Philosoraptor

I was sure it was going to be professional genocide ghoul Shapiro. Color me surprised.

In 2023, the CO2 growth rate was 3.37 +/- 0.11 ppm at Mauna Loa, 86% above the previous year, and hitting a record high since observations began in 1958, while global fossil fuel CO2 emissions only increased by 0.6 +/- 0.5%. This implies an unprecedented weakening of land and ocean sinks, and raises the question of where and why this reduction happened.

Despite the incredible, unprecedented work of The Most Progressive President of Our Lifetime in the US, global carbon emissions continue to accelerate. However, in general carbon that's introduced into the atmosphere from burning fossil fuels doesn't always just stay there; in fact, most of the time most of that carbon gets absorbed by one or another carbon sink as part of normal geosystemic processes. These sinks include getting sucked up by plants as part of photosynthesis, dissolving into the ocean to marginally raise its pH (mostly this one), or reacting with rocks on the surface to from new minerals. The upshot is that a lot of the warming potential of the fossil fuels we've been burning has been averted by the natural carbon cycle absorbing much of our collective waste.

This natural absorption showed an alarming drop off in 2023, even as carbon emissions continued to rise. This is very, very bad and is setting us up for warning and other climate change impacts that may happen far in advance of what our models predicted--decades instead of centuries.

The kids are alright.

There's one overwhelmingly common mistake that people make about enshittification: assuming that the contagion is the result of the Great Forces of History, or that it is the inevitable end-point of any kind of for-profit online world.

In other words, they class enshittification as an ideological phenomenon, rather than as a material phenomenon. Corporate leaders have always felt the impulse to enshittify their offerings, shifting value from end users, business customers and their own workers to their shareholders. The decades of largely enshittification-free online services were not the product of corporate leaders with better ideas or purer hearts. Those years were the result of constraints on the mediocre sociopaths who would trade our wellbeing and happiness for their own, constraints that forced them to act better than they do today, even if the were not any better.

Corporate leaders' moments of good leadership didn't come from morals, they came from fear.

Politicians are terrified of the protests, but they are even more terrified by the prospect that the protests could continue past the end of the school year, spilling over the bounds of the campus and into a long, hot, summer. It is the responsibility of anyone trying to stop this genocide to ensure that their nightmare becomes a reality.

Link

Concerning

“I don’t have a problem with the Palestinian flag – people can share whatever flag they like, but the people who post ‘no Zionists’ are basically saying ‘no Jews’. It’s what they think is an acceptable way of saying it,” he adds.

“It’s like the signs that used to read: ‘No Blacks. No Jews. No Dogs. No Irish.’” Stephen says there are masses of Palestinian flags on Hinge, and he’s come across profiles of women who say: “No terfs, no Tories, free Palestine.” “It’s put me off opening the app.”

I teach at a public high school for "profoundly gifted" kids, and work pretty much exclusively with 16+ students. They're all very smart, and range from libs to somewhat better than normal libs (we had one open ML, but he graduated a few years ago). They all think Trump is a fucking dumbass. As with every election, a big crop of our seniors is going to be eligible to vote for the first time this year.

For the first time in the decade or so that I've worked here, pretty much every single one of them has said they don't intend to vote. They hate Biden almost as much as Trump, either because they condemn the genocide in Israel or just because they (correctly) believe that he has done nothing to actually benefit them. This is a population of kids who are much more politically engaged than your average teenager, and vote turnout in previous years has been high. I was actually very surprised at how many of them expressed contempt for the whole process this year, and indicated that they were totally uninterested in supporting Biden (and of course would not support Trump). I'm guessing this is part of a big trend that we're going to see this year, and I'm preparing myself for libs blaming young people--for whom Biden has done little but make their future demonstrably worse--for Democrats' loss.

I'm trying to convince all of them to vote anyway, just for some third party that speaks to them. Yesterday, we talked about PSL, Cornel West, the Greens, and Afroman for a bit. It would be incredibly funny to see young people reject Biden/Trump, and yet turn out in record numbers anyway. The narrative that kids are just too addicted to their phones to vote would fall apart. I'll keep working on it.

No real point here, just

Terrible work, everyone.

Link

A longish, but fascinating, look at the computational constraints surrounding Soviet-style central planning, and some thoughts about how such planning might work with the assistance of modern computing power. You might know Cosma Shalizi from his excellent essay "Cognitive Democracy," which argues that coalitions of people who are more diverse (in all senses) tend to make better decisions.