For an indication of what we face the next 4 years, watch the 2003 movie
Imagining Argentina.
[#]uspol
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20 January 2025
Body Of A Suspected Poacher Found In Kruger National Park
This morning Kruger National Park (KNP) Management received reports about the body of a suspected poacher that was left along the road in the Pretoriuskop section of the Park.
According to initial unconfirmed reports, three individuals entered the Park illegally during the night with the intention to commit crime. It is at these times that they were attacked by a hippo and consequently one suspect sustained fatal injuries. The other two are suspected to have carried the body of their accomplice to where it was discovered this morning.
The remains was spotted by a tourist who covered the body and reported the matter to the Section Ranger. This resulted in an immediate response of all relevant law enforcement authorities with the pathologists securing the scene. The South African Police Service is currently investigating the matter.
Management cautions anyone who took pictures of the body not to share same as it might jeopardise further investigations. Management also reiterate the warning to anyone entering the Park illegally to desist from this dangerous practice considering the dangers it poses from freely roaming wild animals as well as arrest.
https://www.sanparks.org/news/body-of-a-suspected-poacher-found-in-kruger-national-park
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PSA
For those who may be interested.
The battle lines have been drawn.
Lead, follow or help any way you can.
Don't obey in advance.
Find your ppl and organize.
[#]NoNazis
[#]FuckTrump
[#]FuckMaga
[#]FuckNazis
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Anyone else remember during trump's first term all of the government Alt accounts that popped up?
AltEPA, AltBLM, AltDOJ to name a few.
Most every govt department had one; ppl working in their departments who were aghast/disgusted with what trump1 was doing to their departments. Bringing us the truth of what trump1 was doing and how it effected them, their work and in the end, all of us.
There will be no Alt accounts this time around.
What with the firings and purging at every level of employment in every department, no one with a will to start an Alt account will be around.
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Explaining the TT ban to ppl on other social media sites ( references to IG, but applies everywhere. )
https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZP8FqWaKv/
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[#]TikTokBan
[#]TikTokRefugees
Tik Tok is back on. 🎉
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[#]TikTokBan
If Mastodon really wants to grow their numbers, they lost out on a huge opportunity with TT shutting down in the US.
All the talk I saw was ppl moving to bluesky, with only one mention of Mastodon among the thousands of comments I've read over the past weeks.
TT also has large and strong poc communities; autistic and neurodivergent communities; environmental activism; animal rights and queer communities.
Mastodon's struggle to grow the black community is well known and discussed often.
TT has shown way more support/accounts relating to/supporting Palestine and Ukraine, along with other under siege/struggling ppl across the globe than anything I've ever seen here.
What I have seen on Mastodon unfortunately is a lot of hostility to TT, gatekeeping by ppl who present as straight and white; gatekeeping that attempts to censor/deny any person or topic they find objectionable or contrary to their own way of thinking - facts be damned.
Ppl cheering and smirking about TT being shut down isn't a good look. It's supporting censorship, misinformation, exclusion and the efforts of ppl like musk, zuck, and bezos - ppl who are usually and rightfully scorned on this site.
But joining TTers in their condemnation of these (and all the 1%ers) was a bridge too far, I guess.
To those ppl - congrats, you've joined with the 1%ers to condemn and censor ppl who would be your allies.
If Mastodon wants to grow, they need to be more open and accepting, imo.
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musk and other dimwitted rich ppl who use billions of our tax dollars to fund their hobbies of playing with giant toys* want to use Hawaii as a dumping ground for their debris, threatening critical habitats that supports a diversity of wildlife.
If you have influence in this fight, helping to oppose it would not only distract you from the rest of the shit going on around us on the daily; you would also meet great ppl and it would be worth it.
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Criminal convictions sealed for estimated 500,000 criminal cases
Jay Kolls KSTP
Updated: January 16, 2025 - 9:47 PM
The Minnesota Clean Slate Act took effect Jan. 1 after state lawmakers approved it in 2023.
Anyone convicted of a misdemeanor, gross misdemeanor or non-violent felony will have their criminal record sealed from the public.
State Rep. Jamie Long (DFL-Minneapolis) co-authored the bill, which is now law. He told 5 EYEWITNESS NEWS it gives people a fair shake after serving their time and remaining crime-free for anywhere between two to five years depending on the offense.
“Most of these are for minor offenses that they might have committed when they were younger. But, those often stick with them for a long time and can provide barriers to getting housing, or employment and education,” said Long.
. . .
https://kstp.com/kstp-news/top-news/criminal-convictions-sealed-for-estimated-500000-criminal-cases/
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Without humans, what would happen to Earth?
'After every extinction event the place is devastated, but life is so resilient.'
By Lauren Leffer
Posted on Nov 4, 2024
. . .
Regardless of the circumstances, imagine that people have gone extinct. Suddenly the geologically brief moment of human dominance on Earth is over. So, what happens next?
We only have speculation. There’s no single correct answer, nor certainty. Yet people have considered versions of this apocalyptic thought experiment for centuries, if not millenia, says Carlton Basmajian, an associate professor of community planning at Iowa State University who studies cities. Ideas of human extinction and societal dissolution are rampant in religious texts and myths of ancient cultures.
In recent decades our environmental footprint has become more intense and well-understood and so, perhaps, has awareness of our own fragility. Through the threat of the atomic age, pandemics, and climate change, we have a clearer sense than ever before about how we could be eliminated or eliminate ourselves. “Perhaps people are even more cognizant now of the limits to human survival,” says Basmajian.
And, perhaps by considering Earth after us, we can get a realistic understanding of all the ways we’ve shaped and changed the planet, says Alan Weisman, an environmental journalist and author of multiple books including the 2007’s The World Without Us. For him, writing on the idea was a way to reach those who might otherwise be turned off by environmental literature, and get a broader swath of readers to consider the reality of our species-level legacy. “If we all just suddenly vanished, everything left would be the sum total of our environmental impact.”
Infrastructure degrades
Without people around to keep things running, water and electricity would quickly stop flowing through pipes and wires, says Basajian. Gas and coal power plants require a steady diet of fuel and water pumps need both human operators and power. The subway and traffic tunnels underneath major cities would flood, says Weisman, without the functioning pumping systems that keep them dry now.
In humid environments, interior drywall would mold. Fallen trees would crush roofs in storms. Fires would go unextinguished. In seismically active zones, earthquakes would wear down and eventually topple structures. Vining plants would cover walls and push apart bricks and siding. And wooden structures, including the vast majority of residential buildings framed with wood beams, would rot. Even creosote-soaked telephone poles wouldn’t last more than 20 years, estimates Basmajian. “Anything wood, especially in a wet climate, is going to degrade pretty quickly,” he says. Newer construction buildings, built from the 1980’s onwards, are made from lighter wood and lower quality materials and would fall apart especially fast, he adds.
Mid-century steel and glass skyscrapers would last longer, Basmaijan imagines, but not forever–especially considering those flooded tunnels, which could easily collapse streets and lead to inundated foundations. The Empire State Building is anchored to bedrock, but if water were to seep into its lower levels from the subterranean train tracks beneath West 33rd Street, perhaps its supports would corrode and fall away.
Sturdy stone buildings would remain standing the longest, predict both Basmajian and Weisman. But over the course of a few centuries, most every municipality would fall into visible ruin–resembling the abandoned monuments and cities of the fallen Roman Empire, the Ancient Egyptians, or the Incas. Even now, there are parts of some American cities that have been effectively abandoned, which show how quickly these processes of decay take hold, Basmaijan notes. “Houses are caved in, streets are cracked, trees grow through structures,” all in a matter of a decade or two.
. . .
Full article:
https://www.popsci.com/science/earth-without-humans/
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Pluralistic: Billionaire-proofing the internet; Picks and Shovels Chapter One (Part 4) (14 Jan 2025)
. . .
Which brings me to social media. The problem with social media is that the people we love and want to interact with are being held prisoner in walled gardens. The mechanism of their imprisonment is the "switching costs" of leaving. Our friends and communities are on bad social media networks because they love each other more than they hate Musk or Zuck. Leaving a social platform can cost you contact with family members in the country you emigrated from, a support group of people who share your rare disease, the customers or audience you rely on for your livelihood, or just the other parents organizing your kid's little league game.
Hypothetically, you could organize all these people to leave at once, go somewhere else, and re-establish all your social connections. Practically, the "collective action problem" of doing so is nearly insurmountable. This is what platform owners depend on – it's why they know they can enshittify their services without losing users. So long as the pain of using the service is lower than the pain of leaving it, the companies can turn the screws on users to make their lives worse in order to extract more profit from them. This is why Musk killed the block button and why Zuck fired all his moderators. Why bear the expense of doing something nice for users if they'll still stick around even if you cut a ton of headcount and/or expensive compute?
There's a way out of this, thankfully. When social media is federated, then you can leave a server without leaving your friends. Think of it as being similar to changing cell-phone companies. When you switch from Verizon to T-Mobile, you keep your number, you keep your address book and you keep your friends, who won't even know you switched networks unless you tell them:
https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/29/how-to-leave-dying-social-media-platforms/
There's no reason social media couldn't work this way. You should be able to leave Facebook or Twitter for Mastodon, Bluesky, or any other service and still talk with the people you left behind, provided they still want to talk with you:
https://www.eff.org/interoperablefacebook
That's how the Fediverse – which Mastodon is part of – works already. You can switch from one Mastodon server to another, and all the people you follow and who follow you will just move over to that new server. That means that if the person or company or group running your server goes sour, you aren't stuck making a choice between the people you love who connect to you on that server, and the pain of dealing with whatever bullshit the management is throwing off:
. . .
https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/14/contesting-popularity/#everybody-samba
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Looking for recommendations for an email service so I can finally get off g mail.
Any suggestions, anyone?
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Watching the World Go Bye
Eliot Jacobson's Collapse of Everything Blog
January 4, 2025
Alive in 2035*
“Write a dystopian essay predicting events in 2025 using this list as a guideline for your predictions: https://climatecasino.net/2021/10/top-40-impacts-of-climate-change/“
I edited the text in parts, removed several referenced to ‘hope’ and changed 2025 to 2035, because, well, things are just not as bad as this essay paints. Yet.
I still remember how the horizon looked just 10 years ago: a steady, reassuring line of gray silhouettes beyond the city’s outskirts. Back then, a future shaped by climate chaos seemed more like the backdrop of a grim science fiction film than the cold reality we face every day. Now, in 2035, those silhouettes are no longer visible—obscured by a haze of smoke, dust, and long abandoned hope.
My morning routine has become an act of near-desperation. I step outside into an early summer day with temperatures that often exceed 110°F. The air feels thick, suffocating, and the ground under my feet cracks with every tentative step. Some say this is just the “new normal,” as if normalizing such drastic changes is the only way to cope. But the shift isn’t merely in temperature; it is in spirit, in expectation, in the way people’s eyes flicker with fear and desperation.
No single development is solely responsible for the chaos unfolding worldwide. In 2025, scientists and environmental advocates warned of cascading tipping points and their consequences—rising seas, more frequent hurricanes, devastating wildfires, the extinction of species critical to our ecosystem. Now, in 2035, each of those threats has begun to crystallize into daily life. It’s not just the frequency of natural disasters, but their magnitude that is shocking. Last year, a super typhoon devastated entire stretches of coastline in Southeast Asia, forcing millions of people to flee in a matter of days. Many remain displaced, living in overcrowded camps plagued by waterborne diseases and acute food shortages.
The land I stand on, once stable and reliable, feels altogether fickle. Our region’s rain patterns abruptly shifted two years ago. Instead of the gentle, seasonal rain that nourished farmland, we get bursts of torrential downpours that flood fields one month, followed by months of parched soil. Farmers have largely given up on predicting yield; as a result, local produce has grown expensive, and the government rations basic staples. Bread prices have doubled. Meat—especially beef—has vanished from most markets, as feed costs soared and water remained scarce. Even basic fish stocks have collapsed in some regions, thanks in large part to warming oceans and acidification killing coral reefs and driving aquatic life to cooler waters or to extinction.
When news broadcasts air—whenever the unstable power grid allows it—I’m confronted by images from around the globe: unstoppable wildfires in the American West and parts of Southern Europe, unstoppable floods in coastal cities, unstoppable droughts in Africa. Entire species have vanished from the wild: pollinator populations have plummeted even further, making the once simple act of growing fruit a challenge requiring artificial pollination programs. Governments that can afford it have begun using drones equipped with pollination technology. In less developed regions, these solutions are a remote luxury, leading to barren orchards and collapsing economies.
Some governments still cling to the idea that technological breakthroughs will rescue humanity from this predicament. Solar geoengineering, carbon capture, and climate-modifying satellites—those terms often appear in hopeful headlines. Yet, daily life reveals a tragically harsher reality. Technological fixes are slow to implement, expensive, and rarely equitable. The few large-scale carbon capture plants that exist run at partial capacity, strapped by underfunding and hamstrung by the scarcity of resources once taken for granted—fresh water and stable energy grids.
Meanwhile, the people around me focus on immediate survival. Those who can afford to move away from affected coasts have done so, crowding inland cities where infrastructure is already strained. The cost of living has skyrocketed, and conflict over resources has intensified. To access drinkable water, many neighborhoods rely on intermittent shipments by the government. Lines at distribution centers stretch for hours under punishing sun. Tensions run high; fights break out, sometimes turning fatal. The desperation for water, for a single commodity that used to flow from taps without a second thought, underscores how vulnerable we’ve become.
Occasionally, I travel to the outskirts of the city, where farmland is now an expanse of brittle husks. I volunteer with a small non-profit that tries to distribute drought-resistant seeds and set up micro-irrigation systems. The last time I was there, I saw once-fertile fields turned to sand. Farmers, faced with repeated crop failures, have either given up or joined the growing ranks of climate refugees. In many places, the topsoil has blown away, leaving a barren layer of rock-strewn dust. Without enough trees or plants to anchor the soil, even a moderate breeze can stir a choking cloud of grit. Masks designed for viral pandemics are now part of everyday fashion, if only to keep the dust from scouring our lungs.
Airborne diseases—malaria, dengue, and other mosquito-borne illnesses—continue to spread northward, thriving in the new, warmer climate zones. We thought an end to certain tropical diseases was near, but they’re resurging with a vengeance. Hospitals are overwhelmed; even the wealthier nations struggle with repeated waves of illnesses, many antibiotic-resistant.
The social ramifications are equally grim. Communities fracture as neighbors turn against each other in the scramble for supplies. Several extremist groups have taken advantage of the chaos, capitalizing on the disillusionment of those who feel betrayed by ineffective leadership. Governments around the world either tighten control over populations—instituting curfews, limiting travel, rationing energy usage—or collapse entirely. Places that once boasted strong democracies find themselves on precarious footing, as the public grows more frustrated by each broken promise of relief.
The national and global picture remains largely bleak. Even if we’ve managed to marginally reduce our carbon emissions this past year, the climate continues to spin deeper into chaos. Systems set in motion decades ago cannot be reversed overnight. The speed at which glaciers are melting and oceans are warming has far surpassed conservative estimates from the early 2000s. Seaside towns, once magnets for tourism, lie deserted; rising seas flood roadways and erode foundations. Some coastal cities invest heavily in expensive seawalls, but whether they can hold back the tides over the coming years is questionable. More climate migrants arrive daily, carrying whatever possessions they still own, fleeing submerging homes.
Full article:
https://climatecasino.net/2025/01/alive-in-2035/
(My comment here - I am opposed to chat gpt, but decided to share what I perceive as an important message/viewpoint.)
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Here we are now.
trump and Project 2025 are our new reality.
Tho written in 2024 as a warning to not elect trump, it is now a comprehensive look at what to expect from here on out.
What “Project 2025” Would Do to America
The Right has developed concrete plans to make America into a much nastier place for anyone who dares to deviate from the white Christian patriarchal order. That’s what is on the ballot in November
Thomas Zimmer
Feb 29, 2024
Democracy Americana
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What “Project 2025” Would Do to America
The Right has developed concrete plans to make America into a much nastier place for anyone who dares to deviate from the white Christian patriarchal order. That’s what is on the ballot in November
Thomas Zimmer
Feb 29, 2024
213
70
74
Photo credit: Megan Varner/Getty Images
This is the second part (of four) of my deep dive into “Project 2025” and the plans to establish a more effective, more ruthless rightwing regime. Part I focuses on the ideas, ideologies, and grievances fueling the project – the radicalizing siege mentality on the Right. This Part II offers a detailed dissection of the concrete policy agenda and strategies to impose a reactionary vision on the country. Part III contextualizes “Project 2025” by comparing it to what other rightwing factions, including Trump himself, are planning, situates these plans in the broader context of the Right’s history since the 1930s, and explores why a second Trump presidency would be operating under completely different conditions from the first – conditions that make it much more likely for these radical plans to succeed. Finally, in Part IV, I dove deeper into Trump’s relationship to Project 2025 and why these radical plans represent the self-mobilization of a “conservative” establishment that is fundamentally in agreement with the extremist Right.
What would a second Trump presidency look like? What happens if the Reactionary Right returns to power?
Over the past few months, different factions on the Right have presented detailed plans for what they want to do the next time they get back to the White House. Among them, “Project 2025,” launched in April 2022 under the leadership of the Heritage Foundation, stands out because it unites much of the conservative movement and the machine of think tanks as well as activist and lobbying groups behind the goal of installing a more effective, more ruthless rightwing regime.
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Last week, in Part I of my deep dive into “Project 2025,” I examined the worldview of the people behind these plans They see themselves as noble defenders of “real America” against a totalitarian “woke,” “globalist” assault. “Project 2025” is their declaration of war on multiracial pluralism. The “Promise to America” Heritage president Kevin Roberts has offered in his foreword to the “Project 2025” report perfectly captures the siege mentality, self-victimization, and grievance-driven lust for revenge that are fueling the Right’s plans. They are driven by a desperate sense that nothing short of a reactionary counter-revolution will suffice to save the nation from the onslaught of anti-American “woke” forces – and that there is very little time remaining to pull that off.
How seriously should we take “Project 2025”? Isn’t this all just the abstract raging of feverish minds? Just empty threats far removed from any chance of implementation? Mostly just a messaging effort intended to placate and mobilize a frenzied base? If only. “Project 2025” is evidence that the American Right has concrete plans and a detailed strategy of how to take over and transform American government into a machine that serves only two purposes: Autocratic revenge against the “woke” enemy – and the imposition of a reactionary vision for society against the will of the majority.
That doesn’t mean these reactionaries will be able to put all their plans into practice in exactly the way they have outlined within just a few short months upon re-taking power. But if they were to win the 2024 presidential election, they would be in a significantly better position to realize their vision than they were in 2017. Nothing is ever predetermined in history. But in all likelihood, a second Trump presidency would be causing a lot more damage and harm – to democracy, the fundamental rights of the vast majority of people in this country, and the lives of the most vulnerable groups in America.
They weren’t ready in 2017 – in 2025, they will be
Trump world was not ready in 2017. Non one understands this more clearly than the American Right. The conservative machine was late to endorse Trumpism and hadn’t been fully mobilized in time to provide the personnel or policy plans. “Malevolence hampered by incompetence” was a prominent dictum in the early months of Trump’s first presidency, and there was definitely something to that. The extremist Right had to rely on more establishment types, as the Trump campaign entered office without a clue and with very few of their own people to staff government. Remember the infamous “adults in the room,” people like John Kelly as White House Chief of Staff, Rex Tillerson as Secretary of State, James Mattis as Secretary of Defense, and H. R. McMaster as National Security Advisor? The idea that they would keep things from getting off the rails and prevent anything dangerous from happening – something they proved mostly unwilling and/or unable to do – was always silly. They did as much to legitimize and normalize Trump’s start as president as they did to constrain and contain him. And yet, it is also true that they were not fully radicalized extremists willing to do whatever necessary to implement reactionary authoritarianism. And certainly, the American Right now looks at them – and the many career civil servants, and lawyers, and bureaucrats in and around the executive who just continued to do their jobs – as a big reason why the first Trump presidency didn’t deliver what they had hoped for. They are determined to not let that happen again.
All the plans from 2025 start from this diagnosis of what, supposedly, went wrong the first time around. The central goal for the Right, therefore, is to have plans ready on Day 1 in January 2025 and implement them without hesitation. To achieve that goal, they are determined to eliminate all the hurdles that slowed them down – sabotaged them, as they see it – in Trump’s first presidency. This is exactly what “Project 2025” suggests. In their own parlance, “Project 2025” consists of four “pillars”: A policy agenda, spelled out in the 920-page report they published last April, titled: “Mandate for Leadership: A conservative promise” (I); a personnel database, intended to build an army of loyalists (II); a “training effort” that currently consists of online courses they call the “Presidential Administration Academy” to get these loyalists and all political appointees ready to implement the rightwing agenda (III); and, finally, “Project 2025” vows to create “a playbook of actions to be taken in the first 180 days of the new Administration to bring quick relief to Americans suffering from the Left’s devastating policies” (IV) – this fourth “pillar” is, at this point, still distinctly vague and seems to exist only in the form of an announcement of future action.
It is important not to get bogged down in the terminology here and not miss the forest for the trees. If we zoom out, “Project 2025” is a plan to execute what amounts to a comprehensive authoritarian takeover of American government. Broadly speaking, it envisions a vast expansion of presidential power over the executive branch. Moreover, “Project 2025” seeks to dismantle certain parts of government, the administrative state, and federal agencies – while simultaneously mobilizing and weaponizing others. Finally, “Project 2025” is a promise to purge from government anyone who is not all in on the Trumpist project and replace them with loyalists and ideological conformists.
A policy agenda to entrench white Christian patriarchal dominance
Let’s dive into the policy agenda of “Project 2025” to get a sense of what this all breaks down to in practice. This is the first of the aforementioned four “pillars,” and it is by far the most fully developed part of “Project 2025.” To the Right’s credit, they are not hiding their plans. In fact, they have outlined them in great detail in “Mandate for Leadership: A Conservative Promise,” their 920-page report available freely online. The report is organized by five sections: “Taking the reins of government,” “The common defense,” “The general welfare,” “The economy,” and “Independent regulatory agencies.” In each section, specific departments as well as the many federal agencies and commissions each get their separate chapter, 30 in total, in which a host of different authors lay out what it is the Right wants to do with / to American government.
Broadly speaking, there are two dimensions to what “Project 2025” envisions: On one level, this is a radical program to dismantle the modern state. Certainly, the Right wants to rob the executive and the administrative state of any kind of tool that might be used to install boundaries for moneyed interests or help create a fairer pluralistic society. At the same time, however, they are also planning to weaponize and mobilize certain parts of the state. This is often presented as an attempt to “depoliticize” government.
Please find Part I of my three-part series on Project 2025 (titled “Project 2025 Promises Revenge, Oppression, and Autocratic Rule”) here, Part III (titled: “What Makes Project 2025 So Dangerous”) here, and Part IV (titled: “Allies Against Democracy”) here.
Full article:
https://thomaszimmer.substack.com/p/what-project-2025-would-do-to-america
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Jan. 9, 2025
Why Are People Blaming ChatGPT for the Los Angeles Fires?
By Andrea González-Ramírez
In an alarming reminder of the climate crisis, wildfires raging across Los Angeles this week have destroyed thousands of buildings, killed at least five people, and forced nearly 180,000 residents to evacuate. As of Thursday afternoon, most of the fires remain uncontained, while efforts to battle the largest blaze, in the Pacific Palisades, have been hampered by temporary water shortages.
These shortages fueled a wave of social-media posts about the impact ChatGPT and other forms of artificial intelligence have on the environment: “Somewhere, the men who build AI chatbots are selecting the interiors for the rocketships they will use to leave earth and all of us burning with it,” artist and activist Matt Bernstein wrote in a viral Instagram post. “One search on ChatGPT uses 10x the amount of energy as a Google search. Training one AI model produces the same amount of carbon dioxide as 300 round trip flights between New York and San Francisco and five times the lifetime emissions of a car.”
While some social-media users suggested these AI technologies were related to the L.A. fires, the hydrants in Pacific Palisades actually ran dry due to high demand, as municipal water systems aren’t designed to fight fires as fast-moving and widespread as those in Los Angeles right now.
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But as AI technology continues to expand, experts say that its energy and water usage will, too. The servers that power AI chatbots are housed in data centers and generate a lot of heat. (If you’re old enough, you may remember how hot the tower of your desktop computer used to get. Basically, the same thing is happening here.) Some data centers — like Microsoft’s in Iowa, which powered ChatGPT — rely on vast amounts of water to cool the equipment down, while others consume a lot of electricity by setting up large, air-conditioner-like units to keep the system cold enough.
A recent study by the Washington Post and researchers at the University of California broke down how much energy ChatGPT, specifically, uses to perform basic functions. The study found that an AI chatbot requires about 18 ounces of water — slightly more than a bottle — using GPT-4 to generate a single 100-word email. Generating one email per week over the course of a year could use about 27 liters of water, or about one and a half jugs. If one in ten Americans — around 16 million people — did that, ChatGPT would require more than 435 million liters of water. That’s equivalent to the water usage of all Rhode Island households for a day and a half.
AI’s electricity consumption isn’t much better, researchers found. Generating one 100-word email uses 0.14 kilowatt-hours (kWh) of electricity, which is the equivalent of powering 14 LED light bulbs for one hour. If you do that once a week for a year? You’d be consuming 7.5 kWh, or about the same energy more than nine households in D.C. use in one hour. And if 16 million Americans were doing this once a week for a year, it’d use up to 121,517 megawatt hours (MWh), or about the same electricity consumed by every household in D.C. in 20 days.
These findings track with a January 2024 report by the International Energy Agency, made up of representatives from 31 countries, which forecast that, by 2026, the energy consumed by global data centers, artificial intelligence, and cryptocurrency could more than double compared to 2022 levels. The report says the total energy usage would be comparable to the consumption of the entire country of Japan.
What does this all have to do with climate change and the current situation in Los Angeles? It’s simple: Our world is heating up more each year, which exacerbates extreme-weather events. Conserving energy and lowering the amount of greenhouse gases we’re releasing into the atmosphere can help curb that trend. Ditto with our water usage: Conservation efforts can address scarcity and help us deal more effectively with the impact of climate events. So if you care about the future of our planet, skip using AI to write that response to your boss you’ve been avoiding. We both know it’d take all of 60 seconds to do yourself.
(This link is free for a limited time)
https://www.thecut.com/article/is-chatgpt-ai-water-use-part-of-what-caused-the-wildfires.html
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Community and Cooperation
Meditations On Moloch
by Scott Alexander
29th Jul 2014
57 min read
. . .
Allan Ginsberg’s famous poem, Moloch:
What sphinx of cement and aluminum bashed open their skulls and ate up their brains and imagination?
Moloch! Solitude! Filth! Ugliness! Ashcans and unobtainable dollars! Children screaming under the stairways! Boys sobbing in armies! Old men weeping in the parks!
Moloch! Moloch! Nightmare of Moloch! Moloch the loveless! Mental Moloch! Moloch the heavy judger of men!
Moloch the incomprehensible prison! Moloch the crossbone soulless jailhouse and Congress of sorrows! Moloch whose buildings are judgment! Moloch the vast stone of war! Moloch the stunned governments!
Moloch whose mind is pure machinery! Moloch whose blood is running money! Moloch whose fingers are ten armies! Moloch whose breast is a cannibal dynamo! Moloch whose ear is a smoking tomb!
Moloch whose eyes are a thousand blind windows! Moloch whose skyscrapers stand in the long streets like endless Jehovahs! Moloch whose factories dream and croak in the fog! Moloch whose smoke-stacks and antennae crown the cities!
Moloch whose love is endless oil and stone! Moloch whose soul is electricity and banks! Moloch whose poverty is the specter of genius! Moloch whose fate is a cloud of sexless hydrogen! Moloch whose name is the Mind!
Moloch in whom I sit lonely! Moloch in whom I dream Angels! Crazy in Moloch! Cocksucker in Moloch! Lacklove and manless in Moloch!
Moloch who entered my soul early! Moloch in whom I am a consciousness without a body! Moloch who frightened me out of my natural ecstasy! Moloch whom I abandon! Wake up in Moloch! Light streaming out of the sky!
Moloch! Moloch! Robot apartments! invisible suburbs! skeleton treasuries! blind capitals! demonic industries! spectral nations! invincible madhouses! granite cocks! monstrous bombs!
They broke their backs lifting Moloch to Heaven! Pavements, trees, radios, tons! lifting the city to Heaven which exists and is everywhere about us!
Visions! omens! hallucinations! miracles! ecstasies! gone down the American river!
Dreams! adorations! illuminations! religions! the whole boatload of sensitive bullshit!
Breakthroughs! over the river! flips and crucifixions! gone down the flood! Highs! Epiphanies! Despairs! Ten years’ animal screams and suicides! Minds! New loves! Mad generation! down on the rocks of Time!
Real holy laughter in the river! They saw it all! the wild eyes! the holy yells! They bade farewell! They jumped off the roof! to solitude! waving! carrying flowers! Down to the river! into the street!
What’s always impressed me about this poem is its conception of civilization as an individual entity. You can almost see him, with his fingers of armies and his skyscraper-window eyes.
A lot of the commentators say Moloch represents capitalism. This is definitely a piece of it, even a big piece. But it doesn’t quite fit. Capitalism, whose fate is a cloud of sexless hydrogen? Capitalism in whom I am a consciousness without a body? Capitalism, therefore granite cocks?
Moloch is introduced as the answer to a question – C. S. Lewis’ question in Hierarchy Of Philosophers – what does it? Earth could be fair, and all men glad and wise. Instead we have prisons, smokestacks, asylums. What sphinx of cement and aluminum breaks open their skulls and eats up their imagination?
And Ginsberg answers: Moloch does it.
There’s a passage in the Principia Discordia where Malaclypse complains to the Goddess about the evils of human society. “Everyone is hurting each other, the planet is rampant with injustices, whole societies plunder groups of their own people, mothers imprison sons, children perish while brothers war.”
The Goddess answers: “What is the matter with that, if it’s what you want to do?”
Malaclypse: “But nobody wants it! Everybody hates it!”
Goddess: “Oh. Well, then stop.”
The implicit question is – if everyone hates the current system, who perpetuates it? And Ginsberg answers: “Moloch”. It’s powerful not because it’s correct – nobody literally thinks an ancient Carthaginian demon causes everything – but because thinking of the system as an agent throws into relief the degree to which the system isn’t an agent.
Bostrom makes an offhanded reference of the possibility of a dictatorless dystopia, one that every single citizen including the leadership hates but which nevertheless endures unconquered. It’s easy enough to imagine such a state. Imagine a country with two rules: first, every person must spend eight hours a day giving themselves strong electric shocks. Second, if anyone fails to follow a rule (including this one), or speaks out against it, or fails to enforce it, all citizens must unite to kill that person. Suppose these rules were well-enough established by tradition that everyone expected them to be enforced.
So you shock yourself for eight hours a day, because you know if you don’t everyone else will kill you, because if they don’t, everyone else will kill them, and so on. Every single citizen hates the system, but for lack of a good coordination mechanism it endures. From a god’s-eye-view, we can optimize the system to “everyone agrees to stop doing this at once”, but no one within the system is able to effect the transition without great risk to themselves.
And okay, this example is kind of contrived. So let’s run through – let’s say ten – real world examples of similar multipolar traps to really hammer in how important this is.
(Ashcans and unobtainable dollars!)
As a thought experiment, let’s consider aquaculture (fish farming) in a lake. Imagine a lake with a thousand identical fish farms owned by a thousand competing companies. Each fish farm earns a profit of $1000/month. For a while, all is well.
But each fish farm produces waste, which fouls the water in the lake. Let’s say each fish farm produces enough pollution to lower productivity in the lake by $1/month.
A thousand fish farms produce enough waste to lower productivity by $1000/month, meaning none of the fish farms are making any money. Capitalism to the rescue: someone invents a complex filtering system that removes waste products. It costs $300/month to operate. All fish farms voluntarily install it, the pollution ends, and the fish farms are now making a profit of $700/month – still a respectable sum.
But one farmer (let’s call him Steve) gets tired of spending the money to operate his filter. Now one fish farm worth of waste is polluting the lake, lowering productivity by $1. Steve earns $999 profit, and everyone else earns $699 profit.
Everyone else sees Steve is much more profitable than they are, because he’s not spending the maintenance costs on his filter. They disconnect their filters too.
Once four hundred people disconnect their filters, Steve is earning $600/month – less than he would be if he and everyone else had kept their filters on! And the poor virtuous filter users are only making $300. Steve goes around to everyone, saying “Wait! We all need to make a voluntary pact to use filters! Otherwise, everyone’s productivity goes down.”
Everyone agrees with him, and they all sign the Filter Pact, except one person who is sort of a jerk. Let’s call him Mike. Now everyone is back using filters again, except Mike. Mike earns $999/month, and everyone else earns $699/month. Slowly, people start thinking they too should be getting big bucks like Mike, and disconnect their filter for $300 extra profit…
A self-interested person never has any incentive to use a filter. A self-interested person has some incentive to sign a pact to make everyone use a filter, but in many cases has a stronger incentive to wait for everyone else to sign such a pact but opt out himself. This can lead to an undesirable equilibrium in which no one will sign such a pact.
The more I think about it, the more I feel like this is the core of my objection to libertarianism, and that Non-Libertarian FAQ 3.0 will just be this one example copy-pasted two hundred times. From a god’s-eye-view, we can say that polluting the lake leads to bad consequences. From within the system, no individual can prevent the lake from being polluted, and buying a filter might not be such a good idea.
You live a long life, mate, and have a dozen children. All of them have a dozen children, and so on. In a couple generations, the island has ten thousand rats and has reached its carrying capacity. Now there’s not enough food and space to go around, and a certain percent of each new generation dies in order to keep the population steady at ten thousand.
. . .
Full article:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/TxcRbCYHaeL59aY7E/meditations-on-moloch
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The Collapse Will Be Normalized
As civilization collapses, the media will attempt to normalize things like war, famine, and genocide. Don't let them.
2/29/24
Ukraine began, everyone was terrified it would lead to nuclear armageddon. But now, it’s normal.
And of course, the IDF—using bombs from the US—continues to kill children whose only crime was being born on a piece of land that Israel wants for itself. When Israel first started indiscriminately bombing the Gaza strip, most people were surprised. But now, it’s normal.
There are dozens of other examples, but you get the idea.
I used to think that once the collapse became obvious, society would wake up and change. But right now, the fact that our civilization is in the early stages of collapse is pretty goddamn obvious, yet most people look at the world today and consider it perfectly normal. Even when a flood wipes out half a country’s breadbasket and displaces millions of people, government officials still say things like, “It’s called weather.”
So I guess that’s how it’s going to be. No matter how bad things get, it will be normalized.
The first time a heatwave knocks out the power grid and millions of people die, the media will find a scapegoat. They’ll blame green energy, climate activists, terrorists, anyone but the capitalists who are destroying the planet for their own gain. The second time a heatwave kills millions, it will be normal.
. . .
Full article:
https://www.collapsemusings.com/the-collapse-will-be-normalized/
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"What's Coming Is WORSE Than A Recession."
Richard Wolff's Last Warning.
https://youtu.be/zuY484ynNxY?feature=shared
While what Wolff says is true economically, he is still blind to the fact that capitalism itself, regulated or not, is a planet destroying economic model.
Capitalism is built on and depends on the destruction of the natural world, which will (or already has) leave us trying to survive on a dying planet devoid of the life sustaining systems that once allowed life to flourish on the only planet in the known universe to support this level and diversity of life.
Notwithstanding, his predictions here give good examples of what to expect in the next few decades as we march to self annihilation.
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"Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter."
MLK
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