Old Fucking Punk @lwriemen@librem.one

#Road-building spree will derail #UK’s net zero targets, warn campaigners | #Environment | The Guardian

The #Road and #MotorVehicle #lobby is too powerful.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/apr/12/road-building-spree-will-derail-uks-net-zero-targets-warn-campaigners

#Pollution #GlobalWarming #ClimateChange #Congestion #Traffic #Transport

Hard to pick the most reprehensible company in the tech industry (other than the spyware outfits, like NSO, that should be burned to the ground on general principle).

But Clearview AI -- which has scraped billions of photos and sold them to police who hold the Constitution in contempt -- deserves a special dishonorable mention: https://www.businessinsider.com/clearview-scraped-30-billion-images-facebook-police-facial-recogntion-database-2023-4

Our report on Kristina Karamo, the new chair of the Michigan GOP, who has accused music stars like Beyoncé, Jay-Z, Cardi B, Ariana Grande and Billie Eilish of being tools of Satan. https://www.cnn.com/2023/04/11/politics/kfile-michigan-gop-chair-kristina-karamo-comments/index.html

Insurance (CVS): "We only cover medication bought at CVS pharmacies."

Pharmacy (CVS): "We're out of that medication. It's a nationwide shortage."

Insurance (CVS): "Ask your doctor about a different medication."

Me: "Here is a prescription from my doctor for a different medication."

Insurance: "We don't cover that medication because your regular medication is cheaper."

Unsurprisingly, #HealthInsurance working as intended to steal money from me in exchange for nothing. #ADHD

The extremist right, which now totally controls the Republican Party, is on the offensive everywhere -- curbing women's healthcare, censoring books, banning dissent, encouraging violence, flouting racism, rigging the election system, and ultimately threatening democracy.

Journalism is covering all of this piecemeal -- noting the individual brush fires but never, ever warning the public that the entire forest is ablaze.

Journalistic business as usual is malpractice.

And time is short.

Not content with banning ideas they fear from school and public libraries, the extremist right (aka Republican Party) is now looks to kill the libraries. See this from ever-more-retrograde Missouri: https://heartlandsignal.com/2023/04/11/missouri-house-republicans-vote-to-defund-libraries/#:~:text=Missouri%20House%20Republicans%20voted%20to,the%20GOP%2Dcontrolled%20state%20Senate

EFF's @jgkelley talks with Politico about Utah's law to restrict access to social media for minors and require parental monitoring: "Parents don’t need to be listening over the shoulder for every conversation that a young person has." https://www.politico.com/news/2023/04/11/social-media-privacy-parents-kids-00091400

Like protesters, journalists write lawyers’ numbers on their arms not because they intend to commit crimes but because they know they may be wrongly arrested. Letting prosecutors infer criminality from this common practice would reward cops’ bad behavior. https://freedom.press/news/reject-unconstitutional-efforts-to-criminalize-legal-support-numbers/

‘The Saint’ leaves Italian town after case opened into statue’s ‘tears of blood’ - https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/apr/11/the-saint-leaves-italian-town-after-case-opened-into-statues-tears-of-blood "blood stains on statue of Virgin Mary come from a pig". no, really? I shocked, shocked...

Let's be real: none of us authors could even get away with naming a shady billionaire "Harlan Crow," much less him tampering with elections, building a Garden of Evil, and owning Hitler's teapot.

Basically:

🔹 AI doesn't reliably give useful results, but even if it did
🔹 AI rampantly perpetuates existing harms, but even if it didn't
🔹 AI proponents are not being honest or acting in good faith, but even if they were
🔹 People don't understand the limits of LLMs or how they work, but even if they did
🔹 AI cannot maintain a complex system because it's fundamentally a task of understanding the system, but even if it could

Humans still need opportunity to learn how to make sense of those systems, and we do that by making them. Giving all the work that's most conducive to learning to a computer is selling out our futures. Even if there was some present benefit, which I'm not convinced there is.

https://jenniferplusplus.com/losing-the-imitation-game/

@xor The owners of Uline are massive funders of the right wing ideologues https://refuseuline.com/

Which best describes how you feel when a stranger "favorites" one of your toots?

(boosts welcome)

For anyone considering these #BigTech tools for their next online #conference consider that there's a better option:

Respect the #privacy of your participants, avoid the #SurveillanceCapitalism and help break the dominance of monopolist tech giants. Go #FOSS all the way. There's great tools out there to get you going.

Learn how the #Fedora Design Team discovered this first-hand by hosting the very first #CreativeFreedomSummit in January 2023 🎉

https://blog.linuxgrrl.com/2023/04/10/run-an-open-source-powered-virtual-conference

(thx @indieterminacy)

Now we're talking...

"#Tennessee House Speaker Cameron Sexton (R) said on Monday that he could not stop two expelled representatives from being reappointed.

In a statement, a spokesperson for Sexton said that the speaker would not stand in the way of the reappointment of Democratic Reps. Justin #Pearson and Justin #Jones. Both were expelled after they used a bullhorn on the House floor to call for gun safety laws." https://www.rawstory.com/cameron-sexton-justin-pearson-justin-jones/

The media, at least those that are even bothering to cover it, are truly missing the forest for the trees. The disaster of the bird site is not its garbage performance and functionality “clunkiness.” It’s that is a goddamned misinformation fascist propaganda engine. That’s it. That’s the story. I’ve been trying to get journalists to cover it. Guess I have to do it myself.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/07/technology/elon-musk-twitter-changes.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

A Facebook post announces "the completion of our groundbreaking book, written in just 24 hours by ChatGPT-4...this innovative collaboration has resulted in a comprehensive exploration of data privacy, security, and the future of technology."

Two questions (among many):

1) How much of this is drawn directly from other published works or slightly modified?

2) Since there's obviously no time for fact-checking, how much of it is wrong?

‘Headed off the charts’: world’s #ocean #SurfaceTemperature hits record high | Oceans | The Guardian

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/apr/08/headed-off-the-charts-worlds-ocean-surface-temperature-hits-record-high

#Environment #GlobalWarming #ClimateChange #Biodiversity #Ecology

Water firms threatened to hike bills if made to clean up sewage in rivers - https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/water-companies-sewage-pollution-rivers-customers-pay/ keeping rivers and seas clean is part of their job; if they can't do it without blackmail, they should be renationalised...