Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • Those Community Trigger outcomes

    I've just posted about the UK's Anti-Social Behaviour powers under the 2014 Antisocial Behaviour, Crime and Policing Act 2014. One of the new facilities introduced by that act was the Community Trigger.

    Let's see how well that has worked on a development with which I'm familiar. It's been used six times, presumably soon to be seven.

  • Data gaps on Anti-Social Behaviour

    In the last few days I've come across the story of Dean Kennedy, whose struggle with persistent nuisance neighbours ended up with bailiffs descending on the head office of the L&Q housing association, which is the property disputes equivalent of wheel-clamped Rolls Royce. Dean has written up his thoughts, and done an interview with the Social Housing Action Campaign: [...]

  • Re: Loners and Vacation

    I understand where you're coming from. In the past I was a very social person, an extrovert. I wasn't the most popular guy in school but I was invited to everything, everyone knew who I was and could easily fit in any social group. College was similar and then life changed.

    I started a job that had me work long hours and travel a lot. My friends all moved away and while my girlfriend (later my wife) had social connections through her work, I never really fit in anywhere. Coworkers were either older, didn't share interests, were all homebodies, etc. So I just kind of stopped being social.

    But when I traveled for work I went out and met people. Most trips I was alone so if there was a bar at the hotel I'd sit down next to someone and strike up a conversation. Sometimes they were short and uninteresting and sometimes we would end up talking all night. I ended up meeting some pretty interesting people over the years and it made boring, lonely trips a little bit better.

• Politics and World Events

  • Why our broken food system remains a climate disaster: ‘broiling the planet to stuff our faces’

    Ridding ourselves of fossil fuels has been a tortuously ponderous process and, in the current political era, one that can seem to be in full retreat. But we do have the tools to run our cities, vehicles and industries on clean energy and even through the murk of vested interest, the contours of a post-fossil world are becoming clearer.

    Our system of producing food, though, is in a relative stone age when it comes to the climate crisis. We continue to raze vast tracts of carbon-rich forests for crop and grazing land thereby creating, by some estimates, as much as a third of all global planet-heating emissions.