we should globally ban the introduction of more powerful computer hardware for 10-20 years, not as an AI safety thing (though we could frame it as that), but to force programmers to optimize their shit better
I reblogged this like 9 times kinda jokingly, but software should be able to run on older and less powerful hardware, and consume less power on newer hardware. Like, this is a real problem imo
I completely agree with this but I do need you to understand that the image above is 32 times the size of the lunar mission’s memory
This is what the image looked like compressed to 4 kb
Rapid response networks have evolved swiftly over the past several months. Besieged by 3000 federal mercenaries, volunteers in the Twin Cities have continuously updated their rapid response model, developing a dynamic and resilient system.
This report explores how you can learn from their model to build your own.
So turns out the US are setting babies up for a lifetime of illness and increased likelihood of liver cancer in Guinea Bissau in the name of “research”
7000 newborns will be denied the neoneatal HepB vaccine until 6 weeks to ‘prove’ that the HepB vaccine is linked to neurodevelopmental disability on the directions of the Department of Health vis RFK Jr and in collaboration with researchers in Denmark, despite the fact that the vaccine’s efficacy rate and best protection is when administered to newborns, and the total lack of correlation between vaccination and neurodevelopmental disabilities.
Guinea Bissau has some of the highest rates of HepB on the continent, and infants are the group at the highest risk of contracting HepB, leading to chronic hepatitis & long term hepatic diseases like cirrhosis and liver failure as well as increased chance of liver cancer.
The study can’t be carried out in the US or Denmark because it fails almost every benchmark for medical ethics — surprising absolutely nobody, it is in fact heinously unethical to expose babies to preventable disease that causes liver failure and liver cancer, but the “study” has been green lit in Guinea.
Fuck the US imperial project in Africa, fuck RFK Jr and the US Department of Health, and fuck every single collaborative researcher in Denmark. This is some nightmare Tuskegee Study shit and every single individual involved deserves to be in The Hague.
Make sure you have the LUCE hotline number saved and keep your eye out, if you speak Vietnamese, Cantonese, Nepali, Bengali, Khmer, or Cape Verdean Kriolu they are actively looking for hotline operators with those languages
it’s really funny teaching rhetoric to college freshmen because i explained ad hominem to them via example by arguing with a student over something silly (i kept insisting 25 minutes was a quarter of an hour, not 15) and then “insulted” her instead of addressing her argument (i said she doesn’t have a college degree whereas i have two, so of course she’d be wrong - which the whole point is that it’s a stupid insult but not something that’s actually mean) but she got soooooo mad so even when i stopped the exercise and explained that she was indeed correct (15 minutes is a quarter of an hour). like she was still fuming. so i validated her feelings on that, complimented her, and even reminded the class that a college degree doesn’t mean that a person is smart/right. and then i went on to explain that, yeah, dirty arguing techniques like that are meant to make you so unreasonably angry that you can’t respond or that you lose your cool, so your opponent looks like they win by default. the student i was arguing with then just said that it seemed like professional ragebaiting and i was like. well yeah that’s correct.
and then this kid, this one kid who is always very eager to answer questions and is always kind to his classmates, raised his hand looking a little bothered. now for context, i emphasize thinking for yourself in my classroom, even if that means disagreeing with something i say and he has echoed some stuff that his parents clearly have told him before. he’s not a bad kid or an asshole, he’s just an 18 year old with conservative parents who otherwise knows nothing about politics. but he just looks so bothered after i explain this about dirty arguing techniques. big frown on his face. looking unsure. when i nod at him to speak, he says, in a very quiet voice, “didn’t – didn’t charlie kirk used to do that?”
and i was like. well yes. yes he was famous for stuff like this.
and then the kid looked down and was just like, “oh. i thought he was just really good at debating. i never watched his videos though, only clips. why would he do that?”
and that coincidentally lined up perfectly with the rest of the lesson, which was on propaganda
this? is why conservatives hate liberal arts education
Now would be a good time for everyone to understand how the US dollar hegemony works, and how oil was leveraged to turn the dollar into a weapon. Here, it goes like this:
1. The United States creates dollars, which costs them essentially nothing.
2. Over time, US military power compelled the biggest oil producers (starting with Saudi Arabia in 1974) to trade exclusively in dollars.
3. When a company needs oil, it needs dollars to buy it. You can obtain dollars in a number of ways: you can take a loan or you can sell shoes to the US or teacups to Europe. Notice that the factory has to ship actual shoes to the US or to third markets in order to obtain, basically, a bookkeeping entry that took the US microseconds to create.
4. The oil company receives the shoe factory’s dollars in exchange for oil. It invests these dollars into US treasury bonds or securities, which is really the only sensible thing they can do –cash deprecates in value over time, and there are virtually no other risk-free places to park your billions of dollars worth of oil earnings.
5. The US puts part of the investment it received into military use, so that it can keep anyone who would dare to detach from this dollar hegemony in check. The rest goes to enrich the US. Return to step 1.
Note that this mechanism is essentially an obfuscated tax on the rest of the world. An Iranian shoe factory has to obtain dollars if it wants to buy oil, and the oil company is incentivized to store its dollars in the US treasury. This means that part of the value that foreign capitalists would otherwise pocket actually ends up in the United States.
To obtain a million dollars, the US government pushes a button; to obtain the same million a Bangladeshi factory has to sew 500 000 T-shirts.
Because the oil bill comes in dollars and the only deep, liquid, politically safe asset is a US Treasury bond, value flows to Wall Street.
In other words: The US creates money, manufactures a need for everyone to hold some of that money, and then incentivizes them to return that money to the US.
The petrodollar was only ever the beginning. Many things are gated behind the dollar: Shipping, aviation, SWIFT transactions, etc. Everyone needs dollars; if you can’t get any you’re going to struggle in the global capitalist economy. This is why the US gets to create seemingly endless dollars and have them still hold value, it’s why the US can bend anyone reliant on the dollar to their will via sanctions; the dollar itself acts as a weapon. Of course, the status quo is maintained at gunpoint, and the dollar’s value is ultimately backed by US military might. The United States exports death.
Because of all of this, the US has an enormous material incentive to keep oil flowing, to keep its military spending high, and to topple any and all projects that would endanger this system. To stop the flow of unequal exchange, to stop the coercive taxation over the rest of the world, would be to destabilize the US empire. Anyone who would provide an alternative must necessarily be seen as an adversary.
Want to nationalize your oil? Want to deal in another currency? Are you another military superpower? No? Too bad, here’s one million drone strikes and a new *democratic* government for you.
This is why shifting to renewables has been such a struggle in the west, this is why the planet is warming, this is why the US is engaged in endless wars, this is why most of the world is poor, this is why millions have died. This is imperialism and it must be dismantled.
