While talking with my niece at the tea party yesterday she described her kids as “going all yampy” which was the first time I’d heard this midlands expression in the wild. I felt like an ethnologist who’d stumbled upon a tribe he’d only read about in old Lew Stringer comics.

Cynicism and naïveté in the summer of a thousand fires

Rebecca Solnit on the myth that the more you know about a crisis, the more dispirited and cynical you become. But cynicism comes from not bothering to learn more:

One arena in which this is startlingly true is climate. I have been around the climate movement for more than fifteen years. Everyone who’s up to their neck in climate politics, economics, and science knows the situation is serious, alarming, dismaying – but not doomed, and so they keep doing what they can do. Their valor, generosity of spirit, dedication is so profoundly beautiful that being around these people one of the rewards for doing climate work. […] But outside that world of informed people who are doing the work are people who throw up their hands and give up.

Also has some good stuff on how people can naturally come together during and after a crisis which is not what authoritarians want, so they push back against it. This reminded me of the movie Contagion which was seen as prescient about the Covid pandemic, and yeah, it was about some things, but it also showed a highly competent ruling elite and a troublesome populace with striking nurses and rioters. During the actual non-fictional pandemic that was kinda the other way around.

A chat with Daz about how bad the webcam bears seem to be at catching salmon and whether they should try catching seagulls instead.

John Harris on data centres in Slough

To be fair to him, his beat is politics and what people are thinking outside of the Westminster bubble, so it’s not entirely reasonable for the BTL comments to go on about how data centres actually use water for cooling. But while there are certainly closed-loop and conservation-minded methods of cooling it’s doubtful they’ll be employed by an industry that is happy to burn coal and gas for AI chatbots that nobody really needs.

Why Andy Burnham is no ordinary Labour prime minister

Of all the “this time will be different” articles this is the most personally interesting as it turns out Burnham is one of those Co-operative Party members who have a pact with Labour. You see them on ballot papers and they have a surprising 43 MPs. As a co-op head I’ve long been interested in this group as the co-op values and principles don’t seem to perfectly fit with how the Labour Party tends to operate. How strongly he holds these values is moot, of course. Manchester is co-op central so it might just be the default for his intake.

I’ve been listening to Steve Reich – Works: 1965-1995, a 10 CD, nine hour box set which I came across after hearing one of the tracks on Radio 3 and following the link from the website to Apple Music. It was one of those moments where despite the modern internet frequently being insanely problematic you’ve really got to appreciate what we have now. Back in the old days I would have had to write down what the presenter said and take that to a record shop, where I’d have to spend an inordinate amount of money on the CDs, or go to the library and hope they had this for loan. Now I pay a £10.99 subscription and can spend the night listening to what I assume is the entirety of Steve Reich’s work, just like that, and tomorrow something completely different. You can make many arguments against the streaming hegemony and I will agree with lots of them, but the idea of little me having this kind of affordable access in the 90s (or even the mp3 downloading 2000s) is laughable.