From Steven Donziger @sdonziger.bsky.social
Musk’s $277 million “investment” in the Trump campaign allowed him to ingratiate himself to the inner circle. His net worth has since risen $170 billion to $455 billion — a roughly 600x rate of return.
It's not about efficiency.
It's about the Holy Grail of the Oligarchs: Government with no other purpose than to funnel money from taxpayers to private corporations.
Back in 2016, I posted this graph of global temperature by year. at that time 2016 was by far the warmest year ever. I thought I'd post again, showing the graph updated for the present. What seemed so impressively hot in 2016 has been blown away by recent years. The Earth just keeps getting hotter and hotter... Two graphs showing the yearly temperatures overlaid, and the most recent are the warmest.
From Jim Means on Fazebuk.
I've been using Linux on my home computers since 1993. I use it because I trust the community that creates and maintains it more than I trust any corporation. Meta seems to think talking about it is a security threat. Or something.
www.notebookcheck.net/Facebook-cen...
The book of Mozilla is one of the great software easter eggs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Book_of_Mozilla
Merry Christmas. Have an easter egg on me.
Righteous rant from Rebecca
youtu.be/A1WFmsH30dg
archive.org is the Web's history book. Aka the Wayback Machine. It was attacked the same way last month and ongoing.
gizmodo.com/the-internet...
Some asshole is DoS-ing Wikipedia now. And Archive.org is still under attack. Who wants to take down the Web's history book and global encyclopedia? A state actor? Someone who didn't want an ongoing TELEVISED GENOCIDE recorded in detail for historians perhaps?
news.un.org/en/story/202...
Exxon lobbyist company hired mercenary hackers to spy on environmentalists who were suing them.
www.reuters.com/business/ene...
Did your favorite newspaper cover this?
Sketch shows an active layer of soil above a permafrost layer. Water seeps thorugh the active layer, activating bacteria that release poisons. Meanwhile pyrite exposed in the active layer by melting reacts with the water and acidifies it. Resulting destruction resembles acid mine waste.
Permafrost thaws, releasing iron that stimulates bacteria that release metallic poisons into streams. Exposed pyrite acidifies the water. Seen in google earth across the Yukon and British Columbia.
"North America's Ongoing, Ignored Disaster"
www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lxfp...
Acid rock drainage.
Elon Musk's parents own about half of the biggest emerald mine in South Africa Bill Gates' grandpa owned a bank and his mom used her connections on the board of IBM's law firm to get Microsoft's first deal with IBM. Jeff Bezos got $250K seed money from his wealthy parents Self made billionaires are a myth. Wealth is mostly hereditary.
The official history of Silicon Valley is more false than true.
Is this a nightmare? Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists says it's 90 seconds to midnight. During the Cuban missile crisis, it was seven minutes. Tell me this is only a bad dream.
thebulletin.org/doomsday-clo...
Bike party!
short essay argues against tiny PCs, in favor of bulkier, but user serviceable home and office computers. User serviceability keeps e-junk out of landfills.
Resist planned obsolescence. MSFT ending Wndoz10 will send 100millions of perfectly good PCs to the dump.
Save yours with free software. debian.org
Many choices. https//distrowatch.com
I see Potus-elect wants to put a pseudoscience crank in charge of NIH and FDA. Last time, he put a crank in charge of NASA but the guy came around on global warming, didn't wreck the agency. Will the scientists be able to mitigate the disaster of RFKJr as well?
rationalwiki.org/wiki/Pseudos...
Best reply I've seen, projecting climate is kinda the opposite of predicting weather:
www.easterbrook.ca/steve/2010/0...
So you're the guys who spend $millions throwing third party and independent candidates off the ballot, and you have the nerve to call yourselves advocates for democracy? Mr. Orwell would like a word.
We have an opinion piece at the NYT on the need to operationalize some aspects of climate science. 🧪
Thoughts welcome!
(Gift link)
www.nytimes.com/2024/11/13/o...
On a Wednesday in February 1938, Guy Stewart Callendar stood before a group of leading scientists, members of the United Kingdom’s Royal Meteorological Society. He had a bold idea to share:
Humans’ burning of fuel was making the planet warmer.
nautil.us/the-part-tim...
Even if you disagree, you have to recognize a well reasoned argument.
I've been citing this article a lot recently.
The author is recognized as a particularly clear and insightful thinker. He won the Nobel in physics for discovering the photoelectric effect, which we exploit in solar panels.
monthlyreview.org/2009/05/01/w...
The Emperor's new Climate Scenarios
Actuaries say we're figuring climate risk all wrong.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=X-FJ...
Conservative science demphasize their most fearsome scenarios, the ones actuaries find most important.
One critical question around climate tipping elements is the type of threshold behavior - do global temperatures need to only temporarily pass a critical level, or do they have to stay there for centuries. Thankfully for Greenland it seems to be the latter: www.nature.com/articles/d41...
Is your figure adjusted for the annual zig zag?
Climate scientist facing big fines for nonviolent, nondestructive protest.
Dr. Abramoff got thrown off stage (and fired) at a geophysics conference last year, for unfurling a banner with Peter Kalmus.
She researches biogeochemistry and soil modeling.
heated.world/p/why-did-th...
Ramaswamy isn't just any climate science denier. He's running the campaign against socially conscious investing.
heated.world/p/how-vivek-...
Seems to me the name for the new package is neofascist. It's got everything the old package had except supremacy of the state. Mussolini, meet Ayn Rand. And a little Jefferson Davis.
