Yesterday, hacker-turned-Tantric-priest-turned-global-resilience-guru Vinay Gupta went on one of his better rants on Twitter. I've Storified it for your pleasure here. The gist was roughly

1. We don't have enough resources to give everyone a Western lifestyle.
2. Said lifestyle isn't actually very good at giving us the things which really make us happy.
3. ( Read more... )

[This is a followup to Teaching our kids to codeWhen I say that I yearn for a mass-algorate society, I don't mean a society in which everyone has the level of knowledge of today's professional programmers. We live in a mass-literate society, but we don't expect everyone to be able to write novels or sonnets or in-depth analyses of the politics of ( Read more... )

[All opinions stated herein are my own: I do not speak for SGP or any other environmental organisation.]

The journalist George Monbiot (whose work I have long admired) has caused a lot of spluttering among my Green friends this morning with this article, in which he argues that the Green movement should throw its weight behind anti-pylon campaigns ( Read more... )

[For my previous critique of the Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt tactics used by the anti-Alternative Vote campaign, including a more detailed explanation of both these terms, see here.]

On this morning's Today programme, Daniel Kawczynski MP (who chairs the parliamentary group promoting First Past The Post) made several claims that, I'm afraid, fall ( Read more... )

In my considered opinion, Sir Fred Goodwin is a wanker.

That is all.

[Non-UK readers: we're having a referendum on May 5th about whether or not to alter the voting system used to elect Members of Parliament. The alternative on offer is, appropriately enough, the Alternative Vote system, sometimes called Instant-Runoff voting ( Read more... )

I think it should be better-known that there is literally a playing field at Eton called Mesopotamia.

The jokes write themselves...

Impressed by their consistent stand in favour of civil liberties, and concerned worried absolutely frickin' terrified by the way none of the other parties were treating climate change with the seriousness it merits, I joined the Scottish Green Party shortly before the election, and spent a few evenings posting leaflets, hanging up placards and so ( Read more... )

Judging by the sentiment on news aggregator Reddit at the time, the 2008 US presidential election should have been a straight fight between Dennis Kucinich and Ron Paul ( Read more... )

[Everything herein will be extremely old hat to many regular readers, but it's new to me and so I thought I'd share. Consider this part of my ongoing project of self-education.]

Charlie Stross, in the comments to his most recent blog post, posted a link to the site Derailing for Dummies. The conceit is that it's a guide to arguing with members of ( Read more... )