauthorized, owner-selected modification into an IP rights violation ("IP" in this case is "any law that lets me control the conduct of my customers or competitors"):

https://locusmag.com/2020/09/cory-doctorow-ip/

EVs are also designed so that the manufacturer can unilaterally exert control over them or alter their operation. EVs – even more than conventional vehicles – are designed to be remotely killswitched in order to help manufacturers and dealers pressure people into paying their car notes on time:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/24/rent-to-pwn/#kitt-is-a-demon

Manufacturers can reach into your car and change how much of your battery you can access:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/28/edison-not-tesla/#demon-haunted-world

They can lock your car and have it send its location to a repo man, then greet him by blinking its lights, honking its horn, and pulling out of its parking space:

https://tiremeetsroad.com/2021/03/18/tesla-allegedly-remotely-unlocks-model-3-owners-car-uses-smart-summon-to-help-repo-agent/

And of course, they can detect when you've asked independent mechanic to service your car and then punish you by degrading its functionality:

https://www.repairerdrivennews.com/2024/06/26/two-of-eight-claims-in-tesla-anti-trust-lawsuit-will-move-forward/

This is "twiddling" – unilaterally and irreversibly altering the functionality of a product or service, secure in the knowledge that IP law will prevent anyone from twiddling back by restoring the gadget to a preferred configuration:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/19/twiddler/

The thing is, for an EV, twiddling is the best case scenario. As bad as it is for the company that made your EV to change how it works whenever they feel like picking your pocket, that's infinitely preferable to the manufacturer going bankrupt and bricking your car.

That's what just happened to owners of Fisker EVs, cars that cost $40-70k. Cars are long-term purchases. An EV should last 12-20 years, or even longer if you pay to swap the battery pack. Fisker was founded in 2016 and shipped its first Ocean SUV in 2023. The company is now bankrupt:

https://insideevs.com/news/723669/fisker-inc-bankruptcy-chapter-11-official/

Fisker called its vehicles "software-based cars" and they weren't kidding. Without continuous software updates and server access, those Fisker Ocean SUVs are turning into bricks. What's more, the company designed the car from the ground up to make any kind of independent service and support into a felony, by wrapping the whole thing in overlapping layers of IP. That means that no one can step in with a module that jailbreaks the Fisker and drops in an alternative firmware that will keep the fleet rolling.

This is the third EV risk – not just finance, not just charger infrastructure, but the possibility that any whizzy, cool new EV company will go bust and brick your $70k cleantech investment, irreversibly transforming your car into 5,500 lb worth of e-waste.

This confers a huge advantage onto the big automakers like VW, Kia, Ford, etc. Tesla gets a pass, too, because it achieved critical mass before people started to wise up to the risk of twiddling and bricking. If you're making a serious investment in a product you expect to use for 20 years, are you really gonna buy it from a two-year old startup with six months' capital in the bank?

The incumbency advantage here means that the big automakers won't have any reason to sink a lot of money into R&D, because they won't have to worry about hungry startups with cool new ideas eating their lunches. They can maintain the cozy cartel that has seen cars stagnate for decades, with the majority of "innovation" taking the form of shitty, extractive and ill-starred ideas like touchscreen controls and an accelerator pedal that you have to rent by the month:

https://www.theverge.com/2022/11/23/23474969/mercedes-car-subscription-faster-acceleration-feature-price

Put that way, it's clear that this isn't an EV problem, it's a cleantech problem. Cleantech has all the problems of EVs: it requires a large capital expenditure, it will be "smart," and it is expected to last for decades. That's rooftop solar, heat-pumps, smart thermostat sensor arrays, and home storage batteries.

And just as with EVs, policymakers have focused on infrastructure and affordability without paying any attention to the enshittification risks. Your rooftop solar will likely be controlled via a Solaredge box – a terrible technology that stops working if it can't reach the internet for a protracted period (that's right, your home solar stops working if the grid fails!).

I found this out the hard way during the covid lockdowns, when Solaredge terminated its 3G cellular contract and notified me that I would have to replace the modem in my system or it would stop working. This was at the height of the supply-chain crisis and there was a long waiting list for any replacement modems, with wifi cards (that used your home internet rather than a cellular connection) completely sold out for most of a year.

There are good reasons to connect rooftop solar arrays to the internet – it's not just so that Solaredge can enshittify my service. Solar arrays that coordinate with the grid can make it much easier and safer to manage a grid that was designed for centralized power production and is being retrofitted for distributed generation, one roof at a time.

But when the imperatives of extraction and efficiency go to war, extraction always wins. After all, the Solaredge system is already in place and solar installers are largely ignorant of, and indifferent to, the reasons that a homeowner might want to directly control and monitor their system via local controls that don't roundtrip through the cloud.

Somewhere in the hindbrain of any prospective solar purchaser is the experience with bricked and enshittified "smart" gadgets, and the knowledge that anything they buy from a cool startup with lots of great ideas for improving production, monitoring, and/or costs poses the risk of having your 20 year investment bricked after just a few years – and, thanks to the extractive imperative, no one will be able to step in and restore your ex-solar array to good working order.

I make the majority of my living from books, which means that my pay is very "lumpy" – I get large sums when I publish a book and very little in between. For many years, I've used these payments to make big purchases, rather than financing them over long periods where I can't predict my income. We've used my book payments to put in solar, then an induction stove, then a battery. We used one to buy out the lease on our EV. And just a month ago, we used the money from my upcoming Enshittification book to put in a heat pump (with enough left over to pay for a pair of long-overdue cataract surgeries, scheduled for the fall).

When we started shopping for heat pumps, it was clear that this was a very exciting sector. First of all, heat pumps are kind of magic, so efficient and effective it's almost surreal. But beyond the basic tech – which has been around since the late 1940s – there is a vast ferment of cool digital features coming from exciting and innovative startups.

By nature, I'm the kid of person who likes these digital features. I started out as a computer programmer, and while I haven't written production code since the previous millennium, I've been in and around the tech industry for my whole adult life. But when it came time to buy a heat-pump – an investment that I expected to last for 20 years or more – there was no way I was going to buy one of these cool new digitally enhanced pumps, no matter how much the reviewers loved them. Sure, they'd work well, but it's precisely because I'm so knowledgeable about high tech that I could see that they would fail very, very badly.

You may think EVs are bullshit, and they are – though there will always be room for some personal vehicles, and it's better for people in transit deserts to drive EVs than gas-guzzlers. You may think rooftop solar is a dead-end and be all-in on utility scale solar (I think we need both, especially given the grid-disrupting extreme climate events on our horizon). But there's still a wide range of cleantech – induction tops, heat pumps, smart thermostats – that are capital intensive, have a long duty cycle, and have good reasons to be digitized and networked.

Take home storage batteries: your utility can push its rate card to your battery every time they change their prices, and your battery can use that information to decide when to let your house tap into the grid, and when to switch over to powering your home with the solar you've stored up during the day. This is a very old and proven pattern in tech: the old Fidonet BBS network used a version of this, with each BBS timing its calls to other nodes to coincide with the cheapest long-distance rates, so that messages for distant systems could be passed on:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FidoNet

Cleantech is a very dynamic sector, even if its triumphs are largely unheralded. There's a quiet revolution underway in generation, storage and transmission of renewable power, and a complimentary revolution in power-consumption in vehicles and homes:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/12/s-curve/#anything-that-cant-go-on-forever-eventually-stops

But cleantech is too important to leave to the incumbents, who are addicted to enshittification and planned obsolescence. These giant, financialized firms lack the discipline and culture to make products that have the features – and cost savings – to make them appealing to the very wide range of buyers who must transition as soon as possible, for the sake of the very planet.

It's not enough for our policymakers to focus on financing and infrastructure barriers to cleantech adoption. We also need a policy-level response to enshittification.

Ideally, every cleantech device would be designed so that it was impossible to enshittify – which would also make it impossible to brick:

Based on free software (best), or with source code escrowed with a trustee who must release the code if the company enters administration (distant second-best);

All patents in a royalty-free patent-pool (best); or in a trust that will release them into a royalty-free pool if the company enters administration (distant second-best);

No parts-pairing or other DRM permitted (best); or with parts-pairing utilities available to all parties on a reasonable and non-discriminatory basis (distant second-best);

All diagnostic and error codes in the public domain, with all codes in the clear within the device (best); or with decoding utilities available on demand to all comers on a reasonable and non-discriminatory basis (distant second-best).

There's an obvious business objection to this: it will reduce investment in innovative cleantech because investors will perceive these restrictions as limits on the expected profits of their portfolio companies. It's true: these measures are designed to prevent rent-extraction and other enshittificatory practices by cleantech companies, and to the extent that investors are counting on enshittification rents, this might prevent them from investing.

But that has to be balanced against the way that a general prohibition on enshittificatory practices will inspire consumer confidence in innovative and novel cleantech products, because buyers will know that their investments will be protected over the whole expected lifespan of the product, even if the startup goes bust (nearly every startup goes bust). These measures mean that a company with a cool product will have a much larger customer-base to sell to. Those additional sales more than offset the loss of expected revenue from cheating and screwing your customers by twiddling them to death.

There's also an obvious legal objection to this: creating these policies will require a huge amount of action from Congress and the executive branch, a whole whack of new rules and laws to make them happen, and each will attract court-challenges.

That's also true, though it shouldn't stop us from trying to get legal reforms. As a matter of public policy, it's terrible and fucked up that companies can enshittify the things we buy and leave us with no remedy.

However, we don't have to wait for legal reform to make this work. We can take a shortcut with procurement – the things governments buy with public money. The feds, the states and localities buy a lot of cleantech: for public facilities, for public housing, for public use. Prudent public policy dictates that governments should refuse to buy any tech unless it is designed to be enshittification-resistant.

This is an old and honorable tradition in policymaking. Lincoln insisted that the rifles he bought for the Union Army come with interoperable tooling and ammo, for obvious reasons. No one wants to be the Commander in Chief who shows up on the battlefield and says, "Sorry, boys, war's postponed, our sole supplier decided to stop making ammunition."

By creating a market for enshittification-proof cleantech, governments can ensure that the public always has the option of buying an EV that can't be bricked even if the maker goes bust, a heat-pump whose digital features can be replaced or maintained by a third party of your choosing, a solar controller that coordinates with the grid in ways that serve their owners – not the manufacturers' shareholders.

We're going to have to change a lot to survive the coming years. Sure, there's a lot of scary ways that things can go wrong, but there's plenty about our world that should change, and plenty of ways those changes could be for the better. It's not enough for policymakers to focus on ensuring that we can afford to buy whatever badly thought-through, extractive tech the biggest companies want to foist on us – we also need a focus on making cleantech fit for purpose, truly smart, reliable and resilient.

Support me this summer on the Clarion Write-A-Thon and help raise money for the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers' Workshop!

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/26/unplanned-obsolescence/#better-micetraps

Image: 臺灣古寫真上色 (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Raid_on_Kagi_City_1945.jpg

Grendelkhan (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ground_mounted_solar_panels.gk.jpg

CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en

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drnikolatesla · 4 months ago

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How Tesla’s 1934 Roast Looped Back to Donald Trump’s Uncle

Time travel to 1934 when Tesla dropped the most technical roast in science history! ⚡️🔥

The 1930s were a wild time for physics—scientists were just starting to crack open atoms, and everyone was hyped about particle acceleration. Enter MIT professor Van de Graaff, who unveils this massive static electricity generator housed in an airplane hangar. And it was impressive—a breakthrough in creating high-voltage environments for controlled research! 🏗️

But Tesla, the high-voltage GOAT since the 1890s, saw the numbers and was like, “Hold up...” 🤔

He broke it down (remember, this is the guy who gave us AC power):

The generator produced a CRAZY high voltage (10 million volts!) but barely any current (0.00022 amperes).

Imagine a super-skinny water pipe with extreme pressure vs. Tesla’s previous systems, which were more like Niagara Falls.

Only 23% efficient—a major issue for power generation.

The machine was producing its own ozone, which was deteriorating its belts. ☠️

Tesla had already pushed 18 million volts and 1,100 amperes through the air back in 1899, so he wasn’t easily impressed. He published a full analysis in Scientific American, saying, “Most people, and not a few electricians, will think that very long and noisy sparks are indicative of great energy, which is far from being the case.” 📝

Here’s the science tea ☕: While Van de Graaff’s machine was revolutionary for particle experiments, Tesla calculated that 99.33% of its input energy was lost during charging. For particle acceleration, it only hit 0.122 times the speed of light. But here’s the kicker—Van de Graaff’s machine wasn’t built for power plants; it became crucial for nuclear research and is still used in labs today! 🔬

Now, the plot twist: former president Donald Trump’s uncle, Dr. John Trump, was working with Van de Graaff at MIT during all this. Imagine getting a detailed critique from THE Nikola Tesla about your project and he's just dunking on you! 😅

Tesla wasn’t just throwing shade, though—when they improved the machine to 20 kilowatts, he acknowledged the progress with a galaxy-brain analogy: “A little water pumped through some joint in a big low-pressure main is of no consequence, but in a pump designed for an extremely high pressure and very small delivery it is all-important.” Different tools for different jobs! 🛠️

And here’s the full-circle moment: When Tesla passed in 1943, the FBI called Dr. John Trump to review his papers. Seems like a perfect time to restore your reputation and get back at Tesla. Trump said that Tesla's work, while innovative and intriguing, lacked concrete, practical applications and was largely speculative. He concluded that his papers did not contain any groundbreaking discoveries or revolutionary technologies. Sure, buddy! 😉

What do you think? Was Tesla too harsh on Van de Graaff, or was he spot-on?

#nikola tesla #science #history #Trump

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misaverawrites · 1 year ago

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In the Heat of Your Electric Touch

((johnny silverhand x reader))

summary: you're the manager of SAMURAI, johnny talks to you about changing his image after some reflection since Alt died, you decide that he can do what’s best for him… and you might be it.

tags: no arasaka tower bombing, johnny is a good person, johnny has a body, rockerboy johnny silverhand, samurai stays together, fluff, alt’s death (mentioned), cursing, fluff, forehead kisses, NO PHANTOM LIBERTY SPOILERS

a/n: uhhhh, your honor, i am a 20 year old silly goose with a love for this man.

You stare out over the crowd from backstage, with wide smiles, music amplified by their singing as the bass vibrates through your teeth. You run a hand through your hair, just for a second, pushing away a rogue strand. You take a look at your phone, then back at the stage, where you find Johnny, looking at you with a wide and almost uncharacteristic grin, only to flash it back at the crowd, brandishing horns on his hand, the loud cheers from the crowd egging him on, bringing a small, but not, unwelcome smile to your face. Johnny loved what he did, no one could deny that, even if it seemed he only did it to further his own agenda at times. You knew better though, you and Johnny had spent too much time together on this tour for you to think too far against him.

“Alright, and we want to dedicate this encore to every single one of you!” You hear Kerry say from the stage, the wild roar from the crowd amplifying itself, you tend to watch the crowd more than anything during these shows, it was therapeutic, these people were the lifeblood of bands similar to SAMURAI , and you intended to keep them happy. As SAMURAI closes out their set, as well as Henry’s tab, some of the people start their slow, exhausted post-concert shuffle back out onto the streets of Night City, bags of SAMURAI merchandise in hand, you begin your clean-up, helping stage-hands move everything back onto the van.

“Hey, take a load off, they’ve got it.” You hear Johnny, and you shake your head. “Shouldn’t you be getting under the skirt of some barely-legal SAMURAI fangirl?” You joke and he rolls his eyes, “Fuck off,” he justifies himself, playfully all the same, until his tone gets a bit more serious in nature, “Besides, thinkin’ that’s not all too much my scene anymore.” You laugh, almost dropping the set piece in your hands. “Alright, I’m gonna hear you out, but it sounds like you just started talkin’ like one of those Maelstrom goons after they’ve had one too many implantations, what do you mean ?”

Johnny scoffs and takes the set piece from you, setting it down as he sits you down on the stage, the lingering fans vie successfully for Kerry’s attention, less so successfully for Johnny’s, his attention is all on you.

“I’m just… Fuckin’ sick of it, since Alt, since fuckin’ Arasaka, I don’t wanna ramble in those streets to a God who ain’t listenin’. Y’know?” You sigh and he puts his hand on top of yours, “I just want somethin’... Someone , even who makes me not want to shove an iron in my fuckin’ mouth.” You look at him, just for a second, as if he’s grown two heads, until you realize, from the way he’s looking at you, for once in his life, he’s serious . Your eyes widen a bit, does he mean you ? “It’s not your scene,” You say simply, it’s almost matter-of-fact in delivery.

“What if I wanted it to be?” He asks, that genuine tone of voice still there, he’s still Johnny, he knows what he wants, and he’s pushing for it. Not too hard, lest he drive you away, which is a change all in itself. “I’m the band’s manager, Johnny.” He rolls his eyes a bit, “You’ve been around Corpos a bit too long, babe,” You can’t help but love the way it sounds coming off his tongue, when it’s aimed towards you and not at another girl, “You know the fans don’t care, hell, they live for this stupid drama.” You can’t deny that. Your miles-long social media inbox, brimming with fans begging for any bit of gossip, said that all on its own. You smile a bit, “I mean, if you’re saying it could be your scene, then who am I to fight that, Johnny?” He grins, it’s a big, goofy grin unlike you’d ever seen before from him, “Shit, if you’re willing to allow it, then I guess I’d better not fuck it up.” You and him pause for a moment, not realizing how close the two of you are to one another, bodies pressed tightly against one another, you feel his eyes flicker to your lips for just a moment, until you, for once decide, fuck it . You pull Johnny in and kiss him, he’s warm, warmer than you’d expected whenever you thought about this, his hands meet your elbows awkwardly, he doesn’t know what to do here, and neither do you, really. His lips are chapped against yours and he tastes of cigarettes and tequila, a dangerously addictive combination that makes you want him more and more. You feel his hand suddenly brush against your hair and support the underside of your mouth, giving him more access to your mouth as he deepens the kiss, and everything else is simply null and void, besides him and you.

Until you hear the familiar sound of Kerry, clearing his throat, “Hey, both of you!” He calls, actually subtle for him, as the two of you pull away awkwardly, as though the two of you are teenagers, trying to act cool after being caught getting hot and heavy in a dark movie theater. “We’ve gotta go, bar wants us out, but you two can keep going on the tour bus, cool?” Your skin flushes and you avoid direct eye contact with Kerry, as Johnny chuckles awkwardly, despite himself, trying to keep any sense of his usually un-poised yet still collected poise. You nod, turning to look back at Johnny, who does the same to you, as you both share a small laugh with one another, you playfully push him without any real force, as he wraps his ‘ganic arm around you, kissing your forehead softly as the two of you get onto the tour bus together.

#johnny silverhand x reader #cyberpunk 2077 #cyberpunk 2020 #cyberpunk red #cyberpunk 2077 fanfiction #johnny silverhand #keanu reeves #fanfiction #fanfic #writers of tumblr #ao3 fanfic #fanfic writing #ao3 writer

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envihellbender · 6 months ago

Note

What is each member of the DBD agency’s fave flavour of ice cream ?

Edwin: Rum Raisin

It was a very grown up choice, Edwin thought. Or at least he did when he was ten years old on holiday in Cornwall. He was at Lizard’s point after a walk that made his legs ache and his chest heave and being asked what he’d like in front of what looked like a tram filled with ice cream. Mostly he’d been copying his mother, she always had Rum Raisin. In fact the smell of tobacco and rum always reminded him of home. When he’d first tried it, he felt that internal sense of anxiety inside of him calm. He felt like a true adult, even his father’s permanent frown and disappointed veneer soothed. For once Edwin felt in that rainy holiday on the coast that he wasn’t a weak little child. Even now, as a teenage hundred year old ghost, he still can taste the strong, overwhelming taste and the way his mind started to feel at its most relaxed point.

Charles: Mint chocolate chip

Ice cream flavours weren’t particularly prevalent during Charles’s childhood. He ran to the ice cream van with his pocket money once a day and got the standard swirl of vanilla with a chocolate flake stuck inside. It wasn’t until he was twelve and he saw his first ever ice cream parlour that he discovered anything different. That sort of thing wasn’t common in England, it seemed so American and suave. It was like he was a character in Grease or something, he thought. When he saw the selection in front of him he felt his brain freeze with decision paralysis. He eventually pointed at the green ice cream with chunks of chocolate in it, the concept of mint being anything other than the imperials his mum kept in her pocket in the taxi so she didn’t get carsick was so alien to him… the idea that the ice cream was a soft, gentler spearmint that was tamed by the chocolate blew his mind. It was far pricier than the 99p flake, but it was worth it.

Crystal: Affogato

Crystal regularly attempts to regain parts of her memory through her senses, she doesn’t entirely know what she likes and dislikes because so much of her identity has been ripped from her. The small parts she can regain matter so much to her as a result. That was how she approached trying to remember her favourite ice cream when Jenny offered to take her and Niko to an ice cream parlour. She felt sorry for the two teens under her care who couldn’t afford to go out during the uncharacteristically hot summer and took them out for a treat. Crystal didn’t know what affogato was but there was a strong pull in her chest towards it, an electricity pulsing through her body as she demanded it. She felt uncertain when she saw them poor a hot espresso over the ice cream, but when she tasted it she felt this sense of overwhelming belonging and joy. She didn’t know why, but she knew this was a good, safe memory.

Niko: Miyazaki Mango

Niko likes a lot of ice cream and is fairly easy to please in this regard. She is generally a huge fan of sweet treats, especially the fruitier kind. However, she finds the change from the Japanese treats of her childhood to American ones. For example, she was rather disappointed when she discovered strawberries are different in the States. When it comes to ice cream she insists that Miyazaki Mango is the best in the entire world, not even other types of mango ice cream in different parts of Japan compares to it. It has to come from Miyazaki prefecture, she had it a few times when she went with her parents as a child and hasn’t tasted anything close to it since. She is offered a mango ice cream in Port Townsend and is very disappointed, dare I say disgusted, at how inferior it is.

Jenny: Black Raspberry

Jenny never had much of a sweet tooth even as a kid, but as he always did her dad tried to push her to like the normal kid things. As a result she didn’t know what her ‘favourite ice cream’ was until she was around fifteen. On trips to New England with her dad as a teen to get deliveries for the shop, they’d always stop at an ice cream parlour. She eventually tried the black raspberry expecting something similar to a raspberry swirl but was delighted to discover it contained chocolate chips. If she ever goes for ice cream and they have this flavour she orders it in bulk. As an edgy teenager she claimed it was because it looked like blood. One of the few sweet treats she adores.

The Cat King: Strawberry

CK is extremely fussy when it comes to food especially something sweet. He’d personally prefer strawberries and cream, but like most cats he is extremely partial to strawberries. He might be a little disgruntled by the cold but he’d enjoy it in the end. He once tried a tiger tail ice cream purely because of the name but when he tasted the orange and the liquorice he hissed and spat it on the ground. He considers both of those things to be poisonous and pure evil. Strawberries however he always considered quite decadent in the early years of his life and is amazed at how easy it is to get now.

Monty: Moon mist

Monty knew his new human self had to have a favourite ice cream, so he experimented and researched. He went to every ice cream shop and parlour in Port Townsend, trying everything he could find. He preferred the berry related flavours, blueberry, strawberry, raspberry… but he couldn’t find the perfect ice cream. He was reading a list of flavours in the Internet when he came across the perfect name: moon mist. He adored the moon, the planets, and the stars. He’d watch them and allow them to guide him, so it made sense they’d bringing him to his favourite ice cream. He couldn’t find anywhere in the town that had it in stock, so he printed it out and brought it to a gelato place owned by an Italian couple and asked if they could make it. When they did and gave it to him, the first taste filled Monty with joy and magic. The mix of colours and flavours made him feel like he was mixed in to the galaxy itself. As a crow banana, grape, and bubblegum were foreign to him, but now he didn’t want to eat anything else.

Night Nurse: Scottish tablet chunks in vanilla ice cream

She obviously has no such time for such trivial matters, however when she was a child in Falkirk her Uncle would make a special treat for her and her siblings. He would break-up pieces of Scottish tablet and mix it in with the ice cream. That was one of the few pleasant memories of her childhood, that was until they got sent away again. Poor Scottish children evacuated to another cold foster home in the countryside didn’t tend to get ice cream quite so much. Still, a bowl of vanilla ice cream and Scottish tablet might make her soften around the edges just a little.

#dead boy detectives #dbda headcanons #Edwin Payne #Charles rowland #Crystal Palace #niko sasaki #Jenny the butcher #the cat king #Monty the crow #night nurse

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morpheus-somnium · 9 months ago

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Thieves Guild [modern au]

[masterlist]

Informations

Location: Ragged Flagon, Ratway, Riften

Leader: Mercer Frey

Headcanons

The Ratway in my modern au is a street or scummy neighborhood that most people avoid. The Ragged Flagon is an internet cafe.

I mean, I can see Delvin doxing someone while eating instant noodles, tbh.

From the outside, it looks so bad, but from the inside, it really is. JK. Inside it’s pretty cool; you can buy different foods, there is an electric kettle, and maybe you can even get some drinks from Vekel if you are old enough.

In fact, a lot of people come here to actually play online games, and no one cares when a shady figure in the back of the cafe is on Facebook, writing a letter to an unknown Orc grandmother and convincing her that he is her missing grandson and let him have her inheritance.

The Thieves Guild, as a faction, is very diverse. They scam, they dox, they plan and do actual heists, they hack bank accounts, they pickpocket people (if they ever get out of bed or the internet café), they steal, they start a “devious lick” trend on social media…

Ragged Flagon is more of a meeting point for them.

On a larger-caliber mission, the members wear mainly techwear.

Brynjolf? You will find him in every city. He’s always in shopping centers where he scams people. Not in the underpass, but in the building itself. For example, he sells “nano-magic” and “high-tech” phone protector screens that were stolen from a one-dollar store (or from a delivery van).

Delvin works with technology; he is the one hacking bank accounts, and I think he might invest in crypto 😭 He is also kind of like a walking lexicon?

Even though Mercer says that there aren’t any places that the Guild protects, every other member thinks otherwise. For example, the members never steal from orphanages, and they never steal from those places that certain members visit (in a non-criminal way). For example, I think Vex likes hot springs, jacuzzis, saunas, etc., so no one steals from the local spa that she visits (not even her, unless there is a rude customer).

They organize family game nights!! They play Mario Kart and similar games.

And they also place dozens of bets on the people they know, not just guild members. They made bets on when Talen-Jei would propose to Keerava, for example.

How does Mercer subdue the Thieves Guild? He keeps the prices so high for everyone. He charges almost 3-5 times more for internet and electricity. And the members don’t question it. Like they are one (1) Google search away from finding out that the average price for using the computers and wifi should be around 12 septim and not 40 septim.

#skyrim #skyrim modern au #tesblr #the elder scrolls #modern au #elder scrolls skyrim #elder scrolls #alternate universe #thieves guild #thieves #brynjolf #vex #delvin #mercer frey

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mariacallous · 6 months ago

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Five years ago, in a splashy speech in Washington, DC, Jeff Bezos rolled out Amazon’s Climate Pledge, a series of commitments to show that the company was serious about addressing climate change.

A core component of that pledge, one that Bezos touted in front of members of Congress during Amazon’s antitrust hearing a year later, was putting 100,000 electric delivery vans on the road by 2030. In a blog post from this July—headlined with a picture of a Prime Rivian van driving through an open field filled with wind turbines—the company proclaims that it has now delivered 800 million packages in the US using EVs, with 15,000 trucks on the road in neighborhoods across the country.

But those EVs might not be doing much to help the climate. The company’s US delivery vehicle emissions have potentially shot up an estimated 194 percent since the Climate Pledge went into place in 2019, according to a new report.

The report, released Thursday from corporate campaigners at Stand.earth, attempts to figure out just how much damage shipping the US’s Amazon orders is doing to the planet. It finds that overall emissions from shipping packages have increased 75 percent since 2019, from 3.3 million tons of CO2 equivalents in 2019 to 5.8 million tons last year. The 2.5-million-ton difference is the equivalent of putting 595,000 additional gas-powered cars on the road for a year.

Those Rivian vans are often just delivering the last leg of a package’s life. Before coming to customers’ doorsteps, packages travel by airplane, cargo ship, and/or long-haul truck—transport methods that are both notoriously dirty and tricky to decarbonize.

Doing the math on Amazon’s delivery emissions entails a lot of guesswork. Unlike some of its competitors, Amazon does not break out details on its emissions associated with shipping and delivery. In fact, the company’s annual sustainability report doesn’t give any hard numbers at all on its logistics operations, despite Amazon dominating the US ecommerce market and delivering 4 billion packages in the US within two days in 2023.

“Stand.earth’s work is based on inaccurate data, a broad mischaracterization of our operations, and by their own admission, a methodology based on assumptions and unverified information,” Amazon spokesperson Steve Kelly said in a statement to WIRED. “The truth is that The Climate Pledge is an ambitious commitment for Amazon and the more than 525 companies that have signed up to achieve net zero carbon emissions by 2040. It’s only by taking this on that we can work collectively to transform industries such as shipping, transportation, and the built environment, and we need more companies encouraged to take this direction and quick action.” (As well as committing Amazon to addressing climate change, another aim of the Climate Pledge is to get other companies to follow Amazon’s lead.)

Kelly added: “We’ve continued to publish a detailed, transparent reporting of our year-on-year progress. We encourage everyone to track our progress through our annual Sustainability Report, which has correct data, transparent methodologies, and a third-party assurance.”

The company did not provide WIRED with any additional emissions statistics or other additional data for its shipping and delivery operations.

“We’re doing the best we can with the data available,” says Joshua Archer, a campaigner at Stand.earth and the primary author of the report. “Amazon’s [data] doesn’t even scratch the surface of this massive operations network.”

As a result, the Stand.earth report is based on a mountain of third-party data—all US-based—and math equations to get to some ballpark estimates. UPS and FedEx emissions data disclosed in those companies’ sustainability reports allowed researchers to get an idea of the emissions created by shipping packages by truck in the US. Third-party data from two aviation analytics providers helped to tally up the estimated domestic emissions associated with Amazon Air, a fleet of planes that deliver parcels for the company. Maritime shipping estimates are based on manifest data from US ports where Amazon was a signee. Many of these numbers, the report stresses, are almost certainly an undercount, as authors excluded calculations like emissions associated with package returns and packages shipped or delivered by third-party carriers due to lack of data.

The main culprit for Amazon’s increased shipping emissions, the report finds, is from airplanes: US emissions associated with Amazon Air have skyrocketed 67 percent since 2019. According to Kelly, Amazon’s overall emissions have increased since 2019 due to the company’s expansion during the pandemic.

“When you think of things people order through Amazon, a lot of them are things you don’t need the next day,” Archer says. “Nevertheless, they’re getting shipped on airplanes.”

This trend tracks with the rest of the industry. During the pandemic, port disruptions around the world forced providers to switch over to airplanes to transport cargo; much of this air infrastructure remains in place today. Simultaneously, the US ecommerce market shot up by 43 percent in 2020 as everyone stuck inside ordered more and more stuff. In 2023, the US shipped 21.7 billion parcels—that’s 687 packages every second.

There’s one area where things are improving for Amazon: according to the Stand.earth report, emissions per package have been dropping for Amazon since 2020, which, Archer says, is largely thanks to loading more parcels on bigger planes. (Kelly says that the company’s overall carbon intensity—measuring the efficiency of its operations—has improved by 34 percent since 2019, even as its overall emissions went up.) In comparison, UPS’s package emissions intensity has consistently risen since 2020, thanks in part to its increased reliance on aviation.

But even considering small improvements like these, the aggressive growth Amazon has driven over the past few years is, in many ways, incompatible with sustainability. “Keep an eye on the skies for even more A330s delivering for Amazon customers in the coming months and years,” Amazon concludes in a blog post touting its new, more efficient cargo planes. Unless greener alternatives to jet fuel become available years ahead of schedule, it will be impossible for the company to add more planes to its fleet without also making emissions jump up.

“Amazon prides itself on being an ambitious and innovative company, but it’s making quite a problem for itself with its air freight cargo growth,” Archer says. “If Amazon is serious about climate progress, that’s a really easy place to start: stop flying so much.”

Amazon is no stranger to climate criticism. Its overall emissions have skyrocketed since it rolled out the Climate Pledge in 2019, despite an incremental drop in 2023. Last year, Amazon lost the support of a key UN-backed global climate organization, the Science Based Targets Initiative, for not meeting certain deadlines to set targets to reduce emissions; it was one of nearly two dozen companies axed by SBTI from its list of climate-conscious companies. In July, Amazon Employees for Climate Justice, an employee group, released a report criticizing the company’s calculations around its claim that it had met a sustainable energy goal. In 2023, Amazon quietly eliminated a goal to make half its shipments carbon neutral by 2030—a goal which, the company says, was superseded by the larger Climate Pledge.

Part of the issue in calculating emissions for Amazon is just how sprawling the challenges it faces are, thanks to its relentless vertical integration: the Wall Street Journal reported in May that in order to expand its control over its logistics processes, the company had already leased, bought, or announced plans to expand warehouse space in the US by 16 million square feet this year. Kelly said in an email in response to WIRED’s request for comment that the vast network of logistics the company has built allows it to deliver packages closer to their destination and avoid driving long miles.

Reading the company’s sustainability report is an exercise in understanding a variety of different ambitious technical and sociological climate goals across different industries involved in its supply chain. In response to WIRED’s request for comment, Kelly listed out Amazon’s membership in two business organizations advancing sustainable shipping, its membership in a buyers’ alliance encouraging the adoption of sustainable aviation fuel, and its investment in electric trucking: in May, the company put 50 electric trucks on the road in Southern California.

“I think it creates a lot of challenges for the broader transportation industry if every company just does what Amazon does and brings air freight in house,” Archer says. “Then you’ll have a situation where a lot of people are flying a lot of planes.”

There’s a real question of whether or not the company making significant changes would just move emissions from one company’s balance sheet to another’s as the rest of the industry keeps growing. Atlas Air, a subcontractor of Amazon Air, announced in May that it would stop domestic flights carrying Amazon parcels in favor of concentrating on other customers, including Chinese ecommerce titans Shein and Temu.

Still, with Amazon dominating so much of the US market—and with the capacity to kick off trends that other suppliers then follow, like expedited shipping—the company has an opportunity to set an aggressive example, like throwing a substantial effort into decreasing plane use and helping the US build out infrastructure for more sustainable long-haul trucking. (The company didn’t provide figures on how much it has spent on partnerships, research, lobbying, or other activities to decarbonize the trucking sector in the US.)

As for that splashy electric van pledge? The Stand.earth report projects that at Amazon’s current growth rates, if the company puts all the electric vans it promises on the roads by the end of the decade, that would still only account for a third of the company’s deliveries. If Amazon’s sales keep growing on pace, it would need 400,000 EVs to deliver all its packages.

“The 100,000 vans by 2030 is way too little, way too late,” Archer says.

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carsthatnevermadeitetc · 1 year ago

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Helixx delivery van prototype, 2023. A UK-based technology company has revealed their first demonstrator vehicle. Utilising a cube-like aesthetic, it has been designed for ease of assembly and optimum interior load space. When it enters production in 2024, it will be accompanied by a pick-up truck, an open-body and a closed-body passenger vehicles for ride-hailing fleets. The body system comprises only five key structural components.. All five components ‘click and bond’ together for effortless assembly, significantly reducing manufacturing costs.

#Helixx #Helixx delivery van #prototype #electric van #boxy #box van #delivery van #2023 #2024 #new van #central driving position

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neathbowprideflag · 1 year ago

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so im looking at articles to figure out the logistics of mail delivery in the neath and

Other experiments were more radical. An electric parcel van was trialled in the City of London in 1894. A steam driven van carried the mails between London and Reigate for nine weeks in 1897 but it struggled with the weight. (source)

and now im thinking of red science-powered parcel vans. your mail will get to you fast but it might also blow up.

#neathchat #the courier's correspondent specialization is crimson engineer...

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wekiaam · 4 months ago

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DUTCH MOULIN ROUGE: Thoughts and fun details!!

I just saw Moulin Rouge at the Beatrixtheater in Utrecht you guys!!!! I want to share my memories of it while it's still fresh in my mind, some cast information and general details I was able to notice from all the way in the back rows of the theatre!

I have to be honest, I was a little disappointed when I found out that the Dutch production of Moulin Rouge was going to keep the songs in English, although I kind of got it bc people still have to recognize the pop songs. I am now sorry for ever having doubted that choice. It somehow worked really well, even at the part where Christian goes from Dutchly speaking to Englishly singing the lyrics of Your Song (Het is een beetje raar, this feeling inside (I'm dead)).

Zidler is usually played by Carlo Boszhard (BIG name in Dutch theatre, known mainly as a tv host but played Thenardier, Lumière, and voiced The Grinch, Mushu, and Donkey from Shrek) but tonight he was played by his understudy Wim van den Driessche (Javert, Valjean, Captain von Trapp, Judge Turpin, the Phantom) who was AMAZING at hyping up the audience and he played the character as so stressed out all the time it was great

Satine was also played by understudy Tessa Sunniva (Ariel, Anya), and Christian was played by Martijn Noort (Fiyero) and they had such good chemistry on stage they just melted into each other each time they embraced

I also looked up each of the ensemble members and at more than half of the ensemble had been in either Tina: the Tina Turner Musical, The Bodyguard, or both. The Netherlands truly has five musical productions

And now for some fun bits I noticed (spoilers ofc) (all the dialogue was Dutch but I will be citing in English for convenience)

-Christian was so adorably awkward in his line delivery and body language throughout the whole show (Satine: You're different from what I expected Christian: Surpriiise *jazz hands*)

-At the moment when Christian usually rickrolls the audience, he sang samples from famous Dutch pop songs instead ( "What brings you to Paris?" "🎶Ik ben mezelf niet of al die jaren nooit geweest🎶" en "Sing one of your love songs!" "🎶Je komt in ademnood🎶") Audience lost it

-The audience went WILD when Satine came down on the trapeze

-Zidler breaks his over-the-top-extravagant-night-club-owner persona at the line "The Duke is expecting the Sparkling Diamond!🥰 MAKE SURE THAT SHE IS THERE." cue audible gasps

-After Christian says "I have been practicing all day" Satine downs her whole drink

-Pitch song was entirely in Dutch!!! :D

-Nature boy. Oh my goooodd

-Speaking of, Toulouse-Lautrec, played by Giovanni van Gom (Tarzan, Aida, Hairspray, ALSO TINA) is my absolute favourite character in the whole show what a beautiful man with a beautiful voice (his speaking voice was high and enthusiastic but his singing voice was a lot lower in contrast)

-When Christian starts singing "Everlasting love" Satine tries to run away from him but he sort of chases after her it was so funny

-Backstage Romance was so electric!!

-The Duke played by Nino Ruiter (Soldaat van Oranje, ZODIAC) was SO CREEPY he would constantly lean in so close to Satine when speaking to her and just being such a sleaze the whole time it was great

- Zidler was so excited about his shaving blade prop it was hilarious

-After "BECAUSE SHE DOESN'T LOVE YOU!" there were like three hours of dead silence

- EL TANGO DE ROXANNE WAS STELLAR I LOVED IT SO MUCH

-During Satine's first verse in "Crazy Rolling", Baby Doll takes her hands in hers, then turns away so Satine won't see her crying, then when she rolls the vanity off the stage she turns around to look at Satine one last time and excuse me while I go sit in a corner and cry

-All of Satine's last interactions with the Moulin Rouge people made me so so sad by the way

- At the end, Satine and Christian sing Come What May one last time, and the ensemble lined up on both sides of the stage and singing along and I'm surprised I didn't bawl my eyes out actually

Here are the bows and me screaming!!

Also caught these two in 4k

#moulin rouge #moulin rouge musical #musical theatre #dutch theatre

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