mastodon 4.4.25esoteric thinker, egg chair philosopher, permaculture advocate, pattern literate human being. The clock is ticking for all life on this planet. we need change. landscape designer.
Fair Warning: Very little of my descriptive content will have CWs. I will put sensitive media blocks on any photos or vids though.
Went scouting willow stands for an upcoming ceremony.
Also decided to start getting some of the standard Los Padres native plants moved up to our part of the mountain and established. For some reason we have no Matilija Poppy, Monkey Flower, or Buckwheat growing on our property, but it's abundant just a few miles down the road.
Hopefully these will transplant ok.
Back in the city at my friend’s shop…
Mysterious note on their white board:
John Claude Spam Van
Getting the landscape ordered in front of the trailer. The flags mark a level contour where I want a swale to slow and sink water coming down from the hillside. Below the future swale everything is leveled just a few inches below the deck level. After sheet mulching with cardboard and mulch the grade will be level with the deck. Rocks from along the 33 will create the retaining wall for the swale.
Oh Jeez.
Modest Mouse is gonna be playing in Ojai in early August but the cheapest tickets are $180. Damn concerts are expensive now.
Had a couple community members up doing a bunch of projects this week. This was my project. I usually prefer to start retaining wall/terrace projects from the bottom, but the wood retaining wall was totally giving way, so had to get it replaced.
@ai6yr@m.ai6yr.org @douglasvb@m.ai6yr.org
There are 3 separate things to consider along with their lags, interactions with each other, and various feedback loops:
As far as the atmosphere goes, the bulk of the human CO2 buildup is going to last for 300-1000yrs after we stop emitting without hacking the carbon cycle for active drawdown. That's one lag.
As long as the excess greenhouse gasses remain, heat is being actively trapped/added to the planetary system. Much of that heat goes into the oceans. (as does much of the CO2) but with deleterious impact of it's own: acidification, ecosystem impacts, weather & climate impacts, etc. So stopping emissions doesn't stop global warming. That's another lag.
And since the heat continues to build up - especially in the oceans (which will take a long time to be undone), climate impacts will continue to worsen. Another lag.
Then there's the interactions between all of those. for example, far too many people are unaware of the hard temperature limits of photosynthesis - the principle means by which plants draw down CO2 from the atmosphere. The laws of physics and chemistry mean that photosynthesis stops working once the ambient cell temperature reaches 100-110F in many plants (including most food crops).
And then there are the feedback loops. e.g. excessive heat evaporates water resulting in water vapor in the atmosphere. Water vapor is itself a very potent greenhouse gas resulting in more heat buildup in the terrestial system. Or rising global temperatures mean less snow and ice, so the albedo changes resulting in more heat absorbed by the planet, which is why arctic regions are warming 2.5x faster than equatorial regions.
All of these then impact the climate and weather in ever increasing and unpredictable ways like the ocean currents and jet stream slowing causing ever more drastic impacts.
While all this sounds dire, I do have hope and will now talk about things we can be doing that will have significant impacts on atmospheric CO2 levels which need to be reduced before anything can get better...
Well, that’s new at Annandale Nursery…
YUM!!!
The Food and Drug Administration has issued a recall for Simply Nature Spinach Bites, a frozen food product sold at Aldi locations on the east coast. The recall was first initiated on Jan. 16 but was updated this week to a higher Class II recall over concerns the product “has the possibility of contamination with rodent hair,” according to the FDA’s recall notice.
While it's reasonable to assume Joe Kent is anti-semitic, there is none on display in his resignation letter. Any foreign nation that has undue influence over our politics and wars should be called out like he did. The ethnic and religious bent of that nation doesn't matter. Being concerned about the undue influence of Israel doesn't make one anti-semitic anymore than holding the same concerns regarding Saudi Arabia's undue influence over this regime makes one anti-muslim.
Back on Pine Mountain
Tesla says FSD was off before Cybertruck crash — but the video tells a different story https://electrek.co/2026/03/18/tesla-cybertruck-fsd-crash-video-musk-logs-overconfidence/
After the video went viral, Musk posted “Logs show driver disengaged Autopilot 4 seconds before crashing.” Tesla propagandists ran with this, framing the incident as proof that the media unfairly blames FSD for crashes that happen under manual driving. But this framing misses the point entirely.
Saint Amour’s attorney acknowledged that his client disengaged the system before impact. The reason she disengaged it is the critical detail: the system was already failing... she tried to take control, but it was too late to correct the vehicle’s trajectory.
The Cybertruck is approaching the overpass curve at full highway speed with no sign of slowing down or turning. The system appears to have completely missed the curve. By the time the driver realized FSD was not going to navigate the turn correctly at that speed and grabbed the wheel, the vehicle was already committed to a straight-line path into the barrier. 4 seconds is not enough time to correct a multi-ton truck traveling at highway speed toward a concrete wall.
This incident is a textbook example of what we’ve been documenting at Electrek for years, the fundamental flaw in Tesla’s approach to “supervised” autonomy. Just yesterday, we covered how former Uber self-driving chief Raffi Krikorian crashed his Tesla on FSD and wrote a damning essay in The Atlantic about the “vigilance decrement” problem. The research is clear: drivers need 5 to 8 seconds to mentally reengage after an automated system fails. Emergencies unfold faster than that.
Periodic reminder that Pakistan and Afghanistan are also at war.
