Jonathan Schofield

Cycling, designing,
coding, over-thinking.
Bit sweary.
Portsmouth, UK.

Luddite trying not to be po-faced
in the face of so much po💩

A JS trying to make his JS, CSS and HTML lean and kind.

“The times are urgent.
Let’s slow down.”
—Bayo Akomolafe

Header image is a panoramic view of Southsea seafront from the groyne built from imported Norwegian granite to protect the beach from longshore drift.

Profile image is a 50-something me behind a card box that says “Fragile, this way up”.

Helping to build…: https://seethroughtogether.org
Micturition interpreter: https://mastodon.social/@urlyman/113175303993039170

Public Key

npub1hfwkjq7umjjkj8wj73e30pgv3qxa8d07pxvsrw2np85djg8q0ucsqrpfwr

NIP-05 Address

urlyman_at_mastodon.social@momostr.pink

Profile Code

nprofile1qqst5htfq0wdeftfrhf0guchs5xgsrwnkhlqnxgph9fsn6xeyrs87vgpz3mhxue69uhhyetvv9ujuerpd46hxtnfduqs6amnwvaz7tmwdaejumr0ds5ycy97

Publishing to

relay.damus.io

nos.lol

Author Public Key

npub1hfwkjq7umjjkj8wj73e30pgv3qxa8d07pxvsrw2np85djg8q0ucsqrpfwr

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Last Notes

2026-04-26 09:11:55 UTC

It is quite striking that even though Israel has expanded its terrorism from regional genocide and ecocide to now holding the entire world to ransom in pursuit of its plans for Greater Israel – a chokehold which threatens the viability of European societies – the European Council of the European Union cannot bring itself to say anything by way of admonishment except “deep concern” about the death penalty.
Here’s the Council’s press statements filtered by “Israel”:
https://www.consilium.europa.eu/en/press/press-releases/

2026-04-23 07:32:15 UTC

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“The IDF, the world’s leading killer of journalists, was blocking rescue operations.”
https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:evgc4ukadedre3gwsiwygkpz/post/3mk4dbingv22m
#Eurovision

2026-04-23 07:21:30 UTC

It’s been clear for a couple of years, but in 2026 it is especially clear that in supporting Israel’s entry to its contest, #Eurovision is an enabler of terrorism https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c5yvn036evlo

2026-04-22 14:57:39 UTC

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and some (🙋‍♂️) are prone to over analysing where they spend a lot of time ;)

2026-04-22 14:32:06 UTC

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beautifully articulated. In saying what I said at the top I wasn’t denigrating it. I was merely trying to sketch out some dynamics. But of course in doing so I was being reductive.
Over the course of a little over 20 years I’ve dedicated myself mostly sequentially to 4 large projects of online discourse and this one is by far the most rewarding. And I’m enriched by knowing you a little bit at a distance :)

2026-04-22 07:31:05 UTC

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…We call what we’re doing here ‘social media’ but it’s really only practice 1 of the 3 above that is social. And it’s rare.
Neither 2 nor 3 is socialising, and 2 is the most probable one.
The practice of 2 may be procrastinatory, but that’s not the dominant *intent*, I feel. For myself, it’s a subconscious yearning for the social in a society stripped of the opportunities to *be social*

2026-04-22 07:23:48 UTC

Asynchronous media have deterministic qualities.
1. When people are *co-present* something akin to conversation can flow. Those moments are fun and highly engaging.
When they are not, a couple of dynamics tend to unfold:
2. When people are in scrolling/procrastination mode, any depth beyond a post gets ignored. A thread may as well not be there.
3. When people are in *discovery* mode, a thread may get engaged with.
- - -
Not judging, cos I observe these behaviours in myself. Just noting

2026-04-20 07:45:40 UTC

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Yes 😔
Even as I find myself spewing out yet another stream of consciousness about tech (and will probably do so again), I find myself weary of tech and technocracy.
Fwiw, this past weekend, I’m finding this conversation helpful https://mastodon.social/@urlyman/116430811092516783

2026-04-20 07:29:22 UTC

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it is

2026-04-20 07:20:33 UTC

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…It’s a shame that the first 3 words of that report’s title are framing a lie (presumably to act as a honeypot for a particular mindset), but here we are

2026-04-20 07:18:42 UTC

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…But if yet more numbers in the realm of mining is what you need, there are plenty in
‘Achieving Zero Emissions with More Mobility and Less Mining’
by Thea Riofrancos,
Alissa Kendall,
Kristi K. Dayemo,
Matthew Haugen,
Kira McDonald,
Batul Hassan and
Margaret Slattery
In partnership with the University of California, Davis
https://climateandcommunity.org/research/more-mobility-less-mining/

2026-04-20 07:07:07 UTC

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…I was going to pull numbers from Thea Riofrancos’s work to lay out the lithium landscape as a counterpoint to the post at the top, but I’ve ended up not doing so, because then it just becomes yet another conversation about who has the better numbers about the ‘right’ metal.
So much more than the numbers, where we’re going is about the cultural values.
What is any of this *for*?
How much is enough?
Can any of it be *regenerative* and is it safe?
And what if it can’t and isn’t?

2026-04-20 06:54:27 UTC

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…As long as facing what the implications are is *not* coming from “electrify everything” industrialists, technologists, entrepreneurs and their cheerleaders we remain just differently fucked.
A much more metals intensive economy that seeks ‘growth’ in an era where we’ve already mined the best of the best stuff is dangerously fragile *by design*

2026-04-20 06:42:23 UTC

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…I’ve already spent 37 years hooked to a computer, and 27 years hooked to variations of portable ones. So decomputering people like me is hard.
Throughout that entire time, the metal supply chains underpinning it were being fuelled by the most energy-potential dense, portable, long term storage of ‘charge’ known to humankind: oil.
That time is going.
I do wish we could see entrepreneurs and advocates in the renewables space face what that means robustly

2026-04-20 06:32:24 UTC

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…In fairness to Renew Economy, they do occasionally post about the dynamic of where our limits are but there seems to be an editorial bias that wants to put ‘limits’ in the bin
https://reneweconomy.com.au/ai-wont-use-as-much-electricity-as-we-are-told-and-its-not-a-reason-to-slow-transition-to-renewables/

2026-04-20 06:30:38 UTC

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…Our dilemma is that we’re a culture addicted to uninterrupted and growing power consumption.
So if we don’t keep the implications of that front and centre as we advocate for the transition from one set of minerals to another set of minerals, we’re just shifting where the fragility of our economics is located without fundamentally ratcheting down the fragility

2026-04-20 06:19:05 UTC

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…The strong implication above is that lithium extraction is fine and just a part of a “transition that must happen as quickly as it can”.
The reality is more uncomfortable.
Renewables (rebuildables) are much more metals intensive than fossil fuels and nuclear. Which, if we are as strategically inattentive as we currently are, carries in it the seeds of its own downfall
https://mastodon.social/@urlyman/116351244625787731

2026-04-20 05:45:17 UTC

This Renew Economy article does a good job of deconstructing the disinformation around cobalt and renewables, pointing out that…
“Nearly every big battery installed in Australia these days uses lithium iron phosphate chemistry, which means no cobalt, and no nickel”
and that…
“cobalt has been used widely in many industries”
…which long predate the current boom for rebuildables.
But it contains a kind of disinformation of its own by omission…
https://reneweconomy.com.au/wild-attack-on-batteries-and-renewables-by-7s-spotlight-program-falls-over-at-the-first-fact-check/

2026-04-19 08:29:42 UTC

I have enjoyed #eurovision with friends for many years but they’ve really fucked it.
We can’t keep politics out of anything but we can not give genocidal warmongering nations a platform.
Their failure to do is indefensible

2026-04-17 09:37:44 UTC

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The targets are clear https://mstdn.social/@corporateeurope/116418732395307751

2026-04-17 07:24:46 UTC

Every physical tool has affordances which strongly indicate how it is to be used.
Today I just discovered a handy touch interface gesture which has clearly been there for years, but I had no idea because it has zero affordances.
Also today, we have ‘chat’ interfaces that we definitely cannot afford but seem to millions like useful tools.
And this decade, we’re approaching the end of oil affordability because it has been radically under-priced for about 170 years

2026-04-15 10:01:11 UTC

So far, only about 1% of the British electorate has registered an interest in having a vote on channeling water management away from dumping effluent for profit and instead into public ownership for health.
Perhaps we can bump the numbers a bit, at least to the point where how to not enshittify what we drink and cook with might be debated by MPs?
https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/762640

2026-04-15 07:59:28 UTC

What kind of rich is Ireland?
“They feel: the 3-hour commute in traffic, the closed GP list, the €2,200 rent, the 14-month wait for an MRI, the buses that don’t come, the trains that don’t exist, the schools with no places, the pubs that close before midnight, the €12 sandwiches.
And they keep being told: Ireland is the second richest country in Europe with a €23 billion surplus, record employment, and even if you’re not happy with this, just shut up and put up.”
https://mastodon.ie/@ccferrie/116407638837677583

2026-04-14 09:10:21 UTC

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…5/n
This from is a nice thought piece from @npub1fug…35hh
‘Platforms as the Preface to Community’
https://forbetter.ghost.io/platforms-as-the-preface-to-community/

2026-04-14 08:16:21 UTC

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…4/n
Here are some Newsmast people I’ve found here.
Founder
@npub19hh…yxnx
Lead content creator
@npub1fug…35hh
Chief technologist
@npub1m0w…dq70
- - -
I must say, it’s encouraging to see these folks active here. One of the things I dislike about Ghost’s ActivityPub pitch is that they big it up but they’re basically not here, not living it. Ghost’s AP enthusiasm seems to be chanelled into Threads (and John O’Nolan couples that with a kind of banal enthusiasm for LLMs and generative AI)

2026-04-14 08:08:59 UTC

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…3/n
Via a circuitous route, I’ve found https://home.channel.org/organisations
I need to spend more time with it to get a handle on it.
I like the sound of what Newsmast are about but the comms are a bit disjointed across several sites

2026-04-14 07:53:54 UTC

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…2/n
The pitch for hyper-local communities sounds great https://newsmastfoundation.org/how-it-works/for-hyper-local-communities/
It’s a shame there’s no case study for the Totnes instance, so one can’t get a sense of how the building blocks can be deployed, and the dynamics they’re creating (both good and challenging).
This seems like a potentially useful tool in the world that @npub1hmq…tzeg is sketching out with https://lifepod.transistor.fm/

2026-04-14 07:47:31 UTC

I’m intrigued and tentatively enthused by @npub142g…kmy5 and have questions and thoughts. Here are some:
1/n
Newsmast say they’re working with Mastodon and @npub14rp…za3l but the bits I’ve seen so far (https://www.blog-pat.ch/your-community-your-platform/) are light on details.
They say there are integrations with WordPress and Ghost. Is that because those CMSes have ActivityPub integrations? What are the possibilities of integrating with other CMSes?

2026-04-12 08:14:40 UTC

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#Oil201: 24/27
…“The reality is we have never in human history fully transitioned off an energy source. We always *add*.
There’s a name for this pattern. It’s based on Jevon’s paradox.
When we find a more efficient way to use a resource, we don’t use less of it. We use *more*.
Coal efficient steam engines didn’t reduce coal consumption. They made coal available for more things, so demand exploded…

2026-04-12 08:13:37 UTC

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#Oil201: 23/27
…“Most alternative energy tech only produces electricity, which is very important, but represents only a fraction of what fossil hydrocarbons do in the world – currently around 20%.
Diesel for shipping, jet fuel, aviation, petrochemical, feedstocks, none of these have clean substitutes at scale.
But beyond these limits, there’s a deeper pattern. The current popular stories of an energy transition are built upon a myth, a false narrative about the history of humans and energy…

2026-04-12 08:12:49 UTC

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#Oil201: 22/27
…“So if oil is this hard to replace, what is this energy transition?
We keep hearing about solar panels and wind turbines but they do not reproduce themselves. The sun and the wind are renewable, but the technology we use to harness them is best labeled ‘rebuildable’, not renewable.
Because they require massive inputs of material and energy and complexity to build, and they need to be rebuilt every 20 or 30 years…

2026-04-12 08:12:18 UTC

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#Oil201: 21/27
…“Alternative energy sources will play a role in the human energy portfolio, but our current system was built around the qualities of oil.
These time, land and material dimensions are almost never discussed, but they’re some of the main reasons that direct substitution is so much harder than people assume, and why there are now warships in the Persian Gulf…

2026-04-12 08:11:52 UTC

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#Oil201: 20/27
…“Wind and solar deliver energy intermittently when the sun shines and the wind blows. Sometimes giving an enormous power burst, but sometimes giving us nothing, especially depending on your location.
Nuclear power can give us a constant stream of high power, but it’s difficult to ramp up and down and requires connection to a larger grid and is capital intensive and costly…

2026-04-12 08:11:19 UTC

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#Oil201: 19/27
…“Biological creatures on Earth do not optimize for energy. We optimize for power.
Organisms and economies that get more energy sooner out-compete those that don’t.
Oil and its products – like gasoline, diesel, heating oil and jet fuel – contain unbelievable power when burned. They give us ginormous work *fast*, and importantly, whenever and wherever we want it…

2026-04-12 08:10:29 UTC

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#Oil201: 18/27
…“Replacing oil isn’t a matter of just matching kilowatt hours from another source.
Our entire mining, shipping, rail, trucking, and personal transport system runs on oil.
And despite the headlines about solar and electric vehicles, that is likely not going to change.
But here’s a key distinction.
Energy is the total amount of work available. Power is the rate at which you get that energy per unit of time…

2026-04-12 08:09:39 UTC

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#Oil201: 17/27
…“and after that, there’s nothing left.
Okay. Some of you might be thinking that I’ve been ignoring other forms of energy throughout this brief analysis: hydro, nuclear, and especially solar and wind, but there’s a reason substitutes can’t simply step in.
Energy quality matters almost as much as energy quantity.
Oil is liquid at room temperature, energy dense, portable, and storable. And these qualities are what made modern civilization possible…

2026-04-12 08:08:53 UTC

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#Oil201: 16/27
…“The growth in global oil of the last decade or so is mostly from US shale, but shale is a fundamentally different beast.
We widened the straw with fracking technology, so it looks like plenty is flowing, but we have to drill more.
We have to drill deeper and faster just to keep production flat, and that brings us so much closer to the eventual slurping sound from the straw, because shale oil is found in the source rock, which is where all the other oil migrated from…

2026-04-12 08:08:08 UTC

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#Oil201: 15/27
…“Most people are unaware of the depletion rate at which we’re drawing down and drying up oil fields and wells.
It’s accelerating.
Especially in the United States, conventional oil globally has been on a production plateau for about 15 years. Exxon itself shows existing global production will decline to 10 to 20% of its current level if there’s no new drilling or tertiary extraction…

2026-04-12 08:07:15 UTC

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#Oil201: 14/27
…“Oil is a story of nations and geology, not corporations. So the oil is concentrated in a few places, many of which are the center nodes of global conflict today.
But there’s a deeper problem.
Earth’s crude oil isn’t running out – well, technically it’s always been running out – but today’s availability and low priced oil is running out faster than most people and our financial system realizes…

2026-04-12 08:06:39 UTC

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#Oil201: 13/27
…“A side note here. People like to blame Exxon and Shell and the like for both oil price spikes and climate change, and so on.
The reality is that only about 12% of global oil reserves belong to publicly traded oil companies.
The other 88% belong to national oil companies like Saudi Aramco, Rosneft, and the national companies of Iran, Iraq, China and Venezuela.
So swapping out Exxon’s executive for Greenpeace leadership would change almost nothing about global oil production…

2026-04-12 08:05:05 UTC

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#Oil201: 12/27
…“Much of [that 60%], around 20% of global oil supply – which is around 40% of what’s actually available for purchase internationally – passes through the narrow strait of Hormuz, which has become the center of the world’s attention for the last few weeks.
And as we’re quickly realizing there are no alternative routes at anything close to that capacity, and now we’re seeing a war for its control…

2026-04-12 08:04:09 UTC

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#Oil201: 11/27
…“The United States sits on ancient ocean beds once filled with water and life millions of years ago, ultimately resulting in immense reservoirs of oil and gas, which is a primary reason why the USA has produced and consumed more oil than any country in history.
But remaining ‘conventional’ reserves are mostly concentrated elsewhere.
Around 60% of the world’s remaining conventional oil sits inside a 600 mile triangle in southwest Asia, AKA, the Middle East…

2026-04-12 08:03:23 UTC

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#Oil201: 10/27
…“And these products are woven into global supply chains now of extraordinary complexity. Tiny invisible components. Each with its own petrochemical ancestry, each manufactured somewhere, shipped somewhere else, assembled somewhere else, and only then is it shipped to the stores and to us.
When people talk about supply chain disruptions, what they usually mean at the root is energy and material disruptions, which brings us to why geography is destiny…

2026-04-12 08:02:44 UTC

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#Oil201: 9/27
…“Only about 40% of a barrel of oil becomes gasoline. The rest is diesel, jet fuel, heating oil, bunker fuel, asphalt, and feed stock for roughly 6,000 other products like medicines, plastics, surgical devices, synthetic clothing, electronics, contact lenses, tents, kayaks, the interior of our cars, and the list goes on.
The assumption that electric cars would eliminate our need for oil misses the overwhelming majority of what non-gasoline oil actually does…

2026-04-12 08:01:55 UTC

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#Oil201: 8/27
…“And beyond food, our clean water pumping, treating, desalinating and distributing also all requires fossil fuel inputs.
So when people say oil and gas, most think of our cars. We should also be thinking of groceries and dinner.
But even food is only one part of the story. Oil is woven into virtually everything we touch…

2026-04-12 08:01:27 UTC

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#Oil201: 7/27
…“The tractors run on diesel. The fertilizer comes from natural gas, the pesticides from petrochemicals, and the food is packaged and shipped on trucks and container ships and kept cold the entire way. And here’s the truly staggering part…
Roughly half the nitrogen in your body today carries a chemical signature from the Haber Bosch process, which makes synthetic fertilizer from natural gas. That single industrial process is what allows us to feed about 4bn of our 8 bn humans…

2026-04-12 08:00:17 UTC

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#Oil201: 6/27
…“And nowhere would this be more consequential than in the thing we all do three times a day…
Eat.
To some of you, this might sound like an exaggeration, but when we sit down for a meal, what most of us are really eating is processed fossil fuels.
Contrary to all of human history, our food system now runs in energy deficit and a huge one at that.
Roughly 10 calories of fossil hydrocarbons go into every one calorie of food on your plate…
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/116/391/287/870/792/112/original/c490d7b866798ae9.png

2026-04-12 07:59:15 UTC

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#Oil201: 5/27
…“Even at $500 a barrel oil would still be a remarkable gift for the work it performs for us. But our current industrial system could not function at anything close to those prices because every margin, every business model, every supply chain was calibrated to cheap, stable energy inputs.
The margins were always thin and when cheap energy turns expensive, the margin disappears and often turns negative…

2026-04-12 07:58:38 UTC

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#Oil201: 4/27
…“However, the *financial* payoff has been enormous because the primary input to the process is energy that effectively costs almost nothing.
This is why energy price spikes hit so hard in the global economy.
Our processes around the world were designed around cheap energy, especially oil…
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/116/390/910/250/581/319/original/b51b4692b0e934d0.png

2026-04-12 07:58:07 UTC

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#Oil201: 3/27
…“A dairy farmer milking cows by hand was limited to a few dozen animals. Modern industrial dairy applies enormous quantities of diesel, electricity, refrigeration, and transport to the same basic task producing. Orders of magnitude more milk at a much lower price and higher profits, but importantly at a very different cost sensitivity.
The energy payoff of processes like this is terrible in pure physics and efficiency terms, because lots of energy is wasted…
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/116/390/880/083/330/353/original/f2f4dbad9aea9ccf.png

2026-04-12 07:55:31 UTC

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#Oil201: 2/27
…“When energy prices spike, entire systems can become fragile and often break because oil’s been so cheap, pretty consistently. The economic logic has been to imagine and then engineer thousands of mechanical processes around that cheapness.
The industrial evolution is really the story of adding hundreds or thousands of units of fossil energy to tasks that humans used to do by hand…

2026-04-12 07:54:25 UTC

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#Oil201: 1/27
“In the last part [#Oil101], we explored what oil is and how it’s effectively acting as invisible fossil pixie dust through many of our lives.
But the parallel associated risk is that we have built everything: our institutions, governments, stories and expectations about the future on this cheap energy input. And now its scale and affordability is no longer guaranteed…

2026-04-12 07:51:25 UTC

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…I said yesterday I would do this, so here goes. Follow or mute or ignore #Oil201.
As a follow-on to #Oil101 above, the following 27 posts are the words of Nate Hagens from the 14 minutes of https://www.thegreatsimplification.com/frankly-original/136-oil-201

2026-04-11 16:43:17 UTC

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…The transcript above represents 10 minutes of audio across 14 posts for #Oil101.
I’ve just prepped the equivalent for part 2, which is close to 50% longer, and in segmenting it into coherent blocks it will make 27 posts.
I’ll post it tomorrow under the #Oil201 hashtag if you want to follow along – or the opposite, to mute it!

2026-04-11 11:34:29 UTC

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I certainly hope we can manifest the self-restraint it will take for that dynamic to play out.
The reality is that all renewables are themselves currently dependent upon fossil fuel inputs, a conundrum nearly everyone is understandably keen to look past.
So the key challenge will be to eschew the vast arrays of one-time hydrocarbon use that is in service to the highest of energy and resource throughputs, in favour of those which are less extravagant *and* to restrain the rebound effect

2026-04-11 11:18:43 UTC

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to answer your first question, I found a source that says a barrel of oil is about 90cm tall and about 58cm in diameter. Dunno if that’s right.
In part 2, Nate gets into the landscape that your other questions sit in, though not the direct answers.
I suspect he may address them more directly in part 3, which is not yet out.
Go ahead and listen to https://www.thegreatsimplification.com/frankly-original/136-oil-201 – it’s only 14 minutes – or wait for me to post its words tomorrow! 💚

2026-04-11 11:01:07 UTC

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… #Oil101 Postscript:
The irony that I’ve corrected, edited and then posted the above with ease due to The Great Simplification’s team using an LLM to translate their audio signal into text is not lost on me.
Part 2 in the series is already out, but I’ll defer that until tomorrow.
Have a good Saturday. Please integrate the above into the awareness of you and yours 💚

2026-04-11 10:57:48 UTC

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Oil 101: 14/14
…“This all sounds like a miraculous gift, and in many ways it is.
Here’s the kicker.
This ultra cheap energy in the form of coal, gas, and especially oil, will not be available to us forever at today’s price and scale, and it may well be gone sooner than we expect.
We’ll explore this in part 2 of our intro trilogy on oil.”
End of transcript of part 1 of https://www.thegreatsimplification.com/frankly-original/135-oil-101

2026-04-11 10:56:31 UTC

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Oil 101: 13/14
…“Most of us wake up in a climate-controlled room and we flick on a light switch and turn on hot water for a shower, and we make a coffee and put on synthetic clothes. All possible from oil and hydrocarbons.
You are living at a metabolic rate that no organism in the history of life on Earth has ever sustained, and almost none of it is visible to us in our cultural stories in the media…

2026-04-11 10:56:01 UTC

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Oil 101: 12/14
…“Here’s one way to feel how blind we are to this. Your body needs around 2,000 kilo calories a day to stay alive. But the average American – when you count all the energy consumed on their behalf through heating and transport and manufacturing and lighting, and food systems and supply chains – uses roughly 200,000 kilo calories a day. A hundred times more than our bodies require…

2026-04-11 10:54:54 UTC

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Oil 101: 11/14
…“I got my master’s at the University of Chicago and my 3 Nobel Prize winning professors never once mentioned the word energy as a contributor to economic productivity because during their lifetimes, the supply just kept growing.
So they treated this exceptional period of human history as if it were normal based on ingenuity and technology…

2026-04-11 10:54:10 UTC

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Oil 101: 10/14
…“And yet almost no one sees it.
That’s because we swim in energy the way a fish swims in water.
Every product, every service, every bit of GDP first requires an energy conversion, no exceptions.
The average American home has around 40 items constantly plugged in, draining power around the clock, even when they’re turned off.
But because energy has become abundant and growing our entire lives, we have become… energy blind…

2026-04-11 10:53:10 UTC

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Oil 101: 9/14
…“That level of energy service with the associated billions of helpers surpasses what kings and queens had access to a few centuries ago:
- hot water on demand
- refrigeration
- personal travel by car
- global travel by plane
- year round, fresh food
- climate-controlled sleep conditions
all from ancient sunlight, powering the research, the innovation, the manufacturing, the infrastructure, the factories, the transport, the supply chains, and the commerce all around the world…

2026-04-11 10:51:33 UTC

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Oil 101: 8/14
…“On top of that. Every economic miracle of the last 150 years was underwritten by this invisible workforce.
What does this actually look like at an individual level?
Oil alongside gas and coal has made the average person significantly richer than historical royalty.
The average American uses roughly 40 barrels of oil equivalents of oil, gas, and coal combined, compared to a global average today of around 10 barrels of oil per person…

2026-04-11 10:50:23 UTC

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Oil 101: 7/14
…“This giant labor subsidy when combined with machines is primarily what explained and underpinned the explosion of wealth globally.
It boosted wages.
It boosted corporate profits.
It slashed the price of goods and transportation, so things show up at your door the next day in a brown truck.
It’s supercharged agriculture to increase our population from 1 billion to 8 billion, and it dramatically increased per capita consumption…

2026-04-11 10:49:09 UTC

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Oil 101: 6/14 #climateDiary
…“That is a single 42-gallon barrel of oil.
Now multiply it by the total amount we burn every year, and we’ll see what this looks like at scale.
We use around 100 billion barrels of oil-equivalent of fossil hydrocarbons per year, globally.
At around 5 years of labor per barrel, that’s 500 billion human labor equivalents – running, working alongside around 5 billion actual human workers.
100 fossil-powered ghost workers for every living one…

2026-04-11 10:46:07 UTC

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Oil 101: 5/14
…“This makes oil absurdly cheap relative to the work it performs.
Economic textbooks and business school classes teach that energy’s contribution is its dollar price tag, in effect. The cost share of oil is equal to the value it provides, but the cost we pay is orders of magnitude smaller than the value it provides for us. This is the deepest subsidy in the history of civilization, and it’s mostly invisible except in energy crises like now…

2026-04-11 10:44:46 UTC

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Oil 101: 4/14
…“The next time you drive, imagine running out of gas and pushing your car home. Even with 3 or 4 friends a single gallon of gasoline that cost you $4 would take you and your buddies weeks to replace with human muscle and would be hella unpleasant in the process.
We never think about this. We just swipe the credit card and go places. And all we pay is the cost of pulling it out of the ground, not the millions of years to create it, not the environmental cost of burning it…

2026-04-11 10:43:16 UTC

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Oil 101: 3/14
…“Anywhere from 1 to 20 years of human labor is replaced when a barrel of oil is combined with machines. So for an average human 5 years is a solid approximation.
This incredibly powerful economic subsidy is indistinguishable from magic on human timescales. Here’s a way to actually feel this…

2026-04-11 10:42:40 UTC

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Oil 101: 2/14
…“And coal and natural gas are a similar story.
So how much work does this ancient sunlight actually do for us?
A barrel of oil replaces 5 years of human labor for around $100. It used to be $50.
A single barrel of oil contains 1,700 kilowatt hours of work potential. A healthy human being doing physical work generates around 0.6 kilowatt hours per day, depending on how strong a person is or what the task is, or how many hours a day they work or how efficient they are…

2026-04-11 10:41:15 UTC

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Oil 101: 1/14
“Most people’s mental image of oil comes from a cartoon of dead dinosaurs turning into goo, which we put in our car.
In reality, oil formed from dead marine phytoplankton, algae that captured solar energy tens of millions of years ago, that was then compressed by heat and pressure over geological time, creating a super energy-dense liquid substance, which we refine.
It was a solar battery that took millions of years to charge, and we’re draining it in centuries…

2026-04-11 10:39:39 UTC

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…“The final part will take the lens of the first two and help us explore what all this means for the future of humanity and earth.”
Series setup ends.
- - -
What follows is a 14-post transcript of part 1 of the series:
https://www.thegreatsimplification.com/frankly-original/135-oil-101

2026-04-11 10:36:57 UTC

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…“This series is a way of seeing oil from a systems perspective. My hope is it might help contextualize the massive historical moment that we’re witnessing unfold.
This episode is the first of 3 on the subject. In this one, we’ll cover the basics of oil, what it is, and how it benefits society. Things we should’ve been taught in school but weren’t.
The second will expand to look at how our systems and institutions depend on oil, and how this knowledge can help us understand our present moment…

2026-04-11 10:36:25 UTC

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Nate Hagens, April 2026:
Oil 101 preamble:
“As a result of the Strait of Hormuz closure, you’ve probably heard a lot about oil in the news lately. You might know that oil is important for filling up your car, but you’re probably not quite sure what the big deal is beyond that. It turns out that our entire modern civilization is only possible primarily because of oil, and the resulting products from it…

2026-04-11 10:34:57 UTC

Anyone who has followed me for a while will know that I’m a regular listener to The Great Simplification by Nate Hagens.
I don’t agree with everything he says, and I think he’s probably wrong on some things, but I do think he’s an important voice, and he’s in the process of publishing a 3-part series on oil and what it does for us.
I think it’s *very well phrased* for a general audience, so I’m going to post the text of it all here in a long thread. So mute me now if you need to!…

2026-04-09 07:12:03 UTC

“BIG, POORLY RUN” you say?
https://mastodon.social/@MAKS23/116373058838530359
Image description by @npub1p09…m5vl https://mastodon.ar.al/@aral/116373480015097739

2026-04-09 06:21:33 UTC

“Google search results are accurate ~91% of the time.”
…”translating to tens of millions of wrong answers provided every hour…”
“…people tend to trust what an AI tells them without question, with one report finding that only 8% of users actually double checked an AI’s answer. Another experiment found that users still listened to AI when it gave them the wrong answer nearly 80% of the time — a grim trend the researchers dubbed ‘cognitive surrender’.”
https://legal.social/@malteengeler/116373209995847377

2026-04-08 06:35:01 UTC

My thanks to TACOistan

2026-04-07 16:55:51 UTC

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a veritable Venn diagram of dangerously inept dudes

2026-04-07 16:51:46 UTC

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…Searched the BBC News section pages for “Starmer”, “Prime” (as in Minister), and “Downing” (as in Street) just to see if our own dear leader has had anything to say at all about the President of the USA effectively trailing a genocide on social media.
Guess what the results were

2026-04-07 16:42:07 UTC

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…Constitutions are wonderful ideas but of no use when contagion is coursing through cohorts of deluded people filled with hatred

2026-04-07 16:39:55 UTC

I see that Section 3 of the 25th Amendment makes no allowances for when the Vice President and the whole White House senior staff have lost their minds as well
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twenty-fifth_Amendment_to_the_United_States_Constitution#Section_3:_President's_declaration_of_inability

2026-04-04 09:06:33 UTC

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…1. I listen to a podcast.
It uses an LLM to produce a transcript. The podcast authors state that they do not review the generated output.
It is always littered with mistakes.
When I, a listener, draw upon it, it is useful. I can and do acquire excerpts, the bulk of which are correct, albeit with bizarre punctuation, and correct the bits I know to be incorrect.
When someone who has not listened to it encounters the transcript directly the bits that are wrong carry a *bigger* payload, but…

2026-04-04 09:04:50 UTC

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…3 examples of my regular exposure to LLMs. All of which rest on practices which are toxic…

2026-04-04 07:45:44 UTC

There are things I’ve normalised which are already toxic. Regrettably, they took over a decade for their toxicity to me to become obvious. And I still do them. Because I’ve normalised them.
I don’t want to add new practices which are obviously toxic out of the gate. Cos that way is what @npub15t7…08hr calls “psychic suicide”

2026-04-02 07:24:23 UTC

I am 6% tech bro.
But that 6% is only because there’s a question in there that tech bro aligns and has only one realistic answer
https://amiatechbro.com/

2026-04-01 12:11:53 UTC

Written 31 March:
“The map at the top of this post shows J.P. Morgan’s estimates of when tankers from the Gulf will stop arriving at various destinations. Deliveries to Asian markets will end this week; deliveries to Europe will end next week.”
ht @npub1cke…g7rv
Europe consumes ~5x more oil than it produces
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/the-oil-crisis-is-about-to-get-physical

2026-03-31 15:20:42 UTC

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Jeremy Vine voice:
“let’s have a look at the future swingometer”
https://www.postcarbon.org/publications/the-future-is-rural/

2026-03-30 08:07:34 UTC

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…Please do read the piece about Hannah above. I hope it brightens your day.
Hannah and people like her are a much needed antidote to the default, which all too often has the shape of overlooking brilliant women and instead pouring on slop:
“the BBC’s board has fallen for one of the most dangerous myths of our time: that tech will save us”.
https://mstdn.social/@junesim63/116305896801514905
#note197x…6l0g

2026-03-30 07:50:16 UTC

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…One of the best bits in this interview (and there are many) is how Zack Polanski didn’t get involved in her selection. The local party made their own selection.
Trusting people to be good and wise, instead of egging them on to be performatively callous, is how we might add enough momentum to what Joanna Macy called The Great Turning

2026-03-30 07:28:42 UTC

What a lovely interview with Hannah Spencer MP:
“If you distill her politics to one principle, it’s that you should never have to leave anywhere to have a good life. ‘Towns like Bolton have been absolutely shat on. After a decade and a half of austerity, under the Conservatives and Labour, no wonder people feel like they have to leave’, she says. ‘But I don’t want that any more. I don’t want that for me and I don’t want that for other people.’”
#green
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2026/mar/30/wow-people-were-so-angry-at-labour-green-mp-hannah-spencer-on-politics-plumbing-smears-and-snobbery

2026-03-29 16:11:11 UTC

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…Or to put it the other way around, on average, a USA resident consumes as much as
30.4 Indians
8.7 Brazilians
6.3 Chinese
5.4 Russians
2.6 Japanese
2.3 Spaniards
2 Italians
1.8 French
1.6 Canadians
1.5 Britons
1.5 Germans
Obviously, in all these countries, this is extreeeeemely unevenly distributed

2026-03-29 15:49:44 UTC

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…The above 12 nations represent about half the world’s population.
Their ratios of oil consumption relative to domestic production are:
Russia: 0.4
Canada: 0.4
Brazil: 0.8
USA: 0.9
UK: 1.9
China: 3.1
India: 5.9
Italy: 10.0
Germany: 11.3
France: 14.2
Spain: 17.2
Japan: 30.7
For countries other than the USA, the ratio of GDP per capita relative to the USA is:
India: 0.03
Brazil: 0.12
China: 0.16
Russia: 0.19
Japan: 0.39
Spain: 0.44
Italy: 0.49
France: 0.56
Canada: 0.63
UK: 0.65
Germany: 0.68

2026-03-29 15:33:54 UTC

#climateDiary
The Gulf War gulfs of the world’s dirtiest dozen.
GDP is very closely correlated with climate heating and biosphere destruction. The 12 nations shown here are listed top to bottom in order of the size of their national GDP, but their per capita GDP varies greatly, as does their reliance upon oil from other nations.
- - -
Sources:
GDP per capita:
IMF: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nominal%)_per_capita
Oil consumption and production:
nation specific pages at:
https://www.worldometers.info/oil/
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/116/313/243/214/498/410/original/458629fa35f6afa3.png

2026-03-29 11:03:14 UTC

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thanks for sharing Baldur

2026-03-29 09:09:34 UTC

#climateDiary
Houston, we have a problem:
“A sense of foreboding but an enjoyment of the immediate windfall, for sure.”
https://mastodon.social/@lymphomation/116311571398322496

2026-03-27 09:14:37 UTC

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I didn’t say it’s centrists who got us here. It’s all of us https://mastodon.social/@urlyman/116300269685982212

2026-03-27 08:33:36 UTC

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broadly speaking, the role of centrists is to keep society functioning as it is. To act as a brake on change.
And we have a society which is really dangerously overshooting 7 of 9 planetary boundaries.
So, bad as society falling apart on its own centrist terms is, the erosion of the substrate it exists upon is a very much worse predicament.
We are effectively at war with our own basis of existence, with centrists pretending it’s peace time
https://mastodon.social/@urlyman/115836341749190500

2026-03-26 07:11:28 UTC

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a one-in one-out strategy with people in prison who have had their sentence commuted to suspended?

2026-03-22 07:22:26 UTC

In the same time period, the world’s privately-owned oil companies have made $5 billion in elevated profits.
So we might infer that the price of a tonne of carbon should be $1,000 per tonne.
The EU has one of the highest carbon prices. It’s currently at about €68 ($79), so at least 12x too low
#climateDiary https://mastodon.world/@davidho/116271391844076790