I did see Quiggin post here the other day. Felt obliged look at Mastodon immediately to check it was still up.
12.03.2026 08:01
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I did see Quiggin post here the other day. Felt obliged look at Mastodon immediately to check it was still up.
In Mastodon’s defence, John Quiggin, Cory Doctorow and Timnit Gebru post over there.
Every billionaire is a policy failure vol. umpteen thousand and twelve
"Sunlight travels 93 million miles to reach the earth. None of them through the Strait of Hormuz."
—Bill McKibben
Iran’s people were facing a horrible shortage of water before the war began. If we are destroying desalination plants and setting fire to Teheran we are committing unfathomable crimes.
My works are publicly available because I believe in science and research for the public good. And because I am required to publish them in order to keep my job. In no way does that mean I consented to the building of a machine that impersonates me. More anti-human trash every single day.
Morally indefensible and unacceptable.
the epidemic of men launching podcasts about nothing has gotten out of control
to combat this I am launching a podcast WITH A WOMAN (veteran climate journalist Tracy Wholf) to talk about stuff that actually matters (the planet being destroyed by the worst people alive)
Find subscribe links here:
Nothing gives me more energy than basking in the work of the REAL ONES who are staying focused on fossil fuels and climate
extremely glorious news on that front: @emorwee.bsky.social is teaming up w/ former CBS climate journo Tracy Wholf for a new video podcast -->>>
This is amazing.
www.getyourfuckingmoneyback.com
Tax billionaires out of existence.
If you work with ppl who are sensitive to noise or in situations where a scare might be dangerous: the National Emergency Management Agency will be testing the Commonwealth AusAlert emergency warning system on July 27th at 2pm.
Put it in your calendar now with a warning reminder ten minutes prior
Meta Exec Learns the Hard Way That AI Can Just Delete Your Stuff https://gizmodo.com/meta-exec-learns-the-hard-way-that-ai-can-just-delete-your-stuff-2000725450
I know we in Uni IT aren't always the friendliest folks but please PLEASE if you are a student or faculty member, put in an ticket pointing out this service to the IT security team. This service amounts to a serious login credentials security risk to any individual who signs up.
Karen has no criminal record. She is a grandmother who spent eight years working as an admin assistant at a primary school before her retirement. “I don’t even have parking tickets in the background anywhere,” she says. “I am not a dangerous criminal. I didn’t enter the country illegally and I had everything I needed to be there.” So why did ICE detain her, and keep her locked up for so long? A possible answer began to emerge over the weeks she was incarcerated. As Karen got to know the guards at the Northwest ICE Processing Center where she was held, she kept hearing the same thing from them: that ICE officers are paid a bonus every time they detain someone. “Individual ICE agents get money per head that they detain – the guards told me that,” Karen says.
Border Patrol is operating as bounty hunters.
Agents are apparently getting paid for each person they put in detention. Even if those people are grandmothers traveling on valid tourist visas.
www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026...
One of the most important details in all of transportation and climate policy.
The other day I saw a video of an historian (maybe?) saying he didn’t understand why billionaires are opposed to being taxed more because “taxation is the compromise.” And that last ~500 years teaches us what happens when that compromise is not struck.
Can’t stop thinking about it.
"When banks make big profits media organisations love to cheer them on as though there are no losers from some of the biggest corporations in Australia making ever more money.
But profits don’t come from thin air, they come from customers: they come from you."
thepoint.com.au/opinions/260...
![Wikipedia entry for dinkus
In typography, a dinkus is a typographic device or convention that typically consists of three spaced asterisks or bullet symbols in a horizontal row, e.g. ∗ ∗ ∗ or • • • . The device has a variety of uses, and it usually denotes an intentional omission or a logical "break" of varying degree in a written work. This latter use is similar to a subsection, and it indicates that the subsequent text should be re-contextualized. Such a dinkus typically appears centrally aligned on a line of its own with vertical spacing before and after the device. The dinkus has been in use in various forms since c. 1850.[1][2] Historically, the dinkus was often represented as an asterism, ⁂, though this has fallen out of favor and is now nearly obsolete.](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:2zcfjzyocp6kapg6jc4eacok/bafkreiat5pvuu2mdh5bauxt7uxlo4rdf6bue3exmrmskgi5aycbemv5dyq)
Wikipedia entry for dinkus In typography, a dinkus is a typographic device or convention that typically consists of three spaced asterisks or bullet symbols in a horizontal row, e.g. ∗ ∗ ∗ or • • • . The device has a variety of uses, and it usually denotes an intentional omission or a logical "break" of varying degree in a written work. This latter use is similar to a subsection, and it indicates that the subsequent text should be re-contextualized. Such a dinkus typically appears centrally aligned on a line of its own with vertical spacing before and after the device. The dinkus has been in use in various forms since c. 1850.[1][2] Historically, the dinkus was often represented as an asterism, ⁂, though this has fallen out of favor and is now nearly obsolete.
perennial reminder that this typographic thing:
* * *
is called a "dinkus"
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dinkus
Everybody’s talking about the destruction of consumer electronics and that’s bad, but basically everything in modern life has a computer in it. Hospitals, airports, transportation, shipping, medical devices, farm equipment, and point of sale terminals had a good run
People talk about this stuff in terms of how much it'll suck for gaming and I hate to inform you how many MRI machines, X-Rays, all sorts of other vital machinery are just a Windows IoT Edition PC in a beige plastic box with a big magnet/accelerator/whatever attached.
This is completely correct other than the infrastructure not existing. I think people need to realize WHY this is happening is because, for example, NVIDIA sells GB200 NVL72s (racks of 72 GPUs) with *17TB of RAM* and likely over 500TB of storage.
The AI bubble RAM crisis is caused for non-existent problems by non-existent money for a non-existent infrastructure to meet non-existent demand to make non-existent business and will utterly destroy real business based on real demand and real infrastructure built with real money for real problems.
The AI bros (who clearly don't understand AI) in the comments are hilarious. "ask stupid questions, get stupid answers". LLMs have no concept of how intelligent a question is, and they certainly were not designed to deliberately give stupid responses if they deem your question too stupid. 1/?
Franzi Schimmer captured this Grizzly bear in Brooks Falls, Alaska just floating along, tippy-tapping down the river, browsing the salmon.
Prior to hibernation, up to 40% of a bear's body mass is fat, which is less dense than water (~0.9 g/cm^2), so the murder-monster is also a floaty-boaty.
Picture of a green cargo ship with the headline "China starts sea trials for largest electric powered containership"
You can't prove received wisdom wrong if you don't try... and you've got to give China credit for not being afraid to try. A step on the way to serious reduction of shipping emissions by 2050? Or an expensive experiment with niche coastal uses? Time will tell!
maritime-executive.com/article/chin...
M&Ms CEO: 'most, if not all' meals can be replaced by M&Ms within 12-18 months
Politics has always driven everything in the economy. What you mean is different politics now. The idea that there was some golden age in which geopolitics, domestic politics, etc. didn't drive exchange rates, trade, & economic policy is a fantasy. Everything is political economy & always has been.
