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I was lucky enough to be able to finish a trip to South America with some friends just before the COVID-19 lockdowns began around the world. This is an album of photos I took on my Kodak Euro-35 throughout the trip, passing through Montevideo, Buenos Aires, Santiago, and the Atacama desert in Chile (where most of these photos were taken).

This was the first time I’d used this camera with color film and for landscape photography, and needless to say the result wasn’t phenomenal. This particular camera is a point-and-shoot, and seems to be best at capturing subjects reasonably nearby and in brighter environments.

Either way, I’ve decided to post these because I like how the some photos look as if they’re old NASA images from another planet. Enjoy!

In the most predictible of fashions after a potentially disastrous court order for their business, the CEO of Uber has written an Op-Ed in the New York Times claiming to have a fix for the exploitation of workers by companies who run “gig economies” (ie, Uber). After reading through it, I wanted to jot down a few notes on how obviously flawed this proposal is, even from the eyes of someone who knows very little about labor laws.

Things are crazy right now, especially here in the United States. I’ve been hanging in by a thread lately, but one thing that’s been keeping me going is the thought that the ongoing public health, economic, and political crisis all have a silver lining: there is the potential to make big changes right now.

Take a look at these timelapses on Google Earth. If this doesn’t inspire you to do something towards trying to conserve the environment, I don’t know what will.

Some ideas:

• Donate to a local conservation/environmental activist group.
• If you have a car, try substituting one car trip to use public transit, a bike, or some kind of micromobility vehicle (ie an electric scooter).
• Write to your local representative about enacting some sort of pro-environment policies. Anything from increasing funding of public transit, blocking a pipeline (esp those of us in North Brooklyn) to planting trees around your town.
• If you’re really wanting to dive in: consider dedicating your career to the cause (we’re hiring at Amperon), or moving to a place that doesn’t rely on cars as the primary form of transit.

Sorry if this comes off as preachy, but for some reason these timelapses got to me this morning.

It’s no secret that we need to find ways to move American suburbs away from automobile dependence. The idea of peppering sparse neighborhoods with these small shops sounds wonderful, from both environmental and social perspectives.

Environmental: Less dependence on cars! The more walkable neighborhoods are, the less car trips are required to perform common tasks. How many suburban neighborhoods have you been to that have any sort of shop or restaurant within reasonable walking distance? For many people, any sort of trip is impossible without their car.

Social: Cheaper rents means it’s easier for mom ‘n pop shops to sprout up, experiment with new ideas, and create actual character in a neighborhood. An easy way city people dunk on American suburbs is how cookie-cutter they are; generally being filled with nothing but national chains. Cute shops, restaurants, and cafes nestled away amongst previously-sparse neighborhoods are the antidote to suburban monotony.

These kinds of businesses can be anchors of neighborhoods, providing a place for people to meet their neighbors, bump into friends, and more generally interact with other humans (which is a good thing!). These are interactions that are otherwise pretty limited if everybody is going through the drive-thru window on their way to/from work.

In any case, if we want to start getting serious about protecting the environment (and rebuilding our sense of community), we need to start implementing ideas like these ASAP in order to retrofit our suburbs into something more sustainable.

I’ve been progressively trying to detach myself from social media and am finally calling it quits on the last network I checked with any sort of regularity: Twitter. I just don’t think anything good comes from scrolling through an endless feed of bad news, echo chambers, and bottom-of-the-barrel hot takes. Or worse, doomscrolling– which is a phenomenal term. It just feels like you’re binging on the brain-equivilent of doritos. I’ll still keep my account around to syndicate content, but this is done automatically at this point so I don’t actually need to log in (and subsequently be tempted to start scrolling).

Instead I’ve been subscribing to interesting content via RSS (using Feedly). I find this to be much less stressful, as there’s a finality to the feed of content that doesn’t exist on social media platforms. Once you’ve browsed through all of the new items in your feeds, you’re done. There’s nothing more to look at.

If you’re a hacker news user, I’d also recommend replacing the front page with one of the feeds at hnrss. I’ve subscribed to one that surfaces any post with >200 points, filtering out a lot of the noise that would previously consume my time. 1Blocker on iOS or Impulse Blocker on Firefox are also a huge help in ensuring you’re not subconsciencely navigating to social media websites to take a hit of content dopamine.

If you have any other tips/strategies for taming the internet, drop me a line.