A lot of expensive hobbies don’t have to be expensive. I’m a musician, and I have spent thousands of dollars on musical equipment but realistically, if I weren’t going to play out, or record high quality songs, you can get away with just a $200-$300 guitar (you might even be able to go lower. Cheap guitars are crazy good these days), a used amp, a tuner, and a cable. With that alone you have a lifetime of entertainment and challange, and the most expensive long-term cost is your strings. It’s honestly a steal in term of cost to entertainment ratio.

Now. That said. The real challenge is not falling into GAS (Gear Aquisition Syndrome), which is a real challange. And if you become even mildly capable on guitar you’re probably gonna wanna play live and record too, so, easier said than done, but it doesn’t have to be expensive.

Because it’s slightly tricky to replace the post master general: https://www.federaltimes.com/federal-oversight/2022/08/24/can-biden-fire-us-postmaster-general-louis-dejoy/

Are we sure it’s cheaper though? I mean it legitimatly might not be. I have some friends who work in tech and they use an AI model for, amongst other things, summarizing information on their internal documentation. They’ve told me what their company is paying for the license to use this thing, and it’s eyewatering. also, uhh last time I checked, the company they got that license from does not turn a profit… so it appears to be too cheap at the moment.

It might really be the case that it isn’t cheaper than just paying someone a normal salary to do that work, and it probably isn’t cheaper than just jamming the work being done by the AI now back onto preexisting employees (which is what they did before ~2 years ago anyway).

The other thing that makes me feel this might not be unreasonable is that everyone on the team likes the tool, except their manager, who has thrown out the idea to cut it twice now (that I know of).

Yeah, but because our government views technological dominance as a National Security issue we can be sure that this will come to nothing bc China Bad™.

Who does IP serve? It seems to me it serves very wealthy people who have the legal means to protect it. With that in mind, I think we should just get rid of it.

My county has very much felt it has a stake in your country, whatever country that may be. We probably enforced that stake with weapons at some point.

My countrymen spend a lot of time pontificating on how they feel about other countries. I think it is entierly welcome that people other than Americans and Europeans have some discussions about us.

I sincerely hope that some of my fellow Americans get mad about the things you might have to say about us. We very much deserve it.

Is he fondling the grunt’s junk?

Nah. Poor public schools spend waaaay to much money on shit like this. Source: Have worked as a teacher in a poor public school.

Low Quality Facts, the account that made this has a lot of these kinds of made up quotes. https://mstdn.social/@lowqualityfacts

https://youtu.be/X9FGRkqUdf8?si=L3qIpoF6TfV5S8D9

Damn. And these bitches are charging me 12 dollars a lb for ham?

This really saddens me. I’ve lived within a few miles the coast basically my whole life and I’ve seen the floods get worse; Friends’ houses getting ruined. The river that flows by my house to the sea regularly consumes the nearest neighborhood to it now, once a year or so. Noone is moving because of it. People are moving here, in fact, and all the new houses are on stilts with first floor parking. I know it’s gonna keep getting worse, and when it finally gets bad enough, where are these people gonna move. All the “nice” towns a little further inland are entierly single-family zoned and woefully unprepared for all the people who will have to move. My town’s population is like 6 of those “nice towns”, and like half of it is gonna be underwater or so flood prone that you can’t live there. It’s gonna be really bad.

Even if they’re right, that just means I won’t be able to afford those “Miracle Medications” anyway…

Golf With Your Friends

My girlfriend always jokes with me that despite being tech-competent I am an old Luddite about tech. It is never more true than when something asks me to make an account.

Andres Malm suggests in his book “Fossil Capital” that part of the reason that fossil fuels (stocks of energy) are so profitable is that you can pick and choose when to extract and then again when to release the energy stored in them, which will always be more profitable than, for instance, wind and solar (flows of energy) because you can manipulate production to prevent over supply, and choose when to release energy instead of waiting for the energy to be available in the flow. The higher capability to profit means that they will remain more profitable than renewables long after any other sort of calculation other than “profitability” would favor the renewables (cost to produce, damage to the environment, ability to satisfy energy demand).

I keep thinking about how Google has implemented it. It sums up my broader feelings pretty well. They jammed this half-baked “AI” product into the very fucking top of their search results. I can’t not see it there - its huge and takes up most of my phone’s screen after the search, but I always have to scroll down past it because it is wrong, like, pretty often, or misses important details. Even if it sounds right, because I’ve had it be wrong before I have to just check the other links anyway. All it has succeed at doing in practice is make me scroll down further before I get to my results (not unlike their ads, I might add). Like, if that’s “AI” it’s no fucking wonder people avoid it.

I’m not going to claim this is a positive take that will make you feel less hopeless, but the “climate transformation” is guaranteed to succeed. We will be hitting “peak carbon” and it will decline from there. The only choice we get is whether that transition is by choice in the next decade or two (the easy way) or if we are compelled to by cataclysmic collapse of the world systems we depend on to maintain our modern society (the hard way).

The transition is guaranteed, we just get to decide if we wanna do it the easy way and maintain a reasonable quality of life for billions of people, or the hard way and watch as millions of people die and put planet’s ability to support humans is substantial cut down.

To solve the climate crisis the ~1 billion people in global north will absolutely need to significantly bail out the global South. There is no clear development path that doesn’t go through heavy fossil fuel usage, and it should go without saying we probably can’t even improve the living standard of another billion people, let alone seven billion without basically just giving them money and technology to skip the fossil fuel step. Countries in the global north have actually agreed to this framework, it’s just that noone has actually made good on the promise yet. So… not only is it not nonsense… it’s an active dispute between developed countries and developing countries.

Noone is saying that. The argument is pretty much that people want more scrutiny applied to other companies beyond tiktok, and ideally not be under constant surveillance by any of them, not that people want to be monitored by all police states equally.