#End Use Industry (Power Generation

[aarunresearcher]

The United States solar power market size is projected to exhibit a growth rate (CAGR) of 17.6% during 2024-2032. The favorable government initiatives, rapid technological advancements, growing awareness of environmental sustainability, climate change and the need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, rising energy demand and increasing investment in research and development (R&D) efforts represent some of the key factors driving the market.

[phoenixyfriend]

Ko-fi prompt from @liberwolf:

Could you explain Tariff's , like who pays them and what they do to a country?

Well, I can definitely guess where this question is coming from.

Honestly, I was pretty excited to get this prompt, because it's one I can answer and was part of my studies focus in college. International business was my thing, and the issues of comparative advantage (along with Power Purchasing Parity) were one of the things I liked to explore.

-----------------

At their simplest, tariffs are an import tax. The United States has had tariffs as low as 5%, and at other times as high as 44% on most goods, such as during the Civil War. The purpose of a tariff is in two parts: generating revenue for the government, and protectionism.

Let's first explore how a tariff works. If you want to be confused, then you need to have never taken an economics class, and look at this graph:

(src)

So let's undo that confusion.

The simplest examples are raw or basic materials such as steel, cotton, or wine.

First, without tariffs:

Let us say that Country A and Country B both produce steel, and it is of similar quality, and in both cases cost $100 per unit. Transportation from one country to the other is $50/unit, so you can either buy domestically for $100, or internationally for $150. So you buy domestically.

Now, Country B discovers a new place to mine iron very easily, and so their cost for steel drops to $60/unit due to increased ease of access. Country A can either purchase domestically for $100, or internationally for $110 (incl. shipping), which is much more even. Still, it is more cost-effective to purchase domestically, and so Country A isn't worried.

Transportation technology is improved, dropping the shipping costs to $30/unit. A person from Country A can buy: Domestic: $100 International: $60+$30 = $90 Purchasing steel from Country B is now cheaper than purchasing it from Country A, regardless of where you live.

Citizens in Country A, in order to reduce costs for domestic construction, begin to purchase their steel from Country B. As a result, money flows from Country A to B, and the domestic steel industry in Country A begins to feel the strain as demand dwindles.

In this scenario, with no tariffs, Country A begins to rely on B for their steel, which causes a loss of jobs (steelworkers, miners), loss of infrastructure (closing of mines and factories), and an outflow of funds to another country. As a result, Country A sees itself as losing money to B, while also growing increasingly reliant on their trading partner for the crucial good that is steel. If something happens to drive up the price of B's steel again, like political upheaval or a natural disaster, it will be difficult to quickly ramp up the production of steel in Country A's domestic facilities again.

What if a tariff is introduced early?

Alternately, the dropping of complete costs for purchase of steel from Country B could be counteracted with tariffs. Let's say we do a 25% tariff on that steel. This tariff is placed on the value of the steel, not the end cost, so:

$60 + (0.25 x $60) + $30 = $105/unit

Suddenly, with the implementation of a 25% tariff on steel from Country B, the domestic market is once again competitive. People can still buy from Country B if they would like, but Country A is less worried about the potential impacts to the domestic market.

The above example is done in regards to a mature market that has not yet begun to dwindle. The infrastructure and labor is still present, and is being preemptively protected against possible loss of industry to purchasing abroad.

What happens if the tariff is not implemented until after the market has dwindled?

Let's say that the domestic market was not protected by the tariff until several decades on. Country A's domestic production, in response to increased purchasing from abroad, has dwindled to one third of what it was before the change in pricing incentivized purchase from B. Prices have, for the sake of keeping this example simple, remained at $100(A) and $60(B) in that time. However, transportation has likely become better, so transportation is down to $20, meaning that total cost for steel from B is $80, accelerating the turn from domestic steel to international.

So, what happens if you suddenly implement a tariff on international steel? Shall we say, 40%?

$60 + (0.4 x 60) + 20 = $104

It's more expensive to order from abroad! Wow! Let's purchase domestically instead, because these prices add up!

But the production is only a third of what it used to be, and domestic mines and factories for refining the iron into steel can't keep up. They're scaling, sure, but that takes time. Because demand is suddenly triple of the supply, the cost skyrockets, and so steel in Country A is now $150/unit! The price will hopefully come down eventually, as factories and mines get back in gear, but will the people setting prices let that happen?

So industries that have begun to rely on international steel, which had come to $80/unit prior to the tariff, are facing the sudden impact of a cost increase of at least $25/unit (B with tariff) or the demand-driven price increase of domestic (nearly double the pre-tariff cost of steel from B), which is an increase of at least 30% what they were paying prior to the tariff.

There are possible other aspects here, such as government subsidies to buoy the domestic steel industry until it catches back up, or possibly Country B eating some of the costs so that people still buy from them (selling for $50 instead of $60 to mitigate some of the price hike, and maintain a loyal customer base), but that's not a direct impact of the tariff.

Who pays for tariffs?

Ultimately, this is a tax on a product (as opposed to a tax on profits or capital themselves, which has other effects), which means the majority of the cost is passed on directly to the consume.

As I said, we could see the producers in Country B cut their costs a little bit to maintain a loyal customer base, but depending on their trade relationships with other countries, they are just as likely to stop trading with Country A altogether in order to focus on more profitable markets.

So why do we not put tariffs on everything?

Well... for that, we get into the question of production efficiency, or in this case, comparative advantage.

Let's say we have two small, neighboring countries, C and D, that have negligible transportation costs and similar industries. Both have extensive farmland, and both have a history of growing grapes for wine, and goats for wool. Country C is a little further north than D, so it has more rocky grasses that are good for goats, while D has more fertile plains that are good for growing grapes.

Let's say that they have an equal workforce of 500,000 of people. I'm going to say that 10,000 people working full time for a year is 1 unit of labor. So, Country C and Country D have between the 100 units of labor, and 50 each.

The cost of 1 unit of wool = the cost of 1 unit of wine

Country C, having better land for goats, can produce 4 units of wool for every unit of labor, and 2 units of wine for every unit of labor.

Meanwhile, Country D, having better land for grapes, can produce 2 units of wool per unit of labor, and 4 units of wine per unit of labor.

If they each devote exactly half their workforce to each product, then:

Country C: 100 units of wool, 50 units of wine Country D: 50 units of wool, 100 units of wine

Totaling 150 units of each product.

However, if each devotes all of their workforce to the product they're better at...

Country C: 200 units of wool, no wine Country D: no wool, 200 units of wine

and when they trade with each other, they each end up with 100 units of each product, which is a doubling of what their less-efficient labor would have resulted in!

The real world is obviously much more complicated, but in this example, we can see the pros of outsourcing some of your production to another country to focus on your own specialties.

Extreme examples of this IRL are countries where most of the economy rests on one product, such as middle-eastern petro-states that are now struggling to diversify their economies in order to not get left behind in the transition to green energy, or Taiwan's role as the world's primary producer of semiconductors being its 'silicon shield' against China.

Comparative advantage can be used well, such as our Unnamed Countries (that are definitely not the classic example of England and Portugal, with goats instead of sheep) up in the example. With each economy focusing on its specialty, there is a greater yield of both products, meaning a greater bounty for both countries.

However, should something happen to Country C up there, like an earthquake that kills half the goats, they are suddenly left with barely enough wool to clothe themselves, and nothing for Country D, which now has a surplus of wine and no wool.

So you do have to keep some domestic industry, because Bad Things Can Happen. And if we want to avoid the steel example of a collapse in the given industry, tariffs might be needed.

Are export tariffs a thing?

Yes, but they are much rarer, and can largely be defined as "oh my god, everyone please stop getting rid of this really important resource by selling it to foreigners for a big buck, we are depleting this crucial resource."

So what's the big confusion right now?

Donald Trump has, on a number of occasions, talked about 'making China pay' tariffs on the goods they import into the US. This has led to a belief that is not entirely unreasonable, that China would be the side paying the tariffs.

The view this statement engenders is that a tariff is a bit like paying a rental fee for a seller's table at an event: the producer or merchant pays the host (or landlord or what have you) a fee to sell their product on the premises. This could be a farmer's market, a renaissance faire, a comic book convention, whatever. If you want to sell at the event, you have to pay a fee to get a space to set up your table.

In the eyes of the people who listened to Trump, the tariff is that fee. China is paying the United States for access to the market.

And, technically, that's not entirely wrong. China is thus paying to enter the US market. It's just the money to pay that fee needs to come from somewhere, and like most taxes on goods, that fee comes from the consumer.

So... what now?

Well, a lot of smaller US companies that rely on cheap goods made in China are buying up non-perishables while they can, before the tariffs hit. Long-term, manufacturers in the US that rely on parts and tools manufactured in China are going to feel the squeeze once that frontloaded stock is depleted.

Some companies are large enough to take the hit on their own end, still selling at cheap rates to the consumer, because they can offset those costs with other parts of their empire... at least until smaller competitors are driven out of business, at which point they can start jacking up their prices since there are no options left. You may look at that and think, "huh, isn't that the modus operandi for Walmart and Amazon already?" and yes. It is. We are very much anticipating a 'rich get richer, poor go out of business' situation with these tariffs.

The tariffs will also impact larger companies, including non-US ones like Zara (Spanish) and H&M (Swedish), if they have a huge reliance on Chinese production to supply their huge market in the United States.

If you're interested in the repercussions that people expect from these proposed tariffs on Chinese goods, I'd suggest listening to or watching the November 8th, 2024 episode of Morning Brew Daily (I linked to YouTube, but it's also available on Spotify, Nebula, the Morning Brew website, and other podcast platforms).

[nasa]

What We Learned from Flying a Helicopter on Mars

The Ingenuity Mars Helicopter made history – not only as the first aircraft to perform powered, controlled flight on another world – but also for exceeding expectations, pushing the limits, and setting the stage for future NASA aerial exploration of other worlds.

Built as a technology demonstration designed to perform up to five experimental test flights over 30 days, Ingenuity performed flight operations from the Martian surface for almost three years. The helicopter ended its mission on Jan. 25, 2024, after sustaining damage to its rotor blades during its 72nd flight.

So, what did we learn from this small but mighty helicopter?

We can fly rotorcraft in the thin atmosphere of other planets.

Ingenuity proved that powered, controlled flight is possible on other worlds when it took to the Martian skies for the first time on April 19, 2021.

Flying on planets like Mars is no easy feat: The Red Planet has a significantly lower gravity – one-third that of Earth’s – and an extremely thin atmosphere, with only 1% the pressure at the surface compared to our planet. This means there are relatively few air molecules with which Ingenuity’s two 4-foot-wide (1.2-meter-wide) rotor blades can interact to achieve flight.

Ingenuity performed several flights dedicated to understanding key aerodynamic effects and how they interact with the structure and control system of the helicopter, providing us with a treasure-trove of data on how aircraft fly in the Martian atmosphere.

Now, we can use this knowledge to directly improve performance and reduce risk on future planetary aerial vehicles.

Creative solutions and “ingenuity” kept the helicopter flying longer than expected.

Over an extended mission that lasted for almost 1,000 Martian days (more than 33 times longer than originally planned), Ingenuity was upgraded with the ability to autonomously choose landing sites in treacherous terrain, dealt with a dead sensor, dusted itself off after dust storms, operated from 48 different airfields, performed three emergency landings, and survived a frigid Martian winter.

Fun fact: To keep costs low, the helicopter contained many off-the-shelf-commercial parts from the smartphone industry - parts that had never been tested in deep space. Those parts also surpassed expectations, proving durable throughout Ingenuity’s extended mission, and can inform future budget-conscious hardware solutions.

There is value in adding an aerial dimension to interplanetary surface missions.

Ingenuity traveled to Mars on the belly of the Perseverance rover, which served as the communications relay for Ingenuity and, therefore, was its constant companion. The helicopter also proved itself a helpful scout to the rover.

After its initial five flights in 2021, Ingenuity transitioned to an “operations demonstration,” serving as Perseverance’s eyes in the sky as it scouted science targets, potential rover routes, and inaccessible features, while also capturing stereo images for digital elevation maps.

Airborne assets like Ingenuity unlock a new dimension of exploration on Mars that we did not yet have – providing more pixels per meter of resolution for imaging than an orbiter and exploring locations a rover cannot reach.

Tech demos can pay off big time.

Ingenuity was flown as a technology demonstration payload on the Mars 2020 mission, and was a high risk, high reward, low-cost endeavor that paid off big. The data collected by the helicopter will be analyzed for years to come and will benefit future Mars and other planetary missions.

Just as the Sojourner rover led to the MER-class (Spirit and Opportunity) rovers, and the MSL-class (Curiosity and Perseverance) rovers, the team believes Ingenuity’s success will lead to future fleets of aircraft at Mars.

In general, NASA’s Technology Demonstration Missions test and advance new technologies, and then transition those capabilities to NASA missions, industry, and other government agencies. Chosen technologies are thoroughly ground- and flight-tested in relevant operating environments — reducing risks to future flight missions, gaining operational heritage and continuing NASA’s long history as a technological leader.

You can fall in love with robots on another planet.

Following in the tracks of beloved Martian rovers, the Ingenuity Mars Helicopter built up a worldwide fanbase. The Ingenuity team and public awaited every single flight with anticipation, awe, humor, and hope.

Check out #ThanksIngenuity on social media to see what’s been said about the helicopter’s accomplishments.

Learn more about Ingenuity’s accomplishments here. And make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space!

[stjohnstarling]

Alright, so: I want to explain a little more about this connection between the Twilight fandom, Fifty Shades of Grey, and seemingly, the self-publishing industry as a whole. It's a lot, so I'm going to have to chip away at it a bit at a time, and I think the best place to start is by describing the scene in late 2000s Twilight fandom.

In 2009, Twilight was one of the biggest fandoms in the world, although it was nearly invisible to outsiders because it

Was about a straight couple, while most other fandoms were predominantly gay, and

Was conducted almost entirely on fanfiction.net among a group of people who had little other background in fandom. (x)

That meant for many Twilight fans, Twilight was fandom. It was all they knew, and many had no path out. That also made it a corked champagne bottle with the pressure building.

Because of these community dynamics and the declining quality of the Twilight books themselves, Twilight fanfiction evolved to be mostly AUs so alternate they were more-or-less original romance novels that used Bella and Edward as broad character templates. (x)

Seriously, Twilight fandom got really crazy big for a few years there. It was not totally uncommon to get multi-million clicks on a semi-popular story. It's weird looking back on it and calling it "Twilight fandom" because it was really more like "Romance Novel fandom". For real, for a period there, calling a Twilight fanfic author a 'Twilight fan' would be the ultimate insult. But they never stopped writing about Edward and Bella! It's so weird. (x)

If you were in 2000s era fandom, you're probably aware of the phenomenon of Big Name Fans and the various social-climbing dynamics that happened around them. The Twilight fandom took this social power game another level:

This wasn't even just an author thing. There were Big Name Authors (BNAs) but there were also Big Name Readers. These were basically like... full-time rabid fans of a BNA. They devoted so much of their time to helping out the BNAs, reviewing their chapters, making them fanart, promoting their fics, kissing their asses with cringe-worthy intensity, you name it. Which is why you saw what looked like BNAs having 'employees', such as Moi, tby789's Director of Marketing. (x)

It became apparent that these power games weren't just for fandom clout. The fandom was proving that that social power could be translated into real-world dollars. You see, the Twilight fandom used to organize charity auctions where big name authors would auction off custom fanfiction, and the money generated was substantial:

Mostly authors would auction off stories. So if you donated in my name, I'd write you 10,000 words of porn in my Tattward universe, or something new, etc. That's how it worked. The 2009 auction raised $80,000. The 2010 auction raised $140,000. The 2011 auction raised $20,00. [NOTE: this is likely a typo] (x)

A lot of these dynamics were not unique to the Twilight fandom, but it was the combination that created a perfect storm of opportunism. This would end up changing not just fandom dynamics but the publishing industry as a whole.

[creepyscritches]

I read your post about open enrollment for the ACA and was hoping you might expand on why you believe it would take years to dismantle. I've been terrified that with a Republican house/senate, Trump could just snap his fingers and make it go away within months of taking office. I'd love some reassurance that that's not possible.

Hiya, sure I can share some thoughts on the matter! First, it's very important to understand the ACA is a huuuuuuuuuuuuge system with subject matter experts in dozens of places throughout the process. I'm one of those SMEs, but I am at the end of the process where the revenue is generated, so my insight is limited on the public facing pieces.

What this means is that I am professionally embedded in the ACA in a position that exists purely to show what conditions people are treated for and then generate that data into what's called a "risk score". There's about 6 pages I could write on it, but the takeaway is that the ACA is

1) intricately interwoven with the federal government

2) increasingly profitable, sustainable, and growing (it is STILL a for-profit system if you can believe it)

3) wholeheartedly invested in by the largest insurance companies in the country LARGELY due to the fact that they finally learned the rules of how to make the ACA a thriving center of business

4) since the big issuers are arm+leg invested in the ACA, there is a lot of resistance politically and on an industry level to leave it behind (think of the lobbyists, politicians, corporations that will fight tooth and nail to protect their profit + investment)

The process to calculate a risk score takes roughly 2 years. There is an audit for the concurrent year and then a vigorous retro audit for the prev year - - this is a rolling cycle every year. Medicare has a similar process. These are RVP + RADV audits if you would like the jargon.

Eliminating the ACA abruptly is as internally laughable as us finishing the RADV audit ahead of schedule. If Trump were to blow the ACA into smithereens on day 1, he would be drowning in issuer complaints and an economic health sector that is essentially bleeding out. You cut off the RVP early? We have half of next RADV stuck in the gears now. You cut off the RADV early? No issuer will get their "risk adjusted" payments for services rendered in the prev benefit year (to an extent, again very complex multi-process system).

The ACA is GREAT for the public and should be defended on that basis alone. However, the inner capitalistic nature of the ACA is a powerful armor that has conservatives + liberals defending it on a basis of capital + market growth. It's not sexy, but it makes too much money consistently for the system to be easily dismantled.

Or at least that's what I can tell you from the money center of the ACA. they don't bring us up in political conversation because we are confusing to seasoned professionals, boring to industry outsiders, and consistently we are anathema to the anti-ACA talking points.

I am already preparing for next year's RVP for this window of open enrollment. That RVP process will feed into the RADV in 2026. In 2025, we begin the RADV for 2024. If nothing else, the slow fucking gears of CMS will keep the ACA alive until we finish our work at the end of the process. I highly doubt that will be the only reason the ACA is safeguarded, but it is a powerful type of support to pair with people protecting the ACA for other reasons.

I work every day to show, defend, and educate on how many diagnoses are managed thru my company's ACA plans. My specialty is cancer and I see a lot of it. The revenue drive comes from the Medical Loss Ratio (MLR) rule stating only 20% MAX of profit may go to the issuer + the 80% at a minimum must go back to the customer or be invested in expanding benefits. The more people on the plan using it, the higher that 20% becomes for the issuer and the more impactful that 80% becomes for the next year of benefit growth. It is remarkably profitable once issuers stop seeking out "healthy populations". The ACA is a functional method for issuers to tap into a stable customer base (sick/chronic ill customers) that turns a profit, grows, and builds strong consumer bases in each state.

The industry can never walk away from this overnight - - this is the preferred investment for many big players. Changing the direction of those businesses will be a monumental effort that takes years (at least 2 with the audits). In the meantime, you still have benefits, you still have care, and you still have reason to sign up. Let us deal with the bureaucracy bullshit, go get your care and know you have benefits thru 2025 and we will be working to keep it that way for 2026 and forward. This is a wing of the federal government, it is not a jenga tower like Trump wishes.

[were--ralph]

why exactly do you dislike generative art so much? i know its been misused by some folks, but like, why blame a tool because it gets used by shitty people? Why not just... blame the people who are shitty? I mean this in genuinely good faith, you seem like a pretty nice guy normally, but i guess it just makes me confused how... severe? your reactions are sometimes to it. There's a lot of nuance to conversation about it, and by folks a lot smarter than I (I suggest checking out the Are We Art Yet or "AWAY" group! They've got a lot on their page about the ethical use of Image generation software by individuals, and it really helped explain some things I was confused about). I know on my end, it made me think about why I personally was so reactive about Who was allowed to make art and How/Why. Again, all this in good faith, and I'm not asking you to like, Explain yourself or anything- If you just read this and decide to delete it instead of answering, all good! I just hope maybe you'll look into *why* some people advocate for generative software as strongly as they do, and listen to what they have to say about things -🦜

if Ai genuinely generated its own content I wouldn't have as much of a problem with it, however what Ai currently does is scrape other people's art, collect it, and then build something based off of others stolen works without crediting them. It's like. stealing other peoples art, mashing it together, then saying "this is mine i can not only profit of it but i can use it to cut costs in other industries.

this is more evident by people not "making" art but instead using prompts. Its like going to McDonalds and saying "Burger. Big, Juicy, etc, etc" then instead of a worker making the burger it uses an algorithm to build a burger based off of several restaurant's recepies.

example

the left is AI art, the right is one of the artists (Lindong) who it pulled the art style from. it's literally mass producing someone's artstyle by taking their art then using an algorithm to rebuild it in any context. this is even more apparent when you see ai art also tries to recreate artists watermarks and generally blends them together making it unintelligible.

Aside from that theres a lot of other ethical problems with it including generating pretty awful content, including but not limited to cp. It also uses a lot of processing power and apparently water? I haven't caught up on the newer developements i've been depressed about it tbh

Then aside from those, studios are leaning towards Ai generation to replace having to pay people. I've seen professional voice actors complain on twitter that they haven't gotten as much work since ai voice generation started, artists are being cut down and replaced by ai art then having the remaining artists fix any errors in the ai art.

Even beyond those things are the potential for misinformation. Here's an experiment: Which of these two are ai generated?

ready?

These two are both entirely ai generated. I have no idea if they're real people, but in a few months you could ai generate a Biden sex scandal, you could generate politics in whatever situation you want, you can generate popular streamers nude, whatever. and worse yet is ai generated video is already being developed and it doesn't look bad.

I posted on this already but as of right now it only needs one clear frame of a body and it can generate motion. yeah there are issues but it's been like two years since ai development started being taken seriously and we've gotten to this point already. within another two years it'll be close to perfected. There was even tests done with tiktokers and it works. it just fucking works.

There is genuinely not one upside to ai art. at all. it's theft, it's harming peoples lives, its harming the environment, its cutting jobs back and hurting the economy, it's invading peoples privacy, its making pedophilia accessible, and more. it's a plague and there's no vaccine for it. And all because people don't want to take a year to learn anatomy.

[avelera]

Arcane's Jayce & Viktor: A Tech Industry Perspective

I've been wrestling with whether to make a short and sweet post about these points or to just have another long-winded meta and clearly since I'm incapable of being brief, I guess we'll just dive in.

I work in tech. What I see in this industry colors a lot of how I see Jayce and Viktor in Arcane. I'll try to be brief about a few of the things that stand out to me the most and that I think are intentional.

1 ) Jayce and Viktor are references to Alfred Nobel - This is a historical reference so direct I genuinely don't know how people grasp Jayce and Viktor's characters if you don't know about it.

Alfred Nobel is known for two things: inventing dynamite and bequeathing his subsequent fortune to founding the Nobel Peace Prize. These things are very much related.

Nobel was brilliant but socially naive. When he invented dynamite, he intended it to make life easier and safer for working in mines. Sound familiar? That is literally what the Atlas Gauntlets and Hex Claw Jayce and Viktor invented with Hextech was posed to be. It is a direct reference to Alfred Nobel and dynamite, there is no question about it in my mind whatsoever that they pose the benefit to society as specifically being useful to miners.

Nobel also believed that the awesome destructive power of dynamite would mean the end of warfare. Literally. He thought it was so disgusting and unthinkable that people would use explosives on each other that it would grind violence to a halt. He was very, very wrong about this. So wrong, in fact, that he spent the rest of his life in horror and remorse at how explosives were being used to kill people and created the Nobel Peace Prize to promote innovations aimed at peace, a prize which annually recognizes those who "conferred the greatest benefit to humankind".

Likewise with Jayce and Viktor, they are both horrified to imagine Hextech used for warfare and we think they're incredibly socially naive for thinking this, because they are. Maybe in another universe, there'd be the Talis Peace Prize to try to make up for what they unleashed on the world. Which brings me to my next point:

2 ) Jayce and Viktor have typical engineer blindspots to society's ills - As I've discussed in-depth in another meta, Jayce and Viktor both desperately needed some non-STEM or scientific classes in their life because their worldview is so naive and stunted as a result that it's the source of a dizzying number of their problems. Neither of them could even consider that Hextech, like dynamite, would be weaponized immediately. But they have other huge gaps too as a result of their narrow focus on science, and I do believe this is intentional by the writers as a commentary on engineers and tech people in general.

Short version, Jayce desperately needs some understanding of history and of rhetoric. When Ambessa asks him if his school teaches military history, he doesn't even know if they offer it. She was testing him with that question and as a canny manipulator and general, she clearly takes that to mean she can run circles around him, and she is right. Because with incredibly simplistic plays to his male ego, like calling his leadership "impotent", Ambessa immediately gets Jayce riled up and not thinking clearly. She blindfolds him, spins him around, and shoves him headlong into taking violent military action in exactly the direction she wanted him to go in to kick the nest and set off a war.

Jayce is also easily manipulated by Mel for more benevolent but still self-serving reasons with appeals to his life's work with flattery, his male ego with sex, and his dreams for a better world to make him fall quickly into step with the city's corruption with only a little nudging because he has no strong civic understanding of his own to fall back on. As Cait notes, he's never taken an interest in the Council or politics before until he becomes a Councilor himself.

Short version for Viktor, he wants to make the world a better place but he's never actually had to think through human nature before. He's literally never bothered. We know this because of his blindspot towards Hextech weaponry where he truly believed they could avoid it being used for warfare, and the fact that later in his cult, he's somehow shocked to learn that people will do bad things for the ones they love and won't just slice pieces of their own nature and personality off to fit into his little Utopian commune.

Literally cracking any kind of history or sociology book or heck, a Pratchett Discworld book, would have told him that there's a straight fucking line between deciding people are the problem when it comes to fixing society's ills and eugenics. He falls headlong into that trap and it requires his older, wiser self to beat him over the head with the truth of the horrors of his own simplistic worldview would lead to before he literally annihilates all life in his home city in his attempt to save it.

Which brings me to my next point:

3 ) Jayce and Viktor as oblivious tech nerds who have never cracked a book open but suddenly thinking that because they're great engineers, they have the solution to all of life's problems.

This is a somewhat shorter point, but I think in modern society we all know about the proverbial tech bro who keeps reinventing things like public transportation and taxes because they've never read a book in their life that doesn't have equations in it.

To be clear, they aren't bad people! I'd even hazard to say that young tech bros trying to make public good-based startups with a laughable lack of social awareness aren't bad people either! If anything, the education system has failed them, and they're pouring their intellect and earnest, human desire to help others into endeavors with the narrowest possible world perspective, which happens to be their field of expertise and thus it makes sense they'd see that as the greatest value that can offer, it's just too limited a view so they end up reinventing things that already exist or making worse, more dangerous versions of things that already exist. Tragically, their naive but well-meaning worldview often leads to:

4 ) Viktor and Jayce, but mostly Jayce, as tech bros being beholden to billionaire interests to make their dream come true:

Like Jayce, we see how these tech bros have their vision co-opted by people with a broader vision and understanding of the world, by billionaire investors who turn their inventions into making a quick buck for themselves, to warmongers and dictators who turn the creations of their mind into surveillance state horror stories. Some of that is a lack of wisdom on their parts when it comes to building in safeguards, sure, but part of that is there is a class divide too between the powerful and bright-eyed young inventors who just want to improve the world. As Singed notes, no one in power is ever innocent. And those in power have the capital to make a young inventor's dream come true and thus, tie them to their demands and interests. As Jayce said, they built the Hexgates, "Like [the Councilors] asked." Specifically this indicates that their vision has already been co-opted to serve financial interests. It also, again, makes it almost laughable how naive they are that they didn't realize warfare was next after trade.

Like many tech bros with billionaire investors, Jayce relied on the Kirammans, who were one of the wealthiest people in the city and literally on the Council that represents the State, and on Mel who is also part of the State, who is the wealthiest woman in Piltover, and who comes from a family of world-conquering warmongers, to make his dream come true from the very start.

From the beginning, Jayce was at a losing disadvantage when it came to keeping his dream ideologically pure and free of the influence of the wealthy and powerful.

And finally, just to point out that I'm not making this up, that these parallels are in fact intentional and built into the story:

4 ) Jayce and Viktor as parallels to Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, founders of Apple. Christian Linke, co-creator of Arcane, specifically noted them as inspirations for Jayce and Viktor's relationship, with Jayce (Jobs) as the face of the company and Viktor (Woz) as the real brains behind the invention.

This caused a lot of sturm and drang on Twitter with people misinterpreting that he means Jayce isn't the actual inventor of Hextech, which I think is an overreaction. Jobs, unlike many tech bros who have earned society's ire lately like Musk, was actually an engineer too. It's completely common in tech spaces for partnerships to be made up of one partner who is able to handle being the public face of the company, and one introverted and socially awkward genius who prefers to sit in a dark room and actually tinker with the problem and who would literally rather set themselves on fire than talk to a non-technical human being. I know because I've been in such partnerships before myself as the public face.

Where Jayce and Viktor rather charmingly buck the stereotypes of that relationship and so in turn actually make it more like what I've seen in the real world, is the fact there isn't resentment between the two as a result. Viktor is glad that Jayce is willing to be the public face and doesn't want to get in the way. This is actually very common with the engineers I know! It's not seen as glory stealing, it's seen as sparing them awful, painful work they don't want to do, like networking.

Yes it means Jayce needs to sacrifice some time in the lab, but it's a simple division of labor that he's happy to do, especially if it frees Viktor from the responsibility so he can focus on what he loves, because Jayce loves him. And you'll note that Jayce is very above-board academically speaking on this front, he always cites Viktor as his partner and is scrupulous in giving Viktor credit, in conversation at least, even if he doesn't forcibly drag Viktor on stage to take credit there.

Anyway, when I write meta or even fic for these two, this sort of background is always on my mind, and I thought it might be valuable for others who maybe aren't as familiar with the tech space as I am.

[spam-monster]

Why I Think Stone Should Be Shadow's Human Buddy:

- Both processing their grief.

- Shadow gets someone who's used to dealing with overdramatic rage and not talking about feelings.

- Shadow wakes up in a panic after a nightmare and trashes his room? Stone replaces everything without complaint and adds a force field around his stuff so he doesn't break anything else at night. Shadow mentions he misses having a record player? Stone buys him a new one and throws in every album released 50 years ago just in case.

- Stone gets someone who genuinely appreciates his help and who would actually do nice things for him in return.

- Shadow insists on helping Stone cook. Shadow helps clean up his own messes. Shadow tries to listen to his advice.

- Riding motorcycles out in the wilds and then setting up a tent and stargazing together.

- Also they're just both kinda hecked-up little guys.

- Like both probably mad at GUN still but settle for clandestinely thwarting their plans undercover.

- Also Stone kinda wants to take over the world in Robotnik's name but also wants to protect the world he sacrificed himself to save but also is too nice to use Shadow as a tool.

- Somehow they end up settling on "take over the coffee industry by offering better job benefits and use sustainable business practices to help protect the environment"

- Shadow helps transport the beans to reduce fuel costs. He likes having a job that's not just "run around to generate energy and let scientists poke at you"

- GUN is appalled when they find out the ultimate lifeform is working at a coffee company. "You have the power to level or fuel entire cities and you're wasting it on coffee?!"

- "I like coffee." Shadow glares dramatically.

- Team Shadow fits into dynamic as well - Stone having access to Eggman tech could be how they find Omega, and he and Rogue would be very catty at each other.

- Stone asks Tom and Maddie for advice on living with an alien hedgehog. They start giving him parenting advice.

- "I'm not a parent" he says

- but then he sees Shadow in danger and the switch clicks to "crap in trying to cope with the loss of the man I loved I accidentally adopted an edgy teenager"

- Just let him join the family dynamic as the weird uncle who watches soap operas with Knuckles and Maddie and helps Tails test inventions and threatens GUN with an entire arsenal of Egg tech if they try to go after the silly little alien critters ever again.

[reasonsforhope]

"China’s additions of wind and solar capacity once again exceeded forecasts and prior records in 2024, new data releases show.

Another 277GW of solar was installed through the year, 28% more than was added in 2023, according to the National Energy Administration. That brings the country’s total operational solar capacity to 887GW. Wind installations also hit a fresh record of 79GW — a 5% increase from the previous year — taking total capacity to 521GW.

That means China now has 1,408GW of wind and solar capacity — well ahead of the government’s prior target of having 1,200GW in place by 2030....

“The combination of accelerating clean energy growth and moderating power demand growth promises to bend China’s emissions down further from the current plateau,” Myllyvirta said in a post.

That’s despite coal- and gas-fired power capacity additions of 54GW in 2024, a slight decline from the prior year.

Myllyvirta said energy capacity additions tend to accelerate towards the end of each year, which means last year’s new installations will only fully show up in generation statistics from 2025.

“So the record additions in the end of 2024 are highly relevant for the 2025 emission trend,” Myllyvirta said.

Close to half of the experts surveyed by CREA last year said China’s carbon dioxide emissions had probably already peaked, or would do so in 2025, thanks in large part to its unprecedented wind and solar boom.

However, it’s still too soon to call the top. China’s fossil fuel power plants generated 1.5% more electricity in 2024 than the previous year, per the National Bureau of Statistics. This indicates that electricity consumption continued to grow faster than clean energy output.

Meanwhile, 11 million electric vehicles were sold in China in 2024, a 40% increase, according to a tally by research group Rho Motion. One in two new cars sold in the country now has a plug, meaning China is expected to see a steady decline in gasoline demand in the years ahead. The country’s crude oil imports fell 1.9% in 2024, the first annual decline in two decades, barring the Covid-induced slump.

China’s rapid progress in electrifying transport, heavy industry, and heating will help turn the tide on emissions. The eastern province of Zhejiang has reached a world-leading electrification rate of 51%, according to an analysis by US-based research group RMI."

-via The Progress Playbook, January 21, 2025

[chocodile]

Worldbuilding time! Let's talk about vehicular travel in modern day Amaranthine, using the snowmobiles from this recent comic as a jumping off point.

"Prowler" - Ironfrost patrol snowmobile - (year of manufacture: 1912)

These half-track all terrain vehicles are used by Ironfrost soldiers to travel long distances over the tundra. Originally adapted from older, four-wheeled automobiles, the half-track Prowler design became increasingly standardized over the years as eternal winter continued to creep southward. They are capable of operating in a wide variety of terrain conditions and are fairly modular. Common mods include removable skis, hardtop and softtop roofs, gun mounts, and towing attachments.

Like all vehicles, Prowlers are steam-powered. The external combustion engine runs on kerosene. In snowy conditions, feedwater can be obtained automatically through a scraper port on the underside of the vehicle, though manual feeding is required in muddy or dry conditions.

Though not as fast, reliable, or efficient as trains, their agile nature have made them an essential part of life in the far north… and, increasingly, in the middle country as well. The Rising Dawn have stolen several Prowlers for their own usage.

"Aspire" - Classic automobile (year of manufacture: 1890)

Four-wheeled vehicles are an unusual sight in the modern day. Ironfrost-made cars were in vogue among the southern rim upper class for many years, but the worsening climate has made them more and more niche as road conditions outside of major cities deteriorate. The majority of higher horsepower automobiles were converted directly into half tracks, while older, lower-end vehicles were generally scrapped for parts.

The Aspire was the last four-wheeled vehicle widely available to the public. Advertised as a stylish, powerful, modern vehicle for the elite on the go, it boasted a sleek, classy aesthetic, a removable softtop roof, and a powerful steam engine with a large kerosene tank suitable for travel between cities. Preorders were advertised to southern rim wealthy in local papers. However, a series of unusually bad winters soon after its debut scared off buyers, shutting down production early and ultimately spelling doom for the entire four-wheeled automobile industry.

One of those Aspire preorders went to Baroness Jocosa North. Though she has since passed away, her son, Theopolis North, still maintains the now wildly impractical car in near mint condition. It is almost never seen outside of its garage.

"'Icebreaker' Class E 250" - Northern cross-country train (year of manufacture: 1903)

The majority of modern-day overland travel is accomplished via train. Massive long-distance rail lines, laid before the world became quite so cold, connect the remaining cities, allowing (relatively) safe travel and trade across vast expanses of tundra.

Southerly locomotives typically operate with only a basic wedge plow attachment. However, trains that run further north must be fitted with gigantic rotary snowplows. These complex machines require significant maintenance. Though they can and will chew up most things that get in the train's way, encounters with particularly large and bony beasts have been known to jam them.

Ironfrost's line terminates in a massive, sprawling rail yard where Icebreakers are fitted and maintained. Those who have visited it tell of a dark, dreary wasteland of twisted scrap metal and ice where coal dust and smoke have turned both the sky and ground black. All northern trains must pass through that place eventually.

"Chariot of the Dawn" - One-of-a-kind luxury automobile (year of manufacture: 1920)

The only place where four-wheeled automobiles still thrive is the City of the Sun. The eternal summers and paved roads are well-suited to cars and trolleys, though they are, of course, still something of a luxury good. Licenses for ownership and operation are ultimately controlled by the church, with His Radiance having the final say. (His most devout followers, of course, tend to get preferential treatment here.)

The City of the Sun manufactures its own vehicles, adapted from Ironfrost designs in a sort of divergent evolution. Freed from the road and weather concerns of the outside world, their automobiles favor sleek, swoopy body shapes, ornamental trim, low-slung bodies with limited ground clearance, and pastel paintjobs. Additionally, the engines are far less powerful and far more finicky, requiring regular maintenance.

His Radiance himself owns several custom automobiles, all of which are egregiously bedazzled to a degree that would look grotesque to anyone who wasn't used to it. Some are open-top, allowing his loyal followers an audience with his beautiful face and glittering halo, while others feature tinted windows. You know, in case he wants subtlety.

[aarunresearcher]

United States lubricants market size reached USD 32.6 Million in 2024. Looking forward, IMARC Group expects the market to reach USD 41.9 Million by 2033, exhibiting a growth rate (CAGR) of 2.9% during ​2025-2033​. The escalating advances in lubricant technology, including the development of high-performance synthetic lubricants, which contribute to increased efficiency and extended equipment life, are driving the market.

[mariacallous]

In 1999, the year I turned 16, there were three cultural events that seemed to define what it meant to be a young woman—a girl—facing down the new millennium. In April, Britney Spears appeared on the cover of Rolling Stone lying on a pink bed wearing polka-dot panties and a black push‐up bra, clutching a Teletubby doll with one hand and a phone with the other. In September, DreamWorks released American Beauty, a movie in which a middle‐aged man has florid sexual fantasies about his teenage daughter’s best friend; the film later won five Academy Awards, including Best Picture. In November, the teen-clothing brand Abercrombie & Fitch released its holiday catalog, titled “Naughty or Nice,” which featured nude photo spreads, sly references to oral sex and threesomes, and an interview with the porn actor Jenna Jameson, in which she was repeatedly harangued by the interviewer to let him touch her breasts.

The tail end of the ’90s was the era of Clinton sex scandals and Jerry Springer and the launch of a neat new drug called Viagra, a period when sex saturated mainstream culture. In the Spears profile, the interviewer, Steven Daly, alternates between lust—the logo on her Baby Phat T‐shirt, he notes, is “distended by her ample chest”—and detached observation that the sexuality of teen idols is just a “carefully baited” trap to sell records to suckers. Being a teen myself, I found it hard to discern the irony. What was obvious to my friends and to me was that power, for women, was sexual in nature. There was no other kind, or none worth having. I attended an all-girls school run by stern second-wave feminists, who told us that we could succeed in any field or industry we chose. But that messaging was obliterated by the entertainment we absorbed all day long, which had been thoroughly shaped by the one defining art form of the late 20th century: porn.

By this point in history, pornography, as Frank Rich argued in a New York Times Magazine story in 2001, was American culture, even if no one wanted to admit it. Porn was a multibillion-dollar industry in the United States—worth more money, Rich suggested, than consumers in the U.S. spent on movie tickets in a year, and purportedly “a bigger business than professional football, basketball and baseball put together.” It was a cultural product few people bragged about consuming, but it was infiltrating our collective imagination nevertheless, in ways no one could fully assess at the time. And things were just getting started. Porn helped define the structure and mores of the internet. It dominated popular music, as the biggest hip-hop stars of the era released hard-core films and the teenage stars of my generation redefined themselves for adulthood with fetish-tweaking music videos. In 2003, Snoop Dogg arrived at the MTV Video Music Awards with two women wearing dog collars attached to leashes that he held in each hand, to minimal protest. In 2004, the esteemed fashion photographer Terry Richardson released a coffee-table book that predominantly featured pictures of his own erect penis, and the models he’d cajoled into posing with it.

This period of porno chic arrived with an asterisk that insisted it was all a game, a postmodern, sex-positive appropriation of porn’s tropes and aesthetics. But for women, particularly those of us just entering adulthood, the rules of that game were clear: We were the ultimate Millennial commodity, our bodies cheerfully co-opted and replicated as media content within the public domain. If we complained, we were vilified as prudes or scolds. This kind of sexualization was “empowering,” everyone kept insisting. But the form of power we were being allotted wasn’t the sort you accrue over a lifetime, in the manner of education or money or professional experience. It was all about youth, attention, and a willingness to be in on the joke, even when we were the punch line.

What did growing up against this particular cultural backdrop do to me? What did it do to all of us? I didn’t start trying to process this particular initiation into adulthood until two decades later. A few months into the coronavirus pandemic, I gave birth to twins, and becoming a parent in almost complete isolation triggered a kind of identity crisis. I was too exhausted to read; I could no more sit through an entire movie than I could sprout wings and fly. When I went back to work, the #MeToo movement had many women parsing their own historical experiences of assault and abuse. All of the subjects I wrote about seemed to be circling the same theme: an environment that had been set up against women from the beginning.

In 2022, when the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, progress no longer seemed inevitable. The recreational misogyny of the aughts was back, this time with new technology and a cult figurehead, Andrew Tate, who’d briefly appeared on the reality series Big Brother while under investigation for rape. (In the years since, Tate has been accused by multiple other women of sexual misconduct and is now under investigation for human trafficking. He has denied all allegations against him.) On TikTok, doll‐like women murmured in affectless monologues about living the financially dependent dream of a “soft, feminine life.” In 2024, when Kamala Harris ran for president, she was subjected to a targeted campaign of sexualized slander, some of it broadcast personally by Donald Trump. And when Trump became president for the second time, his victory was jubilantly claimed by misogynists, who taunted women with a new catchphrase: “Your body, my choice.”

So much of this seemed familiar. It was all too reminiscent of the beginning of the 21st century, when feminism felt similarly nebulous and inert, squashed by a cultural explosion of jokey extremity and Technicolor objectification. This was the environment that Millennial women had been raised in. It informed how we felt about ourselves, how we saw one another, and what we understood women to be capable of. It colored our ambitions, our sense of self, our relationships, our bodies, our work, and our art. I came to believe that we couldn’t move forward without fully reckoning with how the culture of the aughts had defined us.

But as I revisited the entertainment of the ’90s and 2000s, what surprised me the most was how much the murk of the era came right from porn. It’s a more influential cultural genre than any other, and yet its impact outside of people’s homes and hotel rooms has hardly been analyzed. I should say here that I’m not opposed to porn on principle. Some of it is liberating; some of it is ethical; a tiny amount of it is even devoted to understanding female desire in a universe built on the male gaze and money shots. Still, in studying porn’s long cultural shadow, I’ve come to agree with the radical feminist Andrea Dworkin, who wrote in 1981 that “pornography incarnates male supremacy. It is the DNA of male dominance.” Porn has undeniably changed how people have sex, as researchers and anyone who has even fleeting experience with dating apps can attest. But it has also changed our culture and, in doing so, has filtered into our subconscious minds, beyond the reach of rationality and reason. We are all living in the world porn made.

Pornography has tended to be at the forefront of emerging technologies, for the simple reason that titillation mixed with novelty is a powerful draw. The porn industry adopted VHS before many Americans had even heard of it. In 1977, when videocassette players first went on the market, up to 75 percent of the tapes being sold were pornographic. Over the course of the 1980s, as AIDS became an unprecedented public-health crisis, both VHS adoption and porn consumption surged, fueled by convenience (movies you could watch alone, at home) and fear (casual sex was much safer as a solitary endeavor). Independent video stores, which pragmatically stocked the explicit tapes that chains such as Blockbuster refused to carry, also realized that porn could shore up their bottom line—in 1985, Americans rented 75 million adult videos. A decade later, that number had increased almost tenfold, according to the trade magazine Adult Video News.

America’s adoption of hard-core porn as a leisure pursuit happened so quickly that its effect on popular culture was hard to measure in the moment. But, as David Friend writes in his book The Naughty Nineties, the final decade of the 20th century was consumed with sex, a subject that dominated politics and art, but also public health. By the end of 1990, AIDS had claimed more than 120,000 lives in the United States; one‐fifth of the victims had lived in New York City, the epicenter of fashion, art, music, media, and advertising. The idea that sex could kill you had led to two wildly divergent schools of thought in American culture. One, nicknamed the New Traditionalism after a nostalgic Good Housekeeping ad campaign, called for a revival of old‐fashioned family values, suggesting that women go home and stay there. (The 1987 movie Fatal Attraction made this fear of a corrupted American culture literal, in the form of Glenn Close’s sexually adventurous, bunny‐boiling career woman, the fling who won’t be flung.) The other, the New Voyeurism, embraced sex—as a spectator sport. “At a time when doing it has become excessively dangerous, looking at it, reading about it, thinking about it have become a necessity,” a Newsweek feature on Madonna declared in 1992. “AIDS has pushed voyeurism from the sexual second tier into the front row.”

Already, the ’90s were a decade of unprecedented sexual openness. Explicit representations of sex were no longer taboo; they were, in fact, now considered vital for public education. This shift meant that artists could experiment with pornographic tropes in plain sight. Near the end of 1990, Madonna released a video to accompany her new single, “Justify My Love,” that set the tone for the coming years: audacious, fiercely sexual, a bit trollish. Madonna, shot in black and white, is seen walking down a hotel hallway toward an assignation, limping slightly in heels and a black raincoat, clutching her head as if in pain. As she passes different doorways, we see fleeting glimpses of the rooms’ occupants, watching us watch them. After she enters a room, orgiastic flashes of different scenes appear: Madonna with her lover (played by her real‐life boyfriend at the time, the amiable lunk Tony Ward); a man lacing a woman into a rubber corset; a dancer in a unitard contorting into shifting positions; Ward watching Madonna with another partner, then getting trussed up in a fetish harness. Finally, Madonna puts on her coat and leaves, laughing, renewed and jubilant, no longer tired.

The brazen sexuality of the video was the whole point. Madonna had lost many friends to AIDS, the artist Keith Haring among them. But she was adamant that sexual freedom, fantasy, and pleasure not be sacrificed amid the devastation. What some people call “sex positivity” today was, in the ’90s, understood by those promoting it as an expression of defiance and celebration. In 1990, HBO debuted Real Sex, an unfiltered peek into the lives of strippers, phone‐sex operators, porn directors, and exhibitionist couples looking for an audience. The show, according to HBO’s then–head of documentary programming, Sheila Nevins, was a direct response to fears about sexuality that had been stoked by the AIDS crisis. Depicting sex, she said, had become “much more important because of all the terror that surrounds it.” Four years later, Janet Jackson released a video for “Any Time, Any Place” that teased the same voyeuristic impulses at play in “Justify My Love”: An elderly neighbor looks on, disapprovingly, as Jackson pushes her lover’s head down while he’s on top of her—a then-radical assertion of sexual power and equality.

It was around this same time that then–presidential candidate Bill Clinton admitted on 60 Minutes, with his wife at his side, to “causing pain” in his marriage, referencing an affair with the TV reporter Gennifer Flowers. “I have said things to you tonight,” he acknowledged, “and to the American people from the beginning, that no American politician ever has.” Clinton’s public acknowledgment of scandal, nonspecific though it might have been, was unprecedented, and it helped underscore how much his era would embrace confession and self-exposure. The Jerry Springer Show had debuted in 1991, offering Americans a space to air their wildest secrets to a nation of rubberneckers. By the end of the decade, we had been obliged to consider what stains on a blue dress signified; what, exactly, Hugh Grant was arrested for on Sunset Boulevard; whether John Wayne Bobbitt got what he deserved; and whether a person might sell themselves for $1 million, as Demi Moore’s financially struggling Diana did in Indecent Proposal.

In the mid‐’90s, DJ Yella, of the hip-hop group N.W.A, started directing adult movies, kicking off a collaborative relationship between hip-hop and porn. In 1996, Lil’ Kim’s debut album, Hard Core, opened with what sounded like a recording of a man going to an adult theater, purchasing a ticket to a porn movie, unzipping his pants, and audibly masturbating when Kim appeared as its star. In 1998, the tired porn trope of the sexy schoolgirl was defibrillated by the video for “Baby One More Time,” in which the 16‐year‐old Britney Spears thrust her hips with an intensity that, now, I find more unsettling than her much-discussed exposed midsection. The video works because Spears seems so earnest, so unaware of how people might be reading her. She looks so young. This is teen sexuality as postmodern spectacle: a mishmash of transgressive allusions transmuted into a product that can’t possibly be interpreted as serious.

In 2001, Snoop Dogg starred in the top‐selling hard-core pornographic video in America, “Snoop Dogg’s Doggystyle.” (Snoop didn’t perform explicit acts on camera, but rather acted as a hype man and an emcee, introducing performers and providing the soundtrack.) For fans, this was less a shift toward transgression than a cultural crossover event. “We’ve been using sex to sell music for years,” Camille Evans, a magazine publisher, told The New York Times. “Now we’re just flipping it to have music sell sex.” At the beginning of the decade, the provocative, expressive experimentation of artists like Madonna and Jackson had foregrounded women’s desires. By the end, the cultural dominance of porn was pushing a much more regressive set of sexual standards. And the technological mechanisms that helped bolster this dominance would come to underscore—and exacerbate—a potent idea: that women existed only for men’s pleasure.

The impulse to look at eroticized pictures of other people, of course, is as old as art itself. What changed toward the end of the 20th century was the ease with which pornographic images and videos could be made, disseminated, and turned into profit. If you investigate the origins of today’s most prominent online platforms, a surprising number stem from the equivalent impulse of an eighth grader typing boobies into a search bar. Google Images was created after Jennifer Lopez wore a vivid‐green jungle‐print Versace dress to the 2000 Grammy Awards, cut so spectacularly low that it became the most popular search query Google had seen to date. Facebook was born in 2004, after Mark Zuckerberg first experimented with making a website dedicated to assessing the relative hotness of Harvard undergraduates. And when Jawed Karim, Chad Hurley, and Steve Chen founded YouTube in 2005, it was partly because Karim had been searching for videos of Janet Jackson’s “wardrobe malfunction” at the Super Bowl and couldn’t easily find one. “Sex is the one drive that can shape immediate consumer response,” Gerard Van der Leun wrote in January 1993, in the first-ever issue of Wired, considering the extent to which the early internet was already being informed by sexual content.

In the mid-’90s, with porn now firmly propping up the rest of the web, and with shows such as Real Sex typifying the kinds of footage Americans wanted to watch, two women found themselves traversing fresh technological terrain. Both would end up determining the future of the internet. One was Pamela Anderson, who in 1997 became the first celebrity to have sexually explicit footage of herself disseminated on the internet without her consent. Despite the fact that the video in question was extremely private—made by herself and her husband, Tommy Lee, on their honeymoon, and stolen from a safe in their Malibu home—millions of people delighted at the opportunity to see something wholly new: a celebrity, an American icon, as exposed as anyone could possibly be.

When Anderson sued Penthouse, which was trying to profit from her tape, the company’s lawyer told her that because she’d previously posed nude for Playboy, she could not legitimately claim that she was being victimized and had “forfeited” her right to privacy. The following year, exhausted and seven months pregnant, Anderson agreed to let a distributor broadcast the tape online if he stopped selling physical copies on VHS, not understanding that the internet was already a thriving marketplace for porn. The footage became the quintessential cultural product of the ’90s: One of the most famous women in the world lost the right to a private sex life, and countless more people learned how to get online, enticed by a novel form of public spectacle. That very same year, Girls Gone Wild made its infomercial debut, selling videos in which college girls (and, often, high schoolers) revealed their breasts, made out with one another, and performed stripteases on camera, all for the low, low compensation of branded trucker caps and dubious street cred.

Just as Anderson was making futile attempts to protect her own image, an unknown college student was becoming the first woman to allow the internet unfiltered, unmediated access to her life. In 1996, a 19‐year‐old student at Dickinson College named Jennifer Ringley bought a webcam that she connected to a computer in her dorm room. Ringley was, in her words, a “computer nerd,” and she wanted to see if she could write a programming script that would take pictures in real time and upload them to her website. The script worked, and Ringley began to post: regular, unposed, black‐and‐white images that published first every 15 minutes, and then every three. The banality of the pictures seemed to be, for her, the draw of the project: She sat at her computer, she ate, she talked on the phone, she slept. “I think the camera would be a lot less interesting if I paid that much attention to it,” Ringley told Ira Glass on a 1997 episode of This American Life, by which time her “JenniCam” was getting upwards of half a million hits a day. “It would be more of a staged show. And you can go see a staged show anywhere.”

There was nothing particularly erotic about these photos, but the majority of visitors to her site, she said, were men. Many people seemed interested in JenniCam less for its humdrum snapshots of everyday life and more for the long‐odds hope that Ringley would do something salacious while they watched her. The first time she invited a date over who didn’t flee as soon as he saw the camera, so many viewers flocked to her site that they crashed the server and ended up seeing nothing. Ringley’s intentions weren’t to actively court what the film theorist Laura Mulvey termed “the male gaze,” and the camera didn’t deter her from doing anything that she felt like doing. She was opening up her life online to try something different, brokering a parasocial intimacy with the people watching her. But what most of them wanted to see—and what even well‐meaning interpreters such as Glass and David Letterman wanted to talk about—was nudity and sex, the most fascinating contours of private life turned into public exhibition.

The internet, at this point, still felt redolent with possibility. Going online was an opportunity to experiment with identity, self-presentation, communication. For women, though, what was becoming clear was how much we were already the primary objects of the online age. As the ’90s went by, third-wave feminism was edged out by postfeminism, a cheerful, consumerist movement arguing that feminism had achieved what it needed to and now women were largely free to behave just like men, sexually liberated and socially empowered. The catch was that we were also subtly being conditioned to perform.

I’m fascinated by Ringley because in her effort to find a new way to connect online, she set a template for how women would learn to act. Her experiments with radical honesty influenced the confessorial online writing of the 2000s. And her willingness to become a living, breathing character on people’s computer screens, coupled with the expectations that porn had already set, shaped the future of both celebrity and sex work. Before Instagram and TikTok and OnlyFans, even before blogs and MySpace and reality television, the internet had reaffirmed that women were to be what Mulvey defined as “erotic objects” whose bodies were very much in the public domain. With no other direction to go in, 21st-century porn would exploit this idea to new extremes.

By the time I was in college, porn was everywhere in popular culture, providing a recognizable aesthetic that filtered through fashion magazines, advertising, independent film, and online media. In 2004, the Deitch Projects gallery, in New York City, debuted a splashy exhibition of new work by Terry Richardson, accompanied by the publication of his coffee-table book, both titled Terryworld. Richardson, by that point, was the torchbearer for a visual mode that was irresistible at the beginning of the 21st century: a tacky, sweaty genre of portraiture that gave Hollywood stars and random passersby the same high‐flash, semisurprised, not‐quite‐human aura. Richardson’s book included images of Dennis Hopper, Kate Moss, and Pharrell Williams, as well as the photographer’s erect penis, which he captured in different settings: resting on a brown teddy bear, pointing down at the head of a seemingly passed‐out model whom Richardson holds by the hair; choking another model whose eyes display what appears to be discomfort. (In 2017, Condé Nast finally ended its working relationship with Richardson after years of well-publicized allegations by models that Richardson relentlessly harassed, manipulated, and coerced them into sexual activity during shoots; Richardson has always denied the allegations.)

The tone of Richardson’s work—the way it flattens its subjects into two‐dimensional beings seen through the photographer’s leering, cynical lens—might feel discomfiting now, but the substance of it, in that moment, wasn’t unusual. In the early 2000s, popular culture was doing everything it could to emulate hard-core pornography, playing with its tropes and lack of boundaries. In 2003, the British photographers Rankin and David Bailey (both of whom had previously shot Queen Elizabeth II) collaborated on a series devoted to explicit images of female genitalia that was known officially as “Rankin + Bailey: Down Under” and unofficially as “the pussy show.” At the Cannes Film Festival, the British filmmaker Michael Winterbottom—who’d previously directed a Thomas Hardy adaptation starring Kate Winslet—debuted his movie 9 Songs, the story of a young couple’s relationship that contained multiple scenes of unsimulated sex. In the summer of 2004, Jenna Jameson’s memoir, How to Make Love Like a Porn Star, spent six weeks on the New York Times best-seller list. In October, stars including Ben Stiller and Rachel Weisz attended the opening of Timothy Greenfield‐Sanders’s XXX, a photographic series featuring porn actors that was accompanied by an HBO documentary—a project that captured the porno-chic style of the moment. “Fashion has tremendous influence on how the culture changes,” Greenfield‐Sanders told a Times reporter. “And porn has had a tremendous influence on fashion.”

At the same time, porn was adapting to a world in which it was no longer on the margins. The more mainstream culture ripped off its imagery and its sexual excess, the more pornographers had to find new ways to stand out. The techno-optimistic vision of porn saw the medium as a sexually liberating force for everyone. But as the industry adapted to the jaded palate of the contemporary porn consumer, it pushed boundaries further. “The new element,” Martin Amis wrote in 2001, reporting for The Guardian on the business of porn, “is violence.” And it was overwhelmingly being inflicted on women, in content so degrading, it sometimes made even Larry Flynt, the Hustler publisher, uncomfortable.

Porn was getting crueler, and so was popular culture, as both met a growing taste for extremity. In 1999, a documentary was released about the porn actor Annabel Chong, who’d had sex 251 times in a single 10‐hour period and then went on The Jerry Springer Show to discuss her experience, while audience members gasped and cringed at the spectacle. Chong’s feat of endurance and the 2002 Gaspar Noé film Irréversible—which included a nine‐minute anal-rape scene featuring the actor Monica Bellucci—were arguably extensions of the same idea: testing the limits of what men could do to women for entertainment while the cameras rolled.

As the decade progressed, photographers lay on sidewalks trying to get up-skirt, genital-exposing pictures of actresses who’d only just turned 18, and female celebrities psychologically disintegrated in full view of the cameras; what remained consistent was how people kept on watching. We had been conditioned to see people on our computer screens not as human beings but as characters in an ongoing, multiplatform story, whose degradation was all part of the grand spectacle. Male aggression and female submission had been coded into the ways women in public were treated. The photographers who haunted Princess Diana until her death, in 1997, had supposedly used violent language to describe their methods: They “blitzed her” as a group, “whacked her,” “hose[d] her down.” The overwhelmed princess once reportedly shouted at them to go “rape someone else.” In her 2023 memoir, The Woman in Me, Britney Spears describes how she flipped out after a photographer repeatedly harassed her during a moment of crisis, attacking him with an umbrella. “Later, that paparazzo would say in an interview for a documentary about me, ‘That was not a good night for her … But it was a good night for us—’cause we got the money shot.’ ”

The vivisection of women peaked in 2007, when, within the space of a few months, Spears shaved her head, Anna Nicole Smith fatally overdosed on combined prescription drugs, a sobbing Paris Hilton went to jail, and a pantsuit-clad Hillary Clinton announced that she was running for president. All of this was documented in what felt like real time, in a rolling barrage of blog posts, paparazzi photos, and cable-news clips. The cruelty and disdain expressed toward women during the aughts were, I’d argue, more significant and enduring than they’ve been given credit for. We were being asked to see a woman as capable of occupying the most powerful position in the world, in a media landscape conditioned to view us as high-definition train wrecks. Early in 2008, when Clinton briefly welled up in a coffee shop after a bruising loss in the Iowa caucus, the moment was interpreted as being a melodramatic scandal fit for TMZ and a cynical ploy for attention that eventually won her New Hampshire.

The specter of a Hillary Clinton presidency was immediately presented by some pundits in objectified terms. How else were women in this era to be understood? “Will this country want to actually watch a woman get older before their eyes on a daily basis?” Rush Limbaugh asked on his radio show in 2007. It’s no longer at all surprising to me that a capable and experienced woman lost to a reality‐TV character and virulent misogynist in 2016 (to say nothing of 2024). The overwhelming cultural message that Americans had absorbed during the decades leading up to Clinton’s first presidential campaign enshrined the idea that women fundamentally lacked the qualities required to gain and exercise authority: intelligence, morality, dignity.

Clinton tends to loom large in any discussion of female political ambition in this century, but there’s another woman whose rapid, turbulent ascent fittingly illustrates the cultural trends of this era. In August 2008, when Senator John McCain announced Sarah Palin as his presidential running mate, the 44‐year‐old Alaska governor was virtually unheard-of outside her state. She had minimal political experience: two terms as the mayor of Wasilla, a town with fewer than 7,000 residents at the time, and less than two years as governor. But she was a woman—which the McCain campaign hoped would energize voters—a conservative Christian, and a mother. An early profile of Palin in the Times highlighted the latter identity, describing her as someone who had never had political ambitions of her own but rather was drawn to office reluctantly, out of a pragmatic desire to share her skills. Her successor as mayor described her to the newspaper as just “a P.T.A. mom who got involved.”

Palin also fit neatly into the decade’s understanding of what a woman should be. She’d won the title of Miss Wasilla and had placed as a runner-up in the 1984 Miss Alaska pageant. Mere days after she addressed the Republican National Convention as a candidate for vice president—the first woman ever to do so—Larry Flynt’s production company posted an ad on Craigslist requesting a “Sarah Palin look‐alike for an adult film to be shot in the next 10 days.” Flynt had a history of trying to unite porn and politics: In 1975, one year after launching Hustler, he published photographs of former First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis sunbathing nude in Greece, and in 1983, he attempted to run for president himself as a Republican. Who’s Nailin’ Paylin?, which filmed over a weekend in October, starred the porn performer Lisa Ann as Serra Paylin, a politician who thinks the Earth is 10,000 years old, struggles to keep from saying “You betcha,” and participates in hard-core group scenes, including one with satirical versions of Hillary Clinton and Condoleezza Rice.

What did it mean, that American culture’s immediate response to a woman’s political ascent was to put her on her back? Who’s Nailin’ Paylin? was absurd, but it made undeniable all the ways in which porn had reset ideas about women. “Porn does not inform, or persuade, or debate,” Amia Srinivasan wrote in her 2021 book, The Right to Sex. “Porn trains.” For the past few decades, it has trained men to see women as objects—as things to silence, restrain, fetishize, or brutalize. But it has trained women, too. In 2013, the social psychologist Rachel M. Calogero found that the more women were prone to self‐objectification—the defining message of porn and aughts mass media—the less inclined they were toward gender-based activism and the pursuit of social justice. This, to me, goes a long way toward explaining what happened to women and power in the early 21st century. For decades, male supremacy was being coded into our culture, in ways that were both outlandish and so subtle, they were hard to question.

Given what Millennials had grown up with, it wasn’t surprising when they started examining their own conditioning through storytelling, taking stock of what the first decade of the new century had wrought. One of the most prominent was Lena Dunham, whose HBO series, Girls, debuted in 2012. The show reckoned with, among other subjects, the indignities of sleeping with 20-something men whose sexual scripts and practices now tended to be ripped right out of porn. (In the second episode, while Dunham’s Hannah is having sex with Adam Driver’s Adam, he calls her a “dirty little whore” and puts his hand around her neck before he ejaculates. “That was so good—I almost came,” she says meekly in response.) By the time Sam Levinson’s Euphoria debuted in 2019, explicit sexual imagery was omnipresent among teenagers, something Zendaya’s protagonist, Rue, notes in a voice-over: “I’m sorry. I know your generation relied on flowers and fathers’ permission, but it’s 2019, and unless you’re Amish, nudes are the currency of love, so stop shaming us. Shame the assholes who create password-protected online directories of naked, underage girls.”

Euphoria was provocative to a fault—one locker-room montage featuring more than a dozen full-frontal penises felt more like a challenge to find premium cable’s limits than a coherent piece of storytelling. But the series was intent, in a bleakly cynical kind of way, on exploring what porn culture had passed down to the next generation. In one scene, Rue, who battles addiction throughout the series, blithely offers a tutorial on the art of dick pics; in another, she tears apart her house looking for pills. Many of the show’s sex scenes were unnerving: Kat (Barbie Ferreira) loses her virginity after being challenged by other high schoolers to prove she’s not a prude, but she’s secretly filmed and the footage is uploaded to PornHub; she panics that she’ll become a social pariah. Jules (Hunter Schafer) meets a man online named “DominantDaddy” who turns out to be the father of one of her classmates, and when he meets her at a motel to have sex, her pain and forced submission are hard to watch.

Levinson has insisted that his show was simply trying to convey how rapidly the experience of adolescence was changing. By the time Euphoria debuted, porn’s practices and mores had thoroughly defined not just culture but sex itself. That year, a survey found that 38 percent of British women younger than 40 had experienced unwanted violent behavior—including slapping, gagging, spitting, or choking—during consensual sex. A culture of unfettered male dominance had simultaneously sprawled across the rest of the web, as misogynistic abuse and harassment manifested in different communities and targeted campaigns, and even culminated in episodes of real violence. “Incels,” as certain disaffected young men began calling themselves, hate women for not being more sexually agreeable, as though sex is a commodity that should be redistributed to the needy rather than a matter of personal desire. That particular term was relatively new, but the rest of their verbiage was familiar: One 2021 study conducted by researchers in Britain found that much of the language used in incel forums is identical to the language used in mainstream pornography, routinely employed to dehumanize and sexually humiliate women.

The impulse to subject women to sexual violence obviously predates porn. And not all porn is degrading or hateful toward women, even if much of it is. But, looking back across the past few decades, it’s hard not to see that the explosion of pornography as a cultural product during the 1990s and 2000s changed the terms of how women were to be viewed and understood. The ramifications have rippled throughout our on- and offline lives. In 2014, two years before Trump’s first presidential victory, approximately 70 percent of American men ages 18 to 39 reported using pornography within the past year. Trump’s election confirmed how widespread and even tacitly accepted the degradation of women had become: Here was a winning candidate who’d been accused of sexual misconduct by dozens of women (which he has denied); the first “porn president,” as my colleague Caitlin Flanagan wrote, for whom the reduction of women to sexual objects was as natural as breathing.

By 2024, the debasement of women in public life had become so instinctive that Kamala Harris was subjected to sexual slurs in the lead-up to her presidential campaign—even before she was officially a candidate. On Fox Business, a guest labeled Harris “the original Hawk Tuah girl,” a reference to a viral video about blow jobs; Trump himself reposted memes inferring that Harris had used sex to further her career. In October, a week and a half before the election, a billboard appeared in Ohio that depicted Harris on her hands and knees, mouth agape, about to engage in oral sex with a frenzied look on her face. I spent much of the year with my head in my hands. For a moment, it seemed possible, again, that Trump’s hateful rhetoric, his nonsensical diatribes, his coalition of creeps and podcast bros and internet-poisoned trolls might be enough to make a capable woman seem favorable by comparison.

But that wasn’t the case. And as he returned to the presidency, I found myself thinking less about men than about women, particularly some of the women in Trump’s orbit—the ones who trade power for visibility, a high-definition, glaringly enhanced veneer of public womanhood that insists being seen is the same thing as being significant. So much of this century’s popular culture has presented women as spectacles: chaotic, melodramatic, hypersexualized recipients of attention.

Porn’s logic of male supremacy has successfully saturated politics. The new administration is in thrall to the manosphere, and unabashed about its project of white masculine domination; in 2025, just 15 percent of Republican members of Congress are women. Young men and boys are growing up with misogynist influencers who assert that women are something less than fully human. “One must believe in the existence of the person in order to recognize the authenticity of her suffering,” Andrea Dworkin wrote in her 1983 book, Right-Wing Women, during another period of anti-feminist backlash. “Neither men nor women believe in the existence of women as significant beings.”

The first part of her argument stands. That the second part is questionable—regarding how women see themselves, at least—is a positive development. And for all the ways in which popular culture helped enshrine porn as the defining form of modern entertainment, culture may be turning into the one place where we no longer want to be reminded of it. I keep coming back to HBO’s 2023 miniseries The Idol, a work to which Sam Levinson brought all of Euphoria’s provocations and none of its emotional intelligence. The show starred Lily-Rose Depp as a disgraced pop star in the Britney tradition and Abel “The Weeknd” Tesfaye as the nightclub owner and cult leader who seduces her with rough sex and BDSM; its intentions seemed to be to marry premium-cable aesthetics with the hollow transgressions of extreme porn. In one scene, Tesfaye’s character suffocates Depp’s Jocelyn with a scarlet silk robe, then uses a knife to slash a hole so she can breathe, reducing the character to a bright-red slash, a pornographic crevice. Jocelyn’s experiences, the show implied, had empowered her, a suggestion so absurd and anachronistic that viewers could only cringe in response. The Idol was a critical failure that hardly anyone even talked about—a possible sign of progress.

For me, the process of adulthood has been less about lessons learned than unlearned—the steady dismantling of ideas I absorbed before I could really think critically about them. But I still believe that by understanding all of the ways in which women have been diminished and broken down in the recent past, we can identify and defuse those same attacks in the present. Our culture isn’t just entertainment—it’s the means by which we understand and relate to ourselves and one another. In moments when I’m galled by how cyclical backlash and progress are, it’s consoling to remember that most women have newfound language and skepticism that I couldn’t have imagined while watching Girls Gone Wild or listening to “P.I.M.P.” Both of those developments feed the kind of unlearning, in other words, after which power is real, change is necessary, and wholly new stories can begin.

[nasa]

Athletes Go for the Gold with NASA Spinoffs

NASA technology tends to find its way into the sporting world more often than you’d expect. Fitness is important to the space program because astronauts must undergo the extreme g-forces of getting into space and endure the long-term effects of weightlessness on the human body. The agency’s engineering expertise also means that items like shoes and swimsuits can be improved with NASA know-how.

As the 2024 Olympics are in full swing in Paris, here are some of the many NASA-derived technologies that have helped competitive athletes train for the games and made sure they’re properly equipped to win.

The LZR Racer reduces skin friction drag by covering more skin than traditional swimsuits. Multiple pieces of the water-resistant and extremely lightweight LZR Pulse fabric connect at ultrasonically welded seams and incorporate extremely low-profile zippers to keep viscous drag to a minimum.

Swimsuits That Don’t Drag

When the swimsuit manufacturer Speedo wanted its LZR Racer suit to have as little drag as possible, the company turned to the experts at Langley Research Center to test its materials and design. The end result was that the new suit reduced drag by 24 percent compared to the prior generation of Speedo racing suit and broke 13 world records in 2008. While the original LZR Racer is no longer used in competition due to the advantage it gave wearers, its legacy lives on in derivatives still produced to this day.

Trilion Quality Systems worked with NASA’s Glenn Research Center to adapt existing stereo photogrammetry software to work with high-speed cameras. Now the company sells the package widely, and it is used to analyze stress and strain in everything from knee implants to running shoes and more.

High-Speed Cameras for High-Speed Shoes

After space shuttle Columbia, investigators needed to see how materials reacted during recreation tests with high-speed cameras, which involved working with industry to create a system that could analyze footage filmed at 30,000 frames per second. Engineers at Adidas used this system to analyze the behavior of Olympic marathoners' feet as they hit the ground and adjusted the design of the company’s high-performance footwear based on these observations.

Martial artist Barry French holds an Impax Body Shield while former European middle-weight kickboxing champion Daryl Tyler delivers an explosive jump side kick; the force of the impact is registered precisely and shown on the display panel of the electronic box French is wearing on his belt.

One-Thousandth-of-an-Inch Punch

In the 1980s, Olympic martial artists needed a way to measure the impact of their strikes to improve training for competition. Impulse Technology reached out to Glenn Research Center to create the Impax sensor, an ultra-thin film sensor which creates a small amount of voltage when struck. The more force applied, the more voltage it generates, enabling a computerized display to show how powerful a punch or kick was.

Astronaut Sunita Williams poses while using the Interim Resistive Exercise Device on the ISS. The cylinders at the base of each side house the SpiraFlex FlexPacks that inventor Paul Francis honed under NASA contracts. They would go on to power the Bowflex Revolution and other commercial exercise equipment.

Weight Training Without the Weight

Astronauts spending long periods of time in space needed a way to maintain muscle mass without the effect of gravity, but lifting free weights doesn’t work when you’re practically weightless. An exercise machine that uses elastic resistance to provide the same benefits as weightlifting went to the space station in the year 2000. That resistance technology was commercialized into the Bowflex Revolution home exercise equipment shortly afterwards.

Want to learn more about technologies made for space and used on Earth? Check out NASA Spinoff to find products and services that wouldn’t exist without space exploration.   

Make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space!

[jadeharleyinc]

the scale of AI's ecological footprint

standalone version of my response to the following:

"you need soulless art? [...] why should you get to use all that computing power and electricity to produce some shitty AI art? i don’t actually think you’re entitled to consume those resources." "i think we all deserve nice things. [...] AI art is not a nice thing. it doesn’t meaningfully contribute to us thriving and the cost in terms of energy use [...] is too fucking much. none of us can afford to foot the bill." "go watch some tv show or consume some art that already exists. […] you know what’s more environmentally and economically sustainable […]? museums. galleries. being in nature."

you can run free and open source AI art programs on your personal computer, with no internet connection. this doesn't require much more electricity than running a resource-intensive video game on that same computer. i think it's important to consume less. but if you make these arguments about AI, do you apply them to video games too? do you tell Fortnite players to play board games and go to museums instead?

speaking of museums: if you drive 3 miles total to a museum and back home, you have consumed more energy and created more pollution than generating AI images for 24 hours straight (this comes out to roughly 1400 AI images). "being in nature" also involves at least this much driving, usually. i don't think these are more environmentally-conscious alternatives.

obviously, an AI image model costs energy to train in the first place, but take Stable Diffusion v2 as an example: it took 40,000 to 60,000 kWh to train. let's go with the upper bound. if you assume ~125g of CO2 per kWh, that's ~7.5 tons of CO2. to put this into perspective, a single person driving a single car for 12 months emits 4.6 tons of CO2. meanwhile, for example, the creation of a high-budget movie emits 2840 tons of CO2.

is the carbon cost of a single car being driven for 20 months, or 1/378th of a Marvel movie, worth letting anyone with a mid-end computer, anywhere, run free offline software that consumes a gaming session's worth of electricity to produce hundreds of images? i would say yes. in a heartbeat.

even if you see creating AI images as "less soulful" than consuming Marvel/Fortnite content, it's undeniably "more useful" to humanity as a tool. not to mention this usefulness includes reducing the footprint of creating media. AI is more environment-friendly than human labor on digital creative tasks, since it can get a task done with much less computer usage, doesn't commute to work, and doesn't eat.

and speaking of eating, another comparison: if you made an AI image program generate images non-stop for every second of every day for an entire year, you could offset your carbon footprint by… eating 30% less beef and lamb. not pork. not even meat in general. just beef and lamb.

the tech industry is guilty of plenty of horrendous stuff. but when it comes to the individual impact of AI, saying "i don’t actually think you’re entitled to consume those resources. do you need this? is this making you thrive?" to an individual running an AI program for 45 minutes a day per month is equivalent to questioning whether that person is entitled to a single 3 mile car drive once per month or a single meatball's worth of beef once per month. because all of these have the same CO2 footprint.

so yeah. i agree, i think we should drive less, eat less beef, stream less video, consume less. but i don't think we should tell people "stop using AI programs, just watch a TV show, go to a museum, go hiking, etc", for the same reason i wouldn't tell someone "stop playing video games and play board games instead". i don't think this is a productive angle.

(sources and number-crunching under the cut.)

good general resource: GiovanH's article "Is AI eating all the energy?", which highlights the negligible costs of running an AI program, the moderate costs of creating an AI model, and the actual indefensible energy waste coming from specific companies deploying AI irresponsibly.

CO2 emissions from running AI art programs: a) one AI image takes 3 Wh of electricity. b) one AI image takes 1mn in, for example, Midjourney. c) so if you create 1 AI image per minute for 24 hours straight, or for 45 minutes per day for a month, you've consumed 4.3 kWh. d) using the UK electric grid through 2024 as an example, the production of 1 kWh releases 124g of CO2. therefore the production of 4.3 kWh releases 533g (~0.5 kg) of CO2.

CO2 emissions from driving your car: cars in the EU emit 106.4g of CO2 per km. that's 171.19g for 1 mile, or 513g (~0.5 kg) for 3 miles.

costs of training the Stable Diffusion v2 model: quoting GiovanH's article linked in 1. "Generative models go through the same process of training. The Stable Diffusion v2 model was trained on A100 PCIe 40 GB cards running for a combined 200,000 hours, which is a specialized AI GPU that can pull a maximum of 300 W. 300 W for 200,000 hours gives a total energy consumption of 60,000 kWh. This is a high bound that assumes full usage of every chip for the entire period; SD2’s own carbon emission report indicates it likely used significantly less power than this, and other research has shown it can be done for less." at 124g of CO2 per kWh, this comes out to 7440 kg.

CO2 emissions from red meat: a) carbon footprint of eating plenty of red meat, some red meat, only white meat, no meat, and no animal products the difference between a beef/lamb diet and a no-beef-or-lamb diet comes down to 600 kg of CO2 per year. b) Americans consume 42g of beef per day. this doesn't really account for lamb (egads! my math is ruined!) but that's about 1.2 kg per month or 15 kg per year. that single piece of 42g has a 1.65kg CO2 footprint. so our 3 mile drive/4.3 kWh of AI usage have the same carbon footprint as a 12g piece of beef. roughly the size of a meatball [citation needed].

[batboyblog]

Things the Biden-Harris Administration Did This Week #28

July 19-26 2024

The EPA announced the award of $4.3 billion in Climate Pollution Reduction Grants. The grants support community-driven solutions to fight climate change, and accelerate America’s clean energy transition. The grants will go to 25 projects across 30 states, and one tribal community. When combined the projects will reduce greenhouse gas pollution by as much as 971 million metric tons of CO2, roughly the output of 5 million American homes over 25 years. Major projects include $396 million for Pennsylvania’s Department of Environmental Protection as it tries to curb greenhouse gas emissions from industrial production, and $500 million for transportation and freight decarbonization at the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach.

The Biden-Harris Administration announced a plan to phase out the federal government's use of single use plastics. The plan calls for the federal government to stop using single use plastics in food service operations, events, and packaging by 2027, and from all federal operations by 2035. The US government is the single largest employer in the country and the world’s largest purchaser of goods and services. Its move away from plastics will redefine the global market.

The White House hosted a summit on super pollutants with the goals of better measuring them and dramatically reducing them. Roughly half of today's climate change is caused by so called super pollutants, methane, hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs), and nitrous oxide (N2O). Public-private partnerships between NOAA and United Airlines, The State Department and NASA, and the non-profit Carbon Mapper Coalition will all help collect important data on these pollutants. While private firms announced with the White House plans that by early next year will reduce overall U.S. industrial emissions of nitrous oxide by over 50% from 2020 numbers. The summit also highlighted the EPA's new rule to reduce methane from oil and gas by 80%.

The EPA announced $325 million in grants for climate justice. The Community Change Grants Program, powered by President Biden's Inflation Reduction Act will ultimately bring $2 billion dollars to disadvantaged communities and help them combat climate change. Some of the projects funded in this first round of grant were: $20 million for Midwest Tribal Energy Resources Association, which will help weatherize and energy efficiency upgrade homes for 35 tribes in Michigan, Minnesota, and Wisconsin, $14 million to install onsite wastewater treatment systems throughout 17 Black Belt counties in Alabama, and $14 million to urban forestry, expanding tree canopy in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh.

The Department of Interior approved 3 new solar projects on public land. The 3 projects, two in Nevada and one in Arizona, once finished could generate enough to power 2 million homes. This comes on top of DoI already having beaten its goal of 25 gigawatts of clean energy projects by the end of 2025, in April 2024. This is all part of President Biden’s goal of creating a carbon pollution-free power sector by 2035. 

Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen pledged $667 million to global Pandemic Fund. The fund set up in 2022 seeks to support Pandemic prevention, and readiness in low income nations who can't do it on their own. At the G20 meeting Yellen pushed other nations of the 20 largest economies to double their pledges to the $2 billion dollar fund. Yellen highlighted the importance of the fund by saying "President Biden and I believe that a fully-resourced Pandemic Fund will enable us to better prevent, prepare for, and respond to pandemics – protecting Americans and people around the world from the devastating human and economic costs of infectious disease threats,"

The Departments of the Interior and Commerce today announced a $240 million investment in tribal fisheries in the Pacific Northwest. This is in line with an Executive Order President Biden signed in 2023 during the White House Tribal Nations Summit to mpower Tribal sovereignty and self-determination. An initial $54 million for hatchery maintenance and modernization will be made available for 27 tribes in Alaska, Washington, Oregon, and Idaho. The rest will be invested in longer term fishery projects in the coming years.

The IRS announced that thanks to funding from President Biden's Inflation Reduction Act, it'll be able to digitize much of its operations. This means tax payers will be able to retrieve all their tax related information from one source, including Wage & Income, Account, Record of Account, and Return transcripts, using on-line Individual Online Account.

The IRS also announced that New Jersey will be joining the direct file program in 2025. The direct file program ran as a pilot in 12 states in 2024, allowing tax-payers in those states to file simple tax returns using a free online filing tool directly with the IRS. In 2024 140,000 Americans were able to file this way, they collectively saved $5.6 million in tax preparation fees, claiming $90 million in returns. The average American spends $270 and 13 hours filing their taxes. More than a million people in New Jersey alone will qualify for direct file next year. Oregon opted to join last month. Republicans in Congress lead by Congressmen Adrian Smith of Nebraska and Chuck Edwards of North Carolina have put forward legislation to do away with direct file.

Bonus: American law enforcement arrested co-founder of the Sinaloa Cartel, Ismael "El Mayo" Zambada. El Mayo co-founded the cartel in the 1980s along side Joaquín "El Chapo" Guzmán. Since El Chapo's incarceration in the United States in 2019, El Mayo has been sole head of the Sinaloa Cartel. Authorities also arrested El Chapo's son, Joaquin Guzman Lopez. The Sinaloa Cartel has been a major player in the cross border drug trade, and has often used extreme violence to further their aims.

[ellipsus-writes]

Each week (or so), we'll highlight the relevant (and sometimes rage-inducing) news adjacent to writing and freedom of expression. This week:

Inkitt’s AI-powered fiction factory

Inkitt started in the mid-2010s as a cozy platform where anyone could share their writing. Fast forward twenty twenty-fuckkkkk, and like most startups, it’s pivoted hard into AI-fueled content production with the soul of an algorithm.

Pictured: Inkitt preparing human-generated work for an AI-powered flume ride to The Unknown.

Here’s how it works: Inkitt monitors reader engagement with tracking software, then picks popular stories to publish on its premium app, Galatea. From there, stories can get spun into sequels, spinoffs, or adapted for GalateaTV… often with minimal author involvement. Authors get an undisclosed cut of revenue, but for most, it’s a fraction of what they’d earn with a traditional publisher (let alone self-publishing).

“'They prey on new writers who have no idea what they’re doing,' said the writer of one popular Galatea series."

Many, many authors have side-eyed or outright decried the platform as inherently predatory for years, due to nebulous payout promises. And much of the concern centers on contracts that don’t require authors’ consent for editorial changes or AI-generated “additions” to the original text.

Now, Inkitt has gone full DiSrUpTiOn, leaning heavily on generative AI to ghostwrite, edit, generate audiobook narration, and design covers, under the banner of “democratizing storytelling.” (AI? In my democratized storytelling platform? It’s more likely than you think.)

Pictured: Inkitt’s CEO looking at the most-read stories.

But Inkitt’s CEO doesn’t seem too concerned about what authors think: “His business model doesn’t need them.”

The company recently raised $37 million, with backers including former CEOs of Sony, Penguin, and HarperCollins, proving once again that publishing loves a disruptor… as long as it disrupts creatives, not capital. And more AI companies are mushrooming up to chase the same vision: “a vision of human-created art becoming the raw material for AI-powered, corporate-owned content-production machines—a scenario in which humans would play an ever-shrinking role.”

(Not to say we predicted this, but…)

Welcome to the creator-industrial complex.

Publishers to AI: Stop stealing our stuff (please?)

Major publishers—including The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Guardian, and Vox Media—have launched a "Support Responsible AI" campaign, urging the U.S. government to regulate AI's use of copyrighted content.

Like last month's campaigns by the Authors Guild and the UK's Society of Authors, there's a website where where you can (and should!) contact your representatives to say, “Hey, maybe stop letting billion-dollar tech giants strip-mine journalism.”

The campaign’s ads carry slogans like “Stop AI Theft” and “AI Steals From You Too” and call for legislation that would force AI companies to pay for the content they train on and clearly label AI-generated content with attribution. This follows lobbying by OpenAI and Google to make it legal to scrape and train on copyrighted material without consent.

The publishers assert they are not explicitly anti-AI, but advocate for a “fair” system that respects intellectual property and supports journalism.

But… awkward, The Washington Post—now owned by Jeff Bezos—has reportedly already struck a deal with OpenAI to license and summarize its content. So, mixed signals.

Still, as the campaign reminds us: “Stealing is un-American.”

(Unless it’s profitable.)

#WarForever

We at Ellipsus love a good meme-turned-megaproject. Back in January, the-app-formerly-known-as-Twitter user @lolt64 tweeted a cryptic line about "the frozen wastes of europa,” the earliest reference to the never-ending war on Jupiter’s icy moon.

A slew of bleak dispatches from weary, doomed soldiers entrenched on Europa’s ice fields snowballed (iceberged?) into a sprawling saga, yes-and-ing with fan art, vignettes, and memes under the hashtag #WarForever.

It’s not quite X’s answer to Goncharov: It turns out WarForever is some flavor of viral marketing for a tabletop RPG zine. But the internet ran with it anyway, with NASA playing the Scorcese of the stars.

In a digital hellworld increasingly dominated by AI slopification, data harvesting, and “content at scale,” projects like WarForever are a blessed reminder that creativity—actual, human creativity—perseveres.

Even on a frozen moon. Even here.

Let us know if you find something other writers should know about, (or join our Discord and share it there!)

- The Ellipsus Team xo