rjzimmerman:

Corporations Plunder US West’s Water Amid Worst Drought in 1,200 Years

Excerpt from this story from Truthout:

Rural La Paz County, Arizona, positioned on the Colorado River across from California, is at the center of a growing fight over water in the American Southwest. At the heart of the battle is a question: Should water be treated as a human right, to be allocated by governments with the priority of sustaining life? Or is it a commodity to be bought, sold and invested in for the greatest profits?

As the West suffers its worst megadrought in 1,200 years, investors have increasingly eyed water as a valuable asset and a resource to be exploited. For years, investment firms have bought up farmland throughout the Southwest, drilling to new depths for their water-hungry crops and causing nearby wells to run dry. Now, new players have entered the scene: “Water management companies” are purchasing up thousands of acres of farmland, with the intention of selling the water rights at a profit to cities and suburbs elsewhere in the state. Some argue that treating water as a commodity can efficiently get it where it is needed most. But others fear that water markets open the door to profiteering and hoarding, leaving poorer communities in the dust.

In 2013 and 2014, GSC Farm, a subsidiary of a water management company called Greenstone Resource Partners, which is backed by MassMutual, bought nearly 500 acres of farmland in Cibola, a tiny town in Arizona’s La Paz County, for just under $10 million. The farmland comes with the rights to more than 2,000 acre-feet of Colorado River water a year. (An acre-foot is the amount of water it takes to cover one acre with one foot of water.) Then in 2018, Greenstone sold the water rights, in perpetuity, to Queen Creek, a rapidly growing suburb of Phoenix nearly 200 miles away, for $24 million.

The transfer marked the first time a water management company sold Colorado River water rights. La Paz and two other counties sued to block the transfer, arguing that the Bureau of Reclamation, the federal agency that oversees water resource management, had conducted an insufficient environmental review before signing off. The counties’ request for a preliminary injunction was denied in April 2023 by a federal judge, and three months later the water began flowing down the Central Arizona Project, a 336-mile canal. Then, the judge seemingly backtracked in February 2024, ordering a more thorough environmental review.

“In the meantime, they’re still allowing for the water to flow, which we argued should have been stopped completely until the complete environmental studies have been done,” Holly Irwin, a La Paz County supervisor, told  Truthout. “It’s really frustrating, not only for myself, but for the other leaders and elected officials in what we refer to as the river communities.”

The ultimate results of the lawsuit could affect how easily water management companies are able to transfer river water rights for profit in the future.

“I’ve had people already contacting me, asking, ‘Hey, look, I’m looking to buy this piece of property. It’s got water rights. Can it be transferred off the Colorado River?’” said Irwin. “Which is what we knew was going to happen. They just opened up Pandora’s box.”

Companies like Greenstone are betting that the price of water will increase. Western states generally allocate water through a “prior appropriation” policy of “first in time, first in right.” In times of shortage, those with the most senior water claims — often farmers and ranchers whose ancestors claimed Native land — are allotted their full share of water first. Now, companies like Greenstone are lining up to buy those increasingly valuable water rights.

The Colorado River provides drinking water to 40 million people across seven U.S. states, two Mexican states, and multiple tribal lands. Since 1922, its water has been allocated among the states through a framework created by the Colorado River Compact. But river volume has decreased 20 percent since the beginning of the century, leading to tense renegotiations, with the three “lower basin” states — California, Arizona and Nevada — agreeing to reduce their water shares.

Compared to Colorado River water, groundwater tends to be less regulated. Major investment banks have spent hundreds of millions buying up farms with claims to the groundwater beneath them — part of a larger movement by investors into physical assets like lumber, buildings and infrastructure.

Once pumped, groundwater aquifers in warm, dry places can take thousands of years to replenish. In an effort to conserve water basins, Arizona passed the 1980 Groundwater Management Act, heavily restricting groundwater pumping in several urban “active-management areas” (AMAs), including the Phoenix and Tucson areas. It also mandated that developers obtain a state Certificate of Assured Water Supply, demonstrating their new projects have enough water for 100 years. The law is credited as a success for protecting water levels in urban areas. But its lack of restrictions on groundwater removal from rural basins has become a concern as the state population swells and rural wells run dry.

garadinervi:

John Giorno, Cut-up letter to Brion Gysin, October 8, 1965 [Mousse Magazine and Publishing, Milano. Courtesy by Giorno Poetry Systems Archive, New York, NY. © John Giorno]

funstealer:

Deteriorated film from the 70s by Nobuyoshi Araki. From “Shijyo” / 1998 (extracts) via japanese.neo.noir

postpunkindustrial:

Negativland - Escape From Noise LP

While some of the records I have posted on this blog are inexplicably out of print, others like this one are very explicably out of print.

Negativland and SST had a spat after their US record brought the wrath of both Bono and Casey Kasem upon their heads orphaning a bunch of fasntatic bit of noisy, experimental plunderphonics

If you like having your own copies of things download it from my Google Drive Here

fipindustries:

my personal favorite example of literary artistic “plagiarism” is when Laurence Sterne stole verbatim a passage from The Anatomy of Melancholy about how contemporary writers don’t even write anything new, they just go back to old books and take whole passages and no one knows (the anatomy was out of print at the time, so critics didn’t get this joke for something like at least 100+ years)

mostlysignssomeportents:

Tech monopolists use their market power to invade your privacy

ALT

On SEPTEMBER 24th , I’ll be speaking IN PERSON at the BOSTON PUBLIC LIBRARY!

It’s easy to greet the FTC’s new report on social media privacy, which concludes that tech giants have terrible privacy practices with a resounding “duh,” but that would be a grave mistake.

Much to the disappointment of autocrats and would-be autocrats, administrative agencies like the FTC can’t just make rules up. In order to enact policies, regulators have to do their homework: for example, they can do “market studies,” which go beyond anything you’d get out of an MBA or Master of Public Policy program, thanks to the agency’s legal authority to force companies to reveal their confidential business information.

Market studies are fabulous in their own right. The UK Competition and Markets Authority has a fantastic research group called the Digital Markets Unit that has published some of the most fascinating deep dives into how parts of the tech industry actually function, 400+ page bangers that pierce the Shield of Boringness that tech firms use to hide their operations. I recommend their ad-tech study:

https://www.gov.uk/cma-cases/online-platforms-and-digital-advertising-market-study

In and of themselves, good market studies are powerful things. They expose workings. They inform debate. When they’re undertaken by wealthy, powerful countries, they provide enforcement roadmaps for smaller, poorer nations who are being tormented in the same way, by the same companies, that the regulator studied.

But market studies are really just curtain-raisers. After a regulator establishes the facts about a market, they can intervene. They can propose new regulations, and they can impose “conduct remedies” (punishments that restrict corporate behavior) on companies that are cheating.

Now, the stolen, corrupt, illegitimate, extremist, bullshit Supreme Court just made regulation a lot harder. In a case called Loper Bright, SCOTUS killed the longstanding principle of “Chevron deference,” which basically meant that when an agency said it had built a factual case to support a regulation, courts should assume they’re not lying:

https://jacobin.com/2024/07/scotus-decisions-chevron-immunity-loper

The death of Chevron Deference means that many important regulations – past, present and future – are going to get dragged in front of a judge, most likely one of those Texas MAGA mouth-breathers in the Fifth Circuit, to be neutered or killed. But even so, regulators still have options – they can still impose conduct remedies, which are unaffected by the sabotage of Chevron Deference.

Pre- Loper, post- Loper, and today, the careful, thorough investigation of the facts of how markets operate is the prelude to doing things about how those markets operate. Facts matter. They matter even if there’s a change in government, because once the facts are in the public domain, other governments can use them as the basis for action.

Which is why, when the FTC uses its powers to compel disclosures from the largest tech companies in the world, and then assesses those disclosures and concludes that these companies engage in “vast surveillance,” in ways that the users don’t realize and that these companies “fail to adequately protect users, that matters.

Keep reading

itscontinental:

7

thecalminside:

After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.

-Aldous Huxley

cosmicportal:

“The impermanent appearance of happiness and distress and their disappearance in due course are like the appearance and disappearance of winter and summer seasons. They arise from a sense of perception, and one must learn to tolerate them without being disturbed.”

— Bhagavad Gita

thevaultoftheatomicspaceage:

journalofanobody:

“The more you throw black into a color, the more dreamy it gets…Black has depth. It’s like a little egress, you can go into it, and because it keeps continuing to be dark, the mind kicks in, and a lot of things that are going on there become manifest. And you start seeing what you’re afraid of. You start seeing what you love and it becomes like a dream…”

— David Lynch  (via ontheedgeofdarkness)

femmenietzsche:

femmenietzsche:

Have decided to ground my beliefs in axioms instead of an infinite regress or circular reasoning

Well christ almighty

ralfmaximus:

foldingfittedsheets:

Back in 2017 I signed up for one of the Cards Against Humanity sillies and did their Cards Against Humanity Saves America. Basically they were like fuck Tr*mp and his border wall and used the funds from the campaign to buy land and to make all 150,000 contributors part owners of said land across the US/Mexico border.

It was fun and silly and I got a little certificate.

Today I got an email that Elon Musk illegally annexed that land for SpaceX and that CAH are suing him over it. So possibly I’ll get like $100 if they manage to win a lawsuit and stick it to Musk. It’s like even more bang for my original buck.

Holy shit

prokopetz:

I understand why a lot of fantasy settings with Ambiguously Catholic organised religions go the old “the Church officially forbids magic while practising it in secret in order to monopolise its power” route, but it’s almost a shame because the reality of the situation was much funnier.

Like, yes, a lot of Catholic clergy during the Middle Ages did practice magic in secret, but they weren’t keeping it secret as some sort of sinister top-down conspiracy to deny magic to the Common People: they were mostly keeping it secret from their own superiors. It wasn’t one of those “well, it’s okay when we do it” deals: the Church very much did not want its local priests doing wizard shit. We have official records of local priests being disciplined for getting caught doing wizard shit. And the preponderance of evidence is that most of them would take their lumps, promise to stop doing wizard shit, then go right back to doing wizard shit.

It turns out that if you give a bunch of dudes education, literacy, and a lot of time on their hands, some non-zero percentage of them are going to decide to be wizards, no matter how hard you try to stop them from being wizards.

devonsawas:

T H E M A T R I X | 1 9 9 9
↳ Written & Directed by Lana & Lilly Wachowski

alcrego:

N.thing

kingjamesprogramming:

26:4 And he did that which was found in the global environment

grabsomeironmeat:

• Hiroyasu Kawate

389:

Hinterland by Tom Leighton
Scars of human presence punctuate this hostile environment, where unknown chemical elements now surface from their captivity.

xphaiea:

Yugoslavian folk costumes

marxism-leninism-utenaism:

depsidase:

so a fun thing about an electrical grid is that it needs to be balanced. if you consume more electricity than you produce, the frequency (of the alternations in an AC system) drops. Similarly, if you produce more than you consume, the frequency will increase.

This is very very very bad if you have a lot of expensive heavy machinery (like generators) hooked up to the grid, and can cause extremely expensive damage that is very difficult to repair. if you get too far of balance, it can even take down the entire electrical grid.

thankfully, this load imbalance can normally be managed, by incentivizing consumption or increasing production or any number of other interventions. electric utilities do this management as part of their regular functioning, so most people never need to think about it.

unless you go and hook a bunch of solar panels up to the grid. and, to do it cheaply, you don’t install the equipment that would allow those panels to be disconnected from the grid, in the event that you didn’t want to utilize their output.

so what this leads to is that, in order to prevent the excess electricity generated by these panels at peak generation times from completely destroying the power grid, you have to call up industrial power consumers (like big factories etc.) and tell them to run all their equipment to consume the excess power. this causes wear and tear on their equipment, and so you have to pay them to do this. this is what it means when “the price goes negative”.

so the culprit is ultimately the failure of industry and government to invest in the infrastructure that would allow us to properly manage having this amount of distributed solar power hooked up to the grid.

nemfrog:

“Various urodele amphbians, not all to the same scale.” The life of vertebrates. 1962.

Internet Archive

wolfliving:

Sabotaged, exploding communications devices in Lebanon include pagers and walkie-talkies, September 2024

slack-wise:

Edward Burtynsky

whosafraidofvirginiawoolf:

Predictions are uttered by prophets (free of charge); by clairvoyants (who usually charge a fee, and are therefore more honored in their day than prophets); and by futurologists (salaried). Prediction is the business of prophets, clairvoyants, and futurologists. It is not the business of novelists. A novelist’s business is lying.

Ursula K. Le Guin in the introduction to The Left Hand of Darkness

emmaklee:

thinkingimages:

DIANE ARBUS (1923-1971) An  Empty Movie Theater, N.Y.C., 1971

Hiroshi Sugimoto / Cinerama Dome, Hollywood (1993)

henk-heijmans:

Bridging home, Liverpool, England, 2010 - by Do-Ho Suh (1962), South Korean

animeengineer:

mostlysignssomeportents:

Disenshittify or die! How hackers can seize the means of computation and build a new, good internet that is hardened against our asshole bosses’ insatiable horniness for enshittification.

From your lips to ${DEITY}’s ears.

youzicha:

Google Docs provides language-model driven autocorrect, where it highlights “unlikely” strings of words and offers to replace them for you.

It makes a lot of sense. But it’s also a bit ironic, given that statistical language models started with Shannon’s information theory, which identifies “information” with surprisal. Like, you could imagine if you just keep right-clicking the text, eventually Google will rewrite it for you into something carrying zero bits of information.

That’s actually what LLM-written texts try to optimize for. Which I believe you can notice!

There is no “idea” in the poem except what is forced on it by the prompt; the text generation algorithm specifically tries to put as few bits as possible into the text. The more clichéd the poem is, the closer it is to optimal.

Sometimes humans fall into the same trap. I keep thinking about the editor who changed “a feeling of jealousy” into “a pang of jealously”, replacing the phrase by a cliché and deliberately erasing the bits of information contained in it.

mosertone:

mentaltimetraveller:

Adrián Villar Rojas, The End of Imagination VI, 2024

Engel 38-sided space-filling polyhedron​

Of the 230 space groups, the symmetries possible in a crystal lattice, the most complicated is group 214, I4_1 32. In the words of Steve Dutch, “This group looks chaotic, but visualizing it is easy. All you do is sit there until little beads of blood form on your forehead.” In 1980, P. Engel used this group to make a 38-sided space-filling polyhedron. In 2016, Moritz Schmitt did a complete study of lattice-based space-filling polyhedra, and the Engel-38 had more faces than anything else.

So, what does Engel-38 look like? Just use the symmetries of I4_! 32 with the following generator point and find the Voronoi cells

via https://community.wolfram.com/groups/-/m/t/2617634

Taking advantage of the recent, simpler classification of three-dimensional crystallographic groups by Conway, Delgado-Friedrichs, Huson and Thurston, in a previous paper we proved that Dirichlet stereohedra for any of the 27 “full” cubic groups cannot have more than 25 facets. Here we study the remaining “quarter” cubic groups. With a computer-assisted method, our main result is that Dirichlet stereohedra for the 8 quarter groups, hence for all three-dimensional crystallographic groups, cannot have more than 92 facets.

via https://arxiv.org/abs/0708.2114

mostlysignssomeportents:

Enemies vs cowards

With few exceptions, it is more accurate to divide most politicians into two broad categories: Enemies, and Cowards. The enemies are those politicians who are legitimately opposed to your policy goals. The cowards are those politicians who may agree with your policy goals, but will sell you out if they must in order to protect their own interests. Embrace the idea that we are simply pushing to elect the cowards, rather than the enemies. Why? Because the true work of political action is not to identify idealized superheroes to run for office. It is, instead, to create the conditions in the world that make it safe for the cowards to vote the right way.

Under this framework, you can set aside the tedious feelings of disappointment that come with holding moral views while also supporting any politician. Will your favorite candidate do something bad? Almost certainly. After all, they are cowards. The onus is on us to give the cowards a soft path to the moral choice. The education necessary to equip citizens with the facts; the persuasion necessary to move public opinion to the right place; the organizing necessary to mobilize people to fight for the right thing. These things are the substance of “politics.” Elections can be seen as just another organizing task, one in an endless procession of efforts necessary to arrange the chess pieces of power in a way that will, eventually, produce the righteous outcome.

-Hamilton Nolan

jareckiworld:

Mary Bauermeister (1934-2023) — Ultramarine Tubes [object box; aluminum, glass, plexiglas, optical lenses, shaped and painted wood, stones, ink, 1969/1970]

tt-type:

Ici et là - Sofiya Loriashvili
type: Gikit

derevo-raw:

mutant-what-not:

qualityfarmprofessorpaper-blog:

😍😍

probablyasocialecologist:

The problem here isn’t that large language models hallucinate, lie, or misrepresent the world in some way. It’s that they are not designed to represent the world at all; instead, they are designed to convey convincing lines of text. So when they are provided with a database of some sort, they use this, in one way or another, to make their responses more convincing. But they are not in any real way attempting to convey or transmit the information in the database. As Chirag Shah and Emily Bender put it: “Nothing in the design of language models (whose training task is to predict words given context) is actually designed to handle arithmetic, temporal reasoning, etc. To the extent that they sometimes get the right answer to such questions is only because they happened to synthesize relevant strings out of what was in their training data. No reasoning is involved […] Similarly, language models are prone to making stuff up […] because they are not designed to express some underlying set of information in natural language; they are only manipulating the form of language” (Shah & Bender, 2022). These models aren’t designed to transmit information, so we shouldn’t be too surprised when their assertions turn out to be false.

ChatGPT is bullshit

tanadrin:

• medieval monks and accountants start using Italian millione (“one thousand” + augmentative suffix) to mean 10^6 by the 1200s; this spreads to other languages
• Jehan Adam coins bymillion and trimillion to mean 10^12 and 10^18 in 1475
• Nicolas Chuquet extends this scale up to nonyllion (10^54), with every step being another six orders of magnitude ( million, byllion, tryllion, quadrillion, quyllion, sixlion, septyllion, ottylion, nonyllion) in 1484. Note that in this period, it was common to put the digit separator every sixdigits instead of every three.
• Guillaume Budé refers to 10^9 as milliartin 1516, in a Latin text
• But in 1549, Jacques Pelletier du Mans uses milliard to mean 10^12, citing Budé as a source
• In the 1600s, people start putting digit separators every threedigits. But some scientists and mathematicians define the numerical scale according to how digits are grouped, rather than the actual order of magnitude: thus, one billion becomes 10^9, one trillion becomes 10^12, etc, creating the short scale.
• “Milliard” is eventually added to the long scale, meaning 10^9 (in keeping with Budé’s usage); the first published example is from 1676
• By 1729, the short-scale meaning of “billion” (10^9) has already crept into American usage
• This is in keeping with French usage at the time: in 1762, the Académie Française dictionary cites billionas meaning 10^9.
• By the early 19th century, France has almost completely converted to the short scale, and U.S. usage follows France; the long scale is referred to in some sources as “obsolete.” But Britain is still using the long scale (and I assume Germany and most other European countries)
• Over the course of the 20th century, the long scale begins to become more influential in France, presumably due to the influence of continental usage; while the short scale becomes more influential in Britain, presumably due to the influence of American English. Notably the SI system very specifically uses unique prefixes that are the same across languages, to prevent confusion!
• In 1961, the French Government confirms that they’re going to officially use the long scale from now on; in 1974, Britain officially switches over to the shortscale, and many other English-speaking countries follow.
• In 1975, the terms “short scale” and “long scale” are actually coined, by mathematician Geneviève Guitel.

One reason large number names could be so unstable for so long is, of course, that outside specialized usage they are rare, and were even more rare before modern science and large modern monetary amounts became commonplace points of discussion. Wikipedia says “milliard” wasn’t common in German until 1923, when bank notes had to be overstamped during Weimar-era hyperinflation.

As it currently stands, English, Indonesian, Hebrew, Russian, Turkish, and most varieties of Arabic use the short scale; continental Europe and most varieties of Spanish outside Europe use the long scale. A few countries use both, usually in different languages, like South African English (short scale) and Afrikaans (long scale) or Canadian English (short scale) and Canadian French (long scale) . Puerto Rico uses the short scale in economic and technical usage, but the long scale in publications aimed at export.

Notably some languages use neither, having their own names for large numbers–South Asian languages have the Indian numbering system, and Bhutan, Cambodia, and various East Asian languages also have their own numbering systems. Greek, exceptionally, uses a native calque of the short scale rather than a borrowing.

funstealer:

Aleksandr Manamis A/W 2024

globalvoices:

Australian Ghost Nets Art: Indigenous people turning trash into treasure

raven-thecelt:

regardintemporel:

Federico Drigo

argumate:

The researchers “use de-identified smartphone geolocation data for a sample of US phones from January 2019 to February 2020,” obtained “from an online data vendor that provides data commercially to businesses, governments, and researchers” and “works with numerous mobile application providers that track ‘pings’ of the location of a phone while the application is either currently in use or is running in the background.” Then they use the addresses of SEC offices and corporate headquarters, and then match the smartphone pings to the buildings. A smartphone is assumed to belong to an SEC employee if it “pinged for at least 20 unique workday hours within one SEC location during the month” and “the accumulated time in that SEC building [is] greater than in any other buildings in the respective month.” And then they go measure which companies those SEC employees visited.

Matt Levine casually mentioning this in an aside like it’s normal

kingjamesprogramming:

Verily I say unto you, that my joy is the joy of programming.

At the risk of ruining it, I’m going to deconstruct this excellent joke and use it as a lens through which to look at the state of life, the universe, and everything.

Taleb of course, is being his usual obnoxious self, performing Levantine identity in a way that has perhaps single-handedly turned me off ever being a Levantophile, over the decades he’s been doing it. That’s just Taleb being Taleb, and he’s old and beyond reform. Sadly, most people the world over perform their cultural identities this way. Though rarely with such relentless thin-skinnedness, and to such a global audience.

Sosna’s reply also performs identity, Slavic in this case, but in exactly the opposite way — self-deprecating (the stupidity of joyless drinking), emphasizing a universally resonant sentiment (life is pain) via a globally familiar motif (the potato). The vodka-vs-wine subtext is only gestured at, not centered. This is a reply that makes me want to be a Slavophile.

Of course, given that both the Levant and the Slavic world are being torn apart by really ugly wars right now makes being either a Levantophile or a Slavophile something of an armchair aspiration at the moment.

In the grim darkness of the unevenly distributed future, there is only potato.

“ life is pain, only potato.”

365filmsbyauroranocte:

Tampopo (Jūzō Itami, 1985)

questcequecestqueca:

This powerful image transcends time, and continues to go viral over 70 years later.

Helen Konek is 91 years old now. But she was 17 when photographer Richard Harrington asked to take images of her family near Arviat, Nunavut. This one is in the massive igloo her father Pipqanaaq built.

Nudes & Noises

disease:

“AS IF TO SWALLOW THE SHINING SUN”
OLIVIA BOTHA // 2022
[oil and oil stick on canvas | 100 × 100 cm.]

captcreate:

dinovelvet:

Close enough.

nobrashfestivity:

Happy Birthday Romare Bearden

Pittsburgh Memory
1964
photomontage
27 ½ x 35 7/8 in.

disease:

“THE ARCHAEOLOGISTS”
GIORGIO DE CHIRICO // 1972
[silkscreen printing on paper | 100 × 70 cm.]

diana-andraste:

Woman Thinking, David Lynch, 2008

preservationofnormalcy:

Got a metal sign printed for a customer. These look great in this form. You can find the listing for these in my ko-fi!

ilcontephotography:

Abandoned Marxer Laboratory, by Alberto Galardi (1964).

Loranzè, Italy.

© Roberto Conte (2015-2021)

Follow me on Instagram

catvincent:

gamer-crow:

cognitiveinequality:

boyquet:

I just want to remind people that it’s 2024 and we didn’t “go thru a pandemic” we are “going thru a pandemic” present tense. It is still happening. People are still get sick, still becoming disabled, and still dying. Covid hasn’t gone away and I beg people to not normalize getting sick with it.

Covid literally damaged my brain. Want to know what I can’t do anymore? Work full time. Concentrate for more than 2-4 hours at a time. Be outside in the high heat (I’m more susceptible to heat stroke now). Now, I have to wear sunglasses outside even when it’s cloudy, or else pain. I developed central serous retinopathy. I have to work from home for the foreseeable future, so I can work around my own schedule.

My partner and I both have significantly decreased energy still, after 3 YEARS, and we find ourselves sometimes exhausted after a moderate task.

One of our neighbors lost kidney function. My father in law is now permanently on oxygen. One of my colleagues now has arythmia and I think POTS?

I know this is all anecdotal, but fuck, people. You all know someone with long covid. Mask up, wash your hands. Distance yourself. Be courteous. Be aware, not anxious.

Over 4 years of Long Covid; neural damage, immune damage, dropped instantly into ‘moderate’ ME/CFS symptoms, occasional spasms (sometimes my whole body for up to an hour).

You want this, or worse? Want your parents or kids like this or worse?

Keep fucking doing what you’re fucking doing and you will get your wish.

omgthatdress:

Absolutely love this Twitter thread from The Menswear guy. Love it so much I have to post it here.

First of all, if you’re going to accuse The Menswear Guy of snark based on moral judgement, it’s worth noting that the Duke of Windsor was an unequivocally AWFUL person. He struck a deal with Hitler to let Germany conquer Britain so he could be king again. But he was one dapper motherfucker.

A lot of times, I ask myself a lot why it is someone like Ben Shapiro would come begging to you for fashion advice like there’s some x+y=z secret code to being fashionable. (Yes, The Menswear Guy has shown screenshots of Ben Shapiro’s assistant asking him for fashion advice.)

When the fact is there is no real formula to being fashionable, you have to express yourself and take genuine pleasure in what you’re wearing. Ben Shapiro has never felt pleasure in his life without hating himself afterwards.

When you treat fashion as a status symbol and not something you love and find joy in, you will never be a fashionable person, which is something that respectability and conformity-minded conservatives will NEVER understand.

scipunk:

Max Headroom (1987)

kafkasapartment:

Looks like a nudibranch, but it’s a Gold-spotted Flatworm, Thysanuzoon flavomaculatum, Red Sea.

fatehbaz:

tobermoriansass:

Real life worse than…anything actually

Context here is not just the size and planet-wide power of the mining company, it’s that this same mining company infamously, in May 2020, blasted an Aboriginal site at Juukan Gorge in the Pilbara region of Australia that contained important evidence of 47,000 year-old Aboriginal presence, despite the site’s importance having already been known at the time. The blasting was done with legal government permitting/permission for the expansion of an iron ore mine, which resulted in massive public outcry and criticism of the permitting process in Australia. It was then revealed, in September 2020, that not only was the company aware of the site’s significance, but that several days before detonating explosives, upper-level corporate managers hired lawyers in anticipation of potential legal injunctions that might be launched by Puutu Kunti Kurrama and Pinikura people.

The Murujuga region, specifically, is estimated by archaeologists to be home to perhaps the highest concentration of surviving ancient rock art on the planet, with a million, or more, petrogylphs, some dating to 40,000 years before present.

In 2024, confirmation of this Aboriginal record were reported and published at Phys dot org (“Results from Juukan Gorge show 47,000 years of Aboriginal heritage was destroyed in mining blast”, July 2024) and Quaternary Science Reviews, Volume 338 (“A 47,000 year archaeological and palaeoenvironmental record from Juukan 2 rockshelter…”, August 2024).

In the Pilbara region alone, not including the rest of the state of Western Australia, there are at least 13,000 formally documented Aboriginal/ancient cultural sites on land leased to Ri* Tint*, not including the land leased to other mining companies. Multiple other mining companies have also continued to receive approval to expand mines while knowingly obstructing, removing, or destroying Aboriginal cultural heritage sites. The B/H/P mining company “owns” over 8,000 Aboriginal sites in the Pilbara. In 2020, in the aftermath of the Juukan news, there were 536 formally-documented cultural heritage sites located within the Paraburdoo iron ore extraction hub.

Near Murujuga, the local area is also home to some of the planet’s most massive gas plants, iron ore terminals, ammonium and nitrates and explosives plants, undersea gas pipelines, and what has sometimes been called the southern hemisphere’s largest gas refinery.

In just two years from the end of 2016 to the end of 2018, the value of Western Australia petroleum and mineral extraction grew from $10 billion to $90 billion. In Western Australia, rates of Aboriginal incarceration doubled between 1990 and 2010.

xphaiea:

Abandoned mine, Slovakia

itscolossal:

Schmidt Ocean Institute Discovers 20 New Species Along the Remote Nazca Ridge

thejaymo:

How Solarpunk Envisions A World We Will Want To Live In | Ecogradia

I was recently on EcoGradia Podcast, talking Solarpunk; its narrative vision for the world, and the challenges we face in building sustainable futures.

I was recently invited to join Nirmal Kishnani on season 5 of EcoGradia, the architecture and sustainability podcast, to talk about Solarpunk.

We had a great conversation about Solarpunk, its visions for the world, and the challenges we face in building sustainable futures. I talked about the role of storytelling, design, and technology in imagining better futures, and how solarpunk can inspire…

How Solarpunk Envisions A World We Will Want To Live In | Ecogradia

brucesterling:

Artificially Inflated Music Streaming

SMITH then created randomly generated song and artist names for audio files so that they would appear to have been created by real artists rather than artificial intelligence.  For example, an alphabetically consecutive selection of 25 of the names of the AI songs SMITH used is as follows: “Zygophyceae,” “Zygophyllaceae,” “Zygophyllum,” “Zygopteraceae,” “Zygopteris,” “Zygopteron,” “Zygopterous,” “Zygosporic,” “Zygotenes,” “Zygotes,” “Zygotic,” “Zygotic Lanie,” “Zygotic Washstands,” “Zyme Bedewing,” “Zymes,” “Zymite,” “Zymo Phyte,” “Zymogenes,” “Zymogenic,” “Zymologies,” “Zymoplastic,” “Zymopure,” “Zymotechnical,” “Zymotechny,” and “Zyzomys.” 

Similarly, an alphabetically consecutive selection of 25 of the names of the “artists” of the AI songs SMITH used is as follows: “Calliope Bloom,” “Calliope Erratum,” “Callous,” “Callous Humane,” “Callous Post,” “Callousness,” “Calm Baseball,” “Calm Connected,” “Calm Force,” “Calm Identity,” “Calm Innovation,” “Calm Knuckles,” “Calm Market,” “Calm The Super,” “Calm Weary,” “Calms Scorching,” “Calorie Event,” “Calorie Screams,” “Calvin Mann,” “Calvinistic Dust,” “Calypso Xored,” “Camalus Disen,” “Camaxtli Minerva,” “Cambists Cagelings,” and “Camel Edible.”

North Carolina Musician Charged With Music Streaming Fraud Aided By Artificial Intelligence

teathattast:

bogleech:

teathattast:

Wake up babe new fish dropped

I can’t believe none of this post shows off the actual most unique feature of this squid!!

One eye of this species is normal, the other is more than twice as big and bugged out. Each has different sensitivity to light levels so she can aim one up (towards the brighter sky) and the other down (to the darker depths) as needed.

No other animal has this setup that we’ve ever found!! You can’t ignore her monocle!!!

unmatched queen energy tbh

bouncinghedgehog:

fuckyeahkitschy2:

scopostims:

ferrofluid under a microscope (source) :•]

made by me, please credit this post if you use elsewhere!

dinovelvet:

chronivore:

Richard Teschner, 1916

weaselle:

weaselle:

koko-mochi:

Do y’all ever think about how absolutely bananas Lake Baikal is? It’s the world’s largest lake by volume. It’s the world’s deepest lake. It’s the world’s oldest lake. It contains nearly a quarter of the planet’s surface freshwater. It’s a rift lake, caused by the earth’s crust literally coming apart at the seams. It would be deeper than the Mariana Trench except the bottom is covered in a sediment layer that is miles deep. There are trains that have sunk to the bottom because Russia tried to build a railroad over the ice. The entire lake surface freezes for half the year. The lake is a focal point of multiple indigenous cultures. The lake has its own species of seal, which is the only exclusively freshwater pinniped in the world. There are unique ice formations formed by convection from the depths of the lake. There are 330 inflowing rivers.

I dunno, Lake Baikal sure is a thing.

a truly unique and magnificent Feature on our planet, as singular and fascinating as Jupiter’s Great Red Spot

in the words of farmboy, as you wish

the lake is quite cold, and as a result, these seals are very loaf

the babbeez are white poofs with lil eyebrowses

it is incredibly deep, and over a thousand species of plant and animal live ONLY there

brucesterling:

*The “Internet Research Bureau” #SaintPetersburg #cyberwar #statesupported

scipunk:

Johnny Mnemonic (1995)

nicostiel:

#this had to be done

funstealer:

“Wink Ring” by Kazuo Okazaki
Sold at The Apple in Shinjuku in 1968

thehauntedrocket:

Universal Monsters: Creature From The Black Lagoon Lives! (2024)

thehauntedrocket:

The Twilight Zone Magazine (1981-1989)

docgold13:

Jack Kirby’s The Lord of Light illustrations

brightlotusmoon:

The Microlab is a do-it-yourself Controlled Lab Reactor (CLR). You don’t need a CLR to make chemical reactions happen, but it makes the process of synthesizing compounds from precursors much easier and more reliable.

The Microlab is designed to load a recipe for a chemical reaction, then automate the temperature control, reagent addition, and stirring that are needed. It is designed for small-molecule organic chemistry to make certain medicinal compounds in your own home or workshop.

mostlysignssomeportents:

Marshmallow Longtermism

The paperback edition of The Lost Cause , my nationally bestselling, hopeful solarpunk novel is out this week!

My latest column for Locus Magazine is “Marshmallow Longtermism”; it’s a reflection on how conservatives self-mythologize as the standards-bearers for deferred gratification and making hard trade-offs, but are utterly lacking in these traits when it comes to climate change and inequality:

https://locusmag.com/2024/09/cory-doctorow-marshmallow-longtermism/

Conservatives often root our societal ills in a childish impatience, and cast themselves as wise adults who understand that “you can’t get something for nothing.” Think here of the memes about lazy kids who would rather spend on avocado toast and fancy third-wave coffee rather than paying off their student loans. In this framing, poverty is a consequence of immaturity. To be a functional adult is to be sober in all things: not only does a grownup limit their intoxicant intake to head off hangovers, they also go to the gym to prevent future health problems, they save their discretionary income to cover a down-payment and student loans.

This isn’t asceticism, though: it’s a mature decision to delay gratification. Avocado toast is a reward for a life well-lived: once you’ve paid off your mortgage and put your kid through college, then you can have that oat-milk latte. This is just “sound reasoning”: every day you fail to pay off your student loan represents another day of compounding interest. Pay off the loan first, and you’ll save many avo toasts’ worth of interest and your net toast consumption can go way, way up.

Cleaving the world into the patient (the mature, the adult, the wise) and the impatient (the childish, the foolish, the feckless) does important political work. It transforms every societal ill into a personal failing: the prisoner in the dock who stole to survive can be recast as a deficient whose partying on study-nights led to their failure to achieve the grades needed for a merit scholarship, a first-class degree, and a high-paying job.

Dividing the human race into “the wise” and “the foolish” forms an ethical basis for hierarchy. If some of us are born (or raised) for wisdom, then naturally those people should be in charge. Moreover, putting the innately foolish in charge is a recipe for disaster. The political scientist Corey Robin identifies this as the unifying belief common to every kind of conservativism: that some are born to rule, others are born to be ruled over:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/01/set-healthy-boundaries/#healthy-populism

This is why conservatives are so affronted by affirmative action, whose premise is that the absence of minorities in the halls of power stems from systemic bias. For conservatives, the fact that people like themselves are running things is evidence of their own virtue and suitability for rule. In conservative canon, the act of shunting aside members of dominant groups to make space for members of disfavored minorities isn’t justice, it’s dangerous “virtue signaling” that puts the childish and unfit in positions of authority.

Again, this does important political work. If you are ideologically committed to deregulation, and then a giant, deregulated sea-freighter crashes into a bridge, you can avoid any discussion of re-regulating the industry by insisting that we are living in a corrupted age where the unfit are unjustly elevated to positions of authority. That bridge wasn’t killed by deregulation – it’s demise is the fault of the DEI hire who captained the ship:

https://www.axios.com/local/salt-lake-city/2024/03/26/baltimore-bridge-dei-utah-lawmaker-phil-lyman-misinformation

The idea of a society made up of the patient and wise and the impatient and foolish is as old as Aesop’s “The Ant and the Grasshopper,” but it acquired a sheen of scientific legitimacy in 1970, with Walter Mischel’s legendary “Stanford Marshmallow Experiment”:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_marshmallow_experiment

In this experiment, kids were left alone in a locked room with a single marshmallow, after being told that they would get two marshmallows in 15 minutes, but only if they waited until them to eat the marshmallow before them. Mischel followed these kids for decades, finding that the kids who delayed gratification and got that second marshmallow did better on every axis – educational attainment, employment, and income. Adult brain-scans of these subjects revealed structural differences between the patient and the impatient.

For many years, the Stanford Marshmallow experiment has been used to validate the cleavage of humanity in the patient and wise and impatient and foolish. Those brain scans were said to reveal the biological basis for thinking of humanity’s innate rulers as a superior subspecies, hidden in plain sight, destined to rule.

Then came the “replication crisis,” in which numerous bedrock psychological studies from the mid 20th century were re-run by scientists whose fresh vigor disproved and/or complicated the career-defining findings of the giants of behavioral “science.” When researchers re-ran Mischel’s tests, they discovered an important gloss to his findings. By questioning the kids who ate the marshmallows right away, rather than waiting to get two marshmallows, they discovered that these kids weren’t impatient, they were rational.

Keep reading

cosmicportal:

thoughtsaboutgirls:

Aleksandra Kirievskaya

nudityandnerdery:

Queer as in an “identity is fluid and descriptors can be imprecise so I prefer a more general term” sort of way but also queer in a “What are you, a cop?” sort of way.

rjzimmerman:

bcnmar:

Insomnia

itscolossal:

ALT

In ‘Old Growth,’ Mitch Epstein Travels the U.S. to Capture Monumental Ancient Relics

grammarpedant:

hearthfire-heartfire:

starlit-mansion:

listen. i honestly do try my best to not be bitchy about stuff. but if you not-joking-joked that you wanted to watch a video essay from hbomb on the kendrick-drake rap beef. i think that you are obligated to watch fd signifier’s 3 hour video essay. i KNOW the watch time is not the issue.

I spent three and a half hours utterly immersed in a beef I was barely aware of from a scene I am not part of. This is a video about rap artists, of course, but also if you like hearing about scene drama, art history, Black culture, or if you just enjoy watching video essays, you gotta watch this video. F.D. Signifier is not playing around- this is documentary-level production covering decades of what rap means through the lens of a conflict between prominent artists, presented in a way that’s both informative and engaging for a newcomer AND also deeply incisive and analytical for the seasoned rap purist. And aside from teaching me a fuckton about hip hop, this video also just made me feel excited about and open to nonfiction media once again.

Cannot overstate how HIGHLY I recommend this video essay.

rjzimmerman:

In France, One Group Seeks to Do the Unthinkable: Unite the Climate Movement • The Revelator

Short summary of this story from The Revelator. Because of the nature of the story, pulling an extract would be difficult and meaningless to you. No paywall, so just click/tap on the caption if you want to know more.

In France the unthinkable has happened: The working-class Yellow Vest movement, racial equity movements, and progressive climate activists have joined forces in a multiracial, cross-class coalition called Earth Uprisings. In uniting the climate movement with broader social justice causes, “Les Soulèvements de la Terre” is not just making history in France; it’s offering a blueprint for global environmental resistance. But the response has been shockingly violent and extreme. In response government officials called the group “eco-terrorists” — continuing a worldwide strategy of criminalizing protest.

mutant-distraction:

Krzywy Domek, the extravagant “crooked house” of Sopot, Poland

architects Szotynscy and Zaleski.

The two architects were inspired by the fairy tale illustrations of the Polish artist Jan Marcin Szancer and the poet Per Dahlberg, completing construction in 2004, which immediately after the inauguration was nicknamed the Crooked House. This house, defined as a masterpiece of housing construction, measures approximately 4,000 square meters and is home to residential dwellings as well as the Rezydent shopping center, bars, restaurants and prestigious offices for some of the most well known businesses in the country.

famouspainterwombat:

gabebrodudeman:

darklordreasonable:

tendie-defender:

New political strategy just dropped.

Taiwanese parliament member stole a Bill before it could get passed. 

@NFL Someone sign this man as a running back.

This is simply how they do things in Taiwan. In 2006, DPP deputy Wang Shu-hui successfully prevented a vote on an incoming bill by Eating It.

rjzimmerman:

This brain-eating amoeba is on the rise

Excerpt from this National Geographic story:

A 14-year-old boy who went swimming in a pond in India’s sweltering heat. A 13-year-old girl who bathed in a pool during a school excursion, and a five-year-old girl who took a dip in a river near her home. The three children lived in different parts of the southern Indian state of Kerala. Yet they have something in common ⸺all of them succumbed to a brain infection, Primary Amoebic Meningoencephalitis (PAM), caused by a tiny organism found in warm freshwaters and poorly maintained swimming pools. About a dozen others have been undergoing treatment in India, one of whom, a 27-year-old man, has also succumbed.

Although rare, PAM is a deadly infection with a worldwide occurrence. It is caused by  Naegleria fowleri, also known as the “brain-eating amoeba”, as it infects the brain and destroys brain tissue. At least 39 countries have reported such infections so far, and the rate of infections is increasing by 4.5 percent every year. In Pakistan alone, 20 deaths are reported every year due to the disease, and in 2024, infections have been reported in India, Pakistan, and Israel.  N. fowleri was also detected at a popular freshwater swimming spot in Western Australia and hot springs in the U.S’s Grand Teton National Park. 

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the majority of global case exposures⸺85 percent⸺have been reported during warm, hot, or summer seasons. Several studies have also observed that changes in temperature and climate may further drive a global increase in PAM incidence. A study published in May last year found that PAM infections are on the rise in the northern U.S. ” N. fowleri is expanding northward due to climate change, posing a greater threat to human health in new regions where PAM has not yet been documented,“ the study noted.

Yun Shen, an assistant professor of chemical and environmental engineering at the University of California, Riverside, says that she considers PAM as “a potential emerging medical threat worldwide”. She explains that while warmer temperatures are likely to facilitate the survival and growth of  N. fowleri, the risk of exposure may also increase as people indulge in more water-based recreational activities in hotter weather.

N. fowleri is found in warm, untreated freshwater, soil, and dust, says Karen Towne, a clinical associate professor of nursing at the University of Mount Union in Ohio, who co-authored a 2023 study on how the amoeba poses “a new concern for northern climates”. She adds that so far, PAM infections have typically occurred in cases involving swimming, splashing, and submerging one’s head in freshwater lakes, ponds, hot springs, and reservoirs. Meanwhile, less common routes of transmission have included warm hose water, a lawn water slide, splash pad use, and exposure of the nasal membrane to tap water from private well systems.

“Epidemiologically, most cases have occurred in healthy children and young adults⸺more males than females⸺who have had recent contact with untreated fresh water,” Towne told  National Geographic in an email interview .

According to Barbara Polivka, an associate dean of research at the University of Kansas School of Nursing, who co-authored the study with Towne,  N. fowleri enters the nose via contaminated water, crosses the nasal membrane, and follows the olfactory nerve into the brain, where it incubates for an average of five days. “PAM begins with rapid onset of severe frontal headache, fever, nausea and vomiting, which worsen into stiff neck, altered mental status, hallucinations, coma, and death,” says Polivka.

whydidisavethistomyphone:

Starliner, haunted by the souls of dead Boeing whistleblowers

funstealer:

Archivio J.M. Ribot A/W 2023
G02/NF/OLD Hand Aged Blazer

noosphe-re:

The reason I wanted to discuss this in the first place is that I actually don’t know what to think. Taking light and vision to be two aspects of the same phenomenon leads us into a whole other area: the seemingly metaphorical meaning of light in the context of the “light of consciousness.” For example, when we dream, we see things in a kind of light. This light illuminates psychedelic visions, dreams, daydreams, and all visual imagery that occurs with our eyes closed. There’s some sense in which our imagination, our image-making faculty, is self-luminous.

In the case of vision in normal physical light, the light comes first and vision comes second. If you shut the light off, you can’t see. But in the visionary sense, vision itself may generate light, at least subjectively. Visions are self-luminous. If someone has visions enough, according to religious traditions, they start developing halos and their bodies become luminous.

The point I’m trying to make is that if physical light has conscious vision associated with it, then the reverse may also be true: conscious imagery may have light associated with it.

Rupert Sheldrake, Chaos, Creativity, and Cosmic Consciousness (Rupert Sheldrake, Terence McKenna and Ralph Abraham)

oojamaflip-whatchamacallit:

voyaging-too:

thehungrycity:

Making students proofread an AI essay is a brilliant teaching moment, it gives students a first-hand understanding of what current LLMs can and cannot do, and especially of the things they look like they can do but absolutely cannot do.

start ID

A thread of tweets by C.W. Howell (@cwhowell123), paragraph breaks added based on where tweets are cut off onto the next one.

So I followed @/GaryMarcus’s suggestion and had my undergrad class use ChatGPT for a critical assignment. I had them all generate an essay using a prompt I gave them, and then their job was to “grade” it–look for hallucinated info and critique its analysis *All 63* essays had

hallucinated information. Fake quotes, fake sources, or real sources misunderstood and mischaracterised. Every single assignment. I was stunned–I figured the rate would be high, but not that high.

The biggest takeaway from this was that the students all learned that it isn’t fully reliable. Before doing it, many of them were under the impression it was always right. Their feedback largely focused on how shocked they were that it could mislead them. Probably 50% of them

were unaware it could do this. All of them expressed fears and concerns about mental atrophy and the possibility for misinformation/fake news. One student was worried that their neural pathways formed from critical thinking would start to degrade or weaken. One other student

opined that AI both knew more than us but is dumber than we are since it cannot think critically. She wrote, “I’m not worried about AI getting to where we are now. I’m much more worried about the possibility of us reverting to where AI is.”

end ID