the potential energy of water stored at elevation is one of those genius, elegant solutions that clever communities have been using for hundreds of years to my knowledge, but probably longer. of course, rather than using photovoltaics, those people have been using wind driven pumps to effectively store water at elevation so they can release it at pressure for irrigation, etc. i saw setups like that all over the navajo reservation when i worked out there. they pump water from the aquifer and keep it in a gravity tank on a mesa. at just 6’ of relative elevation, one can totally meet the flow requirements of drip irrigation. but at like 100 feet, the pressure is incredible and can hit 40PSI.

water is kinda wild, because it doesn’t compress. the pressure just builds with depth and the “shock” or “hammer effect” can be captured. if you want to see some crazy low tech shit to move water, check out ram pumps. you can make a little one with shit from a hardware store, but seeing a serious one in action is fucking crazy.

i mostly think about moving water around when it comes to energy costs, because i’m an ag guy and delivering the right amount of water to the right place at the right time (often when weather patterns are not doing so) is the name of the game. for a long time, affluent growers have relied on gas and diesel pumps because fuel was cheap and there was no downside! back in the day, was only the tightwads (me) and the lazy (me) who would start trying to find site specific solutions using topography/gravity and look into picohydroelectric systems to trickle charge batteries and shit. having a access to a janky little stream that is flowing opens up a lot of possibilities for capturing energy.

but yeah, this system is basically capturing the periodic availability of solar energy (or wind energy is totally possible to run a pump) and storing it as gravitational potential energy (from elevating water) so it can be released on demand. honestly, the earthworks necessary to initially build out something like this is one of the few uses of fossil fuel energy i think is justifiable.

I’m totally a club guy, but I’ve never had the extra bread. I would take it out! I don’t want any more bread than the absolute minimum necessary for me to hold the thing and cram it into my angry chew hole.

this one cafe I used to get them at regularly would toast them for me in a panini maker, smashing them even further. that was my gold standard.

can’t wait to see these boys get pissy at each other over some perceived slight.

it’s gonna be the cattiest, messiest shit ever.

yeah, one of the other drawbacks of the PhD that is rarely discussed is that people who get one enter a national/international job market for applicants that are generally prepared to completely relocate almost anywhere. especially young/new phds.

and some of those positions, at least in my field or potential path can be in places I do not want to build a life, making the configuration of right job + right place super rare/competitive.

like yeah, maybe I could make phat stacks in a role I would find pleasant and valuable… but it would be in like Lubbock or Modesto. my MSc, on the other hands, has let me target a broader range of decent roles and seems to have rewarded me with more agency in what sort of career path I want to take, and where I want to take it.

“only” having an MSc in the academy definitely relegated myself and other “professional staff” into this twilight world of no institutional power/weirdly toxic codependence on senior faculty patronage, relatively low pay:effort ratio compared to faculty.

I also had a front row seat to witnessing the hollowing out of education/research/service missions in favor of being turned into an amusement park for the fail progeny of the wealthy and a debt peon factory for the brightest offspring of the working class. just endless emails of lib platitudes from people who are making 7 figures a year to dismantle DEI offices and crack down on BLM and anti-genocidr protests while casting themselves as the guardians of intellectual inquiry.

in the end, after nearly a decade, it became too much. I no longer wanted my earnest efforts to do right by the public be used to launder the reputation of an organization that is actively selling out the public to juice its bond rating.

sorry, of unmonitored, I will rant about the failed promise of the academy literally forever.

i would say go for it. one of the more fortunate ways a working person can exist anymore is to be somewhat materially secure, not mind doing your job, and, critically, to not be looking for your job to provide long term fulfillment and satisfaction with your life… to mentally have a foot out the door.

to have an OK situation and know that you could conceive of walking away from it in a year or so if you found something better is close to perfect, because it means you can periodically look around, day dream, and make calculated/strategic moves towards something without feeling pressured or rushed.

also, there’s a sweet spot of being someone who has lots of experiences across a range of sectors, and no employer looks down on NGO work, nor do they ask or expect someone to do it for their entire career due to burnout / funding idiosyncrasies. in my experience, leaving a state job or a private for-profit sector role is usually treated as though there’s some specific reason behind it, but leaving an NGO people can just say, “it was time” or something super vague and nobody pushes back.

also, i would only go for a phd at this point to use it to emigrate out or to dig deeper in and get some federal job. trying to inhabit the academy is fucked, imo. people claim to make it work, but i am deeply suspicious of how fucked their personal lives are at this stage of the managerial/neoliberal university and austerity. or the peace they’ve made with careerism and workplace toxicity.

there are multiple counties in alabama that are 50% not white, and some as high as 80% not white. despite the constant exogenous framing of The American South as a docile, easily oppressed place it is now and historically been very much contested. (full text)

large capital formations’ strategic plans for the region are the same as they ever were (though somewhat different, tactically) and to achieve them requires ongoing, highly visible maintenance of its institutions alongside a constant occluding of its histories. this ongoing effort serves to attract the investment of capital, becalmed by the overt hostility and purported unchallenged control over the lives of a massive, highly diverse working class.

while we all understand the democratic party is no friend of the working class, it does live or die by the participation of black americans. outside of a few gerrymandered “safe” districts–which the national party tightly controls access to with graft and corruption–it has largely ignored the south, creating room for people unbeholden to the national party to exist and politically organize in places that “don’t matter”, making the party leadership’s control over the region at large, unstable and uncertain.

no, to let all Alabamans express themselves, even symbolically at the ballot box, may lead to something that upsets the existing, highly profitable order. there is a bright future there for large manufacturers. better to keep hammering nails in, never letting up, or else something might escape that threatens the engine room of the entire core.

i got a line on some 100% vidalia that will put you off your face. right off the fuckin’ truck.

people rent out rooms/reaudences all the time there. yes there are landlords in Cuba, but as no person can own more than one residences, that means the most wealthy, hustlegrind one is someone who is married and lives with their spouse in one unit and rents out the other. and there are controls on what they can charge, and the government takes like 33% of it.

one of my top 3 dream jobs would be to sit in a room with these assholes and riff headlines.

like no other responsibilities or whatever, just some shitty conference room, unlimited diet soda, tons of take out options. a nerf ball to toss around.

fucking bullseye.

NYP headline editorial room, you have done it again.

knew a guy who lived there for a decade. loved it. you can live in Cuba pretty openly, but you won’t have legal status as a national unless you marry somebody.

that basically means you can’t own a home or be majority owner of a business and you can only be listed on a joint bank account with an actual national.

so if you meet someone you can trust with everything, you can totally do it. otherwise, you’ll be kinda marginal status. but the guy was like that and loved it.

**EDIT: dude was a US citizen, from NY. I spent about 2 weeks down there and there doesn’t seem to be much popular or institutional distrust of regular ass Americans. people were all pretty jazzed I was from the states, because most honky visitors are from like Europe or Canada. all the fear and aggression is coming from the US.

I was originally CS major from 18-20 and dropped out. it was not interesting and I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was learning a lot quicker by muddling on my own.

at 29, I went back to school for something in the life sciences, with a lot of biology. I remember my first semesters of BIO absolutely blowing my mind at the complexity and resilient adaptation capacity of like… plant tissue.

the mechanisms of life are so far beyond anything we have synthesized or built. if one ignores the dogma of artificial and natural as constructed imaginaries, a tree is a profoundly advanced form of technology. not just in how they function, but how they maintain themselves materially from their surroundings in context and how they adapt it to support the web of interconnected relationships they depend on and how the respond to injury from the elements and other inhabitants.

and don’t even get me started on fungi, the vanguard of life.

whenever i use one of those homemade bars of soap with sandalwood, i get compliments. i think mostly because the subtlety of the mixed soap and oil, it can be hard to place for people used to the typical deodorants and soaps. i have heard that traditionally socialized dudes are attracted to wood oils (i.e. cedar) and traditionally socialized women are attracted to florals, like as a foundational memory trigger sort of thing, for whatever that’s worth. i used to dabble with various essential oils sometimes to test that when i was trying to eff, but haven’t in a long time. i think scents work best when it’s at the edge of perception, like the person detecting it doesn’t recognize its happening until their mind already went somewhere.

having seen shit go down, a lot of people wildly misunderstood what tenure is it what it does to protect the individual, full professor at a university. in truth, it is a feather in the cap for careerists and allows them to Lord over younger faculty. it is granted by the institution to people who bring in a lot of money to the institution, in other words, people who are good at navigating the political economy of funding institutions.

if you go against the president of a university publicly, it will be stripped from you and you will be shit canned. if you make yourself an enemy of administration or, in the instance if publicly supported institutions, get in the radar of a politician holding ourselves strings in a negative way, or if you jeopardize the reputation of the institution, it will be stripped from you. if you don’t basically keep doing what you’ve been doing and bringing $ in, you can lose it too.

it basically only protects you if you’re the sort of senior faculty who doesn’t really need or deserve any protection.

God I love how much of American government processes depends on some Gentlemen’s Agreement type of b.s. and how rapidly everything comes crashing to a halt when some openly corrupt crank enters the scene… who should have never been allowed to even run by the establishment, but was instead granted a wave of institutional support to foreclose upon a populist left movement.

fucking genius strategic plan, liberals. by fetishizing the process, you only expose and broadcast it’s fatal flaws.

look, tankie. if you don’t vote for hitler, you will get turbo hitler. it’s all just hitlers and you have to vote for whichever of the hitlers we tell you, because that’s democracy.

if you don’t use your symbolic power to keep this going, there will be consequences… we have hitlers you cannot imagine in the pipeline.

“What is this a follow up to the–oh, this is a different, new derailed train loaded with toxic waste.” - Your brain, engaging with America

you know those tuxedo print t-shirts? I was on vacation in a really shitty part of Florida and saw one in a dead mall where the bowtie and vest were camo printed. it has become one of my favorite shirts and always gets comments/reactions, which allows me to retort, deadpan, “well it seemed like a formal thing so I figured I should dress nice.”

generally im with you and I think camo is aesthetically kinda busted looking, especially the modern hunting commercial camp and the US military multicam patterns. I kinda like the old school 80s style more, as a throwback to those action flicks and I could totally see wearing a camo pattern from a nation hostile to NATO.

dying to know what Dilbert guy thinks is a productive conversation.

sell gold coins, survival seeds, reverse mortgages and user meta data.

LLMs for “content” which are all basically ads crafted to look like editorials about topics of the day.

basically, wring every cent out of the brand for a year or so, and then delete everything and put up a deep fake video of Alex Jones doing 9/11.