climate change activist and science communicator; photographer; mapmaker — advocate for a stable global climate, reduced nuclear weapon risks, and safe human-AI interaction
Matters of money
My photos from this year’s Massey College Christmas Gaudy are online.
If any of my photos this year have been valuable to you, please consider making a contribution:
My PhD student funding doesn’t even cover rent and basic expenses, so any extra income is useful for things like buying Christmas gifts.
A contribution of $5 would be very welcome. An envelope left in my mailbox in the Massey lodge would be ideal.
Tonight I was elected to the first board of Toronto350.org, which is in the process of incorporating as a non-profit.
Does anyone have experience being on the boards of non-profit organizations? I would be grateful if people could direct me toward some useful sources of information on how boards work and the responsibilities of directors. We also need to finalize our bylaws, so guidance along those lines would also be appreciated.
P.S. Toronto350.org has an ongoing donation drive. Donations will go toward our campaign work, which is all volunteer-driven.
Often, email feels like an impossible torrent of mostly-unwanted information.
For a while, I have felt like one way to improve it would be to require refundable stamps for messages. In order to send you an email, a person might pay $0.50 or $1.00 for a virtual ‘stamp’. When you receive the message, you get to choose whether to refund the sender (perhaps minus a set fee for the email provider), or keep the value of the stamp yourself (again, minus a $0.05 or $0.10 cut).
If emails cost $1 each to send, there would be a lot fewer trivial ones. I doubt many people would totally replace their normal email with StampMail, but a lot might set up a parallel account for higher-priority messages.
Some spam will be profitable enough to make sending emails with stamps worthwhile. There are two responses to this. First, StampMail could be a lot more aggressive than existing email providers about banning accounts that are sending spam. Second, any spam you receive is more tolerable when it comes with a $0.90 to $0.95 payment.
The union that represents me as a teaching assistant at the University of Toronto is holding a strike vote.
They are calling for more generous funding packages for TAs, increased health and childcare benefits, and a few other things. U of T is especially stingy when it comes to graduate funding packages. The standard package of $23,000 minus about $8,000 tuition (and assuming 210 hours of work as a TA) doesn’t cover the cost of living in Toronto, requiring most TAs to either borrow or do additional outside work.
I don’t know how I feel about the strike vote. I am pretty wary about unions in general (especially when it comes to public sector unions). That is because of how they often seem to defend particular interests as opposed to the general welfare, and often establish and perpetuate inequalities between ‘insiders’ and ‘outsiders’. I also don’t know what the prospects are for a strike actually improving TA pay at U of T.
Voting goes on until November 18th, so I will need to do some more thinking and decide before then.
More than 150 people showed up for the fossil fuel divestment march today, on campus at the University of Toronto.
Tonight I got some photos at a panel discussion on fossil fuel divestment, organized by Toronto350.org.
The University of Toronto has now officially created a committee to consider fossil fuel divestment.
One of my big tasks in the weeks ahead will be to update the brief with everything important that has happened since it was opened for attestations last September.
From the date when they first meet, the committee will have a year to produce a recommendation. President Gertler will then make his own recommendation to the Governing Council, which in turn will make the final decision.
If a way could be found to make firms and governments take it seriously, it seems like a single auction of all the planet’s ‘safe’ remaining carbon emissions could be an alternative form of carbon pricing with some virtues.
Starting with the goal of keeping warming to under 2˚C, we could estimate the total quantity of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions that humanity can still produce. In order to make the auction at all fair, it would need to take into account national populations and levels of wealth. Probably, it should be set up so that everyone is positioned to acquire equal per-capita shares in the world’s remaining emissions.
If confidence is created that no more credits will ever be auctioned, we can expect the price of those from the initial auction to rise across time as people use them up and trade them. People in countries with excessively high per-capita emissions (like Canada, Australia, and the United States) will find themselves burning through their reserves at a frightening pace, and face a strong incentive to cut emissions quickly.
Of course, there would be many challenges with such an approach. Governments would need to agree to participate. Global monitoring of GHG emissions would be necessary. Rogue governments, individuals, and firms could simply disregard the system. Splitting up the emission allowance between present and future generations is also a major problem (especially since the smartest course of action is probably to save a big chunk of the remaining total for the activities that are hardest to decarbonize, like air travel and space launches). All that being said, an auction of the whole resource would strongly reinforce the idea that humanity has a finite amount of atmospheric space for GHG pollution and that we need to move aggressively to stay within the limit.
Since the summer of 2011 – right before my bus trip to New Orleans and Washington D.C. – I have been wearing the same pair of Blundstone #500 boots. Buying brand new boots right before a trip was a big mistake, since stretching the side of each boot to accommodate my smallest toe was a long and surprisingly painful process. Despite mostly sitting still, the boots made that long bus ride very painful, and complicated walking about effectively in NOLA and Washington. Once about three weeks had passed, however, the boots proved very comfortable, functional, and versatile. I have worn them with suits at work and formal events, and with every type of clothing in conditions ranging from hot summer days to blizzards.
Now, after years of constant wear, the boots have holes in the leather sides (the leather itself still looks great after a bit of polishing). There is also an especially problematic hole in the rubber sole, right under the ball of my right foot. When the ground is even a bit wet, it acts as a suction device, rapidly drenching my sock.
As soon as I have some money in my bank account again, I intend to pick up another pair. Rather than trying to break them in through continuous wear, my plan is to wear the new boots 25% of the time at first, progressively increasing that figure until they are my main footwear.
I have written about nuclear fusion as an energy source before:
Periodically, however, there are news stories about supposed breakthroughs in fusion technology with the potential to be rapidly and affordably deployed, potentially curbing climate change.
I have seen enough of these stories in my life to be pretty skeptical, but this can be a thread for keeping track of and discussing them.
Here’s the latest: Lockheed says makes breakthrough on fusion energy project