"Parasite-linked lettuce" is really "horrible-work-conditions-linked lettuce" if you go back one layer of proximate causes
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Rich Puchalsky ⩜⃝
@richpuchalsky@mastodon.social
mastodon 4.8.0-nightly.2026-10-06freelance librarian, anarchist
1093 Followers
226 Following
50 Posts
Joined February 24, 2024
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Last boost: the value of Youtube, for me, is that it has every more or less obscure song on it. It somehow became a free music site where things were not taken down: I have no idea why. It has music that streaming services do not carry.
When people write things like "we need to end the use of fossil fuels", who is "we"?
It's important to think about this because otherwise you end up with foolish stuff like "everyone is guilty."
The people who had the authority and power to build infrastructure that everyone has to use are guilty.
Do people in liberal democracies have any power over those people? No they do not, at least via voting and protest. Those people inhabit all political parties.
#climate
Replying to
@Hex@kolektiva.social
People really, really do not want to believe that the daily stuff in use is set by infrastructural decisions made over large scales by people with power. Sure, you as an individual can not buy a car, which will be a variably livable decision based on where you live, but a society where the infrastructure builders have decided on cars will have cars.
The Amnesty International report that TERF Island censored:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1UggI-VPSk7uWpw4xIWS2lua3x-rF2A8T/view
Replying to
@cwebber@social.coop
Here's another way "LLMs are in the air and you can't not breathe them" manifests: if you are a librarian, you index texts so that people can find them. But LLMs keep generating texts that look like human ones to such a degree that they will fool an automated indexing process. No one wants to find the LLM texts since they are slop, but -- if you are a librarian, your index still fills up with them so the human ones can't be found, even though you've never used LLMs.
Andrew Tate: "I am being held in the highest level of security which exists", which is why I'm able to post on X.
#uspol
I'm still in awe of this one. US society, un-influenced by any leftist, keeps coming up with these amazing sabotage campaigns.
https://www.hcn.org/articles/people-are-betting-on-wildfires-should-they/?utm_content=bufferf720c&utm_medium=social&utm_source=bufferapp.com&utm_campaign=buffer
RE: @heidilifeldman@mastodon.social
People ask why the Supreme Court makes the decisions that they do, and the answer is most of the time just simple bribery.
RE: @cdarwin@c.im
As always, gun rights are only for right-wingers, and gun nuts organizations will only defend right-wingers.
("Right-wingers" excludes any of the targets of right-wingers, such as Black and/or trans people, no matter what the actual politics of those people are.)
Replying to
@afewbugs@social.coop
I'm a data librarian, and I've tried since the beginning of current "AI" (LLMs) to tell people that one of the big problems is that it's corrupting all the indexes. When you can't find anything, the result is very close to being the same as if nothing had ever been written at all.
Which I know is what you already said, but I just wanted to repeat it again.
Replying to
@alisynthesis@io.waxandleather.com
It doesn't magically become a non-Nazi country when Trump goes away. He was elected in fair elections twice.
What's better for the rest of the world is that the destruction of American capability that the article talks about actually happens.
Replying to
@HeavenlyPossum@kolektiva.social
I hope that Trump destroys the expectation of the vast middle of America that the elections are fair, just as he has destroyed so much else that lets America continue as it is.
He may require effort to thwart, but I hope that any anarchist who works to do so decides to do in some more important sphere than the elections that sustain the empire.
Good headline, but of course this is still a good vibes shading the truth headline. It's true in that stopping burning fossils fuels will eventually fix our smoky skies. It's false in that this will happen, probably, long into the future.
In the short run the answer to "What will fix our smoky skies?" is that nothing will. We already screwed up the chance that we had to fix this.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/science/wildfire-climate-emissions-smoke-9.7274862
Replying to
@impermanen_@zirk.us
I've been really thinking about getting this one but it's two doses (both of which have probable multi-day low fever for me) and I haven't been able to be incapacitated for any day in the last couple of years
Replying to
@Hex@kolektiva.social
The most basic thing that most Euro-derived artists feel about the art they make is not a capitalist framing, but it does concern the moral rights of the artist. LLMs violate both attribution and integrity.
https://www.copyright.gov/policy/moralrights/
Replying to
Looking at this near-future hellscape, I have nothing but scorn for people who think that we need to preserve our current arrangements. "Oh no people will get killed if we do something" really? What are we looking at if we do nothing?
Keep in mind that our current arrangements equal doing nothing.
Replying to
@tsyum@thepit.social
CDC does not exactly say that. They write:
"f you give someone naloxone, stay with them until emergency help arrives or for at least four hours to make sure their breathing returns to normal."
Texas currently has a Good Samaritan law for Naloxone only but not other things, and that protects only the person calling but not the overdosing person.
https://www.healthline.com/health/substance-use/calling-911-for-overdose#good-samaritan-laws
https://www.cdc.gov/stop-overdose/caring/naloxone.html
Since I have written about how bad tariffs on Chinese renewables are -- and since both Europe and the US (under both parties) have these tariffs -- I should explain in more detail what tariffs do in this case.
tl/dr: "Oh no the fossil fuel I own is being underpriced by renewables how can I make renewables more expensive"
#climate #renewables
1/n
It's the end of an era. I went to archive.ph to get around an NYT paywall and got a message that I needed to disable my ad blocker.
I never trusted archive.ph (or any of its equivalent aliases) but it was good enough to evade paywalls with.
Canadian high school student saves USAID data that Musk deleted (+1) but as part of a "machine learning" project (-1)
https://www.aiddata.org/blog/before-reimagining-development-data-remember-what-weve-learned
Replying to
@cabel@social.panic.com
Why would anyone send back out again a skydiver who thought it was a good idea to steer their trailing flag into a tree?
Replying to
@Hex@kolektiva.social
Here's a bit more about it. It's an idea that came from post-revolutionary France: it's not really a capitalist idea.
https://uslawexplained.com/droit_moral
Replying to
@Hex@kolektiva.social
The actual shut-down is happening this year, so it's not history yet.
For what happened over the last decade, sure.
Replying to
@Hex@kolektiva.social
Did you find the information about the IWW shutting down the GDCs that you were looking for before?
Replying to
@jrhawley@scholar.social
The US can not destroy global science. As for US science, a Nazi country should not have any.
Replying to
@ramsey@phpc.social
Everyone knows that if your work requires you to run an LLM you set it to do something in an environment where it can't change anything, and pretend to use its output.
@dirtside@phpc.social
Replying to
@kboyd@phpc.social
It's important to think about who "we" is in each sentence. Like, can "we" as in the human species do anything about global climate change? Yes, we can do a whole lot if the "we" is the Chinese nation-state, which is doing a whole lot. Can Americans do anything? Pretty much all that Americans can do at this point is to make sure that their current society ends.
(when I hear the US/Iran war is hot again)
[the meme saying "Yes... Ha Ha Ha... Yes!" but with the sickos guy holding some CO2 / climate change graphs]
An important statement from Eric King about the earlier Fire Ant piece
https://crimethinc.com/2026/07/11/no-way-home-an-anarchist-ex-prisoners-response-to-fire-ant-movement-defense
Replying to
I'm not saying that people should do nothing. There are worse and worse losses that will continue and we should try to stop them. But after telling people that we have 30 years to do something for 30 years, and with nothing being done, it's dishonest to say that sure we can fix everything now.
Replying to
@ramsey@phpc.social
It's a waste of energy, yes. It's also a waste of your life to be dealing with a job that makes you do this. But sometimes you have to.
@dirtside@phpc.social
Replying to
So for instance let's say that the US funds a lot of climate science and research on renewable power. Oh no, people say, Trump is shutting this down.
It was only made in order to be shut down if our elites decided to do so. That's what "they control the funding stream for science that needs a lot of money" means.
Replying to
@kboyd@phpc.social
(I should have continued this with "can Canadians do anything", and given the existence of the tar sands I decided that this was a really rude question for an American to address given that our President keeps threatening aggressive war against you.)
Replying to
@mattsheffield@mastodon.social
Amusing that he had an LLM write: "Who Wrote This? Turing, Total Variation, and the Mathematics of AI-Text Detection" as a supposed math article
Replying to
If it helps, you can think of US science as Nazi science. Should we fight to preserve Nazi science? No we should not, because Nazi science is a danger to the entire world.
/fin
Replying to
The administration, and PJM Interconnection one of the predatory "electricity market" entities that has taken over the grid, of course say the emergency is in part due to environmental restrictions or whatever. But it's due to data centers.
Replying to
@kevinrothrock@infosec.exchange
There was also a recent Russian assassination plot on the head of a German drone firm. Everyone wants to get rid of the drone makers.
Replying to
Trump is more crude and is shutting US science of this type down. That is good. Other countries that are actually interested in doing something informed by science will take up doing the science, and it will no longer be under the imperial control of the world's largest fossil fuel producer.
Replying to
There is a long history of imperial science making the public confuse funding with irreplaceability. Early on British scientists were funding to dig up artifacts and study strange "primitive" peoples. Who would study them if not a well-funded expedition sent halfway around the world? Certainly not the people living there -- right?
This clickbait "which animals could a person actually beat in a fight" is boring because it focuses on the large ones where we know that people are delusional. I was more interested in the small ones. 30% of humans think that they couldn't beat a house cat in a fight? Or 40% for a goose? There have been no reports of someone dying due to a goose attack. There have been reports of broken bones but it's not clear whether this is from running away and tripping.
https://www.newsweek.com/surprising-americans-beat-wild-animals-fight-experts-1691793
Replying to
Here's the thread:
https://mastodon.social/@richpuchalsky/116846213002644261
Replying to
But back to climate science. The function of US funding of climate science was to make people around the world pretend that the US wasn't the most powerful country that was sabotaging any attempt to do something about use of fossil fuels. For a while elites were content to hire scientists to study the problem, long after we knew the practical basics, and meanwhile make sure that no actual reduction in fossil fuel use really happened.
What stage of #climate are we in? The half a million deaths by February stage.
https://www.cnn.com/2026/09/23/climate/super-el-nino-heat-deaths?Date=20260923&Profile=CNNweather&utm_content=1790178401&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter