The Mandelbear's Musings

And what am I doing in this handbasket?

It's been almost exactly a month since my last State of the Bear post, but this feels like more of a "state of the nation" post. It does not look good.

Even though Biden won the election, the Repugs will do as much damage to the country -- and the environment -- as they can in the remaining two months before he takes office. If he takes office. And after that, it's only a matter of time before the Trumpists get back in control. Then what?

I should go to bed. Ticia has been trying to tell me it's bedtime for the last half hour. I've been sleeping very badly the last few weeks.

NaBloPoMo stats:
   8377 words in 18 posts this month (average 465/post)
    135 words in 1 post today
      1 day with no posts

It isn't often that I see the name of someone I've met, and respect, in the lede of a New York Times article, but here you go:

Tim Bray, an engineer who had been a vice president of Amazon’s cloud computing arm, said the firings were “evidence of a vein of toxicity running through the company culture.”

A prominent engineer and vice president of Amazon’s cloud computing arm said on Monday that he had quit “in dismay” over the recent firings of workers who had raised questions about workplace safety during the coronavirus pandemic.

But first go read his blog post - it's scathing. Here's a sample:

Management could have objected to the event, or demanded that outsiders be excluded, or that leadership be represented, or any number of other things; there was plenty of time. Instead, they just fired the activists.

Snap! · At that point I snapped. VPs shouldn’t go publicly rogue, so I escalated through the proper channels and by the book. I’m not at liberty to disclose those discussions, but I made many of the arguments appearing in this essay. I think I made them to the appropriate people.

That done, remaining an Amazon VP would have meant, in effect, signing off on actions I despised. So I resigned.

The victims weren’t abstract entities but real people; here are some of their names: Courtney Bowden, Gerald Bryson, Maren Costa, Emily Cunningham, Bashir Mohammed, and Chris Smalls.

I’m sure it’s a coincidence that every one of them is a person of color, a woman, or both. Right?

Here are a couple more quotes:

at the end of the day, the big problem isn’t the specifics of Covid-19 response. It’s that Amazon treats the humans in the warehouses as fungible units of pick-and-pack potential. Only that’s not just Amazon, it’s how 21st-century capitalism is done.

[...]

Firing whistleblowers isn’t just a side-effect of macroeconomic forces, nor is it intrinsic to the function of free markets. It’s evidence of a vein of toxicity running through the company culture. I choose neither to serve nor drink that poison.

The post links to other press coverage of Amazon's cavalier treatment of its warehouse workers during the pandemic.

Personal note: I met Tim at a Web conference twenty years or so ago, when I was working on an XML-based project at Ricoh -- Tim was one of the authors of the XML spec. Turns out he's also an environmental activist, and a signatory to an Open letter to Jeff Bezos and the Amazon Board of Directors calling for Amazon to adopt "an immediate company-wide plan addressing climate change". That's well worth a read, too.

The Future We Choose: Surviving the Climate Crisis by Christiana Figueres and Tom Rivett-Carnac just hit the bookstores this morning; I it up on Kindle this afternoon. Which means I only just finished Part I (I'm a slow reader, actually), which sets out two visions of the year 2050: "The World We Are Creating" -- that's Chapter 2, and "The World We Must Create" (Chapter 3). I've read a lot of dystopian SF that's not as grim as Chapter 2.

But this is not science fiction, unfortunately. The authors, Christiana Figueres and Tom Rivett-Carnac, are respectively the executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) from 2010-16, and her strategic advisor.

To quote from an article published yesterday under the headline "Former UN Climate Chief Calls For Civil Disobedience"

“Large numbers of people must vote on climate change as their number one priority,” they write. “As we are in the midst of the most dire emergency, we must urgently demand that those who seek high office offer solutions commensurate with the scale of the problem.”

But they note that electoral politics have failed to meet the challenge, largely because of systemic roadblocks including corporate lobbying and partisan opposition.

They endorse Extinction Rebellion and Greta Thunberg. They evoke legendary activists who effected change on the scale required by the climate crisis, including Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., and Nelson Mandela.

“Civil disobedience is not only a moral choice, it is also the most powerful way of shaping world politics,” they write, citing scientific resources on the impact of civil disobedience.

“Historically, systemic political shifts have required civil disobedience on a significant scale. Few have occurred without it.”

— Forbes: Jeff McMahon

It links to a follow-up article, "10 Things You Can Do About Climate Change, According To The Shepherds Of The Paris Agreement " which basically just summarizes the 10 chapters in part III.

( Quoted under the cut: )

Just go read it. Let me know what you think.