Internet feels like a human right now: providing access to information, communication, and life admin tools (at the least). There’s around 1m people in NYC that don’t have access to internet, due to cost barriers driven to the oligopolistic market of providers. They won’t invest in areas where it’s deemed a low return on investment.

NYC Mesh is a community run organisation, run by volunteers, helping people get access to high speed internet. Super nodes are fibre-connected and act as gateways, repeaters then beam internet to neighbourhood nodes, which relay it to a user’s individual router. It becomes a web of interconnected routers and repeaters keeping internet access operational. Users cover the cost of installation if they have the means, it still goes ahead if they don’t. Everything else is run on donations. It’s free for those who can’t financially support the cause.

Security-wise, the mesh router is firewalled from a user’s local network meaning it’s not possible to reach beyond the mesh router to a user’s local access network (LAN). The mesh internet connection and traffic between nodes is encrypted using WPA2.

To understand why the world currently burns fossil fuels, it helps to follow the money.

Energy demand has long tracked economic growth. So much so that for the past two centuries, the amounts of energy that economies need have increased virtually in lockstep with the amounts of wealth that economies create. And, to a remarkable degree, wealth creation has depended on a society’s proficiency at burning things.

In 1800, the fuel of choice was biomass, such as wood from fallen trees. Biomass was highly inefficient as fuel, as almost all of its embodied energy was lost in its burning (low conversion). Still, before widespread industrialisation, the conversion loss was bearable; generally, there was enough wood to burn to make economies grow. The resulting wealth creation wasn’t enormous, but it was pointing up.

Then, at the turn of the 20th century, rates of both energy demand and economic growth took off. From 1900 to 1950 – as horses gave way to cars, oil lamps to electric lighting, and ice boxes to refrigerators – primary energy demand nearly doubled. Economic growth rates soared as well; in the United States, GDP per capita in 1950 was more than twice that of 1900.¹ For that level of wealth creation, burning trees and other forms of biomass wouldn’t quite suffice.

Enter fossil fuels, whose energy conversion was far greater than biomass. The 20th century’s embrace of petroleum and coal sent production and consumption into overdrive. Fossil fuels lose about 40-70% of their embodied energy when converted into electrical energy – a lot, but not a lot compared to the near-total loss incurred by burning wood. It was simply more efficient while also abundant. Source: McKinsey

Until renewable energy tech is widely innovated and harnessed, unfortunately it’s not as practically abundant and financially efficient as fossil fuels. However, it’s promising that electricity generated worldwide in 2020 from renewable source, grew to 29%. Its adoption has a flywheel effect, entrenching renewable energy production through economies of scale and the compounding advancements.

I think it may have always been about the economics. Once renewables are markedly cheaper and more practical than fossil fuels, we’ll have entered a new epoch. Economies will fall in line…their growth depends on it.

Alan Watts’ words making us think…

Existence, the physical universe, is basically playful. There is no necessity for it whatsoever. It isn’t going anywhere. That is to say it doesn’t have some destination that it ought to arrive at. But that it is best understood by analogy with music. Because music, as an art form, is essentially playful, we say you play the piano. You don’t work the piano. Why?

Music differs from say, travel. When you travel, you are trying to get somewhere. In music, though, one doesn’t make the end of the composition the point of the composition. If that was so the best conductors would be those who played fastest. And there would be composers who wrote only finales. People would go to a concert just to hear one crackling chord, because that’s the end! Same when dancing, you don’t aim at a particular spot in the room for where you should arrive. The whole point of the dancing is the dance.

Now, but we don’t see that as something brought by our education into our everyday conduct. We’ve got a system of schooling which gives a completely different impression. It’s all graded. And what we do is we put the child into the corridor of this grade system, with a kind of come on, kitty, kitty, kitty and now you go to kindergarten, you know, and that’s a great thing because when you finish that you’ll get into first grade. And then come on, first grade leads to second grade and so on and then you get out of grade school and you go to high school and it’s revving up, the thing is coming.

Then you’re gonna go to college and by Jove then you get into graduate school and when you’re through with graduate school, you’ll go out to join the world. And then you’ll get into some racket where you are selling insurance and they’ve got that quota to make and you’re going to make that. And all the time that thing is coming, it’s coming, it’s coming that great thing, the success you’re working for.

Then when you wake up one day about forty years old, you’ll say, my God I’ve arrived. I’m there! And you don’t feel very different from what you’ve always felt. Look at the people who live to retire and put those savings away. And then when they’re 65, they don’t have any energy left, they’re more or less impotent and they go and rot in an on old people’s senior citizens community.

We’ve simply cheated ourselves the whole way down the line. And we thought of life by analogy with a journey, with a pilgrimage which had a serious purpose at the end and the thing was to get to that end. Success or whatever it is or maybe heaven after you’re dead. But we missed the point the whole way along. It was a musical thing and you were supposed to sing or to dance while the music was being played.

To run the grid reliably and affordably, we need new cost-effective technologies capable of storing electricity for multiple days. Form Energy reinvented and optimized the iron-air battery for the electric grid. The active components of our iron-air battery system are some of the safest, cheapest, and most abundant materials on the planet — low-cost iron, water, and air.

The iron-air battery is composed of cells filled with thousands of iron pellets that are exposed to air and create rust. The oxygen is then removed, reverting the rust to iron. Controlling this process allows the battery to be charged and discharged.

Source: Form Energy

Here’s a site that organises and allows one to set up RSS feeds for all things US politics. I don’t mean news media with click bait headlines, but actual public papers of the President, the budget, and proceedings in the legislative and judicial departments.

Here’s a site for UK folk to check what their local MP is working on currently, what they’re contributing to political discourse, and how they’ve voted on proposals passing through the house.