Purely for education and artistic purposes.

A sort of introduction the politics of data centers as the material bodies of "the cloud."

The European Central Bank (ECB) is the central bank of the European Union countries which have adopted the euro. Our main task is to maintain price stability in the euro area and so preserve the purchasing power of the single currency.

...

Euro area households, which are increasingly channelling funds into low-cost ETFs, have around €440 billion of exposures to US technology equities without necessarily being aware of the associated concentration risk. Insurance companies and pension funds also hold significant exposures to the Mag7.

404media:

The past, present, and future of deepfakes, as seen by the world’s leading expert on synthetic media.
I think we’re pretty good at telling the difference between an AI generated image and a real photograph, but when I need help I call Hany Farid.

source

The Government™ made an ad about Ai Data Centres, and it’s surprisingly honest and informative.

The segment starts around minute 8.

Some good pointers for discourse, arguments and what to watch out for.

Prof Gio | Giordano Scarciotti:

Why does Europe have so little air conditioning compared with the United States? With European heatwaves becoming more intense and around 90% of US homes using air conditioning compared with roughly 20% in Europe, this video explores the real reasons behind Europe’s low AC adoption: from historically milder summers, traditional building design, passive cooling and high electricity prices to renting and changing climate conditions. I also examine what widespread air-conditioning adoption could mean for Europe’s electricity grid, including peak demand, the UK’s future cooling scenarios, and how solar power could help meet growing cooling demand. Finally, I look at the increasingly political debate over air conditioning in Europe and unpack the rhetoric behind claims that environmentalists and climate policies are responsible, including scapegoating, causal oversimplification, the Motte-and-Bailey fallacy, adaptation-washing and the false dilemma between protecting people from extreme heat and tackling climate change.

00:00 - Introduction: Europe's Air Conditioning Gap

01:18 - The Engineering Problem & Architectural History

04:16 - The Politics and Culture War of Cooling

06:01 - What Happens to the Power Grid?

07:51 - The Overlap with Solar Energy

09:45 - Analyzing the Rhetorical Techniques

13:06 - Conclusion

(short interview)

During Thursday's live show, we shared a quote from author Naomi Klein that we later discovered was AI-generated. Klein has written about the fake quote and on her Substack, and joins Democracy Now! to discuss the growing difficulty of verifying oline information.

"These companies are creating digital doppelgangers of us, trying to monetize our identities," says Klein. "One wonders how we're ever going to get out of this house of mirrors unless companies are forced to label AI-generated work."

Alexandra Fasulo says she’s protecting farms and wildlife. Her campaign is becoming a blueprint for the fossil fuel right.

Few people understand language quite like today's guest. Emily M. Bender is a Professor of Computational Linguistics at the University of Washington.

She's also the person who coined the term 'Stochastic Parrots' in the now infamous paper that saw Google fire its Ethical AI lead; and the co-author of The AI Con, a book which is unflinching in its criticism of both AI boosterism and doomerism (in fact she objects to the term AI).

Chapters

00:00 Introduction to AI and Linguistics

02:54 Understanding Computational Linguistics

05:47 The Stochastic Parrots Paper

08:32 The Implications of AI Terminology

10:57 Skepticism Towards AI Claims

12:58 The Illusion of Intelligence in AI

15:55 The Dangers of AI in Professional Settings

18:33 Democratization and Distrust in AI Development

28:02 Doomers vs. Boosters: The AI Narrative

32:57 Skepticism in AI: A Personal Journey

36:30 The Rapid Evolution of AI: Are We Outdated?

40:13 The Role of Software Engineering in AI

48:14 Automation vs. Human Expertise: A Balancing Act

53:02 Geopolitical Narratives: The AI Arms Race

56:33 The Future of AI: Regulation and Ethical Use

57:44 Pride in Expertise: Understanding Our Value

Post on YouTube.

He's a Sci-Fi writer and fan.

00:00:00 Intro

00:02:34 Background – EU lawmaking, corporate capture and deregulation

00:06:16 Permission to Pollute: What's happening and why does it matter?

00:14:33 How did we get here?

00:19:30 Lessons from around Europe

00:20:10 Data centres in Ireland

00:30:13 Mining in Sweden

00:39:32 Planned CO2 pipelines in Germany and Italy

00:49:17 Implications and how to resist?

Researchers and campaigners from Corporate Europe Observatory Rachel Tansey, Bram Vranken and Pascoe Sabido will discuss what's at stake from sweeping changes to EU permitting rules for industrial projects, in response to lobbying from Big Tech, fossil fuel and mining companies.

They address how it will affect communities resisting polluting and badly planned infrastructure; lessons from around Europe (data centres in Ireland, mining in Sweden, CO2 pipelines in Germany and Italy); and how to resist this attack on hard-won social and environmental protections, under the guise of corporate 'competitiveness'.

This article offers a case study of the Russian-American pro-family organisation the World Congress of Families, explaining its emergence, strategies, and religious and political agenda from 1995 until 2019. The article adds to a growing body of research that sheds light on transnational networks of conservative and right-wing political and civil society actors. It zooms in on Russian pro-family activists as connected to such networks and thereby takes an innovative perspective on the Russian conservative turn as part of a global phenomenon. The article also makes the argument that a specific Russian Christian Right movement, comparable to and linked with the American Christian Right and conservative Christian groups in Europe, is taking shape in Russia.

Article was published in 2019.

Leo-linked operatives were among a who's who of the international right that gathered for the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (ARC) conference in June.

Leo-linked operatives were among a who's who of the international right that gathered for the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (ARC) conference in June.

Alarms are ringing across the world as reports suggest there is a 90% chance of El Niño developing, with some models even warning of a possible Super El Niño if current trends continue. For India, this is not just a weather event. It could stress every part of an already fragile system, from agriculture and water supply to electricity, food prices, public health, and livelihoods. But this is not a moment for panic. It is a moment for preparation. The urgency of El Niño gives us a rare opportunity to look closely at our weakest points, strengthen our infrastructure, and build resilience not just for the months ahead, but for every climate shock India will face in the future.

The Government™ has made an ad about Palantir, and it's surprsingly honest and informative.

Record breaking June temperatures have been deadly in Europe as the mercury soared past 40 degrees in several locations. The heat was hard to handle in Paris, London and Berlin, but our expert says we need to get used to it. But, how fast can we adapt to a scorching new-normal?

Abstract: Previous attribution studies of heat-related excess mortality have given limited attention to temporal trends in vulnerability and their non-climatic drivers. Here, we address this gap by combining counterfactual temperature data derived from multidecadal reanalysis series with time-varying warm-season temperature-mortality associations for the 15 most populous cities in Germany over 1993-2022. We find that declining vulnerability, associated with improvements in life expectancy, has led to decreasing trends in heat-related excess mortality in most cities despite summer warming. In contrast, if life expectancies had not improved, climate change would have induced increasing trends in the heat-related death burden. The growing anthropogenic fingerprint also emerges in the relative proportion of heat-related excess mortality attributable to climate change, which increased by 5.6% per decade (95% confidence interval: 2.6%, 8.6%), averaging 53.6 % (49.8%, 58.9%) across the study period. Our results underline the importance of accounting for evolving vulnerability when attributing human health outcomes to climate change.

Conclusion paragraph:

our study suggests that declining risks of heat-related mortality in the 15 most populous cities of Germany, associated with improvements in life expectancies, have so far overcompensated the increased heat exposure due to climate change. As a result, temporal trends in heat-related excess mortality were negative from 1993 to 2022. However, given the intense regional warming expected under current greenhouse gas emission trajectories, the trend may flip sign in the coming years. Strong efforts in adaptation, such as through heat-health action plans, urban greening, and the expansion of residential air conditioning, might lower the heat vulnerability of the population to keep up with the pace of increasing temperatures, which ultimately will depend on the stringency of mitigation undertaken.