#$1.2 Billion

[lunarian-anarchist]

Why is it that even today when you look up "three major religions" Judaism is in the top three on most of the search results?

Seriously y'all....why? Hinduism and Buddhism outnumber us by the hundreds of millions.

Hell even if you counted monotheistic faiths, we're still not top 3. Sikhism also outnumbers us.

We're 0.2% of the global population and 2.4% of the USA's population.

The only way this makes sense is if you're talking about the three major "Abrahamic" religions. But if that's the case maybe specifying that is important?

Btw there's also Bábism, Druzism, Samaritanism (Jewish kin), and the Baháʼí for "Abrahamic" religions.

[anonprotagging]

idk if this is smt you already know but a tip I heard regarding what to do with your chest when binding is to push down on them, like try to gather all the fat from under your arms and whatnot and push it downwards against the binder, not upwards . I think it helps avoid damage although I can't remember if it also helps it look more natural? the not being able to bind comfortably thing sounds like it rly sucks though :(

yeah, I've seen tips for all kinds of different bound-chest distribution though, and none of them seem to do anything except look weird -- pushing down, up, not moving anything around, etc. because a lot of tips are for people who could probably already bind with a good enough sports bra :(

I deleted that reblog because OP was in the comments saying they wished the post hadn't blown up since it was from 2018 and badly written and they'd made a blog trying to find a safer way to bind for all sizes since then

(like, it was irking me the way they were like "trans guys accept pain because they're told binding should hurt" as if having a chest larger than a C doesn't inherently hurt no matter what you do. just standing up long enough to do the dishes or sweep a single room, whether supported or not, has a 30% chance of making my back hurt so bad I have to lie down after.) but yeah, it sucks a lot fksjhfkjsdf 😭😭😭

[tanagause]

😍🥰😘

[batboyblog]

Things the Biden-Harris Administration Did This Week #39

October 18-25 2024.

President Biden issued the first presidential apology on behalf of the federal government to America's Native American population for the Indian boarding school policy. For 150 years the federal government operated a system of schools which aimed to destroy Native culture through the forced assimilation of native children. At these schools students faced physical, emotional, and sexual abuse, and close to 1,000 died. The Biden-Harris Administration has been historic for Native and Tribal rights. From the appointment of the first ever Native American cabinet member, Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland, to the investment of $46 billion dollars on tribal land, to 200 new co-stewardship agreements. The last 4 years have seen a historic investment in and expansion of tribal rights.

The Biden-Harris Administration proposed a new rule which would make contraceptive medication (the pill) free over the counter with most Insurance. The new rule would ban cost sharing for contraception products, including the pill, condoms, and emergency contraception. On top of over the counter medications, the new rule will also strength protections for prescribed contraception without cost sharing as well.

The EPA announced its finalized rule strengthening standards for lead paint dust in pre-1978 housing and child care facilities. There is no safe level of exposure to lead particularly for children who can suffer long term developmental consequences from lead exposure. The new standards set the lowest level of lead particle that can be identified by a lab as the standard for lead abatement. It's estimated 31 million homes built before the ban on lead paint in 1978 have lead paint and 3.8 million of those have one or more children under the age of 6. The new rule will mean 1.2 million fewer people, including over 300,000 children will not be exposed to lead particles every year. This comes after the Biden-Harris Administration announced its goal to remove and replace all lead pipes in America by the end of the decade.

The Department of Transportation announced a $50 million dollar fine against American Airlines for its treatment of disabled passengers and their wheelchairs. The fine stems from a number of incidences of humiliating and unfair treatment of passages between 2019 and 2023, as well as video documented evidence of mishandling wheelchairs and damaging them. Half the fine will go to replacing such damaged wheelchairs. The Biden administration has leveled a historic number of fines against the airlines ($225 million) for their failures. It also published a Airline Passengers with Disabilities Bill of Rights, passed a new rule accessible lavatories on aircraft, and is working on a rule to require airlines to replace lost or damaged wheelchairs with equal equipment at once.

The Department of Energy announced $430 million dollars to help boost domestic clean energy manufacturing in former coal communities. This invests in projects in 15 different communities, in places like Texas, West Virginia, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Kentucky, and Michigan. The plan will bring about 1,900 new jobs in communities struggling with the loss of coal. Projects include making insulation out of recycled cardboard, low carbon cement production, and industrial fiber hemp processing.

The Department of Transportation announced $4.2 billion in new infrastructure investment. The money will go to 44 projects across the country. For example the MBTA will get $400 million to replace the 92 year old Draw 1 bridge and renovate North Station.

The Department of Transportation announced nearly $200 million to replace aging natural gas pipes. Leaking gas lines represent a serious public health risk and also cost costumers. Planned replacements in Georgia and North Carolina for example will save the average costumer there over $900 on their gas bill a year. Replacing leaking lines will also remove 1,000 metric tons of methane pollution, annually.

The Department of the Interior announced $244 million to address legacy pollution in Pennsylvania coal country. This comes on top of $400 million invested earlier this year. This investment will help close dangerous mine shafts, reclaim unstable slopes, improve water quality by treating acid mine drainage, and restore water supplies damaged by mining.

Data shows that President Biden's Inflation Reduction Act (passed with Vice-President Harris' tie breaking vote) has saved seniors $1 billion dollars on out-of-pocket drug costs. Seniors with certain high priced drugs saw their yearly out of pocket costs capped at $3,500 for 2024. In 2024 all seniors using Medicare Part D will see their out of pocket costs capped at $2,000 for the year. It's estimated if the $2,000 cap had been in effect this year 4.6 million seniors would have hit it by June and not have had to pay any more for medication for the rest of the year.

The Department of Education announced a new proposed rule to bring student debt relief for 8 million struggling borrowers. The Biden-Harris Administration has managed despite road blocks from Republicans in Congress, the courts and law suits from Republican states to bring student loan forgiveness to 5 million Americans so far through different programs. This latest rule would take into account many financial hardships faced by people to determine if they qualify to have their student loans forgiven. The final rule cannot be finalized before 2025 meaning its fate will be decided at the election.

The Department of Agriculture announced $1.5 billion in 92 partner-driven conservation projects. These projects aim at making farming more susceptible and environmental friendly, 16 projects are about water conservation in the West, 6 support use of innovative technologies to reduce enteric methane emissions in livestock. $100 million has been earmarked for Tribal-led projects.

[xtruss]

Pro-Palestine 🇵🇸 demonstrators gathered to protest Google's Project Nimbus, blocking an entrance to the Google 1/0 conference in Mountain View in the US State of California on May 14. Conference attendees were redirected to a different entrance while the protest continued. Project Nimbus is a controversial $1.2 Billion Al and Cloud computing contract between Google, Amazon and “The Terrorist , Fascist, Apartheid, War Criminal, Liar, Conspirator, Genocidal and the Illegal Regime of the Zionist 🐖 🐷 🐖 🐗 Isra-helli” Government.

The system can collect all data sources provided by “The Terrorist , Fascist, Apartheid, War Criminal, Liar, Conspirator, Genocidal and the Illegal Regime of the Zionist 🐖 🐷 🐖 🐗 Isra-hell” and Its War Criminal Military, including databases, resources, and even live observation sources such as street and drone cameras. Critics argue that the project could help “The Terrorist , Fascist, Apartheid, War Criminal, Liar, Conspirator, Genocidal and the Illegal Regime of the Zionist 🐖 🐷 🐖 🐗 Isra-hell” continue its occupation of Palestinian territories and segregation of the Palestinian people.

[nommedtail]

welp time to unfollow strayc*tj

[luarenah]

I have a bunch of very specific experimental timepoints today and in between im running a sample across campus to load into the sequencer help

[txttletale]

Saw a tweet that said something around:

"cannot emphasize enough how horrid chatgpt is, y'all. it's depleting our global power & water supply, stopping us from thinking or writing critically, plagiarizing human artists. today's students are worried they won't have jobs because of AI tools. this isn't a world we deserve"

I've seen some of your AI posts and they seem nuanced, but how would you respond do this? Cause it seems fairly-on point and like the crux of most worries. Sorry if this is a troublesome ask, just trying to learn so any input would be appreciated.

i would simply respond that almost none of that is true.

'depleting the global power and water supply'

something i've seen making the roudns on tumblr is that chatgpt queries use 3 watt-hours per query. wow, that sounds like a lot, especially with all the articles emphasizing that this is ten times as much as google search. let's check some other very common power uses:

running a microwave for ten minutes is 133 watt-hours

gaming on your ps5 for an hour is 200 watt-hours

watching an hour of netflix is 800 watt-hours

and those are just domestic consumer electricty uses!

a single streetlight's typical operation 1.2 kilowatt-hours a day (or 1200 watt-hours)

a digital billboard being on for an hour is 4.7 kilowatt-hours (or 4700 watt-hours)

i think i've proved my point, so let's move on to the bigger picture: there are estimates that AI is going to cause datacenters to double or even triple in power consumption in the next year or two! damn that sounds scary. hey, how significant as a percentage of global power consumption are datecenters?

1-1.5%.

ah. well. nevertheless!

what about that water? yeah, datacenters use a lot of water for cooling. 1.7 billion gallons (microsoft's usage figure for 2021) is a lot of water! of course, when you look at those huge and scary numbers, there's some important context missing. it's not like that water is shipped to venus: some of it is evaporated and the rest is generally recycled in cooling towers. also, not all of the water used is potable--some datacenters cool themselves with filtered wastewater.

most importantly, this number is for all data centers. there's no good way to separate the 'AI' out for that, except to make educated guesses based on power consumption and percentage changes. that water figure isn't all attributable to AI, plenty of it is necessary to simply run regular web servers.

but sure, just taking that number in isolation, i think we can all broadly agree that it's bad that, for example, people are being asked to reduce their household water usage while google waltzes in and takes billions of gallons from those same public reservoirs.

but again, let's put this in perspective: in 2017, coca cola used 289 billion liters of water--that's 7 billion gallons! bayer (formerly monsanto) in 2018 used 124 million cubic meters--that's 32 billion gallons!

so, like. yeah, AI uses electricity, and water, to do a bunch of stuff that is basically silly and frivolous, and that is broadly speaking, as someone who likes living on a planet that is less than 30% on fire, bad. but if you look at the overall numbers involved it is a miniscule drop in the ocean! it is a functional irrelevance! it is not in any way 'depleting' anything!

'stopping us from thinking or writing critically'

this is the same old reactionary canard we hear over and over again in different forms. when was this mythic golden age when everyone was thinking and writing critically? surely we have all heard these same complaints about tiktok, about phones, about the internet itself? if we had been around a few hundred years earlier, we could have heard that "The free access which many young people have to romances, novels, and plays has poisoned the mind and corrupted the morals of many a promising youth."

it is a reactionary narrative of societal degeneration with no basis in anything. yes, it is very funny that laywers have lost the bar for trusting chatgpt to cite cases for them. but if you think that chatgpt somehow prevented them from thinking critically about its output, you're accusing the tail of wagging the dog.

nobody who says shit like "oh wow chatgpt can write every novel and movie now. yiou can just ask chatgpt to give you opinions and ideas and then use them its so great" was, like, sitting in the symposium debating the nature of the sublime before chatgpt released. there is no 'decay', there is no 'decline'. you should be suspicious of those narratives wherever you see them, especially if you are inclined to agree!

plagiarizing human artists

nah. i've been over this ad infinitum--nothing 'AI art' does could be considered plagiarism without a definition so preposterously expansive that it would curtail huge swathes of human creative expression.

AI art models do not contain or reproduce any images. the result of them being trained on images is a very very complex statistical model that contains a lot of large-scale statistical data about all those images put together (and no data about any of those individual images).

to draw a very tortured comparison, imagine you had a great idea for how to make the next Great American Painting. you loaded up a big file of every norman rockwell painting, and you made a gigantic excel spreadsheet. in this spreadsheet you noticed how regularly elements recurred: in each cell you would have something like "naturalistic lighting" or "sexually unawakened farmers" and the % of times it appears in his paintings. from this, you then drew links between these cells--what % of paintings containing sexually unawakened farmers also contained naturalistic lighting? what % also contained a white guy?

then, if you told someone else with moderately competent skill at painting to use your excel spreadsheet to generate a Great American Painting, you would likely end up with something that is recognizably similar to a Norman Rockwell painting: but any charge of 'plagiarism' would be absolutely fucking absurd!

this is a gross oversimplification, of course, but it is much closer to how AI art works than the 'collage machine' description most people who are all het up about plagiarism talk about--and if it were a collage machine, it would still not be plagiarising because collages aren't plagiarism.

(for a better and smarter explanation of the process from soneone who actually understands it check out this great twitter thread by @reachartwork)

today's students are worried they won't have jobs because of AI tools

i mean, this is true! AI tools are definitely going to destroy livelihoods. they will increase productivty for skilled writers and artists who learn to use them, which will immiserate those jobs--they will outright replace a lot of artists and writers for whom quality is not actually important to the work they do (this has already essentially happened to the SEO slop website industry and is in the process of happening to stock images).

jobs in, for example, product support are being cut for chatgpt. and that sucks for everyone involved. but this isn't some unique evil of chatgpt or machine learning, this is just the effect that technological innovation has on industries under capitalism!

there are plenty of innovations that wiped out other job sectors overnight. the camera was disastrous for portrait artists. the spinning jenny was famously disastrous for the hand-textile workers from which the luddites drew their ranks. retail work was hit hard by self-checkout machines. this is the shape of every single innovation that can increase productivity, as marx explains in wage labour and capital:

“The greater division of labour enables one labourer to accomplish the work of five, 10, or 20 labourers; it therefore increases competition among the labourers fivefold, tenfold, or twentyfold. The labourers compete not only by selling themselves one cheaper than the other, but also by one doing the work of five, 10, or 20; and they are forced to compete in this manner by the division of labour, which is introduced and steadily improved by capital. Furthermore, to the same degree in which the division of labour increases, is the labour simplified. The special skill of the labourer becomes worthless. He becomes transformed into a simple monotonous force of production, with neither physical nor mental elasticity. His work becomes accessible to all; therefore competitors press upon him from all sides. Moreover, it must be remembered that the more simple, the more easily learned the work is, so much the less is its cost to production, the expense of its acquisition, and so much the lower must the wages sink – for, like the price of any other commodity, they are determined by the cost of production. Therefore, in the same manner in which labour becomes more unsatisfactory, more repulsive, do competition increase and wages decrease”

this is the process by which every technological advancement is used to increase the domination of the owning class over the working class. not due to some inherent flaw or malice of the technology itself, but due to the material realtions of production.

so again the overarching point is that none of this is uniquely symptomatic of AI art or whatever ever most recent technological innovation. it is symptomatic of capitalism. we remember the luddites primarily for failing and not accomplishing anything of meaning.

if you think it's bad that this new technology is being used with no consideration for the planet, for social good, for the flourishing of human beings, then i agree with you! but then your problem shouldn't be with the technology--it should be with the economic system under which its use is controlled and dictated by the bourgeoisie.

[scientesting]

World development is so hard. Like I gotta figure out why the core of the earth would change from lava to pure electricity when there's no way to scientifically explain that. Like i don't NEED to explain it but it's gonna bug me if i don't have a reason at all even if it's a ridiculous one

[sayruq]

Dozens of Google employees began occupying company offices in New York City and Sunnyvale, California, on Tuesday in protest of the company’s $1.2 billion contract providing cloud computing services to the Israeli government. The sit-in, organized by the activist group No Tech for Apartheid, is happening at Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian’s office in Sunnyvale and the 10th floor commons of Google’s New York office. The sit-in will be accompanied by outdoor protests at Google offices in New York, Sunnyvale, San Francisco, and Seattle beginning at 2 pm ET and 11 am PT. Tuesday’s actions mark an escalation in a series of recent protests organized by tech workers who oppose their employer’s relationship with the Israeli government, especially in light of Israel’s ongoing assault on Gaza. Just over a dozen people gathered outside Google’s offices in New York and Sunnyvale on Tuesday. Among those in New York was Google cloud software engineer Eddie Hatfield, who was fired days after disrupting Google Israel’s managing director at March’s Mind The Tech, a company-sponsored conference focused on the Israeli tech industry, in early March. Several hours into the sit-ins on Tuesday, Google security began to accuse the workers of “trespassing” and disrupting work, prompting several people to leave while others vowed to remain until they were forced out. The 2021 contract, known as Project Nimbus, involves Google and Amazon jointly providing cloud computing infrastructure and services across branches of the Israeli government. Last week, Time reported that Google’s work on Project Nimbus involves providing direct services to the Israel Defense Forces. No Tech for Apartheid is a coalition of tech workers and organizers with MPower Change and Jewish Voice for Peace, which are respectively Muslim- and Jewish-led peace-focused activist organizations. The coalition came together shortly after Project Nimbus was signed and its details became public in 2021.

You can read No Tech for Apartheid's open letter here.

[qupritsuvwix]

Soooo… all the money spent training you bozos up til now was… wasted? Useless? You guys fucked up.

[elbiotipo]

In a way I can understand why people use Greek or Norse or Egyptian gods in fantasy fiction since in the minds of many people they aren't established religions anymore. Though for certain they are still cultural traditions with believers.

What is incredible (in a bad way) to me is when they do the same with Hindu gods. From a set of beliefs practiced by around 1.2 billion people.

[reasonsforhope]

No-paywall version.

"You can never really see the future, only imagine it, then try to make sense of the new world when it arrives.

Just a few years ago, climate projections for this century looked quite apocalyptic, with most scientists warning that continuing “business as usual” would bring the world four or even five degrees Celsius of warming — a change disruptive enough to call forth not only predictions of food crises and heat stress, state conflict and economic strife, but, from some corners, warnings of civilizational collapse and even a sort of human endgame. (Perhaps you’ve had nightmares about each of these and seen premonitions of them in your newsfeed.)

Now, with the world already 1.2 degrees hotter, scientists believe that warming this century will most likely fall between two or three degrees. (A United Nations report released this week ahead of the COP27 climate conference in Sharm el Sheikh, Egypt, confirmed that range.) A little lower is possible, with much more concerted action; a little higher, too, with slower action and bad climate luck. Those numbers may sound abstract, but what they suggest is this: Thanks to astonishing declines in the price of renewables, a truly global political mobilization, a clearer picture of the energy future and serious policy focus from world leaders,

we have cut expected warming almost in half in just five years.

...Conventional wisdom has dictated that meeting the most ambitious goals of the Paris agreement by limiting warming to 1.5 degrees could allow for some continuing normal, but failing to take rapid action on emissions, and allowing warming above three or even four degrees, spelled doom.

Neither of those futures looks all that likely now, with the most terrifying predictions made improbable by decarbonization and the most hopeful ones practically foreclosed by tragic delay. The window of possible climate futures is narrowing, and as a result, we are getting a clearer sense of what’s to come: a new world, full of disruption but also billions of people, well past climate normal and yet mercifully short of true climate apocalypse.

Over the last several months, I’ve had dozens of conversations — with climate scientists and economists and policymakers, advocates and activists and novelists and philosophers — about that new world and the ways we might conceptualize it. Perhaps the most capacious and galvanizing account is one I heard from Kate Marvel of NASA, a lead chapter author on the fifth National Climate Assessment: “The world will be what we make it.” Personally, I find myself returning to three sets of guideposts, which help map the landscape of possibility.

First, worst-case temperature scenarios that recently seemed plausible now look much less so, which is inarguably good news and, in a time of climate panic and despair, a truly underappreciated sign of genuine and world-shaping progress...

[I cut number two for being focused on negatives. This is a reasons for hope blog.]

Third, humanity retains an enormous amount of control — over just how hot it will get and how much we will do to protect one another through those assaults and disruptions. Acknowledging that truly apocalyptic warming now looks considerably less likely than it did just a few years ago pulls the future out of the realm of myth and returns it to the plane of history: contested, combative, combining suffering and flourishing — though not in equal measure for every group...

“We live in a terrible world, and we live in a wonderful world,” Marvel says. “It’s a terrible world that’s more than a degree Celsius warmer. But also a wonderful world in which we have so many ways to generate electricity that are cheaper and more cost-effective and easier to deploy than I would’ve ever imagined. People are writing credible papers in scientific journals making the case that switching rapidly to renewable energy isn’t a net cost; it will be a net financial benefit,” she says with a head-shake of near-disbelief. “If you had told me five years ago that that would be the case, I would’ve thought, wow, that’s a miracle.”"

-via The New York Times Magazine, October 26, 2022

[o-craven-canto]

Filters in the way of technologically advanced life in the universe and how likely I think they are

1. Abiogenesis (4.4-3-8 billion years ago): Total mystery. The fact that it happened so quickly on Earth (possibly as soon as there was abundant liquid water) is a tiny bit of evidence for it being easy. Amino acids and polycyclic hydrocarbons are very common in space, but nucleotides aren't, and all hypothetic models I've seen require very specific conditions and a precise sequence of steps. (It would be funny if the dozen different mechanisms proposed for abiogenesis were all happening independently somewhere.)

2. Oxygenic photosynthesis (3.5 billion years ago) (to fuel abundant biomass, and provide oxygen or some other oxidizer for fast metabolism): Not so sure. Photosynthesis is just good business sense -- sunlight is right there -- and appeared several times among bacteria. But the specific type of ultra-energetic photosynthesis that cracks water and releases oxygen appeared only once, in Cyanobacteria. That required merging two different photosynthetic apparati in a rather complex way; and all later adoptions of oxygenic photosynthesis involved incorporating Cyanobacteria by endosymbiosis. For all that it's so useful, I don't know if I'd expect to see it on every living planet.

3. Eukaryotic cell (2.4 billion years ago?): Probably the narrowest bottleneck on the list. Segregated mitochondria with their own genes and a nucleus protecting the main genome are extremely useful both for energy production (decentralized control to maximize production without overloading) and for genetic storage (less DNA damage due to reactive metabolic waste). But there's a chicken-and-egg problem in which incorporating mitochondria to make energy requires an adjustable cytoskeleton, but that consumes so much energy it would require mitochondria already in place. Current models have found solutions that involve a very specific series of events. Or maybe not? Metabolic symbiosis, per se, is common, and there may have been other ways to gene-energy segregation. Besides, after the origin of eukaryotes, endosymbiosis occurred at least nine more times, and even some bacteria can incorporate smaller cells.

4. Sexual reproduction (by 1.2 billion years ago): Without meiotic sex (combining mutations from different lineages, decoupling useful traits from harmful ones, translating a gene in multiple way), the evolution of complex beings is going to be painfully slow. Bacteria already swap genes to an extent, and sexual recombination is bundled in with the origin of eukaryotes so I probably shouldn't count it separately (meiosis is just as energy-intensive as any other use of the cytoskeleton). Once you have recombination, life cycles with spores or gametes and sex differentiation probably follow almost inevitably.

5. Multicellularity (800 million years ago?): Quite common, actually. Happens all the time among eukaryotes, and once in a very limited form even among bacteria. Now we'd want complex organized bodies with geometry-defining genes, but even that happened thrice: in plants, fungi, and animals. As far as I know, various groups of yeasts are the only regressions to unicellularity.

6. Brains and sense organs (600 million years ago): Nerve cells arose either once or twice, depending on whether Ctenophora (comb-jellies) and Eumetazoa (all other animals except sponges) form a single clade or not. Some form of cellular sensing and communication is universal in life, though, so a tissue specialized for signal transmission is probably near inevitable once you have multicellular organisms whose lifestyle depends on moving and interacting with the environment. Sense organs that work at a distance are also needed, but image-forming eyes evolved in six phyla, so no danger there (and there's so many other potential forms of communication!). Just to be safe, you'll also want muscles and maybe mineralized skeletons on the list, but I don't think either is particularly problematic. An articulated skeleton is probably better than a rigid shell, but we still have multiple examples of that (polyplacophorans, brittle stars, arthropods, vertebrates).

7. Life on land (400 million years ago): (Adding this because air has a lot more oxygen to fuel brains than water (the most intelligent aquatic beings are air-breathers), and technology in water has the issue of fire.) You're going to need a waterproof integument, some kind of rigid support system, and kidneys to regulate water balance. Plenty of animal lineages moved on land: vertebrates, insects, millipedes, spiders, scorpions, multiple types of crabs, snails, earthworms, etc. Note that most of those are arthropods: this step seems to favor exoskeletons, which help a great deal in retaining water. Of course this depends on plants getting on land first, which on Earth happened only once, and required the invention of spores and cuticles. (Actually there are polar environments where all photosynthesis occurs in water, but they are recently settled and hardly the most productive.)

8. Human-like intelligence (a few million years ago?): There seems to a be a general trend in which the max intelligence attainable by animals on Earth has increased over time. There's quite a lot of animals today that approach or rival apes in intelligence: elephants, toothed cetaceans, various carnivorans, corvids, parrots, octopodes, and there's even intriguing data about jumping spiders. Birds seem to have developed neocortex-like brain structures independently. Of course humans got much farther, but the fact that even other human species are gone suggests that a planet is not big enough for more than one sophont, so the uniqueness of humans might not necessarily imply low probability. (We seem to exist about halfway through the habitability span of Earth land, FWIW.) The evolution of sociality should probably be lumped here: we'll want a species that can teach skills to its offspring and cooperate on tasks. But sociality is also a common and useful adaptation: many species on our list (octopodes are a glaring exception) are intensely social and care for their offspring. I mentioned above that the land-step favors exoskeletal beings, which in turns favors small size; but the size ranges of large land arthropods and very intelligent birds overlap, so that's not disqualifying.

9. Agriculture and urban civilization (11,000 years ago): Agriculture arrived quite late in the history of our species, but when it arrived -- i.e. at the end of the Wurm glaciation -- it arrived independently in four to eight different places around the world, in different biogeographic realms and climates, so I must assume that at least some climate regimes are great for it (glacial cycles are a minority of Earth's history; but did agriculture need to come after glaciations? Maybe a shock of seasonality did the trick). And once you have agriculture, complex urbanized societies follow most of the time, just a few millennia later. Even writing arose at least three times (Near East, China, and Mexico), and then spread quickly.

10. Scientific method and industrialization (300 years ago): We're getting too far from my expertise here, but whatever. The Eurasian Axial Age suggests that all civilizations with a certain degree of wealth, literacy, and interconnection will spawn a variety of philosophies. Philosophical schools that focus on material causes and effects like the Ionians or Charvaka have appeared sometimes, but often didn't win over more supernaturalist schools. Perhaps in pre-industrial times pure materialism isn't as useful! You may need to thread a needle between interconnected enough to exchange and combine ideas, and also decentralized enough that the intellectual elite can't quash heterodoxy. As for industrialization, that too happened only once, though that's another case in which the first achiever would snuff out any other. I hear Song China is a popular contender for alternative Industrial Revolutions (with coal-powered steelworks!); Imperial Rome and the Abbasid Caliphate are less convincing ones. For whatever reason, it didn't take until 18th century Britain.

11. Not dying randomly along the way: Mass extinctions killing off a majority of species happened over and over -- the Permian Great Dying, the Chicxulub impact, the early Oxygen Crisis -- but life has always rebounded fairly quickly and effectively. It's hard enough to sterilize an agar plate, let alone a planet. Disasters on this scale are also unlikely to happen in the lifespan of planet-bound civilizations, unless of course the civilizations are causing them. A civilization might still face catastrophic climate change, mega-pandemics, and nuclear war, not to mention lesser setbacks like culture-wide stagnation or collapse, and I couldn't begin to estimate how common, or ruinous, they would actually be.

****

I have no idea how common the origin of life is, but the vast majority of planets with life will only have bacterial mats and stromatolites. Of the tiny sliver that evolved complex cells, a good chunk will have their equivalents of plants and animals, most of which may have intelligent life at least on primate- or cetacean-level at some later point. At any given time, a tiny fraction of those will have agricultural civilizations, at an even tinier fraction of that will have post-industrial science and technology. Let's say maybe 1 planet with industrial technology out of 100 with agriculture, 100,000 with hominid-level intelligence, 10 million with animal-like organisms, 100 millions with complex cells, and 10 billions with life at all?

[batboyblog]

Things Biden and the Democrats did, this week #27

July 12-19 2024

President Biden announced the cancellation of $1.2 billion dollars worth of student loan debt. This will cancel the debt of 35,000 public service workers, such as teachers, nurses, and firefighters. This brings the total number of people who've had their student debt relived under the Biden Administration to 4.8 million or one out of every ten people with student loan debt, for a total of $168.5 billion in debt forgiven. This came after the Supreme Court threw out an earlier more wide ranging student debt relief plan forcing the administration to undertake a slower more piecemeal process for forgiving debt. President Biden announced a new plan in the spring that will hopefully be finalized by fall that will forgive an additional 30 million people's student loan debt.

President Biden announced actions to lower housing coasts, make more housing available and called on Congress to prevent rent hikes. President Biden's plan calls for landlords who raise the rent by more than 5% a year to face losing major important tax befits, the average rent has gone up by 21% since 2021. The President has also instructed the federal government, the largest land owner in the country, to examine how unused property can be used for housing. The Bureau of Land Management plans on building 15,000 affordable housing units on public land in southern Nevada, the USPS is examining 8,500 unused properties across America to be repurposed for housing, HHS is finalizing a new rule to make it easier to use federal property to house the homeless, and the Administration is calling on state, local, and tribal governments to use their own unused property for housing, which could create approximately 1.9 million units nationwide.

The Department of Transportation announced $5 billion to replace or restore major bridges across the country. The money will go to 13 significant bridges in 16 states. Some bridges are suffering from years of neglect others are nearly 100 years old and no longer fit for modern demands. Some of the projects include the I-5 bridge over the Columbia River which connects Portland Oregon to Vancouver Washington, replacing the Sagamore Bridge which connects Cape Cod to the mainland built in 1933, replacing the I- 83 South Bridge in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, and Cape Fear Memorial Bridge Replacement Project in Wilmington, North Carolina, among others.

President Biden signed an Executive Order aimed at boosting Latino college attendance. The order established the White House Initiative on Advancing Educational Equity, Excellence, and Economic Opportunity through Hispanic-Serving Institutions. Hispanic-Serving Institutions (HSIs) are defined as colleges with 25% or above Hispanic/Latino enrollment, currently 55% of Hispanic college students are enrolled in an HSI. The initiative seeks to stream line the relationship between the federal government and HSIs to allow them to more easily take advantage of federal programs and expand their reach to better serve students and boost Hispanic enrollment nationwide.

HUD announced $325 million in grants for housing and community development in 7 cities. the cities in Tennessee, Texas, Alabama, Florida, Nevada, New York and New Jersey, have collectively pledged to develop over 6,500 new mixed-income units, including the one-for-one replacement of 2,677 severely distressed public housing units. The 7 collectively will invest $2.65 billion in additional resources within the Choice Neighborhood area – so that every $1 in HUD funds will generate $8.65 in additional resources.

President Biden took extensive new actions on immigration. On June 18th The President announced a new policy that would allow the foreign born spouses and step children of American citizens who don't have legal status to apply for it without having to leave the country, this would effect about half a million spouses and 50,000 children. This week Biden announced that people can start applying on August 19, 2024. Also in June President Biden announced an easing of Visa rules that will allow Dreamers, Americans brought to the country as children without legal status, to finally get work visas to give them legal status and a path way to citizenship. This week the Biden Administration announced a new rule to expand the federal TRIO program to cover Dreamers. TRIO is a program that aims to support low income students and those who would be the first in their families to go to college transition from high school to college, the change would support 50,000 more students each year. The Administration also plans to double the number of free immigration lawyers available to those going through immigration court.

The EPA announced $160 million in grants to support Clean U.S. Manufacturing of Steel and Other Construction Materials. The EPA estimates that the manufacturing of construction materials, such as concrete, asphalt, steel, and glass, accounts for 15% of the  annual global greenhouse gas emissions. The EPA is supporting 38 projects aimed at measuring and combatting the environmental impact of construction materials.

The US announced $203 million in humanitarian assistance for the people of Sudan. Sudan's out of control civil war has caused the largest refugee crisis in the world with 11 million Sudanese having fled their homes in the face of violence. The war is also causing the gravest food crisis in the world, with a record setting 25 million people facing acute food insecurity, and fears that nearly a million will face famine in the next months. This aid brings the total aid the US has given Sudan since September 2023 to $1.6 billion, making America the single largest donor to Sudan.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau put forward a new rule that would better regulate popular paycheck advance products. 2/3rds of workers are payed every two weeks or once a month and since 2020 the number of short term loans that allow employees to receive their paycheck days before it’s scheduled to hit their account has grown by 90%. the CFPB says that many of these programs are decided with employers not employees and millions of Americans are paying fees they didn't know about before signing up. The new rule would require lenders to tell costumers up front about any and all fees and charges, as well as cracking down on deceptive "tipping" options.

[1americanconservative]

I’m sorry FEMA spent 940 million dollars on illegals and are now saying they don’t have enough money for the hurricane victims?

Where is the 42 billion for high speed internet?

Where is the 7.5 billion dollars allocated to build EV charging stations? We only built 7.

Where is all of this money going?

We passed a $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill, there has been no new infrastructure that has even been started.

I’m willing to bet if we do an audit, the majority of all of these funds were redirected towards facilitating the flow of illegal immigrants into the country.

Of all the scandals that Biden and Harris administration have been involved in. This might be the most insidious one.