I'll be moving my Mastodon account sometime later this week, and honestly, I am going to miss my wise-ass comments from yore.

President Trump announces that to combat climate change he is facilitating crude oil prices going to $500/barrel.

Usually there’s only one Occam’s Razor answer to a given question but we have so, so many:

• For the oil, duh
• Distraction from the Epstein files
• Corollary: Blackmail by Netanyahu about same
• Pretext to cancel the midterm elections
• Orders from oil executives
• Orders from apocalyptic Christian nationalist zillionaires
• Bizarre dementia-enhanced grudge from 1980

There is no better way to insulate yourself from global oil & gas price volatility than to invest in technologies that generate useful heat & power without any oil & gas input. The Trump WH attack on renewables is a direct attack on your economic security.

Once you realize it’s not “age verification”, but actually “identity verification”, then it’s easy to understand that the real goal is “papers, please” for the entire internet.

So, the Epstein files are "start a war with Iran" bad

Brilliant.

https://vimeo.com/1168468796

Canada vs. USA, a study in duality: in one country, an entire nation sits down to watch the most important sporting event of the year; in the other, a small group of die-hards and a bunch of drunks still awake tuck in for a nice alternative to pre-season baseball.

RE: https://flipboard.com/@cbcnews/world-mu65cd2uz/-/a-d-yL2DGfQpSiYmIPlv4dEg%3Aa%3A107108217-%2F0

I have to wonder if it will function so much like US health care that the visit will also include accounting squids toting point-of-sale terminals.

Full article here: open.substack.com/pub/agentsof... And if you want to get notified so you can read my stuff off Substack, I have a Ghost newsletter signup on my website (reneediresta.com) that sends articles when they come out, every 2 weeks or so.

From Epstein to Everything

And yes, the orbital AI datacenter thing is real, and 2 companies that I know of have already filed with the FCC for over a million satellites for this completely untested, fucking stupid idea. Fuck you, SpaceX, for one million satellites and using pseudo-religious language in your filing.

Instructions on how you can submit a comment to the FCC telling them that you also think this is stupid are here! https://darksky.org/news/two-satellite-proposals-threaten-the-night-sky-the-window-to-act-is-now/

Too wound up to go to bed, so I just sent lots of emails to people hoping that they'll spread the word and get lots more people to write comments to the FCC telling them that orbital data centres and sunlight-as-a-service are incredibly stupid, dangerous ideas and should never be launched.

Instructions how to submit here: https://darksky.org/news/two-satellite-proposals-threaten-the-night-sky-the-window-to-act-is-now/

I don't think it'll actually make a big difference. But I do think it's incredibly important that the official record shows how many opposed this.

Hockey is for everyone, but I'll be honest, I'm not sure that includes this British commentator using footie commentary terms like "delirium" and "clinical finish."

#USpol

If you're a technologist in the US, I think it's worth sitting with the reality that the government's current abuses against the population are playing out almost every single *"if we allow databases of X, bad thing Y will be possible"* warning.

Performative privacy protections were never enough; we have to make them structural (in law), toothsome (right-of-action for individuals), and national. Nothing else will do.

Reflect Orbital wants to destroy the night sky to deliver "sunlight as a service". SpaceX wants to destroy Low Earth Orbit to launch one million "AI datacentres"

The only way to formally protest these two ideas is to file a comment with the US FCC, which is horribly complicated, but the American Astronomical Society has detailed instructions posted here: https://aas.org/posts/advocacy/2026/02/how-submit-comments-satellite-applications-fcc

Comments due March 6 for SpaceX and March 9 for Reflect Orbital. Write! Write! Write!

Just so EVERYONE understands this:

Moderna has a flu shot. It works. It works well. It is safe. It is safe in people with compromised immune systems (like cancer patients!).

Trump’s nutjob at FDA, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., appears to have ordered FDA to refuse to even accept the application to review the shot for approval.

RFK wants to kill your grandma. Fuck RFK.

Inspired by a discussion elsewhere:

I've been on the Internet since 1987, started a career building the commercial Internet in 1995, and have spent the last 25 years writing books about how to build foundational Internet infrastructure. I've consulted for and worked with any number of dot-coms, and the one lesson I've gotten over and over again?

The Internet's business model is betrayal.

We have no smart lights. No voice assistants. No Alexa or Siri. No video doorbell. Our thermostat and appliances constantly complain about their lack of Internet. None of this stuff is safe.

The Internet tech I do use? A desktop PC. Email on my phone is for travel only: airplane tickets, hotel reservations, hockey and concert tix. Location on my phone? Nope, we use a dedicated non-networked GPS in the car. The microphones are off.

How can a light bulb betray me? I don't know. I do know that the vendors have put a LOT of thought into it, though, and I can't out-think all of them.

Dystopia notwithstanding, Ring's commercial about using their surveillance to find lost pets makes no sense.

They say 10M pets are lost per year & their service finds "more than 1 dog per day." So let's even say generously 500 dogs per year.

Out of 10M lost pets, they want Americans to commit privacy suicide for a .005% success rate???

"We fail 99.995% of the time! Let us violate your privacy!" is a helluva way to burn $10M in ads and destroy your brand.

I'm uninstalling my RING today.