We need to distinguish between all the varieties

If we're both in the engine room, then who is steering the ship?!

Apple, Inc. recently announced that all of their facilities are 100% powered by green/renewable energy sources. This is laudable, and they are apparently putting pressure on their partners and supply chain to make similar efforts.

One really nuanced point of criticism here is that I bet they have some facilities which pay a power bill to a green energy source but are connected to a grid which has a mix of fossil fuel and green energy sources, and one never knows whether each particular joule of energy one is consuming was ultimately “from” one source or the other.

People get very excited about locally sourced artisanal things even when they are indistinguishable from their non-local sourced non-artisanal counter-parts, and I bet if you were really motivated you could convince some well intentioned group of whiners and one-uppers that this Apple energy situation was problematic and a big lie and needed to be spoken up about until the company was not only paying 100% of their energy bill to green source suppliers, but was confident that all of the watts and volts of power coming into their facilities was from fossil fuel supply free grids as well.

Do we measure that material using calibers or decibels?

On a recent outing I walked past my local coffee shoppë and noticed a woman who had a sticker on her laptop which read "No farms, no food". As I continued walking past I let my mind get to work on this one and I'm happy to report back with some possibilities.

The most obvious and simple explanation for this sticker is that this woman is like a pro-farm activist of some sort and she's trying to remind everyone (is there some sort of anti-farm bloc of people? I don't know) that the food comes from the farms and since we probably still want the food we should take special case to keep the farms around. This strikes me as both too simple to need saying out loud, but also probably what it is she was saying with her sticker.

There's another more sinister possibility here, and that is that this woman is some sort of maniacal planner trying to destroy civilization and the sticker is actually a thinly veiled threat to destroy all the farms. I guess she's entrusting the reader of the sticker to come to the encounter with the foreknowledge of whatever power she would personally have to destroy all the farms, and to thus extend her some goddamn respect lest she topple them all and take all the food along with her.

These two random guys in a coffee shop have most of the answers to politics

As part of the "hashtag me too" movement a lot of ladies have been telling their stories about the way a lot of guys have been acting for apparently decades now without much in the way of repercussions. There's a pretty wide range of offenses here and some are pretty awful and some are probably like barely worth mentioning or maybe closer to someone being a jerk than they are to someone abusing their power or position.

Anyway, some of the guys are like "yeah, I mean, you got me here. I did that and that was bad and I will leave now" and they just go on their way and either resign or retire or whatever. Other guys are either denying the thing happened outright, or staying kinda wishy washy about the thing having happened and just trying to stay in their position until someone forces them out. In many cases, no one forces them out.

I think a real power move would be to resign for someone else's hashtag me too scandal. Like say hypothetically when those ladies were like "yeah Matt Lauer is a naughty boy and has a special desk button" if he had not been fired and not resigned, it would have been awesome if some other random guy was like "Because of the Matt Lauer situation I can no longer honorably serve my community as city highway inspector, and I am stepping down effective immediately".

Maybe that guy would start a trend and lots of local municipal employees who had never met Matt Lauer could all start stepping down, and then we could send him all the newspaper clippings to show him all the damage he was causing by failing to take ownership of his own thing.

There's a lack of civility in this debate

During pre-season practices for American Football teams a lot of clubs will take some time out of their practice schedule to make sure they drill basic skills and game fundamentals. Once the season gets going they wind up in the grind of preparing for the next opponent, so the pre-season is a good time to reset the basics and work on doing the simple things right.

That one guy in the navy said to make your bed every morning and this seems sort of in line with that so they're probably on the right path. Speaking of which, pretty much no one that I live with can make their bed correctly. The one daughter is less than a year old so she gets a pass. The other daughter is almost six and really needs to get her act together. My wife's arms might be too short to make a bed the right way, I don't know. I tried to raise the issue with her parents but then I realized we had a "no returns" policy on the whole thing so I guess I just have to accept this. I spend a good part of a given day shutting off lights, picking up stray socks, and making everyone's bed.

Point here being, a "fumble drill" is one thing that one of these football teams might practice. You have two players stand back to back, and then a coach will drop or throw the ball somewhere a few meters away from them, and yell "ball", and the players attempt to dive on and possess the ball. This will come in handy some day during a game when a ball is dropped and they are reminded of their training and of what they are supposed to do when a ball is on the ground. They are supposed to dive on and possess the ball, and make it their own.

I think it'd be pretty funny if a tech company with college interns did a drill like this during intern orientation. They'd line up the interns back to back and then some mid level manager would scatter iPads and laptops in either direction and yell "mobile app!" and they'd have to hit the floor and lock that thing down.

It's about time for the orienteering class to share their findings

A lot of small talk between people when they all arrive at the place is how they got to the place. Like one lady might be like "Oh did you take the new road that goes past the courthouse?" and the other person might say "oh I always forget to come that way, it's so much faster. I just came the old way on the road past the ice cream place". In a more urban setting you might see the same conversation but you'd have more in the way of cabs and ubers and maybe subways.

In the future this conversation won't be as interesting anymore because everyone's journey to the thing will be a small data point in an algorithm. The conversation with the other party guest will be sort of pointless, because the decision to have taken the new courthouse road or the old ice cream place road probably wasn't theirs to make -- they just told their personal AI friend that they wanted to go to the thing, and then the AI friend routed them there in the best way.

I guess maybe you'd have a conversation of like "oh yes, I always pay the upgrade to get priority routing" or something. Or maybe you'd talk about which book you listened to on the way there. Maybe the car robots could talk to each other and remind themselves about the new road by the courthouse. But then again they probably helped build the damn road so they don't really need reminding.