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"With each interaction, Alexa is training to hear better, to interpret more precisely, to trigger actions that map to the user's commands more accurately, and to build a more complete model of their preferences, habits and desires. What is required to make this possible? Put simply: each small moment of convenience - be it answering a question, turning on a light, or playing a song - requires a vast planetary network, fueled by the extraction of non-renewable materials, labor, and data. The scale of resources required is many magnitudes greater than the energy and labor it would take a human to operate a household appliance or flick a switch. A full accounting for these costs is almost impossible, but it is increasingly important that we grasp the scale and scope if we are to understand and govern the technical infrastructures that thread through our lives. III The Salar, the world's largest flat surface, is located in southwest Bolivia at an altitude of 3,656 meters above sea level. It is a high plateau, covered by a few meters of salt crust which are exceptionally rich in lithium, containing 50% to 70% of the world's lithium reserves. 4 The Salar, alongside the neighboring Atacama regions in Chile and Argentina, are major sites for lithium extraction. This soft, silvery metal is currently used to power mobile connected devices, as a crucial material used for the production of lithium-Ion batteries. It is known as 'grey gold.' Smartphone batteries, for example, usually have less than eight grams of this material. 5 Each Tesla car needs approximately seven kilograms of lithium for its battery pack. 6 All these batteries have a limited lifespan, and once consumed they are thrown away as waste. Amazon reminds users that they cannot open up and repair their Echo, because this will void the warranty. The Amazon Echo is wall-powered, and also has a mobile battery base. This also has a limited lifespan and then must be thrown away as waste. According to the Ay

" Fearless commentary on finance, economics, politics and power Follow yvessmith on Twitter Feedburner RSS Feed RSS Feed for Comments Subscribe via Email SUBSCRIBE Recent Items Links 3/11/17 - 03/11/2017 - Yves Smith Deutsche Bank Tries to Stay Alive - 03/11/2017 - Yves Smith John Helmer: Australian Government Trips Up Ukrainian Court Claim of MH17 as Terrorism - 03/11/2017 - Yves Smith 2:00PM Water Cooler 3/10/2017 - 03/10/2017 - Lambert Strether Why a 400-Year Program of Modernist Thinking is Exploding - 03/10/2017 - Yves Smith Links 3/10/17 - 03/10/2017 - Yves Smith Why It Will Take a Lot More Than a Smartphone to Get the Sharing Economy Started - 03/10/2017 - Yves Smith CalPERS' General Counsel Railroads Board on Fiduciary Counsel Selection - 03/10/2017 - Yves Smith Another Somalian Famine - 03/10/2017 - Yves Smith Trade now with TradeStation - Highest rated for frequent traders Why a 400-Year Program of Modernist Thinking is Exploding Posted on March 10, 2017 by Yves Smith By Lynn Parramore, Senior Research Analyst at the Institute for New Economic Thinking. Originally published at the Institute for New Economic Thinking website Across the globe, a collective freak-out spanning the whole political system is picking up steam with every new "surprise" election, rush of tormented souls across borders, and tweet from the star of America's great unreality show, Donald Trump. But what exactly is the force that seems to be pushing us towards Armageddon? Is it capitalism gone wild? Globalization? Political corruption? Techno-nightmares? Rajani Kanth, a political economist, social thinker, and poet, goes beyond any of these explanations for the answer. In his view, what's throwing most of us off kilter - whether we think of ourselves as on the left or right, capitalist or socialist -was birthed 400 years ago during the period of the Enlightenment. It's a set of assumptions, a particular way of looking at the world that pushed out previous modes o

"Prosociality is endemic. In a common experiment called the social dilemma, anonymous subjects choose between a "defection" strategy that maximizes their own personal payoffs, and a "cooperation" strategy that gains them slightly less, but gives other members of the group substantially more. Up to 97% of subjects choose cooperation in some social dilemmas. Not surprisingly, researchers have found that the incidence of such prosocial behaviors declines as the personal cost of acting prosocially rises. We are more likely to be nice when it only takes a little, not a lot, of skin off our noses. But the scientific evidence demonstrates the vast majority of people will make at least small sacrifices to follow their conscience and help others."

"When animals die, waves of microbes consume their corpses. Scientists have looked at how this "necrobiome" changes over the hours and days after an animal perishes. But Saitta's work suggests that microbes continue to colonize cadavers long after their flesh has decayed, after their bones have turned to stone, and after they've been buried several miles deep for millions of years.   MORE STORIES A Dinosaur So Well Preserved, It Looks Like a Statue ED YONG How a Fossil Can Reveal the Color of a Dinosaur CARI ROMM The Counterintuitive Way That Microbes Survive in Antarctica ED YONG The Scientist Who Stumbled Upon a Tick Full of 20-Million-Year-Old Blood SARAH ZHANG That came as a huge surprise to Tullis Onstott, a microbiologist from Princeton who worked with Saitta, and who always thought of fossils as inert and inanimate. "I thought that dinosaur bone must be some kind of sealed sarcophagus," he says. "It's not, by any means. It's basically a condo for bacteria. Now the question becomes: Is this true for all dinosaur bones?""