Meeting Chris La Tray

and becoming a cranky old man

Bitcoin mining, along with billionaires in general, should be taxed out of existence.

Scammers have found a new way to spam you; apparently this newsletter is recommended by a bitcoin investor who loves AI. Which is why I started off with that.

The amount of energy used by these scams to run data centers will overwhelm the power grid; to power AI, Microsoft is paying billions to have Exelon fire up the Three Mile Island reactor again. I’m not anti-nuke, and I think we’ll need modern nuclear reactors to go carbon negative, but the fact that no one has decided to fire up reactors until the lure of AI money came along should tell you something.

And that something is that there’s not enough financial incentive for these schmucks to keep the planet inhabitable. They have skated on paying their fair share of taxes for far too long. If you think Kamala Harris is a socialist, wait’ll you get a load of me. I may look like a typical middle class white dude, but my family are immigrants and blue collar workers, and made Jimmy Carter banners back in ‘80 when all my friends were going for the oily-haired actor scab.

Lately, I’ve been thinking about how the rent-seeking leech class wants to make life a subscription that you pay for from birth. Which is why Americans can’t have health care, we’ve got an entire for-profit industry to support. There’s a term for how web-based products degrade over time, called “enshittification.” This can be applied to just about every product, as competition is dead, thanks to conglomeration and lack of anti-trust enforcement. They’ve got you; it’s a pain in the butt to change vendors for everything from cable, health care, music streaming apps, and just about any service that you were suckered into buying because it would “make life easier,” before it become a full-time job just to make your shit work like it used to.

But enough of me complaining like an old man yelling at clouds; I’ve been a programmer since 1983, and on the ’net since ‘89. I have never been more aggravated at my tech, except perhaps during the height of the Microsoft monopoly. They still haven’t broken up, but there’s hope, as the DOJ is going after Google. When megacorps have money to bring nukes back online—which is “too expensive” when necessary to save us from dying in heat waves—it’s time to break them up and nationalize any that are “too big to fail.”

Whew, is that breeze from all of you unsubscribing? Nice knowing ya.

Chris at the podium; Chris, Anna East & friend, Hannah Fischer; me & CLT

I met Chris La Tray on his book tour last week. He gave a great talk at Kramer’s Books in DC, and I was happy to be there. If you haven’t read Becoming Little Shell: A Landless Indian’s Journey Home, his potent memoir and history of the Métis people and their successful fight for national recognition, I highly recommend it. Nonfiction writers often don’t get enough praise for their writing, in my opinion. Making complex subjects into compelling reads is not easy, even if some writers make it look that way. You can read some of Chris’s writing here, and find a link for his books:

Imminent Upcoming Events – The East Coast Edition!

Another fine writer on substack is Christopher Brown. He started writing science fiction, but also writes about urban nature and landscapes in his book A Natural History of Empty Lots. My pre-order arrived, and I am eager to dig in. You can find his writing here:

Frontage road moons and dead end owls

And you can find mine on my substack page, all my books are listed in the lower right corner. Next week, I’ll write about the New Jersey mountain bike fest, and visiting the site where the first dinosaur bones were dug up in North America. Until then, hide your phone and go outside. To hold you over, here is a video I made of some woolly aphids moshing and noshing on tree sap:

thomaspluck

A post shared by @thomaspluck

These are likely Beech Blight Aphids, and their dance is a reaction to sensing a predator. I may have frightened off whatever was threatening them. I noticed the movement from far away, so it wasn’t me that caused it, at least initially.