Not only is natural gas dependence a climate threat to Europe, good luck when the jet stream turns off, but it’s also a security threat. As long as they have to keep paying there main geopolitical adversary billions to keep from freezing in the winter, they will never be truly sovereign.
The leads buried pretty deep:
It was in summer 2020, in the early months of Covid, Zhu says, that he made the decision to leave the US. He cited his disaffection with the direction of the AI community and the hothouse of American politics – both its leftwing brand of campus progressivism and the Trump-era national security crusades. There was also a personal factor. His younger daughter, Zhu Yi, is a figure skater who was recruited in 2018 to compete for China in the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics
In general he seems more angry at the direction silicon valley ai is going rather then how US politics are going. He thinks larger more traditional explainable statistical models are the way forward as opposed to the black box neural networks and transformers that power llms and most other models in this recent wave.
China is giving him hundreds of millions in grants to pursue those theories, whereas silicon valley vcs probably won’t give him a dime unless it’s got an llm in it and US research grants are drying up in general but especially to Chinese professors.
IMO, the algorithm is overhyped, and the secret to tik toks success is its scale. If you gave metas algorithm the same amount of data to train on and the same amount of content to recommend, it would be equally as addictive. It might suck at first but give it a couple months and people won’t be able to tell the difference between the old algorithm and whatever oracle creates.
It’s just like chatgpt, given the same set of public data any company with sufficient engineering and compute resources can make there own model that performs very similarly.
In an ideal world we’d have algorithmic choice, like in bluesky sort of, and we could actually compare different ones, but that would cut into the profits of the data monoplies.
I know this is how the fediverse works, and how it has to work. But maybe we shouldn’t be advertising this tool right now when the right is trying to dox people and get them fired/deported for liking a kirk meme.
Damn, making it suck even worse to be a fish. even if you’re not dredged up from a fishing net or choke on plastic you now can die from starving because the nutrients that have been coming up from the deep for millenia aren’t any more.
case in point, in reference to some people who made edgy memes on bluesky
Idk, looks like a cigarette to me. /s
Then everyone reacts, calling her dumb and racist and talking about how cool Tunis is, so when you search on tik tok for Tunis, you just get the drama about this instead of war crimes…
Yes, there are plenty of other investment opportunities, the fact that you chose the one that profits off of housing insecurity shows you don’t care enough about it to forgo a little bit of extra money.
Like other people have mentioned you would also have to be advocating against your own interest. Yes you can do that but your passion will at least be dulled by your innate desire for profit. You’d have more passion and will for the cause if you didn’t own investment properties, even more if you are renting and are a victim of housing commodification.
Another point is that you’d be adding to the demand of houses and thus raising the price. You could argue it’s a drop in the ocean, but that sort of attitude leads to a million drops in the ocean and rising sea levels. You would also probably be buying it on a mortgage that’s larger then the house was previously on so the floor for rent , the break even point, would be higher.
Eg. If you bought the property for $400,000 on a mortgage for say $2,000 a month from someone who only had a $200,000 mortgage on it for $1,000 a month you’ve now upped the rent floor $1,000.
You could make a lot of these same arguments for owning slaves. If you don’t buy them then someone else will, and they may be a worse master then you. Better that you buy them and treat them right, provide them good food and housing, while at the same time advocating for the abolition of slavery.
In both secenarios you may say you want what’s best for them, but that desire is in direct conflict with your desire for profit so either you become a bad investor or a bad slave master / landlord. Why bring yourself into that conflict instead of investing in something without those moral implications?
The thing is if the US just left maduro alone his regime probably would’ve collapsed by now. Every time anything bad happens there he can blame it on the CIA and US plots and half the time he’s right so people still believe him.
If we got rid of the sanctions then the people couldn’t blame anyone else but maduro for the shit economy and they maybe would oust him. But America just can’t stand an independent left wing country “in there backyard”
Mormons and skiers, also a decent amount getting born there too. There fertility rate may not be positive but it’s a lot better then the other states so they’re relatively gaining population.
Lately it’s been the waymos (driverless cars) in San Francisco, assume it’s the same in the other couple cities there going. They’ve been going a couple years now so they’ve been normalized for locals but every so often I see people taking pictures of them or waving there hands in front of them trying to fuck with them.
Why do you say stick to protein? I understand for health reasons but emissions wise starches like wheat and maize are some of the most efficient per calorie, especially when compared to animal protein..
I guess you could argue there less filling so you’ll eat more but you’d need to eat a ton of potato chips to get to the same amount of emmisions as a steak.
That 80% may care, especially since climate change will hit them the hardest, but there’s a lot less they can do to lower emmisions. Ask them to:
stop flying
stop driving
stop buying cheap plastic clothes, toys etc.
eat less meat
don’t use as much AC
They’ll just reply OK, already doing all that…
The richest 10% globally (~$50,000) account for half of carbon emmisions while the poorest half only account for 10%. The problem isn’t that the top 20% are the only ones who care, the problem is there lifestyle is disproportionately causing this.
Decentralization in general is less efficient and therefore requires more resources. For example small scale farming has less yield per acre compared to large scale farming, thus you have to use more acres to produce the same yield leading to more environmental destruction. Or with the small local workshops, each of those workshops will require a vast array of machines and tools to handle every situation, some that may be rarely used if at all, so you need to produce thousands of copies of these tools for every shop that may not be used, using more resources, as opposed to having to only create one copy for a central repair facility.
The cost, including the environmental cost, of transport rarely exceeds the gains in efficiency from centralization. Working at an office for a computer job is the exception as theres very little gain. But working from home in a job where you cant send your work over a wire to the next worker would obviously lose a lot of efficiency from work from home.
We don’t want to spread people out, the more spread out they are the longer it will take to get places and the more likely they will use a car. We need people in dense centralized places because that’s where we get these efficiencies of scale. Public transportation becomes better with density, distribution of goods becomes easier, heating and cooling large complexes is more efficient than individual homes.
I agree but you should emphasize the positives of degrowth otherwise everyone either gets scared or dismisses it as a non-serious solution politically. The main one being more leisure and less work.
Then we need to stop antagonizing them and giving them a reason to get nukes. At this point they have enough institutional knowledge and resources to make one so them not doing it is more them not wanting to, ie. The ayatollahs fatwa against them.
If Israel and the US keep bombing them though and make them think the only path to safety is through nukes then maybe that fatwa goes away.
No, probably Korean incels. They’ve become a real problem recently and have started to become more political.