So, basically, the only purpose of recycling is to provide recycling companies with income. Recycling was never intended to do anything except make consumers responsible for a mess that nobody can actually fix while distracting the world from the companies that are creating the mess.

Funny that the plastics companies are… wait for it… also the same companies that pump the oil and natural gas out of the ground or are so closely related to them the separation is largely a technical matter. Same companies that intentionally filled the air with greenhouse gasses. Same companies that fought tooth and nail to keep lead in toys, paint, and gasoline.

I see a pattern…

We destroyed their natural habit and were tasty. Not exactly a surprise.

There’s some drawbacks that make it challenging for us plebs to use it, of course. The amount of hardware needed for training isn’t something we’re likely to have at hands. Renting it from AWS appears to be around $87k / year. Though I guess we could just feed it text and wait the couple of years for it to be trained 😬

Still gonna try it. I’m used to waiting for R to finish its work so…

This is a big benefit to any organization that has a reasonable budget for using Azure or AWS, though.

EDIT: we can probably still make use of it despite the hardware demands. It just means it will take us longer to train as non-corporate entities.

You can feed this one your own training materials. That means you can teach it to “speak” the way you want it to. Hypothetically, you could feed it every text you’ve ever composed and it would eventually generate text that sounds like you instead of a combination of every random person from the internet or whatever authors they “borrowed” content from.

The global economy only exists so long as humans exist. Climate change will eventually result in a planet where nearly every life form we know of today is extinct… including us. The global economy is unimportant compared to extinction.

But I get it. You may feel differently about it. Maybe you’re hoping that it’s all a hoax or it won’t be as bad as scientists have been saying. Or maybe you’re hoping some other species will come along and they’ll maintain the global economy and Capitalism in our absence. We’d hate to ruin it all for the lizards from Alpha Centuri or the hyper intelligent cockroaches by making decisions that don’t ensure profits for shareholders. Either way, I strongly suggest you not put your faith in the markets or hope that the scientists are wrong. Your call, though.

There’s nothing we’re going to create that will permanently keep the ocean at bay. The only things we could’ve done are:

• stop cutting down trees
• stop putting greenhouse gasses in the air

We collectively choose to do neither. So that’s done and over with. There’s nothing that’s going to change what we did at this point. We adapt or we die and go broke along the way. Pretending there’s some magical terraforming we’re going to engage in that will prevent the ocean from rising at this point is magical thinking.

That same money should be spent relocating these folks. We’re not going to win a battle against the ocean. I get that nobody wants to accept that the world has changed and that it’s our own fault. However, the longer we live in denial, the harder it’s going to be to adapt to a warmer world with less stable weather patterns and higher sea levels.

H1-B workers are essentially indentured servants. Well paid indentured servants, but indentured servants all the same. They’re usually hired because they can be compelled to work for less pay than an equally qualified citizen and forced to put up with things a citizen would never tolerate. It’s a purely exploitative system designed to play would-be immigrants against people who live here. And it works exactly as expected. The hiring company either saves money by underpaying them or by making them work twice as hard in hopes of not getting deported.

The best part is when someone on a H1-B thinks they are so much better than US citizens. Much like the folks who serve as offshore labor, some portion of them believe they were brought on board because of being the best. That’s not how Capitalism works. Whoever can be exploited better gets hired… unless they are a white male. Then it’s anybody’s guess as to whether they’re qualified at all 🤷🏾‍♂️ (some are… but some of y’all know perfectly well you bring nothing to the table aside from being pink lol)

Who would’ve thought that an app designed to train China’s facial recognition systems and spy on people would ever be used to spy on people? What a surprise that nobody ever saw coming?

> Warning: Thinking kills your happiness

FTFY

All that snark for one person’s opinion? Somebody has a boner for Yale grads, I guess 🤷🏾‍♂️😂😂

I’ve met Yale educated lawyers. Not really impressed.

Not sure if I care what Yale thinks about anything. They’ll always be third rate compared to Stanford and Harvard. Haven’t met a Yale grad yet that was more impressive in person than they are on paper.

> Depending on your point of view it is either genius or a depressing idea…

I’m in the latter camp. This is depressing.

I wonder how much longer before humans are an endangered species? If we were, would we say so openly?

Considering we’re actually building solar and wind right now and nuclear takes years to setup, it’s safe to say we can scale the mix of renewables faster than nuclear.

Hydro has a lot of issues, too. But those are moot since climate change may eventually make hydro hard to maintain.

Uh, they did bad things at least twice that we know of. And no state in the US is willing to build the geological containment facilities because they aren’t interested in making their groundwater radioactive. Heck, out here in Washington state we can’t even clean up a contaminated site without constant political fights. Why would anyone want the same issue? And it’s going to be an issue anywhere. Not hypothetically… it’s pretty much guaranteed.

So, no, it’s not between nuclear and fossil fuels. It’s where the money is for large companies that will get the contracts… but it’s not in the best interest of anyone that isn’t keen on getting leukemia.

It’s not a binary choice between nuclear and fossil fuels. They are both really bad ideas that make lots of money for the companies running it and the politicians that support them. They’re both horrible for the environment, just for different reasons. And they’re both industries run by corrupt assholes that have bs scientists playing down the harms and corrupt, bribe taking politicians. Both will literally kill you if you get in their way, too. As in assassinate you, shoot you, etc. So, no, I’m not buying any argument about how green nuclear is when Silkwood and Three Mile Island are both things that happened. Nobody killed whistleblowers over windmills as far as we know. Nobody has needed to trot out a politician to downplay a radiation release with a solar panel. This stuff happened. The only reason we’re talking about nuclear right now is because most of the folks alive when the scandals happened are so old their memories are shit. The folks who weren’t adults when that happened have no memory of this stuff and, therefore, have no idea how messed up the players in the nuclear industry are and how indifferent they are to actively or passively killing us all for a dollar.

BTW my issue with Three Mile Island isn’t necessarily that they had a meltdown. It’s that they lied about it and got President Carter to do a dog and pony show to give them cover. That’s enough reason for me to call bullshit on that industry.

EDIT: This is all related to a larger problem we Americans have: a lack of historical memory. We’re taught little about history until we get to college. The little we are taught is meant to make us feel good about being Americans. This means things that don’t make us look good are systematically avoided, downplayed, or spun. This includes how American industries and industrialists have actually behaved. As a result, we glorify people and industries that do not deserve the veneration and deference we give them.

Geological repositories that nobody wants to host and that will eventually leak.

What incentives do you give any location that hosts these? Free cancer meds until 79000 AD? Lead underwear?

Except the waste products from nuclear don’t go away for eons. Anything that makes a place cancerland for 75,000 years isn’t exactly clean.

I would say “if we could deal with the waste” but we all know that’s never going to happen. If we can’t solve a problem in a year we tend to just say screw it and let people suffer. The problem is following that pattern means cancer and radiation poisoning for a lot of people who wouldn’t have that if we just built some wind farms and called it a day.

Maybe in the very, very distant future after most humans are dead, sure, they won’t use them on civilians since they’ll exist in so few numbers as to make it meaningless.

These weapons are likely to see battlefield use in our lifetime. Wealthy nations (basically just NATO) will have these. That means when the US invades someone (which we most certainly will at least 2-3 more times in our lifetime) the opponents will most likely have human soldiers and humans living in the cities. Our robots will slaughter their soldiers. Our robots will occupy their cities. Our robots will kill any of their citizens that resist. There’s no need to discuss the robots our opponents will have because they won’t have any.

Uh, they’ll use the droids to kill us. Lots of humans are gonna die. Lots.

So much for not weaponizing robots. The Oakland police plan to deploy shotgun wielding robots, too.