Often overlooked, when we learn nothing from the doing the learning curve can go the other way inducing scarcity.

What if instead of technological or business innovation being favored by utilities today, they favor political innovation. Like tax filing services; structurally opposed to progress.

25 years ago "You sounded older on email" might have fit that description. When I get that today... it just feels kind of mean.

I think the canonical example must be:
"I don't know half of you as well as I should like; and I like less than half of you half as well as you deserve."

Traditional normal wind, you mean?

Can't approve of this units conflation; 1.99 million acres, no?😆

I did a similar thing with the State Trust Forests in WA, converting 2.3M acres of working forestland into $200M for schools per year sounds like a lot until you look at the schools budget of $40B and value / acre of... any other use.

The 90% top tax rate at the start of that era was a big deal too. Executives/companies couldn't compete on salary so they plowed it into RnD.

With the IP and tax changes we now have incentive to milk any invention for as long as possible. Enshitification fits here too - get more from old things.

This is about the size of a golf course, we could have so many of these! But attempts to reclaim a golf courses get shouted down.

What needs to happen here to get a different outcome? A new district like this has more community services and park-like space than the golf course it would replace.

In forestry you can get one species that recovers from disruption faster than others. If you have a preference, say for Ponderosa Pine forests over Juniper woodlands, the faster Juniper would be getting in first and spoiling the future for the Pondo following. That's Colonization and Exclusion.

In a gradient descent you'd call it getting stuck in a local minima and immediately adjust your hyperparameters to continue the search for that global optimization.

That's all gibberish though and importantly doesn't spoil the terrain for the next actor.

I'm still going to post this and the next 😀

In a classical military context: foraging can turn into spoliation, where an army crosses over into plundering as they move. Typically only when chased or retreating from someone else's lands - so again not trailblazing.

Salting the earth as another already mentioned.

In running & cycling you have folks who try to set an unsustainable pace to deliberately exhaust others; there is front running and spoilage, but of contenders instead of terrain. In cross country or cyclocross you can get in before everyone degrades the trail, not reckless or deliberate damage.

Might be free to innovate!

"Poisoning the well" doesn't really carry the trailblazer connotation.

If in a legal context, "Fruit of the poisonous tree" fits - illegally obtained evidence becomes inadmissible to criminal proceedings.

Digging up fossil fuels and burning them *is* geoengineering and we industrialized it ~250 years ago. We looked at the ability to do work; not the damages.

This gives us three important insights: it is possible, full consequences were unknown, and once committed we find it difficult to stop.

Futurama kind of nailed this… 23 years ago in Crimes of the Hot.

When we only watch one variable a lot of things seem reasonable. There are many ignored consequences of these solutions on long-adapted ecosystems; temp is a big thing but it isn’t the only thing.

Once and for all, indeed.

"Let's put our heads together and make a rock-pile!"

There are cooling options too, like this windcatcher at the Zion National Park Visitor Center. They've also got Trombe wall in this building.

Caltech (Private, small) had rules about naming buildings only after graduates or faculty which led to wealthy donors fighting to get their names on campus, mostly as research funds eventually landing on support buildings and dorms.

That's been relaxed as gifts have gotten... larger.

UW has a number of buildings funded by Gates, one named for his father, one for Bill and Melinda (+ another for MSFT cofounder Paul Allen). I was an undergrad during the blow-up over the Law building; the State put in money to design it ($1M), sold constr. bonds ($44M) and private donations ($34M).

The conversation about finance leads me to think large projects (multifamily and utility scale) but I think your focus was homeowner scale - it matters for both that finance is broken.

By broken, I mean the focus on short term yield discounts the future, the community, and the environment.