De-Amazonification update: ordered an item we buy monthly directly from the manufacturer instead of from Amazon. It was two dollars cheaper, but I had to pay $4.99 for shipping.
On the other hand: do I want to pay for shipping, or do I want to pay for fascism?
#DeAmazonification #externalities
Recent searches
Search options
#externalities
0 posts0 participants0 posts today
Garden @Tarnport @shonin
The "Conspicuous consumption" section was the first to grab me enough to respond. The "yuck" this inspires immediately rebounded to another understanding of why some factions of the "commuting living room" fraternity oppose cycling so much. Utility #cycling, especially #quaxing, ebiking and cargo-biking is the perfect antidote - it's "Conspicuous conservation" in the public face of those flaunting the opposite - hence bringing it into question. #eBikes in particular, because someone who can afford to buy a ready-made quality eBike or #cargoBike can also afford to buy a lane-clogging, polluting, down-market mobile living-room but chooses the bike. Running costs aside, of course. #externalities #warOnCars #overconsumotion #degrowth
Environment Minister #Tanya_Plibersek and the #ALP government approve four more #CoalMine expansions in these lands now called Australia.
They claim that as these four coal mines are (mainly) extracting #MetallurgicalCoal, that they are unavoidable and necessary, as there is not a currently viable alternative to metallurgical coal in steel-making.
But there are alternatives. They are only considered 'non-viable' because under current economic practices they are not yet as cheap as metallurgical coal. And they only seem to be more expensive than coal due to coal not having to pay its true costs. And coal doesn't have a price anywhere near reflective of its myriad actual harms (immediate and long-term, local and planetary) since the Australian government joins a globally dominant delusion that #externalities don't need to be considered when there's masses of short-term profit to be had by burning our collective future.
If the #CoalIndustry were held responsible for the toxic and climate-disrupting rubbish it dumps (for free!) into the global atmosphere, then it would rapidly become apparent that burning more coal, whether in thermal energy production or in making steel, is utterly unaffordable.
The Guardian · Albanese government approves four coalmine expansions as Greens condemn ‘despicable’ move
“Not a single speaker addressed where the training data for current large language models comes from (it comes from scraping other people’s copyrighted creative works).
Not a single speaker addressed the energy requirements for current large language models (the requirements are absolutely mahoosive—not just for the training, but for each and every query).”
#ai #ux #externalities https://mastodon.social/@adactio/113412996954724395
MastodonJeremy Keith (@adactio@mastodon.social)Journal: Unsaid
I listened to a day of talks on AI at UX Brighton, and I came away disappointed by what wasn’t mentioned.
🔗https://adactio.com/journal/21525
Whenever I see pieces by Nnimmo Bassey go by, I know there's going to be something of importance within.
Take note of the fact that the referenced page has two tabs, a "Full Article" and a "Quick Read". If you're in a hurry, go for the latter. But the Full Article is full of useful detail.
There's lots of good information in the full article that is not commonly discussed, so I recommend that. But I'll just grab a few excerpts here that illustrate the breadth of discussion:
«The corporate extractive sector, in particular, has been looking for new territories to extract minerals such as manganese, cobalt, copper, nickel, and rare earth elements. This has become increasingly problematic due to the risks involved in resource extraction. Though the ocean may seem like an unlimited expanse that profiteers exploit purely for financial gain, it has natural limits.
“[A]lthough scientists and campaigners have been warning of the consequences of our rampant exploitation for decades, time is now running out to protect our oceans,” Hugo Tagholm, executive director of Oceana in the UK, and Callum Roberts, a professor of marine conservation at the Center for Ecology and Conservation at the University of Exeter, wrote in EuroNews in November 2023. “We like to think of our ocean as infinite, but the truth is, it cannot stand this industrial-scale exploitation.”»
and later
«When governments and corporations decide what should be done, they often ignore the people closest to the water and the fact that they know more about what is necessary to protect it. It gets more troubling when the uninhabited deep sea is discussed. For example, in Nigeria, Shell Oil is selling off its onshore oil fields and moving operations to the deep sea, where there is limited oversight on the damage being done. Even if the harm being done in the deep sea stays out of sight, its results still affect everyone onshore. This is a major reason for the concern anywhere in the world that is near the water.»
The ‘Blue Economy’ Myth: We Have to Stop Thinking the Ocean Can Be Run Like a Business
https://observatory.wiki/The_%E2%80%98Blue_Economy%E2%80%99_Myth:_We_Have_to_Stop_Thinking_Like_the_Ocean_Can_Be_Run_Like_a_Business
#BlueEconomy #OceanConservation #MarineEcosystems #ocean #fishing #mining #pollution #capitalism #extractivism #externalities #oil #OilSpills
#BlueWashing #environment
Continued thread
This topic and framing has been on my mind for a long time, but the recent news story about Vermont is relevant.
Our oceans have piled up a disproportionate share of heat. It takes an unfathomable amount of energy to have bumped ocean heat as much as we have, and it's not stopping. Amazing the land hasn't long ago cooked, but, speaking metaphorically, there is starting to be no more place for all that trapped heat to go.
Meanwhile an unfathomable ocean of money has piled up from years of rewarding oil companies for the service of putting fossil fuels into play, never for a moment considering or charging for the environmental externality of climate change. No accident that. They knew the consequence. They pumped tons of money, enough to control media empires, enough to corrupt and outright buy politicians, into distracting and denying and defrauding.
Buying public image and buying politicians in this way was reasoned cheaper than what any sane person would ask if they new the truth about the naked greed, about the willingness to knowingly stoke an existential risk to humanity.
Vermont is not being extreme here, though much corrupt money will go into focus groups and A/B testing and AI bots designed to help us think so. What Vermont asks is a drop in the bucket of their wealth. Probably they, and all of us, should pro-actively take back every dime. In that light, it's hard to see Vermont as being at all extreme. They have, even now, responded modestly.
A modern equivalent of pitchforks at the castle gates, though far more poiite. The castle will fight back. It's well motivated and very well capitalized. But its ethical position is the inverse. We must remember that as we see that retaliation play out. The oil companies have no moral authority here, but will tell us they are victims and faithful public servants. That will be lies. We need to say that out loud and frequently to remind ourselves and inform others.
It's not just an issue of penalizing oil companies. There is evil here that needs punishment, but we are not doing that yet. We probably should, but such vengeance would detract and we don't have the luxury of time.
For now the key thing is this, and we must not lose focus: Money is how we set priority. We need to set the collective compass to right, recalibrating for survival.
There needs to be ZERO priority to mining oil. The vast wealth, the ocean of prioritization chits, of individual dollars, that represent represent our colective and ill-informed giving of public priority and permission need to be taken back and redirected immediately from the hucksters who knowingly misled us. A fraud was perpetrated, but that's water under the bridge. The priority and permission that this ocean of money represents must be applied as fully and immediately as possible toward the endeavor of human survival.
Even that may not be enough. But we cannot as an allegedly intelligent species indulge any tolerance of leaving them any control of society's priority if we want to survive at all.
There is no greater urgency nor higher priority.
What Vermont has done is minimal and appropriate. Responses to problems must be proportionate. To do less would not be conservative, THAT would be radical, as it would be meeting an existential threat with a shrug. The other states, the ones doing nothing, are the ones acting radically, by letting these hucksters continue to operate and profit on making the problem worse.
Rolling Stone · Vermont Is Making Big Oil Pay for Climate Damage. Other States Should Too
Replied in thread
Human beings are just #externalities to them
Replied in thread
I like your observation about the two-step from worthless to holy private property. Funny how that changes as soon as they have "proper" claim. They flatter themselves by saying the value is in what they did to improve it, but that's not at all clear. (It would be especially obvious how bogus it is if we started to value sustainability rather than growth.)
Here's how I would say the rest of it. It's different enough that I'm not 100% sure I'm saying the same thing, though certainly they are complementary points...
I think it was Naomi Klein in one of her books who noted that the reason we came to the "New World" to do all that colonializing and genociding was that we hadn't the discipline to work within existing limits back where we came from, so we needed other resources to ravage. We had used up the "Old World" to an extend it was failing without expansion.
Some say space is the next such frontier, but we're killing the planet so fast we won't have time to expand in that way before we're gone, and at this point I regard space as a dangerous technological distraction from things needed more urgently.
But I guess the point I'm getting to is that The Government is just We The People. Politically it's useful for the elite class to "other" that, but really the laws that we ask them to conform to relate to whether they are treating our world as an externality they can burn through. They figure in the end if things get tight they'll use their wealth to overcome the mess they've made, whereas We The People's only wealth is the stuff they're treating as consumable.
So we need to stop listening to them tell us that it's an imposition to listen to The Government because they're really just saying that as a way of saying it's an imposition to care about anyone but themselves.
They want us to believe that The Government can never do anything right, but this is just a mind game intended to undercut our sense of confidence and think We The People can never do anything right. It isn't so.
Anyway, at this point, there's nowhere else to go after this if we don't start taking environment sustainability seriously. We're running out of world and cannot keep pretending the world is not finite. My essay Losing Ground in the Environment makes this last point perhaps more clearly.
http://netsettlement.blogspot.com/2019/09/losing-ground-in-environment.html
netsettlement.blogspot.comLosing Ground in the EnvironmentEssay on how we can't still see the world as an infinite resource. Things are interconnected and finite, so we need a fresh mindset when planning.
Replied in thread
It was easier to locate the individuals in their private houses.
“We were not interested in killing operatives only when they were in a military building or engaged in a military activity. On the contrary, the IDF bombed them in homes without hesitation, as a first option. It’s much easier to bomb a family’s home. The system is built to look for them in these situations.”
Yuval Abraham reports: https://www.972mag.com/lavender-ai-israeli-army-gaza/
(to follow) 
#longThread @palestine @israel @ethics @military @idf @terrorism
+972 Magazine · ‘Lavender’: The AI machine directing Israel’s bombing spree in GazaThe Israeli army has marked tens of thousands of Gazans as suspects for assassination, using an AI targeting system with little human oversight and a permissive policy for casualties, +972 and Local Call reveal.
Replied in thread
Replied in thread
@stealthisbook @pluralistic
The #nukes folks don't like to talk about #externalities 
Replied in thread
> "Climate-proofing will make living in NL more expensive, widen gap between rich & poor"
I disagree.
Climate-proofing will, I suppose by some accounting, make living in NL more expensive. Even then, what is the cost of living without Climate-proofing? Are you sure it's a net cost at all, and not pure savings?
OK, maybe against traditional spend it looks expensive. But that's the analysis that's killing us. Physics has denied our application for continued traditional spend.
But that's not why I came here to say something today. The part I *really* disagree with is the second part.
Climate-proofing will not widen the gap between rich and poor. The fault in that is everything about social policy. Social policy is not a law of physics. It is malleable by humans if they choose to, and it is important to see that any gap between rich & poor is everything about the willingness of the rich to leave the poor behind in their quest to be ever more rich.
Proper tax policy and social programs would narrow the gap. Legal requirements that actions taken by the rich must benefit the poor would narrow the gap. Social programs that incentivize and empower, through loans and education and that kind of thing, can help the poor get started on jobs in climate mitigation.
If the rich are allowed to continue to profit on the externalities that drive climate, even as the poor are not consuming much of any resource that's driving climate, that's not physics driving the show, it's the plutocratic rich pulling up the ladder on the tree house so that no one else tries to climb in. Don't blame that on Climate. It creates a lot of problems for us, but its hands are clean on the matter of our societal propensity for injustice.
Replied in thread
“Levy describes a system that has almost reached perfection. The political echelon wants to maintain the status quo, and the military provides it with legitimacy in exchange for funds and status.”
“Levy points out the gradual withdrawal of the old Ashkenazi middle class from the ranks of the combat forces[…]:
• the military’s complete reliance on technology as a decisive factor in warfare;
• the adoption of the concept […] of an army that is “small and lethal”;
• the obsession with the idea of #deterrence, which is supposed to negate the other side’s will to fight; and
• the complete addiction to the status quo as the only possible and desirable state of affairs.”
https://www.972mag.com/yagil-levy-army-middle-class/ @israel @ethics @military @idf
+972 Magazine · ‘Change in Israel will only happen when there are costs that force our eyes open’Oct. 7 has ‘broken a contract’ between the army and gov’t, but has yet to shake Israeli society into a different paradigm, says Yagil Levy.
Continued thread
The profit motive drives ecological exploitation and the externalization of costs onto the environment. Consumer coops respond to the voice of the community.
Continued thread
"This analysis makes clear that the pat notion of “affordable clean #energy” views the world through a narrow keyhole that is blind to innumerable economic, ecological, and social costs. These undesirable #externalities can no longer be ignored. To achieve #sustainability and salvage civilization, society must embark on a planned, cooperative descent from an extreme state of overshoot in just a decade or two."
https://www.mdpi.com/1996-1073/14/15/4508 @climate
MDPIThrough the Eye of a Needle: An Eco-Heterodox Perspective on the Renewable Energy TransitionWe add to the emerging body of literature highlighting cracks in the foundation of the mainstream energy transition narrative. We offer a tripartite analysis that re-characterizes the climate crisis within its broader context of ecological overshoot, highlights numerous collectively fatal problems with so-called renewable energy technologies, and suggests alternative solutions that entail a contraction of the human enterprise. This analysis makes clear that the pat notion of “affordable clean energy” views the world through a narrow keyhole that is blind to innumerable economic, ecological, and social costs. These undesirable “externalities” can no longer be ignored. To achieve sustainability and salvage civilization, society must embark on a planned, cooperative descent from an extreme state of overshoot in just a decade or two. While it might be easier for the proverbial camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for global society to succeed in this endeavor, history is replete with stellar achievements that have arisen only from a dogged pursuit of the seemingly impossible.
Replied in thread
"In this episode we talked with Sefi Cohen, head of Data Science squad in the IDF. He tells us about the different projects they're doing and how he started a Data Science team with very little knowledge of Machine Learning and Data Science techniques, how he chose the right people for this team and how they all learned the craft together."
(December 2017) https://podtail.com/en/podcast/unsupervised/what-do-data-scientists-do-in-the-army-with-sefi-c/ @dataGovernance @data @ai @israel @ethics @military @idf @terrorism
PodtailWhat do Data Scientists do in the Army? with Sefi Cohen – Unsupervised – PodcastIn this episode we talked with Sefi Cohen, head of Data Science squad in the IDF. He tells us about the different projects they're doing and how he started a Data Science team with very little kn... – Listen to What do Data Scientists do in the Army? with Sefi Cohen by Unsupervised instantly on your tablet, phone or browser - no downloads needed.
Can't stop thinking about this engineer who invented freon, which inadvertently poked a hole in the ozone layer (then died via strangulation by his own device; #externalities; #sustainability)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Midgley_Jr.
en.wikipedia.orgThomas Midgley Jr. - Wikipedia
I think the way I'd say it is that capitalist markets attach value to scarcity. Scarce things command a higher price. So where there is not scarcity, it must be created in order to profit from it.
A serious problem with capitalism is its reductionist nature. That is, it sees a problem that's a real problem and reduces it to a market model so that it can be reasoned about as a simple matter of maximizing profit. But the people doing it really don't care about the original profit. They subscribe to the greed-is-good and disingenuously presume that all relevant variables are encoded such that it's fair for them to simply maximize profit.
But then they find they can profit better by regulatory capture or exploiting externalities than by solving the original problem because no one has made a specific rule against it. And so the regulatory capture part makes sure that rules aren't made against regulatory capture or externalities, which assures that capitalism will continue to distract itself making profit and never really even trying to solve many of the biggest problems we have.
Capitalism is, at its best, merely an optimization engine. But if not programmed with boundary conditions, it will generate nonsensical solutions, as any mathematical optimization system would. Morality must be one of the boundaries. It is a mistake and an active attack on society to assert that morality must not be encoded in law. Even Adam Smith suggested that it had to be put there, because it would not be otherwise discovered. As I recall, he pretty much expected that capitalists unfettered by boundary laws would become tyrants.
As to the finite nature of the world and its resources, I refer you to my 2019 essay Losing Ground in the Environment, which I think sums things up more neatly than I could quickly do here.
http://netsettlement.blogspot.com/2019/09/losing-ground-in-environment.html
netsettlement.blogspot.comLosing Ground in the EnvironmentEssay on how we can't still see the world as an infinite resource. Things are interconnected and finite, so we need a fresh mindset when planning.
Replied in thread
If we could just force a public discussion of why a company, any company, that is making money hand-over-fist needs ANY government susidy, that would be useful.
But then especially one that the government itself has committed to phasing out because its actions are injuring humanity's chance to survive...
(At minimum, any such subsidy should be tied to specific goals of reduced net revenue due specifically to diminished market share against non-carbon-based renewables.)
Ah, to hear those arguments aloud...