Listening to the sheep and beef chair of Federated Farmers talking to Susie on RNZ just now... He talks about how NZ stopped subsidies for agriculture/farming in the 80s... but of course he's mistaken - the lack of responsibility for the waste generated (including greenhouse gas emissions) - especially dairy - is an effective subsidy to NZ farmers by the rest of society and future generations who have to bear the cost of spoiled land & water, loss of biodiversity, and rising temps/se…

I'm not big on the whole Christian "natural/artificial" binary, or the settler-colonialist concept of "wilderness" which erases indigenous stewardship in a bid to claim mid territory (see, e.g., tribes forced out of what are now national parks in the US). But I do enjoy getting out of urban/suburban environments and into places where the human impact on the land is minimal and/or synergistic with non-human flourishing.
I was thinking about why I enjoy this so much today while out on a stroller hike with my younger child, and came to the conclusion that it may be less about being in a "natural" space and more about being in a space whose flourishing is not tied to the capitalist necropolitical "growth" spiral.
Like, there's the baseline intrinsic beauty of flowers, trees, flowing water, etc. Then there's the pleasure of considering how these things fit together into an ecosystem and mutually support each other (and also compete/predate, etc.). But on top of all that, there's the sense that these things are part of a self-sustaining pattern that's capable of continuing without outside inputs and without creating external waste over vast, geologic timescales. The things I see when I look around in a city aren't like that. 100 or 1000 or 10000 years from now they'll be ruins, not necessarily because of human extinction or anything like that, but because the resource flows that create them are inseparable from a fundamentally unsustainable economy built around a paradoxical assumption of infinite exponential growth.
There *are* of course some human-built or -stewarded things in the world that are sustainably maintained, and ruins can have their own kind of beauty. But to me part of the joy of being on a hiking trail is to look around and see beautiful systems that will persist regardless of (most) human political outcomes that I spend a lot of energy worrying about.
Even in the extreme cases of climate change these things will eventually come back, albeit in an altered form. I don't want to ignore the incredibly destructive impact of humans on the environment, of course, but still, it's comforting to me to think about how the problems and brokenness of currently-dominant human cultures might change and scar but will not actually destroy the many systems on this planet that just don't depend on humans for their propagation.

📝 Local news, minus the noise

September 22, 2026
I wanted local news for Wassenaar, but without press releases pretending to be journalism, political parties' own opinions dressed up as reporting, and definitely without gambling ads. So I built my own aggregator.The idea is simple enough: pull RSS from every local source I can find, dump it in a database, filter out the garbage, read what's left. In practice the filtering turned into the whole project.Right now I'm pulling from eight feeds. The municipality's own news, Omroep West, Centraal , Wassenaarders.nl, the Police1, Wassenaar Times, a 112-incident feed, and Vrienden van Wassenaar2. There's also a Google News search bolted on for regio15.nl (for pictures of accidents), since that site doesn't bother with RSS. That one runs backwards from the others: instead of a blacklist of things to exclude, it needs a whitelist of every street name in Wassenaar.Local news has a lot of overlap, and that turned out to be its own little problem. A fire, a crash, a stabbing — the same incident shows up on Omroep West, Centraal , Wassenaarders.nl and the municipality's site within a few hours, each with its own angle and its own stock photo. Reading all four versions back to back is a waste of my time. So every article gets a story ID, and anything covering the same event shares one. The August fire near Wassenaarse Slag is a good example: the municipality's evacuation notice, Omroep West's first report, Centraal 's follow-up and Wassenaarders.nl's colour piece all fold into a single thread. I read it once instead of four times with diminishing returns each pass.
The municipality's own feed, for what it's worth, is fine — road closures, permit notices, the odd royal decoration. Boring in exactly the way a municipal feed should be. The actual problem is political parties. Wassenaarders.nl in particular runs a fair amount of content that reads like it came straight out of the VVD's press office: opinion with the "opinion" part quietly removed, no facts, never a critical word. Similar stuff turns up on other sites too, from groups clearly attached to a party. None of it belongs in a news feed, because it isn't news, it's a party talking about itself.And then, separately, there's the gambling ads. At some point the person running Wassenaarders.nl started slipping in LLM-written ads for online casinos. Tacky doesn't cover it, that's close to unethical, and it has no business anywhere near something calling itself local news.Both problems land on the same site, which is why its exclude list dwarfs everyone else's combined, and keeps growing. The real reason it's such a pain is that the guy doesn't use metadata at all — no categories, no tags, nothing structured to filter on. Every other feed gives me some kind of handle beyond raw text. This one just gives me a title and a blob, so I'm stuck excluding it phrase by phrase as new junk appears. Death by a thousand keywords.One nice side effect of all this: both the 112-meldingen.nl feed and the police feed carry GPS coordinates and a priority code for every incident. Too good a dataset to ignore, so I'm using it to plot a risk map of incidents around Wassenaar, somewhere you can actually see where things cluster, rather than scroll a list of accident reports. Give it a few more months and I can map the most dangerous places in Wassenaar.Aggregating local news sounded like a small job. It wasn't, because most local sites simply aren't built to be aggregated: no proper feeds, no metadata, party messaging laundered as journalism, and in one case, a whole side business in AI-written gambling ads. The technical bit was the easy part. The filtering never really finishes.
Which took an incredible effort to find, only to discover het Police only posted two items in the last 3 years. ∩A weird local organisation that's quite critical of the government. ∩
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