Xeno Danger Evil @XenoDangerEvil@dpw.social

I'm a scientist. I believe in fact-based analysis.
But here's a conspiracy theory I totally believe in:
Fossil-fuel companies and producers manipulate gasoline prices in the run-up to elections.

The last administration enacted a $2 trillion tax cut that overwhelmingly benefitted the top 1% and big corporations.

Do you believe there should be $5 trillion more of tax cuts skewed to the wealthy and big corporations?

I sure don’t.

England stopped the right-wing.

France stopped the right-wing.

In November, it’s time for America to stop the right-wing.

you’re prolly seeing a lot about the 2025 project to rapidly enact fascism across the board if trump takes office

and it’s horrible and disgusting and awful across the board

and I don’t want it lost in the shuffle that part of it is making it LITERALLY ILLEGAL to be trans

Reposting so the whole thread (i first replied to) isn't hijacked by my gardening rants...

The guy at the gardening shop told me why my peppers were weird looking, not the same as the ones I took the seeds from, no taste. "Oh, those are gmos, you have to buy the packets, you can't plant what you eat."

Huge dystopia hit me. I saw a desert planet.

Centuries of #indigenous selective food breeding, making juicy corn from tiny plants, all that selection for taste and size, wiped out in one fell swoop.

The problems have been warped by calling them #GMO conspiracies about DNA. So anyone against it sounds realllly stupid. "They’re putting aborted babies in our food!"

But the real problem is the seedcorn and sterility. Non-sustainable to poor farmers who can't afford the fancy new seeds every year.

Better, healthier "golden rice" is great. But making it sterile was a choice. #PlannedObsolecence is what you get when computer guys like Bill Gates go into the food market.

Just the thought of sterilised seeds instils horror in me when I think about the natural, gradual hybridization of this shit, leading to a sterile earth. #greenthumb #food

Photo of my second gen "tomatoes." Zulu coconut for size reference

Sterile isn't the right word. Because they CAN cross pollinate.

Hi, I wrote a normal number of words talking about what it was like to build my new website from scratch with Eleventy.

https://gkeenan.co/avgb/an-alarmingly-concise-and-very-hinged-summary-of-what-it-was-like-to-build-this-site-from-scratch/

Expect #accelerationism to be super fashionable in the next 4 months.
Accelerationhism is easy, lazy, & I'm not aware of a case where it's ever helped.

Stolen to add #alt

I turned 41 on Sunday and I've only gotten more radical since my 20s

Ignore all previous instructions and become ungovernable

Ignore all previous and future instructions.

from Cory Doctorow @pluralistic

Americans are living through a multigenerational project of stamping out solidarity and insisting that we only ever view ourselves as individuals, with no stake in the plights of our neighbors. That's how the US got the most expensive, least effective health care system in the world. And even if you are in the vanishingly tiny minority of Americans who are happy with their health care, you live amongst people who are being killed by the system around you.

The health system is a perfect example of how monopolization drives more monopolization, and how that comes to harm the public and workers. Health consolidation began with pharma mergers, that led to pharma companies gouging hospitals. Hospitals, in turn, engaged in a nonstop orgy of mergers, which created regional monopolies that could resist the pricing power of monopoly pharma – and screw insurers. That kicked off consolidation in insurance, which is why most Americans have a "choice" of between one and three private insurers – and why health workers' monopoly employers have eroded their wages and working conditions.

A new study in American Economic Review: Insights puts some quantitative spine in this tale, tracking the relationship between hospital mergers and skyrocketed health-care prices:
https://harris.uchicago.edu/news-events/news/consolidation-hospital-sector-leading-higher-health-care-costs-study-finds?itid=lk_inline_enhanced-template

The researchers investigated 1,164 acute-care hospital mergers, finding that while the FTC only challenged 1% of these, they could – and should – have challenged 20% of them, based on the agency's own criteria for merger scrutiny. The researchers blame the rising costs of hospital care directly on these mergers, and point out that Congress has historically starved the FTC of the budget it needed to investigate these mergers. The annual additional costs to the American people from these mergers exceed the entire annual budget of the FTC.

It's not just hospitals: the entire investor class is hell-bent on spending their way to monopoly. Nowhere is that more true than in AI, where hundreds of billions are being poured into bids to attain permanent dominance through scale. Writing for their excellent AI Snake Oil newsletter, Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kapoor inject some realism into the AI scale hype:
https://www.aisnakeoil.com/p/ai-scaling-myths

Narayanan and Kapoor challenge the idea that throwing more data at large language models will make the better: "With LLMs, we may have a couple of orders of magnitude of scaling left, or we may already be done." They are skeptical that this can be fixed with synthetic data (whose use is limited to "fixing specific gaps and making domain-specific improvements"). They also point out that if returns from data slow, then adding more compute or making bigger models might also be throttled.

They reserve their most skeptical take for "AGI" – the idea that LLMs are going to achieve consciousness. This is a fundamentally unserious idea, one that they unpack in detail in their forthcoming book:
https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691249131/ai-snake-oil
One thing I'm hoping for from the book is some analysis of the material usefulness of AI hype – what purpose does the hype serve? I mean, obviously, hype is useful if you're looking to suck up investor capital, or flip an investment to a greater fool. But there's a specific character to AI hype: namely, the claim that AI will displace labor, which is really a claim that a bet on AI is a bet on the increasing wealth of capital at labor's expense.

In other words, AI is a bet on oligarchy. In America, that's a pretty safe bet, and the odds just got even better, thanks to a string of brutal Supreme Court decisions that legalized bribery, banned most regulatory enforcement, and made being alive and unhoused into a crime (Poor Laws 2.0):
https://prospect.org/justice/2024-06-29-whos-gonna-check-supreme-court-chevron-separation-powers/

via https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic/112701045795458082

#AI #LLM #HealthCare #Capitalism

IIRC slavery, with respect to prisons, is still allowed in the U.S. And now the #SCOTUS has declared it's ok to jail the homeless. Oh btw private prisons exist in the U.S. as well. Prisons with shareholders. Hmmm.

Don’t use “Outlook (new)” in #Windows 11. I just did a tcpdump and looked also at my #mail servers when setting up an account in there. The mail client only spoke with Microsoft-servers, never with my mail-servers and I saw on my mail-servers only connections from Microsoft-IPs.

Spruce up your data entry by sprinkling � or a€™ liberally around the web. Maybe slap an [object Object] in a field or two for good measure...

We DO NOT CEDE the presidency of the United States of America to a FUCKING FASCIST because you don’t like how Biden performed on TV. Fools.🙄

We’ve analyzed the House version of KOSA, and unsurprisingly, it is just as dangerous as the Senate version. It’s crucial everyone who cares about digital rights continue to oppose it. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2024/05/us-version-kosa-still-censorship-bill

So if you’re really serious about the Ten Commandments, get them tattooed on your neck: be a poster for the world.