Open thread: New political parties as a climate change response

In the UK, Ed Gemmell launched a “Climate Party” to “take on 110 Conservatives in the next election”.

In the US, Andrew Yang is trying a “Forward Party”.

Is there any sense in this approach, or will such issue-specific parties inevitably be marginalized like other third parties in a first past the post electoral system?

Poor DreamHost performance

I’m sorry this site is being so unreliable at the moment.

I have contacted DreamHost about the terrible load times and unstable performance, despite how almost nobody reads this site. They sent complex instructions for back-end changes to how it is run, but I don’t have time to do that now.

My hosting worked pretty well until recently, but now doing anything on the back end dashboard side is painfully slow and often fails, as does people trying to post comments.

Meanwhile, it might help some people to know that a standard DreamHost hosting plan can’t handle a couple of visitors per hour without back end caching and optimization.

Again through familiar pages

This weekend I have been working through a complete draft of my dissertation, with two tasks in mind. Now that the big pieces are in place, I can work on making sure the whole thing is as well-written as possible and flows smoothly. Also, I am incorporating comments from my third committee member on chapters 2-4, most of which are either requests for more substantiation, objections to excessive substantiation, and requests for clearer storytelling.

The aim is to have this next draft finished tomorrow, essentially completing the project of having a draft ready for the internal external examiner by the end of July.

Authorship under supervision

I haven’t done much of anything lately, aside from the bare necessities of life, other than work toward a version of my dissertation that will be ready for the external examiners.

It has been very hard for me not to have final control over the document, which I have had in every other context since leaving the government.

I suppose the PhD dissertation is the pinacle of scrutiny for a piece of writing — totally different from all the research papers I have written during the program, which just get a grade and some comments from one person. It’s weird for me to have authorship and responsibility for the content of a document, but not the final say about what I can actually put in it and how. I know this is all to make it conform to the norms and standards of a particular and esoteric style of writing, but it’s still a command structure that I keep grating against.

No doubt, the way I keep bumping up against this approach partly explains the delays and frustration on all sides.