Gerry McGovern

Author of World Wide Waste. Developer of Top Tasks. Focused on reducing data waste and e-waste.

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Last Notes

2024-08-17 10:57:38

Some say that those who propose Degrowth want us to go back to living in caves.
Those shilling infinite growth on a finite planet will send us back to a place where having a cave to live in will be like being in a five-star hotel.
The future the Growth Death Cult is preparing will make the Stone Age seem like a hippy dream.
Intelligence is our problem. And now we've made it artificial.
Wisdom is what we need. Where are the wise today?
The solution is social, not technological.

2024-08-16 10:52:57

AI is a con
AI is a grift
AI is a scam
"The people who have temporarily gotten rich or famous on AI have done so by pretending that this outlier problem simply doesn’t exist, or that a remedy for it is imminent. When the bubble deflation that I have been predicting comes, as now seems imminent, it will come because so many people have begun to recognize that GenAI can’t live up to expectations."
https://garymarcus.substack.com/p/this-one-important-fact-about-current

2024-08-16 10:32:04

"Proponents of degrowth also favour the democratisation of the economy and collectively managing key resources like housing – including through housing co-ops. The documentary features Sostre Civic, a housing co-op in Barcelona as a case study. Founded in 2004, Sostre Civic has 1,000 members and 17 ongoing projects, comprising 236 homes. It retains collective ownership of the property and members are granted the right to use the dwellings for 75 years."
https://www.thenews.coop/bbc-degrowth-documentary-features-sostre-civic-housing-co-op/

2024-08-15 04:36:48

"Governments and industry alike are pushing to rapidly unlock Canada’s critical minerals potential to lead us out of the climate crisis through sustainable and ethical mining practices. But the energy transition needs to be delinked from critical minerals and the opening of new mines. Failing to do so entrenches rather than transforms the process of extracting natural resources for consumer use – the traditional pattern at the root of the climate crisis."
https://policyoptions.irpp.org/magazines/august-2024/critical-minerals-green-shift/

2024-08-15 04:33:16

"Australian cyber security experts have uncovered one of the largest ever networks of AI-controlled fake social media accounts. Cyber CX, has discovered more than 5,000 fake X accounts, raising concerns they may be used to interfere in the US presidential election later this year."
https://www.abc.net.au/listen/programs/radionational-breakfast/huge-network-of-ai-controlled-fake-social-media-accounts-uncover/104221330

2024-08-14 13:11:43

Few countries in the world use more energy per capita than Sweden. Nevertheless, its greenhouse gas emissions are low, thanks to renewables generating a large part of the power consumed. The homeland of climate activist Greta Thunberg aims to be CO2 neutral by 2045.
https://www.statkraft.com/newsroom/news-and-stories/2020/country-series-sweden-global-leader-in-reducing-climate-impact/
According to the 2022 Sustainability Development Index, Sweden is 133rd out of 163 countries measured
https://www.sustainabledevelopmentindex.org/

2024-08-14 10:34:15

The rise of the Growth Death Cult
“Social, moral, and ecological ills were sustained in the interest of economic growth; indeed, adherents to the faith proposed that only more growth could resolve such ills. Economic growth became the indispensable ideology of the state nearly everywhere. … The overarching priority of economic growth was easily the most important idea of the twentieth century.”
https://www.resilience.org/stories/2024-08-13/from-growth-fetish-to-post-growth/

2024-08-14 07:18:47

"Indigenous communities in Ontario are flooded with mining claims that chip away at their territories. It’s a ‘racist, colonialist’ system, the lawyer leading a new court case said. Six northern First Nations have filed a court case challenging a major section of Ontario’s mining law, an attempt to strike down the existing system for how mineral claims are staked."
https://nationtalk.ca/story/these-are-not-your-lands-to-give-away-6-first-nations-take-ontario-to-court-over-mining-law-the-narwhal

2024-08-13 11:01:22

For many years now, a key objective of Big Tech Social Media has been to isolate and de-socialize people, so as to make them more dependent on technology to live their daily lives. AI brings this to its perfect conclusion. Who needs people and society when you’ve got your AI friends and companions? To the advertising industry, led by Google and Facebook, this is the ultimate goldmine. You don’t get better than owning a human and being able to extract at will value from them.

2024-08-12 14:11:56

E-waste colonialism--Big Tech doing what Big Tech does
"While most African countries gained independence decades ago, a new form of exploitation is eroding the foundation of their liberty. Each year, millions of tons of electronic waste (e-waste) are generated as consumers eagerly upgrade to the newest models, often discarding still-functional devices. Much of this e-waste, including everything from smartphones to refrigerators, finds its way to Africa."
https://www.azerbaycan24.com/en/how-can-iphone-poison-africa/

2024-08-11 13:13:31

When the poor get state welfare, it's awful.
When the richest and most powerful brands like Amazon get corporate welfare, it's great.
Socialism for the rich Capitalism for the poor
"The St. Joseph County Council will vote on final approval Aug. 13 of tax abatements for Amazon’s $11 billion data center project near New Carlisle, giving tax breaks of 50% on property and 85% on technological equipment."
https://eu.southbendtribune.com/story/news/local/2024/08/11/amazon-data-center-new-carlisle-tax-breaks/74727953007/
Data centers are tax scams.

2024-08-11 10:40:01

"Eliminating CO2 emissions and reining in climate change would be a great victory, but it doesn’t get us out of trouble. The intense ecological pressures would still be in place. Think about it: isn’t the whole point of renewable energy to be able to keep doing these things—business-as-usual—but without CO2 emissions? Isn’t the point to keep modernity fully powered? Just be aware that doing so keeps our boot on the throat of the community of life so it can’t breathe."
https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2024/08/mm-11-renewable-salvation/

2024-08-11 10:33:56

"In terms of concrete, steel, copper, glass, and aluminum (not counting the fossil fuel mass itself), renewable energy requires an order-of-magnitude more material per unit of electrical energy delivered than does fossil fuel combustion. This translates to never-ending mining, manufacturing, pollution, and all the associated ecological costs. It’s not a build-it-once-and-done game."
https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2024/08/mm-11-renewable-salvation/

2024-08-09 09:49:26

"Now I will take a step further and claim the place of Indigenous women at the heart of the struggle to guarantee a future for humankind. For in many Indigenous communities it falls to us, Indigenous women, to manage and preserve our ecosystems and to preserve our knowledge through memory and custom."
Sônia Guajajara, a Brazilian Indigenous activist, environmentalist and politician, writing in The Climate Book
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/709837/the-climate-book-by-greta-thunberg/

2024-08-06 13:17:30

"By the mid-1960s, climate change was already becoming a matter of concern to the federal government, the new analysis shows. A 1965 report from the National Science Foundation found that the ways humans were inadvertently changing the world — through urban development, agriculture, and fossil fuels — were “becoming of sufficient consequence to affect the weather and climate of large areas and ultimately the entire planet.”"
https://grist.org/science/lost-history-climate-1960s-clean-air-act-supreme-court/

2024-08-06 13:03:17

"The movement to explore economic systems beyond growth is by now unstoppable. More and more grassroots collectives support this orientation, academic literature on benefits of degrowth is expanding fast and now, local civil society organise conferences to bring these systemic ideas closer to their national politicians – and into their very parliaments."
https://www.webwire.com/ViewPressRel.asp?SESSIONID=&aId=325160

2024-08-05 13:04:11

Inspired by the original indigenous worldview, a global movement is currently underway to recognize that nature is not mere property, but instead has inherent rights, such as a forest’s right to health or a river’s right to flow.
What is Rights of Nature?, United Nations of Nature
https://unitednationsofnature.com/what-is-rights-of-nature/

2024-08-05 12:50:02

The roots of white supremacy
"Singer’s stance challenges human exceptionalism, the view that humans are greater in moral value than nonhuman beings simply by virtue of being human. Our species imagines itself occupying the top rung of a mythical scala naturae (‘great chain of being’) that places all other species on lower levels according to how similar they are to us."
https://aeon.co/essays/why-nonhuman-beings-should-be-granted-personhood-rights#Echobox=1663215230-2

2024-08-05 09:41:20

AI is a scam on our environment
"Besides requiring huge quantities of fresh water to keep data centres cool, when powered by non-renewable energy sources, artificial intelligence also releases significant amounts of carbon emissions. Each individual use of genAI to answer a question or produce an image comes at an incredible cost to the planet; with the technology spreading at unprecedented pace around the world, its environmental footprint is only destined to increase."
https://earth.org/generative-ai-is-exhausting-the-power-grid/

2024-08-05 05:25:14

"Green" future for the rich is genocide for Indigenous
"This green future is coming at the expense of indigenous communities whose historic land surrounded many of the reservoirs where these rare minerals are formed."
"It introduces pollution, surge of various diseases, respiratory issues, cardiovascular problems, cancer, more. It also leaves behind profound social impacts, including drug abuse, alcoholism, missing and murdered indigenous women."
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/how-the-mineral-mining-boom-endangers-indigenous-communities-worldwide

2024-08-04 14:28:18

SCAM ALERT: Data centers bring practically zero local jobs. They are a tax break scam everywhere they operate.
"Washington lawmakers approved a tax break for data centers to create more jobs in rural Washington, but they can’t say how many jobs the state actually got. Repeated expansions turned a modest program to bring a budding industry to rural areas into one of the biggest corporate tax giveaways in the state."
https://www.propublica.org/article/washington-data-centers-tech-jobs-tax-break

2024-08-03 11:35:42

• Billionaires belch and fart a million times more CO2 than normal people
• 125 ultra-wealthy individuals belch and fart more CO2 than 85 million
• Bill Gates belches and farts almost 7,500 tonnes of CO2 per year.
• 80 million belch and fart more CO2 than the poorest 5 billion people.
• Top 1% get about 40% of all new wealth created. Poorest 50% get 2%.
• USA with 5% of the world's population, has done 25% of the total environmental damage. It's the No 1 all-time greatest belcher and farter.

2024-08-02 15:12:20

Slow down to save the planet
"As Tokyo's millions put in another day's work on the coalface of capitalism, celebrity Marxist philosopher Kohei Saito and his friends are clearing rocks from a muddy mountain stream. Saito's core argument -- that capitalism is the root cause of climate change and we need to stop chasing growth to save the planet -- has struck a chord in the world's fourth-largest economy, especially among young people."
https://uk.finance.yahoo.com/news/slow-down-save-planet-says-023229271.html

2024-08-02 13:54:31

Slow water is local water, and a slow water solution is unique its place. It is bespoke, requiring local wisdom and deep engagement from the community. Slow water is about living within local water means. There are studies that found that dams and other forms of control, brought water to 20% of the population, while taking it away from 24% of the population.

2024-08-01 12:36:26

Power-Hungry Data Centers Are Gobbling Up Texas Amid AI Boom
A state’s infamously strained electric grid faces a new threat.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-07-31/power-hungry-data-centers-are-gobbling-up-texas-because-of-ai

2024-08-01 10:13:09

People: Help! Our home is on fire.
Tech bro: Here's a gallon of organic diesel.
People: What? That'll burn our home down even faster.
Tech bro: The burning of your home will help drive innovation in fire prevention technologies.
People: Our home will be burned at that stage.
Tech bro: Your home is immaterial. The innovation is required for the homes we will build on Mars.
People: But it's your home too!
Tech bro: ?

2024-08-01 05:58:52

How much longer can AI companies get away with the "hallucinations" excuse?
"Facebook owner Meta had some very awkward questions to answer after its AI assistant denied that former president Donald Trump had been shot, even though he absolutely was indeed wounded by a gunman earlier this month — bizarre, conspiracy-laden claims that highlight the technology's glaring shortcomings, even with the resources of one of the world's most powerful tech companies behind it."
https://futurism.com/meta-ai-trump-wasnt-shot

2024-08-01 05:17:49

We cannot address environmental collapse if we don't address white supremacy, colonialism and imperialism. It is no surprise that the white racists and fascists deny that their greed and violence are collapsing our environment. The very essence of whiteness is supremacy. Everything is there for white people to greedily devour and there are no consequences. Any problems will be solved by white scientists and engineers. We can save white supremacy or our environment.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0962629824001136?dgcid=coauthor

2024-08-01 04:56:21

We Western white people have tried so hard to keep the pollution and damage we do contained to poor countries. Unfortunately, it's not working and the pollution is finally coming home. So now we need to carry out another genocide among you Indigenous. We genuinely appreciate you accepting to be a Green Sacrifice Zone so we can get all our lithium and copper and stuff for our clean & green & sustainable tech that we hope will save capitalism.
https://grist.org/indigenous/the-green-transition-will-make-things-worse-for-the-indigenous-world/

2024-07-31 08:50:04

"Many tech companies present a vision of their products as shining, autonomous machines — computers teaching themselves as they go from huge quantities of data — rather than the reality of the labor that trains them and is managed by them. The illusion of autonomous AI has historical roots. In the late 18th century, a supposedly automated chess-playing machine, the “Mechanical Turk,” was developed to impress the empress of Austria."
https://www.siliconvalley.com/2024/07/30/opinion-whats-behind-the-ai-boom-exploited-humans/amp/

2024-07-31 08:22:28

People: AI is destroying our environment.
Tech bro: This is an incredible opportunity for innovation in green tech energy!
People: There's no such thing as green tech energy. It all pollutes. It's just a matter of scale
Tech bro: The more energy and water AI consumes the greater the opportunities for tech innovation in energy and water conservation
People: You're not making any sense.
Tech bro: AI is the future. You can't stop progress. Innovation is key to everything.
People: Are you AI?

2024-07-30 05:17:15

"Nvidia's Blackwell pulls down 15kW of power. That's 15,000 watts of power. Data center energy usage is already out of control, but Blackwell is going to pour jet fuel on it. Worse still, Huang said that in the future, he expects to see millions of these kinds of AI processors in use. One million Blackwell GPUs would suck down an astonishing 1.875 gigawatts of power. A typical nuclear power plant only produces 1 gigawatt of power."
https://www.techradar.com/computing/i-watched-nvidias-computex-2024-keynote-and-it-made-my-blood-run-cold?

2024-07-29 05:58:58

"The progressively powerful artificial intelligence (AI) models are becoming increasingly hungry for electrical power. The carbon footprint of generative AI, which includes models like Gemini and ChatGPT, is overwhelming. We should act now before it snowballs into another challenge to the planet's sustainability."
https://www.newsweek.com/will-ai-another-unsustainable-environmental-disaster-opinion-1928737
Big Tech is on a mission to destroy our environment. Why? Greed and power.

2024-07-29 05:44:47

"If AI were revolutionizing the economy, we would see it in the data. We're not seeing it. I could talk about the fact that AI companies have yet to find a killer app and that perhaps the biggest application of AI could be, like, scams, misinformation and threatening democracy. I could talk about the ungodly amount of electricity it takes to power AI and how it's raising serious concerns about its contribution to climate change."
https://www.npr.org/transcripts/1197967800

2024-07-29 05:13:09

Washington Is Giving Tax Breaks to Data Centers That Threaten the State’s Green Energy Push
In 2019, Washington adopted legislation requiring electric utilities to go carbon-neutral in a decade. Yet lawmakers continued to promote the growth of energy-guzzling data centers with generous tax incentives.
https://www.propublica.org/article/data-centers-clean-energy-washington-state

2024-07-26 08:41:00

"For the vast majority of human history, people made group decisions through consensus. It is perhaps the most conspicuous feature of political life among recent hunter-gatherer societies, from the Ju/’hoansi to the Aboriginal peoples of Australia to the Indigenous societies of the early Americas. As an anthropologist, I have observed consensus-based decision-making myself among hunter-gatherers in the rainforests of Malaysia."
https://aeon.co/essays/what-the-ju-hoansi-can-tell-us-about-group-decision-making

2024-07-25 05:35:24

"Based on several months’ research — and writing an in-depth review about Copilot for Microsoft 365 — I can tell you that hallucinations are a lot more common than you might think, and possibly dangerous for your business. No, Copilot isn’t likely to fall in love with you. But it might make up convincing sounding lies and embed them into your work."
https://www.computerworld.com/article/3475988/is-copilot-for-microsoft-365-a-lying-liar.html
When companies buy a Great Big Lying Machine they get a great big lying machine.

2024-07-24 12:23:01

Data centers are now consuming 21% of Irish electricity. It's a staggering, crisis number.
What is the Irish government doing? Planning to double the number of data centers, so that they will be consuming 42% of Irish electricity.
Ireland is a Growth Death Cult. Ireland is bought, owned and sold by Big Tech. The Irish data center policy was written by Big Tech.
1261MW of Data Centers are currently operational
1286MW are planned
https://www.bitpower.ie/index.php/dashboard

2024-07-24 12:10:05

Tell the locals nothing
The artificial intelligence plant already under development in southwest Memphis will require enough electricity to power 100,000 homes and consume up to 1.5 million gallons of water a day to cool equipment.
Negotiations between Musk, the Greater Memphis Chamber, and city-owned Memphis Light, Gas & Water have moved swiftly and behind closed doors since the tech billionaire and his team first approached local officials in March.
https://tennesseelookout.com/2024/07/23/due-diligence-questions-surround-musks-xai-plans/

2024-07-24 08:25:39

Indigenous peoples are one of the greatest sources of knowledge and wisdom when it comes to genuine sustainable living. They are under the most severe threat from our attempt to mine and manufacture and consume our way out of the problems we mined and manufactured and consumed our way into. The voices of the tech bro elite have been much too loud for much too long. We must center new voices, from the Indigenous, to the animals, to the birds and bees, to the rivers, oceans, soil, air and trees.

2024-07-24 05:26:10

"Media companies, by offering “open web access,” inadvertently fostered the perception that online content is free. While readily available, this content was never truly free. It cost money to create, curate, and host – often subsidized by advertising. However, weak enforcement of copyright notices and terms of use – and the media’s own mistake by referring to their web content as “free” – created a gray area that AI companies are now exploiting."
https://mediamakersmeet.com/high-noon-showdown-ai-content-theft/

2024-07-24 05:04:47

"With the 2024 U.S. election season already the most volatile in recent history, election officials across the country are scrambling to prepare for a new threat that has quickly become a top concern: a potential tidal wave of artificial intelligence–fueled lies designed to confuse and agitate angry, scared and paranoid American voters."
https://www.thecipherbrief.com/how-2024-battleground-states-are-preparing-for-ai-election-threats
The stock market is going crazy about the Great Big Lying Machine. Such innovative lying. Such progress in lying.

2024-07-23 05:07:20

“Supplies of dissolved oxygen in bodies of water across the globe are dwindling rapidly, and scientists say it's one of the greatest risks to Earth's life support system.”
https://www.sciencealert.com/earths-water-is-rapidly-losing-oxygen-and-the-danger-is-huge
Scientists have discovered “dark oxygen” being produced in the deep ocean, by the very nodules of metals that mining companies want to dredge and collect, thus destroying entire ecosystems and vital oxygen supplies.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c728ven2v9eo

2024-07-23 04:53:53

As AI has allowed companies to deliver crappier customer service, "security vulnerabilities have become a major concern. Time and time again, users have found ways to exploit these chatbots, leading to costly data breaches and negative exposure. These bots can sometimes even inadvertently release sensitive information and spew misinformation without any external manipulation."
https://www.calcalistech.com/ctechnews/article/b1gco00ioc

2024-07-22 11:18:42

- reply

@npub1q9m…zgdu
You're right here. I think there's a huge amount to be learned from Indigenous cultures, as you describe here. The West has devastated Nature wherever it went. A culture of supreme arrogance.

2024-07-22 06:33:17

Intelligence is the problem.
Technology is the problem.
Speed is the problem.
If we had less intelligence and less technology and less speed, our environment would be in a much better state.
What we lack is wisdom. And to be wise, we must slow down and look more to Nature to learn, than we now look to our tools. Our tools are killing us as our leaders are telling us that our tools are liberating us. All because the elites gain power through tools.

2024-07-21 13:34:55

Land Defenders Shut Down a Toxic Mine. Now Its Corporate Backers Want Damages.
A Canadian firm is demanding $200 million in damages from Mexico following the cancellation of its mining concessions.
Having lied and asserted there were no Indigenous communities in the area, the company had its concessions canceled by the Mexican Supreme Court due to the legally required Indigenous consultation process not having occurred.
https://truthout.org/articles/land-defenders-shut-down-a-toxic-mine-now-its-corporate-backers-want-damages/

2024-07-20 15:38:31

"The drinking water used in data centers is often treated with chemicals to prevent corrosion and bacterial growth, rendering it unsuitable for human consumption or agricultural use. This means that not only are data centers consuming large quantities of drinking water, but they are also effectively removing it from the local water cycle."
https://utulsa.edu/news/data-centers-draining-resources-in-water-stressed-communities/

2024-07-20 11:12:35

Data centers and AI delivering a "golden era" for Big Oil
Big Oil is so excited by AI. Oil industry insiders believe that "a surge in demand for electricity to feed data centres and to power an artificial intelligence revolution will usher in a golden era for natural gas."
https://www.ft.com/content/1f93b9b2-b264-44e2-87cc-83c04d8f1e2b
Driven by Big Tech, humans are accelerating the pace at which we devour our environment.

2024-07-19 13:01:26

New EU "ecodesign requirements aim to improve the environmental profile of products, addressing everything from product durability to energy and resource efficiency, to restrictions on the use of hazardous chemicals, and end-of-life management. Circular economy principles are also central, encouraging reusability, recyclability, and remanufacturing."
https://natlawreview.com/article/circular-economy-european-commission-adopts-new-ecodesign-requirements

2024-07-19 12:50:06

Bitcoin is depraved and evil on so many levels
"Residents of the small town of Granbury, Texas, say bitcoin is more than just a figurative headache. Soon after a company opened up a bitcoin mine there a couple years ago, locals started experiencing excruciating migraines, hearing loss, nausea, panic attacks, and more. Several people even ended up in the emergency room. The culprit? Noise from the mine’s cooling fans."
https://www.sciencefriday.com/segments/bitcoin-mine-health-crisis-noise-pollution-texas/

2024-07-19 04:52:00

The Sámi are Europe’s only recognized Indigenous group, having hunted, fished and herded reindeer across Arctic Europe for millennia before the arrival of Christianity.
Today, the Sámi are fighting across their territories to resist mining, logging and energy projects that disrupt traditional activities.
https://news.mongabay.com/2024/07/how-europes-only-indigenous-group-is-inspiring-a-greener-christianity/

2024-07-17 05:08:47

Amazon deforestation reduced by up to 83% in areas protected by Indigenous Peoples, study says
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41559-024-02458-w

2024-07-17 04:53:50

"Deforestation at one of Indonesia's largest nickel processing hubs is threatening an Indigenous group that is among the country's last uncontacted tribes, rights groups allege. Nickel is a key component in the batteries of electric vehicles, and Indonesia is both the world's largest producer and home to the biggest known reserves globally."
https://www.voanews.com/a/nickel-hub-apocalyptic-for-uncontacted-indonesia-tribe-say-ngos/7699909.html
The cost of the "Green" Transition is the Genocide of the Indigenous. So has Global North always done.

2024-07-16 09:28:07

In 2023, Google and Microsoft each consumed 24 TWh of electricity, surpassing the consumption of over 100 nations, including places like Iceland, Ghana, and Tunisia, according to an analysis by Michael Thomas.
https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/google-and-microsoft-consume-more-power-than-some-countries#xenforo-comments-3849364

2024-07-13 13:05:13

"US tech giants export their toughest and most dangerous jobs overseas. The work is mentally and emotionally draining. We scrub Facebook, TikTok and Instagram to ensure these important platforms do not become awash with hate speech and incitement to violence. We label images and text to train generative AI tools like OpenAI. Our work involves watching murder and beheadings, child abuse and rape, pornography and bestiality for less than $2 per hour."
https://www.foxglove.org.uk/open-letter-to-president-biden-from-tech-workers-in-kenya/

2024-07-12 14:07:31

"Artificial intelligence is now essential to human well-being, but the conscious and sustainable use of AI is the need of the hour if we are to continue reaping its benefits."
https://www.wionews.com/technology/ai-supercomputers-run-on-fossil-fuels-water-even-nuclear-energy-how-hard-is-it-hitting-our-planet-739977
AI is not even remotely essential to human well being. The exact opposite, actually. We are only at the very beginning of the existential threat AI and Big Tech will become to a livable environment. And all driven by greed and laziness.

2024-07-12 14:01:39

"Chances are, if you’ve lived through a few innovation cycles, you’ve got too many old computers — and their cables — cluttering your house. Do you think that if you had the right to repair your devices, to swap out obsolete components for more performant ones, you wouldn’t keep piling up castoff electronics? So does Matt Hartley, guest on this On the Road episode of The New Stack Makers."
https://thenewstack.io/why-frameworks-right-to-repair-ethos-is-gaining-fans/

2024-07-11 15:05:45

About as many countries opened new coal plant units as shut units down in 2023, but overall more capacity added than retired
A surge in new coal plants coming online in China drove this increase — 47.4 GW, or roughly two- thirds of global additions — coupled with new capacity in Indonesia, India, Vietnam, Japan, Bangladesh, Pakistan, South Korea, Greece, and Zimbabwe.
https://globalenergymonitor.org/report/boom-and-bust-coal-2024/

2024-07-11 05:13:47

"AI still remains, I would argue, completely unproven. And fake it till you make it may work in Silicon Valley, but for the rest of us, I think once bitten twice shy may be more appropriate for AI."
James Ferguson, founding partner of the UK-based macroeconomic research firm MacroStrategy Partnership
https://futurism.com/the-byte/expert-warns-ai-industry-collapse

2024-07-10 05:19:47

“The deep sea is our ʻohana, and seabed mining has no place in Hawaiian waters or our Moananuiākea, the great Pacific Ocean.”
The Metals Company “claims that its contract areas hold enough nickel, cobalt and manganese to supply all of the needs for car battery metals in the United States.”
https://kauainownews.com/2024/07/09/hawaii-gov-josh-green-signs-bill-banning-seabed-mining-in-state-waters/

2024-07-09 15:56:56

"A generative AI system may use 33 times more energy to complete a task than it would take with traditional software. This enormous demand for energy translates into surges in carbon emissions and water use, and may place further stress on electricity grids already strained by climate change."
https://techxplore.com/news/2024-07-power-hungry-ai-surge-tech.html
For what? What do we get for this this unbelievable surge in energy consumption right at the moment we must reduce energy consumption.
AI is a scam of biblical proportions

2024-07-07 09:16:37

“We’re defending the rights of our communities against the wind power companies and the solar power plants that are taking over. It’s the last phase of land dispossession.”
Russel, Mexican National Indigenous Congress
https://www.netflix.com/es-en/title/81442108
All over the world the remaining Indigenous communities are being genocided in order to install wind and solar systems.
The very people we need to learn from in order to survive are being killed and dispossessed for the "Green" Transition.

2024-07-06 10:20:45

Despite its environmental track record, Suriname is still the only country in South America that hasn’t formally recognized the territorial rights of Indigenous and Maroon peoples.
The Saamaka claim that a 2007 ruling by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights should give them collective land rights, yet the government continues to grant forestry and mining concessions on their land.
https://news.mongabay.com/2024/07/as-logging-booms-in-suriname-forest-communities-race-to-win-land-rights/

2024-07-06 10:17:54

"All those generative AI tools are incredibly computationally intensive, which means they require a lot of dedicated hardware within massive hyperscale data centers owned by the cloud oligopoly, and all that computing power requires a immense amount of water and electricity to keep it running. As Microsoft, Google, and Amazon have dropped billions of dollars every few weeks on new communities around the world for new data center projects."
https://disconnect.blog/generative-ai-is-a-climate-disaster/

2024-07-05 09:32:39

"What I'm most worried about is that we're building an enormous infrastructure for artificial intelligence that is extremely energy- and water-intensive, without looking at the very real downsides in terms of the climate impacts. These large-scale data centers, they use GPUs that are enormously heat-producing. And the water to cool these GPU chips is freshwater. So it's often coming from exactly the same reserves that are used for drinking water."
Kate Crawford
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/ai-and-the-energy-required-to-power-it-fuel-new-climate-concerns

2024-07-05 08:55:46

Planned Google data centre will create almost quarter million tonnes of carbon emissions
Planned facility would indirectly contribute 224,250 tonnes of CO2 emissions per annum without any mitigation measures
https://www.irishtimes.com/business/2024/07/04/planned-google-data-centre-would-create-almost-quarter-million-tonnes-of-carbon-emissions/
Electricity onsumption by data centres increased by 31% between 2021 and 2022. The amount of electricity being used by data centres in Ireland has risen by 400% since 2015.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cpe9l5ke5jvo

2024-07-04 09:24:19

Lithium mining "lowers water tables, and because freshwater often sits on top of salty water. This has the potential to dry up the lakes, wetlands, springs, and rivers that flourish where the underground water reaches the surface. Argentina’s lithium rush is set to turn the region’s delicate ecosystems to desert. Meanwhile, the Indigenous people fear that the water on which they rely for domestic use is being sacrificed in a global drive for green vehicles.”
https://e360.yale.edu/features/lithium-mining-water-andes-argentina

2024-07-04 04:54:06

"Brazilian indigenous lands lost over 13,000 hectares of forest to mining in 2023. Although the rate of deforestation has slowed compared to previous years, it indicates that illegal activity persists in the Amazon, where mineral exploration on indigenous lands is prohibited by law."
https://reporterbrasil.org.br/2024/07/expansion-of-mining-in-indigenous-lands-raises-concerns-about-new-methods-of-gold-laundering-in-brazil/

2024-07-03 08:23:12

In the next 25 years there needs to be more copper mining than in all of human history. Among many competing demands is the need of copper to make electric vehicles. “Replacing today’s 1.35 billion light-duty gasoline and diesel vehicles with EVs and supplying the expanded market (estimated at 2.2 billion cars by 2050) would thus require nearly 150 million tons of additional copper during the next 27 years,” scientist Vaclav Smil explained.
Copper mining is intensely polluting.

2024-07-02 12:51:09

"Opponents of a set of controversial Michigan data center bills that critics say would almost certainly derail Michigan’s nation-leading climate legislation while draining its groundwater have defeated a tense last-minute effort to pass the measures before the summer recess. Though the bills are dead for now, observers expect supporters and industry to continue pressing lawmakers to change their positions before the legislative session concludes at the end of the year."
https://planetdetroit.org/2024/07/michigan-data-centers/

2024-07-02 07:04:11

Germany’s BASF and France’s Eramet have pulled out of a $2.6 billion nickel-and-cobalt refinery in Halmahera, Indonesia, amid criticism that the mine supplying it threatens the forest home of an isolated Indigenous tribe.
The refinery is part of the wider Weda Bay Nickel project, the world’s biggest nickel mine, whose concession overlaps with forests that are home to the hunter-gatherer Forest Tobelo people.
https://news.mongabay.com/2024/07/basf-eramet-drop-2-6b-indonesian-nickel-project-that-threatens-isolated-tribe/

2024-07-01 12:39:04

"Much of what they sell will end up in a landfill within a year and was manufactured by invisible workers laboring under poor conditions, enabled by bizarre trade loopholes without which $5 products shipped 8000 miles to customers’ doors don’t make any sense."
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/the-troubling-triumph-of-the-supercheap-gadget.html
Over-consumption of cheap products designed for the dump are a far greater threat to our environment than CO2.
Over-consumption is the meta crisis.

2024-07-01 12:14:03

"Microsoft's Satya Nadella emphasizes environmental resilience through AI for Good projects in Egypt and Kenya."
https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/technology/tech-news/chatgpt-google-search-need-power-to-run-heres-how-much-water-and-electricity-are-used-to-answer-questions/articleshow/111382705.cms
Yes, environmental resilience through the maximum use of water, electricity and materials. Is this guy serious?
Yes, he is. He's totally serious. He's knows exactly what he's doing.

2024-07-01 09:17:56

Steal a song and it's theft.
Steal a million songs and it's innovation.

2024-06-30 14:21:02

To survive today—if you’re not male, white and “well” educated—you now have to play a new game. Which is to optimize yourself for AI. To AI you must not simply prove that you are human. You must prove that you are a human of worth. Not a human of trash. It’s such perfect strategy from Big Tech. First they release AI in the wild for “free”. Then the addiction and dependency start.
https://gerrymcgovern.com/surviving-in-an-ai-world/

2024-06-29 14:54:21

"As AI companies work furiously to improve the intelligence and usefulness of their products, their demand for cheap, plentiful energy has skyrocketed. This gold rush has been extremely profitable for an unlikely beneficiary: Bitcoin miners."
https://time.com/6993603/ai-bitcoin-mining-artificial-intelligence-energy-use/
AI and bitcoin, a marriage of pure evil made in environmental hell. But to an AI grifter, it's always about making the fastest buck.

2024-06-29 14:51:42

Bill Gates says not to worry about
AI gobbling up energy, tech will adapt
So that's fine then
Bill Gates says the massive power draw required for AI processing is nothing to worry about as AI will ultimately identify ways to help cut power consumption and drive the transition to sustainable energy.
https://www.theregister.com/2024/06/28/bill_gates_ai_power_consumption/
Hah hah
Hah hah
Hah hah
Hah hah
Hah hah
Hah hah
Hah hah
Hah hah
Hah hah
Hah hah
Hah hah

2024-06-29 14:05:20

When AI comes for journalism and the newsroom, the argument is never about improving quality, accuracy, insight, or depth of reporting. It is always about reducing costs, replacing staff, increasing quantity and speed.
This is it. This is what it's all about. Progress. Innovation. Growth. It's all for this. It's all to create crap faster.

2024-06-29 08:09:12

This Viral AI Chatbot Will Lie and Say It’s Human
Bland AI’s customer services and sales bot is the latest example of “human-washing” in AI. Experts warn against the consequences of blurred reality.
https://www.wired.com/story/bland-ai-chatbot-human/
The Great Big Lying Machine is designed to lie. Lying is one of the best sales tools. Lying has so many advantages. The killer app of AI is lying. And the real killer app of AI is advertising and propaganda.

2024-06-28 05:05:47

"70% of the top 10 most commonly used AI applications may use your data for training their models. This practice can go beyond mere data learning and storage. It can involve retraining on your data, having human reviewers analyze it, and even sharing it with third parties. Often, these threats are buried deep in the fine print of Terms & Conditions agreements and privacy policies, which outline data access and complex opt-out processes."
https://thehackernews.com/2024/06/the-secrets-of-hidden-ai-training-on.html

2024-06-27 13:13:06

"If you look at the supply side alone, you could be fooled into thinking that the energy transition is going strong. Solar-generating capacity in California has doubled in last six years. On the demand side, however, things have gone haywire. Earlier this month, PG&E CEO Patti Poppe predicted that the utility’s load — or the amount of power consumed — would double by 2040. Poppe is not exaggerating; Texas grid operators expect demand to double there in just six years."
https://www.hcn.org/articles/do-data-centers-mean-doomsville-for-renewable-energy/

2024-06-27 11:18:20

“We find that, since their invention, cars and automobility have killed 60–80 million people and injured at least 2 billion. Currently, 1 in 34 deaths are caused by automobility.”
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0966692324000267
A 15-year study of 2 million Danish adults concluded that traffic noise is likely responsible for ~11% of **all** annual dementia diagnoses in Denmark.

2024-06-27 09:50:10

"Deep learning is energy inefficient. AI tasks that use computer vision, speech processing, and NLP require big data, and typically, the training is executed using GPUs — the processes are all energetically costly. The accuracy of Alexnet meant that the processing of a single image required 700 million different MAC multiplication and accumulation) operations, with concomitant high energy consumption."
https://electronics360.globalspec.com/article/21222/back-to-the-future-how-analog-computing-can-drive-ai
AI is wasting our environment. For what? Greed.

2024-06-27 08:29:09

The late 19th-century industrial revolution triggered relentless consumerism
The Doomsday Clock is set at 90 seconds to midnight, the closest ever
Recent reports stress that green growth alone cannot curb rising carbon emissions
https://www.indiatoday.in/information/story/consumerism-the-gdp-fad-and-the-planet-people-disconnect-that-fuels-it-2558041-2024-06-26
We don't have an energy production problem.
We do have an energy consumption problem.
Degrowth is the only hope.

2024-06-26 05:56:11

"In order to hallucinate, one must have some awareness or regard for the truth; LLMs, by contrast, work with probabilities, not binary correct/incorrect judgments. Based on a huge map of words created by processing huge amounts of text, LLMs decide which words would most likely follow from the words used in a prompt. They’re inherently more concerned with sounding truthy than delivering a factually correct response, the researchers conclude."
https://www.fastcompany.com/91145865/why-experts-are-using-the-word-bullshit-to-describe-ais-flaws

2024-06-26 05:18:50

Mícheál Ó Muircheartaigh just died. He was a legendary Irish broadcaster of Gaelic football and hurling. I grew up in a football mad house and Mícheál was this voice of magic and humor and poetry. He gave things a dreamlike intensity.
Mícheál Ó Muircheartaigh's most memorable lines of commentary
https://www.rte.ie/sport/football/2024/0625/1456635-micheal-o-muircheartaighs-most-memorable-lines/

2024-06-25 13:49:11

"The computing power required to build generative AI demands quantities of energy and water on a scale that can cause severe and long-term damage to the environment. This makes the development of generative AI a human rights issue."
"If AI development continues on its current trajectory, it will compound the environmental harm we are already doing to our planet, long before it gets the chance to show us whether it can live up to its much-hyped potential."
https://www.justsecurity.org/96534/environmental-impacts-of-ai/

2024-06-25 04:49:10

"You can, for example, ask your phone when your mother's plane is landing, and based on previous texts and emails — which your phone read because you clicked "Accept" on the terms and conditions without reading them and you believe a company when it says "We value your privacy, which is why we want to know absolutely everything about you" — the phone tells you the precise time the plane touches down, and probably the decibel level of the squealing tires."
https://www.startribune.com/why-you-should-lie-to-your-phone/600375663/

2024-06-24 11:34:55

Modern AI is advertising. It is born out of the great advertising minds in Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon, etc. Advertising has always been fake news. Advertising has always been about lying and targeting vulnerable, poorer people, and/or the vulnerabilities in all of us. Advertising is constantly probing for our weaknesses. As one marketer boasted to me: “The best marketing is when I make you buy something and you don’t even know why.”

2024-06-24 04:48:30

95% of the world’s land could become degraded by 2050. The UN says that 40% is already degraded.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c977r51e1z0o
"52% of our soil is already degraded. In a grim look to the future, projections suggest that degradation levels could rise to 90% by 2050 if we do not act immediately. The impacts of this would be devastating. Degraded soils cannot function in the same way healthy soils do: they cannot grow our food, filter our water, and clean our air.”
https://earth.org/why-2024-is-a-pivotal-year-for-our-soil/

2024-06-23 12:31:01

Employee sparks upset with photo of 'perfectly good' electronics being thrown away: 'This place just trashes it all'
"The company I work for would rather throw away perfectly good huge [TVs] than donate or sell them," they wrote. "I'm sure someone will tell me there's some sort of policy at play here, but every other company I've worked for would auction off to employees or sell equipment. This place just trashes it all."
https://www.thecooldown.com/green-business/e-waste-company-discard-unused-electronics/
E-waste is fastest growing waste stream.

2024-06-23 12:24:45

Wired asked AI Perplexity to summarize a test webpage that contained the sentence, "I am a reporter with Wired."
Result? It came up with a "story about a young girl named Amelia who follows a trail of glowing mushrooms in a magical forest called Whisper Woods."
In fact, as Wired's logs showed, the AI search engine never even attempted to visit the page.
https://futurism.com/perplexity-webpage-mushrooms

2024-06-23 11:17:58

"You might ask how AI generates something so completely bananas. It’s because AI can’t tell the difference between true and false. Instead, a complex computer program plays probabilistic language guessing games, betting on what words are most likely to follow other words. If an AI program hasn’t been trained on a subject — unusual last names, for instance — it can conjure up authoritative-seeming but false verbiage."
https://kansasreflector.com/2024/06/22/artificial-intelligence-has-spread-lies-about-my-good-name-and-im-here-to-settle-the-score/

2024-06-22 10:41:59

Please stop with your innovation, productivity and efficiency. It's killing us. It's killing life.
Human innovation is destroying:
Climate
Soil
Air
Water
Human innovation is pumping into a dying environment:
Chemicals
Plastics
E-waste
Nitrogen
Phosphorous
If we weren't so intelligent, we wouldn't be nearly so dangerous. And now we've created an artificial, industrialized version of our destructive intelligence.
It won't end well.
Where's the wisdom?

2024-06-22 10:36:59

"It may come as a shock to learn that an exhaustive survey of various studies, published by the journal Patterns, examined the behavior of various types of AI and alarmingly concluded that yes, in fact, AI systems are intentionally deceitful and will stop at nothing to achieve their objectives."
https://www.zdnet.com/article/how-ai-lies-cheats-and-grovels-to-succeed-and-what-we-need-to-do-about-it/

2024-06-22 10:26:47

AI Is Already Wreaking Havoc on Global Power Systems - Bloomberg
The Hidden Environmental Impact of AI - Jacobin
Tech firms look for a miracle solution as AI exhausts the power grid - The
Left or right, the devastating environmental impacts of AI is becoming all too clear. As our environment teeters on the edge, the AI grifters, scammers and con artists can wait to push it over, hoping to make some fast bucks on the way down.

2024-06-21 05:45:05

"White Australia has a short-sighted approach to Country. You are still trying to clean up the mess of Maralinga, Emu Field, Ranger Uranium Mine, and the many closed mines that still scar the landscape across Australia, and leak radioactive tailings. You have forced poison onto the lands of Traditional Owners, and now are proposing to create poisons that would last 100,000s of years. We have learnt that white Australia cannot be trusted with nuclear power.”
https://nit.com.au/20-06-2024/12091/duttons-nuclear-plans-threaten-traditional-owners-land-rights

2024-06-20 14:46:01

"Nvidia, the leader of the AI-chip revolution and a Wall Street darling, has over the past three years alone shipped some 5 million high-power AI chips. To put this in perspective, every such AI chip uses roughly as much electricity each year as do three electric vehicles."
https://www.city-journal.org/article/the-energy-transition-wont-happen

2024-06-20 14:40:16

Net Zero always was a con, always is a con, always will be a con
The energy transition imposes unprecedented demands for minerals including copper and lithium, which require substantial time to locate and develop mines.
To achieve net-zero carbon, affluent countries will incur costs of at least 20 percent of their annual GDP.
https://www.fraserinstitute.org/sites/default/files/halfway-between-kyoto-and-2050.pdf
We are heading towards environmental catastrophe, and all we want to hear is
LIES
LIES
LIES
LIES
LIES
LIES
LIES