#400 million dollars people!

[saveme-storybrooke-potc]

the Baldoni vs Lively/Reynolds lawsuit is EIGHT TIMES the amount of DeppvsHeard OH MY GOSH

[gender-euphowrya]

concord's development cost what now

[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.

[libraford]

The word 'rural' is in the public consciousness again and every time people start going in about the 'rural values' 'rural way of life' I remember just how subjective that word is.

I have a friend that lives in LA. He considers Columbus, OH to be 'rural.' A population of over 900k. Thriving arts community, tons of culture festivals, every kind of restaurant you can think of, one of the most annoying college campuses ever, several smaller colleges, lots of queer spaces, comic book conventions, huge concerts... rural.

The town I live in considers itself 'rural.' 38k population. Arts festival every year, a small pride celebration, monthly gallery hop, big Halloween festival. Five ice cream shops, three coffee shops, a couple fancy bars, so many grocery stores. Huge library, conservation and sustainability advocates, queer spaces, a hospital, one private college. Rural.

The town we nearly annexed, but lost the deal considers us 'urban' compared to them. Less than 5k. They have a limited hospital, often send their surgeries here. Downtown has hardware store, bars, craft supply store, a couple grocery stores, pizza places. There's some farmland, but much of the square acreage is golf. Mega churches. The houses here are 500k. Most people drive ATVs. They have a handful of festivals in the summer.

A town I would often get sent to to cover their high school sports- a little over 2k. There's a Subway, a Domino's, Family Dollar. Some bars, some corner stores. Some local crafts. All the students grow up knowing each other, most of them stay there. But they have craft fairs and art galleries, still.

Less rural still than the town I go through to get there, population of around 600. Houses, farmland, post office, general store.

Who would still look down upon the town of about 400 that I would go to sometimes- post office. Gas station. Bar. The school is the only big thing there.

And yet still, I have seen towns with population in the double digits that have a church and a post office.

Even just looking at the numbers doesn't lend accuracy to what 'rural' actually looks like. Because this is what it looks like in ohio, but it's different in West Virginia- where your closest neighbor might be a mile down a hill. Or in Montana, where your town might be planned very tightly and your neighbors are very close, but the nearest grocery store is an hour and a half away. These are places I've been, friends that I've talked to. I've never been to Missouri or Alabama or Louisiana- I'm sure they have a unique experience of being 'rural.'

So my point is that when people talk about 'the rural experience' or 'rural values,' they are talking about millions of people across the entire country who all have lived unique lives- and who may not even agree on what 'rural' is.

Think about who is talking, and who is being talked over, and who isn't even being asked to join the conversation.

[trixibebe]

Sometimes when I talk about prices I just remain at Forint. Idc do the calculations yourself.

[sirfrogsworth]

The Price of "Efficiency"

There is a classic story about writing in space. It typically goes something like,

"NASA spent millions of dollars developing an ink pen so they could write in microgravity.

Russia used a pencil."

It became a parable about efficiency and bloated, wasteful budgets and overcomplication.

And without nuance, it feels like a good lesson. It's a simple teaching you can store in your brain and it can help you avoid complication when simplicity will work just as well.

But the parable is a lie.

There is a reason they spent millions of dollars making a space pen. Pencils in space are fucking dangerous. If one splinter or shard or speck gets loose in zero gravity that fucker can float directly into your eyeball.

There is a more modern version of this story. Congress will look over NASA or the military's budget and ask why they need $400 hammers or bolts that cost $50 apiece. They will hold up a bag of bolts and tell the taxpayer they are getting screwed.

But the NASA hammer has the pencil problem. If a shard of steel breaks off that hammer in zero gravity, it's a big problem. It could float into an important electrical system and cause a short. Maybe even a fire.

And those bolts might be for a $50 million fighter jet. They need to be custom manufactured to extreme tolerances. And you'll be glad you paid for those $50 bolts because replacing the fighter jet will end up being much more costly.

This is a concept Elon Musk should understand considering his work at SpaceX. People often deride SpaceX when a rocket blows up. They see it as a giant waste. But that is a normal part of rocket development. If you want to make a better rocket, you cannot avoid blowing a few into smithereens.

Everything needs context.

You have to consider nuance before making huge unilateral decisions about apparent wasteful spending. The folks who run these programs should be allowed to defend their existence. But outside his own interests, Elon can only seem to see space pens when Russian pencils will suffice. He is looking at these programs and making no effort to see the nuance.

They say USAID gives more money to "governance" than they give to "humanitarian aid."

HOW WASTEFUL!

Except a lot of humanitarian aid gets stolen without government infrastructure to secure and deliver said aid.

Waste happens. Fraud happens. I have no doubt.

But figuring out what is *actually* wasteful is a difficult job that takes a lot of research and understanding.

But also, sometimes the fraud and the waste are worth it. Large companies will actually factor theft and fraud into their budget because it would be more costly to try and prevent it. They consider it "the cost of doing business."

But it seems no fraud or waste is acceptable to a conservative when the goal is helping people. 100% efficiency is required. You can't give all kids school lunches because some of those kids have rich parents. You can't give people disability income because some will take advantage.

Apparently if you can help millions of people but you have to absorb 10% of the cost due to fraud... well that is just unacceptable.

It's better to help no one at all.

Oftentimes Republicans will create anti-fraud programs that end up costing more than the actual fraud happening. And all the anti-fraud programs end up doing is making deserving people jump through extra hoops.

Get a lawyer. See an approved doctor. Gather 20 years of evidence that you've been disabled. Whoops, they didn't request the proper records. Start over.

That was basically my disability case. I was already on disability. They had already determined I was disabled 20 years ago. But I had to prove that I was disabled all over again to get the better kind of disability. They couldn't take their own word that I was disabled.

Those hoops were created because catching fraud is more important than helping people.

Not terribly efficient.

And then there is the "not our problem" approach.

Taxpayer money is "wasted" helping people in other countries. "We have homeless veterans! Why are we helping African babies?"

Giving out free condoms is one of the easiest and cheapest ways to stop the spread of disease. Sickness cares very little for imaginary borders. Saving lives in another country also saves lives here. It's mutually beneficial. We probably even prevented some of those homeless vets from getting infected.

No thought is being put into this scorched earth shit show.

As always... get fucked, Elon.

[rlyehtaxidermist]

December 2-3, 1984

It's been forty years since a Union Carbide chemical plant exposed five hundred thousand people to methyl isocyanate in Bhopal, India. Thousands were killed in the initial event, thousands more died from complications months or years later, and at least a hundred thousand were permanently injured.

The cause of the incident was the introduction of water to a methyl isocyanate storage tank. This caused a runaway reaction, overpressurising the tank from 14 to 280 kPa over the course of two hours, at which point the tank cracked - but even with atmospheric escape of the gas, pressure continued to increase to nearly 400 kPa - at which point the gauge could no longer give an accurate reading.

After roughly 30 tonnes of gas escaped, employees triggered the plant's alarm system - which was originally designed to alert both workers in the plant and the people in the surrounding city. Company policy mandated that they not alarm the populace about "inconsequential" leakages, so the two alarms had been decoupled by the time of the release. For nearly an hour and a half, the plant's management continued to tell authorities that everything was fine and they had no idea what had happened. Hospital staff had to guess what gas was causing the symptoms. No shelter in place order was given; the public siren remained silent for an hour and a half.

Union Carbide had identified 61 hazards at the Bhopal plant in a 1982 audit, but never followed up on the inspection. Mere months before the incident, UCC discussed the possibility of a methyl isocyanate reaction similar to what occurred in Bhopal at one of their West Virginia plants - however, the report and its predictions were never forwarded to the Bhopal plant, despite the similar design and process.

The Union Carbide Corporation asserts that the incident was caused by sabotage performed by a disgruntled worker. They claim that workers conspired with the Indian government to hide evidence of sabotage in order to blame the company, claiming that the safety systems were sufficient to prevent the incident without human intervention.

On the night of the incident, the tank's monitoring equipment had been malfunctioning for years, reduced to a single manually operated backup. Management had shut off refrigeration of the tank, keeping it at more than 15 degrees Celsius above the recommended temperature. The emergency flare and gas scrubbers had been out of order for months - and even if they had been active, they had insufficient capacity. Deluge guns - a type of pressurised water cannon intended to dissolve escaping gas - lacked enough pressure to even reach the gas cloud.

No motive for the alleged sabotage was suggested.

Warren Anderson, CEO of Union Carbide, refused to answer homicide charges by the Indian government, with the US government denying repeated requests for extradition. He died in 2014, months before the thirtieth anniversary of the disaster in Bhopal.

Union Carbide have divested their stake in their Indian subsidiary UCIL, and refuse to fund any efforts to clean up the abandoned site, insisting that the fault lied with UCIL management and the alleged saboteur. The company paid $470 million dollars to the Indian government - which worked out to a cost of 43 cents per share of the company. Union Carbide's annual earnings were $4.88 per share after the Bhopal settlement.

The 2012 Global Intelligence Files leak revealed that Union Carbide's current owner, Dow Chemical, had employed the surveillance firm Stratfor to monitor activists seeking compensation for the Bhopal disaster.

Dow responded to the email leak that they were "required to take appropriate action to protect their people and safeguard their facilities" - an attitude that seems to have been very lacking in 1984.

[dandelionsresilience]

Dandelion News - February 22-28

Like these weekly compilations? Tip me at $kaybarr1735 or check out my Dandelion Doodles! (This month’s doodles will be a little delayed since I wasn’t able to work on them throughout the month)

1. City trees absorb much more carbon than expected

“[A new measurement technique shows that trees in LA absorb] up to 60% of daytime CO₂ emissions from fossil fuel combustion in spring and summer[….] Beyond offering shade and aesthetic value, these trees act as silent workhorses in the city’s climate resilience strategy[….]”

2. #AltGov: the secret network of federal workers resisting Doge from the inside

“Government employees fight the Trump administration’s chaos by organizing and publishing information on Bluesky[…. A group of government employees are] banding together to “expose harmful policies, defend public institutions and equip citizens with tools to push back against authoritarianism[….]””

3. An Ecuadorian hotspot shows how forests can claw back from destruction

“A December 2024 study described the recovery of ground birds and mammals like ocelots, and found their diversity and biomass in secondary forests was similar to those in old-growth forests after just 20 years. [… Some taxa recover] “earlier, some are later, but they all show a tendency to recover.””

4. Over 80 House Democrats demand Trump rescind gender-affirming care ban: 'We want trans kids to live'

“[89 House Democrats signed a letter stating,] "Trans young people, their parents and their doctors should be the ones making their health care decisions. No one should need to ask the President’s permission to access life-saving, evidence-based health care." "As Members of Congress, we stand united with trans young people and their families.”“

5. Boosting seafood production while protecting biodiversity

“A new study suggests that farming seafood from the ocean – known as mariculture – could be expanded to feed more people while reducing harm to marine biodiversity at the same time. […] “[… I]t’s not a foregone conclusion that the expansion of an industry is always going to have a proportionally negative impact on the environment[….]””

6. U.S. will spend up to $1 billion to combat bird flu, USDA secretary says

“The USDA will spend up to $500 million to provide free biosecurity audits to farms and $400 million to increase payment rates to farmers who need to kill their chickens due to bird flu[….] The USDA is exploring vaccines for chickens but is not yet authorizing their use[….]”

7. An Innovative Program Supporting the Protection of Irreplaceable Saline Lakes

“[… T]he program aims to provide comprehensive data on water availability and lake health, develop strategies to monitor and assess critical ecosystems, and identify knowledge gaps to guide future research and resource management.”

8. EU to unveil ​‘Clean Industrial Deal’ to cut CO2, boost energy security

“The bold plan aims to revitalize and decarbonize heavy industry, reduce reliance on gas, and make energy cheaper, cleaner, and more secure. […] By July, the EU said it will ​“simplify state aid rules” to ​“accelerate the roll-out of clean energy, deploy industrial decarbonisation and ensure sufficient capacity of clean-tech manufacturing” on the continent.”

9. Oyster Restoration Investments Net Positive Returns for Economy and Environment

“Researchers expect the restored oyster reefs to produce $38 million in ecosystem benefits through 2048. “This network protects nearly 350 million oysters[….]” [NOAA provided] $14.9 million to expand the sanctuary network to 500 acres by 2026 […] through the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law.”

10. Nations back $200 billion-a-year plan to reverse nature losses

“More than 140 countries adopted a strategy to mobilize hundreds of billions of dollars a year to help reverse dramatic losses in biodiversity[….] A finance strategy adopted to applause and tears from delegates, underpins "our collective capacity to sustain life on this planet," said Susana Muhamad[….]”

February 15-21 news here | (all credit for images and written material can be found at the source linked; I don’t claim credit for anything but curating.)

[aduck8myshoes]

seeing people on the bird app defend their cringe oligarch gods by saying 'well Bernie is worth 2 million dollars' like that's the same thing reminds me how little the average person truly understands how big the eat the rich gap is

Bernie Sanders worked for 50 years to make his 2 million dollars in worth. he would have to do that 200,000 TIMES to make the 400 billion that musk is valued at currently

THAT'S 10 MILLION YEARS

I'm not saying that we don't need to take a serious look at the amount of personal wealth our government representatives have, we absolutely do, but the difference between someone being a single digit millionaire after a lifetime of working vs throwing around billions of dollars on the regular is astronomical

[mostlysignssomeportents]

The AI hype bubble is the new crypto hype bubble

Back in 2017 Long Island Ice Tea — known for its undistinguished, barely drinkable sugar-water — changed its name to “Long Blockchain Corp.” Its shares surged to a peak of 400% over their pre-announcement price. The company announced no specific integrations with any kind of blockchain, nor has it made any such integrations since.

If you’d like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here’s a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/09/autocomplete-worshippers/#the-real-ai-was-the-corporations-that-we-fought-along-the-way

LBCC was subsequently delisted from NASDAQ after settling with the SEC over fraudulent investor statements. Today, the company trades over the counter and its market cap is $36m, down from $138m.

https://cointelegraph.com/news/textbook-case-of-crypto-hype-how-iced-tea-company-went-blockchain-and-failed-despite-a-289-percent-stock-rise

The most remarkable thing about this incredibly stupid story is that LBCC wasn’t the peak of the blockchain bubble — rather, it was the start of blockchain’s final pump-and-dump. By the standards of 2022’s blockchain grifters, LBCC was small potatoes, a mere $138m sugar-water grift.

They didn’t have any NFTs, no wash trades, no ICO. They didn’t have a Superbowl ad. They didn’t steal billions from mom-and-pop investors while proclaiming themselves to be “Effective Altruists.” They didn’t channel hundreds of millions to election campaigns through straw donations and other forms of campaing finance frauds. They didn’t even open a crypto-themed hamburger restaurant where you couldn’t buy hamburgers with crypto:

https://robbreport.com/food-drink/dining/bored-hungry-restaurant-no-cryptocurrency-1234694556/

They were amateurs. Their attempt to “make fetch happen” only succeeded for a brief instant. By contrast, the superpredators of the crypto bubble were able to make fetch happen over an improbably long timescale, deploying the most powerful reality distortion fields since Pets.com.

Anything that can’t go on forever will eventually stop. We’re told that trillions of dollars’ worth of crypto has been wiped out over the past year, but these losses are nowhere to be seen in the real economy — because the “wealth” that was wiped out by the crypto bubble’s bursting never existed in the first place.

Like any Ponzi scheme, crypto was a way to separate normies from their savings through the pretense that they were “investing” in a vast enterprise — but the only real money (“fiat” in cryptospeak) in the system was the hardscrabble retirement savings of working people, which the bubble’s energetic inflaters swapped for illiquid, worthless shitcoins.

We’ve stopped believing in the illusory billions. Sam Bankman-Fried is under house arrest. But the people who gave him money — and the nimbler Ponzi artists who evaded arrest — are looking for new scams to separate the marks from their money.

Take Morganstanley, who spent 2021 and 2022 hyping cryptocurrency as a massive growth opportunity:

https://cointelegraph.com/news/morgan-stanley-launches-cryptocurrency-research-team

Today, Morganstanley wants you to know that AI is a $6 trillion opportunity.

They’re not alone. The CEOs of Endeavor, Buzzfeed, Microsoft, Spotify, Youtube, Snap, Sports Illustrated, and CAA are all out there, pumping up the AI bubble with every hour that god sends, declaring that the future is AI.

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/wall-street-ai-stock-price-1235343279/

Google and Bing are locked in an arms-race to see whose search engine can attain the speediest, most profound enshittification via chatbot, replacing links to web-pages with florid paragraphs composed by fully automated, supremely confident liars:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/16/tweedledumber/#easily-spooked

Blockchain was a solution in search of a problem. So is AI. Yes, Buzzfeed will be able to reduce its wage-bill by automating its personality quiz vertical, and Spotify’s “AI DJ” will produce slightly less terrible playlists (at least, to the extent that Spotify doesn’t put its thumb on the scales by inserting tracks into the playlists whose only fitness factor is that someone paid to boost them).

But even if you add all of this up, double it, square it, and add a billion dollar confidence interval, it still doesn’t add up to what Bank Of America analysts called “a defining moment — like the internet in the ’90s.” For one thing, the most exciting part of the “internet in the ‘90s” was that it had incredibly low barriers to entry and wasn’t dominated by large companies — indeed, it had them running scared.

The AI bubble, by contrast, is being inflated by massive incumbents, whose excitement boils down to “This will let the biggest companies get much, much bigger and the rest of you can go fuck yourselves.” Some revolution.

AI has all the hallmarks of a classic pump-and-dump, starting with terminology. AI isn’t “artificial” and it’s not “intelligent.” “Machine learning” doesn’t learn. On this week’s Trashfuture podcast, they made an excellent (and profane and hilarious) case that ChatGPT is best understood as a sophisticated form of autocomplete — not our new robot overlord.

https://open.spotify.com/episode/4NHKMZZNKi0w9mOhPYIL4T

We all know that autocomplete is a decidedly mixed blessing. Like all statistical inference tools, autocomplete is profoundly conservative — it wants you to do the same thing tomorrow as you did yesterday (that’s why “sophisticated” ad retargeting ads show you ads for shoes in response to your search for shoes). If the word you type after “hey” is usually “hon” then the next time you type “hey,” autocomplete will be ready to fill in your typical following word — even if this time you want to type “hey stop texting me you freak”:

https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/provocations/neophobic-conservative-ai-overlords-want-everything-stay/

And when autocomplete encounters a new input — when you try to type something you’ve never typed before — it tries to get you to finish your sentence with the statistically median thing that everyone would type next, on average. Usually that produces something utterly bland, but sometimes the results can be hilarious. Back in 2018, I started to text our babysitter with “hey are you free to sit” only to have Android finish the sentence with “on my face” (not something I’d ever typed!):

https://mashable.com/article/android-predictive-text-sit-on-my-face

Modern autocomplete can produce long passages of text in response to prompts, but it is every bit as unreliable as 2018 Android SMS autocomplete, as Alexander Hanff discovered when ChatGPT informed him that he was dead, even generating a plausible URL for a link to a nonexistent obit in The Guardian:

https://www.theregister.com/2023/03/02/chatgpt_considered_harmful/

Of course, the carnival barkers of the AI pump-and-dump insist that this is all a feature, not a bug. If autocomplete says stupid, wrong things with total confidence, that’s because “AI” is becoming more human, because humans also say stupid, wrong things with total confidence.

Exhibit A is the billionaire AI grifter Sam Altman, CEO if OpenAI — a company whose products are not open, nor are they artificial, nor are they intelligent. Altman celebrated the release of ChatGPT by tweeting “i am a stochastic parrot, and so r u.”

https://twitter.com/sama/status/1599471830255177728

This was a dig at the “stochastic parrots” paper, a comprehensive, measured roundup of criticisms of AI that led Google to fire Timnit Gebru, a respected AI researcher, for having the audacity to point out the Emperor’s New Clothes:

https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/12/04/1013294/google-ai-ethics-research-paper-forced-out-timnit-gebru/

Gebru’s co-author on the Parrots paper was Emily M Bender, a computational linguistics specialist at UW, who is one of the best-informed and most damning critics of AI hype. You can get a good sense of her position from Elizabeth Weil’s New York Magazine profile:

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/ai-artificial-intelligence-chatbots-emily-m-bender.html

Bender has made many important scholarly contributions to her field, but she is also famous for her rules of thumb, which caution her fellow scientists not to get high on their own supply:

Please do not conflate word form and meaning

Mind your own credulity

As Bender says, we’ve made “machines that can mindlessly generate text, but we haven’t learned how to stop imagining the mind behind it.” One potential tonic against this fallacy is to follow an Italian MP’s suggestion and replace “AI” with “SALAMI” (“Systematic Approaches to Learning Algorithms and Machine Inferences”). It’s a lot easier to keep a clear head when someone asks you, “Is this SALAMI intelligent? Can this SALAMI write a novel? Does this SALAMI deserve human rights?”

Bender’s most famous contribution is the “stochastic parrot,” a construct that “just probabilistically spits out words.” AI bros like Altman love the stochastic parrot, and are hellbent on reducing human beings to stochastic parrots, which will allow them to declare that their chatbots have feature-parity with human beings.

At the same time, Altman and Co are strangely afraid of their creations. It’s possible that this is just a shuck: “I have made something so powerful that it could destroy humanity! Luckily, I am a wise steward of this thing, so it’s fine. But boy, it sure is powerful!”

They’ve been playing this game for a long time. People like Elon Musk (an investor in OpenAI, who is hoping to convince the EU Commission and FTC that he can fire all of Twitter’s human moderators and replace them with chatbots without violating EU law or the FTC’s consent decree) keep warning us that AI will destroy us unless we tame it.

There’s a lot of credulous repetition of these claims, and not just by AI’s boosters. AI critics are also prone to engaging in what Lee Vinsel calls criti-hype: criticizing something by repeating its boosters’ claims without interrogating them to see if they’re true:

https://sts-news.medium.com/youre-doing-it-wrong-notes-on-criticism-and-technology-hype-18b08b4307e5

There are better ways to respond to Elon Musk warning us that AIs will emulsify the planet and use human beings for food than to shout, “Look at how irresponsible this wizard is being! He made a Frankenstein’s Monster that will kill us all!” Like, we could point out that of all the things Elon Musk is profoundly wrong about, he is most wrong about the philosophical meaning of Wachowksi movies:

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2020/may/18/lilly-wachowski-ivana-trump-elon-musk-twitter-red-pill-the-matrix-tweets

But even if we take the bros at their word when they proclaim themselves to be terrified of “existential risk” from AI, we can find better explanations by seeking out other phenomena that might be triggering their dread. As Charlie Stross points out, corporations are Slow AIs, autonomous artificial lifeforms that consistently do the wrong thing even when the people who nominally run them try to steer them in better directions:

https://media.ccc.de/v/34c3-9270-dude_you_broke_the_future

Imagine the existential horror of a ultra-rich manbaby who nominally leads a company, but can’t get it to follow: “everyone thinks I’m in charge, but I’m actually being driven by the Slow AI, serving as its sock puppet on some days, its golem on others.”

Ted Chiang nailed this back in 2017 (the same year of the Long Island Blockchain Company):

There’s a saying, popularized by Fredric Jameson, that it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism. It’s no surprise that Silicon Valley capitalists don’t want to think about capitalism ending. What’s unexpected is that the way they envision the world ending is through a form of unchecked capitalism, disguised as a superintelligent AI. They have unconsciously created a devil in their own image, a boogeyman whose excesses are precisely their own.

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/tedchiang/the-real-danger-to-civilization-isnt-ai-its-runaway

Chiang is still writing some of the best critical work on “AI.” His February article in the New Yorker, “ChatGPT Is a Blurry JPEG of the Web,” was an instant classic:

[AI] hallucinations are compression artifacts, but — like the incorrect labels generated by the Xerox photocopier — they are plausible enough that identifying them requires comparing them against the originals, which in this case means either the Web or our own knowledge of the world.

https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/chatgpt-is-a-blurry-jpeg-of-the-web

“AI” is practically purpose-built for inflating another hype-bubble, excelling as it does at producing party-tricks — plausible essays, weird images, voice impersonations. But as Princeton’s Matthew Salganik writes, there’s a world of difference between “cool” and “tool”:

https://freedom-to-tinker.com/2023/03/08/can-chatgpt-and-its-successors-go-from-cool-to-tool/

Nature can claim “conversational AI is a game-changer for science” but “there is a huge gap between writing funny instructions for removing food from home electronics and doing scientific research.” Salganik tried to get ChatGPT to help him with the most banal of scholarly tasks — aiding him in peer reviewing a colleague’s paper. The result? “ChatGPT didn’t help me do peer review at all; not one little bit.”

The criti-hype isn’t limited to ChatGPT, of course — there’s plenty of (justifiable) concern about image and voice generators and their impact on creative labor markets, but that concern is often expressed in ways that amplify the self-serving claims of the companies hoping to inflate the hype machine.

One of the best critical responses to the question of image- and voice-generators comes from Kirby Ferguson, whose final Everything Is a Remix video is a superb, visually stunning, brilliantly argued critique of these systems:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rswxcDyotXA

One area where Ferguson shines is in thinking through the copyright question — is there any right to decide who can study the art you make? Except in some edge cases, these systems don’t store copies of the images they analyze, nor do they reproduce them:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/09/ai-monkeys-paw/#bullied-schoolkids

For creators, the important material question raised by these systems is economic, not creative: will our bosses use them to erode our wages? That is a very important question, and as far as our bosses are concerned, the answer is a resounding yes.

Markets value automation primarily because automation allows capitalists to pay workers less. The textile factory owners who purchased automatic looms weren’t interested in giving their workers raises and shorting working days. ‘ They wanted to fire their skilled workers and replace them with small children kidnapped out of orphanages and indentured for a decade, starved and beaten and forced to work, even after they were mangled by the machines. Fun fact: Oliver Twist was based on the bestselling memoir of Robert Blincoe, a child who survived his decade of forced labor:

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/59127/59127-h/59127-h.htm

Today, voice actors sitting down to record for games companies are forced to begin each session with “My name is ______ and I hereby grant irrevocable permission to train an AI with my voice and use it any way you see fit.”

https://www.vice.com/en/article/5d37za/voice-actors-sign-away-rights-to-artificial-intelligence

Let’s be clear here: there is — at present — no firmly established copyright over voiceprints. The “right” that voice actors are signing away as a non-negotiable condition of doing their jobs for giant, powerful monopolists doesn’t even exist. When a corporation makes a worker surrender this right, they are betting that this right will be created later in the name of “artists’ rights” — and that they will then be able to harvest this right and use it to fire the artists who fought so hard for it.

There are other approaches to this. We could support the US Copyright Office’s position that machine-generated works are not works of human creative authorship and are thus not eligible for copyright — so if corporations wanted to control their products, they’d have to hire humans to make them:

https://www.theverge.com/2022/2/21/22944335/us-copyright-office-reject-ai-generated-art-recent-entrance-to-paradise

Or we could create collective rights that belong to all artists and can’t be signed away to a corporation. That’s how the right to record other musicians’ songs work��— and it’s why Taylor Swift was able to re-record the masters that were sold out from under her by evil private-equity bros::

https://doctorow.medium.com/united-we-stand-61e16ec707e2

Whatever we do as creative workers and as humans entitled to a decent life, we can’t afford drink the Blockchain Iced Tea. That means that we have to be technically competent, to understand how the stochastic parrot works, and to make sure our criticism doesn’t just repeat the marketing copy of the latest pump-and-dump.

Today (Mar 9), you can catch me in person in Austin at the UT School of Design and Creative Technologies, and remotely at U Manitoba’s Ethics of Emerging Tech Lecture.

Tomorrow (Mar 10), Rebecca Giblin and I kick off the SXSW reading series.

Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

[Image ID: A graph depicting the Gartner hype cycle. A pair of HAL 9000's glowing red eyes are chasing each other down the slope from the Peak of Inflated Expectations to join another one that is at rest in the Trough of Disillusionment. It, in turn, sits atop a vast cairn of HAL 9000 eyes that are piled in a rough pyramid that extends below the graph to a distance of several times its height.]

[dollarstoreartsupplies]

i’m a little late to this but i’d love to hear your hc’s for any of the main npmd characters!!! (especially grace or pete!!)

oooooohhhh baby hell yeah hell yeah

hyper specific pete headcanons:

sits crammed into the tiniest ball possible, like, full knees to chest, arms wrapped around shins, hunched tiny -- he's so damn tall that it looks WILD but he Cannot and Will Not Sprawl

left handed, but very aggresive about it, he owns literally every left handed tool; scissors, notebooks, etc..

really only likes sweets, he has to actively make himself to eat shit that isn't just insanely sugary (and, like, he doesn't hate everything savory) but if he didn't need it to survive i dont think he'd eat anything but desserts

really good dancer techncially, but he has a ton of trouble doing anything artistic with his movement or expressions

always cold at all times forever

cannot and will not get his drivers license

grace:

in love with esther from veggie tales

loves cutesy things like sanrio and strawberry shortcake from an aesthetic standpoint but she doesn't ever really buy anything specifically branded, and refuses to go into stores like hot topic where they'd sell it becuase she think's they're satantic

her and her parents always watch old movies from the 40's and 50's when things were 'simpler' and more 'wholesome' (a lot of the very rauchy innudendos packed into said movies go right the fuck over her head)

she's one of those girls who in, like, 6th grade decided she wanted really neat handwriting, so she practiced that specific handwriting that's all round and cutesy and even

she uses a tinted lip balm and feels really rebellious about it (and slightly guilty)

loves those grandma strawberry candies

has a really, deeply, intensely curated pintrest and NO OTHER SOCIAL MEDIA

steph:

dyed her hair that specific purple-red color in middle school that every cool, edgy tumblr girl did

she eats like a person who got her menu straight from tiktok, like takis, monster, airhead sour strips,,,,, she does think this makes her cool and unique

prefers ankle socks but she wears crew socks when it became clear people thought that they looked cooler

vapes the fruitests, most artifically flavored shit

she has not left the house without eyeliner on since she was 12

she plays guitar and sings really well (it's her mom's old guitar; her mom was a honey queen winner and handed her the guitar to hold onto for 'just a second' while she went to do things with roman murray,,,, she did Not Come Back)

her car keys are on a lanyard with 400 million key chains

ruth:

she loves primary colors and painting her nails bright, mismatched colors and fun patterns, so she owns a lot of fun clothes/makeup/nail polish, but she gets too into her own head about it and never wears it out of the house

the physical embodiment of waiting until everyone leaves the house and taking out her laptop to sing along to musical theatre karaoke tracks

misses popcorn so bad :(

big dc nerd, but she does love the marvel hero squirrel girl

her first 'porn' was gay newsies smut fanfic

she's a middle child (OBVIOUSLY), she has a little sister whose really sporty and popular (and she's really jealous of her) and an older sister whose in college (the older sister is the hatchetfield bee from tgwdlm)

she probably vaped once a theatre cast party and had a panic attack in the bathroom

richie:

bleaches and dyes his own hair So! Badly! like his forehead is blue constantly and it turns green in a day and every surface of his home is stained blue

has spent hours trying to get the marble out of a ramune bottle

inexplicably knows a lot bird facts

had a close up magic phase as a kid which does impact his current day

has a samsung with like four million phone charms

he's the friend with a car but good fucking lord he's a bad driver it's so bad for his two friends with anxiety disorders

horrible with money, he spent like all his bar mitzvah money in a day on like a thousand dollar gaming laptop and a really rare anime figurine

wants to be a streamer so bad

i feel like he's an oldest child but in the way where he's the older twin or something and then has one or two little siblings, like it's a very vauge version of oldest

pierced his own ears and it went badly

[kvetchlandia]

I Keep...

thinking I'm becoming adjusted to the new abnormal, the hell that the United States has inflicted upon itself and on the rest of an innocent (sort of) planet under our new "leader," His Imperial Highness, Generalissimo, Field Marshall, Dear Leader and Defender of the Cult, Trump I and his Imperial Sidekick, the equally reactionary, repulsive and repugnant Elon Musk. Because of the horrors being wreaked by them of late, I've been posting nothing but the occasional rant and lots of images of fighting fascism, not to mention the occasional image of Jews defending themselves from the once again threatening onslaught of antisemitism. I imagine that as the ugliness becomes more commonplace, I'll settle down and get back to posting my usual silliness: lovely photographs by fine photographers; cool music; interesting quotes; lovely poetry and art pieces that I find beautiful or important in some way. Then, something happens that sends me back into feeling the only thing that's appropriate to post in this rapidly sinking world is more anti-fascist stuff. I can't say how long this s going to go on, but at the moment it shows no sign of subsiding. This is what set me off yet again.

It was revealed today that the new United States Department of State budget has a budget line item for the purchase of $400 million dollars worth of Tesla trucks. Not just any trucks, or any electric trucks, but a specifically designated budget line for those hideously ugly and not particularly efficient Tesla trucks. No conflict of interest there and the already ungodly rich Elon Musk certainly isn’t going to be further enriched by the very government he’s claiming to be rooting corruption out of (while in reality not touching corruption at all and mercilessly gutting the very few programs that constitute this country’s minimal social safety net, dismantling what little remains of the old New Deal quasi-social democracy and firing millions of unionized federal employees). I guess it’s a good thing this country has those Inspectors General whose job it is to prevent such corrupt and self-serving contracts from going into effect. Oh, wait a second…

For those of you not in the United States, the Inspectors General were, at least in theory, independent of political interference, and had the job of, among other things, examining proposed federal contracts for waste, fraud and corruption. To keep them supposedly independent, it was written into the laws establishing their positions that they couldn't simply be fired by presidents, that the presidents had to demonstrate incompetence, corruption on their part or inability to do their job, and then the Congress had to vote to approve those firings. Trump, very quickly after he assumed his imperial throne, simply ignored the law, didn't seek Congressional approval and didn't demonstrate malfeasance or inability by the Inspectors General. He simply fired most of the them. It was obvious to anyone who cared to think about it that the notoriously corrupt Trump was aiming to further enrich himself and his billionaire buddies with corrupt federal contracts, further fattening their already bloated selves on the ever-shrinking supply taxpayer dollars. This instance, of Musk, the man in charge of gutting the federal workforce, firing millions of unionized workers and making it impossible for the government to do much of anything other than persecute trans people and deport those who are undocumented, somehow "accidentally" failing to notice that he was going to make a tidy sum in this contract, was just too much. So, my anti-fascist posts will continue for a while longer.

Sorry.

[tsscat]

On a higher level I agree with this but I fundamentally disagree with this being applied to Arcane (what this post was inspired by) because the animation of Arcane is so handmade and detail heavy that you fundamentally cannot have 15-20 episodes. Like it cannot happen because it takes a long time and a lot of skilled people to make animation like that and it’s near impossible to get the time or money to do that length.

A lot have people talked about how the finale was cut down from its original hour and a half long script but less have talked about why — its because (from what I remember) it was too long to animate. The budget for arcane was 250 million dollars. That’s actually pretty efficient for big budget animation when you look at cost per minute, as some people have pointed out. But that’s still overall larger than most big budget animated films (both spiderverses were 100 million, largest Pixar films are around 200 million). 15-20 episodes per season for Arcane would have likely been something like 400-500 million dollars. That’s obscene amounts of money for any project. The highest budget film ever made from what I can tell (Star Wars The Force Awakens) was 447 million. 20 episodes would be like 555 million!

There’s some oversimplification here that I’m doing because obviously 18 episodes is still a lot more than one movie and it’s actually really impressive what they’ve been able to accomplish with the money they have. BUT this still doesn’t even factor in the time and labor took to make this, and the even more time and labor it would take to make a 15-20 ep arcane.

From what I can tell, writers knew how many episodes there were per season going in (though there’s maybe a rumor that they thought for a second that there were 5 seasons? Idk). I think it is more productive to critique writers on what they chose to write for and how they wrote season 2 given this 9 ep limit. You need to scope properly for any project, and I think fundamentally writers either did not scope properly or did not write for the scope they set.

[cleverthylacine]

Freaking MAGA liars (propaganda war)

All of the ordinary Chinese people who got mad when they heard that Americans pay $200 for a couple bags of groceries and ambulances and medical care are not free apparently complained to somebody.

And our government got MAD.

Yesterday the US Embassy in China told the Chinese people that the average worth of Americans is close to $1 million.

Someone posted about it on Rednote. I commented that Elon Musk has over 400 billion dollars and lives here and if they take him out of the pool I bet the numbers will be very different. I probably should have mentioned that there's also Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates and Trump himself but I think the point was made.

Also they've seen a lot of our houses and cars and kitchens now, so. We don't look like millionaires!

400 billion dollars. if there are 8 million people on earth and he had to share it with everyone he and everyone else would still have 50 billion dollars which is still way more money than anyone on earth has ever needed for any reason. If there were 50 billion dollars in the bank per person (because there's still a lot of money left in the world from the other stupidly rich people) that was set aside to make sure every human got a good start in life and an education in whatever they want to do (tech education counts, trades counts, we need plumbers or the doctors will be overworked) and a universal basic income...

And people ask why I'm literally a commie.

[silencespring]

From the National Park Service Conservation Association:

It’s been two weeks since the new administration took office, but a hiring freeze, buyouts and other staffing directives are already taking a hefty toll on the National Park Service.

More than 2,000 National Park staff have already lost their jobs. And things will get worse for our parks if we don’t act now.

It takes tens of thousands of people to protect over 400 national park sites, from Yellowstone and Zion to Gettysburg and Independence Hall. Park staff work every day to maintain our nation’s most precious natural and historic places, educate visitors and keep them safe, and gather critical data that helps parks thrive.

These specialized, trained, dedicated professionals share with visitors the stories that have helped to define America. They perform daring search and rescue operations, clear trails, clean bathrooms and ensure our national parks are ready for all who visit them.

Put simply, parks wouldn’t be parks without the people of the National Park Service – and those people are under attack. Tell Congress to stand up for park staff and put an end to these devastating job cuts.

Park staff are crucial to local economies and provide a world-class experience to the millions of tourists who visit national parks every year. Gateway towns depend on millions of dollars spent in businesses from hotels, restaurants, tour operators, outfitters, and guides. Every state has a national park site, and every member of Congress is proud of their home state’s parks and the support they provide to local businesses.

Your leaders in Washington can – and must – speak up for their constituents who were let go and for the others who are left questioning whether they will be able to keep their jobs.

These staffing cuts mean our national parks and gateway communities will struggle as they enter the busiest time of year. Millions of visitors will flock to parks during the spring and summer months. Ranger-led programs, resource protection, maintenance needs, trash pickup and visitor safety will suffer. Needed repairs will fall behind, making matters even worse for parks and visitors. And should any more jobs be cut, some parks could face the reality of reducing services for the summer – with less access to visitor centers and historic sites.

Take action for park staff right now. National Park staff are the heartbeat of our parks. Congress must roll back these cuts and ensure national parks – and the communities who rely on them – can continue to thrive.

Shortchanging our parks only means they will continue to struggle at a time when our parks are more popular than ever. National parks, visitors and the people who dedicate their careers to protecting our most treasured places deserve better.

[blorbocedes]

very sorry. I am your $400 a person dinner party anon and in hindsight I do see where that ask kinda didn't come across the right way. apologies on that. I'm a waitress and wine professional and I do make pretty decent money but it isn't crazy. Idk. Fine dining is my hobby like gaming or cosplay and cons or f1 tickets are for some people. so yeah. I spend what many people would consider dumb money on food. it's what I'm passionate about. Mostly I guess I don't really understand why people are getting so pressed about 5k on dinner for 20 (ive have served dinner parties for far more for far fewer people) when every single one of those guys shows up in 5k outfits every day. this time the is discourse was on my pet topic and I went into your inbox to complain which was a dick move. rip my internet etiquette.

hi anon. I appreciate the self reflection. let me try to explain where I was coming from. so I saw a reel of valtteri saying the dinner cost €5000 and the number struck to me cause that's my entire personal savings and they had it for dinner. which is why i made the post of being from different planets.

you ask why ppl got pressed over the dinner when they routinely wear designer outfits that's more expensive - true! they do. I don't think I can physically comprehend charles wearing that 2 million dollar watch he has. but we're all accustomed to designer clothes costing an insane amount and an outfit has more utility - you can wear it multiple times. a dinner is a One Time Meal, and maybe some of us will never own designer but we all have had dinner. which makes it an easier reference point to compare.

so when you said in my inbox you spend $500 at expensive resturant for dinner, you're essentially telling me you spend 10% of my life savings on dinner. it came across as humble bragging.

I get that the service industry in america is not respected and you wouldn't consider yourself rich and maybe by your standards you're not but if you read through the notes of my post, of people talking about how that dinner costs more than their tuition or year's rent or salary it's just the incredible wealth gulf between the first world and second/third. and then there's the ultra rich (atheletes). ppl who buy f1 tickets or can spend a bunch at cons or fine dining are actually not the rest of the world

and although it probably is the standard amount for fine dining for the first world wealthy and you wanted to inform us of that, your comment came across as a little tone deaf. we all know f1 drivers are rich, this isn't new info, it's seeing your car payment or years rent being spent on a single dinner that contextualises just how rich they are.

I hope you understand this is nothing personal, I don't Know you beyond the 2 messages you sent. pls don't feel the need to apologize again, we've all made gaffes on the internet. I appreciate your self reflection and I hope this explains my side of it

PS. do still donate to the Gaza soup kitchen if you can. it's genuinely a good cause and feeds so many, and US dollar goes so far