I think having a baby niece is great cause my brother will send me just a constant stream of messages that sound indistinguishable from how someone at Jurassic park would text if they were being hunted by the raptor
So Crawford won. Elon is, as far as I know, still being investigated for ~election crimes~ in Wisconsin. Canada is still investigating Tesla’s alleged fraud with rebates. Illinois just elected a bunch of Democrats for local offices. Louisiana rejected a bunch of Republican proposed changes to their state constitution. Cory Booker held the floor of the Senate for 25 hours, breaking the record of racist shitheel Strom Thurmond and in the process, listing out the sins of the Trump administration in the Senate records and delaying their vote for some other Trump asshole. And Speaker of the House Mike Johnson got embarrassed by House Republicans joining Dems in opposing him and threw a baby hissy fit and shut down the House for a week.
We didn’t get Florida. But look at all that up there.
Oh and tomorrow, Tesla has to share information about how many cars it actually delivered in the first three months of the year, which unless they fudge the books, is going to be a lower number than they would like, and might make their stock dip some more. Or just drop. Forbes has provided a little graph of their sales.
Edit: and oh shit! Mike Waltz fucked up again and got caught using fucking Gmail for work discussions. Gmail. Because Google never spied on anyone. (He has a government email address.)
Idgaf if you don’t want to write essays for school. I don’t care if you don’t want to write corporate emails yourself. I don’t care if you can’t draw well, I don’t care if you can’t write well, I don’t care if you just really really want to talk to your favorite fictional character but don’t want to RP with a real person because you have social anxiety or whatever
If you’re still regularly using generative ai, chatgpt or midjourney or character.ai or literally whatever the fuck, im personally blaming you when my utility prices start going up.
Why would utility prices go up because of ai?
(I am not defending the usage of generative AI/ChatGPT/Character.ai etc etc i am very much against it – I am just curious as to the correlation between using it and utility price surge please don’t come at me this is a genuine question)
ChatGPT uses 1-3 bottles of water for cooling for every query you put into it. This is FRESH WATER, which is evaporated and eventually mostly returns to the ocean, effectively removing a lot of it from our already dwindling fresh water supply on the planet. It also consumes 17 THOUSAND TIMES more electricity than the average American home.
More AI use = more data centers = power drain on local cities = gas, electricity, and water utility prices rise because all of our resources are being funneled into a machine that makes garbage
If most of the subject matter experts hate a particular technology and have a laundry list of specific technical reasons why, maybe listen to them instead of the marketing goon gushing about how great it is.
Generative tools have some cool applications, but their output is of limited value, the tech itself is being almost universally misunderstood and/or dangerously misapplied and comes at a cost that would be unsustainable even if it were far more justifiable than it is.
just want to add a little note to say: this electricity draw problem wider than generative AI. even before it got popular, the increase in renewable energy generation was barely keeping pace with increased demand for electricity. the promise of “make more renewable sources so we can shut down the coal plants!” has never come to fruition because we keep making more things electronic and electric. why is there a tv screen oreos billboard in my grocery store? why does my washer want to connect to the internet?
you should look at the world around you and think “hmm, was this the best use of that energy?”
Man, it would be the thinnest of upsides to this malevolent clown show if this once and for all destroyed the REPUBLICANS ARE GOOD FOR THE ECONOMY myth that has been kneecapping the country since Reagan. But since four years after Trump 1, people completely memoryholed everything he did and everything much worse he was planning to do this time and just shrugged and voted for him again, my hopes are. Hmm. Not high.
On the other hand, if that’s what it takes to get the Republicans to lose the House and Senate for 60 years again….
In terms of science communication and space exploration advocacy, Elon Musk has sent us back into the fucking Stone Age.
It’s hard enough to encourage the public to see the value in space exploration, especially when the problems facing society right now are so intense that space exploration seems frivolous and needlessly expensive by comparison (keyword “seems”) but now that this clown is the face of the future of space, it’s doubling, hell, tripling down on the idea that space exploration is a fantasy for bored billionaires that would rather fuck off to mars and escape the problems of earthly society (problems that they had a starring role in creating) rather than spend a penny of their wealth to help remedy them. Tale as old as time for a science communicator. Heard it a million times. But now it’s so much harder to get people to understand the other side of the coin because the nightmare scenario is already here and his name is elongated muskrat
To add a little bit of context as to what that value actually is… The thing I hear the most in this conversation is “we need to take care of this planet before we start thinking about other ones.” Yes, I agree. The well-being of our planet and it’s people should be out top priority. But we can’t properly take care of our planet if we don’t fully understand it.
The Earth does not exist in a bubble. It’s part of a dynamic and ever-evolving solar system, and galaxy and universe. He have to look at the earth in that context to be able to know and care for it. To care for a planet, we have to know how planets work. When doctors treat patients they look at the medical record, they look at family history, they look at symptoms and compare them to known diseases to find a diagnosis.
How did the earth form? What was it like in the past? Why did it change? That’s the medical record.
We’ve got the earths siblings in the neighborhood. Why is Mars a frozen desert? Why is Venus a molten hell scape? Could those things happen here? That’s the family history.
What kinds of things are floating around our neighborhood? Could they affect us? All this is necessary to diagnose the Earths problem, to anticipate the direction it’s going, and to help it heal.
And the minute we get an asteroid scare, that’s when folks start asking why we weren’t looking up 🙄
As a science communicator at a well known establishment, 10000x this. We have a student program that talk about Earth systems and how missions like Landsat were so useful to understand our own planet better FROM SPACE. I could go on and on but just, like, reread OP’s thoughts, they’re perfect.
amhrancas 