Month: December 2020

As ubiquitous as the web is, it is not currently as democratic as I suspect its early creators anticipated it would be. In particular, creating an extremely basic text based website is complicated enough that the rising generation Z tends to either rely on a social media platform, or they resort to creating their content as images. Text as images is terribly inaccessible for the blind. It can’t be easily searched or copied and pasted. The beauty of digital formats has given way to analog style degradation by way of lossy image compression.

There is a way to make a basic website quickly and easily for free with no skills necessary. I have dog-fooded it and documented it here.

GitHub is owned by Microsoft, so you’re still dependent on a tech giant. You do have to sign away your soul a little to create the GitHub account. But they don’t add any crap to around your content like cookies or pop-ups to use the mobile app. They don’t require readers of your content to create an account. I think this is a pretty good trade-off for most people. I’m sure there are plenty of other ways to get a similar basic site up, but I think the stability, reliability and dependability of GitHub, and the robust hosting you’ll get makes this a pretty sweet solution overall.

I think the best argument against climate change denial is the free market. Anybody can spew nonsense arguments on social media, or even on the floor of congressional chambers. But when real money is on the line, do companies deny climate science? I propose the creation of a climate change denial fund. A mutual fund/ETF that invests in companies and perhaps some commodities that would benefit from climate change being a hoax. Then when confronted with a denier, we can ask them to put their money where their mouth is and invest in this fund.

You might retort that there are already pro-climate funds. This is true, and theoretically you could say that shorting those would be equivalent. I think a purpose built denial fund would be superior though for teasing out true positions from green-washing.

The best argument against this is that asking a politician to invest in such a fund creates perverse incentives. But I think it would still be a good argument to use against non-politician deniers. Also just having the price of the fund to point to is well worth creating it.