Nick Doty @npd@octodon.social

It looks to me like the City of Durham State of Emergency declaration marked the beginning of a rapid change in behavior: either because Mayor Schewel picked up on an inflection point in larger trends or because residents responded to that announcement.

The City, County and State Stay-at-Home orders seem mostly to have confirmed the behavior that was already taking place, rather than creating a large change through legal mandates.

When did people change behavior to stay at home in Durham?

Aggregate cellphone mobility data timelines for Durham County, with orders of state of emergency and stay-at-home marked.
Data from Google: https://google.com/covid19/mobility/

also, even though they disabled access to all the Adobe software, that doesn't mean I can uninstall the several gigabytes of it. a final indignity as I try to kick it out the door.

(To use any of the uninstallers, I need to log in to an account that has approved access to the software.)

Anaconda is a tool where you copy and paste a command from anaconda.com, watch a spinning prompt next to "Solving environment:" for a few minutes, and then you're asked whether you want to downgrade some of your software.

@emsenn I didn't keep up with the indoor microgreens on our windowsills that I was trying (including the shooting peas you gave me). It was especially difficult when I was traveling out of town frequently, and now I'm definitely not doing that for an extended period, so hopefully I can better maintain some plants now.

@emsenn I scoped out the community garden nearest me in downtown Durham and I'm pretty confident that the plots have just been abandoned (overrun with weeds -- Lamium, or just poles/hoses lying there from previous seasons).

I haven't really done much gardening before: what vegetables do you think we should start with?

tfw you've been away from an open source project you were working on long enough that the version of Python it depends on has reached end of life in the meantime

but mostly right now at this moment, I just feel hopeless, like none of this matters and I should just give up

I've spent months talking to people here in Durham about it and it's encouraging to see some names behind this effort:
https://greennewdealfordurham.org/
We can take climate action at the local level and it can be a direct benefit to the community.

I know intellectually that apathy is the biggest threat to collaborative work on so many important issues, including climate change. But antipathy affects me so much more deeply; I have a tendency to become numb and shut down when exposed to it.

oh, mailman

I read a mail archive for a while and then hit back to the listinfo page and subscribe: mailman tells me the page is too old and I need to try again.

So I refresh the page, fill out my email address and immediately click Subscribe. And mailman tells me that I filled out the form too quickly and I need to take more time.

$10/gallon is actually not at the high end for what it may take for high estimates of the social impact ($20/gallon would be closer), and those high estimates are reasonable given the catastrophic outcomes. but $10/gallon is the scary number that people in bad faith are using to try to scare people about the Green New Deal, so it's one more data point to consider

anyway, you may need to anticipate that local gasoline prices will go up by between 50¢ and $10 per gallon in the short term, and should make budget plans accordingly

(tried to calculate a back of the envelope cost for a carbon tax on a gallon of gasoline -- why isn't there an easy-to-read web page with these numbers in a huge font? -- and quickly gave up because the estimates of the social cost of carbon or carbon taxes needed to migrate to renewable energy are enormously variable, and clearly lots of other more informed people ran into that same blocking issue)

followup: not sure why, but just lost access to every piece of Adobe software on my computer at once! who knows why! who cares! they just want more money and have control over my computer so what else can I do!

1. is it really so terrible that other people would be able to safely move through your neighborhood on foot? is the thought of seeing a black or brown person near your house that terrifying?
2. if a sidewalk is your worst nightmare, you're going to be in for a real shock when hurricanes, floods, deadly heat waves and millions of climate refugees pass through our city.

made the mistake this morning of reading the public comments on a local city proposal deciding the route of a new greenway. one homeowner described the possibility of a sidewalk along their street as "my worst nightmare".

(And a good reminder for me personally that while trains are nice -- and much better than flying -- the diesel leg of my train trips is much more carbon intensive than if I took Megabus.)

Distance travel must shift to electric power (trains, buses or even cars), but intercity buses are remarkably efficient even on diesel fuel.

More graphics at: http://www.saxifrages.org/eco/show1s/Transportation

my .plan for the new year:
https://npdoty.name/plan/

* stay healthy
* support and seek support from family
* complete dissertation on enacting privacy in technical standard-setting
* support privacy in the architecture of the Web
* take actions on the climate crisis