Cool cool, Sam Altman met a UK government minister and tried to get the UK gov to buy every citizen a ChatGPT license, at a cost to taxpayers of £2bn a year.
We’re a country with food poverty and food bank usage is high. theguardian.com/politics/2025/…
Exclusive: Deal that could have cost £2bn was floated at meeting between technology secretary Peter Kyle and Sam AltmanEleni Courea (The Guardian)
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This article about indigenous forest management speaks volumes of the forest service’s lack of forethought and arrogance. But one has to wonder how much of the burn bans were to allow the firs to grow so they could be chopped and sold. How much did capitalism contribute to this tinderbox we live in.
storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/7…
Group 3: Stefanie Buckbee, Garrett Brandt, & Christopher D'OnofrioEsri
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levampyre and Simon Brooke reshared this.
Somehow missed this:
Pakistan, home to more than 240 million people, is experiencing one of the most rapid #solar revolutions on the planet, even as it grapples with poverty and economic instability.
Suddenly about half the country’s electricity comes from solar. It’s not industrial solar farms or state-led: it’s a bottom-up revolution: households fed up with rising power costs and blackouts buying what are now ridiculously cheap solar panels.
cnn.com/2025/05/01/climate/pak…
like this
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they are used to not having electricity for large parts of the day, specially during the day and most of the night. Blackouts and brownouts occur daily around there, so people finally have more reliable electricity (or electricity at all) during the sunny hours and keep doing whatever they already did into the night (gas generators or using no power at all).
Batteries (better, energy storage availability and cost) is the major hurdle that, if surpassed, will make solar the definitive renewable energy source for most of the Southern Hemisphere and a big part of the Northern Hemisphere.
@impermanen_
Simon Brooke likes this.
@Grovewest @mastodonmigration Can corroborate from the UK: A significant part of my solar install seven years ago was for the MCS-accredited fitter to hook to the grid.
My cousins in Pakistan didn't have that regulatory hurdle, and they're now running more kW than me from solar; they finally crossed the second poverty line (the "wash line") last year, with a washing machine that can stay running for its whole cycle.
Imran Nazar ~ عمران نزر likes this.
> buying what are now ridiculously cheap solar panels
Solar is cheap for a reason: gerrymcgovern.com/solar-is-che…
«[...] Solar needs cheap coal because making silicon requires volcano-like heat. In the 2020s, China was building about two new coal plants a week—six times more than the rest of the world combined. Solar needs cheap charcoal. Every year, China was also going to its war-torn and destitute neighbor, Myanmar, and extracting 14,000 football fields’ worth of tropical forest wood to make cheap charcoal to help smelt its silicon.
Solar needs cheap nickel. Indonesia had become the world’s leading producer of nickel, much of it going to China. In Indonesia, by the mid-2020s, 50,000 hectares of tropical forests—home to uncontacted Indigenous people—had been cleared for nickel mining, with reports of constant strife and workers deaths at Chinese-run nickel mines in the country. Nickel needs cheap coal. By the 2020s, Indonesia’s coal industry was booming, partly driven by a surging nickel-smelting industry. Making one ton of Indonesian nickel caused about 45 tons of CO2. [...]»
@jones I really like Gerry, who is a degrowth advocate like myself and we mostly agree. We badly need to cut consumption in the industrialized world and we are doing the opposite.
Still, this is an example of a case where some of the factoids he publishes are oil and gas industry propaganda: things that were once true but are no longer. Or things that are dramatically worse when you’re mining/shipping/burning oil, gas and coal all over. Once made a solar panel generates for *25 yrs.*
> Once made a solar panel generates for *25 yrs.*
I guess it is true that it's possible to make solar panels that last for 25 years, but the situation now is very different, as far as i know it, like by far the greatest part of solar panels that are being produced now are produced with very much polluting methods, which are badly exploitative of people and ecosystems, and are not made to last 25 years, but much shorter...
anyway, about this and the rest, let's see what @gerrymcgovern has to say
@jones
True. Solar panel lifespans, particularly those sold in poor countries, can be much closer to five years than 25.
Again, we're trying to solve the wrong problem. It's not an energy production problem. It an energy overconsumption problem. There could be nothing worse for our environment right now than cheap energy. It is cheap energy that brought us to the point of collapse.
And cheap solar is cheap because of slavery and environmental devastation--and lots of coal.
I agree with everything, except with the idea that it is possible to just reduce global consumption enough to avoid natural catastrophes and the spreading of wars, so our decimation or extinction, starting from the most poor in the world who already live much shorter and difficult lives then us: todon.nl/@jones/11505036901889…
Considering only GHG emissions, with climate change being only 1 of the 7 "planetary boundaries" that we are largely outside of, It would probably not be enough even if all the people in the yellow zone in the graph below reduced their consumption to upper green zone area levels, if those in the red zone won't do the same, and they won't do, and also in the yellow zone most people won't change their habits enough and in a short enough time.
@d10c4n3 @GhostOnTheHalfShell @gerrymcgovern
My point is that, considering only one of the eight planet boundaries we are far out of, i.e. the GHG emissions that are still increasing now, our "forced-by-nature-degrowth" will most probably happen when it will be too late for our species and so many others to not extinguish or be heavily decimated. And, at the same time, i see "degrowth-by-our-will" as very, very improbable: i repeat: i see it very, very improbable that the people in the US, in Europe, in China, in Russia, in all these "developed" countries, and particularly those who are the greatest emitters, the upper classes, will "degrow" in numbers high enough and in times short enough to get our species out of the extinction process. That's one of the reasons why i advocate for something like this: bu.noblogs.org/the-necessary-s…
@jones
I agree with you. A terrible collapse is coming. If we massively reduced energy and material consumption--which we will most definitely not--then we could reduce, to some degree, the pain and suffering that is coming. But we will see dramatic population and societal changes over the next 50-100 years because the way the middle class and elites live is simply not sustainable.
As you point out, CO2 is only one card in a 52 card deck of damage and pollution.
I agree with your basic analysis: that a sustainable future is in small communities that can feed themselves from the local land. But that's not easy. I grew up on a small farm without tractors. It takes quite a lot of land to feed a family, and when the people flood out of the cities, there will be major challenges. But small communities were our past and they will be our future--if we have one.
Gerry McGovern reshared this.
No, no degrowth means it's possible to reduce consumption enough to avoid natural catastrophes by executing the top 1%, and staking their heads on pikes to serve as a warning to any who dare consume our world. Or something less extreme, with less risk of exterminating the bottom 50% in retaliation, but it's not about asking them nicely to pretty please don't pollute. And it's not about blaming the bottom 50% for not recycling their plastic bottles. That's why the fat cats are trying so hard to suppress it. We're not asking to reduce production. It has to happen or we are all dead.
Your way seems good. All I want to do is get to know people around me, and work together to do like... community stuff. I don't know how that'd necessarily lead to ramping down resource extraction and production worldwide, but... it couldn't hurt?
Really I'm worried that the elites have already set up invisible roadblocks to keep your idea from happening. No way to expose them other than to try, but... be careful. Our lack of community today is extremely uncharacteristic of the human species, so someone must be doing something to stop it from happening.
We have to work at both problems, Gerry. I agree that the most urgent is for the industrialized North to stop producing crap we don’t need and to respect the boundaries that make our life in the planet possible.
I just don’t believe we can do that without keeping fossil fuels in the ground. And we will need some non-combustible energy to do that.
Do you think degrowth without some renewable energy is possible?
True, but the energy reduction problem is the vastly the bigger one. And renewables are often used as an excuse not to face up to energy and material overconsumption. 'It's ok once its renewables.'
As with all tech, we calculate benefits immediately, but the true harms don't get calculated for 50 years. Something is deeply wrong when we are wiping out entire ecosystems and destroying Indigenous communities for this Green Transition. Why do we need Green Sacrifice Zones?
@jones
I don’t think we need green sacrifice zones on indigenous land and *cannot* have them, in fact. We don’t need lithium or cobalt, for example. I do think there will be sacrifices, but they should be fairly distributed and—this is the key point—much, much less than the sacrifices that the most vulnerable make right now due to the mining, transport, refining and burning of fossil fuels.
Gerry McGovern reshared this.
But that's not the reality that Nature and Indigenous communities are suffering. How do we tell the people of the Andes their sacrifice is worth it? In Indonesia, for example, they're mining more coal than ever to process dirty "green" nickel. All these energy systems feed off each other. There is no transition. Wind and solar combined meet about 6% of total energy needs. We have the worst of all worlds: more oil, gas, coal, hydro, nuclear, wind, solar.
Yes, it’s awful.
I follow oil and gas industry shills on LinkedIn. They’re very focused on wind and solar right now. And this is their mantra: “There is no energy transition.” “Any energy but oil, gas & coal is a joke.”
These are merchants of death. You and I are not. You do good work, but we have a difficult needle to thread. Maybe it’s impossible? I don’t know, but I’m not ready to give up on either degrowth or renewable energy. #1 needs #2.
Gerry McGovern reshared this.
I was trying to get solar installed in our apartment in 2022, having installed solar back in 2010 in my previous house. I used to be a big fan and booster of all this 'renewable' stuff until I discovered the multiple harms it does in the Global South.
We may need wind and solar, but we must calculate their true and total environmental costs, not simply their CO2 impact. We nearly never calculate full environmental impacts.
Agree. And we should make sure we apply the same vigor and honesty to fossil energy. There’s an *awful* lot of money going to highlighting the environmental costs of renewables while hiding the massively greater damage of economies based on oil, gas and coal extraction.
Gerry McGovern reshared this.
@gerrymcgovern @jones I think there are two types of damage. Fossil fuels are warming our world via release of green house gases. Renewables are damaging the environment in the global south due to mining and destroying indigenous populations. They also require fossil fuels to manufacture them. They are also generating a large amount of e-waste.
Neither is acceptable. We need to scale back on the need for both. (1/2)
Most of these factoids are bullshit and fossil fuel hype. No, manufacture of solar panels does not require coal: coal is currenly used in many places but it can be replaced by any energy source. It requires electricity, not fossil fuel magic heat.
grist.org/energy/solar-is-one-…
Some manufacturers are going the extra mile to clean up emissions from a critical material in solar panels' supply chain.Maddie Stone (Grist)
And also, by the way, "mining for renewable components hurts the Global South" is based on some strange idea that mining for fossil fuels is not mining and does not hurt the Global South. It will always take less mining to mine for the components of an engine than it does for fuel for an engine.
@richpuchalsky
It takes coal and charcoal to make silicon
“It’s Like Working In A Volcano”: How Silicon Is Made, Extreme Jobs, ABC Australia, 2021
youtube.com/watch?v=5eVsQSn_EW…
Burning down the house: Myanmar’s destructive charcoal trade, Emmanuel Freudenthal, Mongabay, 2017
news.mongabay.com/2017/10/burn…
Fancy pointing out some more of the factoid mistakes?
BHAMO, Myanmar – A trader turns off his truck’s engine at yet another checkpoint and, again, the soldiers ask him for cash. His truck is filled with charcoal from Myanmar, destined for factories in China’s mountainous southwest province of Yunnan.Genevieve Belmaker (Conservation news)
I'm not going to go one-for-one in finding articles to counter your fossil fuel propaganda, no. I understand how the process works and there is no magical element of heat that only fossil can provide and that electricity can not. Current use of coal is because coal is currently cheaper in some places -- that is all.
@richpuchalsky @gerrymcgovern @jones carbon as a necessary input of silicon production is real, not propaganda. That reality is very likely used as part of fossil fuel propaganda but it shouldn't be dismissed as only this. It seems as though the options for the carbon sources to make silicon are all charcoal or fossil fuel based, though there has been research on partially substituting with wood chips. In all cases, requiring cutting down trees (and/or using fossil fuels). sciencedirect.com/science/arti…
That said, I am convinced that the overall carbon (and planetary ecology) consequences are such that a unit of energy produced by a solar panel is less harmful than the same unit from burning fossil fuels. However I also strongly agree that the primary underlying problem is massive overconsumption of materials and energy. Specifically by a relatively wealthy portion of humanity and the systems that empower/defend them. Adding solar panels without reducing (or at least stabilizing, maybe) overall consumption doesn't actually improve the situation.
The science paper that you cited does not even say that "carbon [is] a necessary input of silicon production". Look right at the top of the paper, it says:
"The exergy efficiencies of three different carbonaceous material mixtures in a silicon furnace were evaluated."
In other words, they compared three different carbon sources against each other. So of course all of the things they compared used carbon.
1/2
It's possible to redesign the process to not use carbon, and people have. Here's a review paper:
link.springer.com/article/10.1…
@gerrymcgovern @jones @impermanen_
Silicon (Si) is an important material for alloying, solar photovoltaics, and electronics. However, current methods of producing silicon require energy consumption of around 11–13 kWh/kgSi and direct carbon emissions are 4.SpringerLink
@richpuchalsky @cleeyv @gerrymcgovern @jones
That and the fact that silicon is no longer strictly needed to make a PV solar panel, this just in the last year. The hope is for a variety of low-energy manufacturing techniques that rely on local and widely available materials. It keeps panning out, not only with the PV modules themselves but with storage tech.
A few points here:
1) it’s simply not the case in 2025 that you need coal and charcoal to make PV silicon film. Because of capitalism and colonialism a small amount is used right now (and less every year). That produces enough enough PV silicon to decommission many coal plants. New PV tech in the pipeline doesn’t even require silicon and uses even less energy to produce. Regardless, a circular system is completely possible. We can do better.
Next…
2) By your own standards the key to threading the needle is to account for all the environmental factors. If you don’t see some kind of LCA or if the LCA is more than a few years old, you can easily be spreading petro-coal-propaganda with the best of intentions. That’s how the weapons-grade environmental denial is done these days. sciencedirect.com/science/arti…
In general, the situation is changing so fast and the special material demands for solar, wind and storage are dropping so precipitously that it’s hard to keep up. It’s like the only good news we have right now.
I don't think transition without suffering is possible, tbh.
Even if we transition successfully away from fossil fuels, the failed States that will result across the world from the collapse in oil prices will cause hundreds of millions of people to suffer, spark wars, migration, and decades of turmoil.
To a person, we seem perfectly sanguine about that suffering in order to save the planet.
If we're looking for a solution that doesn't involve suffering, we need to invent a time machine.
Can we minimize suffering? I think so. But not by denying that *every path forward* involves *huge amounts of suffering* because breaking addictions is as damaging as it is dangerous.
The reason you do it is because the addiction, if left untreated, is worse than the consequences of detox.
@johnzajac
Yeah. It's hard to see anything other than incredible suffering up ahead. Our addiction is to cheap energy and its conveniences. Civilization collapse on a scale never before seen in history, is coming. We need to prepare as best we can for what comes after.
Personally, I think we should do everything we can to center the suffering on the ruling classes and corporate robber barons that have been driving this nonsense past the point of no return, and minimize the suffering of communities and individuals.
Not only because that is more just, but also because minimizing on-the-ground suffering is the only way we're going to get the People's buy in, which is the only way we're gonna accomplish anything.
Gerry McGovern reshared this.
I'm a history amateur, but my understanding of "civilizational collapse" is that it is both less dramatic and more fruitful and positive than (shocker) the ruling classes would have us believe.
Basically it's less "Mad Max" and more "thriving City States and small communities".
As someone who lives in the US, I also have to check my futility bias at the door, because there are States preparing for our climate future; they just aren't in the West.
I do agree that we need to prepare for what's coming. Luckily, the very activities that will make us resilient against fascism - building community, networks of mutual aid, being ungovernable, intersectional equity - will make us resilient against climate catastrophe and civilization collapse.
So that's a silver lining, I guess?
@johnzajac
I suppose! But you're exactly right.
"Building community, networks of mutual aid, being ungovernable, intersectional equity"
These are the exact type of things we need to do to fight fascism and prepare for a post collapse world.
@johnzajac
Have you read Tom Murphy?
dothemath.ucsd.edu/
resilience.org/stories/2024-08…
Yes, civilizational collapse, after initial horrors, is often much better for ordinary people
aeon.co/essays/the-great-myth-…
Societal downfalls loom large in history and popular culture but, for the 99 per cent, collapse often had its upsidesLuke Kemp (Aeon Magazine)
sb arms & legs reshared this.
I have been told that I am too optimistic lol but as an artist and performer I feel like humanity has a lot more potential than our current ruling class would like us to see, and I try to remind myself that this era of neoliberal cultural hegemony is, despite seeming eternal and omnipresent, actually both very new and, as we're seeing, extremely fragile and fleeting.
People want to thrive and live in healthy symbiosis with their environment.
Gerry McGovern reshared this.
No, but now I will. Thanks for sharing!
Gerry McGovern reshared this.
@jones @cy In his conception, since the bourgeoisie would not hand over power to the working class peacefully and by conviction, and since the eventual conquest of political power by the working class would not result in the immediate disappearance of the bourgeoisie, a transitional phase would be needed in which the working class would have to impose its political will on the capitalist class, precisely a class dictatorship. I would add that for Marx, the Paris Commune of 1871 represented the “finally discovered political form of dictatorship of the proletariat” and the Commune was a much more democratic government than the current ones.
->
Instead, I would like to say something about the main topic of the thread, specifically about what was said in this thread by @gerrymcgovern :
> "Again, we're trying to solve the wrong problem. It's not an energy production problem. It an energy overconsumption problem."
this is completely wrong imho. Over-consumption in capitalism is the consequence, not the cause, of a social system that must constantly and systematically produce ever increasing quantities of goods and capital on pain of crisis.
the environmental crisis can only be tackled and (perhaps) controlled by a drastic contraction of production, but capital needs a constant expansion of production that compensates with the mass of profit for the fall in the average rate of profit.
->
@jones I don't want to get into a debate about the dictatorship of the proletariat because it would take too long and i don't think social media is appropriate for that. and i also think it's off-topic in relation to this thread.
about Marx i just want to say this.
@cy Marx was not stupid at all and everything can be said except that he was naive about tyrants. He uses the term dictatorship of the proletariat for a reason: all governments and political regimes in all class societies from the ancient Greeks to the present are dictatorships of one class over another, even the present-day democracies.
->
@cy @gerrymcgovern @muffa
> I thought he was being ironic, calling it a "dictatorship" even though the proletariat are a whole lot of people. He certainly did not call for a dictatorship of the Soviets.
Ok, but this seems very contradictory with what followed...
> Regardless, Marx was kind of stupid and clueless about power politics. He didn't even think that tyrants might just... lie and leech power from the proletariat until they could reinstate tyranny in the proles' name.
So, did he not only use such an ambiguous term as "dictatorship", but also told that tyrants should have ruled?
No I mean he didn't know how tyrants worked, since he'd never seen the ways they gain power, especially in colonized lands. He wouldn't have used the word "dictatorship" if he knew how people could be manipulated into submission. It's a joke made in poor taste.
I'm not exactly a Marx scholar though, so maybe he knew those things? I dunno.
@doctor_zoidberg @cy @gerrymcgovern
> It wasn't, but it started with that idea
It didn't start with that idea: Marx wrote of a "dictatorship of proletariat"; he explained that with this expression he was referring to the moment of the revolution, and i don't know if in other texts or speeches he argued that the revolution should be followed by a period of “dictatorship of the proletariat” - i ask this to a friend who knows much more of Marx's thought than me, @muffa
At the very least, however, the expression “dictatorship” was ambiguous enough to make the majority of “communists” fight for it, which then became the dictatorship of the former revolutionaries (mainly from the middle class) and the bureaucrats (mainly from the petty bourgeoisie).
I thought he was being ironic, calling it a "dictatorship" even though the proletariat are a whole lot of people. He certainly did not call for a dictatorship of the Soviets. Regardless, Marx was kind of stupid and clueless about power politics. He didn't even think that tyrants might just... lie and leech power from the proletariat until they could reinstate tyranny in the proles' name.
It's like that saying in "Animal Farm" where "All animals are equal" becomes "All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others."
CC: @doctorzoidberg@mastodon.social @gerrymcgovern@mastodon.green @impermanen@zirk.us @muffa@puntarella.party
#HVO100 aus #Altspeiseöl ist laut einer neuen Studie im Auftrag der #DUH klimaschädlicher als fossiler #Diesel.
Durch Verlagerungseffekte steigt die Nachfrage nach #Palmöl, was zu #Regenwaldrodung und höheren Emissionen führt.
Die versprochenen 90 % #CO2-Ersparnis entpuppen sich als Täuschung. Die #DUH fordert einen Stopp der Förderung und einen klaren Fokus auf #Elektromobilität statt vermeintlich grüner Scheinlösungen.
duh.de/presse/pressemitteilung…
#Klimaschutz #Biokraftstoffe #Verkehrspolitik
• Neue Studie im Auftrag der DUH: HVO100 und „Bio“-Diesel aus Altspeiseöl in der Gesamtbetrachtung von der Produktion bis zum Verbrauch noch klimaschädlicher als fossiler Diesel• Versprechen von fast 90 Prozent CO2-Einsparung widerlegt, denn Verlager…Deutsche Umwelthilfe e.V.
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Patrick Hadfield, Ciara, Simon Brooke, Quixoticgeek, Kim Possible, Democracy Matters, The Lady (La Donna), wauz ワウズ, Vee, Dave Rahardja and Debbie Goldsmith 🏳️⚧️♾️🇺🇦 reshared this.
When there is legitimate cause for alarm, it's good to be an alarmist.
It's only defeatists we need less of right now.
"Nice people made the best Nazis. Or so I have been told. My mother was born in Munich in 1934, and spent her childhood in Nazi Germany surrounded by nice people who refused to make waves. When things got ugly, the people my mother lived alongside chose not to focus on 'politics,' instead busying themselves with happier things. They were lovely, kind people who turned their heads as their neighbors were dragged away."
- Naomi Shulman
wbur.org/cognoscenti/2016/11/1…
Naomi Shulman makes the post-election case for speaking out.Naomi Shulman (WBUR)
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nini, John Livingston, charis, Cory Doctorow, Ben Royce 🇺🇦 🇸🇩, Mastodon Migration, Simon Brooke, Debbie Goldsmith 🏳️⚧️♾️🇺🇦, Ciara, Aral Balkan and Jure Repinc reshared this.
it's easy to try and be civil, to avoid talking about Trump's fascist policies or the ongoing Gaza genocide.
What's hard is going out there and fighting with every ounce of your effort to stop those things.
We all need to start doing that.
Simon Brooke doesn't like this.
@MisterWanko @burnoutqueen
That's your idea of a useful thing to say? What kind of gotcha is this? Why do you assume the person you're responding to isn't already stepping up?
And just how much sitting back are you planning on doing here? How long are you going to watch other people step up and suffer, before you decide actually yes other people actually are doing something useful so maybe you can finally be bothered to join them?
The hell is even your point?
Simon Brooke reshared this.
”I don’t concern myself with politics” is what the nazis want you to say, actually.
It’s a core part of the scam, too. Everything else is political, except their genocidal bullshit which is normalised.
And don’t even get me started with the victimhood rhetoric!!
@Nouran 🍉's is one of the families in #Palestine I'm trying to help to support. I can't give to many and I can't give much. And giving money won't do nearly so much good for them as stopping the genocide, which surely we must all of us do all we can to achieve.
But while this dreadful siege and famine continue, if you can give aid to those starving in Palestine, please do.
You might get tired of my posts.So please forgive me!
I just wanted to to mention once again that our fundraiser is the only hope for us to survive. Life is very hard here, but this fundraiser helps us to secure our basic life requirements.
Please donate and share with your friends
Thank you my friends
chuffed.org/project/121561-urg…
Urgent help for Ahmed's family
"I’m tired, Mama. I’m thinking of the hours that I'll spend tomorrow in the water line." – says 9 year old Ahmed to his mother before going to sleep.Chuffed
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You might get tired of my posts.
So please forgive me!
I just wanted to to mention once again that our fundraiser is the only hope for us to survive. Life is very hard here, but this fundraiser helps us to secure our basic life requirements.
Please donate and share with your friends
Thank you my friends 
chuffed.org/project/121561-urg…
"I’m tired, Mama. I’m thinking of the hours that I'll spend tomorrow in the water line." – says 9 year old Ahmed to his mother before going to sleep.Chuffed
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Thank youu very much Tom 😍
Thank you so much. I think that I meant "rushing" :(
When I searched about pushy, I found it not good word so I apologize.
I think 'rushing' says what I want to deliver
Simon Brooke likes this.
Whoever that is bothered by people struggling to survive are a piece of shit.
But. And feel free to ignore this self-centered-well-off-secured fellow suggestion of mine. BUT.
I feel like I'd be able to expand your plea for survival way more (to collectives here in france) if you offered gathering money-for-survival to "you and your neighbors (if you ever get enough for yourselves). It may be self-evident for you but here, a lot are stopped by "favorising 1 family only".
(I would totally understand if it's not possible though, survival is survival and you're totaly okay, I wouldn't dare to pretend to know how it must feel 😰 )
I'm just talking from my point of view, where "humanist" are more about "helping the a wide cause" than helping inidivuduals. We may be able to do more if you're offering to "splurge" excess and just telling us about it as reward. I don't know if it's even something imaginable from the severity of your situation ?
✊
I understand that people prefer to support wide case. I wish I could help others, but the problem is that would be a very big reponsibility that I won't be able to deal with nowadays.
So I'm just talking on behalf of my family.
Please make sure that if I have a space to help the others in the near future, I won't hesitate.
Thank you so much for your great suggestion and thank you for thinking of us
Simon Brooke likes this.
That honesty honors you. ...But I can't but feel it's a shame >_<
By default our collective members send it to MSF. ...But we all feel that channeling money through trusted gazan-collectives would be a more effective way to go about it (as emergency relief) - also giving Palestinians the power to use as they see fit instead of using a middle-man.
I hope I can help in the near future😍
One of my favourite ever views! What a landscape.
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What a massively sleazy company Uber is -- see this breakdown of how it profits by systematically screwing drivers and riders.
len-sherman.medium.com/how-ube…
Take a taxi, if you can still find one.
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Cory Doctorow, Debbie Goldsmith 🏳️⚧️♾️🇺🇦, Pratik Patel and Simon Brooke reshared this.
Uber is not a nice company. But they were living off shareholder capital for years, it was obviously unsustainable.
So now that they have market dominance, they raise prices and reduce payouts to drivers. It's no surprise, that was the playbook all along.
Great article, fascinating research.
In the “path to profitability” section it mentions:
> Divested money-losing non-core operations (e.g., autonomous vehicle R&D, air taxi services)
the latter is one of my favorite bits of Uber nonsense.
**music swells as the rider in the air taxi gazes down on the poor proles stuck in traffic down below**
m.youtube.com/watch?v=S_UcY15x…
#uber
Auf YouTube findest du die angesagtesten Videos und Tracks. Außerdem kannst du eigene Inhalte hochladen und mit Freunden oder gleich der ganzen Welt teilen.m.youtube.com
Find one?
Over here you call (just be happy they don't require sending a fax) to order one friday evening, and if you're lucky it shows up around noon sunday.
Pricing seems to be intentionally set to keep DUI competitive, though to be fair it's probably because they are only interested in customers who are too rich or too drunk to care.
But Uber or anything else that smells like competition for the taxi monopolies is illegal, presumably because without income from DUI fines, the government would have to raise taxes (ok, maybe that's not the official reason, but it's what it feels like*).
*) especially when you hear again and again that the government has a goal of reducing CO2 by significantly increasing the number of people who travel by train, but every time someone suggests something that would do that, it gets shot down immediately because that would require investing in more rail cars. But no worries, we are on track to hitting the goal sometime after the year 8000. Yes, that's eight.
a business model deliberately designed to extract value from labour while avoiding the obligations that normally protect and pay workers, in order to "maximise shareholder value". The capitalists wet dream. FInancialising human effort so it can be treated like a raw material, traded and optimised for returns.
If society leaves it to “the market,” these people will keep doing it, because the system rewards them. If society changes the rules of the game - through law, governance, and culture - then the people pushing these models either adapt or lose their licence to operate.
Or there is always guillotines.
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And how did they get there? Infinite money.
They undercut their prices to bancrupt competition for more than a decade.
This is not the free market, this is cartels.
For pete's sake, @mozilla : if you want to measure whether the AI/ML features are worth a damn, put a big green "disable all AI in my browser" button on the version update screen and put some telemetry around how many people instantly click it.
Just about everyone I know who has taken the 142 update is working through about:config menus to toggle off everything under browser.ml.* and grumbling about it, or just straight-up abandoning Firefox in exasperation.
Turn the ship around. *Please*.
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Dan Gillmor, iwein, Jure Repinc, Liam Proven, Quixoticgeek, Simon Brooke, Simon Brooke, Hannah Steenbock, Ciara, Marc, Yann 不停 Heurtaux🔻, Karl Voit, Kim Spence-Jones 🇬🇧😷, bituur esztreym, IrgndSonDepp, Walt Crawford, KaKetelmug, Mastodon Migration, Patrick Hadfield, ⊥ᵒᵚ Cᵸᵎᶺᵋᶫ∸ᵒᵘ ☑️ and Robey ☠️ reshared this.
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@nelson
Why is "ai" the one feature that's so wonderful that it needs to be forced into everything?
When actually useful things are developed people scramble to adapt them!
If socalled was 1) actually useful and 2) available to enable with a setting, people would rush to use it.
Why is so called AI the exception?
@nitot @stephavelo So the broken tool that does nothing useful, spreads misinformation and causes mental health issues is SLIGHTLY less bad for the environment.
It should still be banned and the creators held accountable for the harm it causes
@mattl It certainly may be, but I'm not aware of how to do that. I also don't really want the responsibility of maintaining that, since my free time is relatively limited.
In my case, the makefiles in my dotfiles detect the profile directory automatically, so it's fire-and-forget for me.
I don't have an objection if others want to create an extension, though. I think it would be useful.
@gnomonI have a `user.js` in my dotfiles that I use to always turn on things like Global Privacy Control and turn off things like AI and telemetry.
I do agree that this is something that should have a big Disable Me Now button, though.
github.com/bk2204/dotfiles/blo…
Dotfiles and scripts. Contribute to bk2204/dotfiles development by creating an account on GitHub.GitHub
Cross-platform policy support can be implemented using a JSON file called policies.json.support.mozilla.org
Israel floods YouTube with ads to whitewash Gaza genocide, Iran offensive: Report
Israel has spent tens of millions to purchase ads viewed by 45 million Europeans in the past month
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1. What my daughter posted on Instagram.
2. What Instagram put over her post.
like this
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Ben Royce 🇺🇦 🇸🇩, levampyre, Jurjen Heeck 🍋, Glyn Moody, Juan Per¢ent,🇲🇽 🍉,🇻🇪, earthling, Egon Willigh☮gen 🟥, petitevieille, Simon Brooke, iwein, Ciara, Quixoticgeek, Joseph, Samuel, Simon Brooke, Hannah Steenbock, Eugen Rochko, Kuba Orlik, joene 🏴🍉, Erik Uden 🍑, orlissenberg, Patrick Hadfield, wauz ワウズ, Aral Balkan and Debbie Goldsmith 🏳️⚧️♾️🇺🇦 reshared this.
I have a similar one from a while ago
:\
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Scenes from the halls of New York's immigration courts.
@TheComfortableSpotPodcast All true, and yet....
We won't stop the pernicious effects of #capitalist #clickbait focussed social media if we don't leave it ourselves, and persuade those around us to leave it, too. I do understand how hard this is, and I would hate to be an impediment to young people building their social networks in a way that works for them, but...
@TheComfortableSpotPodcast I had that issue with Facebook and Google messenger/hangouts. I left with the line "If keeping in touch with me is as important to you as my privcy and safety is to me, you'll reach me [here]".
...many did not. Oh well. I have better friends now.
I'm so confused by young people staying on these platforms. Like weren't they calling Insta and FB boomer base alpha?
I always got shit for posting on FB or Insta and now that I'm off them all the people who gave me shit are still farting around there.
UN officially declares famine in Gaza.
lemonde.fr/en/international/ar…
Shame on every fucking nation that had (and still has) the power the prevent this.
A UN-backed report has confirmed that there is widespread famine in Gaza, the first time a famine has been declared in the Middle East. Israel immediately rejected the findings.Le Monde with AFP (Le Monde)
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txerren 🇵🇸, Cory Doctorow, Jorre, Jure Repinc, 🌬️Robot Diver🌊❄️🌨️, No Gods , no Masters! RESIST, Yogthos, Simon Brooke, Graham Janz, Ben Royce 🇺🇦 🇸🇩 and Simon Brooke reshared this.
🔮 oracle of dylphi 🇬🇾
in reply to Kevin Beaumont • • •Sensitive content
JF
in reply to Kevin Beaumont • • •Kevin Beaumont
in reply to Kevin Beaumont • • •Generative AI government lobbying
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