Outbreak of chloera caused the investigation

Good! This is how I'd introduce the lab.

In re: "Team programming": This LO needs to be HAMMERED wayyyyy harder than it's being treated by this lab doc. We need to introduce measurable objectives (e.g. commit quotas, branch requirements, reflections on who did what that reference commit IDs).

This is essentially a list of all course objectives. I agree that this should be presented in the first lab to give a roadmap, but this list doesn't provide me with much information about how these topics relate to one another and why they are in this course together.

Overall comments: This section is all over the place. We bounce from "what we will be doing in this lab" to "specific robot details" to "litany of course objectives; most of which are not addressed in this lab"

This paragraph gives high level lab goals. Unfortunately, it fails to highlight any learning objective of the course! The rewrite will have a paragraph that serves the same purpose, but it will have a higher focus on LOs.

These two paragraphs introduce the robotic arm used in the class. A little more detail than is truly necessary.

reply to u/ArousedByApostasy at https://old.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/1g8diq4/any_books_about_how_someone_used_zettelkasten_to/

If you're suffering from the delusion (and many do) that Zettelkasten is only about Luhmann and his own writing and 4-5 recent books on the topic, you're only lacking creativity and some research skills. Seemingly Luhmann has lots of good PR, particularly since 2013, but this doesn't mitigate the fact that huge swaths of the late 1800s to the late 1900s are chock-a-block full of books produced by these methods. Loads of examples exist under other names prior to that including florilegia, commonplace books, the card system, card indexes, etc.

Your proximal issue is that the scaffolding used to write all these books is generally invisible because authors rarely, if ever, talk about their methods and as a result, they're hard to "see". This doesn't mean that they don't exist.

I've got a list of about 50+ books about the topic of zettelkasten or incredibly closely related methods dating back to 1548 if you want to peruse some: https://www.zotero.org/groups/4676190/tools_for_thought/collections/V9RPUCXJ/tags/note%20taking%20manuals/items/F8WSEABT/item-list

There are a variety of examples of people's note collections that you can see in various media and compare to their published output. I've collected several dozens of examples, many of which you can find here: https://boffosocko.com/research/zettelkasten-commonplace-books-and-note-taking-collection/

Interesting examples to get you started:

• Vladimir Nabokov's estate published copies of his index cards for the novel The Original of Laura which you can purchase and read in its index card format. You can find a copy of his index card diary as Insomniac Dreams from Princeton University Press: https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691196909/insomniac-dreams
• S.D. Goitein - researchers on the Cairo Geniza still use his note collection to produce new scholarship; though he had 1/3 the number of note cards compared to Luhmann, his academic writing output was 3 times larger. If you dig around you can find a .pdf copy of his collection of almost 30,000 notes and compare it to his written work.
• There's a digitized collection of W. Ross Ashby's notes (in notebook and index card format) which you can use to cross reference his written books and articles. https://ashby.info/
• Wittgenstein had a well-known note collection which underpinned his works (as well as posthumous works). See: Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Zettel. Edited by Gertrude Elizabeth Margaret Anscombe and Georg Henrik von Wright. Translated by Gertrude Elizabeth Margaret Anscombe. Second California Paperback Printing. 1967. Reprint, Berkeley and Los Angeles, California: University of California Press, 2007.
• Roland Barthes had a significant collection from which he both taught and wrote; His notes following his mother's death can be read in the book Morning Diary which were published as index card-based notes.
• The Marbach exhibition in 2013 explored six well-known zettelkasten (including Luhmann's): Gfrereis, Heike, and Ellen Strittmatter. Zettelkästen: Maschinen der Phantasie. 1st edition. Marbach am Neckar: Deutsche Schillerges, 2013. https://www.amazon.de/-/en/Heike-Gfrereis/dp/3937384855/.
• Philosopher John Locke wrote a famous treatise on indexing commonplace books which underlay his own commonplacing and writing work: Locke, John, 1632-1704. A New Method of Making Common-Place-Books. 1685. Reprint, London, 1706. https://archive.org/details/gu_newmethodmaki00lock/mode/2up.
• Historian Jacques Barzun, a professor, dean and later provost at Columbia, not only wrote dozens of scholarly books, articles, and essays out of his own note collection, but also wrote a book about some of the process in a book which has over half a dozen editions: Barzun, Jacques, and Henry F. Graff. The Modern Researcher. New York, Harcourt, Brace, 1957. http://archive.org/details/modernreseracher0000unse. In his private life, he also kept a separate shared zettelkasten documenting the detective fiction which he read and was a fan. From this he produced A Catalogue of Crime: Being a Reader's Guide to the Literature of Mystery, Detection, and Related Genres (with Wendell Hertig Taylor). 1971. Revised edition, Harper & Row, 1989: ISBN 0-06-015796-8.
• Erasmus, Agricola, and Melanchthon all wrote treatises which included a variation of the note taking methods which were widely taught in the late 1500s at universities and other schools.
• The Jonathan Edwards Center at Yale has a digitized version of his note collection called the Miscellanies that you can use to cross reference his written works.
• A recent example I've come across but haven't mentioned to others until now is that of Barrett Wendell, a professor at Harvard in the late 1800s, taught composition using a zettelkasten or card system method.
• Director David Lynch used a card index method for writing and directing his movies based on the method taught to him by Frank Daniel, a dean at the American Film Institute.
• Mortimer J. Adler et al. created a massive group zettelkasten of western literature from which they wrote volumes 2 and 3 (aka The Syntopicon) of the Great Books of the Western World. See: https://forum.zettelkasten.de/discussion/2623/mortimer-j-adlers-syntopicon-a-topically-arranged-collaborative-slipbox
• Before he died, historian Victor Margolin made a YouTube video of how he wrote the massive two volume World History of Design which included a zettelkasten workflow: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kxyy0THLfuI
• Martin Luther King, Jr. kept a zettelkasten which is still extant and might allow you to reference his notes to his written words.
• The Brothers Grimm used a zettelkasten method (though theirs was slips nailed to a wall) to create The Deutsches Wörterbuch (The German Dictionary that preceeded the Oxford Dictionary). The DWB was begun in 1838 by Jacob Grimm and Wilhelm Grimm who worked on it through the letter F prior to their deaths. The dictionary project was ended in 1961 after 123 years of work which resulted in 16 volumes. A further 17th source volume was released in 1971.
• Here's an interesting video of Ryan Holliday's method condensed over time: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dU7efgGEOgk
• Because Halloween is around the corner, I'll even give you a published example of death by zettelkasten described by Nobel Prize winner Anatole France in one of his books: https://boffosocko.com/2022/10/24/death-by-zettelkasten/

If you dig in a bit you can find and see the processes of others like Anne Lamott, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Bob Hope, Michael Ende, Twyla Tharp, Kate Grenville, Marcel Mauss, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Phyllis Diller, Carl Linnaeus, Beatrice Webb, Isaac Newton, Harold Innis, Joan Rivers, Umberto Eco, Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, Raymond, Llull, George Carlin, and Eminem who all did variations of this for themselves for a variety of output types.

These barely scratch the surface of even Western intellectual history much less other cultures which have broadly similar methods (including oral cultures). If you do a bit of research into any major intellectual, you're likely to uncover a similar underlying method of work.

While there are some who lionize Luhmann, he didn't invent or even perfect these methods, but is just a drop of water in a vast sea of intellectual history.

And how did I write this short essay response? How do I have all these examples to hand? I had your same question years ago and read and researched my way into an answer. I have both paper and digital zettelkasten from which to query and write. I don't count my individual paper slips of which there are over 15,000 now, but my digital repository is easily over 20,000 (though only 19K+ are public).

I hope you manage to figure out some version of the system for yourself and manage to create something interesting and unique out of it. It's not a fluke and it's not "just a method for writing material about zettelkasten itself".

interesting -- not the history of the fact of homosexuality, but the identity category

sometimes acquired status is official (run for office for position) and can reflect old patriarchies that trying to come back

social position of official is stronger where there's a demand for trained experts- a training that only the wealthy can afford

loyalty to office = loyalty to an impersonal and functional purpose as opposed to a person

regulation not derived from individual judgement but from accordance with rules

training in field of specialization- increasingly important

items of official different from org.

monocratically organized hierarchy- lower offices supervised by higher ones and can be appealed to them

state = bureaucratic agency private = bureaucratic enterprise

officials distributing duties does it in a stable way and according to the rules

necessary regular activities are official duties

Modern bureaucracy means...

personal authority can come from charisma

what status becomes apparent as determining someone's face the aspect of class is under attack

people justify inequality

what makes domination legit has empirical impacts

small number of leaders can address threats and reach understandings more quickly and effectively

can't categorize smaller dem admin from larger dem admin because of such a radically different system

as soon as a struggle for power comes into play, direct dem admin is lost and hierarchical structure comes in

Fight for a more democratic admin is used by poor to fight for their rights but also by the economically powerful who did not obtain this status group

this is where honoratiores come in

transition out of prestige of old age for various factors

honoroatiores- in dem admin, commonly people in power often have wealth with little labor and have social prestige

dem admin almost always falls to wealthy- they have the time to take on part-time low paying jobs

power holder is not to act in own self-interest but in servitude to a collective

immediately democratic admin- 1. assumes all are equally qualified to conduct public affairs 2. limited power

not always where one person had dominion or the person being dominated can't be the dominator

lack of clear set rules despite authority that needs to be followed feels sometimes more oppressive

same within workplace- meaning of "equal" parties and "voluntary" service are construed

monopolies can utilize control until it almost resembles a bureaucratic state agency

ex. monopoly can become authority

In its pure form- former is completely based on having the skills or the resources and engaging with other moving completely in their own interests. Latter is based wholly on an alleged duty to obey

Can have monopolistic domination of market or a sort of "non-rational" power

domination extends from situations in which person is "commanded"

Reminder- domination = ability to impose one own's will on another person

Domination doesn't necessarily = a particular economic org. but how domination is structured often factors into economic significance or is a result of it.

Linguistic example of domination- what dialect is the standard in schools

Membership must be contingent on participation in a certain congregation- beyond just geographic authorities and territories

Useful to pacify conquered people

congregation only when lay people or non- clergy are organized in a way where they can actively participate permanently

Rule of Persian kings made Judaism into religious community in which prophets and their admin were given political power

some religious congregations arose from the annihilated political powers- creating power voids filled in by priests

Spiritual designations make move towards organizational designations, as doctrine is institutionalized and incorporated into everyday life.

In prophet's and prophet admin's best interest to secure congregation through permanent organization

larger congregation verified status with offerings or fixed rules and obligations, depending on whether it was a exemplary or ethical prophet

religious community involves the monopolizing of the distribution of grace and privileges for those charged with religious functions

Is there a way to address this issue in the robots without trashing them? Is this a training Ai issue? Either way, this must be addressed.

I have always found it interesting that the government has a say/controls specifically how elders are treated in a family. In our western culture there is no specific requirement for how elders are cared for.

COVID forced industries to upgrade their tech due to the remote living conditions.

Human care workers are not available, which begs the question of if robots are a suitable replacement.

There is clearly a need for more attention on elder care, and robots is one of the tools being used.

How is it looking now? What impact did COVID have on this timeline?

If the cost of robot care is similar to an elders home, what would people choose?

Previous technology supports this idea.

They understand the threat of automation and view robots as an auxiliary tool, not a replacement.

There is government backing for this idea, demonstrated by funding for the National Institute.

The declaration of Independence in 1776. Politicians and the seeking eyes of the people and their freedom. July 4th 1776, Thomas Jefferson and many other leaders of the colonies got together and signed the document. It was signed and ratified in the Pennsylvania state house. A lot of people often ask questions about the Declaration of independence. I wonder where the document is? I also wonder about how the document being a piece of paper is held and preserved. The declaration document was ratified to grant freedom to the people and formally introduce equality. To separate from Great Britian and to form their own civilization. The audience they were reaching was Great Britian.

is it only for the summary cube? or also the pnl cube

Confused because the sample file listed does not match the columns here... what is listed here is a subset.

I think this helps remind the reader what the main goal of what they are reading is and makes the writing feel more structured, clear, and complete.

I am writing this comment after finishing the chapter. I really like that it started with this story; it's a brilliant way to represent the idea. I also believe that if Dr. X had summarized the opposing views early on, the presentation would have been more compelling.

It's interesting how unsell this advice is, but I think starting with summarizing the other views is received best by people with the other view.

Not exactly related, but I noticed that in some classes, the instructor starts the semester without laying the groundwork for what we will be discussing. They dive deep into the topic, leaving many students confused and unable to understand what is being said. It's important to write in a way that everyone can understand, even if it means starting with small concepts. This approach can help readers conduct their own research on the topic and return with a better background for understanding the material.

Engaging in a debate can help strengthen your own position by analyzing others and does not give you pressure prematurely.

I like this idea, especially the statistic because it's a good way to capture the reader's attention at the beginning of your text. It creates a powerful lead.

This lets other people's perspectives help shape the issue/idea you're addressing, which strengthens the writing.

It's crucial to clarify the concept and ideas to maintain an audience's interest early to make sure they are following the writer's reasoning.

I like how this concept emphasizes the importance of engaging with others opinions to create a richer narrative.

formula that shows the ratio of elements present in the compound

Also known as "NOAA Research," this office maintains NOAA's "Climate.gov" website, with such "alarmist" features as a "global climate dashboard" charting rising CO2 and other greenhouse gases, sea levels, and ocean heat, as well as declining sea ice and mountain glaciers. https://www.climate.gov/about.

The Trump administration let this portal go unfunded and at one point shut it down. The suppression of talk about climate change on this and other agency portals during these years, documented by EDGI, was far-reaching. Climate researchers had to alter webpages, for instance, by changing "climate change" to "climate," apparently taken as less politically charged. https://envirodatagov.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/New_Digital_Landscape_EDGI_July_2019.pdf

Trump's proposed funding cuts for this agency averaged a whopping 35.7% over the first three years. However, Congress pushed back hard, and actually authorized increases in it budget (8.5%) and staff (3.5%).<br /> https://envirodatagov.org/embattled-landscape-series-part-2b-the-declining-capacity-of-federal-environmental-science/

Trump's average proposed budget cuts for his first three years for the Fish and Wildlife Service were slightly higher than those for NOAA itself--more than 18%. However, FWS fared much better in Congress, actually increasing its budget by 2% (adjusting for inflation). It nevertheless lost 5.8% of its staff. https://envirodatagov.org/embattled-landscape-series-part-2b-the-declining-capacity-of-federal-environmental-science/

Trump tried to cut this service's budget by an average of 15.9% over his first years, but thanks to Congress its staff and budget barely budged. https://envirodatagov.org/embattled-landscape-series-part-2b-the-declining-capacity-of-federal-environmental-science/

For Project 2025, data supporting the reality of anthropogenic climate change appears biased by definition, since it takes sides in an imagined "climate debate" among scientists. This is a throwback to an earlier version of climate denialism. https://allianceforscience.org/blog/2024/01/new-analysis-exposes-shifts-in-climate-denial-tactics-on-youtube/

Trump's average proposed budget cuts for this service averaged a more modest 15% for his first three years. But through Congressional action, the inflation-adjusted budget fell over 40% and the staff over 10% during his time in office. https://envirodatagov.org/embattled-landscape-series-part-2b-the-declining-capacity-of-federal-environmental-science/

Here's a belated recognition that the data used by commercial operations is indeed from the NWS. What it would mean for the NWS to also "fully commercialize its forecasting operations" is not at all clear.

A claim that seems to disregard how so much today's commercial services actually hinge on federal weather data. As AccuWeather chief executive Steven R. Smith put it: "NOAA’s 'foundational data' helps inform AccuWeather’s own forecasting software, artificial intelligence and meteorologists." Moreover, “it has never been our goal to take over the provision of all weather information.” https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2024/07/22/project-2025-weather-service-trump/

Here's the reason why NOAA receives such treatment: its contributions to the science of climate change. Another Project 2025 theme: future US prosperity depends on ignoring and not researching climate change, and certainly not seeking to prepare for or mitigate it.

While the roots of some NOAA functions date to the nineteenth century, it took on more modern form after the passage of the Marine Resources and Engineering Development Act in 1966. President Richard Nixon created the agency in 1970, the same year as the EPA. NOAA had the following goals: "to protect life and property from natural hazards, better understand the total environment, and explore and develop ways to use marine resources in a 'coordinated way' within the Department of Commerce." A recent report by the Congressional Research Service outlines the many efforts to legislate on this agency's work and structure.<br /> https://sgp.fas.org/crs/misc/R47636.pdf

The Trump Administration proposed cutting NOAA's budget an average of 17% in its four budget proposals. Because Congressional support for NOAA was less robust than that for other environmental agencies (including EPA), NOAA's actual budget slid over 14% between 2016-2019, the biggest actual funding cut of any environmental agency studied by EDGI over the Trump years. https://envirodatagov.org/embattled-landscape-series-part-2b-the-declining-capacity-of-federal-environmental-science/

Gilman's proposals in the NOAA chapter are among the most hostile plans for any agency proposed by Project 2025.

this way, we actually account for the context, it is just that the starting point is the language and form of the text

that is why suggested that we start with close reading

why very crucial also yung transcription because it changes the feel or effect of the form of the writing

dapat maayos muna yung transcription ng text before makapag close read nang maayos

Close reading as Practical criticism

paying attention to the formal properties, to the language

Here, preparedness grants to the state, local, tribal, and territorial governments DON'T count as federalism. That's in stark contrast with the "New Federalism" proposed by Richard Nixon back in the early 1970s. For Nixon, federalism entailed "revenue sharing" of federal funds with the states, with the states granted more control over how the money was spent: “more money and less interference.” Here, federalism for relief efforts means that states, localities, tribes, etc. will no longer get any federal money. Their efforts will be entirely defunded. https://www.brookings.edu/articles/nixons-new-federalism-45-years-later/

If the NFIP had been wound down prior to Helene and Milton, the vast majority of those whose homes were damaged by these storms would have had means of receiving any compensation to cover the destruction. That's because only 25% of Floridians in storm-affected had purchased flood insurance and far fewer in hard-hit Western North Carolina. Moreover, the storms hitting Florida had come after Florida had passed reforms to attract private flood insurers back into its home insurance market. The struggles owners of these policies faced in getting companies to recognize their claims foreshadow what will happen if flood insurance markets turn completely private. https://www.nbcnews.com/business/consumer/hurricane-milton-helene-insurance-nightmares-torment-florida-residents-rcna175088

The Trump Administration deprived FEMA of funds by repeatedly taking its allocations for disaster relief and applying them to immigration and border policing. Funds transferred included nearly $10 million in 2018 and nearly $160 million in 2019. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2018/09/12/document-shows-the-trump-administration-diverted-nearly-10-million-from-fema-to-ice-detention-program/ https://www.politifact.com/article/2019/oct/02/fema-money-reprogrammed-immigration-enforcement-wh/

Oversimplified. Since its establishment in 1968, the NFIP has indeed struggled to fulfill the roles envisioned by its architects and proponents, according to historian Scott Knowles. But waves of legislation have repeatedly sought reforms to incentivize and create other mechanisms for reducing risks from floods as well as discouraging development of flood prone areas. https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/R/R47646

According a recent history by the Congressional Research Service, the Stafford Act was passed in 1988 largely in response to an effort by the Reagan administration to reduce the federal funding share for many forms of disaster relief to just 50%, leaving states and localities to cover the rest. After a bipartisan outcry, Congress then acted to legislate a 75% federal/25% state and local rate for many of FEMA's programs. Most proposals here seek to reduce or eliminate federal support for disaster relief may face a similar fate to the Reagan Administration's effort. https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/R/R47646

In stark contrast to the approach recommended for immigration and the border, Cuccinelli suggests that FEMA pass more of its responsibilities off to the states and cities and to avoid disasters not considered sufficiently "large" and "widespread."

Cuccinelli's comment neglects another more recent cause of FEMA's dearth of funding: the Trump Administration. From its first proposed budget onward, Trump and his appointee sought to cut FEMA's and other funding for "long-term preparedness efforts, many of them put in place to address the sluggish federal response to Hurricane Katrina." https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/as-agencies-respond-to-storm-some-face-cuts-under-trump-budget-proposal/2017/08/29/0fbbd6ca-8cc8-11e7-84c0-02cc069f2c37_story.html

This constitutes another move to erase climate change from the federal policy. This working group was established in 2009 to draw on the best available science to understand, define, and incorporate "the social benefits of reducing emissions of each of [the main]greenhouse gases, or the social costs of increasing such emissions, in the policy making process." Its calculations were then incorporated in agency cost-benefit analyses. Trump abolished the working group, which was restarted under Biden. https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/TechnicalSupportDocument_SocialCostofCarbonMethaneNitrousOxide.pdf

Consistent with Project 2025's other proposed erasures of climate change, the authors propose to continue this with the Oval Office. A Senior Advisor for "energy and environment" will replace an Office of Domestic Climate Policy.

The 2020 Trump-era rule revision for NEPA faced many questions about its constitutionality. Though court proceedings were cut short by the Biden revocation of that rule, these proposed measures may well be even more judicially vulnerable. https://www.theregreview.org/2020/08/24/glicksman-camacho-trump-administration-unconstitutional-power-grab/

This ruling from 1979 may prove judicially vulnerable in the wake of the Supreme Court's recent overturning of the Chevron decision, which had long grounded judicial doctrines of deference to agencies.

This 2020 rule revision to the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) rolled out early in 2020 and sought to curb the use of science in permitting federal or federally sponsored projects. They attempted to do so indirectly, by mandatory speed-up as well as circumscription of the environmental assessments that NEPA required. More directly, the Trump administration overturned guidance from the Obama administration that NEPA analyses consider effects on climate change. The new rule revision curbed consideration not just of climate change but of all other “effects” that are “remote in time, geographically remote, or the product of a lengthy causal chain” including "cumulative impact analysis"--long a required element of NEPA assessments. https://envirodatagov.org/an-embattled-landscape-federal-environmental-science-integrity-in-the-united-states-a-three-part-series-part-1-targeting-scientific-influence-on-policy/

Upon overturning this Trump-era rule, the Biden Administration also included environmental justice impacts among the "cumulative" assessments to take place under NEPA, a step which Project 2025 also seeks to reverse. https://www.insideenergyandenvironment.com/2024/05/ceq-final-nepa-regulations-and-department-of-energy-actions-aim-to-responsibly-accelerate-clean-energy-transmission-and-other-infrastructure-development/

When President Richard Nixon created the Council in 1970 and announced its first three members, he described CEQ to the press as "the environmental conscience of the nation." https://www.jstor.org/stable/27551558

In his and many subsequent administrations, Republican as well as Democratic, the CEQ played a central role coordinating environmental policy across the agencies. Trump's nomination of Mary Neumayr to head the CEQ came after the rest of his White House-based political appointees. Though she was at the time considered moderate politically, the Council's work under her leadership focused on circumscribing NEPA's requirements and scope under the guise of "streamlining." https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2018/06/13/trump-tries-a-more-middle-of-the-road-pick-for-top-white-house-environment-post/

There has long been a debate about the proper use of the SPR. Should it only be used in the event of actual supply shortages and gasoline lines? Or should it be used when prices spike "too high?" See https://www.tamupress.com/book/9781585446001/the-strategic-petroleum-reserve/

Political perception of the impact of SPR releases on Americans' prices at the pump tend to far outstrip the actual economic impact: https://visualizingenergy.org/can-releases-from-the-strategic-petroleum-reserve-lower-energy-prices/

Under Project 2025, promoting American energy interests is limited to expanding production and consumption of fossil fuels both in the United States and abroad. Currently, the U.S. leads the world in production of oil and gas. Where the U.S. is at greatest risk of falling behind is investments in clean energy manufacturing and deployment, as explained in the International Energy Agency's World Energy Investment 2024 report. For historical context about how the U.S. fell behind China in investments in clean clean energy, see https://uwapress.uw.edu/book/9780295752181/charged/(2022), chapter 4.

How many times does the licensing process need to be streamlined? It was last streamlined in the Energy Policy Act of 2005. What is left unsaid here is that the expected nuclear renaissance of the early 2000's was killed by cheap natural gas produced by fracking. The problem with nuclear power isn't burdensome regulation or environmentalists; it's that the technology is simply not cost-competitive. See https://www.academia.edu/41080344/Nuclear_Power_in_America_The_Story_of_a_Failed_Energy_Transition

While it is proper for the federal government to dispose of spent nuclear fuel, how is this not a subsidy to the civilian nuclear power industry? The fees collected will never come close to paying for disposal.

Substantial private-sector engagement with US energy infrastructure is well-documented: https://visualizingenergy.org/which-banks-fund-upstream-oil-and-gas/

This chapter stands in support of a presidential campaign that advocates increasing tariffs, which is literally the very definition of picking winners and losers (why industrial policy is okay for some sectors of the economy but not energy is left unexplained).

Putting that aside, there is a tension between the market liberalism of trying not to pick winners and losers and the goal of American energy dominance and energy independence. For if the proper role of government is to step back and let the market decide, it shouldn't matter where the energy comes from. It shouldn't matter if the US is energy-independent.

Our involvement in the Middle East over the past century suggests it does matter. Oil is not just another commodity. Daniel Yergin titled his history of oil "The Prize" for a reason. Oil (and energy more broadly) has always been considered too important for its distribution, price and reliability to be left solely to the private market. https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/The-Prize/Daniel-Yergin/9781439110126

This ignores the fact that government has played a role in every energy transition over the past two hundred years. For a study of how government "picked" coal in the early 1800s. See https://www.hup.harvard.edu/books/9780674970922

For more information on the history of energy subsidies for fossil fuels, nuclear, biofuels, and renewables see https://www.dbl.vc/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/What-Would-Jefferson-Do-2.4.pdf

Translation: these are the forms of energy that matter. And their impacts on the atmosphere and those millions whose lives will be disrupted or lost through climate change do not.

A peculiar turn of phrase suggesting we need more public control over the energy industry, especially if readers have some knowledge of how many contemporary energy markets work. If the author was serious about this goal, he would favor doing away with investor-owned electric utilities that possess state-sanctioned monopoly control of their territories.

While Project 2025 authors describe a contermporary "war on oil and natural gas," the data belie this claim. The U.S. currently produces more crude oil than any other country in world history and is producing record levels of natural gas. Biden administration energy policy has included provisions support expansion off-shore oil and gas development, to the consternation of climate hawks. The Energy Information Administration is the best source for information on domestic energy production. On natural gas, see https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=61263 On crude oil production, see https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=61545#:~:text=Crude%20oil%20production%20in%20the,than%2013.3%20million%20b%2Fd.

Such a policy goal disregards the longstanding federal policies subdidizing research, extraction, and deployment of all types of energy sources in the United States, including wood, fossil fuels, biofuels, nuclear power, and renewable energy. As Nancy Pfund and Ben Healey explain, based on their research on historical energy subsidies, "From land grants for timber and coal in the 1800s to tax expenditures for oil and gas in the early 20th century, from federal investment in hydroelectric power to research and development funding for nuclear energy and today’s incentives for alternative energy sources, America’s [i.e., our government's] support for energy innovation has helped drive our country’s growth for more than 200 years." While support for renewables has grown under the Biden administration, those policies are catching renewables up to the historical subsidies provided to the nuclear, oil and gas, and biofuels in the past, many of which also continue into the present. For more information, see https://www.dbl.vc/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/What-Would-Jefferson-Do-2.4.pdf

This is a recurring motiff: fossil fuels are reliable and renewable forms of energy (because they are intermittent) are unreliable. This chapter even references the February 2021 blackout in Texas during winter storm Uri as supporting evidence, repeating conservative talking points from the time that have persisted despite repeated debunking. By far the chief reason for the blackout was the widespread failure of Texas' insufficiently weatherized natural gas plants. They shut down just as natural gas demand for home heating rose. Texas suppliers were also hampered by how disconnected this state remained from any larger grids. Oklahoma suffered many of the same problem experienced in Texas but was able to draw power from states further north avoiding a blackout. https://energy.utexas.edu/research/ercot-blackout-2021#:~:text=In%20February%202021%2C%20an%20extreme,more%20than%204.5%20million%20homes.

Fossil fuels don't ensure reliability. On the contrary, there is a long history of blackouts associated with fossil fueled power; to an extent most people don't realize, these are often caused by issues of transmission lines running from coal-, fuel oil-, or gas-powered generation plants. See https://direct.mit.edu/books/book/3271/When-the-Lights-Went-OutA-History-of-Blackouts-in

We environmental historians are unaware of any recent calls for government ownership of the energy industry; the actual definition of nationalization. There was a debate, in the early years of American electrification, about whether electric utilities should be under public or private control, and other national governments have taken public control over the holdings of private oil companies, including Mexico in 1938. But we have seen no discernible trend toward this nationalization--what most scholars mean by the word-- in recent times in the United States.

Climate change: the problem that cannot be named or acknowledged as genuine here, as elsewhere in Project 2025. Many of the policies in this chapter make little sense absent the assumption that global warming is either a hoax or grossly exaggerated by "radical" environmentalists and a political left, which can be safely ignored. If only we lived in that world.

This claim ignores significant evidence. For instance: since 2015, the US has become a net exporter of gasoline: https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=63224 The reliance on oil advocated here renders us dependent on Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) largely because of its collective ability to set or influence global oil prices, despite America's current status as net fossil fuel exporter.

Moreover, finite oil supplies of particular fields and regions have a habit of running out. What happens when fracking runs its course and the US is no longer a net exporter of oil and gas? Likely: even greater dependence on other oil-producing nations.

Third, true energy independence or dominance is not possible with a reliance on an energy source that is priced by global supply and demand dynamics, such as oil. Not just oil but natural gas may soon rely on international price-setting; many expect a global price for natural gas is on the horizon. Our reliance on a commodity priced by global forces places true "independence" and "dominance" out of reach for national policy-makers.

Fourth, every form of energy is subsidized (some intentionally, some unintentionally) by a range of policies. (see especially the Introduction in https://www.ucpress.edu/books/crude-politics/hardcover). Historically, the oil and gas industry has received the lion's share of these subsidies. If one were to include greenhouse gas emissions, US foreign policy commitments, and federal preferece for automobility (over other forms of transportaton), federal subsidies for petroleum continue to overshadow those for other sources of energy.

The idea advanced by these authors simply ignores these historical and contemporary realities. When they say government should not be picking winners and losers by subsidizing energy, the authors only talk about the subsidies enjoyed by the forms of energy they dislike while ignoring the vast subsidies for the forms of energy they prefer.

As a result, the chapter ignores the costs to the economy of a continued reliance on fossil fuels.

The chapter would have the US completly disinvest from supporting and subsidizing renewable forms of energy arguing that the transition away from fossil fuels is bad for the economy, makes the US less energy secure, and involves the government picking winners and losers.

There are several problems with this analysis. First, burning fossil fuels produces pollution, an environmental externality, that is not factored into the price of oil, coal or natural gas. This is a subsidy that is not recognized by the authors of this chapter.

Second, the US economy is reliant on oil. Virtually every recession since 1945 has been preceded by a significant rise in oil prices. Even though the US is today 'energy independent' (i.e. a net exporter), world oil prices are determined by global supply and demand. It is in our interest not to see oil prices rise too high. There are two ways to achieve this goal: we can reduce our reliance on oil or insure that the world is sufficiently supplied. For the past fifty years, the focus has been on insuring the security of supply. Since the Middle East contains close to half the world's oil reserves and produces a large percentage of the world's oil and natural gas, the US cannot allow unfriendly regimes to control too large a percentage of that region's energy exports. As a result, the US has spent trillions of dollars over the past several decades attempting to support or create such friendly regimes. This interest doesn't change with energy independence and it serves as an enormous unacknowledged subsidy to the oil and gas industry since it would not exist absent our reliance on oil. https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780809075072/panicatthepump https://www.jstor.org/stable/41510316

interesting

cure?

In this part of the journal, Columbus goes on another trip to explore the land. His crew member, Martin Alonso Pinzon, tells him that a Portuguese sailor saw a native carrying large bundles of cinnamon, but didn’t trade for it because of a rule Columbus made that banned trading without permission. The native also had brown objects that looked like nutmeg. This shows the European interest in valuable spices and how Columbus strictly controlled his crew's interactions with the natives, likely to maintain order and avoid conflicts.

In this passage, Columbus describes how the native people brought gifts like parrots, cotton, and darts to trade with the Europeans, who gave them small items like beads and bells in return. The natives were happy to exchange their goods, and Columbus notes that they gave everything willingly. However, he also assumes that the natives are poor because they don't have the same kinds of wealth or goods as the Europeans, showing his limited understanding of their culture and way of life. This exchange highlights the difference in values between the two groups and Columbus's biased view of the natives' lifestyle.

The intended audience for Columbus's journal appears to be the Spanish monarchy, particularly King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella. By documenting his findings and framing his encounters as friendly and productive, Columbus aimed to secure further support and funding for future voyages. This document serves to justify his actions and the continued exploration of the New World.

Annotated Question:

What long-term effects did Columbus’s arrival have on the indigenous peoples of the Caribbean? Initially, the encounters were marked by curiosity and trade, but they quickly turned violent as European powers tried to take control of the area. European diseases wiped out many indigenous people, and the need for labor led to the enslavement of those who survived. This question encourages us to look at the various impacts of colonization, such as cultural disruptions, loss of land, and social changes faced by these communities. How can we better understand how these cultures showed resilience despite these challenges?

One crucial question arising from Columbus’s account is how his descriptions of the indigenous peoples reflect his own cultural biases and assumptions. For instance, by portraying them as "very poor" and "simple," Columbus reveals a Eurocentric view that often disregarded the complexity of their societies. This raises further questions about the impact of these perceptions on subsequent colonial policies and attitudes toward indigenous peoples. How did Columbus's framing of these communities influence European views of colonization? Additionally, to what extent did these narratives shape the justifications for the exploitation of native resources and peoples? Understanding this bias is essential to critically examining the historical narratives surrounding European exploration

Columbus mostly encountered the Caribbean islands, which became important for European colonization after he arrived. These islands were rich in resources and in a good location, attracting various European countries looking to expand their empires. After Columbus landed, the indigenous populations faced terrible consequences, including violence, disease, and forced labor, which caused significant changes in their numbers. The first meetings between Columbus and the indigenous peoples set a pattern for future colonial relationships marked by exploitation and control. The effects of these encounters are still felt today, as they laid the groundwork for complicated histories of colonization, resistance, and cultural exchange in the region.

Christopher Columbus was an Italian explorer whose voyages across the Atlantic Ocean from 1492 onward are credited with opening the Americas to European colonization. Sponsored by Spain, his journeys aimed to find a westward route to Asia but instead led him to the Caribbean. Columbus's encounters with indigenous peoples marked the beginning of a significant and often tragic chapter in history, characterized by exploration, conquest, and colonization that would profoundly alter the social, economic, and cultural landscapes of both Europe and the Americas.

"Inhabitants" refers to the people or animals that live in a specific place, often implying a sense of belonging or connection to their environment.

"Canarians" are the native people from the Canary Islands, known for their unique culture and history, which was influenced by their isolation and later contact with European explorers.

to

It's a complex concept because many sources may fall into a grey area. I like how the list is provided to make sure we understand the relevance and what it can provide.

I agree with this because it allows you to focus on the most relevant information, refining the results. This saves time and ensures accuracy.

I like that this chapter can help with this! I often find that Google can be hard to find relevant and credible information due to popular/sponsored content.

Most of the information available online is overwhelming, especially when trying to determine accuracy and reliability. It's essential to evaluate credibility of the website.

Se analizo la actividad antibacteriana del suero de 23 cocodrilianos vivientes. However, despite living in environments rich in potentially pathogenic micro organisms, these wounds often heal without infection. Several species of crocodylians have been shown to be resistant to disease. For instance, Madsen et al. (1998) found a variety of Salmonella serotypes in the cloacae of healthy Nile crocodiles (Crocodylus niloticus). Manolis et al. (1991) found a high incidence of Salmonella in farmed Crocodylus johnsoni and Crocodylus porosus, while Scott and Foster (1997) described the isolation of Salmonellae from both farmed and wild American alligators (Alligator mississippiensis). In addition, Williams et al. (1990) found 23 different species of bacteria in the gular and paracloacal glands of healthy American alligators.

I thought this was a profound statement! In Intro to Org Leadership, we learned about strengths based theory, the belief that everyone has strengths and if you can identify them and utilize them for the better of the team it is a better technique than pointing out weaknesses and try to change those. I also like the following statement that says, "the role of a leader is to produce more leaders." It takes a confident and humble leader to consciously seek people with strengths that they lack and to place them in the business to utilize those strengths. I hope to be this kind of leader because I do believe in building up those around me and as the saying goes, "It is the greatest achievement of a teacher to enable his students to surpass him." I also believe in learning from the student. Reciprocal leadership is my goal.

En el sistema complemento de los reptiles requiere metales divalentes, temperaturas de 5 y 40 grados, superiores e inferiores lo inactivan . In a subsequent study, Merchant and Britton (Merchant and Britton, 2006) found that the lysis of sheep red blood cells by serum from saltwater (Crocodylus porosus) and freshwater (Crocodylus johnstoni) crocodiles required divalent metal ions, was heat sensitive and was unaffected by methylamine; therefore, suggesting that the alternative pathway was responsible for the lysis. Despite reptiles’ key place in evolutionary history, reptilian immune responses have received relatively little attention. Like all jawed vertebrates, reptiles possess both an innate and adaptive immune system. The innate system, which includes components such as non-specific leukocytes, antimicrobial peptides and the complement system, responds quickly as a non-specific first line of defense against a broad range of pathogens. In many cases the responses are stronger than those of mammals. Much less is known about the adaptive branch, and studies of the cell-mediated and humoral responses have been generally hampered by a lack of appropriate reagents.

Anarchy is defined as a state of disorder due to absent or nonrecognition of authority or other controlling systems. This the perfect and most astute description of the internet I have ever read.

Where would the community have been if it didn't have those dedicated protestors that were brave enough to risk their own health for the good of the kids?

When a community is hit with such injustice, the ability to see people rise and gain strength from each other is such an amazing thing.

At the end of the day, it is hard not to agree to the simple principle that the kids in this area deserved the right to a quality public education in their own neighborhood.

I believe this was the intention. If you divide the community it falls. "A house divided against itself cannot stand"

It is so hurtful to the kids in the community when they see this type of injustice. To watch schools being built in an unfair and inequitable way is just hurtful.

Despite how unfair CPS and the city is to this community, I do love that they find a way to rejoice. It really speaks to the resilience of the community.

It is such an unbelievable shame that it had to come to that. CPS should have listened in the first place.

I can't believe that the original excavation was just a part of a class, maybe that's why it wasn't taken care of very well?

Shows the bond and connection they have with on another. The armpit wax seems to have a deep meaning in their ritual, by the author saying that they mixed together, it shows the care and effort the are putting to help each other.

The women had no idea where her boy was gone because she was to busy doing something else and not taking care of him.

sounds like myth-teller had a important roll of unite people and build kinship.

Throughout the beginning of the text, the author chooses a path of "creation of the world" talking about a "godly" figure or person who provides for people in need. Questioning these thoughts persuade the reader to think deeply about "The Creation".

This probably means a house or a place to keep safe and when they said the world is going bad i think they ment a storm because they said it blew terably and every tree fell down. I see that they knew that bad things were going ot happen and they have plans on what to do so they won't get hurt by it.

All the videos on YouTube are generally of mechanics who are covering things up for a quick operation (like cleaning slugs) and not for longer cleans. This can be misleading for those who are doing longer term work where the rags need to withstand more liquid or are sitting for longer.

Author response:

The following is the authors’ response to the previous reviews.

As you can see from the assessment (which is unchanged from before) and the reviews included below, the reviewers felt that the revisions did not yet address all of the major concerns. There was agreement that the strength of evidence would be upgraded to "solid" by addressing, at minimum, the following: 

(1) Which of the results are significant for individual monkeys; and 

(2) How trials from different target contrasts were analyzed 

In this revision, we have addressed the two primary editorial recommendations:

(1) We apologize if this information was not clear in the previous version. We have updated Table 1 to highlight clearly the significant results for individual monkeys. Six of our key results – pupil diameter (Fig 2B), microsaccades (Fig 2D), decoding performance for narrow-spiking units (Fig 3A), decoding performance for broad-spiking units (Fig 3B), target-evoked firing rate for all units (Fig 3E) and target-evoked firing rate for broad-spiking units (Fig 3F) – are significant for individual animals and therefore gives us high confidence regarding our results. Please also note that we present all results for individual animals in the Supplementary figures accompanying each main figure.

(2) We have updated the manuscript and methods to explain how trials of each contrast were included in each analysis, and how contrast normalization was performed for the analysis in Figure 3. In addition, we discuss this point in the Discussion section, which we quote below:

“Non-target stimulus contrasts were slightly different between hits and misses (mean: 33.1% in hits, 34.0% in misses, permutation test, 𝑝 = 0.02), but the contrast of the target was higher in hits compared to misses (mean: 38.7% in hits, 27.7% in misses, permutation test, 𝑝 = 1.6   𝑒 − 31). To control for potential effects of stimulus contrast, firing rates were first normalized by contrast before performing the analyses reported in Figure 3. For all other results, we considered only non-target stimuli, which had very minor differences in contrast (<1%) across hits and misses. In fact, this minor difference was in the opposite direction of our results with mean contrast being slightly higher for misses. While we cannot completely rule out any other effects of stimulus contrast, the normalization in Figure 3 and minor differences for non-target stimuli should minimize them.”

Reviewer #1 (Public Review): 

Summary: 

In this study, Nandy and colleagues examine neural, physiological and behavioral correlates of perceptual variability in monkeys performing a visual change detection task. They used a laminar probe to record from area V4 while two macaque monkeys detected a small change in stimulus orientation that occurred at a random time in one of two locations, focusing their analysis on stimulus conditions where the animal was equally likely to detect (hit) or not-detect (miss) a briefly presented orientation change (target). They discovered two behavioral and physiological measures that are significantly different between hit and miss trials - pupil size tends to be slightly larger on hits vs. misses, and monkeys are more likely to miss the target on trials in which they made a microsaccade shortly before target onset. They also examined multiple measures of neural activity across the cortical layers and found some measures that are significantly different between hits and misses. 

Strengths: 

Overall the study is well executed and the analyses are appropriate (though several issues still need to be addressed as discussed in Specific Comments). 

Thank you.

Weaknesses: 

My main concern with this study is that, with the exception of the pre-target microsaccades, the correlates of perceptual variability (differences between hits and misses) appear to be weak, potentially unreliable and disconnected. The GLM analysis of predictive power of trial outcome based on the behavioral and neural measures is only discussed at the end of the paper. This analysis shows that some of the measures have no significant predictive power, while others cannot be examined using the GLM analysis because these measures cannot be estimated in single trials. Given these weak and disconnected effects, my overall sense is that the current results provide limited advance to our understanding of the neural basis of perceptual variability. 

Please see our response above to item #1 of the editorial recommendation. Six of our key results are individually significant in both animals giving us high confidence about the reliability and strength of our results. 

Regarding the reviewer’s comment about the GLM, we note (also stated in the manuscript) that among the measures that we could estimate reliably on a single trial basis, two of these – pre-target microsaccades and input-layer firing rates – were reliable signatures of stimulus perception at threshold. This analysis does not imply that the other measures – Fano Factor, PPC, inter-laminar population correlations, SSC (which are all standard tools in modern systems neuroscience, and which cannot be estimated on a single-trial basis) – are irrelevant. Our intent in including the GLM analyses was to complement the results reported from these across-trial measures (Figs 4-7) with the predictive power of single-trial measures.

While no study is entirely complete in itself, we have attempted to synthesize our results into a conceptual model as depicted in Fig 8.

Reviewer #2 (Public Review): 

Strengths: 

The experiments were well-designed and executed with meticulous control. The analyses of both behavioural and electrophysiological data align with the standards in the field. 

Thank you.

Weaknesses: 

Many of the findings appear to be subtle differences and incremental compared to previous literature, including the authors' own work. While incremental findings are not necessarily a problem, the manuscript lacks clear statements about the extent to which the dataset, analysis, and findings overlap with the authors' prior research. For example, one of the main findings, which suggests that V4 neurons exhibit larger visual responses in hit trials (as shown in Fig. 3), appears to have been previously reported in their 2017 paper. 

We respectfully disagree with the assessment that the findings reported here are incremental over the results reported in our prior study (Nandy et al,. 2017). In the previous study, we compared the laminar profile of neural modulation due to the deployment of attention i.e. the main comparison points were the attend-in and the attend-away conditions while controlling for visual stimulation. In this study, we go one step further and home in on the attend-in condition and investigate the differences in the laminar profile of neural activity (and two additional physiological measures: pupil and microsaccades) when the animal either correctly reports or fails to report a stimulus with equal probability. We thus control for both the visual stimulation and the cued attention state of the animal. While there are parallels to our previous results (as the reviewer correctly noted), the results reported here cannot be trivially predicted from our previous results. Please also note that we discuss our new results in the context of prior results, from both our group and others, in the manuscript (lines 310-332).

Furthermore, the manuscript does not explore potentially interesting aspects of the dataset. For instance, the authors could have investigated instances where monkeys made 'false' reports, such as executing saccades towards visual stimuli when no orientation change occurred, which allows for a broader analysis that considers the perceptual component of neural activity over pure sensory responses. Overall, lacking broad interest with the current form.

We appreciate the reviewer’s feedback on analyzing false alarm trials. Our focus for this study was to investigate the behavioral and neural correlates accompanying a correct or incorrect perception of a target stimulus presented at perceptual threshold. False alarm trials, by definition, do not include a target presentation. Moreover, false alarm rates rapidly decline with duration into a trial, with high rates during the first non-target presentation and rates close to zero by the time of the eighth presentation (see figure). Investigating false alarms will thus involve a completely different form of analysis than we have undertaken here. We therefore feel that while analyzing false alarm trials will be an interesting avenue to pursue in the future, it is outside the scope of the present study.

Author response image 1.

Hadn't realised Daniel Dennett died last April. I read his The Mind's I (1981), Consciousness Explained (1991) and Darwin's Dangerous Idea (1995) while at university, those last two as they appeared. Have Elbow Room (1984) on the reading stack currently.

FW as constructing narratology through/via FORM -- still, the formal is substantive

!

Gerty MacDowell

!

Caroline Levine

Finnland hatte sich beim Ziel der CO2-Neutralität 2035 darauf verlassen, dass große Mengen von CO2 von Wäldern, Böden und Feuchtgebieten absorbiert werden. Inzwischen ist das Land dort keine Kohlenstoffsenke mehr. Dazu trägt die globale Erhitzung selbst bei, durch die viele Bäume sterben, aber auch die Abholzung des Waldes. Finnland ist ein Beispiel für die Schwächung der ländlichen Kohlenstoffsenken, von der viele Länder betroffen sind. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/oct/15/finland-emissions-target-forests-peatlands-sinks-absorbing-carbon-aoe

refers to the way dominant groups in society maintain power not just through coercion or force but by securing the consent of the subordinate classes. This is achieved by shaping cultural norms, ideologies, and institutions in a way that makes the dominance of the ruling class seem natural, inevitable, and beneficial to all.

wishes to rewrite and dissemble rather than broaden and expand

2023 haben Böden und Landpflanzen fast kein CO2 absorbiert. Dieser Kollaps der Landsenken vor allem durch Dürren und Waldbrände wurde in diesem Ausmaß kaum vorausgesehen, und es ist nicht klar, ob auf ihn eine Regeneration folgt. Er stellt Klimamodelle ebenso in Frage wie die meisten nationalen Pläne zum Erreichen von CO2-Neutralität, weil sie auf natürlichen Senken an Land beruhen. Es gibt Anzeichen dafür, dass die steigenden Temperaturen inzwischen auch die CO2-Aufnahmefähigkeit der Meere schwächen. Überblicksartikel mit Links zu Studien https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/oct/14/nature-carbon-sink-collapse-global-heating-models-emissions-targets-evidence-aoe

yeah!

The nuts on the ribbon selector and the ribbon reverse on Royal Quiet De Luxes is a 7/32 inch nut.

Royal Quiet DeLuxe Typewriter Complete Total Body Removal by [[The HotRod Typewriter Co.]]

Gerren uses a Weaver gunsmith screwdriver set for most of his screwdriver needs. [5:00]

On the newer QDLs two of the screws for removing the rear plate are accessible from the top underneath the carriage instead of all on the rear.

The screws for the front body plate can be loosened and don't need to be fully removed to take the body plate off of the machine.

This may be way more than what a normal person has available.

What's the maximum time between 'sessions' to count as deliberate practice? Even sportspeople have rest days.

Welcome back and in this demo lesson you're going to get the experience of bootstrapping an EC2 instance using user data.

So this is the ability to run a script during the provisioning process for an EC2 instance and automatically add a certain configuration to that instance during the build process.

So this is an alternative to creating a custom AMI.

Earlier in the course you created an Amazon machine image with the WordPress installation and configuration baked in.

Now that's really quick and simple but it does limit your ability to make changes to that configuration.

So the configuration is baked into the AMI and so you're limited as to what you can change during launch time.

With boot strapping you have the ability to perform all the steps in the form of a script during the provisioning process and so it can be a lot more flexible.

Now to get started we need to create the Animals for Life VPC within our general AWS account.

So this is the management account of the organization.

So make sure that you're logged into the IAM admin user of this account and as always make sure you have the Northern Virginia region selected.

Now attached to this lesson is a one-click deployment link so go ahead and open that.

This is going to take you to the quick create stack page and everything should be pre-populated.

The stack name should be bootstrap everything else has appropriate default so just scroll down to the bottom, check the capabilities acknowledgement box and then go ahead and click on create stack.

Now this will create the Animals for Life VPC which contains the public subnets that we'll be launching our instance into and so we're going to need this to be in a create complete state before we move on.

So go ahead and pause the video and once your stack changes from create in progress to create complete then we good to continue.

Okay so now that that stack has moved into a create complete state we good to continue.

Now also attached to this lesson is another link which is the user data that we're going to use for this demo lesson so go ahead and open that link.

This is the user data that we're going to use to bootstrap the EC2 instance so what I want you to do is to download this file to your local machine and then open it in a code editor or alternatively just copy all the text on screen now and paste that into a code editor.

So I've gone ahead and opened that file in my text editor and if you look through all of the different commands contained within this user data .txt file then you should recognize some of them.

These are basically the commands that we ran earlier in the course when we manually installed word press and when we created the Amazon machine image.

So we're essentially installing the MariaDB database server, the Apache web server, Wget and Cowsay.

We're installing PHP and its associated libraries.

We're making sure that both the database and the web server are set to automatically start when the instance reboots and are explicitly started when this script is run.

We're setting the root password of the MariaDB database server.

We're downloading the latest copy of the WordPress installation archive.

We're extracting it and we're moving the files into the correct locations.

Then we're configuring WordPress by copying the sample configuration file into the final and proper file name so wp-config.php and then we're performing a search and replace on those placeholders and replacing them with our actual chosen values for the database name, the database user and the database password.

And then after that we're fixing up the permissions on the web root folder with the WordPress installation files inside so we're making sure that the ownership is correct and then we're fixing up the permissions with a slightly improved version of what we've used previously.

Then we're creating our DB.setup script in the same way that we did when we were manually installing WordPress.

We're logging into the database using the MySQL command line utility, authenticating as the root user with the root password and then running this script and this creates the WordPress database, the user sets the password and gives that user permissions on the database.

And then finally we're configuring the Cowsay utility so we're setting up the message of the day file we're outputting our animals for life custom greeting and then we're forcing a refresh of the login banner.

So these are all of the steps that you've previously done manually so I hope it's still fresh in your memory just how annoying that manual installation was.

Okay so at this point this user data is ready to go and I want to demonstrate to you how you can use this to bootstrap an EC2 instance.

So let's go ahead and move back to the AWS console.

Once we're at the AWS console this CloudFormation 1 click deployment has created the Animals for Life VPC.

So what we're going to do is to click on the services drop down and then move to the EC2 console and go ahead and click on launch instance followed by launch instance again.

So first things first the instance is going to be called a4l for animals for life - manual WordPress so go ahead and enter that in the box at the top then scroll down select Amazon Linux and then make sure Amazon Linux 2023 is selected in the drop down and then make sure that you've got 64-bit x86 selected.

I want you to pick whichever type is free tier eligible within your account and region in my case it's t2.micro but you should pick the one that's free tier eligible.

Under key pair go ahead and pick proceed without a key pair then scroll down to network settings and click on edit and there are a few items on this page that we need to explicitly configure.

The first is we need to select the Animals for Life VPC next to network so select a4l -vpc1 next to subnet I want you to go ahead and pick sn -web -a so that's the web or public subnet within availability zone a then make sure auto assign public IP is set to enable we'll be using an existing security group so check that box and then in the drop down so click the drop down and select the bootstrap -instance security group so bootstrap was the name of the cloud formation stack that we created using the one-click deployment we won't be making any changes to the storage configuration and next we need to scroll down to an option that we've not used before we're going to enter some user data so scroll all the way down and under advanced details expand this if it isn't already and you're looking for the user data box what we're going to do is paste in the user data that you just downloaded so in my case this is the user data.txt which I downloaded so I'm going to go ahead and select all of the information in this user data.txt making sure I get everything including the last line and I'm going to copy that into my clipboard now back at the AWS console we need to paste that in to the user data box now by default EC2 accepts user data as base64 encoded data so we need to provide it with base64 encoded data and we're not we're just giving it a normal text file so in this case the user interface can actually do this conversion for us so if what you're pasting in is not base64 encoded and what we're pasting in isn't then we don't need to do anything else if we're pasting in data which is already base64 encoded we need to check this box below the user data box we don't need to worry about that because we're not pasting in anything with base64 encoding so we can just paste in our user data directly into this box and this will be run during the instance launch process so this is where our automatic configuration comes from this is what will bootstrap the EC2 instance okay so that's everything we need to configure so go ahead and click on launch instance now at this point while this is launching I want you to keep in mind that in the previous demo examples in this course we manually launched an instance and then once the instance was in a running state we had to connect into it download WordPress install WordPress and then configure WordPress along with all of the other associated dependencies that WordPress requires so that was a fairly time-intensive process that was open to errors in the AMI example we followed that same process but at the end we created the Amazon machine image so keep that in mind and compare it to what your experience is in this demo lesson so now we've launched the instance and it's now in a running state and we've provided some user data to this instance so I want you to leave it a couple of minutes after it's showing in a running state just give it a brief while to perform that additional configuration after a few minutes go ahead and right click on that instance and select connect we're going to be using EC2 instance connect so make sure that's selected make sure the user is set to EC2 - user and then just click connect now what you should see if we've given this enough time is our custom animals for life login banner and that means that the bootstrapping process has completed think about this for a minute as part of the launch process EC2 has provisioned us an EC2 instance and it's also run a relatively complex installation and configuration script that we've supplied in the form of user data and that's downloaded and installed WordPress and configured our custom login banner if we go back to EC2 select instances and then if we copy the public IP address into our clipboard so copy the actual IP address do not click on this link because this will open it using HTTPS which we haven't configured if you take that IP address and open that in a new tab you'll see the installation dialogue for WordPress and that's because the bootstrapping process using the user data has done all the configuration process that previously we've had to do manually now if we go back to the instance I want to demonstrate architecturally and operationally exactly how this works what we can do is use the curl utility to review the instance metadata now because we're using Amazon Linux 2023 we need to do this slightly differently we need to use version 2 of the metadata service so first we need to run this command to get a token which we can use to authenticate to the metadata service so run this next we can run this command which gets us the metadata of the instance and this uses the 169254 169254 address or as I like to call it 169.254 repeating now if we use this with meta hyphen data on the end then we get the metadata service but as we know user data is a component of the metadata service so instead of using forward slash latest forward slash metadata we can replace metadata with user data and this will allow us to see the user data supplied to the instance and don't worry all of these commands will be attached to the lesson so you should recognize this this is the user data that we passed into the instance so this is performed a download a configuration and an installation of Apache the database server and WordPress as well as our custom login banner so that's how the user data gets into the EC2 instance and there's a service running on the EC2 instance which takes this data and automatically performs these configuration steps essentially this is run as a script on the operating system now something else we can do is to move into the forward slash VAR forward slash log folder and this is a folder which contains many of the system logs and if we do an LS space hyphen LA we'll see a collection of logs within this folder there are two logs in particular that are really useful for diagnosing bootstrapping related problems these logs are cloud hyphen init dot log and cloud hyphen init hyphen output dot log and both of these are used for slightly different reasons so what I want to do is to output one of these logs and show you the content so we're going to output using shudu first to get admin permissions and then cat and we're going to use the cloud hyphen init hyphen output dot log and I'm going to press enter and that's going to show you the contents of this file and you'll be able to see using this log file exactly what's been executed on this EC2 instance so you'll be able to see all of the actual commands and the output from those commands as they've been executed on this EC2 instance so you'll be able to see all of the WordPress related downloads and copies the replacements of the database usernames and passwords the permissions fix section the database creation user creation and then permissions on that database as well as the command that actually executes those and then right at the bottom is where we configure our custom login banner so this is how you can see exactly what's been run on this EC2 instance and if you ever encounter any issues with any of the demo lessons within this course or any of my courses then you can use this file to determine exactly what's happened on the EC2 instance as part of the bootstrapping process okay so this is the end of part one of this lesson it was getting a little bit on the long side and so I wanted to add a break it's an opportunity just to take a rest or grab a coffee part two will be continuing immediately from the end of part one so go ahead complete the video and when you're ready join me in part two.

I understand the point in an intuitive way, but I wonder how come companies can be run by managers, and it's only some that fail?

There's always the question, perhaps AirBnB without their founders would be twice as successful.

I believe in essence it comes down to copy/pasting models and frameworks without embracing a changing culture and landscape. Distributed teams across the globe is a relatively new phenomenon. The number of clients a company may have has not been seen earlier. Facebook has billions of users and probably millions of customers across the globe.

Amazon builds and sells hardware (Kindle), rents cloud space, and has a two-sided marketplace for random goods, in some cases managing inventory.

These are new types of companies that require new types of management. OKR's were useful decades ago, can still be used as a copy/paste model?

OK, a bit of intellectual honesty here.

Is this not similar to the football analogy? There's an extremely low chance of getting into the billion's range, we are just exposed to a large survivorship bias.

Imposing this believe benefits incubators and VC's the most, since they hedge the risks by working on multiple startups simultaneously. Entrepreneurs don't get this chance.

Some valuable resources on the Trivium (from Zaytuna College, Hamza Yusuf).

for - Adrian Bejan - constructal law - childhood - art and science - from - The End of Scarcity? From ‘Polycrisis’ to Planetary Phase Shift - Nafeez Ahmed - 2024, Oct 16

Summary - Good explainer video about constructal theory and flow

from - The End of Scarcity? From ‘Polycrisis’ to Planetary Phase Shift - Nafeez Ahmed - 2024, Oct 16 - https://hyp.is/Qt8IMI74Ee--f4O18QMPFQ/ageoftransformation.org/the-end-of-scarcity-from-polycrisis-to-planetary-phase-shift/

for - definition - constructal law - Adrian Bejan - to - The constructal law of design in evolution and nature

to - The constructal law of design in evolution and nature - https://hyp.is/ZRIXfo76Ee-5yZdY2quRaQ/pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2871904/ - youtube explainer video - constructal theory - flow - Adrian Bejan - https://hyp.is/R7V4Yo79Ee-52gO6UYAaYQ/www.youtube.com/watch?v=tgEBTPee9ZM

for - question - entropy definition of life - investigate further - entropy definition of life

question - I'm not fully appreciating his explanation. This requires further investigation - This physical explanation of life appears to be aimed at showing that the hardware and software aspects of life work together to dissipate physical energy - Is he saying that life's purpose is to accelerate the heat death of the universe?

for - definition- hardware - software - Paul Davies

definition - hardware - software - Paul Davies - In the context of life, - hardware - configuration of matter which harnesses energy from its environment - software - complex information sturctures by which configurations of matter and energy are organized and instructed to self-reproduce

for - book - The Demon in the Machine: How Hidden Webs of Information Are Finally Solving the Mystery of Life - Paul Davies

Customer engagement refers to the interactions and experiences a customer has with a brand, which fosters a relationship and emotional connection between the two. It goes beyond simply purchasing products; it involves how customers interact with the brand across various touchpoints, like social media, customer support, emails, or in-store visits. Engaged customers tend to be more loyal, advocate for the brand, and are more likely to make repeat purchases.

I feel I can relate to this because when this happened I was 8 years old, but to watch my family struggle with money and to couch hop so I was able to go to school was heart breaking. BUT my family is is a better place now and now own a house with land and has a beautiful family. it only took till 2012

Its very hard for individuals for example military or individuals who leave jail to leave and join the normal civilian life due to the fact they lived in a high structured environment

for - paper - The constructal law of design and evolution in nature - Adrian Bejan - Sylvie Lorente - 2010 - from - The End of Scarcity? From ‘Polycrisis’ to Planetary Phase Shift - Nafeez Ahmed - 2024, Oct 16

from - The End of Scarcity? From ‘Polycrisis’ to Planetary Phase Shift - Nafeez Ahmed - 2024, Oct 16 - https://hyp.is/Qt8IMI74Ee--f4O18QMPFQ/ageoftransformation.org/the-end-of-scarcity-from-polycrisis-to-planetary-phase-shift/

use like a method to prove or explain the relationship between inflation and unemployment

use like a method to prove or explain the relationship between inflation and unemployment

I believe this return statement should be within the if statement above it.

Concern for congressional oversight is important, but it isn't clear why the executive is responsible for protecting that oversight. Congress has the constitutional authority to amend NEPA as it pleases.

That Pendley does not specifically name Bears Ears may be especially telling. A few lines above, he notes Tribal objections to a monument in Colorado. The Bears Ears Inter-Tribal Coalition remained steadfast behind the Bears Ears designation by Obama, felt excluded by the Zinke process Pendley references, and were angered by the reduction.

https://www.bearsearscoalition.org/timeline/

Since the Antiquities Act passed in 1906, only three presidents have not used it to create national monuments (Nixon, Reagan, and GHW Bush). It has been used widely.

None of this is required. It isn't clear that any of this is even permitted, much less envisioned. The quote and statistic come from an op-ed by a former Trump official and longtime radical Sagebrush Rebel. The numbers and claims seem to be invented; I can find no record of these figures in the EO or other press coverage related to it.

While the Project 2025 authors call for approval and implementation of the most aggressive and expansive version of the controversial project, it is important to emphasize that the Biden administration has approved this massive expansion of fossil fuel development in Alaska--despite the efforts of a broad coalition of environmentalists, Indigenous peoples, and others to stop the project. Opponents of this project include many Alaska Natives who live in Nuiqsut, the town closest to the proposed drilling sites, and a place already encircled by massive oil and gas operations that pose environmental and health risks to the community. Coverage of this topic has been fairly extensive; a a few examples include: Adam Federman in Grist, https://grist.org/energy/permafrost-thaw-conocophillips-willow-project-alpine-leak/; Finis Dunaway in Truthout, https://truthout.org/articles/big-oil-wants-to-refreeze-alaska-permafrost-so-it-can-keep-drilling-there/; and Lisa Friedman and Clifford Krauss in the New York Times, https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/06/climate/willow-alaska-oil-biden.html

You wouldn't know it from reading these pages, but there are many in Alaska (including Indigenous communities, environmental allies, and others) who are calling for a Just Transition away from fossil fuels and for a state economy that is so exclusively reliant on unsustainable extraction. For one article about this, see Winona LaDuke in Truthout: https://truthout.org/articles/native-activists-are-forging-a-just-transition-to-renewable-energy/

There are 229 federally recognized tribes in Alaska. They share some interests but do not constitute a single community. It is a minor point, perhaps, but it suggests an othering that is a problem.

https://www.bia.gov/regional-office/alaska-region

This paragraph acknowledges the basic situation, but with exaggerated numbers. Wild horse and burro populations are actually greater than Pendley states because the population growth rate is closer to 20%. The amount of dollars spent on off-range corrals is less annually. Pendley also does not acknowledge what is working in the wild horses and burros program. See https://extension.colostate.edu/topic-areas/natural-resources/management-of-wild-horses-3-104/.