America is not a monolith. Signal’s developers are very much aware of the risks of operating there and probably already have several escape plans given recent developments. I also think five-eyes probably has access but getting it might be computationally expensive.

If we decide to ban smartphones from schools we should ban them from work too. I’m supposed to be writing an article right now and instead I’m here. Then we should ban them from streets so that people have to pay attention to where they are going and the things going on around them. At that point we’d have something like functioning human beings again instead of mindless zombies. We could still have terminals for plugging into the Machine but our time with it should be regulated (like it already is with research clusters) so that we don’t waste energy. There, the whole problem is solved and all it takes is a global butlerian jihad.

I recently saw a gorilla skull. Note how small the brain is and how much extra bone there is to protect it. Punching this would hurt you more than the gorilla.

So now we’ll have a whole plethora of social networks for everyone to isolate into their own bubbles essentially because our global leadership is comprised of children who can’t play nicely with each other. Sounds good, sign me up for TurkmeniNet.

Tried this with geology. Then quit and went to get a PhD. Now as a postdoc finding out that even the $50 million grant to “sustainably extract critical elements” is mostly bullshit. The system can’t self-correct.

There’s something called an environmental Kuznets curve that suggests that a population will sacrifice environmental health to industrial degradation in favor of per capita income up to a point, after which they are affluent enough to care, and after this environmental health improves. China seems to be at the inflection point.

I bought one from Aventon. It was easy to repair and didn’t require anything special.

What is wrong with it? I’ve been using it for years and it does what it’s supposed to do.

Chomsky’s stroke came at a really critical time and we could use a successor to point out how idiotic the whole movement is.

The idea that LLMs are anywhere close to having the general intelligence needed to comprehend this kind of statement is ludicrous.

I haven’t been over there in a while but I noticed the AIs are starting to show up here. How was it over there? Rough percentage of how many?

And Aaron Swartz is dead.

It’s called digital enclosure. Enclosure was a movement that began in Britain in the 1700s (but really it’s always been going on…) to close off the commons that pastoralists had been using to publicly graze their sheep. It happens to all new media because it’s the only way capitalists can imagine their operations.

Sure, no arguments there. I guess it’s the “green” label I take issue with. Carbon-free capitalism is definitely possible as long as there are enough critical elements to produce all of the necessary solar panels and wind turbines (and I guess fusion reactors if we’re really ambitious about printing money 🤑). I do wonder about rent collection long-term though, especially with such decentralized energy sources. Overproduction will also come sooner than everyone thinks. But I guess these are much better problems to have than imminent eco-catastrophe.

Yeah that’s my point. The average democrat would consider him to be a dangerous radical leftist.

I was considerably happier before I knew this. Hopefully coal prices will continue to increase, and they won’t end up burning more coal even though their capacity has increased. From what I’ve read, it’s mainly provincial governments trying to boost their economic statistics that are responsible for this building spree.

Capitalism can’t do green. If you were to make an accounting of all of the environmental damage that capitalist industry has done to the ecosystem, the cost to clean it all up would dwarf the revenue. Capitalist economists are incapable of calculating such “negative externalities” because they don’t understand basic thermodynamics. I used to work in environmental remediation and am happy to talk more about this if there is interest.

The best way to counter this is to point out the laziness at the top. Corporate welfare is way more damaging to society than the few million lazy people at the bottom. It would cost a lot less to write them off than to pay CEOs 2000 times as much as the average worker.

And, since we’ve shifted so far to the right, the “Marxist” texts can be written by John Maynard Keynes.

“Massive coal” was twenty years ago. India is “massive coal” now.

They have an electric car that costs $10,000.

They are quickly switching from Li batteries to Na, which will not require Ni or Co either.

They have a mixture of capitalism and central planning, so it’s not entirely fair to call them “non-capitalist”.