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“To travel in space you must leave the old verbal garbage behind: God talk, country talk, mother talk, love talk, party talk. You must learn to exist with no religion, no country, no allies. You must learn to live alone in silence. Anyone who prays in space is not there.”
Precisely what activities fall under the umbrella of the DSR has not been officially disclosed, but all known projects work to integrate the hard and soft infrastructures underpinning next-generation IoT capabilities. Examples include 5G antenna and base stations, fiber optic cables, data centers, smart city initiatives, and e-commerce platforms. Across the board, Beijing has encouraged tech companies to deepen cooperation with recipient countries. Some of the flagship companies that have joined the project are state-owned enterprises such as China Telecom and Unicom, as well as ostensibly private operators like China Mobile, Huawei, ZTE, and Dahua. The common denominator among these actors is a commitment to consolidating China’s presence in emerging markets and developing economies.
Over the past decade, Beijing has been able to build a parallel technological ecosystem that challenges Western-dominated norms. While this Initiative has the potential to enhance digital connectivity in developing economies, it also provides Beijing with a mechanism that can be used both to test its surveillance technology in third countries and to train these countries’ leaders on how to leverage the information that they collect. In a 2018 report, Freedom House cited a seminar on “Cyberspace Management for Officials from Countries Along the Belt and Road Initiative” that was repeated this year. It saw foreign officials visit the offices of a Chinese company that uses a big data toolkit to track negative public sentiment in real time and promote positive opinions of the government.
This style of surveillance and public opinion “guidance” is consistent with some of the other projects DSR sponsors have exported to third countries. In Venezuela, for example, PRC tech giant ZTE has been closely working with authorities to develop a system that can monitor citizens and, most importantly, their voting preferences.
A few dozen cities across the country have begun basic-income programs, and the early results have been overwhelmingly positive. In Denver, more than 800 of the city’s most vulnerable residents received monthly stipends of up to $1,000. So far the program has reduced homelessness, increased employment, and bolstered the mental-health outcomes of participants. A similar program in Stockton, California, had similar effects — the unemployment rate among the 125 participants was nearly halved. Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania studying the program concluded it could have “profound positive impacts on local public health.”
Pilot programs have sprung up across the country, from liberal strongholds such as Los Angeles and Baltimore to more centrist and conservative cities like Columbia, South Carolina; Birmingham, Alabama; and Gainesville, Florida. Just Income, the Florida program, also focused its stipends on formerly incarcerated individuals, with a rationale similar to Middleton’s. “It costs Floridians about $28,000 a year to hold someone in prison,” the director of the Gainesville program said in a press release earlier this year. “Alternatively, we’re investing just $7,600 directly to one of our valued neighbors, giving them a vital income floor.” In city after city and cohort after cohort — old, young, single parents, ex-convicts — universal basic income has improved health outcomes, raised employment, and bolstered childcare opportunities (and recipients have had consistently better outcomes than control groups).
No matter the city, there are certain fixtures that are universal among urban settings: corner stores, infrastructure for public transit, pockets of green space, and of course, newsstands, which are the subject of a compelling series by Los Angeles-based photographer Trevor Traynor.
The place that inspired Noguchi to create his “Akari” series was Gifu: the Japanese city where traditionally were manufactured all the paper products such as lanterns or umbrellas.
At that time Noguchi was already internationally known and appreciated for his works, and the city’s major asked him to design an affordable and mass producible lamp to help to revive the local paper-craft industry. The artist started to work at the project the same day sketching out a lamp that perfectly mixed sculptural and design qualities from one side with traditional and advanced manufacturing techniques from the other: the Isamu Noguchi Akari lamp was born.
Since the 50s the Noguchi lamp has been produced by the Gifu paper-lantern manufacturer Ozeki & Co and by Vitra Design Museum from 2001
The lamps were an incredibly commercially successful
“A religion may be discerned in capitalism — that is to say, capitalism serves essentially to allay the same anxieties, torments, and disturbances to which the so-called religions offered answers… In the first place, capitalism is a purely cultic religion, perhaps the most extreme that ever existed. In capitalism, things have a meaning only in their relationship to the cult; capitalism has no specific body of dogma, no theology. It is from this point of view that utilitarianism acquires its religious overtones. This concretization of cult is connected with a second feature of capitalism: the permanence of the cult. Capitalism is the celebration of a cult sans rêve et sans merci (without dream or mercy). There are no “weekdays.” There is no day that is not a feast day, in the terrible sense that all its sacred pomp is unfolded before us; each day commands the utter fealty of each worshipper. And third, the cult makes guilt pervasive. Capitalism is probably the first instance of a cult that creates guilt, not atonement. In this respect, this religious system is caught up in the headlong rush of a larger movement. A vast sense of guilt that is unable to find relief seizes on the cult, not to atone for this guilt but to make it universal, to hammer it into the conscious mind, so as once and for all to include God in the system of guilt and thereby awaken in him an interest in the process of atonement. This atonement cannot then be expected from the cult itself, or from the reformation of this religion (which would need to be able to have recourse to some stable element in it), or even from the complete renouncement of this religion. The nature of the religious movement which is capitalism entails endurance right to the end, to the point where God, too, finally takes on the entire burden of guilt, to the point where the universe has been taken over by that despair which is actually its secret hope. Capitalism is entirely without precedent, in that it is a religion which offers not the reform of existence but its complete destruction. It is the expansion of despair, until despair becomes a religious state of the world in the hope that this will lead to salvation… The cult is celebrated before an unmatured deity; every idea, every conception of it offends against the secret of this immaturity. Freud’s theory, too, belongs to the hegemony of the priests of this cult. Its conception is capitalist through and through. By virtue of a profound analogy, which has still to be illuminated, what has been repressed, the idea of sin, is capital itself, which pays interest on the hell of the unconscious. Capitalism has developed as a parasite of Christianity in the West (this must be shown not just in the case of Calvinism, but in the other orthodox Christian churches), until it reached the point where Christianity’s history is essentially that of its parasite — that is to say, of capitalism.”
I gathered some brilliant commentary on this neglected unfinished work of early Benjamin by traversing blogs, and really find the insight penetrating deeper into what was left behind here but feels extremely necessary and relevant for today. First:
In “Capitalism as Religion”, Walter Benjamin asserts that capitalism is the most utilitarian of beliefs. It is based on pure mechanism and accumulation without dogma or theology. A true cult. We don’t work for God, God works for us. We are blessed when we consume.God wants you to be rich. Every day is feast day for it is always the place and time for worship at the altar of greed. We atone for nothing. Rather,everything (even God) suffers the Schuld (debt/guilt) generated by the cult. The individual reigns with banknotes as his holy iconography.
Certainly, if we look back to capitalism’s early form in mercantilism (the birthplace of the corporation), and proceed up to our present time with mixed economies and state capitalism, we have five hundred years of capitalist religion applied to bloody effect. We often speak of the Abrahamic religions, particularly Christianity and Islam, unleashing thousands of years of bloody conflict through warfare and religious genocide; but, we forget that nearly half a millennia of capitalism has wrought an equivalent level of blood and destruction, from colonialism to world wars and other lesser conflicts. Then, of course, there is the capitalism’s most extreme variant, fascism, as embodied by the Nazis, which was a response to communism—but capitalism at complete service to the might and glory of the nation.
Benjamin, however, might be wrong in suggesting that capitalism does not have dogma—private property would seem to be the exception here. Property, land or product, allows for all manner of acts to defend it and expand its reach. We might also say that the idea of exponentially growing economies, with GDP as the scale, is particular to capitalism. But Benjamin is right in saying that nothing has meaning except within the cult—all alternative theories, all complaints, all flaws, everything that does not serve and glorify capitalism, is rendered irrelevant and destructive to the religion of capitalism.
And Benjamin did not live long enough to see how evangelic Christians and their political candidates have sought to convince the masses—not that they need much convincing anyway—that Jesus Christ wantsyou to have abundance: wants you to have abundant money, property, possessions, etc. At the very least, it would have proven to Benjamin that capitalism had not truly discarded religion, but instead absorbedit and regurgitated it for its own ends. However, he did suggest that Christianity, during the reformation, had transformed itself into capitalism, using many of its symbols, such as on currency.
Benjamin writes, “This concretization of the cult connects with a second characteristic of capitalism: the permanent duration of the cult.”
This is critical—anyone living within a capitalist system and convinced of its greatness cannot imagine an ending. Then, of course, there is Francis Fukuyama and all his acolytes who argue that the capitalist republic (I will not call it a democracy) is the endpoint of civilization; that is, there will be no further evolution. We have reached the most perfect form of civilization possible, even with its flaws. The battle for systems of living, of economies, is over: capitalism is endless and eternal.
It’s interesting to consider that God’s endlessness, his eternal state of being, is transmuted into a theoretically eternal economic system. We should at least give credit to the authors of the Bible who had the imagination to describe God as the alpha and the omega. To create a boundlessness to the narrative. Capitalism, on the other hand, can never claim alpha and omega status—like God, it was a creation of man, and a rather recent one at that.
If in Capitalism transcendence is replaced with immanence, Benjamin continues, salvation is replaced by guilt.If the potential to achieve absolution exists in the actuality, if one can be saved in the here and now, then any failure to do so, any disappointment or unhappiness in the present immediately manifests itself as guilt: “Capitalism is probably the first instance of a cult that creates guilt, not atonement”. In this formulation, the substitution of salvation for guilt correlates to the fulfillment of desire and the production of guilt in Freudian psychoanalysis, as well as to the consumerist cycle that ties self-actualization to debt. As a consequence, “Capitalism… is a religion which offers not the reform of existence but its complete destruction”: the fulfillment of its prophecies can only come true in a complete eradication of its most basic assertions. This is why the counter-cultural absolute rejection of reformist and participatory politics and its flipside, the ethos of uncompromising political purity against a more benign realpolitik are essentially the greatest expressions of belief in the system laid out by Capitalism, a system in which one is forever complicit in one’s own passive collaboration. “God”, writes Benjamin “may be addressed only when [man’s] guilt is at its zenith”.
But the implications of Benjamin’s hypothesis, that Capitalism isn’t merely a counterpart to protestant values but actually forms its own religion, go beyond an individual subject constituted by this creed. According to Emile Durkheim, a religious practice (whether organized or cultish) is defined by its social nature and its function in defining and organizing societies: “A religion is a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things […] beliefs and practices which unite into one single moral community called a Church, all those who adhere to them.” Religious rituals, far from being secondary expressions of faith, are where society creates and recreates its own ideal every time it repeats them communally.
In light of this, the implication of Benjamin’s assertion that Capitalism is the dominant religion of our time is that the guilt at its centre (which is also debt, as neatly encapsulated in the German Schuld) is also the thing that bonds the community together. Not only are we a community because we are all indebted to each other, in an ironic fulfillment of the solidarity whose absence Marcel Mauss bemoaned in early Capitalism, but even those who choose not to practice Capitalism, the laymen in Durkheim’s account, still belong to the church. Benjamin writes: “religion… regarded individual who were irreligious or had other beliefs as members of its community, in the same way that the modern bourgeoisie now regards those of its members who are not gainfully employed”. As we can see, Benjamin does not leave any space outside the community encircled by Capitalism and his description acknowledges the incredible flexibility and elasticity of the practice of Capitalism, redefining itself again and again to include all under the auspices of guilt and debt. This is why art practices which seek to reject the ethos of work and to withdraw completely from the cycle of consumption and production are tolerated or even encouraged by the art market, declining to participate does not deny you of membership.
The ultimate act of ‘dropping out’, of exodus from the Capitalist church is the suicide cult. It is also, paradoxically, the ultimate expression of the logic of Capitalism, and in it the accumulation of the guilt produced by Capitalism is finally given a generative act of resistance, of selfhood. This is the cultic potlatch, the destruction of the thing one holds dearest, of the very life of the community, as a ritualistic gift to the world. In Benjamin’s words: “it is the expansion of despair, until despair becomes a religious state of the world in the hope that this will lead to salvation”. The mass suicide of the Jim Jones’ ‘Communists’ as he called them should have been the last and final move in the dialectical relationship between religion and Capitalism. The birth of the new Capitalist subject is announced by Jones in the last sentence before sipping the cyanide-laced grape flavoured ‘Flavor Aid’: “We didn’t commit suicide, we committed an act of revolutionary suicide protesting the conditions of an inhumane world”. This is a very short distance from the Black Panthers’ transformation of the ‘slow suicide of the ghetto’ into a triumphant death (the elevation of economic despair into action) and a firm step in the direction of suicide bombers, edging on the territory of ‘bare life’ that Giorgio Agamben borrows from Benjamin, the sacrifice of life as a gesture caught in the cogs of the dialectics of political action.
Durkheim defines sacrifice as the linking together of two religious elements – the communion with the gods and the offering or oblation, “a gift and an act of renouncement”. Why else would the gods require food from the believers? He explains this interdependence as a consequence of the idea that without the faith of the community, the gods would literally die. In other words, the sacrificial rite is both a union of a society with its gods in a joint act of biological constitution (you are what you eat – if men and gods share food they become the same, and by extension, so does the entire community) and an offering to the gods who, according to Durkheim, depend on men as much as men depend on them. Hence, the sacrifice of the self in the suicide cult is twofold: it is a symbolic act of unification which implicates all under Capitalism. If in Capitalist society consumer relations dominate, this is an act of supreme consumption, in which modern man cannibalizes and deifies himself at once. We all drink from the fountain of Flavour Aid.
The image shows a highway with a row of solar panels traveling down the median, and underneath them, a protected bike lane. Protecting and encouraging bike travel while gathering clean energy at the same time? Sounds like a win for everybody.
In 2022, South Korea announced plans for a clean energy future that involve converting its current usage of renewable energy sources from 15%, where usage stands now, to 40% by 2034.
Although coal power accounts for 40% of the country’s total energy usage (as of August 2022), the South Korean government has undertaken several initiatives to bring that number down, including introducing a carbon tax, stopping financing of overseas coal plants, and building charging stations for electric vehicles.
As far back as eight years ago, in 2015, South Korea and the Netherlands both incorporated solar panels in road construction. In particular, both countries have built solar bicycle lanes where dedicated roads for cyclists are lined with solar panels. In the case of Korea, the panels went on top. But in the Netherlands, the panels went to the bottom.
In South Korea, the panels work as a solar-powered roof that shelter cyclists from the sun and rain. At the same time, they generate electricity to power lighting and vehicle charging stations along a 32-kilometer highway with three lanes on each side. The bicycle lane is at the center island of the highway, protected by steel crash barriers. Cyclists use underground tunnels to enter and exit the bike lane.
The Netherlands, on the other hand, opted to use the solar panels as the bike lane itself, rather than its roof. Website Science Alert refers to the lane as the “energy-harvesting bike path.” It reports, “engineers say the system is working even better than expected, with the 70-meter test bike path generating 3,000 kWh, or enough electricity to power a small household for a year.”
Science Alert notes that the Netherlands was the first country to put the solar road idea into “practice” with the bike path in Krommenie, a town north of Amsterdam. “The solar panels used on the Dutch bike path are sandwiched between glass, silicon rubber, and concrete, and are strong enough to support 12-ton fire trucks without any damage. Each individual panel connects to smart meters, which optimize their output and feed their electricity straight into street lighting, or the grid,” Science Alert reports.
But the project took a lot of work, with engineers reportedly spending five years “creating the system to be durable.” And then more than 150,000 cyclists were asked to test the solar panels by riding ride over them. The panels were said to have been designed to take in as much sunlight as possible, and to also match the life of rooftop solar panels.
And while the Koreans and the Dutch have taken the lead, the Chinese are not far behind. China has constructed a one-kilometer “solar” road in the Shandong province capital city of Jinan. Website Solar.com reports that the road spans 5,875 square meters and covers it with “a top clear concrete layer, a middle solar panel, and a bottom layer of insulation.”
German Federal Transport Minister Volker Wissing visited the first PV system to cover Autobahn 81 at the Hegau-Ost service area in Germany in June 2023, as the pilot project is nearing completion.
The installation is a collaborative research effort between Germany, Austria, and Switzerland, supported by participating research institutes including Fraunhofer ISE, Forster FF, and the Austrian Institute of Technology. While the original plan was to directly cover the motorway, the adjacent through lane was chosen instead.
The PV roof area, consisting of solar modules on a steel structure, was supplied by Solarwatt. It has a total output of 33 kW. Completion of the PV system is scheduled for July 2023.
[De institutione musica], (manuscript; 52 leaves: paper, color illustrations), France, ca. 1490 [Oversize UPenn LJS 47, Lawrence J. Schoenberg Collection, University of Pennsylvania Libraries, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA]
[De institutione musica], (manuscript; 52 leaves: paper, color illustrations), France, ca. 1490 [Oversize UPenn LJS 47, Lawrence J. Schoenberg Collection, University of Pennsylvania Libraries, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA]
There’s a cheat-code in US antitrust law, one that’s been increasingly used since the Reagan administration, when the “consumer welfare” theory (“monopolies are fine, so long as the lower prices”) shoved aside the long-established idea that antitrust law existed to prevent monopolies from forming
at all.
The idea that a company can do anything to create or perpetuate a monopoly so long as its prices go down and/or its quality goes up is directly to blame for the rise of Big Tech. These companies burned through their investors’ cash for
years, selling goods and services below cost, or even giving stuff away for free. Think of Uber, who lost $0.41 on every dollar they brought in for their first 13 years of existence, a move that cost their investors (mostly Saudi royals) $31 billion.
The monopoly cheerleaders in the consumer welfare camp understood that these money-losing orgies could not go on forever, and that the investors who financed them weren’t doing so for charitable purposes. But they dismissed the possibility that would-be monopolists could raise prices after attaining dominance, because these prices hikes would bring new competitors into the market, starting the process over again.
Well, Uber has doubled the price of a ride and halved the wages of its drivers (not that consumer welfare theorists care about workers’ wages – they care about
consumer welfare, not
worker welfare). And not just Uber: companies that captured whole markets have jacked up prices and lowered quality across the board, a Great Enshittening whose playbook has been dubbed “venture predation”:
Not only was this turn predictable – it was
predicted. Back in 2017, Lina Khan – then a law student – published a earthshaking
Yale Law Journal paper, “Amazon’s Antitrust Paradox,” laying out how monopolists would trap their customers and block new competitors as they raised prices and lowered quality:
Today, Khan is the chair of the FTC, and has brought a case against Amazon that turns her legal theories into practice, backed by a cheering chorus of Amazon customers, workers, suppliers and competitors who’ve been cheated by the e-commerce giant:
Lawn-care equipment — leaf-blowers, lawnmowers, and the like — doesn’t top most people’s lists of climate priorities. But a new report documents how, in aggregate, lawn care is a major source of U.S. air pollution.
Using the latest available data from the Environmental Protection Agency’s 2020 National Emissions Inventory, the report found that the equipment released more than 68,000 tons of smog-forming nitrous oxides, which is roughly on par with the pollution from 30 million cars. Lawn equipment also spewed 30 millions tons of climate-warming carbon dioxide, which is more than the total emissions of the city of Los Angeles.
“When it comes to these small engines in lawn and garden equipment, it’s really counterintuitive,” said Kirsten Schatz, the lead author of the report and a clean air advocate at Colorado PIRG, a nonprofit environmental organization. “This stuff is really disproportionately causing a lot of air pollution, health problems, and disproportionately contributing to climate change.”
Lawn equipment also contributed to a litany of other air toxics, such as formaldehyde and benzene, according to the report, which is titled “Lawn Care Goes Electric.” But perhaps the most concerning pollutant it releases is the fine particulate matter known as PM2.5.
PM2.5 is far smaller than the width of a human hair and can lead to health problems ranging from cancer, reproductive ailments, and mental health problems to premature death. The report found that gas-powered lawn equipment belched 21,800 tons of PM2.5 in 2020 — an amount equivalent to the pollution from 234 million typical cars over the course of a year.
That outsize impact comes because gas-powered lawn equipment runs on different types of engines than passenger cars. They are smaller — coming in two- and four-stroke versions, which reference the differences in the engines’ combustion cycles — and are generally less efficient, with two-stroke engines being particularly problematic because they run a mix of lubricating oil and gasoline.
“[This] really inefficient engine technology is, pound for pound, more polluting than the cars and trucks,” said Schatz. “Outdoor equipment generates a pretty shocking amount of pollution.”
She’s an eco-vengeance iconoclast who loves coyote pee and running at manic speeds. She’s an unstoppable chaos queen with a stink-nipple on her butt, who turns luxury Arizona golf courses into free range charcuterie boards for her grub-worm girl dinner. She’s a guerilla class-warfare legend whose mating call sounds like the hissing warb-garble of a cappuccino machine milk-steamer.
She’s the internet’s most beloved trash-eating ungulate — the uncompromising, the indefatigable, the lovely javelina.
You love to see it.
Oh we DO.
Oh this reminds me of that news about capibaras retaking posh BBAA neighborhoods built over their natural habitats.
I KNOW that playing God is morally wrong, but holy HELL, it looks fun.
Why is it playing God? We aren’t violating any natural laws. God set the parameters of the universe to allow these things. There’s nothing wrong with it, there’s no hubris in learning more about how to manipulate the universe around us.
We made a whole-ass fish.
The reason this was accidental BTW is because they used paddlefish eggs as a negative control group for a breeding experiment on sturgeons because the scientists, quite naturally, assumed that they were SO unrelated it would be genetically impossible for them to mate. Like. I cannot stress enough to you how these creatures last related ancestors were
140 MILLION YEARS BACK.
If you don’t know how far that is, that’s basically the start of the cretaceous. Let me simplify that for you even further. Chimpanzees and humans seperated, what, 5 or 6 million years ago?
This is basically like if humans could hybridise with THESE THINGS.
This is the sort of thing that should be impossible. They used those eggs to be ABSOLUTELY 100% SURE NOTHING WOULD HAPPEN.
And then THEY GOT FISH OUT OF IT.
Like. You can quite clearly understand why they didn’t think anything would happen. WE ARE MORE RELATED TO BLUE WHALES THAN THESE THINGS.
THE AMERICAN PADDLEFISH AND THE STURGEON ARE SO COMPLETELY UNRELATED THAT THIS IS NOT PLAYING GOD. IF ANYTHING THIS IS AN ACT OF GOD.
THE SCIENTISTS HAD NO BLAME IN THIS BECAUSE NOTHING LIKE THIS HAD EVER HAPPENED BEFORE
It sort of goes against the rules of genetics a bit.
Oh i forgot to add
THESE THINGS, FOR HYBRIDS, HAD A REALLY HIGH SURVIVAL RATING. LIKE 70% OF THEM SURVIVED.
To put that into perspective, getting a blue whale and a squirrel and trying to hybridise them is more sensible, and that wouldn’t produce anything but getting you banned from science. Most animals that aren’t plants can barely hybridise two degrees away from each other.
BUT THESE TWO ENTIRELY UNRELATED FISH create PERFECTLY
HEALTHY HYBRIDS.
the scientists literally had to do the tests AGAIN just to be like “okay this is real right. This is actually like, not a fluke, this works right” and it worked again. They just Can!
it’s a few years old now, but here’s a link to the article in the screenshot:
“Banks often give better financing terms if a landlord can bring in what’s called a credit tenant — a national brand like a Starbucks or a Target. That’s because even if a big chain winds up shuttering a local store, the parent company is still around to pay the rent. “If a T-Mobile or a Verizon choose to close a store, the landlord knows they’re good for it,” says Larisa Ortiz, a managing director at Streetsense, an urban-planning consultancy. You’d think everyone involved would be motivated to fill an empty storefront — landlords aren’t making money, cities aren’t getting taxes, and the neighborhood has an eyesore. But that eyesore may actually still be profitable to the landlord and the banks. “In SoHo, something vacant isn’t necessarily vacant,” says Ortiz. “Someone’s paying rent there, and the landlord’s perfectly fine with it. It’s a vacancy to the pedestrian, but not to the landlord.””
There are a few big takeaways here for me.
The first, and funniest, is that X users have become so right-wing and reactionary that they’re spending their time raging over literal ads for porn. The second takeaway is how savvy new porn operations have become.
They’ve built these labyrinthian networks of SFW viral content on major platforms like Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube that guide users to their OnlyFans pages. And the final takeaway for me is that
at our current late stage of Web 2.0 everyone is having such a Bad Time Online at such a consistent level that you can build an entire media company off of short videos of young women saying random stuff that makes weird men angry. Inspiring, really.
Johns Hopkins Computer Science prof Professor Peter Fröhlich grades his students on a curve: the highest score on the final gets an A and everyone else is graded accordingly.
Clever students in Fröhlich’s “Intermediate Programming”, “Computer System Fundamentals,” and “Introduction to Programming for Scientists and Engineers” figured out that this meant that if they all boycotted the exam, they’d all get As.
So they organized a boycott, milling around the hall outside the class where the exams were being sat, sternly reminding each other that if no one sat the exam they’d all get straight As, ignoring Fröhlich’s pleas to come and sit the exam.
Fröhlich praised his students’ solidarity: “The students learned that by coming together, they can achieve something that individually they could never have done. At a school that is known (perhaps unjustly) for competitiveness I didn’t expect that reaching such an agreement was possible.”
Before you condemn this rather attractive fungi for being poisonous you should know that it is in a symbiotic relationship with the trees it is growing under. It infects the tree’s roots and then collects nutrients and water from the soil that are inaccessible to the tree and feeds them to the tree in exchange for carbohydrates that it can’t produce for it’s self. Both the tree and and the mushroom benefit from the relationship.
[I am in the office of the head of Holistic Theology. The room is large for an office, a big comfortable chair across from a long couch. Every surface is in calm, warm, neutral colors, and the furniture is soft plush that isn’t too casual. As I listen to a small bubbling fountain on a bookshelf along one wall, I am given the feeling of a therapist’s office rather than a bureaucratic official. It’s a change I welcome.
Before too long, Wren enters with an apologetic smile and a clipboard. They are tall, somewhat thin. Curly blonde hair over a slender face with big green eyes that smile as they sit in the big chair across from me. They’re wearing a taupe sweater that looks hand-knit, and their voice is calm and even, placing their clipboard on their lap.]
W] Hope you weren’t waiting too long. Meghan, was it?
M] Yes. Wren?
W] Mhm. Head of Holistic Theology for the Office.
M] I saw your division’s poster and I have…a
lotof questions.
“We have a new type of rule now. Not one-man rule, or rule of aristocracy or plutocracy, but of small groups elevated to positions of absolute power by random pressures, and subject to political and economic factors that leave little room for decision. They are representatives of abstract forces who have reached power through surrender of self. The iron-willed dictator is a thing of the past. There will be no more Stalins, no more Hitlers. The rulers of this most insecure of all worlds are rulers by accident, inept, frightened pilots at the controls of a vast machine they cannot understand, calling in experts to tell them which buttons to push.”
No one is going to give you the education you need to overthrow them. Nobody is going to teach you your true history, teach you your true heroes, if they know that that knowledge will help set you free.
—Assata Shakur
Excited to share a new book that I’ve made for LAY—OUT featuring 32 pages of esoteric graphic design Risograph printed in 2 colors with a 2 color silkscreened cover. Available now from shop.seenstudio.com along with many other books in the series from incredible artists and designers.
“Robert Beatty is a Lexington, Kentucky based designer, illustrator and musician whose work and techniques have become something of a gold standard in album artwork and editorial design. His work veers from psychedelic-adjacent 1970s airbrush to inscrutable vector linework to graphically downgraded imagery that feels filtered through broken technologies. Oftentimes in the same piece. His use of type and color only add to his formidable visual skills. His work is consistently inspiring and visually addictive.
For his LAY—OUT volume Robert has produced a suite of esoteric graphic design that feels like coded signals from a lost (or not yet found) civilization. In lush purple and black tones the compositions seem to exude meaning – quasi letterforms mingle with hazy images of storms or sound waves or maybe planetary collapse. Undulating forms ooze over one another, obscuring cartographies of unknowable sites.
32 Pages, 2 color Risograph print, 2 color silkscreened cover, hand stamped inner back cover First edition 2023”
So! This is a perfect case study in situations where you should be wary of misinformation.
Take a moment and ask yourself, a project like this requires a lot of time, money and dedication of resources, why would scientists dedicate that time to something that could just be done by a tree?
The answer is they wouldn’t. So that means this claim requires further investigation!
This project is called LIQUID 3, and it’s not meant for cities with wide open spaces, it’s meant for cities like Belgrade in Serbia. These cities are densely populated and heavily polluted, to the point where pollution actually chokes out current trees and makes creating green spaces difficult.
Liquid 3 was a PhD scientists answer to these problems. The microalgae tank is intended for spaces where you either:
Don’t have enough space to plant full trees, or
Don’t have enough time to plant trees and wait for them to grow up.
The tank is extremely efficient when you consider the amount of space needed compared to the amount of CO2 turned into oxygen. The tank can operate throughout the winter. And most importantly, it can be quickly set up in areas that desperately need relief from air pollution
NOWnot in 10 years when trees are done growing. Children currently suffocating on polluted air can’t wait for trees to grow, they need to be taken care of now, and Liquid 3 is one of the ways to take care of them. Depending on the species of microalgea used, a number have shown a pretty amazing capacity to pull heavy metals out of the air which is something trees can get choked up by.
The tanks aren’t just tanks either! Liquid 3 have solar panels placed on top, they have lighting and mobile phone charging, and they work as public benches. The designers of it want to encourage green spaces where there’s room, but where there isn’t room or time, Liquid 3 can step in.
Realistically, this isn’t a replacement for trees. It’s replacing boring metal city benches with new, cooler benches that also clean the air (and have at least some heating during the winter).
Not only that, but the microalgea that grows is native to Serbia and all that microalgea has a ton of great uses! It makes for great fertilizer, compost, wastewater treatment, cleaner biofuels and even for helping create new tanks for further air purification. They only require a quick algae divide once a month, and the produced algae can be carted off to where ever it’s needed. This makes them effective solutions for areas that can’t sustain complex installations.
So yeah, there’s actually quite a lot of places that would like these. Lots of people currently breathing in terrible quality air would much rather have their boring city benches replaced with really fucking cool algae tanks that clean the air and can be used to help create + sustain future green spaces in cities. I dunno about you, but I’d take that over a dumb metal bench any day. Put these at every bus stop and I’d be delighted.
Giant sequoias live only in scattered groves, at midelevations, on the southwestern side of the Sierra Nevada. Milarch thought that as the world warmed, the unique conditions in which they thrived — well-drained soil that’s neither too hot nor too cold and that is also fed by water from snow melting upslope — would disappear, eventually leading to the trees’ extinction.
Some, though not all, experts share these worries. “It’s highly likely that many of the giant sequoias in their current groves may not make it for the next century,” Park Williams, a climate scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles, who focuses on the Western United States, told me. He notes that the soil is becoming drier in the southern Sierra Nevada, and snowpack is disappearing earlier in the year, ushering in a longer dry season. “We’re already pushing up against the boundaries of what these trees can tolerate,” Williams says. Indeed, in 2020, one of the trees Stielstra visited years earlier on his trip, known as the Waterfall Tree, was killed by wildfire, after having survived climatic lashings for millenniums.
This problem — a species under increasing threat in the place it has long inhabited — isn’t limited to giant sequoias. According to the International Union for Conservation of Nature, more than 12,000 species are in similar situations. The question is what, if anything, can be done to prevent a raft of extinctions driven by our remaking of the earth’s climate. For Milarch, the answer was clear. He ascribed to something called “assisted migration”: moving species to more hospitable areas. Of course, you can’t move a massive, 200-foot tree itself, so Milarch learned to grow new trees from samples he had collected in order to plant these genetic copies beyond the tree’s current range. Stielstra was taken with this idea (though he would later be unable to find any scientists who agreed with Milarch’s claim that the genetics of specific “champion” trees were special). Not only would the species be more likely to survive, he thought, but because the trees suck so much carbon out of the atmosphere, they could also help fight climate change. By the end of the trip, Stielstra resolved to move some of Milarch’s trees to Seattle.
Stielstra knew that Milarch would send him coast redwoods, a close relative of the giant sequoia (both species are commonly referred to as “redwoods”). And he knew they could survive Seattle’s climate: Three giant sequoias, about 80 feet tall, were growing by the entrance to a freeway that passed through his neighborhood, and there were groves of both coast redwoods and giant sequoias, healthy and majestic, in the Washington Park Arboretum that were planted decades earlier.
We came here from a dying world. We drift through the universe, from planet to planet, pushed on by the solar winds. We adapt and we survive. The function of life is survival.
Invasion of the Body Snatchers
(1978) dir. Philip Kaufman
The researchers tested the attack on Stable Diffusion’s latest models and on an AI model they trained themselves from scratch. When they fed Stable Diffusion just 50 poisoned images of dogs and then prompted it to create images of dogs itself, the output started looking weird—creatures with too many limbs and cartoonish faces. With 300 poisoned samples, an attacker can manipulate Stable Diffusion to generate images of dogs to look like cats.
Sure, sometimes it really does make sense to do your own research. There’s times when you really do need to take personal responsibility for the way things are going. But there’s limits. We live in a highly technical world, in which hundreds of esoteric, potentially lethal factors impinge on your life every day.
You can’t “do your own research” to figure out whether all that stuff is safe and sound. Sure, you might be able to figure out whether a contractor’s assurances about a new steel joist for your ceiling are credible, but after you do that, are you also going to independently audit the software in your car’s antilock brakes?
How about the nutritional claims on your food and the sanitary conditions in the industrial kitchen it came out of? If those turn out to be inadequate, are you going to be able to validate the medical advice you get in the ER when you show up at 3AM with cholera? While you’re trying to figure out the #HIPAAWaiver they stuck in your hand on the way in?
40 years ago, Ronald Reagan declared war on “the administrative state,” and “government bureaucrats” have been the favored bogeyman of the American right ever since. Even if Steve Bannon hasn’t managed to get you to froth about the “Deep State,” there’s a good chance that you’ve griped about red tape from time to time.
Not without reason, mind you. The fact that the government
can make good rules doesn’t mean it
will. When we redid our kitchen this year, the city inspector added a bunch of arbitrary electrical outlets to the contractor’s plans in places where neither we, nor any future owner, will every need them.
But the answer to bad regulation isn’t
no regulation. During the same kitchen reno, our contractor discovered that at some earlier time, someone had installed our kitchen windows without the accompanying vapor-barriers. In the decades since, the entire structure of our kitchen walls had rotted out. Not only was the entire front of our house one good earthquake away from collapsing – there were two half rotted verticals supporting the whole thing – but replacing the rotted walls added more than $10k to the project.
In other words, the problem isn’t
too much regulation, it’s
the wrong regulation. I want our city inspectors to make sure that contractors install vapor barriers, but to not demand superfluous electrical outlets.
Which raises the question: where do regulations come from? How do we get them right?
“Duolingo is ‘sunsetting the development of the Welsh course’ (and many others)”.
I’ve used Duolingo since 2013. It used to be about genuinely learning languages and preserving endangered ones. It used to have a vibrant community and forum where users were listened to. It used to have volunteers that dedicated countless hours and even years to making the best courses they could while also trying to explain extremely nuanced and complex grammar in simple terms.
In the past two years it feels like Von Ahn let the money talk instead of focusing on the original goal.
No one truly had a humongous problem with the subscription tier for SuperDuolingo. We understood it: if you can afford to pay, help keep Duolingo free for those who couldn’t.
It started when the company went public. Volunteers were leaving courses they created because they warned of differing longterm goals compared to Duolingo’s as a company; not long after it was announced that the incubator (how volunteers were able to make courses in the first place) would be shut down. A year goes by and the forums—the voice of the users and the way people were able to share tips and explanations—is discontinued. A year or two later, Duolingo gets a completely new makeover—the Tree is gone and you don’t control what lesson you start with. With the disappearance of the Tree, all grammar notes and explanations for courses not in the Big 8 (consisting of the courses made before the incubator like Spanish/French/German/etc. and of the most popular courses like Japanese/Korean/Chinese/etc.) are removed with it. Were you learning Vietnamese and have no idea how honorifics work without the grammar notes? Shit outta luck bud. Were you learning Polish and have absolutely no clue how one of the declensions newly thrown at you functions? Suck it up. In a Reddit AMA, Von Ahn claims that the new design resulted in more users utilizing the app/site. How he claims that statistic?
By counting how many people log into their Duolingo account, as if an entire app renovation wouldn’t cause an uptick in numbers to even see what the fuck just happened to the courses.
Von Ahn announces next in a Reddit AMA that no more language courses will be added from what there already is available. His reasoning?
No one uses the unpopular language courses— along with how Duolingo will now be doing upkeep with the courses already in place. And here I am, currently looking on the Duolingo website how there are 1.8 million active learners for Irish, 284 thousand active learners for Navajo, and even 934 thousand active learners for fucking High Valyrian. But yea, no one uses them. Not like the entire Navajo Nation population is 399k members or anything, or like 1.8 million people isn’t 36% of the entire population of Ireland or anything.
And now this. What happened to the upkeep of current courses? Oh, Von Ahn only meant the popular ones that already have infinite resources. Got it. Duolingo used to be a serious foundational resource for languages with little resources while also adding the relief of gamification.
It pisses me off. It really does. This was not what Duolingo started out as. And yea, maybe I shouldn’t get invested in a dingy little app. But as someone who spent most of her adolescence immersed in language learning to the point where it was literally keeping me alive at one point, to the point where languages felt like my only friend as a tween, and to the point where friendships on the Duolingo forums with likeminded individuals my age and other enthusiasts who even sent me books in other languages for free because they wanted people to learn it, the evolution of Duolingo hits a bitter nerve within me.
~End rant.
There’s an actual term for this, enshittification. I honestly believe the words “went public” are the sign of infection these days.
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