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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 13th, 2023

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  • Except that’s not even how most bus systems work because most of them are majority funded by taxes with fares originally meant to serve as a stopgap but then slowly converted into a profit engine (usually after privitization). Fares are a way to gatekeep a service which your taxes already pay for, which I would argue, is by itself a form of theft.

    As an example check out the latest MTA report only 26% of funding comes from fares, and that ones a bit in the higher end from what I’ve seen (NYC public transit, picked as the example a it’s recently been in the news for issues with fare evasion)

    All that aside, it’s also worth noting that fare increases are extremely unpopular and it’s not that easy to increase them without potential serious backlash (ie the mass protests in Chile a few years back that were in part set off by the fare hikes.)


  • Right and I linked that article because it’s functions as a media literacy litnus test. It takes the viewpoint of the CEO and the scientists as equally valid, and you did get the main points, but you missed the lead that was buried:

    A paper he coauthored last year in Nature Communications, using the massive sargassum seaweed bloom in the Atlantic in recent years as a model, concluded that seaweed farming in the ocean could even become a source of increased carbon dioxide. That’s because the seaweed competes for nutrients with other carbon-sucking species like phytoplankton, among other complex biogeochemical feedback effects.

    Which if you actually look at the paper from the scientist (and ignore the bullshit from the CEO):

    Ocean afforestation at the scale of Sargassum growth in the GASB during 2018 could contribute −0.0001–0.0029 Gt CO2 of CO2 removal, if all of the seawater CO2 consumed through biomass formation is balanced by permanent influx of atmospheric CO2.

    In other words, carbon source to negligible because it kills the photoplakton was already doing that, and doing it more efficiently (albeit at a lower biomass). The paper also, briefly, touches on other concerns (where we get a nice crossover with solar radiation modification) which it unfortunately doesn’t delve much further into:

    Furthermore, we estimate that increased ocean albedo, due to floating Sargassum, could influence climate radiative forcing more than Sargassum-CDR.

    It makes climate change worse because it acts as a potential net CO2 source, requires maintenance and human intervention to maintain, destroys the local ecosystem which was doing carbon sequestration in the first place, and lowers the ocean albedo thus increasing radiative warming.

    If you want to talk SRM instead the oft cited paper is this one However the final line is the important one:

    The sobering reality is that unanswered questions such as these will remind the research and policy communities that relating climate response to anthropogenic perturbations is still a long way from being an exercise in engineering design.

    As it was published in 1992 a lot of the questions it left at the end have answers now, and there have been attempts at some engineering design. Why don’t you try to find one you think is a good potential and we can drill into its possible pros/cons (warning that meteorological stuff gets real math heavy, real quick).



    1. It’s worth pointing out that the IPCC no longer uses the term “geoengineering” or “climate engineering” for the exact reason that we may be talking past each other here. They are problematicly vague and can describe things with very different characteristics. Are you talking about CDR, CCS, CCU, SRM, other vague “offset the impacts of climate change” (IE ocean liming/fertilization, glacier stabilization, etc.), or all of the above?

    Some approaches to geoengineering may have negative side effects, but others don’t appear to.

    Be specific. Which ones?

    1. You have misread my previous comment.

    Climate change would cause famine, ameliorating the effects of climate change would prevent that famine.You have misread

    This statement is correct, but you are bringing it up against the point being made about how taking a “treating the symptoms” of climate change might improve things a bit in the short term, but leads to worse long term outcomes.

    1. Nowhere did I say it’s not worth studying.

    You’ve got some sort of a priori conviction that “no, geoengineering must make the situation worse somehow” and therefore it’s not worth studying. If it’s not studied how can you possibly know?

    I have stated that the current status of said studies do not have sufficient evidence to merit the claims you are making. If you think otherwise please provide some evidence/papers/links etc. otherwise we’re in a Russell’s teapot situation here.

    Unless your definition of “studying” is the argument that because the situation is bad enough it’s worth trying, at scale, whatever approach in the hope it improves things somewhat… Because that’s the argument that many use in order to sell dangerous and unethical grifts which seem promising and ‘harmless’. (I’m linking that article specifically because it’s “neutral journalism” at it’s worst and I’m curious at what you take away from it…)


  • Frankly, this argument always bothered me.

    Because you don’t understand the argument…

    Using your metaphor the thing you’re proposing to “treat the symptoms” has side effects which worsen the disease thus causing more real damage and worsening symptoms.

    The only reason you would willingly pursue that course of treatment is if a treatment for the initial disease was ongoing (in this metaphor it’s not, ghg emissions continue to increase dramatically) or if a patient was on palliative/EoLC.

    You aren’t saving “millions of people from starving to death”, you’re gambling that it will hold a bit longer before tens-hundreds of millions of people starve to death, and the evidence that these “treat the symptoms” is minimal at best thus leading to both outcomes (millions soon, more later).


  • From an article about a recent lawsuit

    The App Store appeared to harvest information about every single thing you did in real time, including what you tapped on, which apps you search for, what ads you saw, and how long you looked at a given app and how you found it. The app sent details about you and your device as well, including ID numbers, what kind of phone you’re using, your screen resolution, your keyboard languages, how you’re connected to the internet—notably, the kind of information commonly used for device fingerprinting.

    Notably, knowing keyboard language and monitoring tap locations allows for reconstruction of text the user types (as detailed in this article

    I do think you are correct that Apple probably isn’t actively keylogging every iOS device (just because there’s easier ways with less legal concerns that ultimately get the same outcomes), but it’s not like there’s “no evidence”.















  • The academic name for the field is quite literally “machine learning”.

    You are incorrect that these systems are unable to create/be creative, you are correct that creativity != consciousness (which is an extremely poorly defined concept to begin with …) and you are partially correct about how the underlying statistical models work. What you’re missing is that by defining a probabilistic model to objects you can “think”/“be creative” because these models dont need to see a “blue hexagonal strawberry” in order to think about what that may mean and imagine what it looks like.

    I would recommend this paper for further reading into the topic and would like to point out you are again correct that existing AI systems are far from human levels on the proposed challenges, but inarguably able to “think”, “learn” and “creatively” solve those proposed problems.

    The person you’re responding to isn’t trying to pick a fight they’re trying to help show you that you have bought whole cloth into a logical fallacy and are being extremely defensive about it to your own detriment.

    That’s nothing to be embarrassed about, the “LLMs can’t be creative because nothing is original, so everything is a derivative work” is a dedicated propaganda effort to further expand copyright and capital consolidation.