Okay kids, here’s a very shallow dive into the conspiracy theories about 11 missing or deceased scientists (and their support staff), all of whom reportedly had high level clearances and worked on vaguely related projects.
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This is precisely how the people who say Ai is useful if you use it right expect everyone to use it. Not that they actually do themselves.
It's a bit like Wikipedia - everyone who "knows how to use it" says you should use it as a starting point to point you to sources. But no one actually does that
Why do the Japanese like their buns askew (2026)
If you want a good example of actually existing PC run amok, think of all the ways the political class avoids the term "racist."
If I'm early, a long line at security is a time to people-watch or get lost in my own thoughts. If I'm running late, a long line at security is a cause for anxiety.
But for the most part, didn't the invention of the washing machine mean that laundresses were out of a job, and working class people now had to fold their own laundry?
Homesteaders on the prairie were never more than a tiny proportion of the population.
A couple points on this manifesto, apart from the racial superiority subtext others noted.
Palantir is a company built on public contracts, they bill the state billions to surveil and target the state's population. The manifesto exists to justify their demand for even more.
/1
Just finished the audiobook, and I'd say it lives up to the hype.
anyone who knew someone with pancreatic cancer knows how big of a deal this is
The retreat into abstraction is always a tell.
and the local officials greenlight the project anyway.
Trust in government. In Michigan the scars of the Flint Water Crisis are still apparent. Datacentres seem to be proof of a rigged system where politicians only answer to the rich.
A few security jobs aren't likely to change that.
People aren't stupid. They know they're being fucked over. A few security jobs aren't likely to change that.
You have a situation where local officials are saying "investment = jobs". You have public meetings where you'll get 200 people speaking against, 3 people speaking in favour...
- like the datacentre's wells that will compete with their own use of well water, on their rural road network that will be overwhelmed by construction vehicles, and deal with the noise, traffic and dust from construction.
And they know the benefits will come to people much wealthier than they are.
not in Ann Arbor, or in Washtenaw County, or in the city of Ypsilanti, but in Ypsilanti Township. They aren't required to get permission from local government but they still pick the lowest-income, most African American local government unit.
They will deal with the demands on their infrastructure
This year will prob be a historically strong El Niño, a terrible fire season in the US. The public hides their head in the sand most of the time, but I imagine 2026 will be a year they remember it exists.
There's also the environmental justice angle. The Univ of Michigan is building a datacentre...
Why build natural gas when solar and wind power is cheaper?
Utilities don't make money on power delivery - their profit comes from building power plants and recovering their costs, plus a guaranteed profit, from consumers.
So people who care about climate change are likely to care.
Whose best interests do you really expect them to act in - those of consumers, or those of their shareholders?
And beyond that, of course, some people still care about climate change. Sure, they promised small nuclear reactors, but they're building natural gas plants. Why?
The deals that have the datacentre cover the full cost of the upgrade are 20-30 year agreements. If the facility goes out of business sooner, the ratepayers are left holding the bag.
And the agreements aren't binding on the utilities - local law is. "Trust me bro" from the utilities isn't great
I'm dubious about that. People want jobs that pay, not minimum wage jobs with no future.
The arguments I've heard against datacentres tend to focus on water and electricity consumption and the cost associated with upgrading infrastructure. The cost of new generation capacity is borne by customers.
My fear of learning that might be true is paralysing, but if 2028 is anything like the last 12 months, she’d win easily.
But whoever the candidate is, the Dems need to overcome ther problems with disinfo (and their tendency to listen to the consultant class).
I’m relieved, but also I suspect there are other deaths that should have been considered homicide.
Still can’t get on board with “misinformation for good”.
Lily of the Valley is an invasive species in many parts of the US, so I’d recommend looking into that before planting it. It can do quite a lot of damage in native habitat.
Also depending where you are (quick search suggests TX) I’m not sure how good they’ll look in the summer heat.
Definitely popular deer food.
I’d feel differently about hostas if they were natives, but I’m just not a fan of lots of hostas. A patch of them is ok if they’re offset by vegetation with a very different form, but generally speaking I don’t see them worth it.
Much better to use the space for natives (/rant)
All right, this piece has triggered me so I have to yell a bit (though this is bluesky, so I realize I'm just preaching at the choir):
Who's this "James Palmer" they're talking about? Clearly your first name is "Beijing". It's on the internet, it must be true.
It's pretty well accepted by people who actually study human evolution, but "many scientists" isn't wrong (though as a Wikipedian I must tag it was {{weasel words}})
And while paleo stuff is extremist, it seems broadly similar to what undergird of a lot of nutritional and medical science.
I think celiac is in the article because Reich talked about it as one of the major findings of the study.
By comparing the estimated age of the mutation that contributed each selected allele to the extrapolated time to reach fixation given its estimated s value, we find that about one-third of the favoured mutations are ancestral alleles and another one-third are derived alleles with true ages an order of magnitude older than the expected sweep age, indicating that selection coefficients must have shifted over time at these variants (Fig. 2c). The remaining up to one-third of the signals that we detect are consistent with classic sweeps where the newly arising variants have been under consistent positive selection since they arose (but they arose recently enough that the sweeps are not complete).
They are explicit in the discussion. Since HLA-DQB1 starts at 0, it's one of the genes that "have been under consistent positive selection since they arose"
And they go on to say "We ruled out the possibility that our results are reflecting not directional selection but stabilizing selection"