Rowley @Rowley@qoto.org

Once again I have no idea who originally created this, but I salute you.

One thing that's already hard to communicate to young people is that the world didn't used to seem like a never-ending parade of sociopathic, gaslighting assholes. Oh, they were there, but they were happy to do their evil work behind the scenes. Now they require pop-star levels of adoration too.

46% of 🇳🇴 Norwegians and 42% of the 🇳🇱 Dutch said they are not very worried or not at all worried about climate change.

Only 38% in both countries think climate change will harm future generations a great deal and only 32% in both countries think climate change will harm them personally a moderate amount or more.

https://climatecommunication.yale.edu/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/international-public-opinion-on-climate-change-2022b.pdf

#ClimateChange #ClimateCrisis #Norway #Netherlands

Did you know about PromptFont?

This is a special font that I made, which includes glyphs for all sorts of button prompts on all sorts of different gamepads and devices. Since it's a font, you can easily include it as part of text and scale it or colour it however you want.

You can find the font available for free here: https://shinmera.github.io/promptfont

#gamedev #indiedev #opensource

"Microsoft's data centers in West Des Moines, Iowa guzzled massive amounts of water last year to keep cool while training OpenAI's ChatGPT-4. [...] This happened in the midst of a more than three-year drought, further taxing a stressed water system that's been so dry this summer that nature lovers couldn't even paddle canoes in local rivers." #AI https://futurism.com/critics-microsoft-water-train-ai-drought?utm_source=werd.io&utm_campaign=mastodon&utm_channel=mastodon

The carbon in my DNA was forged in the heart of a star. The iron in my blood was made in a supernova explosion. The microplastics in my brain are from used condoms made out of ancient plankton corpse goop. Everything is one.

For #SpacetoberChallenge prompt galaxy, my #linocut of #astronomer Vera Rubin (neé Cooper, ‘28-‘16) & her discovery: angular motion of galaxies deviates from predictions, 1st evidence for dark matter, now known as 5x as common as matter & the stuff which dictates dynamics of galaxies & evolution of our universe! Nobel committee waited 3 years after she died to reward another for the theory of dark matter.

🧵1/n

#printmaking #sciart #womenInSTEM #histsci #MastoArt

Weekly #emissions summary for 2023/9/25-2023/10/1 #CO2emissions #billgates #jeffbezos #elonmusk #markzuckerberg #markbenioff

I think the thing that bugs me about the LLM/AGI/GPT/BBQ craze is that it used to be kinda tricky to make computers do what you wanted them to do, but once you did it was absolutely completely reliable, and when they didn't do what you wanted, you could figure out why and fix it.

The new AI stuff throws away everything that computers used to excel at and just tries to give us faster shittier human minds.

The reliability, predictability, and understandability of conventional computation is the great strength of computers, and a marvelous complement to the way that the human mind works. Throwing that out in the service of going faster is just depressing.

Here’s what a firm does when it collects revenue: it invests that revenue in capturing more revenue.

Sometimes this might mean “more production,” by which most people mean “NEW production,” and that’s what orthodox economics imagines capitalists do. We have all this stuff today, you see, because people have endless hedonic wants, so we constantly invest our surplus into creating the tools to make ever more stuff.

But capitalists only *sometimes* invest in new production—building new machines, extracting new resources, etc. This is just one subset of capitalist investment. Here are some other things that capitalists do every single day to maximize their differential accumulation:

- buy patents to stop competitors from making and selling things

- lobbying the state for subsidies for themselves and regulatory obstacles for their competitors

- undercutting prices to drive their competitors out of business

- buying their competitors

Etc. Note that none of these expand production or create new production. All of these are either about *reducing their competitors’ income* and hopefully consolidating control over their capital instead.

5/

The problem with this story is that capitalists don’t seek revenue. They don’t even seek *profits,* which are revenues in excess of costs. There is a myth that human beings are utility-maximizing machines, and our sole goal is to perpetually increase the amount of goods and services we consume, creating ever more pleasure for ourselves. But this myth is false.

Capitalists aren’t seeking to get as much profit for themselves as they can by selling goods and services. Capitalists seek to maximize their *differential accumulation.* They want to *beat the average.* This is the underlying, inescapable drive of capital ownership in a competitive market.

4/

There is a common trope among capitalist apologists, and especially among right-libertarians who imagine that capitalism could somehow survive and indeed thrive in the absence of the state:

Capitalists want to earn profits. Humble and honest, these simple folks want to sell their wares and provide services in mutually beneficial exchanges. Surely, in a truly free market, none of them would ever intentionally harm their customers, because this would reduce their number of customers, scare away new customers, and harm their reputation. In True Capitalism©️™️ , this couldn’t happen.

This is, of course, silly nonsense.

3/

ProPublica just came out with another amazing piece of journalism, this one on the efforts by the capitalist firm Philips Respironics to hide the harms caused by its products.

Philips makes CPAP ventilator machines designed to be worn while asleep, creating positive air pressure to help people with sleep apnea. Back in 2010, Philips added a foam to its CPAP machines to reduce rattling that kept users awake at night. The foam Philips chose degrades, releasing toxic carcinogens directly into the mouths, throats, and lungs of users.

Philips knew about this *right away.* It spent years hiding reports that it was legally obligated to share with US governmental regulators. It waited over a *decade* to issue a recall. Thousands of people are sick; hundreds have died.

Go ahead and read the whole thing, if you have the stomach for it. It’s a typically excellent piece of investigative reporting by ProPublica:

https://www.propublica.org/article/philips-kept-warnings-about-dangerous-cpaps-secret-profits-soared

1/ #thread

I'm starting to think that anyone who falls for this grift deserves to be fleeced.

We curse the one benighted chap /
Who felled the sycamore at the gap /
but tolerate those richer guys /
who burn whole forests, seas and skies.

Simon Heywood, 2023

A substantial number of insect biologists study social parasites. These are organisms that infiltrate the colonies of social insects, like ants or wasps, and divert resources to themselves without contributing to the functioning of the colony.

I gotta say, the super-wealthy who offshore money and purchase judges and politicians fit nearly every techincal definition of social parasitism.

Awkward that Elon Musk now has to pay to sue Elon Musk. #xitter #elonmusk

I guess it's good that they put these Republicans on TV occasionally to remind everyone why they're losing to a loser traitor fraud who stole a bathroom full of national secrets by 50%.

I have history turned off (youtube reminds me constantly).

This is one of the suggestions when I watch a video of actor interviews on a talk show. Oh, you must want to see a whole pile of fascist d-bags.

There is no "left" equivalent of these people in the US, and I never get left(ish) suggestions under non-political videos at all.

Anyone who says youtube isn't boosting fascism is stupid.

Listening to Massive Attack on my headphones as I walk through DFW somehow makes things a lot more dramatic. 😂