R\A\W M\A\T\E\R\I\A\L # 1896 - # 1899 Max Kuiper \24\nov\24
\ R\A\W M\A\T\E\R\I\A\L
\ # 1896 - \ # 1899
\ Max Kuiper
\24\nov\24
\ R\A\W M\A\T\E\R\I\A\L
\ # 1896 - \ # 1899
\ Max Kuiper
\24\nov\24
Bros middle name is BAD LUCK..
😭😭
@ominous-signs have you gotten this yet
An incomplete taxonomy of esoteric texts:
- This text is discussing esoteric subject matter
- This text is being deliberately obscure because its author knows they don’t have a coherent thesis and they’re blowing smoke
- This text is written in earnest, but its author has very poor communication skills
- This text’s translator has misunderstood something that was meant completely literally as a complex metaphor
- This text is actually perfectly straightforward in its native language, but every available translation fucking sucks
6. The author is a troll, and is fucking with a very specific target audience, who would have been well aware they are being fucked with.
You are not the target audience, and thus are missing the joke.
7. This text was reasonably accessible in the context it was written in. It has been removed from that context and is now completely impossible to understand.
The book you are advised to read to understand what this book is going on about has not been digitised. There is a reference copy available at a library 800 miles away. An eBay seller based in Russia is selling a copy for £300, there is no picture of the book included in the listing.
A few related thoughts on abstraction:
1) One classic way to think about abstraction is as the process of forgetting stuff on purpose. You look at a concrete situation, in all its infinite complexity, and say “ok, for the given problem I’m trying to solve, which of these details do I have to worry about and which can I ignore?” You then pick some to keep and “forget” the rest, and there you have an abstraction. This is both very powerful and very dangerous.
One reason abstraction is powerful is that it can turn intractable problems into tractable ones. The human mind can’t possibly keep account of every minute detail of a situation, so if you want to get anything done you have to select a few to focus on and leave the rest for later. A problem that without abstraction would be utterly unsolvable can become manageable with abstraction. As an aside, for this reason, abstraction is also unavoidable. We’re abstracting things all the time in our everyday life, and we simply wouldn’t be able to process the world around us without doing that. There are people who don’t like abstraction, because of the various dangers in it (which I’ll get to), but to those people you kinda have to say: tough luck. Abstraction is the bread and butter of human cognition. Or something like that.
Another reason abstraction is powerful is because it allows you to generalize. If you can pick out the salient details in a situation and focus your analysis only on those, then guess what: that analysis will also be useful in all the other situations in which those salient details are the same. Since the minutiae of basically everything differ, if you refuse to abstract at all, you’ll be forced to analyze every new question totally from scratch. Abstracting allows you to pass over reasoning from one situation into another, or to reason generally about many situations at once. I hope it goes without saying that this is very useful. It’s also another argument for the necessity of abstraction: there are simply too many possible situations, too many questions, for us to think through each one separately with no overlap. Even in a very mundane sense, we need to make generalizations like “chairs can usually be sat on”, “bread is usually edible” and so forth to get through the day. Generalization is a prerequisite for thinking about and interacting with the world basically at all. And abstraction is necessary for generalization.
But, ok, abstraction is also very dangerous. It’s very dangerous because you’re forgetting things on purpose! You’re purposely choosing to ignore certain details! What if those details turn out to be relevant? What if ignoring them leads you to terribly wrong conclusions, or totally handicaps your ability to solve your problem? These dangers are not just hypothetical, they often come to pass when we’re abstracting. And this is very troubling. This is why some people think we should avoid abstraction, and why they can’t be easily dismissed. If abstraction is this incredibly powerful tool, indeed if it’s this unavoidable thing that we do, then the fact that it comes with significant inherent dangers is inconvenient, to say the least.
2) So abstraction is this sort of eldritch power, that we’d like to bring to bear on our various questions about the world, but which comes with inherent epistemic risks. What can be done about this? Well, I think one of the principle factors in the success of the sciences is that they’ve found really good methods of reining in abstraction, of keeping it on a leash, which allows them to apply it in ever more delicate situations where unmitigated abstraction would fail spectacularly.
For instance, take mathematical formalism (not the philosophical school, but formalism as in “a formalism"—i.e. rigor). Mathematical formalism is, I think, maybe the single most powerful leash on abstraction that humanity has ever devised. In mathematics, we take these incredibly out-there ideas about logic and space and structure, and translate them into a formal game of symbols that we can play on a page. Big questions about the nature of reality are turned into small questions about pluses and sigmas and epsilons. And even when mathematicians are thinking post-rigorously—using abstraction in its full power—this formalism acts as a check on just how much it can run amok.
Mathematical formalism is so powerful, in fact, that it rules out the vast majority of abstractions we make in everyday life. "Chairs can usually be sat in”, and “bread is usually edible” don’t stand up to its very high standard. In fact, no empirical observations stand up to its very high standard! Once this formalism has been applied, only the abstractions that we can really control remain, those bound indelibly by logic. Everything else is blasted away. This lets us apply abstraction in ever more complex ways in mathematics, where in other fields we’d lose control of it. So we tend to think of mathematics as a very abstract field, but I think this framing leaves the most important part out! Mathematics might be better understood as a field that could become very abstract while staying productive, because its abstraction-leashing tools are so powerful.
In contrast (I know this sounds contentious, but hear me out), I think philosophy is what happens when you give yourself no abstraction-leashing tools at all. And, look, I like philosophy a lot (in fact, I’m doing philosophy right now!), but the thing about philosophy is that it’s really easy for philosophy to be bullshit. There’s a lot of really great philosophy out there, but there’s also a lot of… total nonsense. Words on page. Just absolute blabber. Why? Well, maybe one reason is that a lot of philosophy seems to set up some abstractions and then let them totally run amok, ride them wherever they go, just go wild with it. And this is really fun, it’s what like half of my posts are. But it often leads to nonsense, to just saying a bunch of words that mean almost nothing at all. You’re out in abstraction land and your connection to the real world has been totally severed.
Perhaps that’s another way to think about abstraction-leashing, as a sort of tether between the abstraction and the real world. You need some kind of wire, hooking your abstractions way up in the sky to concrete things here on the ground, so that all the convolutions going on way up there can be translated into something actionable down here. Without some sort of tether, some translation scheme to turn abstract into concrete and vice-versa, your abstraction doesn’t do much good. It just floats around up there, disconnected, not able to actually say anything. And because you’re a concrete being who ultimately can only take concrete actions (of which even thought is a subset), I’m tempted to say that you can’t even meaningfully interact with an abstraction that lacks a proper translation scheme. You can solve a math problem by shuffling symbols, that’s something you can do. But in philosophy you have all these intractable problems, and it looks to me like one of the main reasons for their intractability is that you can’t “get at them” the way you can “get at” math. You have no tether, no way of concretely interacting with the objects and ideas under consideration, so they just kind of aimlessly float around.
3) So anyway, I’d like a name for these tethers, these abstraction-leashes. And I think a good one is “concretization schemes”. A concretization scheme is a method for translating between the elements and conclusions of your abstraction on the one hand, and the concrete elements of your immediate experience (things you can see and do, etc.) on the other hand.
The concretization scheme in mathematics is mathematical formalism. The concretization scheme in physics is measurement. Actually there’s a quote, which I think I saw in Spivak’s Physics for Mathematicians, that’s something like “In mathematics we introduce new primitives by providing axioms for their behavior. In physics we introduce new primitives by defining a process for measuring them.” That’s exactly what I’m talking about. That’s laying down a concretization scheme.
In general, measurement and experiment are the concretization schemes for the sciences, but I think it’s important to distinguish this concretizing role (whose primary function is, in some sense, to give the abstraction meaning) from the epistemic role of experiment (whose primary function is to check whether a theory is predictive). But these things are maybe somewhat inextricable, since giving meaning to an abstraction often means giving truth conditions, and giving truth conditions is often inextricable from having a specific way to check truth conditions. So I think it’s fair to say that truth-checking procedures are often a fundamental part of concretizing, of reining in abstractions, but they don’t in principle have to be.
Here are some more diverse examples. I think the concretizing scheme in language learning is speaking, reading, listening and so on. You turn abstract grammatical concepts into something specific you can do with people, and thereby get (implicit and explicit) feedback and can appropriately modify the abstractions in your head, etc. The concretization scheme for these same abstractions (grammar) in linguistics is a bit different—it should be measurement and experiment—because linguistics is aiming to be a science. So the same abstractions can have different schemes for different ends. A lot of good philosophy has a concretization scheme burried in it somewhere, like a lot of philosophy of science is concretized in actually performing various different scientific methodologies. And so on.
OP: Commentator Robert is the most chaotic cyber ghost
Cnetizens: Our local specialty mean AI has secretly passed the Turing test
(Commenter Robert is a chatbot that comes with the twitter-like Chinese social media platform weibo, which randomly appears in the user’s comment section and comments on the user’s posts. Cnetizens also created an account called Robert’s Victims Alliance dedicated to post its misdeeds.)
hi, i’m your local laid off discord employee, here to talk about exactly how safe it may or may not be to talk about Political Activism on discord. my credentials here are that i was a senior member of discord’s trust & safety team, which is the team that handles bans, legal investigations, and legal compliance. (my speciality was in child safety, anti-grooming, and taking down CSAM, but i also worked occasionally in low level terrorism issues and assisted that team in investigations.) i also know most of the people still working there in these capacities.
the tldr and most important thing to know is: i do not recommend you plan, discuss plans, or use any kind of hyperbolic (or not) language about violence to government officials or anyone in that vicinity on discord. please use signal instead.
a discord trust & safety employee is technically able to see any message you’ve sent under your account, going all the way back to the beginning of your account. unless you have manually deleted a message, it is viewable to a tns employee. now: it is a tremendous part of being on a tns team that we did NOT invade user privacy without cause. cause was usually: another user reported something you said, and we thought the reported message indicated you might be doing something elsewhere that was illegal (for example: a user says “i’m talking to this girl but she’s in high school lol.” i would then try to find evidence as to whether or not there was a child safety issue there. in this example, we’d require clear admission of age from both the user and the alleged high school girl, and then clear evidence of sexual talk between them, and go from there.) finding evidence required looking though all of that user’s messages.
most of the tns team, as i know them, are pretty resolute about not going further in looking than would be needed for action. most of the tns team that i still speak to is very much on the side of blue. your general conversations are probably perfectly safe, and we were very good at figuring out quickly if someone has reported you maliciously. i don’t believe you need to worry too much about your porn and fanfic and all that.
HOWEVER: reported content must be investigated, and discord can, and has been, legally subpoenaed to turn over user information. again, this has nominally been in Very Evil cases (CSAM and grooming, school shooting threats, murder admissions, etc.) but that could change, either at the federal level, or at the discord policy level. discord, like any social media company, could easily be pressured or forced into taking on different internal policies that could get you in serious trouble if you are organizing violent or “illegal” resistance. if that happens, there is a scenario where this incoming administration is given access to your messages.
again: please do not organize your political or social resistance on discord from now on. please use signal to ensure your maximum safety. do not panic if you have already talks about things on discord: you can easily delete your messages, and that WILL remove from an employee’s view. do that and use signal from now on.
stay safe. i love you. 💕
Diana Scherer, Entanglements, (corn, soil, plastic net, synthetic fiber and textiles; detail), 2017-2020 [© Diana Scherer / InterWoven]
Shiveluch volcano eruption in Kamchatka
l IViS_DVO_RAN ( x ) l August 2024
Wonderful photos of the Star Trek III self-destructed U.S.S. Enterprise model, from the Set Blueprint Archive
The biggest grid storage project using old batteries is online in…
Excerpt from this story from Canary Media:
Cleaning up the grid will require installing a lot of batteries to store renewable energy. Startup Element Energy has delivered a powerful proofpoint for a new way to do that more cheaply without sacrificing safety.
Element has been operating what appears to be the largest grid storage plant in the world composed of previously used electric vehicle batteries, co-founder and CEO Tony Stratakos told Canary Media last week. The 53 megawatt-hour project, which is located in West Texas at a wind farm owned by mega-developer Nextera Energy Resources, came online in May, but the startup is going public with the information now for the first time.
Previously, the largest second-life grid battery that Canary Media had reported on was B2U Storage Solutions’ project in Lancaster, California, which has grown to 28 megawatt-hours.
Element got its hands on a warehouse full of modules taken out of used EV battery packs, all in various states of health after their time pushing different cars around. The startup repackages them into containers operated by its proprietary hardware and software, which fine-tune commands at the cell level, instead of treating all the batteries as a monolithic whole. This enables the system to get more use out of each cell without stressing any so much that they break down or — worst-case scenario for a battery plant — cause a fire.
Element Energy is technically the battery vendor to the power plant’s owner. So far, no company has publicly taken credit for buying this innovative system from Element and installing it, though a Department of Energy grant announcement for the project describes it as a joint pursuit with Nextera, which happens to own the wind farm location where the batteries were installed.
Since Element isn’t in the business of power plant development, its strategy relies on leveraging the success of this first major installation to convince more storage developers to buy its lower priced, refurbished grid batteries instead of the brand-new variety.
Venture capitalists have doubled down on that strategy, handing Element a $72 million Series B last November, alongside a $38 million debt facility from Keyframe Capital. That followed a $15 million Series A in 2019.
Stratakos also revealed that his company finalized a partnership with LG Energy Solution Vertech, the grid storage branch of one of the major global lithium-ion manufacturers. That much bigger company — which previously invested in Element through its venture arm — will take Element’s battery enclosures and supply the inverters and auxiliary equipment needed to make a turnkey power plant. LG will also provide operations and maintenance, alleviating the risks associated with buying a long-term grid asset from a young startup.
Oh my god that’s fucking hilarious
The dog just playing the best game of fetch ever
[Practice of neurosurgery on Saturn
We practice Neurosurgery on SATURN in a country called « ILLUSIONLAND ». 60 million homo sapiens sapiens who live in this country migrated 30 years ago from the Earth. According to anatomical data, there is no difference between terrestrial and Saturnian homo sapiens sapiens. Modern medical and surgical technology has also been imported from Earth. The Saturnians of earthling descent of the earth-lings have roughly kept the same way of life, society, habits, etc. they inherited from their earthly ancestors.]
Walnut shells cut in half.
Johnson Tsang
Reverse engineers bust sleazy gig work platform
If you’d like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here’s a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/11/23/hack-the-class-war/#robo-boss
A COMPUTER CAN NEVER BE HELD ACCOUNTABLE
THEREFORE A COMPUTER MUST NEVER MAKE A MANAGEMENT DECISION
Supposedly, these lines were included in a 1979 internal presentation at IBM; screenshots of them routinely go viral:
https://twitter.com/SwiftOnSecurity/status/1385565737167724545?lang=en
The reason for their newfound popularity is obvious: the rise and rise of algorithmic management tools, in which your boss is an app. That IBM slide is right: turning an app into your boss allows your actual boss to create an “accountability sink” in which there is no obvious way to blame a human or even a company for your maltreatment:
https://profilebooks.com/work/the-unaccountability-machine/
App-based management-by-bossware treats the bug identified by the unknown author of that IBM slide into a feature. When an app is your boss, it can force you to scab:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/30/computer-says-scab/#instawork
Or it can steal your wages:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/12/algorithmic-wage-discrimination/#fishers-of-men
But tech giveth and tech taketh away. Digital technology is infinitely flexible: the program that spies on you can be defeated by another program that defeats spying. Every time your algorithmic boss hacks you, you can hack your boss back:
https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/02/not-what-it-does/#who-it-does-it-to
Technologists and labor organizers need one another. Even the most precarious and abused workers can team up with hackers to disenshittify their robo-bosses:
https://pluralistic.net/2021/07/08/tuyul-apps/#gojek
For every abuse technology brings to the workplace, there is a liberating use of technology that workers unleash by seizing the means of computation:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/13/solidarity-forever/#tech-unions
One tech-savvy group on the cutting edge of dismantling the Torment Nexus is Algorithms Exposed, a tiny, scrappy group of EU hacker/academics who recruit volunteers to reverse engineer and modify the algorithms that rule our lives as workers and as customers:
https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/10/e2e/#the-censors-pen
Algorithms Exposed have an admirable supply of seemingly boundless energy. Every time I check in with them, I learn that they’ve spun out yet another special-purpose subgroup. Today, I learned about Reversing Works, a hacking team that reverse engineers gig work apps, revealing corporate wrongdoing that leads to multimillion euro fines for especially sleazy companies.
One such company is Foodinho, an Italian subsidiary of the Spanish food delivery company Glovo. Foodinho/Glovo has been in the crosshairs of Italian labor enforcers since before the pandemic, racking up millions in fines – first for failing to file the proper privacy paperwork disclosing the nature of the data processing in the app that Foodinho riders use to book jobs. Then, after the Italian data commission investigated Foodinho, the company attracted new, much larger fines for its out-of-control surveillance conduct.
Automne
Saturn, the planet with the most known moons in our solar system: 146
Repeating ourselves
but scanned
The Himalayas, with Mount Everest at top center, captured by satellite at a low angle. The range contains some of Earth’s highest peaks, including over 100 that exceed 23,600 feet (7,200 meters) in elevation. The Himalayas abut or cross five countries: Bhutan, India, Nepal, China, and Pakistan.
Source imagery: Planet
MullenLowe / Tinker / Typography / 2024
Pyramid, 2019 by David Altmejd
Members of the Red Warriors, an antifascist gang in France, 1985. Red Warriors used violent force to remove Neo Nazi gangs from France and provide safe spaces for immigrants during the rise of white nationalism and an outbreak of violent crime against people of colour. They formed a squat called “L.U.S.I.N.E” and were considered the most effective gang to counter nazi violence, working to instill fear in their opposition.
Giordano, A., Zaggia, S., Bernardello, R.A. et al. Geometric Configuration of the Anatomical Theater of Padua. Nexus Netw J 25 (Suppl 1), 175–183 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00004-023-00687-3
littlechien posted this
Vorja Sánchez
Serenity Villa, Tehran, Iran
Green Clay Architecture
Hashima is a small abandoned island about 9.3 miles (15 km) off the coast of Nagasaki, Japan. The island was continuously inhabited from 1887 to 1974 as a seabed coal mining facility, with a peak population of 5,259 in 1959. However, as petroleum began replacing coal in Japan in the 1960s, the mine was closed and cleared of inhabitants. Its abandoned concrete buildings, undisturbed except by nature, and surrounding seawall make the island an eerie, yet popular, tourist destination.
32.627778°, 129.738333°
Source imagery: Maxar
Diana Scherer, Entanglements, (corn, soil, plastic net, synthetic fiber and textiles; detail), 2017-2020 [© Diana Scherer / InterWoven]
Expert agencies and elected legislatures
If you’d like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here’s a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/11/21/policy-based-evidence/#decisions-decisions
Since Trump hijacked the Supreme Court, his backers have achieved many of their policy priorities: legalizing bribery, formalizing forced birth, and – with the Loper Bright case, neutering the expert agencies that regulate business:
https://jacobin.com/2024/07/scotus-decisions-chevron-immunity-loper
What the Supreme Court began, Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy are now poised to finish, through the “Department of Government Efficiency,” a fake agency whose acronym (“DOGE”) continues Musk’s long-running cryptocurrency memecoin pump-and-dump. The new department is absurd – imagine a department devoted to “efficiency” with two co-equal leaders who are both famously incapable of getting along with anyone – but that doesn’t make it any less dangerous.
Expert agencies are often all that stands between us and extreme misadventure, even death. The modern world is full of modern questions, the kinds of questions that require a high degree of expert knowledge to answer, but also the kinds of questions whose answers you’d better get right.
You’re not stupid, nor are you foolish. You could go and learn everything you need to know to evaluate the firmware on your antilock brakes and decide whether to trust them. You could figure out how to assess the Common Core curriculum for pedagogical soundness. You could learn the material science needed to evaluate the soundness of the joists that hold the roof up over your head. You could acquire the biology and chemistry chops to decide whether you want to trust produce that’s been treated with Monsanto’s Roundup pesticides. You could do the same for cell biology, virology, and epidemiology and decide whether to wear a mask and/or get an MRNA vaccine and/or buy a HEPA filter.
You could do any of these. You might even be able to do two or three of them. But you can’t do all of them, and that list is just a small slice of all the highly technical questions that stand between you and misery or an early grave. Practically speaking, you aren’t going to develop your own robust meatpacking hygiene standards, nor your own water treatment program, nor your own Boeing 737 MAX inspection protocol.
Markets don’t solve this either. If they did, we wouldn’t have to worry about chunks of Boeing jets falling on our heads. The reason we have agencies like the FDA (and enabling legislation like the Pure Food and Drug Act) is that markets failed to keep people from being murdered by profit-seeking snake-oil salesmen and radium suppository peddlers.
These vital questions need to be answered by experts, but that’s easier said than done. After all, experts disagree about this stuff. Shortcuts for evaluating these disagreements (“distrust any expert whose employer has a stake in a technical question”) are crude and often lead you astray. If you dismiss any expert employed by a firm that wants to bring a new product to market, you will lose out on the expertise of people who are so legitimately excited about the potential improvements of an idea that they quit their jobs and go to work for whomever has the best chance of realizing a product based on it. Sure, that doctor who works for a company with a new cancer cure might just be shilling for a big bonus – but maybe they joined the company because they have an informed, truthful belief that the new drug might really cure cancer.
Fantastic. These morons will be running scream tests on EVERY SAFETY REGULATION WE HAVE.
Large Geospatial Model
Pokémon Go Players Have Unwittingly Trained AI to Navigate the World
Niantic, the company behind the extremely popular augmented reality mobile games Pokémon Go and Ingress, announced that it is using data collected by its millions of players to create an AI model that can navigate the physical world.
In a blog post published last week, first spotted by Garbage Day, Niantic says it is building a “Large Geospatial Model.” This name, the company explains, is a direct reference to Large Language Models (LLMs) Like OpenAI’s GPT, which are trained on vast quantities of text scraped from the internet in order to process and produce natural language. Niantic explains that a Large Geospatial Model, or LGM, aims to do the same for the physical world, a technology it says “will enable computers not only to perceive and understand physical spaces, but also to interact with them in new ways, forming a critical component of AR glasses and fields beyond, including robotics, content creation and autonomous systems. As we move from phones to wearable technology linked to the real world, spatial intelligence will become the world’s future operating system.”
By training an AI model on millions of geolocated images from around the world, the model will be able to predict its immediate environment in the same way an LLM is able to produce coherent and convincing sentences by statistically determining what word is likely to follow another. …
Building a Large Geospatial Model to Achieve Spatial Intelligence
The LGM will enable computers not only to perceive and understand physical spaces, but also to interact with them in new ways, forming a critical component of AR glasses and fields beyond, including robotics, content creation and autonomous systems. As we move from phones to wearable technology linked to the real world, spatial intelligence will become the world’s future operating system….
Lajos Sirò
Hamburg, 2024
Don Quixote ©yama-bato
( Mygraphic work)
Davide Rubini / Ditroit Studio / Iterations / Graphics / 2023
China’s Soaring Emissions Are Upending Climate Politics. (New York Times)
Excerpt from this New York Times story:
For many years, wealthy places like the United States and Europe have had the biggest historical responsibility for global warming and have been tasked with taking the lead in stopping it.
China’s astonishing rise is upending that dynamic.
Over the past three decades, China has built more than 1,000 coal-fired power plants as its economy has grown more than 40-fold. The country has become by far the largest annual emitter of greenhouse gases in the world.
The United States has still pumped more total planet-warming pollution into the atmosphere since the 19th century, in part because the country has been burning coal, oil and natural gas for longer. But China is quickly catching up.
Last year, China for the first time passed Europe as the second-largest historical emitter, according to an analysis published on Tuesday by Carbon Brief, a climate research site.
When humans burn fossil fuels or cut down forests, the resulting carbon dioxide typically lingers in the atmosphere for hundreds of years, heating the planet all the while. That’s why historical emissions are often used as a gauge of responsibility for global warming.
China, for its part, has promised that its emissions will peak this decade and then start falling. The country is installing more wind turbines and solar panels than all other nations combined and leads the world in electric vehicle sales. But even with China’s shift to low-carbon energy, the Carbon Brief analysis found, the nation’s historical emissions are projected to approach those of the United States in the coming years.
China’s historical responsibility for climate change has become a major point of contention in global climate politics.
This week, diplomats and leaders from nearly 200 countries have gathered at the United Nations climate summit in Baku, Azerbaijan, to discuss how to raise the trillions of dollars that vulnerable nations will need to shift to clean energy and to cope with droughts, heat waves, floods and other hazards of a warming planet. One big question is where that money should come from.
Traditionally, the answer has been that wealthy, industrialized countries — like the United States, Japan, Canada, Australia and most of western Europe — should pay up.
Under a United Nations framework originally written in 1992, these developed countries have been called upon to provide financial aid. Countries like China, India and Saudi Arabia, as well as every nation in Africa, are classified as developing by that framework, and have not been required to chip in.
Today, however, many wealthy nations say this distinction no longer makes sense. Leaders from both the United States and European Union have called on China to contribute more climate finance to poorer countries as part of a final deal at Baku.
One of the Laser Geodynamics Satellites.
Sangmin Oh Illuminates Upcycled Industrial Fiber in Knitted Lighting Sculptures
Two fiber-optic cables – one linking Finland and Germany, the other connecting Sweden to Lithuania – stopped working between Sunday and Monday, recalling previous security incidents in the busy waterway affected by war between Russia and Ukraine.
“We have to state, without knowing specifically who it came from, that it is a ‘hybrid’ action. And we also have to assume, without knowing it yet, that it is sabotage,”
“No one believes that these cables were cut accidentally. I also don’t want to believe in versions that these were ship anchors that accidentally caused the damage,” German Defence Minister Boris Pistorius said before a meeting with EU colleagues in Brussels.
November 18, 2024
Two undersea fiber-optic communications cables in the Baltic Sea, including one linking Finland and Germany, were severed, raising suspicions of sabotage by bad actors, countries and companies involved said on Monday.
The episode recalled other incidents in the same waterway that authorities have probed as potentially malicious including damage to a gas pipeline and undersea cables last year and the 2022 explosions of the Nord Stream gas pipelines.
The 1,200-kilometer (745-mile) cable connecting Helsinki to the German port of Rostock stopped working around 0200 GMT on Monday, Finnish state-controlled cyber security and telecoms company Cinia said.
A 218-km (135-mile) internet link between Lithuania and Sweden’s Gotland Island went out of service at about 0800 GMT on Sunday, according to Lithuania’s Telia Lietuva, part of Sweden’s Telia Company group.
Finland and Germany said in a joint statement that they were “deeply concerned about the severed undersea cable” and were investigating “an incident (that) immediately raises suspicions of intentional damage.”
November 18, 2024
A day after the C-Lion1 and BCS subsea data cables in the Baltic Sea, connecting Finland and Germany as well as Sweden and Lithuania, were damaged, specifics of the incident remain unconfirmed.
The incident is reminiscent of a similar event in 2023 when the Balticonnector between Finland and Estonia was damaged. Hong Kong-registered container vessel
NewNew Polar Bear was later found to have dragged its anchor across the pipeline.
Danish authorities appear to have narrowed down a possible culprit to Chinese bulker
Yi Peng 3, which traveled over the reported incident site at the time of the failure. Its AIS track shows the vessel drifting back and forth for around an hour the morning of November 18.
November 19, 2024
Does the Internet Route Around Damage? - Baltic Sea Cable Cuts
digital superimposition of 3 layers of drawings
Deleonarquitectos
Casa Picasso, Cuba
Ant-mimicking Treehopper (Cyphonia clavata)
A L V A N O T O | Carsten Nicolai
raster-noton etc
Swing Through the World’s Most Spectacular Artist-Designed Playgrounds
materialsscienceandengineering:
Additional tests demonstrate chalk-coated textiles’ cooling effect in urban environments
As air temperatures stay elevated through fall months, people may still want clothes that cool them down while outside, especially if they live in cities that stay warmer than rural landscapes. Researchers who previously demonstrated a cooling fabric coating now report on additional tests of a treated polyester fabric in an article published in ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces. Fabric treated with the team’s chalk-based coating kept the air underneath up to 6°F cooler in warmer urban environments.
Researchers Evan D. Patamia, Megan K. Yee and Trisha L. Andrew created a polymer-mineral coating for commercial fabrics and presented preliminary assessments of the coating’s cooling effect at ACS Fall 2024, a meeting of the American Chemical Society, held August 18–22 in Denver.
Cheese Ring, Cornwall. Photograph.
Wellcome Collection
Xiao Yang’scustom prosthetic leg by YVMIN
Forcing Google to spin off Chrome (and Android?)
If you’d like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here’s a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/11/19/breaking-up-is-hard-to-do/#shiny-and-chrome
Last August, a federal judge convicted Google of being “a monopolist” and acting “as one to maintain its monopoly.” The judge concluded that key to Google’s monopoly was the vast troves of data it collects and analyzes and asked the parties to come up with remedies to address this.
Many trustbusters and Google competitors read this and concluded that Google should be forced to share its click and quer y data. The technical term for this is “apocalyptically stupid.” Releasing Google’s click and query data into the wild is a privacy Chernobyl in the waiting. The secrets that we whisper to search engines have the power to destroy us a thousand times over.
Largely theoretical answers like “differential privacy” are promising, but remain theoretical at scale. The first large-scale live-fire exercise for these should not be something as high-stakes as Google’s click and query data. If anything, we should delete that data:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/08/07/revealed-preferences/#extinguish-v-improve
The last thing we want to do is use antitrust to democratize surveillance so that everyone can spy as efficiently as Google does. In theory, we could sanitize the click and query data by limiting sharing to queries that were made by multiple, independent users (say, only sharing queries that at least 30 users have made), but it’s unlikely that this will do much to improve the performance of rival firms’ search engines.
Google only retains 18 months’ worth of click and query data, thus once we cut off its capacity to collect more data, whatever advantage it has from surveillance will begin to decay immediately and fall to zero in 18 months.
(However: the 18 months figure is deceptive, and deliberately so. Google may only retain your queries for 18 months, but it is silent on how long it retains the inferences from those queries. It may discard your “how do I get an abortion in my red state” query after a year and a half, but indefinitely retain the “sought an illegal abortion” label it added to your profile. The US desperately needs a federal consumer privacy law!)
https://pluralistic.net/2023/12/06/privacy-first/#but-not-just-privacy
And just to be clear, there’s other Google data that would be very useful to rival search engines, like Google’s search index – the trove of pages from the internet. Google already licenses this out, and search engines like Kagi use it to produce substantially superior search results:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/04/teach-me-how-to-shruggie/#kagi
The DOJ has just filed its proposal for a remedy, and it’s a doozy: forcing Google to sell off Chrome, on the basis that both of these are the source of much of Google’s data, and no rival search engine is likely to also have a widely used browser:
https://9to5google.com/2024/11/18/us-doj-google-sell-chrome/
This represents something of a compromise position: the DOJ had initially signalled that it would also demand a selloff of Android, and that’s been dropped. I think there’s a good case for forcing the sale of Android as a source of data, too.
In competition theory, these selloffs are referred to as “structural separation” – when a company that provides infrastructure to other firms is prohibited from competing with those firms:
https://locusmag.com/2022/03/cory-doctorow-vertically-challenged/
For example, it used to be that banks were prohibited from competing with the companies they loaned money to. After all, if you borrow money from Chase to open a pizzeria, and then Chase opens a pizzeria of its own across the street, you can see how your business would be doomed. You have to make interest payments to Chase, and your rival doesn’t, and if Chase wants to, it can subsidize that rival so it can sell pizzas below cost until you’re out of business.
Likewise, rail companies were banned from owning freight companies, because otherwise they would destroy the businesses of every freight company that shipped on the railroad.
In theory, you could create fair play rules that required the bank or the railroad to play nice with the business customers that used their platforms, but in practice, there are so many ways of cheating that this would be unenforceable.
This principle is well established in all other areas of business, and we recoil in horror when it is violated. You wouldn’t hire a lawyer who was also representing the person who’s suing you. Judges (with the abominable exception of Supreme Court justices!) are required to recuse themselves when they have a personal connection with either of the parties in a case they preside over.
One of the weirdest sights of the new Gilded Age is when lawyers for monopoly companies argue that they can play fair with their customers despite their conflicts of interest. Think of Google or Meta, with their ad-tech duopoly. These are companies that purport to represent sellers of ads and buyers of ads in marketplaces they own and control, and where they compete with sellers and/or buyers. These companies suck up 51% of the revenue generated by advertising, while historically, the share taken by ad intermediaries was more like 15%!
https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/25/structural-separation/#america-act
Imagine if you and your partner discovered that the same lawyer was representing both of you in the divorce, while also serving as the judge, and trying to match with both of you on Tinder. Now imagine that when the divorce terms were finalized, lawyer got your family home.
No Google lawyer would agree to argue on the company’s behalf in a case where the judge was employed by the party that’s suing them, but they will blithely argue that the reason they’re getting 51% of the ad-rake is that they’re providing 51% of the value.
Structural separation – like judicial recusal – comprehensively and unarguably resolves all the perceptions and realities of conflict between parties. The fact that platform owners compete with platform users is the source bottomless corruption, from Google to Amazon:
https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/28/enshittification/#relentless-payola
i want a medieval heist novel about a rogue monk who forges charters
Aerial shots of where the city of Manaus meets the Amazon rainforest. location: Manaus, Brazil, South America
BREAK THROUGH IN GREY ROOM
WHITE VINYL LP [LTDx300] • DAIS RECORDS
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS | re. 2023Inspired by the original Industrial Records release of William S. Burroughs’s Nothing Here Now but the Recordings, Belgian record label Sub Rosa worked with Burroughs to release another album: Break Through In Grey Room. Originally compiled in 1986 by producer Bill Rich, the album features Burroughs’s experimental recordings from 1961 to 1976, featuring field recordings by Burroughs of the Master Musicians of Jajouka, experimental collaborations with mathematician Ian Sommerville and painter/cut-up originator Brion Gysin.
Break Through In Grey Room documents William S. Burroughs during his time in Europe and England, working with Ian Sommerville on recording with the ‘cut-up’ technique. Sommerville’s technical background enabled him to contribute to the early development of sound-and-light shows in London, leading to work with gear provided by Paul McCartney in an apartment owned by Ringo Starr. Experimental in nature, the record is as much an exhibition of studio and composition technique as it is a document of underground culture at that time.
©conkerart
The Tees Transporter Bridge, Teeside, Northern England
The bridge, opened in 1911, crosses the River Tees between the towns of Port Clarence and Middlehaven. The bridge carries a travelling ‘car’, or 'gondola’, suspended below the fixed structure, across the river in 90 seconds. The gondola can carry 200 people, nine cars, or six cars and one minibus. The bridge has not been operational since 2019 and it is not expected to return to operation for a number of years. Wikipedia (edited)
image credits: upper - Lynn Pearson on Flickr, 2008
lower - Wonder Book of Engineering Wonders, Harry Golding, 1931
Godspeed You! Black Emperor — “NO TITLE AS OF 13 FEBRUARY 2024 28,340 DEAD” (Constellation)
The night of the election in America, Godspeed You! Black Emperor played a show in Toronto. As they almost always do, they said nothing. No interaction beyond playing music and then expressing wordless thanks to the crowd as each stepped off stage to the roaring feedback surge that closed out “Piss Crowns Are Trebled” and the concert. Even if they’d taken a moment to check the news that night, what was there to say? As suggested last time here, the ineffable, unspeakable power of the Montreal collective can be read at least partially as the only possible response to the deranged and deranging power of repression and evil in the world. 2021 felt dark. Suffice it to say that things have not gotten better and appear set on getting quite a bit worse.
World’s 1.5C climate target ‘deader than a doornail’, experts say
Well, there’s a headline that seems to pretty much cover it…
Harpercollins wants authors to sign away AI training rights
If you’d like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here’s a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/11/18/rights-without-power/#careful-what-you-wish-for
Rights don’t give you power. People with power can claim rights. Giving a “right” to someone powerless just transfers it to someone more powerful than them. Nowhere is this more visible than in copyright fights, where creative workers are given new rights that are immediately hoovered up by their bosses.
It’s not clear whether copyright gives anyone the right to control whether their work is used to train an AI model. It’s very common for people (including high ranking officials in entertainment companies, and practicing lawyers who don’t practice IP law) to overestimate their understanding of copyright in general, and their knowledge of fair use in particular.
Here’s a hint: any time someone says “X can never be fair use,” they are wrong and don’t know what they’re talking about (same goes for “X is always fair use”). Likewise, anyone who says, “Fair use is assessed solely by considering the ‘four factors.’” That is your iron-clad sign that the speaker does not understand fair use:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/27/nuke-first/#ask-questions-never
But let’s say for the sake of argument that training a model on someone’s work is a copyright violation, and so training is a licensable activity, and AI companies must get permission from rightsholders before they use their copyrighted works to train a model.
Even if that’s not how copyright works today, it’s how things could work. No one came down off a mountain with two stone tablets bearing the text of 17 USC chiseled in very, very tiny writing. We totally overhauled copyright in 1976, and again in 1998. There’ve been several smaller alterations since.
We could easily write a new law that requires licensing for AI training, and it’s not hard to imagine that happening, given the current confluence of interests among creative workers (who are worried about AI pitchmen’s proclaimed intention to destroy their livelihoods) and entertainment companies (who are suing many AI companies).
Creative workers are an essential element of that coalition. Without those workers as moral standard-bearers, it’s hard to imagine the cause getting much traction. No one seriously believes that entertainment execs like Warner CEO David Zaslav actually cares about creative works – this is a guy who happily deletes every copy of an unreleased major film that had superb early notices because it would be worth infinitesimally more as a tax-break than as a work of art:
https://collider.com/coyote-vs-acme-david-zaslav-never-seen/
The activists in this coalition commonly call it “anti AI.” But is it? Does David Zaslav – or any of the entertainment execs who are suing AI companies – want to prevent gen AI models from being used in the production of their products? No way – these guys love AI. Zaslav and his fellow movie execs held out against screenwriters demanding control over AI in the writers’ room for 148 days, and locked out their actors for another 118 days over the use of AI to replace actors. Studio execs forfeited at least $5 billion in a bid to insist on their right to use AI against workers:
Entertainment businesses love the idea of replacing their workers with AI. Now, that doesn’t mean that AI can replace workers: just because your boss can be sold an AI to do your job, it doesn’t mean that the AI he buys can actually do your job:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/07/25/accountability-sinks/#work-harder-not-smarter
So if we get the right to refuse to allow our work to be used to train a model, the “anti AI” coalition will fracture. Workers will (broadly) want to exercise that right to prevent AI models from being trained at all, while our bosses will want to exercise that right to be sure that they’re paid for AI training, and that they can steer production of the resulting model to maximize the number of workers than can fire after it’s done.
Hypothetically, creative workers could simply say to our bosses, “We will not sell you this right to authorize or refuse AI training that Congress just gave us.” But our bosses will then say, “Fine, you’re fired. We won’t hire you for this movie, or record your album, or publish your book.”
Given that there are only five major publishers, four major studios, three major labels, two ad-tech companies and one company that controls the whole ebook and audiobook market, a refusal to deal on the part of a small handful of firms effectively dooms you to obscurity.
Flame Monument, built in memory of 16 antifascist partisans killed in 1944, by Alexander Barov (1975).
Panicharevo, Bulgaria.
© Roberto Conte (2022)
Follow me on Instagram
Japanese masks can be found in performances of Noh theater, Kagura, dancing, religious ritual and in a variety of festival settings.Japanese Culture Masks 大面
写真廃棄処分(第一弾)
Wotrubakirche
Photo: David Altrath
Send Musk to Mars (Permanently)- poster in Shoreditch
Mars has two moons named after the Greek mythological twin characters Phobos (fear and panic) and Deimos (terror and dread)…his cult followers go there, thank you, and au jamais.
A 22 yr old in my org got drunk tuesday night and kinda shit on the fact that I’m running a community cleanup for our chapter. Said something along the lines of “i didn’t join up to pick trash.” Which really bothers me and it took me a while to figure out why. The whole point of the community cleanup is that we’re returning to the neighborhoods where we knocked doors for A4 to help clean up their streets and provide material improvement for free in an effort to build inroads with those neighbors.
Like… if your socialism doesn’t include picking uo trash, I’m guessing it also doesn’t include doing the dishes, babysitting, or anything else that is important but not prestigious. Idk man, fuck off with that shit. You’ll pick up trash and you’ll like it until you understand why picking up trash isn’t anyone’s job but your own. I hate that attitude. If helping and doing activism was always fun and visible and impressive, everyone you know would already be doing it.
The first thing the new york chapter of The Young Lords (Puerto Rican American communist civil rights group(Worked alongside the black panthers))did upon forming their group was reach out to their community in east harlem, they asked their community what problems needed to be addressed and consistently the number 1 problem brought up was the trash.
In their chairman Felipe Luciano’s words, “So we’re on 110th Street and we actually asked the people, ‘What do you think you need? Is it housing? Is it police brutality?’" Luciano says. “And they said, ‘Muchacho, déjate de todo eso—LA BASURA!” [Listen kid, fuggedaboutit! It’s THE GARBAGE!] And I thought, my God, all this romance, all this ideology, to pick up the garbage?”
And so the young lords responded to their communities needs and they picked up the trash. This was at a time (1969) when there were literal tons of garbage lining the streets, trash collectors would pick up some garbage every now and then but would leave most of it behind, they also refused to sweep the streets, and only allotted 6 big dumpsters in that entire 40 block area. This was due to racist/classist stances held by the almost exclusively italian american trash collector union.
The young lords stepped up in this situation, they go and ask for brooms and bags from the trash collectors union and get refused and insulted. They go back later and steal the brooms and bags, and get started cleaning their neighborhoods. This is a band aid and it doesn’t fix things but it does show their community these people care, these people will listen and put in the work, these people are our people, it was the basis of community organizing, building trust and responding to people’s actual needs.
While this did help and build trust the problem persisted and so the young lords came up with a program they called the garbage offensive (or maybe the trash offensive i forgot). They started sweeping all of the trash onto the side of the street and waited for the trash collectors to come by, when they refused to pick it up, the young lord would pile that all into trucks and haul it off to 3rd avenue in Manhattan(a much richer whiter area that gets high traffic). They dumped the trash into the middle of the street (not just bags of trash, we are also talking furniture, broken sinks, etc.) and then hauled off and they did this almost daily. They forced people to pay attention. The whole community started to get involved in this, kids, young men and women, and older community members too. They all started to join in on dumping the trash in the richer parts of the city to make people care and pay attention.
These protests got larger and bolder, they would sometimes pile up the trash high and then light it on fire, over turn cars and make a party out of it sometimes too. Police were called and showed up and attacked as they do but the protests persisted.
The Young lords published their demands and sent them out in a press release and their demands were listened too. In that years mayoral race every single candidate had to address the trash problem and promise solutions.
-
This is an important lesson that direct action often pushes reforms, if we want reforms the best way to get them is to act and make the state react to us and catch up with our demands.
-
Their demands included increased sanitation workers, hiring black and puerto rican sanitation workers, increased dumpsters, increase in pay to sanitation workers, end having to pay off your sanitation workers to ensure your trash gets picked up etc. Many of these demands were met and in the coming years the trash does end up getting picked up regularly and the problem does get dealt with.
The Young Lords end up going on to do so much more. They occupy hospitals, steal supplies from the government, and try to build towards a revolution in america. But it starts here, it starts with the trash it starts with all the small menial hardships. We can talk about revolution all we want but if our neighborhoods are unsanitary, our neighbors hungry, our needs uncared for nothing will come of it. The revolution you want to build however radical you are must start rooted in your community, their wants and needs. And part of that is picking up the trash, starting a community run daycare, and all the little unglamorous day to day struggles that weigh people down.
Thank you for this addition! I’m going to read it to the volunteers who come out to trash pick with us today 🤘
Teenage Engineering (TE) / OP–XY / Synthesizer / 2024
Here is the future that awaits the Western world with the energy saving craze….
- Toshiro Kawase
Wrong hand.
2010. A Japanese woman sits down to take photos of her shiba inu dog for her blog. Suddenly, a man leaps out of a time portal. “Sorry, I can’t let you do this. I cannot tell you why.” She asks: “Is it forbidden knowledge from the future?” He sighs: “No, it’s just too fucking stupid to explain.”
joke appreciated but this is subscribing to a theory of time/causality/history/whatever that I disagree with but time travel fiction has helped perpetuate; that all you have to do is change one event (ideally as far back as possible but still in the chain of causality) in the chain that led to a bad event and everything will automatically be on a better timeline and no negative unintended consequences will occur
I mean yeah that’s why the time antibodies exist
THESUBSTANCE
2024, dir. Coralie Fargeat
“Sometimes, carrying on, just carrying on, is the superhuman achievement.”
— Albert Camus
Diana Scherer, Entanglements, (corn, soil, plastic net, synthetic fiber and textiles; detail), 2017-2020 [© Diana Scherer / InterWoven]
As for the vitamins and supplements, we are halting their sale immediately. Utilitarian logic dictates that if we can extend even one CEO’s life by 10 minutes, diluting these miracle elixirs for public consumption is an unethical waste. Instead, we plan to collect the entire stock of the InfoWars warehouses into a large vat and boil the contents down into a single candy bar–sized omnivitamin that one executive (I will not name names) may eat in order to increase his power and perhaps become immortal.
If only SBF could have stayed solvent long enough, right up his alley
[ ☜ left ] arteries, from Diderot and d’Alembert’s Encyclopédie, 1751-1772
[ right ☞ ] Saymaluu-Tash national park petroglyphs, Kyrgyzstan
Jonas Burgert (German, 1969), Untitled, 2005. Oil on canvas, 222 x 200 cm.
much better footage of the haka that shut down parliament today
@endless-demon thank you so much for asking! it’s a little complicated but I think simplification does a disservice to the issue and is exactly what people like David Seymour rely on to spread lies about historical context and current consequences. I’m putting this in a reblog because it’s long, and I’m putting it on this post because I’d rather this video be the one to get seen. as always I’m pakeha and also not an expert, so I’m very open to corrections on details but im confident of the broad strokes.
so when the English first arrived to build settlements in aotearoa, they formed a treaty with Māori (te Tiriti o Waitangi), the people already living there, that the English can govern their own settlements, as long as they allowed for continued māori sovereignty (tino rangatiratanga). there exist two versions of the text, English and te reo Māori, which do not perfectly match. after this, the English settlers began acquiring massive swathes of land by legally questionable means, and asserting absolute sovereignty over these areas. these culminated in the land wars, which then lead to massive land confiscation as a form of both political punishment and colonization. the end result is that now the crown own nearly all land in aotearoa and claim absolute sovereignty over it.
now, the Māori text does not claim sovereignty over the property that the crown recognizes Māori own. the text promises, among other things, self determination for Māori, which is essentially impossible under a westminster system of government because they are currently a demographic minority. it’s only very recent in our history that the crown has acknowledged the legitimacy of the te reo Māori text, and even more recently that we began to actually implement any of its principles. one of the biggest ways the treaty is used in modern day is to guarantee Māori have an opportunity at the table for major national decisions (particular those of environmental significance), and to defer organizational power for Māori issues to Māori communities.
the treaty principles bill seeks to water down these promises by allowing these rights to all new zealanders, “democratising” the treaty and removing those guarantees that have been so hard fought for by Māori. but, more importantly, it seeks to seed division and racism within this country to gather more support for the ACT party who are sponsoring this bill.
this bill was part of the coalition agreement by our current 3 party right wing government. the national party agreed to sponsor this bill to first reading (allowing public submission on the bill) but no further. I personally believe, along with many others, that when the time comes to vote for the second reading the act party will threaten to pull out of the coalition if the bill is not passed again, and our prime minister will not have the strength of character to stand up to his deputy. regardless, the relationship between the crown and Māori has already been damaged, both by the simple introduction of the bill as well as all the changes our current government has implemented.
as Paul Goldsmith, Minister for Treaty Negotiations outlined in his speech during the bill, the National party believe that te Tiriti must be killed, not in a single action, but by a thousand cuts, like the removal of references to the treaty from our legislation and curriculums, and the disestablishment of agencies like the Māori Health Authority, cuts to Māori advisors to govt departments, removing māori seats from local government, etc.
there’s so much more to this issue, like the centuries of abuse and mistreatment of Māori by the crown authorities, how this abuse is ongoing to Māori children and adults today in state care, how iwi voices are our last line of defence against environmental and ecological damage by industry, the unilateral natural of the treaty reparation settlement process… but this is why this protest was staged in parliament today.
(in fact, there is a much larger protest taking place nationwide, scheduled to arrive the day the bill was supposed to be introduced. the bill was in fact introduced a week earlier, in a move many suspect was done to prevent exactly this kind of protest.)
as far as I’m concerned though? I think te pāti Māori achieved exactly what they wanted by this protest. they forced the government to drop the mask of civility, and force the protestors out of the building. and they showed their supporters that their protests are working - they felt threatened enough by this that they lashed out, felt a need to retaliate by suspending hana-rawhiti maipi-clarke from the house for 24 hours. the coalition are getting nervous
Hana-Rawhiti Kareariki Maipi-Clarke, the youngest MP in Aotearoa, starts a haka to protest the first vote on a bill reinterpreting the 1840 Treaty of Waitangi
Goes insanely hard
To provide further context from what I understand the bill wanted to take the rights guaranteed to the Maori in said treaty and expand them to all New Zealand citizens. The issue with that is that it sort of defeats the point of the protections of the treaty.
The Treaty of Waitangi is not even that good of a treaty. But it is better than any treaty the Crown signed with indigenous peoples
And it absolutely was not meant to be
The treaty as written screws over Māori, and was written in Te Reo Māori and English with deliberately misleading translations to Te Reo Māori. I’m not an expert by any means, but basically the Te Reo Māori version has clauses that promise much more independence and sovereignty, while the English version does not
However
The English version promises them rights as Citizens
From what I remember from University 10+ years ago, this clause, this sentence, was added last minute by the writer of the treaty. Like, right before the big signing at Waitangi.
And the Crown was PISSED
Because now they had a legally binding document that promised, in their own language, to treat Māori with the same rights as they would English. Which was absolutely not the goal. The goal was to trick Māori into signing away their lands and that honestly still did happen. The treaty was not a good faith proposal by the Engliah.
But its still better than anyone else got, and it’s better than no treaty. And because nowadays we can’t just ignore the Te Reo Māori side of the treaty, the government’s of the past few decades have been honouring Māori sovereignty, honouring their stewardship of the land, and undoing a lot of the bad faith “sales” or straight up stolen land.
Except our current fuck nuggets, who want to make Te Reo Māori an endangered language again, and steal back that land because they want to mine on it and sell it and they hate that Māori stewardship is so environmentally focused and not profit driven.
So, in a way, the current government is more true to the intentions of the Crown who initially came up with the treaty.
But since those guys were colonising bastards, I don’t see “honouring” them as anything good.
Even with criticism of the treaty, without it, Māori would lose a lot of protections to their lands, their culture, their language, and as a country we would go backwards to a time when they were even more discriminated against
Toitū te tiriti
Uphold the treaty
Unexplained Phenomena, Software Programming
as I said over on mastodon, this is what got me into programming. I was looking for Bigfoot, UFOs, and psychic powers, and accidentally found computers