#hand tools market data

[reasonsforhope]

Green energy is in its heyday. 

Renewable energy sources now account for 22% of the nation’s electricity, and solar has skyrocketed eight times over in the last decade. This spring in California, wind, water, and solar power energy sources exceeded expectations, accounting for an average of 61.5 percent of the state's electricity demand across 52 days. 

But green energy has a lithium problem. Lithium batteries control more than 90% of the global grid battery storage market. 

That’s not just cell phones, laptops, electric toothbrushes, and tools. Scooters, e-bikes, hybrids, and electric vehicles all rely on rechargeable lithium batteries to get going. 

Fortunately, this past week, Natron Energy launched its first-ever commercial-scale production of sodium-ion batteries in the U.S. 

“Sodium-ion batteries offer a unique alternative to lithium-ion, with higher power, faster recharge, longer lifecycle and a completely safe and stable chemistry,” said Colin Wessells — Natron Founder and Co-CEO — at the kick-off event in Michigan. 

The new sodium-ion batteries charge and discharge at rates 10 times faster than lithium-ion, with an estimated lifespan of 50,000 cycles.

Wessells said that using sodium as a primary mineral alternative eliminates industry-wide issues of worker negligence, geopolitical disruption, and the “questionable environmental impacts” inextricably linked to lithium mining. 

“The electrification of our economy is dependent on the development and production of new, innovative energy storage solutions,” Wessells said. 

Why are sodium batteries a better alternative to lithium?

The birth and death cycle of lithium is shadowed in environmental destruction. The process of extracting lithium pollutes the water, air, and soil, and when it’s eventually discarded, the flammable batteries are prone to bursting into flames and burning out in landfills. 

There’s also a human cost. Lithium-ion materials like cobalt and nickel are not only harder to source and procure, but their supply chains are also overwhelmingly attributed to hazardous working conditions and child labor law violations. 

Sodium, on the other hand, is estimated to be 1,000 times more abundant in the earth’s crust than lithium. 

“Unlike lithium, sodium can be produced from an abundant material: salt,” engineer Casey Crownhart wrote ​​in the MIT Technology Review. “Because the raw ingredients are cheap and widely available, there’s potential for sodium-ion batteries to be significantly less expensive than their lithium-ion counterparts if more companies start making more of them.”

What will these batteries be used for?

Right now, Natron has its focus set on AI models and data storage centers, which consume hefty amounts of energy. In 2023, the MIT Technology Review reported that one AI model can emit more than 626,00 pounds of carbon dioxide equivalent. 

“We expect our battery solutions will be used to power the explosive growth in data centers used for Artificial Intelligence,” said Wendell Brooks, co-CEO of Natron. 

“With the start of commercial-scale production here in Michigan, we are well-positioned to capitalize on the growing demand for efficient, safe, and reliable battery energy storage.”

The fast-charging energy alternative also has limitless potential on a consumer level, and Natron is eying telecommunications and EV fast-charging once it begins servicing AI data storage centers in June. 

On a larger scale, sodium-ion batteries could radically change the manufacturing and production sectors — from housing energy to lower electricity costs in warehouses, to charging backup stations and powering electric vehicles, trucks, forklifts, and so on. 

“I founded Natron because we saw climate change as the defining problem of our time,” Wessells said. “We believe batteries have a role to play.”

-via GoodGoodGood, May 3, 2024

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Note: I wanted to make sure this was legit (scientifically and in general), and I'm happy to report that it really is! x, x, x, x

[beatingtheouijaboardallegations]

forever tired of our voices being turned into commodity.

forever tired of thorough medaocrity in the AAC business. how that is rewarded. How it fails us as users. how not robust and only robust by small small amount communication systems always chosen by speech therapists and funded by insurance.

forever tired of profit over people.

forever tired of how companies collect data on every word we’ve ever said and sell to people.

forever tired of paying to communicate. of how uninsured disabled people just don’t get a voice many of the time. or have to rely on how AAC is brought into classrooms — which usually is managed to do in every possible wrong way.

forever tired of the branding and rebranding of how we communicate. Of this being amazing revealation over and over that nonspeakers are “in there” and should be able to say things. of how every single time this revelation comes with pre condition of leaving the rest behind, who can’t spell or type their way out of the cage of ableist oppression. or are not given chance & resources to. Of the branding being seen as revolution so many times and of these companies & practitioners making money off this “revolution.” of immersion weeks and CRP trainings that are thousands of dollars and wildly overpriced letterboards, and of that one nightmare Facebook group g-d damm it. How this all is put in language of communication freedom. 26 letters is infinite possibilities they say - but only for the richest of families and disabled people. The rest of us will have to live with fewer possibilities.

forever tired of engineer dads of AAC users who think they can revolutionize whole field of AAC with new terrible designed apps that you can’t say anything with them. of minimally useful AI features that invade every AAC app to cash in on the new moment and not as tool that if used ethically could actually help us, but as way of fixing our grammar our language our cultural syntax we built up to sound “proper” to sound normal. for a machine, a large language model to model a small language for us, turn our inhuman voices human enough.

forever tired of how that brand and marketing is never for us, never for the people who actually use it to communicate. it is always for everyone around us, our parents and teachers paras and SLPs and BCBAs and practitioners and doctors and everyone except the person who ends up stuck stuck with a bad organized bad implemented bad taught profit motivated way to talk. of it being called behavior problems low ability incompetence noncompliance when we don’t use these systems.

you all need to do better. We need to democritize our communication, put it in our own hands. (My friend & communication partner who was in Occupy Wall Street suggested phrase “Occupy AAC” and think that is perfect.) And not talking about badly made non-robust open source apps either. Yes a robust system needs money and recources to make it well. One person or community alone cannot turn a robotic voice into a human one. But our human voice should not be in hands of companies at all.

(this is about the Tobii Dynavox subscription thing. But also exploitive and capitalism practices and just lazy practices in AAC world overall. Both in high tech “ mainstream “ AAC and methods that are like ones I use in sense that are both super stigmatized and also super branded and marketed, Like RPM and S2C and spellers method. )

[mostlysignssomeportents]

The antitrust case against Apple

I'm on tour with my new, nationally bestselling novel The Bezzle! Catch me TONIGHT (Mar 22) in TORONTO, then SUNDAY (Mar 24) with LAURA POITRAS in NYC, then Anaheim, and beyond!

The foundational tenet of "the Cult of Mac" is that buying products from a $3t company makes you a member of an oppressed ethnic minority and therefore every criticism of that corporation is an ethnic slur:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/12/youre-holding-it-wrong/#if-dishwashers-were-iphones

Call it "Apple exceptionalism" – the idea that Apple, alone among the Big Tech firms, is virtuous, and therefore its conduct should be interpreted through that lens of virtue. The wellspring of this virtue is conveniently nebulous, which allows for endless goal-post shifting by members of the Cult of Mac when Apple's sins are made manifest.

Take the claim that Apple is "privacy respecting," which is attributed to Apple's business model of financing its services though cash transactions, rather than by selling it customers to advertisers. This is the (widely misunderstood) crux of the "surveillance capitalism" hypothesis: that capitalism is just fine, but once surveillance is in the mix, capitalism fails.

Apple, then, is said to be a virtuous company because its behavior is disciplined by market forces, unlike its spying rivals, whose ability to "hack our dopamine loops" immobilizes the market's invisible hand with "behavior-shaping" shackles:

http://pluralistic.net/HowToDestroySurveillanceCapitalism

Apple makes a big deal out of its privacy-respecting ethos, and not without some justification. After all, Apple went to the mattresses to fight the FBI when they tried to force Apple to introduced defects into its encryption systems:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/04/fbi-could-have-gotten-san-bernardino-shooters-iphone-leadership-didnt-say

And Apple gave Ios users the power to opt out of Facebook spying with a single click; 96% of its customers took them up on this offer, costing Facebook $10b (one fifth of the pricetag of the metaverse boondoggle!) in a single year (you love to see it):

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/02/facebook-makes-the-case-for-activity-tracking-to-ios-14-users-in-new-pop-ups/

Bruce Schneier has a name for this practice: "feudal security." That's when you cede control over your device to a Big Tech warlord whose "walled garden" becomes a fortress that defends you against external threats:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/08/leona-helmsley-was-a-pioneer/#manorialism

The keyword here is external threats. When Apple itself threatens your privacy, the fortress becomes a prison. The fact that you can't install unapproved apps on your Ios device means that when Apple decides to harm you, you have nowhere to turn. The first Apple customers to discover this were in China. When the Chinese government ordered Apple to remove all working privacy tools from its App Store, the company obliged, rather than risk losing access to its ultra-cheap manufacturing base (Tim Cook's signal accomplishment, the one that vaulted him into the CEO's seat, was figuring out how to offshore Apple manufacturing to China) and hundreds of millions of middle-class consumers:

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-apple-vpn/apple-says-it-is-removing-vpn-services-from-china-app-store-idUSKBN1AE0BQ

Killing VPNs and other privacy tools was just for openers. After Apple caved to Beijing, the demands kept coming. Next, Apple willingly backdoored all its Chinese cloud services, so that the Chinese state could plunder its customers' data at will:

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/17/technology/apple-china-censorship-data.html

This was the completely foreseeable consequence of Apple's "curated computing" model: once the company arrogated to itself the power to decide which software you could run on your own computer, it was inevitable that powerful actors – like the Chinese Communist Party – would lean on Apple to exercise that power in service to its goals.

Unsurprisingly, the Chinese state's appetite for deputizing Apple to help with its spying and oppression was not sated by backdooring iCloud and kicking VPNs out of the App Store. As recently as 2022, Apple continued to neuter its tools at the behest of the Chinese state, breaking Airdrop to make it useless for organizing protests in China:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/11/foreseeable-consequences/#airdropped

But the threat of Apple turning on its customers isn't limited to China. While the company has been unwilling to spy on its users on behalf of the US government, it's proven more than willing to compromise its worldwide users' privacy to pad its own profits. Remember when Apple let its users opt out of Facebook surveillance with one click? At the very same time, Apple was spinning up its own commercial surveillance program, spying on Ios customers, gathering the very same data as Facebook, and for the very same purpose: to target ads. When it came to its own surveillance, Apple completely ignored its customers' explicit refusal to consent to spying, spied on them anyway, and lied about it:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/14/luxury-surveillance/#liar-liar

Here's the thing: even if you believe that Apple has a "corporate personality" that makes it want to do the right thing, that desire to be virtuous is dependent on the constraints Apple faces. The fact that Apple has complete legal and technical control over the hardware it sells – the power to decide who can make software that runs on that hardware, the power to decide who can fix that hardware, the power to decide who can sell parts for that hardware – represents an irresistible temptation to enshittify Apple products.

"Constraints" are the crux of the enshittification hypothesis. The contagion that spread enshittification to every corner of our technological world isn't a newfound sadism or indifference among tech bosses. Those bosses are the same people they've always been – the difference is that today, they are unconstrained.

Having bought, merged or formed a cartel with all their rivals, they don't fear competition (Apple buys 90+ companies per year, and Google pays it an annual $26.3b bribe for default search on its operating systems and programs).

Having captured their regulators, they don't fear fines or other penalties for cheating their customers, workers or suppliers (Apple led the coalition that defeated dozens of Right to Repair bills, year after year, in the late 2010s).

Having wrapped themselves in IP law, they don't fear rivals who make alternative clients, mods, privacy tools or other "adversarial interoperability" tools that disenshittify their products (Apple uses the DMCA, trademark, and other exotic rules to block third-party software, repair, and clients).

True virtue rests not merely in resisting temptation to be wicked, but in recognizing your own weakness and avoiding temptation. As I wrote when Apple embarked on its "curated computing" path, the company would eventually – inevitably – use its power to veto its customers' choices to harm those customers:

https://memex.craphound.com/2010/04/01/why-i-wont-buy-an-ipad-and-think-you-shouldnt-either/

Which is where we're at today. Apple – uniquely among electronics companies – shreds every device that is traded in by its customers, to block third parties from harvesting working components and using them for independent repair:

https://www.vice.com/en/article/yp73jw/apple-recycling-iphones-macbooks

Apple engraves microscopic Apple logos on those parts and uses these as the basis for trademark complaints to US customs, to block the re-importation of parts that escape its shredders:

https://repair.eu/news/apple-uses-trademark-law-to-strengthen-its-monopoly-on-repair/

Apple entered into an illegal price-fixing conspiracy with Amazon to prevent used and refurbished devices from being sold in the "world's biggest marketplace":

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/10/you-had-one-job/#thats-just-the-as

Why is Apple so opposed to independent repair? Well, they say it's to keep users safe from unscrupulous or incompetent repair technicians (feudal security). But when Tim Cook speaks to his investors, he tells a different story, warning them that the company's profits are threatened by customers who choose to repair (rather than replace) their slippery, fragile glass $1,000 pocket computers (the fortress becomes a prison):

https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2019/01/letter-from-tim-cook-to-apple-investors/

All this adds up to a growing mountain of immortal e-waste, festooned with miniature Apple logos, that our descendants will be dealing with for the next 1,000 years. In the face of this unspeakable crime, Apple engaged in a string of dishonest maneuvers, claiming that it would support independent repair. In 2022, Apple announced a home repair program that turned out to be a laughably absurd con:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/05/22/apples-cement-overshoes/

Then in 2023, Apple announced a fresh "pro-repair" initiative that, once again, actually blocked repair:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/22/vin-locking/#thought-differently

Let's pause here a moment and remember that Apple once stood for independent repair, and celebrated the independent repair technicians that kept its customers' beloved Macs running:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/29/norwegian-potato-flour-enchiladas/#r2r

Whatever virtue lurks in Apple's corporate personhood, it is no match for the temptation that comes from running a locked-down platform designed to capture IP rights so that it can prevent normal competitive activities, like fixing phones, processing payments, or offering apps.

When Apple rolled out the App Store, Steve Jobs promised that it would save journalism and other forms of "content creation" by finally giving users a way to pay rightsholders. A decade later, that promise has been shattered by the app tax – a 30% rake on every in-app transaction that can't be avoided because Apple will kick your app out of the App Store if you even mention that your customers can pay you via the web in order to avoid giving a third of their content dollars to a hardware manufacturer that contributed nothing to the production of that material:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/06/save-news-we-must-open-app-stores

Among the apps that Apple also refuses to allow on Ios is third-party browsers. Every Iphone browser is just a reskinned version of Apple's Safari, running on the same antiquated, insecure Webkit browser engine. The fact that Webkit is incomplete and outdated is a feature, not a bug, because it lets Apple block web apps – apps delivered via browsers, rather than app stores:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/13/kitbashed/#app-store-tax

Last month, the EU took aim at Apple's veto over its users' and software vendors' ability to transact with one another. The newly in-effect Digital Markets Act requires Apple to open up both third-party payment processing and third-party app stores. Apple's response to this is the very definition of malicious compliance, a snake's nest of junk-fees, onerous terms of service, and petty punitive measures that all add up to a great, big "Go fuck yourself":

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/06/spoil-the-bunch/#dma

But Apple's bullying, privacy invasion, price-gouging and environmental crimes are global, and the EU isn't the only government seeking to end them. They're in the firing line in Japan:

https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Technology/Japan-to-crack-down-on-Apple-and-Google-app-store-monopolies

And in the UK:

https://www.gov.uk/government/news/cma-wins-appeal-in-apple-case

And now, famously, the US Department of Justice is coming for Apple, with a bold antitrust complaint that strikes at the heart of Apple exceptionalism, the idea that monopoly is safer for users than technological self-determination:

https://www.justice.gov/opa/media/1344546/dl?inline

There's passages in the complaint that read like I wrote them:

Apple wraps itself in a cloak of privacy, security, and consumer preferences to justify its anticompetitive conduct. Indeed, it spends billions on marketing and branding to promote the self-serving premise that only Apple can safeguard consumers’ privacy and security interests. Apple selectively compromises privacy and security interests when doing so is in Apple’s own financial interest—such as degrading the security of text messages, offering governments and certain companies the chance to access more private and secure versions of app stores, or accepting billions of dollars each year for choosing Google as its default search engine when more private options are available. In the end, Apple deploys privacy and security justifications as an elastic shield that can stretch or contract to serve Apple’s financial and business interests.

After all, Apple punishes its customers for communicating with Android users by forcing them to do so without any encryption. When Beeper Mini rolled out an Imessage-compatible Android app that fixed this, giving Iphone owners the privacy Apple says they deserve but denies to them, Apple destroyed Beeper Mini:

https://blog.beeper.com/p/beeper-moving-forward

Tim Cook is on record about this: if you want to securely communicate with an Android user, you must "buy them an Iphone":

https://www.theverge.com/2022/9/7/23342243/tim-cook-apple-rcs-imessage-android-iphone-compatibility

If your friend, family member or customer declines to change mobile operating systems, Tim Cook insists that you must communicate without any privacy or security.

Even where Apple tries for security, it sometimes fails ("security is a process, not a product" -B. Schneier). To be secure in a benevolent dictatorship, it must also be an infallible dictatorship. Apple's far from infallible: Eight generations of Iphones have unpatchable hardware defects:

https://checkm8.info/

And Apple's latest custom chips have secret-leaking, unpatchable vulnerabilities:

https://arstechnica.com/security/2024/03/hackers-can-extract-secret-encryption-keys-from-apples-mac-chips/

Apple's far from infallible – but they're also far from benevolent. Despite Apple's claims, its hardware, operating system and apps are riddled with deliberate privacy defects, introduce to protect Apple's shareholders at the expense of its customers:

https://proton.me/blog/iphone-privacy

Now, antitrust suits are notoriously hard to make, especially after 40 years of bad-precedent-setting, monopoly-friendly antitrust malpractice. Much of the time, these suits fail because they can't prove that tech bosses intentionally built their monopolies. However, tech is a written culture, one that leaves abundant, indelible records of corporate deliberations. What's more, tech bosses are notoriously prone to bragging about their nefarious intentions, committing them to writing:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/03/big-tech-cant-stop-telling-on-itself/

Apple is no exception – there's an abundance of written records that establish that Apple deliberately, illegally set out to create and maintain a monopoly:

https://www.wired.com/story/4-internal-apple-emails-helped-doj-build-antitrust-case/

Apple claims that its monopoly is beneficent, used to protect its users, making its products more "elegant" and safe. But when Apple's interests conflict with its customers' safety and privacy – and pocketbooks – Apple always puts itself first, just like every other corporation. In other words: Apple is unexceptional.

The Cult of Mac denies this. They say that no one wants to use a third-party app store, no one wants third-party payments, no one wants third-party repair. This is obviously wrong and trivially disproved: if no Apple customer wanted these things, Apple wouldn't have to go to enormous lengths to prevent them. The only phones that an independent Iphone repair shop fixes are Iphones: which means Iphone owners want independent repair.

The rejoinder from the Cult of Mac is that those Iphone owners shouldn't own Iphones: if they wanted to exercise property rights over their phones, they shouldn't have bought a phone from Apple. This is the "No True Scotsman" fallacy for distraction-rectangles, and moreover, it's impossible to square with Tim Cook's insistence that if you want private communications, you must buy an Iphone.

Apple is unexceptional. It's just another Big Tech monopolist. Rounded corners don't preserve virtue any better than square ones. Any company that is freed from constraints – of competition, regulation and interoperability – will always enshittify. Apple – being unexceptional – is no exception.

Name your price for 18 of my DRM-free ebooks and support the Electronic Frontier Foundation with the Humble Cory Doctorow Bundle.

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

https://pluralistic.net/2024/03/22/reality-distortion-field/#three-trillion-here-three-trillion-there-pretty-soon-youre-talking-real-money

[iminseriousdebt]

GENLOSS RAMBLE

Heyo! This is a little ramble I needed to make before the founders cut comes out!  yipee!

(GENERATION LOSS SPOILERS)

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So we can see in the above images the methods Showfall Media is using to control gl!Sneeg gl!Charlie and gl!Ranboo, they use an already pre-existing technology called an Electroencephalogram (EEG). Now this technology has been in use for decades, and essentially how it works is that it uses electrodes placed onto your scalp combined with a conductive gel to measure the electrical activity in your brain, these electrical signals are usually referred to as “brain waves” and these brainwaves can be subdivided into four categories, Gamma (greater than 30 Hz), Beta (13-30 Hz), Alpha (8-12 Hz), Theta (3.5-7.5 Hz), and Delta (0.1-3.5 Hz)

These different brainwaves are generally assosiated with different emotions, awareness levels, brain activities, etc. Now if Showfall Media has installed these onto sneeg, charlie, and ranboo, that means they have access to their thoughts and feelings, but brainscanning isn’t an absolute precise device, it still takes a lot of human effort and time to properly interpret the brainwaves. If Showfall somehow had a tool to easily interpret the signals they could much more easily operate, say, a live show. Lucky for them there is already a real life solution to this problem, kinda.

Its called Brain Generative Pre-Training Transformer, or BrainGPT for short.  What its goal is, is to act as an assist tool for human neurologists to use in real neuroscience cases and case studies, what it does is it uses a Large Language Model (LLM) full of pre-existing human research papers and other neuroscience knowledge too vast for human comprehension. And whenever a neurologist hands BrainGPT a prompt, (such as anomalous finding or to asses the fields understanding of a certain topic) , “would generate likely data patterns reflecting its current synthesis of the scientific literature”  (braingpt.org)

Now in regards to Generation Loss, what this means is that Showfall Media potentially has acces to this sort of technology, and would be able to use it in the production of their shows, now BrainGPT has a good way to go before its widely avalable. But in the genloss au, it can be far into development at this point, and be available for companies to use in whatever way they see fit.

Now reading and decoding brain signals is one thing, but to mind control someone is far beyond what is capable today, but Showfall Media has somehow developed technology to do so, the way I’m guessing they did it is that they produced certain brainwaves from the electrodes on the actors heads to give them the emotional reactions they needed for the show. I can’t exactly get into the technical stuff cause I’m not a neurologist, but its just a hunch on how I think they did it.

As for the mind controlling devices themselves, I feel there’s a more subtextual reason as to why those objects in particular are chosen as the devices that are central to the show’s operation. Ranboo’s mask has been a heavy emphasis throughout Gen 1 TSE,

Its been a central figure in not only generation loss’ marketing, but also ranboo’s marketing, because when you think of ranboo one of the first things that pops up is the mask, atleast in the wider public’s eye.

But these general associations not only exist with Ranboo, with Slimcicle you usually think of the wide brim glasses, with Sneeg its his backwards cap, and this is with the other cast members too when their introduced on the spinning carousel in episode 2. Furthermore, with Niki it’s that’s she's just so nice, with Austin its that he’s just a gay guy,  and with Vinny and Ethan these associations don’t really exist. So, with Vinny he's just the “hoarder”, and Ethan isn't even introduced. And then there's Jerma, who is relinquished to a goofy character with a weird voice and a strange sense of humour which sort of fits his public image.

But what I wanna mention with Ranboo’s mask specifically is that with the three images shown on the genloss twitter of the control devices, sneeg’s is just a hat, like theres nothing special about it, just a hat with electrodes on it, when you take it off he’s completely in control of himself. But, with charlie’s it’s a good bit harder to just take it off. His glasses are drilled into his skull connected to electrodes which are also implanted in his skull, with an additional feature of a speaker in his jaw. But if you remove the glasses, there would be a lot of bleeding and his vision would be impaired, but he would still be a free man.

But with Ranboo, poor, poor, Ranboo… Like Charlie, they have electrodes implanted on to their brain connected to a switch on the back of their skull (which also may or may not also be connected to their spine, idk its hard to tell). These sprout wires that thread through the mask and lead into their throat, and the mask piece itself is sewn shut onto their SKIN.

Now this makes me wonder, why is Ranboo so heavily guarded when the other are (relatively) easy to set free? Is it because Ranboo is an integral part of the show and therefore high risk? Is it because Showfall needed extra resources for the chat to be able to control them?... Or is it because Ranboo tried to escape so many times before that they were forced to disfigure them to such an extreme degree, and yet somehow, SOMEHOW, they are able to resist, whether it be tapping SOS on their hand when they're on full control mode or shanking a Showfall employee with a dagger, Ranboo, Resists. But Showfall will never let them leave. Or they will? Idk founders cut hasn’t come out yet as of writing this, anyway ramble over. You can leave now.

[covid-safer-hotties]

Also preserved on our archive

By Lisa Jarvis

We’re still asking people with COVID to jump through far too many hoops to get their hands on Pfizer Inc.’s Paxlovid.

I experienced the barriers first-hand this month after my mother texted to say that this summer’s COVID wave had finally caught up with her. My first thought was to make sure she quickly started taking the antiviral. You’d think she would be an ideal candidate, because she is in her 70s with an underlying health condition. But it took a daylong effort to get her the medicine, one that involved multiple emails, phone calls with three different doctor’s offices, a telehealth visit and a bit of pharmacy-hopping to find one that had the pills in stock.

“That’s not an uncommon story,” says Amesh Adalja, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security. “There are a lot of misconceptions out there that have undermined the use [of antivirals] from the very beginning.”

The data bear this out. One small study published in early 2024 by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that 4 out of 5 high-risk patients were not offered an antiviral by their doctors. Worse, one large, community-based study found that Black and Latino patients were far less likely to receive the drug than White patients.

It shouldn’t be that way. And the delay matters: Pfizer’s antiviral only helps if taken within the first five days of symptoms. My mom, feverish and exhausted, told me that if I hadn’t stepped in as her advocate, she would have given up.

Doctors must do better, especially as we continue to live through a wave of infections.

Some health care providers may be worried about managing the interactions between Paxlovid and other medicines (my mom, for example, had to pause her Lipitor while on the antiviral). Others have been dissuaded by reports of rebound infections occurring in people who take Paxlovid — despite evidence that the drug’s benefits outweigh those risks in the most vulnerable patients. And some doctors might be operating under perverse incentives that make it more lucrative to have a sick patient make an appointment to confirm their infection instead of simply calling the prescription into a pharmacy after an at-home test.

There’s also lingering confusion about the right candidates for the drug. Paxlovid was authorized in 2021 based on compelling data showing it could keep high-risk unvaccinated people out of the hospital. Yet some doctors don’t seem aware that vaccinated patients can also benefit from it, particularly if they are higher risk. That’s everyone over age 65, or those who are immunocompromised, pregnant or with an underlying condition. Those groups still are at risk of hospitalization and even of dying, especially if their last exposure or booster is in the distant past.

And that’s a lot of people. Only 1 out of every 3 retirement-age adults got last year’s booster. “From my experience as well as others, pretty much everybody I’ve taken care of hasn’t received a vaccine in the last year or so, even though they might have had them originally,” says Peter Chin-Hong, an infectious disease specialist at the University of California, San Francisco. Since mid-August, COVID deaths in the U.S. have been hovering near 1,000 per week, according to CDC data. Shouldn’t we better deploy the tools that might prevent such losses?

Cost shouldn’t be a barrier. When antivirals transitioned to the commercial market last year, the U.S. government partnered with Pfizer to ensure people with public health insurance or without insurance could still get the drugs for free, and minimize the cost for people with private insurance. Yet infectious disease doctors tell me that months into the rollout, too few patients, prescribers and pharmacists seem aware of the program.

True, Paxlovid isn’t perfect. In people who aren’t high-risk, the data are mixed as to whether it helps much (though anecdotes abound for people who say they have felt better faster after taking it). And while there had been much hope that Paxlovid could prevent long COVID, so far the data supporting that hypothesis are inconclusive.

So there’s a clear need for better anti-COVID drugs. Even for young, healthy people who have been jabbed and infected multiple times, an infection can be extremely disruptive, sidelining us from work or school and ruining our best-laid plans. A drug more akin to Tamiflu — a very safe and tolerable treatment for the flu that allows people to bounce back faster, even if only by a day or two — would be a welcome invention.

Yet better antivirals have been slow to arrive. Pfizer is studying a treatment that works similarly to Paxlovid, but doesn’t interact with other medications. And hopes were dashed last spring when Shionogi’s Ensitrelvir, an antiviral approved in Japan, failed to prove it could alleviate symptoms faster than a placebo.

But even if a drug for the masses eventually made it to market, would it be used? When doctors can’t get it right for the most vulnerable, the prospects seem dim.

[mariacallous]

Elon Musk is a ‘promoter of evil,’ EU rule-of-law chief says

BRUSSELS — Elon Musk, unlike other tech bosses, "is not able to recognize good and evil,” a European Union top official said Wednesday.

The multibillionaire tech mogul and boss of X, Tesla and SpaceX is amplifying hatred, outgoing European Commission Vice President Věra Jourová told POLITICO in an interview, calling him a “promoter of evil.”

Musk has been on a collision course with European officials, fighting regulators and governments on multiple fronts. The tech mogul bought Twitter in April 2022, rebranding it as X shortly after, and he has attracted criticism for his management of the platform, with European politicians and civil society saying he has allowed hate speech to fester on the site.

“We started to relativize evil, and he's helping it proactively. He's the promoter of evil,” Jourová said.

The Czech politician, who was the EU’s justice chief from 2014-2019 and has been in charge of “values and transparency” since 2019, has had regular contact with many of the world’s largest technology companies over the last decade on issues like privacy, disinformation and content moderation. 

Big tech companies have “monstrous power in their hands,” Jourová said. “I'm really scared by digital platforms in bad hands."

X is “the main hub for spreading antisemitism now,” Jourová said, adding that she warned ministers from EU capitals on Tuesday to be vigilant to the possibility of online antisemitism spilling over into the real world. 

“Now we are in the situation where the member states’ law enforcement powers have to protect the people who are under threat, under physical threat,” she said. “This is what I mean ... This new chapter, new intensity of antisemitism, where we don't see sufficient action from the side of the platforms.”

Jourová has never met Musk in person, but said that “even without this personal meeting, I would say that out of all the bosses I met, he is the only one who is not able to recognize good and evil.” 

The EU’s former internal market chief Thierry Breton did meet Musk in California in 2022, and since clashed with him publicly over Musk’s approach to online content moderation. 

X did not respond to a request for comment.

Regulation vs. innovation

Jourová also dismissed the increasingly popular narrative that Brussels' overregulation has stifled tech innovation.

The EU passed a raft of digital legislation over the last five years, leading some of the world’s largest technology companies to argue that they cannot launch AI tools and other innovative products in the bloc because they don’t know how the new laws work together or how they will be enforced. 

But innovation for innovation’s sake is not necessarily desirable, Jourová said: “We have to be sure that the innovations are developed to do good to people.”

She said she wondered why innovation was typically "described as something absolutely good, [and] regulations as something which is bad … It's not black and white."

Big tech companies’ vast profits should not be at the expense of Europeans, Jourová said — even if that means product-launch delays. “Nobody says that Google and others cannot introduce new technologies in Europe. Maybe, one, two months, half a year later than somewhere else, but we want to be sure,” she said. 

Jourová led work on the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), a landmark privacy regime that went into force in 2018 and remains one of the EU’s most famous — and infamous — laws. 

Though the EU recently passed the Artificial Intelligence Act, the Digital Services Act and the Digital Markets Act, the GDPR often remains the main target of tech companies' ire, particularly because of how it is interpreted. The question of whether the law will need to be changed in the next five years is a key issue for incoming Commission tech chief Henna Virkkunen, Jourová said. 

“I think in [terms of] GDPR, we will have to look again at how to better enforce under the principle of one continent, one law,” she said. 

Jourová, who is leaving Brussels after 10 years at the Berlaymont, joked that she was returning to Prague as a “dissident,” given she left her own ANO party, which has turned more illiberal under former Czech Prime Minister Andrej Babiš. 

The return of the Euroskeptic Babiš, who is currently leading the polls ahead of next year's Czech election, would strengthen the illiberal forces in the EU, given Babiš’ ties to Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán. 

Jourová dismissed rumors that she would start her own political movement to take on her former boss. Instead, she will return to her alma mater, Charles University in Prague, in a management and teaching role.

[rkcarts]

My thoughts on Midjourney/ Generative AI as a real human artist

So my curiosity got the better of me and I ended up biting the proverbial artificial intelligence bullet. I tested out midjourney/nijijourney.

Honestly, I went into it with a feeling of despair (If I spent 15+ years honing my skills only to be able to produce an image a fraction as beautiful as AI can make within seconds... what was/is the point of even studying so hard for so long?)

But the more I played with it, I came to realize a couple of things.

AI is fantastic at some things, and really super dogshit at others. Human artists still have a HUGE leg up in a ton of cases! I.e complex physical character interactions, depicting more than one character accurately and consistently, words and hands, ect.

2. I feel like the direction it's headed, there's a lot of possibility for the tools to be utilized as a way to speed up or enhance real human artist's workflows, which is exciting. Especially when it comes to visual development and brainstorming.

Personally, as a real human artist, I'm excited about the way it can be used for creative projects. I've already been doing a lot of visual development for fun and playing around directing the program to create some FFXV fan 'art'.

That being said, it's obviously super shitty that these algorithms were trained off of artist's work without their permission. I do think it's unethical to feed the system more of any artists works without their explicit consent.

However, the program already has an insane amount of data, and that isn't going away. I think generative art is here to stay, and over the years it will be adapted to more and more by real human artists.

I've been pondering long and hard the past couple weeks about the ethics of it all and I've come to this conclusion. People who generate AI images and call themselves 'AI artists' are huge tools. Lol. Even worse are the ones who crank out hundreds of low effort AI images each week to try to sell prints/adoptables and tout their Patreon begging for people to (and I quote) "Support their work".

Obviously a huge factor in all of this mess is money. (Thanks, capitalism!). Due to the fact that in order to survive in our society, we need to have a marketable skill that we can trade for income, real human artists having their income taken away by AI and AI users is a huge ethics problem. I think if we lived free of capitalism, the whole AI dilemma wouldn't exist the way it does now. It would be much easier to accept the technology as a cool advance instead of seeing it as a job/life destroyer.

I believe that using the AI to create for the joy of creation is alright. As long as you aren't making money off of it, or feeding more artist's work to the AI monster.

I think any type of group feels a need to define themselves some way. Like we've seen, a lot of people are calling themselves AI Artists. I think that' s a huge insult to real human artists who pour their blood sweat and tears into their craft for thousands and thousands of hours.

I think a more appropriate title would be AI Creative Director, or AI prompter. AI prompt engineer is a little silly IMO but it's better than AI artist.

Okay my long messy AI rant is over! If I post any AI images that I directed the generation of, I'll be tagging them with 'Nijijourney' so they're distinct from my real human art. Peace.

[dontmeantobepoliticalbut]

By Thom Hartmann

Back in 1967, a friend of mine and I hitchhiked from East Lansing, Michigan to San Francisco to spend the summer in Haight-Ashbury. One ride dropped us off in Sparks, Nevada, and within minutes of putting our thumbs out a city police car stopped and arrested us for vagrancy.

The cop, a young guy with an oversized mustache who was apologetic for the city’s policy, drove us to the desert a mile or so beyond the edge of town, where we hitchhiked standing by a distressing light-post covered with graffiti reading “39 hours without a ride,” “going on our third day,” and “anybody got any water?”

Vagrancy laws were so 20th century.

Today, the US Supreme Court heard a case involving efforts by the City of Grants Pass, Oregon to keep homeless people off its streets and out of its parks and other public property. The city had tried a number of things when the problem began to explode in the last year of the Trump administration, as The Oregonian newspaper notes:

“They discussed putting them in their old jail, creating an unwanted list, posting signs at the city border or driving people out of town... Currently, officers patrol the city nearly every day, Johnson said, handing out [$295] citations to people who are camping or sleeping on public property or for having too many belongings with them.”

The explosion in housing costs has triggered two crises: homelessness and inflation. The former is harming the livability of our cities and towns, and the Fed’s reaction to the latter threatens an incumbency-destroying recession just as we head into what will almost certainly be the most important election in American history.

The problem with housing inflation is so severe today that without it the nation’s overall core CPI inflation rate would be in the neighborhood of Fed Chairman Jerome Powell’s 2% goal.

Graphic based on BLM data and interpretation by The Financial Times

Both homelessness and today’s inflation are the result of America — unlike many other countries — allowing housing to become a commodity that can be traded and speculated in by financial markets and overseas investors.

Forty-three years into America’s Reaganomics experiment, homelessness has gone from a problem to a crisis. Rarely, though, do you hear that Wall Street — a prime beneficiary of Reagan’s deregulation campaign — is helping cause it.

32% seems to be the magic threshold, according to research funded by the real estate listing company Zillow. When neighborhoods hit rent rates in excess of 32% of neighborhood income, homelessness explodes.

And we’re seeing it play out right in front of us in cities across America because a handful of Wall Street billionaires want to make a killing.

It wasn’t always this way in America.

Housing prices have spun out of control since my dad bought his house in 1957 when I was six years old. He got a Veteran’s Administration-subsidized loan and picked up the brand-new 3-bedroom-1-bath ranch house my 3 brothers and I grew up in, in suburban south Lansing, Michigan. It cost him $13,000, which was about twice what he made every year working a good union job in a tool-and-die shop.

When my dad bought his home in the 1950s the median price of a single-family house was 2.2 times the median American family income. Today, the Fed says, the median house sells for $479,500 while the median American personal income is $41,000 — a ratio of more than ten-to-one between housing costs and annual income.

As the Zillow study notes:

“Across the country, the rent burden already exceeds the 32% [of median income] threshold in 100 of the 386 markets included in this analysis….”

And wherever housing prices become more than three times annual income, homelessness stalks like the grim reaper.

We’re told that America’s cities have seen this increase in housing costs since the 1950s in some part because of the growing wealth and population of this country. There were, after all, 168 million people in the US the year my dad bought his house; today there are 330 million.

And it’s true that we haven’t been building enough new housing, particularly low-income housing, as 43 years of neoliberal Reaganomics have driven down wages and income for working-class people relative to all of their expenses while stopping the construction of virtually any new subsidized low-income housing.

But that’s not the only, or even the main dynamic, driving housing prices into the stratosphere — and, as a consequence, the crisis in homelessness — over the past decade. You can thank speculation for much of that.

As the Zillow-funded study noted:

“This research demonstrates that the homeless population climbs faster when rent affordability — the share of income people spend on rent — crosses certain thresholds. In many areas beyond those thresholds, even modest rent increases can push thousands more Americans into homelessness.”

So how did we get here?

It started with a wave of foreign buyers over the past 30 years (particularly from China, Canada, Mexico, India and Colombia) who, in just the one single year of 2020, picked up over 154,000 homes as their way of parking money in America. Which is part of why there are over 20 times more empty houses in America than there are homeless people.

As Marketwatch noted in a 2015 article titled “The Danger of Foreign Buyers Gobbling Up American Homes”:

“Unusual high appreciation of the aforementioned urban centers is due to the ever growing influx of foreign buyers — mostly wealthy Chinese — who view American residential real estate as the safest investment commodity. … According to a National Realtors Association survey, the Chinese spent $22 billion on U.S. housing in 12 months through March 2014…. [Other foreign buyers primarily include] Canadians, British, Indians and Mexicans.”

But foreign investment has been down for the past few years; what’s taken over and is really driving home prices today are massive, multi-billion-dollar US-based funds that sweep into neighborhoods and buy everything available, bidding against families and driving up housing prices.

As noted in a Wall Street Journal article titled “Meet Your New Landlord: Wall Street,” in just one suburb (Spring Hill) of Nashville, “In all of Spring Hill, four firms … own nearly 700 houses … [which] amounts to about 5% of all the houses in town.”

This is the tiniest tip of the iceberg.

“On the first Tuesday of each month,” notes the Journal article about a similar phenomenon in Atlanta, investors “toted duffels stuffed with millions of dollars in cashier’s checks made out in various denominations so they wouldn’t have to interrupt their buying spree with trips to the bank…”

The same thing is happening in cities and suburbs all across America; the investment goliaths use finely-tuned computer algorithms to sniff out houses they can turn into rental properties, making over-market and unbeatable cash bids often within minutes of a house hitting the market.

After stripping neighborhoods of homes families can buy, they then begin raising rents as high as the market will bear.

In the Nashville suburb of Spring Hill, for example, the vice-mayor, Bruce Hull, told the Journal you used to be able to rent “a three bedroom, two bath house for $1,000 a month.” Today, the Journal notes:

“The average rent for 148 single-family homes in Spring Hill owned by the big four [Wall Street investor] landlords was about $1,773 a month…”

Ryan Dezember, in his book Underwater: How Our American Dream of Homeownership Became a Nightmare, describes the story of a family trying to buy a home in Phoenix. Every time they entered a bid, they were outbid instantly, the price rising over and over, until finally the family’s father threw in the towel.

“Jacobs was bewildered,” writes Dezember. “Who was this aggressive bidder?”

Turns out it was Blackstone Group, now the world’s largest real estate investor. At the time they were buying $150 million worth of American houses every week, trying to spend over $10 billion. And that’s just a drop in the overall bucket.

In 2018, corporations bought 1 out of every 10 homes sold in America, according to Dezember, noting that, “Between 2006 and 2016, when the homeownership rate fell to its lowest level in fifty years, the number of renters grew by about a quarter.”

This all really took off around a decade ago, when Morgan Stanley published a 2011 report titled “The Rentership Society,” arguing that — in the wake of the 2008 Bush Housing Crash — snapping up houses and renting them back to people who otherwise would have wanted to buy them could be the newest and hottest investment opportunity for Wall Street’s billionaires and their funds.

Turns out, Morgan Stanley was right. Warren Buffett, KKR, and The Carlyle Group have all jumped into residential real estate, along with hundreds of smaller investment groups, and the National Home Rental Council has emerged as the industry’s premier lobbying group, working to block rent control legislation and other efforts to regulate the industry.

As John Husing, the owner of Economics and Politics Inc., told The Tennessean newspaper:

“What you have are neighborhoods that are essentially unregulated apartment houses. It could be disastrous for the city.”

Meanwhile, as unionization levels here remain among the lowest in the developed world, Reagan’s ongoing war on working people continues to wipe out America’s families.

At the same time that housing prices, both to purchase and to rent, are being driven through the roof by foreign and Wall Street investors, a survey published by NPR, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health found that American families are in crisis.

Their study found:

— “Thirty-eight percent (38%) of [all] households across the nation report facing serious financial problems in the previous few months.

— “There is a sharp income divide in serious financial problems, as 59% of those with annual incomes below $50,000 report facing serious financial problems in the past few months, compared with 18% of households with annual incomes of $50,000 or more.

— “These serious financial problems are cited despite 67% of households reporting that in the past few months, they have received financial assistance from the government.

— “Another significant problem for many U.S. households is losing their savings during the COVID-19 outbreak. Nineteen percent (19%) of U.S. households report losing all of their savings during the COVID-19 outbreak and not currently having any savings to fall back on.

— “At the time the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) eviction ban expired, 27% of renters nationally reported serious problems paying their rent in the past few months.”

These are not separate issues, and they are driving an explosion in homelessness.

The Zillow study found similarly damning data:

— “Communities where people spend more than 32% of their income on rent can expect a more rapid increase in homelessness.

— “Income growth has not kept pace with rents, leading to an affordability crunch with cascading effects that, for people on the bottom economic rung, increases the risk of homelessness.

— “The areas that are most vulnerable to rising rents, unaffordability, and poverty hold 15% of the U.S. population — and 47% of people experiencing homelessness.”

The Zillow study makes grim reading and is worth checking out. In community after community, when rent prices exceeded 32% of median household income, homelessness exploded. It’s measurable, predictable, and is destroying what’s left of the American working class, particularly minorities.

The loss of affordable homes also locks otherwise middle-class families out of the traditional way wealth is accumulated — through homeownership: Over 61% of all American middle-income family wealth is their home’s equity. And as families are priced out of ownership and forced to rent, they become more vulnerable to long-term economic struggles and homelessness.

Housing is one of the primary essentials of life. Nobody in America should be without it, and for society to work, housing costs must track incomes in a way that makes housing both available and affordable. This requires government intervention in the so-called “free market.”

— Last year, Canada banned most foreign buyers from buying residential property as a way of controlling their housing inflation.

— New Zealand similarly passed its no-foreigners law (except for Singaporeans and Australians) in 2018.

— Thailand requires a minimum investment of $1.2 million and the equivalent of a green card.

— Greece bans most non-EU citizens from buying real estate in most of the country.

— To buy residential housing in Denmark, it must be your primary residence and you must have lived in the country for at least 5 years.

— Vietnam, Austria, Hungary, and Cyprus also heavily restrict who can buy residential property, where, and under what terms.

This isn’t rocket science; the problem could be easily fixed by Congress if there was a genuine willingness to protect our real estate market from the vultures who’ve been circling it for years.

Unfortunately, when Clarence Thomas was the deciding vote to allow billionaires and hedge funds to legally bribe members of Congress in Citizens United, he and his four fellow Republicans opened the floodgates to “contributions” and “gifts” from foreign and Wall Street interests to pay off legislators to ignore the problem.

Because there’s no lobbying group for the interests of average homeowners or the homeless, it’s up to us to raise hell with our elected officials. The number for the Congressional switchboard is 202-224-3121.

If ever there was a time to solve this problem — and regulate corporate and foreign investment in American single-family housing — it’s now.

[duskmachine]

"Time is money." is a phrase that has eaten away at me for a really long time. Presently, this is a really interesting metaphor. With the deplorable job market and the emergence of "I should've made a linkedin account and gotten an internship while in the womb" memes, "Time is money." begins to take shape in a profound way.

We are expected, from the start, to invest in a future we assume to be still. Businesses promise us they are legacies who will last the test of time. Coco-cola airs its ads focusing on families and the idea that the gift of Cola will be passed down from generation to generation. Brands are identities that we take on; to like Coco-cola is a separate identity from liking Pepsi. You are not A, therefore you are B. Essentially, we believe our lives to be as stable as the market. Which, under the rules of capitalism, will continue to rise and rise and rise. Our jobs, the money we have under our name, is a tool to help us invest in products that add to our identity that grows and grows and grows.

Money becomes something that gives you the right to be human. It gives you the privilege of earning an identity. These are subsets of culture. If you cannot buy your way into culture then you are simply not a part of it. Culture is then created by those who can afford it; that is the future. The future is molded by a culture created by a small sum of people who hold large amounts of a tool (money) that gives them the "right" to be human and be part of "society". That is the security we were sold. Consumerism is such a huge deal because it is a part of culture. Consuming is our future: stocks will rise and rise and rise and we will continue feeding into the market to make it grow and grow and grow.

Our future is only as stable as these stocks, as these legacy brands. If we choose to separate ourselves from the premise of capitalism, we then sever our human identity that we have "earned" through our job, our title, our money. "Time is money." teaches us that time is something we must invest in. It is a trust we must fund. While at the same time, we must spend time to earn that money. Time becomes a tower built by blocks of identities. You were a student. You used to work at that store. You used to really like that product.

Each moment you choose not to invest in your future is time lost. You must procure the time to spend by earning the funds to "buy time". Think about the ideology of: if you live a hard life now, you'll live an easier life later. For the majority of our lives, we will spend it attempting to earn a better future despite our present.

Well, but what if brands fail? What if the future they sell is founded on bad research and baseless lies? Coca-cola sells us a life in an idyllic nuclear family that has its roots in American imperialism. Fossil fuel companies have been paying researchers to stay quiet and to publish data that convinces the public that their production is something that we can rely on since it will never harm our future. For lack of better terms: The future they sell is complete fucking bullshit.

The white picket fence surrounding a beautiful house and lawn is not a future most can afford anymore. That is a culture that is essentially lost because it is hoarded by previous generations. This is wealth that is holed up in dying identities and traditions that do not exist to serve anyone, but the person practicing it. Temperatures rise, our over reliance on oil reveals to us a culture unwilling to change for the benefit of a genuine future: one where the planet is habitable. This future, as previously stated, is created by only a handful of people. It is a product sold and handed to people running out of a future to live meanwhile young people without generational wealth stand on bidding time.

"Time is money." is a saying from Benjamin Franklin. The face of the $100 bill. His legacy, our tool to buy an ungrounded future where the rich live in the stars, abandoning the Earth they set aflame. Not ever acknowledging they chose to treat our future as the fuel for theirs. A sacrifice that was never necessary.

[olderthannetfic]

In response to the AI author person - I’m glad these tools are helping you, but, with all due respect, I’m still scared shitless that companies are going to replace actual writers with people like you, or, once technologies like chat GPT improve, AI itself. And this angers me because it shows that corporations (who already control many avenues of entertainment) don’t value the arts. In fact, there’s been a mysterious increase in slashing funds for art and writing programs in schools across the country, so it isn’t just corporations - it’s everyone in power these days.

It’s turning art even more into an industry about money, rather than creativity. The Entertainment and writing industries already discourage invention in creative works in favor of generating profit through repeating things that have already sold. And I’m so, so scared I’m going to see that mentality spread to FanFiction. Because even though it doesn’t sell, per se, certain tropes already gain more views than others - and that’s a currency in itself.

And Art isn’t just something to create or consume - it’s a catharsis. A release. A way to teach people important lessons through metaphor and narrative - especially in works that are genre-defying (or even genre-defining.) Bur the rise of ChatGPT and AI shows that the people championing and promoting this technology don’t want us to truly learn from writing and art anymore. They might not realize this, but they’re letting people in power incentivize us to blindly believe whatever BS they’re selling us - which generally serves to line their pockets and make everyone else poorer - in exchange for further convenience.

And don’t get me started on the ethics of data scraping. Really. Don’t. But even if AI has helped you, it’s hurting more people than it helps overall, and I think that’s what matters.

--

Art has been made mass market many a time, and all it does is spur more pastoral fantasies and movements to value traditional hand crafts.

I'm not saying there's no danger, but people like individual artists because they feel like they have an emotional connection with that person's art or maybe the artist themself.

The solution is for consumers to personally reject corporate crap. It doesn't require everyone. It just requires little communities of people.

--

Things are bad, but they aren't worse than for your average person caught up in England's industrial revolution. Advertising is plastered everywhere. Wages are shit. Pollution is epic. Culture is changing. Cities are filled with isolated, disconnected people.

We've been here before.

[librarianrafia]

"But there is a yawning gap between "AI tools can be handy for some things" and the kinds of stories AI companies are telling (and the media is uncritically reprinting). And when it comes to the massively harmful ways in which large language models (LLMs) are being developed and trained, the feeble argument that "well, they can sometimes be handy..." doesn't offer much of a justification.

...

When I boil it down, I find my feelings about AI are actually pretty similar to my feelings about blockchains: they do a poor job of much of what people try to do with them, they can't do the things their creators claim they one day might, and many of the things they are well suited to do may not be altogether that beneficial. And while I do think that AI tools are more broadly useful than blockchains, they also come with similarly monstrous costs.

...

But I find one common thread among the things AI tools are particularly suited to doing: do we even want to be doing these things? If all you want out of a meeting is the AI-generated summary, maybe that meeting could've been an email. If you're using AI to write your emails, and your recipient is using AI to read them, could you maybe cut out the whole thing entirely? If mediocre, auto-generated reports are passing muster, is anyone actually reading them? Or is it just middle-management busywork?

...

Costs and benefits

Throughout all this exploration and experimentation I've felt a lingering guilt, and a question: is this even worth it? And is it ethical for me to be using these tools, even just to learn more about them in hopes of later criticizing them more effectively?

The costs of these AI models are huge, and not just in terms of the billions of dollars of VC funds they're burning through at incredible speed. These models are well known to require far more computing power (and thus electricity and water) than a traditional web search or spellcheck. Although AI company datacenters are not intentionally wasting electricity in the same way that bitcoin miners perform millions of useless computations, I'm also not sure that generating a picture of a person with twelve fingers on each hand or text that reads as though written by an endlessly smiling children's television star who's being held hostage is altogether that much more useful than a bitcoin.

There's a huge human cost as well. Artificial intelligence relies heavily upon "ghost labor": work that appears to be performed by a computer, but is actually delegated to often terribly underpaid contractors, working in horrible conditions, with few labor protections and no benefits. There is a huge amount of work that goes into compiling and labeling data to feed into these models, and each new model depends on ever-greater amounts of said data — training data which is well known to be scraped from just about any possible source, regardless of copyright or consent. And some of these workers suffer serious psychological harm as a result of exposure to deeply traumatizing material in the course of sanitizing datasets or training models to perform content moderation tasks.

Then there's the question of opportunity cost to those who are increasingly being edged out of jobs by LLMs,i despite the fact that AI often can't capably perform the work they were doing. Should I really be using AI tools to proofread my newsletters when I could otherwise pay a real person to do that proofreading? Even if I never intended to hire such a person?

Or, more accurately, by managers and executives who believe the marketing hype out of AI companies that proclaim that their tools can replace workers, without seeming to understand at all what those workers do.

Finally, there's the issue of how these tools are being used, and the lack of effort from their creators to limit their abuse. We're seeing them used to generate disinformation via increasingly convincing deepfaked images, audio, or video, and the reckless use of them by previously reputable news outlets and others who publish unedited AI content is also contributing to misinformation. Even where AI isn't being directly used, it's degrading trust so badly that people have to question whether the content they're seeing is generated, or whether the "person" they're interacting with online might just be ChatGPT. Generative AI is being used to harass and sexually abuse. Other AI models are enabling increased surveillance in the workplace and for "security" purposes — where their well-known biases are worsening discrimination by police who are wooed by promises of "predictive policing". The list goes on.

[janetjacksonseo]

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Breaking Down the Factors That Affect Market Perception in Auto Transport

Market Value Over Time

Resale value is a critical factor when purchasing a vehicle, as it represents the predicted market value of a car, truck, or SUV at the time of sale. It is essential to understand that a new car that depreciates faster than its competitors can lead to a lower trade-in value, potentially costing the owner more in the long run if they owe more than the vehicle's worth on a long-term loan. According to Kelley Blue Book's Best Resale Value Awards, vehicles that maintain the highest 5-year residual values, expressed as a percentage of their original Manufacturer's Suggested Retail Price (MSRP), are recognized for their ability to retain value. These awards are determined by experienced automotive analysts who utilize extensive data, including millions of transactions, vehicle specifications, economic conditions, and auction results, to predict and track vehicle depreciation effectively.

Brands like Lexus and Audi consistently rank near the top for value retention in the luxury segment, indicating that these vehicles are likely to depreciate less over time compared to others.

Conversely, brands such as Jaguar, Land Rover, and Volvo may struggle with maintaining high resale values, especially when compared to high-volume models like the Honda Civic or Toyota Sienna.

Brand Prestige and Consumer Perception

Brand perception significantly influences a vehicle's market value and resale potential. Consumers' perceptions are shaped by direct and indirect experiences with the brands, and this perception influences their decision-making process.

For instance, Lexus is often seen as the epitome of high resale value, which enhances its appeal among luxury buyers who consider future trade-in values.

On the other hand, mainstream car buyers who have experienced strong resale values with brands like Honda or Toyota may find the depreciation rates of luxury brands like Jaguar or Volvo less appealing.

The automotive industry's perception is also affected by factors such as safety, reliability, and operating costs. Dramatic events, such as Toyota's large-scale recalls, have been shown to impact brand perception negatively, affecting resale values.

Conversely, brands that manage to maintain strong safety reputations, like Volvo, despite challenges, can sustain their position in the market.

However, as consumer preferences evolve and more brands begin to excel in multiple categories, the perceived difference between top car brands and challengers is diminishing, making the competition for high resale value more intense.

In summary, understanding the factors that influence resale value and consumer perceptions can guide consumers in making informed purchasing decisions that consider both immediate benefits and long-term financial implications.

Making the Right Choice for Your Needs

Assessing Personal Needs and Preferences

When selecting the right vehicle for city driving, it is crucial to assess personal needs and preferences thoroughly. One should consider how the vehicle aligns with their lifestyle, budget, and driving conditions they frequently encounter.

For individuals residing in urban areas, factors like vehicle size, maneuverability, and fuel efficiency take precedence. Compact cars with a tight turning radius are particularly advantageous in cities, where parking spaces are scarce, and streets are narrow.

Understanding one's commitment to vehicle maintenance is essential. A car is not merely a tool for transportation; it reflects one's responsibility and care. Regular maintenance such as timely oil changes and adherence to service schedules extends the lifespan of the vehicle and ensures reliable performance. Prospective buyers should ponder whether they are prepared to maintain a luxury car, which often requires more attention and higher costs, or if an affordable, reliable model better suits their practical needs.

For finding a reliable and responsible auto transport services, you can browse around this website. Lucky Star Auto Transport provide a professional car shipping services in California and nationwide. They offer direct car shipping guide, with fully insured car carriers and transporters that are reviewed for excellent service and competitive prices.

[nishakrishnan1996]

Learning Digital Marketing: Tips and Resources for Beginners

In the current digital world, it is critical for both individuals and organisations to grasp the art of digital marketing. Entering the world of digital marketing can seem like a difficult trip because of the vast diversity of internet platforms and tactics at our disposal. However, anyone can effectively leverage the transformative power of digital marketing if they have the correct tools and attitude. We'll explore the fundamentals of digital marketing in this in-depth guide, as well as many learning resources and practical advice for success in this ever-changing field. A reputable Top Digital Marketing Course in Coimbatore can provide the knowledge and abilities needed for those aspiring to become industry professionals to successfully traverse this dynamic environment.

Grasping the Core Principles

Embarking on your digital marketing odyssey requires a firm grasp of the foundational principles. Digital marketing encompasses a multifaceted landscape comprising social media marketing, search engine optimization (SEO), content marketing, email marketing, pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, and beyond. Each facet plays a pivotal role in connecting with and engaging your target audience.

Commence your journey by immersing yourself in the essence and utility of each digital marketing channel. For instance, social media marketing serves as a conduit for businesses to forge connections with their audience across platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn, while SEO serves as the bedrock for enhancing a website's visibility in search engine results.

Embracing Online Learning

One of the most potent avenues for acquiring digital marketing prowess lies in online learning platforms. The likes of Coursera, Udemy, and HubSpot Academy offer an extensive array of courses catering to various facets of digital marketing. Whether you're a neophyte or a seasoned practitioner seeking to augment your skill set, there exists a plethora of courses tailored to meet your requirements.

When perusing online courses, seek out those that proffer a structured curriculum, practical exercises, and industry-endorsed certifications. Many courses also afford opportunities for engagement with instructors and fellow learners, facilitating collaborative learning and knowledge exchange.

Keeping Abreast of Industry Trends

The realm of digital marketing is in a perennial state of flux, characterized by the continual emergence of novel trends and technologies. To maintain a competitive edge, it's imperative to remain abreast of the latest industry trends and best practices.

Cultivate a habit of staying attuned to reputable digital marketing blogs, subscribing to industry newsletters, and participating in webinars and conferences. These fountains of wisdom furnish invaluable insights into nascent trends, innovative strategies, and illuminating case studies spotlighting successful digital marketing endeavors. Finding the appropriate abilities is just as vital as selecting the appropriate tactics and methods. It can be very beneficial in this situation to register in the Digital Marketing Online Certification.

Enacting Hands-On Practice

While theoretical knowledge serves as a springboard, the crucible of hands-on experience is indispensable in mastering digital marketing. Establish your own blog or social media platforms to experiment with diverse tactics and strategies. Translate the theoretical underpinnings gleaned from online courses and industry resources into tangible outcomes through real-world projects.

Embrace a spirit of experimentation, and employ analytical tools to scrutinize your endeavors and glean actionable insights. The data-driven nature of digital marketing empowers you to refine your strategies iteratively based on empirical evidence.

Cultivating Specialization

As you traverse the digital marketing landscape, contemplate delving into a specialized niche aligned with your passions and proficiencies. Specialization enables you to delve deeper into a specific facet of digital marketing, be it SEO, social media advertising, email marketing, or content creation.

Becoming a connoisseur in a niche not only demarcates you from the crowd but also engenders myriad opportunities for career advancement. Businesses perpetually seek specialists capable of proffering astute insights and delivering tangible results within their niche domain.

Conclusion

Journeying towards mastery in digital marketing entails a multifaceted expedition characterized by unwavering dedication, perpetual learning, and adaptability. By internalizing the core principles, engaging with online learning platforms, staying abreast of industry trends, enacting hands-on practice, and cultivating specialization, you can forge a path towards proficiency in this dynamic arena.

Remember, digital marketing is an art imbued with nuance and dynamism. Embrace the ethos of experimentation and iteration, and chart a course tailored to your unique objectives and target audience. With perseverance and a strategic approach, you can harness the transformative potential of digital marketing to propel your endeavors to unprecedented heights in the digital realm.

[saeedmohammedsblog]

The Future of Website Development: Innovations and Best Practices for Modern Businesses

In today's rapidly changing digital environment, having a robust online presence is of paramount importance. For businesses in Oman, staying ahead in website development is crucial to capturing market share and achieving growth. The future of website development is marked by rapid innovations and evolving best practices that businesses must embrace to remain competitive. This blog explores the latest trends and essential practices in website development, offering valuable insights for businesses aiming to enhance their digital footprint.

1. Harnessing the Potential of Artificial Intelligence (AI)

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is transforming website development through the automation of processes and the customisation of user experiences. AI-powered tools can analyse user behavior, predict preferences, and deliver tailored content, which significantly improves user engagement. Chatbots, driven by AI, are becoming a standard feature on websites, providing instant customer support and enhancing user interaction.

AI also plays a crucial role in optimising websites for search engines. With the help of machine learning algorithms, businesses can analyse vast amounts of data to improve their SEO strategies, ensuring better visibility in search engine results.

2. Mobile-First Design: A Necessity, Not a Choice

With mobile internet usage surpassing desktop, a mobile-first approach is now a necessity in website development. The mobile-first design ensures that websites are optimised for mobile devices, offering a seamless experience across all platforms. This approach involves designing the mobile version of a website first and then scaling up for larger screens.

Responsive design is an essential aspect of mobile-first development. It ensures that a website adjusts its layout and content based on the screen size of the device being used, providing an optimal viewing experience. For businesses in Oman, where mobile device usage is prevalent, adopting a mobile-first strategy is critical for reaching a broader audience.

3. Enhanced User Experience through Progressive Web Applications (PWAs)

Progressive Web Apps (PWAs) are transforming the way websites are built and experienced. PWAs combine the best features of web and mobile applications, offering a fast, reliable, and engaging user experience. They can be accessed through a web browser but provide app-like functionalities, such as offline access and push notifications.

For businesses in Oman, implementing PWAs can enhance user engagement and retention. PWAs load quickly, even on slow networks, and offer a smooth experience, which is crucial for retaining visitors and reducing bounce rates.

4. Emphasize the importance of User Experience (UX) and User Interface (UI) Design.

User Experience (UX) and User Interface (UI) design are central to the success of any website. UX design focuses on the overall experience of the user, including ease of navigation, content accessibility, and interaction quality. UI design, on the other hand, deals with the visual elements of a website, such as layout, colours, and typography.

A well-designed UX/UI can significantly impact user satisfaction and conversion rates. Businesses in Oman should prioritise creating intuitive and visually appealing websites that cater to their target audience's needs and preferences. Conducting regular user testing and gathering feedback can help refine design elements and improve the overall user experience.

5. Integrating Advanced Security Measures

As cyber threats become more sophisticated, website security is more important than ever. Implementing advanced security measures is essential to protect sensitive data and maintain user trust. Some key security practices include:

- SSL Certificates: Secure the communication by encrypting the data exchanged between the user's browser and the server.

- Regular Updates: Keep software, plugins, and themes up to date to prevent vulnerabilities.

- Firewalls and Security Plugins: Use firewalls and security plugins to protect against malicious attacks and threats.

For businesses in Oman, prioritising website security is crucial to safeguarding customer information and maintaining a trustworthy online presence.

6. Optimising for Voice Search

With the rise of voice-activated devices and virtual assistants, optimising websites for voice search is becoming increasingly important. Voice search optimisation involves tailoring content and keywords to match the conversational queries users might speak into their devices.

Businesses in Oman should consider incorporating long-tail keywords and natural language phrases into their content to improve voice search visibility. Additionally, ensuring that websites load quickly and provide concise, relevant answers can enhance their performance in voice search results.

7. Leveraging Data Analytics for Continuous Improvement

Data analytics is a powerful tool for understanding user behavior and improving website performance. By analysing metrics such as user traffic, engagement rates, and conversion rates, businesses can gain valuable insights into what works and what needs improvement.

Implementing data-driven strategies allows businesses in Oman to make informed decisions, optimise their websites, and tailor their content to meet user needs. Regularly reviewing analytics data and making adjustments based on findings can lead to better user experiences and increased business success.

8. The Role of Content in Website Development

Content remains a cornerstone of effective website development. High-quality, relevant content not only attracts visitors but also helps in building authority and trust. Businesses should focus on creating engaging and informative content that addresses their audience's needs and interests.

Integrating multimedia components like videos, infographics, and interactive features can significantly boost user engagement and enhance the overall attractiveness of the website. For businesses in Oman, producing content in multiple languages can also help reach a broader audience and cater to diverse customer segments.

9. Future-Proofing Your Website

As technology continues to advance, it's essential to future-proof your website to adapt to upcoming changes. This involves using flexible and scalable technologies, adopting best practices, and staying updated with industry trends.

Choosing a robust content management system (CMS) and ensuring that your website's architecture is adaptable to new technologies can help future-proof your site. Consistently assessing and refreshing the features and design of your website will help maintain its relevance and effectiveness over time.

Conclusion

The future of website development is dynamic and filled with opportunities for innovation. For businesses in Oman, staying abreast of the latest trends and best practices in website development is crucial for maintaining a competitive edge and delivering exceptional user experiences. By embracing AI, mobile-first design, PWAs, and advanced security measures, businesses can enhance their online presence and drive growth. Prioritising UX/UI design, voice search optimisation, and data analytics will further contribute to building a successful and future-proof website. As technology continues to evolve, staying adaptable and forward-thinking will ensure that your website remains a powerful tool for achieving business success.

[seonsaeng]

YANDEX SEO EXPERT - MASTER SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZER

Becoming a Yandex SEO expert requires a deep understanding of how this search engine operates and what it values in websites. Here's a roadmap to guide your journey:

1. Master the Fundamentals of SEO:

Technical SEO: Solid foundation in website structure, crawlability, indexability, site speed, mobile-friendliness, and schema markup.

On-Page Optimization: Keyword research, content optimization, title tags, meta descriptions, header tags, and image optimization.

Off-Page Optimization: Link building, social signals, and online reputation management.

Content Marketing: Creating high-quality, relevant, and engaging content that satisfies user intent.

2. Dive Deep into Yandex Specifics:

Yandex Webmaster Tools: Familiarize yourself with Yandex.Webmaster (similar to Google Search Console) to monitor website performance, submit sitemaps, analyze indexing, and troubleshoot issues.

Regional Focus: Yandex heavily prioritizes regional relevance. Understand the importance of targeting specific regions within Russia and other countries where Yandex is popular. Utilize the rel="canonical" tag for different language versions to avoid duplicate content issues.

Content Relevance and Quality: Yandex places a strong emphasis on high-quality, original content that truly satisfies user intent. Keyword stuffing and low-quality content are penalized. Invest time in creating comprehensive and informative content that addresses user needs.

Link Building: While similar to Google, Yandex favors links from trusted and relevant websites within its own ecosystem. Focus on building a natural link profile with high-quality backlinks from reputable Russian websites.

Mobile-First Indexing: Yandex adopted mobile-first indexing early on. Ensure your website is fully optimized for mobile devices with a responsive design and fast loading speeds.

Understand User Behavior: Yandex pays attention to user behavior signals like click-through rates, bounce rates, and time on site. Improve user engagement by providing a positive browsing experience.

3. Leverage Yandex SEO Tools and Resources:

Yandex.Metrica: Yandex's web analytics platform provides valuable insights into user behavior, website traffic, and conversion rates. Track key metrics and use the data to improve your website's performance.

Yandex.Wordstat: A keyword research tool that helps you understand search volume and user intent for specific keywords in Yandex. Identify relevant keywords with high search volume and low competition.

Yandex.Catalog: A directory of websites that can help improve your website's visibility in Yandex search results. Submit your website to relevant categories in Yandex.Catalog to increase your website's authority.

4. Stay Updated with Yandex Algorithm Changes:

Follow Yandex Blogs and News: Stay informed about the latest algorithm updates, best practices, and SEO trends from official Yandex sources. Subscribe to Yandex blogs and newsletters to keep your knowledge current.

Engage in Yandex SEO Communities: Connect with other SEO professionals specializing in Yandex to share knowledge and learn from their experiences. Participate in online forums and attend industry events to expand your network.

5. Hands-on Experience:

Practice on Real Websites: The best way to learn is by doing. Optimize websites for Yandex and track your progress. Experiment with different techniques and analyze the results to refine your strategies.

Analyze Successful Yandex Websites: Study websites that rank well in Yandex and identify the factors contributing to their success. Learn from their content strategies, link building techniques, and overall website optimization.

By consistently applying these strategies and staying up-to-date with the latest Yandex trends, you can become a proficient Yandex SEO expert and achieve higher rankings for your websites in this important search engine.