stopdropandprole

Protect this man at all costs!

tax wealth not work

How about lowering prices? Do companies have a straightforward way to do that?

obligatory Tom Lehrer parody about Von Braun:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QEJ9HrZq7Ro

just something to keep in mind…

something like 62% of all water used is for alfalfa crops grown to feed industrial livestock operations. the US exports 1.1 billion tons of beef annually. meaning, multinational meat packing corporations are literally exporting our water so they can capture markets in Asia and elsewhere.

only like ~20% goes to all of Residential, Commercial and Industrial use.

The majority of the water in the Colorado River basin—more than one trillion gallons—is used to grow feed for livestock, connecting the region’s water crisis to how much dairy and meat we eat.

simply managing the resource a teensy bit for the benefit of the public would free up enough water for generations of new development.

this is a resource management problem and can readily be solved if enough people got angry and forced Big Ag to mildly cut back their profits.

Let’s talk about the biggest cause of the West’s water crisis. The Colorado River is going dry … to feed cows.

correct, and that’s exactly how the American president became a king.

the Legislature gradually warped into a machine that never claimed or exercised power for itself (by enacting laws or protections) but only ever ceded power to the Executive (via appointment approvals, judicial nominations, etc).

if Congress had done it’s job over say, the entirety of Mitch McConnells time in office, the power of the president today would be dramatically diminished.

the US govt was completely captured long before Trump took office. they really rolled out the red carpet for an authoritarian criminal to just run with it.

as far as I understand, they were not there to serve a warrant. he was crossing a border and the feds are claiming that the 4th amendment doesn’t apply because he hadn’t yet crossed into America.

border patrol was essentially using a loophole to preemptively collect potential evidence (they’ll figure out what to charge him with after they see his phone contents). he’s a political activist against a cop city, they were obviously trying to do him dirty.

they were not serving a search warrant. they were abusing what should be an illegal search at the border in order to silence those who speak out against govt overreach.

me getting ready to head to the grocery store, circa 2026

AI use boosted homework scores by 18 per cent and cut homework time from 64 to 45 minutes – a clear productivity leap.

viewing homework as “productivity” like it’s an assembly line outputting widgets is such a middle manager-brained framing.

isn’t the point of homework to, ya know, LEARN?

homework is just self-guided educational time, it’s not about how fast you “complete” it.

even if you answer all questions correctly and quickly, but you don’t understand how or why… you got those answers… well then you kinda failed the point of the homework, no?

i think a yet unanswered question in this example is, how will the next generation of experts (doctors) be able to validate the outputs of AI when every new trainee doctor has come to rely on the AI tools so much that they no longer need to put in the work to develop the very skills necessary to validate AI output?

so far in human history, most experts in their fields have arrived there through a challenging process of many hours of effort and many repetitions. medicine is a “practice” that you should theoretically get better at over time. same as carpentry or sculpting or playing violin.

you can’t become an expert carpenter by watching videos of houses getting built. you have to actually do the work of building houses. over and over again. until you know what a well made house looks like, inside and out. experience and intuition play key roles in this process.

similarly, you can’t become a master sculptor by 3D printing a million different objects. or a talented pianist by clicking on a soundboard. people may appreciate and enjoy all the stuff you are producing, but is that the same as being a trusted “expert”?

a tool speeds things up and removes barriers to entry for non experts. very cool, the world needs fewer gatekeepers for sure. but the tool doesn’t necessarily teach you the specialized knowledge intrinsic to being an expert. but AI is very different from most other tools because it doesn’t help you like a hammer helps a carpenter or how a metronome helps a pianist. AI mostly just gives you a result. it bypasses the entire process. sure, arriving quickly at a result is wonderful if you only care about the product, but if the people entrusted to ensure the quality and validity of the results have only ever seen it done ‘the easy way’ I’m not sure if something important is being lost or diminished.

not trying to be clever or circular, just genuinely concerned that de-skilling is a likely consequence of long term (multi generational) AI usage. and the generation of experts (whose expertise actual trained the tools) will be retired or dead so we can’t ask them anymore.

nice