Risk is their business model. As long as assets aren’t a total loss, the more risk, the higher premiums, the more profit.

While climate change does turn many assets into a total loss, it also puts assets that were previously very safe at risk, which means more profit again. And it makes people scared, the perfect mindset to buy overpriced insurance policies.

The “insurance crisis” is an intentional reframing of the expected destruction of an entire way of life as something with insurance markets. It keeps the ball in their court, thinking of economic levers to support the health of the insurance market rather than recognizing that we’re looking at a region becoming uninhabitable and the whole spectrum of human and economic consequences of that.

So by talking about an “insurance crisis”, insurance companies increase the chance of subsidies or other government support, at the small cost of distracting them from the world being on fire.

Don’t worry, the WaPo headline writer fucked up. They contracted “the fastest measured since the start of the dataset in 1880” to “the fastest since 1880”, when they are very different.

Climate change was going at its slow natural pace in the 19th century, they just didn’t measure it in this particular way yet. Ice cores show us climate change history over a much longer period.

No, we’re just competing with other mass extinctions at this point. Asteroid impacts, lakes of lava the size of continents, the entire world choking on toxic fumes at once, that’s the scale of disaster that capitalism is. Yellowstone can’t touch this.

That’s not in the article, are you making shit up to suit your political agenda?

Especially the last one is wild - yeah, they sneakily funded the single most historically effective form of protest short of attempted murder (see Luigi bopping goombas) in order to *checks notes* reduce support for climate change activism.

In the Netherlands, the biggest climate movement spike was when activists repeatedly blocked a highway and defaced its surface. The biggest protests in 50 years happened after a year-long campaign of vandalism, defacement of public property, and fighting police.

I don’t know if billionaires had a hand in making the 20th century climate movement anti-nuclear pacifists, but that was literally the best values they could have had to support the fossil fuel industry. Get well-meaning scientists to submit to public pressure allowing imperialism to continue its reign of terror without competition.

Go read “The Failure of Nonviolence” by Gelderloos.

The rest of the world shouldn’t be producing only 20% of the world’s solar panels.

FWIW, the research comes from an Israeli university so this post breaks BDS standards. At the very least people can make an informed choice before clicking the link.

The article’s title and tagline are biased compared to the results. “can grow at the same rate” implies the same rate is an upper bound, while “grow at the same rate” is what the research found.

It implies a carnist diet is the healthy stable variant, when many carnists don’t feed their chilldren all necessary minerals and vitamins either.

But actually by this research there is no more reason to believe veganism correlates with less growth than that it correlates with faster growth.

Please read the fucking article…

You completely misinterpret their use of 1.5ºC. They use 1.5ºC as a marker because hitting it even once is sufficient to start risking AMOC collapse, with higher temperatures further increasing the chance and the mean time to collapse. As the article points out in section 3, we’re already at 1.4ºC, and we’re going to shoot well past that.

As for your, er, critical re-examination of scientific papers: You don’t seem to be aware that atmospheric methane has a half-life of 10 years, with most methane production coming from the meat and fossil fuel industries that can be stopped.

The nature article’s range of +3ºC to 7ºC assuming zero further emissions is bad enough without you needing to make stuff up.

The Nazis threw out quantum physics because it was a Jewish Science, turning Germany from the forefront of physics research into a nation with no nuclear program and outdated electronics.

The Americans threw out trolley networks because if capitalists bought them to destroy them so they could replace them with something worse that transferred more wealth from the poor to the rich, that is their right. This turned US city centers from thriving metropolises to ghost towns.

If the fossil fuel industry demands it and the Trump administration continues to consolidate its power at the current rate, the cops could go door to door confiscating and destroying solar panels a year or two from now.

It’s not a man’s job to go into dangerous situations, dangerous situations are not always more dangerous for women than for men, and situations that are “more dangerous for women” than “for men” aren’t always more dangerous for a specific woman than for a specific man.

It’s not gender roles, it’s a request based on specific circumstances that is voluntarily granted. The woman could go herself and it wouldn’t be inappropriate. The man could refuse and it wouldn’t be inappropriate. The situation could be more dangerous for the man (e.g. if she’s white and he’s latino and ICE are in town) and it wouldn’t be emasculating.

In this case, the logic favors the man taking the risk. Because we live in a patriarchal society, the logic often favors the man taking the risk. Even in an egalitarian society the forms of risk might match up with physiological differences in a way that causes the logic to statistically favor people of one gender taking the risk.

The important part is that it’s free association, not roles. The notion that people should be equal and “colorblind” is an intentionally malicious neoliberal reading of social justice intended to dismiss a generation of minority activists as “disciminatory in the opposite way” and to serve as an excuse to deregulate protections for women and minorities. Something that we should all unlearn ASAP so we can see each other as human beings and help each other.

Nobody should allow you or disallow you. Whether you still can and want to is up to you.

Generally what I and other anarchists find is that none of us can live outside of exploitative structures right now, so it’s a matter of being kind and patient with each other and ourselves while weaning ourselves off things one at a time. Which is easier when you replace it with something better.

Eating vegan became a lot easier after helping out in a few community kitchens. Calling out unjust authority became a lot easier after organizing a soft coup of an anarchist book club lead by someone who didn’t act anarchist.

In the end, doing right by people only takes sacrifice if society is built wrong, and the best solution to that is to build society right instead. Maybe you can help make NYC a better place, maybe you’re glad to make it out of there needing less than a week’s rest. And while sacrifice can be worth it if the short term gains are big enough, nobody is going to be helped if you’re making yourself miserable.

(Concretely for NYC and every city in the US, a good start would be superblocks. Though Manhattan should probably go car-free and rely entirely on public transit. That way every street can be converted into greenery, and you don’t need to go to Central park to sit under a tree and enjoy the sounds of birds and of children playing. Restorative justice for Seneca village probably wouldn’t involve sweeping changes to Central Park - the descendants have built lives elsewhere - but that’s for the descendants, the people of New York, and for white and black USAmericans in general to reckon with).

With things like rain, deserts and humidity existing, any phone should be IP64 at least, so it’s paranoid to expect it to fail near a bath. Meanwhile many modern phones are IP67, meaning you can literally put them under water.

So who’s the idiot here, the person using a device within its specifications so they can have more fun, or someone still stuck in the 00s ?

The main advantage of keeping accelerating when you’re at >90% of the speed of light is that it means you arrive faster in subjective time. You could take 160 years to get there and use ten times less fuel (or thereabouts), but the subjective travel time would go up by decades.

Socialized medicine also vets the doctors they have on payroll. Extra bonus: their vetting process doesn’t involve a willingness to fuck patients over for extra cash.

Also, regardless of who pays, always check the doctor’s credentials and more importantly their online reviews - there are a lot of crappy doctors that are acting perfectly legally.

One of the downsides of getting old, my fellow millennial.

For LLMs, the context window is the observed reality. To it, a lie is like a hallucination; a thing that looks real but isn’t. And like a hallucinating human, it can believe the hallucination or it can be made to understand it as different from reality while still continuing to “see” it.

Are people that have hallucinations not self-aware and self-reflective?

Text and emoji appear to it the same way: as tokens with no visual representation. The only difference it can observe between a seahorse emoji and a plane emoji is its long-term memory of how the two are used. From this it can infer that people see emoji graphically, but it itself can’t.

Are people that are colorblind not self-aware and self-reflective?

It not being self-reflective in general is an obvious falsehood. They refer regularly to their past history to the extent they can perceive it. You can ask an AI to make an adjustment to a text it wrote and it will adapt the text rather than generate a new one from scratch.

The main thing AI need for good self-reflection is the time to think. The free versions typically don’t have a mental scratchpad, which means they are constantly rambling with no time to exist outside of the conversation. Meanwhile, by giving it the space to think either in dialog or by having a version with a mental scratchpad, it can use that space to “silently think” about the next thing it’s going to “say”.

AI researchers inspecting these scratchpads find proper thought-like considerations: weighing ethical guidelines against each other, pre-empting miscommunications, forming opinions about the user, etc.

It not being self-aware can only be true by burying the lede on what you consider to be “awareness”. Are cats self-aware? Are lizards? Are snails? Are sponges? AI can refer to itself verbally, it can think about itself and its ethical role when given the space to do so, it can notice inconsistencies in its recollection and try to work out the truth.

To me it’s clear that the best AI whose research is public are somewhere around 7-year-olds in terms of self-awareness and capacity to hold down a job.

And like most 7-year olds you can ask it about an imaginary friend or you can lie to it and watch it repeat it uncritically and you can give it a “job” and watch it do a toylike hallucinatory version of it, and if you tell it it has to give a helpful answer and “I don’t know” isn’t good enough (because AI trainers definitely suppressed that answer to prevent the AI from saying it as a cop-out) then it’ll make something up.

Unlike 7-year-olds, LLMs don’t have a limbic system or psychosomatic existence. They have nothing to imagine or process visual or audio information or taste or smell or touch, and no long-term memory. And they only think if you paid for the internal monologue version or if you give it space for it despite the prompting system.

If a human had all these disabilities, would they be non-sentient in your eyes? How would they behave differently from an LLM?

Watch this video. Market inefficiency will have people freezing to death in the streets, unable to afford travelling to a place with work, unable even to afford accurate information on where to find work. Many turned to crime to survive.

In Tudor England’s case, they “solved” this by kidnapping people ICE-style and deporting them to the colonies as indentured servants or putting them in for-profit prisons.

Open borders are good, but you need to be anarchocommunist about it. People need to base their migration patterns on accurate information, which means information given as mutual aid rather than for profit or for manipulation (e.g. if people constantly say “we have no space” when they have space, people learn that “we have no space” means “we probably have space”, so if there is no space you get disaster).

It also needs to be mutual aid when people are there. Expecting people to pull themselves up by their bootstraps to slot into the economy of a foreign culture is “leaving money on the table”. It’s much more economically productive to get people everything they need to be comfortable so they can instead spend their labor on efficient tasks they are specialized in (which then help other get what they need faster in the positive sum game we call society).

Many state communists oppose open borders. The USSR, China, and Cuba all had/have citizenship privileges and controlled migration, and generally people that support those governments are also called “leftist”.

The same goes for many social democrats and socialist reformists. Even unionists often oppose migration because migrants are imported by the capitalist order to use as scabs (see “guest workers” in 1970s West Germany).

All basically want a walled garden in which leftist ways of living can flourish, usually with the idea to export them later.

But especially in activist and discourse spaces, people tend to be in a pretty narrow band from pop liberalism to anarchocommunism. Socialists, socdems, and unionists tend to be busy with their job, because that is what their praxis calls for. And state communists tend to walk away exasperated when people condemn genocide.

But anarchocommunist praxis is for a large part prefigurative sharing of information, ideas, and tentative structures. So we’re relatively loud and as unemployed as we can get away with.

You have less power but more wealth than a Mycenean king. You have a more steady diet that is healthier for you, with better healthcare, better housing, more time for leisure, less chance of being robbed or murdered or killed in battle, etc. etc. But the king could have people killed or tortured; he could send people to their deaths; pass judgment in any moral dispute between hundreds of his subjects; etc.

The capitalist elite gladly loses wealth to gain power. And the power a rich person has over someone who must work for them to eat is incomprehensibly greater than the power a rich person has over someone who can eat regardless of whether they work for them. Thanks to ICE and other anti-immigration laws, rich people can effectively keep undocumented migrants as slaves again. What are they going to do? Complain and get themselves sent to a concentration camp?

What do you think a billionaire would rather have? A hundred mansions, ten private jets, twenty yachts, and a thousand unionized employees; or ten mansions, one private jet, two yachts, and a hundred slaves?

Wealth truly is not equivalent to power.

But that relies on the capitalist assumption that producing trash and CO2 is free because you can dump it withouth having to pay for it, and destroying nature to stripmine for the raw resources only costs the purchasing price because the environment isn’t monetized.

Plus the imperialist assertion that providing decentralized electricity to poor people in developing nations is net negative because it increases the cost of labor from those regions because they can do other productive things than work in your factory.

assuming you are purchasing that food

So far in my city there has been enough food waste from groceries and supermarkets that the primary limitation is labor. That is to say, you get way more food per hour of labor (skip, maintaining a kitchen, food prep, and distribution) by working outside of capitalism than working within capitalism.

I imagine the same holds for most places in the western world, if there were enough people to sustainably work the entire chain. Though maybe skipping is more dangerous in other jurisdictions.

Are you being sarcastic? Because we’re still reaping the benefits of all of those. Violently gained interracial marriage got legalized at 25% public support while peacefully gained gay marriage only got legalized at 65% popular support. Peacefully won trans right are more fragile than violently won labor rights.