beam.phosphor.buzz

mothballing this account except for testing/backup purposes (which there will be a lot of, don't worry). my main account will be @alyaza so you'll probably want to follow me there instead of/in addition to here

50 Phil Ochs fans can't be wrong!

every two to three years someone reminds me Axis Powers Hetalia exists and i don't know how to feel about that

whenever Canadians start getting weird about immigrants and their "national identity" i think about how most of that national identity is reflected in consumptive habits from massive corporations (because otherwise Canadians are very similar to Americans―culturally the two countries are way more likeminded than not), and most of the rest is just a byproduct of whatever the fuck Hudson's Bay Company was doing 200 years ago:

The Hudson’s Bay Company’s potent combination of offshore capital (often borrowed) and indebted local labor is how modern Canada—a continental beaver farm and trading company serving Europe’s hat industry—came into being. By making beaver skins a standardized unit of currency, and offering irresistibly attractive and useful things in return, the Company and its aggressive competitors turned the inhabitants of the boreal forest, human and animal alike, into a huge, surprisingly efficient profit-making machine—until they exhausted the resource. In so doing, the fur trade shaped Canada’s creation myth and set the tone for how extractive industries continue to operate there. Through this lens, Canada in general, and Alberta in particular, could be seen not as “a state in the guise of a merchant,” but as a merchant in the guise of a state. This colonial model, which systematically commodifies natural resources and binds local people to the trading post system with company store–style debt, has replicated itself in resource towns across the continent.

― John Vaillant, from Fire Weather, chapter 3

oh memetic hazards are going to be very funny on this

my Cohost export is 1.6GB lmao

i think the way you know we kind of live in hell is the fact that Substack wants to become a payment processor and it probably has a good chance of doing that. god we fucked up the internet so bad

To avoid fizzling the way competitors like Medium have, Substack is trying to become less a journalism platform and more a payment system for creators.

In recent months, the company has been reaching out to influencers, video creators and podcasters to convince them to join the platform. It doesn’t need beauty influencers, say, to all of a sudden become bloggers. But it does want to be the primary vehicle for paying creators regardless of medium.

(https://www.semafor.com/article/10/06/2024/substack-wants-to-do-more-than-just-newsletters)

hey check this out:

https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/policy-regulation/the-20b-us-green-bank-program-just-funded-its-first-project

The complicated regulatory and financial requirements are some of the reasons why it has taken months for the consortiums to start dishing out green bank funds. But somebody eventually had to go first.

That honor goes to Climate United, the consortium in charge of nearly $7 billion in federal green bank funding, more than any other group. On Tuesday, it announced what is both its first investment and the first project financed by the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund: a $31.8 million loan for Scenic Hill Solar, a Little Rock, Arkansas–based solar developer.

That money will provide pre-construction financing for solar installations that will help lower the utility bills and carbon footprint of the University of Arkansas system. At 66 megawatts across 16 sites, the project will be the largest commercial solar deployment in Arkansas and the fourth-largest university renewable energy deployment in the country.

today on birzeblog: i finished Meet the Neighbors and have a few thoughts on it--also i have a lot of stuff i'd like to write about because of it. but for now, please enjoy animal democracy and the Wuikinuxv Nation's fishing management

https://alyaza.neocities.org/#neighbors

one quote from all of this of note:

“The people who were living here at the time had seen so much of the suffering those bears had gone through,” [Jennifer Walkus] said. They started thinking about how to ensure that the bears had enough fish to survive. The Wuikinuxv have a term for this: n̓àn̓akila, to look ahead, to watch out for someone. That value would guide the scientific study of how to ensure that grizzlies had plenty to eat. And they would not be asking scientists from the government—the same government whose biologists supported the trophy hunting of their kin, who had allowed the fishing industry to decimate the salmon and the timber industry their habitat, who didn’t take their own expertise seriously—for help. “They’re the ones with the loudest voices,” said Walkus of the industries. “The only ones speaking for the bear and the fish and the eagles are us.”

Walkus went to Chris Darimont, science director at the Raincoast Foundation, who had worked on their collaboration with the Heiltsuk. He sent them Megan Adams, an idealistic young ecologist working toward her master’s degree. She would help take Walkus’s questions out onto the landscape. How many grizzly bears lived in their home? How much did they eat? How many salmon did they need, and how could their own salmon harvests include the needs of the bears?

working on today's blog update, where you get to learn about Wuikinuxv fishing practices