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in title, tags, annotations or urlMost Americans comfortable with solar panels, turbines in their communities, Post-UMD poll finds - The Washington Post - 0 views
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As renewable energy becomes more widespread in the United States, large and bipartisan majorities of Americans say they wouldn’t mind fields of solar panels and wind turbines being built in their communities, according to a Washington Post-University of Maryland poll.
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Three-quarters of all Americans say they would be comfortable living near solar farms while nearly 7 in 10 report feeling the same about wind turbines. And these attitudes appear to remain largely consistent regardless of where people live.
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69 percent of residents in rural and suburban areas say they would be comfortable if wind turbines were constructed in their area, as do 66 percent of urban residents.
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What stage of capitalism is Sam Bankman-Fried? - 0 views
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For Sam Bankman-Fried and his crypto exchange FTX, the simple answer is that a leaked balance sheet leads your biggest rival, himself under federal scrutiny, to instigate a sort of “bank run” you cannot possibly cover, exposing billions of dollars in shortfalls you apparently created by riskily investing money that wasn’t yours.
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How do you make a multibillion-dollar company disappear in a week?
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And revealing yourself, in the process, to be a very new kind of financial villain — one who pitches not just the prospect of profit but also deliverance from the corrupt speculative system in which you “made” your “billions.”
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What Does Sustainable Living Look Like? Maybe Like Uruguay - The New York Times - 0 views
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your carbon bill is world-historically anomalous but normal among your neighbors: 17 tons for transportation, 14 tons for housing, eight tons for food, six tons for services, five tons for goods.
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That household total, 50 tons, represents a carbon footprint of about 25 tons per person. It’s a figure that eclipses the global median by a factor of five and is nowhere close to where it needs to be if you — we — want to stave off the worst of warming’s effects: around two tons per person.
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This is the problem with any climate policy, big or small: It requires an imaginative leap. While the math of decarbonization and electric mobilization is clear, the future lifestyle it implies isn’t always
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Opinion | The Triumph of the Ukrainian Idea - The New York Times - 0 views
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The Ukrainians are winning not only because of the superiority of their troops. They are winning because they are fighting for a superior idea — an idea that inspires Ukrainians to fight so doggedly, an idea that inspires people across the West to stand behind Ukraine and back it to the hilt.
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That idea is actually two ideas jammed together. The first is liberalism, which promotes democracy, individual dignity, a rule-based international order.
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The second idea is nationalism.
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"Falsehood Flies, And Truth Comes Limping After It" - 0 views
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“I traced a throughline: from Sandy Hook to Pizzagate to QAnon to Charlottesville and the coronavirus myths to the election lie that brought violence to the Capitol on January 6th,” she told Vox earlier this year. “I started to understand how individuals, for reasons of ideology or social status, tribalism, or for profit, were willing to reject established truths, and how once they’d done that, it was incredibly difficult to persuade them otherwise.”
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She describes the 2012 mass shooting in Newtown, CT as “a foundational moment in the world of misinformation and disinformation that we now live in.”
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the NYT’s Elizabeth Williamson about her book, Sandy Hook: An American Tragedy and the Battle for Truth, which was recently named one of the best books of 2022 by Publishers Weekly.
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Opinion | A Big TV Hit Is a Conservative Fantasy Liberals Should Watch - The New York Times - 0 views
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Pop culture says a lot about the hopes we have for politics. And in a politically polarized and unequal society, we express our political identities as tastes
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We aren’t just divided into red and blue America. We divide ourselves into Fox people versus CNN people, country music versus hip-hop people and reality TV versus prestige drama people. The lines are not fixed — there is always crossover — but they are rooted in something fundamental: identity. Our imagined Americas are as divided as our news cycles.
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a working paper by two sociologists, Clayton Childress at the University of Toronto and Craig Rawlings at Duke University. The paper is titled “When Tastes Are Ideological: The Asymmetric Foundations of Cultural Polarization.” It is part of the subfield of sociology that studies how culture reflects and reproduces inequality. Childress and Rawlings draw out several asymmetries in how liberals and conservatives consume cultural objects like music and television.
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Winning Through Attrition - by Lawrence Freedman - 0 views
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while wars of attrition may open with a stalemate and lack the dash and drama of those of manoeuvre they can still lead to victory. This may be because they create the conditions for a return to manoeuvre warfare or it may be because the losing side recognises that its position can only get worse and needs to find a way out
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Moreover there are different ways of fighting an attritional war, and some strategies can be more effective than others.
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In these circumstances, wider economic and social resilience will matter, as both sides try to produce more equipment and ammunition and find more personnel to make up losses. Once one side falters in this effort then they might lose as a result of unrest at home or a progressive inability to fight effectively
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What to read as an introduction to India | The Economist - 0 views
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The book (which we reviewed in 2021), is two things in one: it is a relatively straightforward chronicle of eight centuries of Indian history, a period that gave rise to many things thought of today as quintessentially Indian, from biryani to the Hindi language
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it offers powerful evidence, backed up with hundreds of examples from Professor Eaton’s scholarship, that Indians before the arrival of the British saw each other and themselves not through the lens of religion, as the leaders of the country today would have their citizens believe, but through the varifocals of language, ethnicity and community.
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It is not uncommon to encounter, among a certain class of English gentleman, the notion that, on balance, India did not do so badly from British rule. Not only were Indians spared the horrors of French or Spanish—or, worse, Belgian—colonisation. But the British built the railways, the postal system and the administrative infrastructure of the country. They left behind the gifts of parliamentary democracy and the English language. In under 300 pages, Shashi Tharoor, a former under-secretary-general of the UN and a serving member of parliament in India, demolishes those arguments
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Biden's Climate Law Is Ending 40 Years of Hands-off Government - The Atlantic - 0 views
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It is no exaggeration to say that his signature immediately severed the history of climate change in America into two eras. Before the IRA, climate campaigners spent decades trying and failing to get a climate bill through the Senate. After it, the federal government will spend $374 billion on clean energy and climate resilience over the next 10 years. The bill is estimated to reduce the country’s greenhouse-gas emissions by about 40 percent below their all-time high, getting the country two-thirds of the way to meeting its 2030 goal under the Paris Agreement.
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Far less attention has been paid to the ideas that animate the IRA.
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, the IRA makes a particularly interesting and all-encompassing wager—a bet relevant to anyone who plans to buy or sell something in the U.S. in the next decade, or who plans to trade with an American company, or who relies on American military power
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Book review - The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity | The Inquisitive Biologist - 0 views
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Every few years, it seems, there is a new bestselling Big History book. And not infrequently, they have rather grandiose titles.
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, I hope to convince you why I think this book will stand the test of time better.
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First, rather than one author’s pet theory, The Dawn of Everything is the brainchild of two outspoken writers: anthropologist David Graeber (a figurehead in the Occupy Wall Street movement and author of e.g. Bullshit Jobs) and archaeologist David Wengrow (author of e.g. What Makes Civilization?). I expect a large part of their decade-long collaboration consisted of shooting holes in each other’s arguments
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An Unholy Alliance Between Ye, Musk, and Trump - The Atlantic - 0 views
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Musk, Trump, and Ye are after something different: They are all obsessed with setting the rules of public spaces.
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An understandable consensus began to form on the political left that large social networks, but especially Facebook, helped Trump rise to power. The reasons were multifaceted: algorithms that gave a natural advantage to the most shameless users, helpful marketing tools that the campaign made good use of, a confusing tangle of foreign interference (the efficacy of which has always been tough to suss out), and a basic attentional architecture that helps polarize and pit Americans against one another (no foreign help required).
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The misinformation industrial complex—a loosely knit network of researchers, academics, journalists, and even government entities—coalesced around this moment. Different phases of the backlash homed in on bots, content moderation, and, after the Cambridge Analytica scandal, data privacy
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How the U.K. Became One of the Poorest Countries in Western Europe - The Atlantic - 0 views
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When the global financial crisis hit in 2008, it hit hard, smashing the engine of Britain’s economic ascent. Wary of rising deficits, the British government pursued a policy of austerity, fretting about debt rather than productivity or aggregate demand. The results were disastrous. Real wages fell for six straight years. Facing what the writer Fintan O’Toole called “the dull anxiety of declining living standards,” conservative pols sniffed out a bogeyman to blame for this slow-motion catastrophe. They served up to anxious voters a menu of scary outsiders: bureaucrats in Brussels, immigrants, asylum seekers—anybody but the actual decision makers who had kneecapped British competitiveness.
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A cohort of older, middle-class, grievously nostalgic voters demanded Brexit, and they got it.
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In the past 30 years, the British economy chose finance over industry, Britain’s government chose austerity over investment, and British voters chose a closed and poorer economy over an open and richer one.
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Opinion | Biden's Tough Tech Trade Restrictions on China - The New York Times - 0 views
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Unlike the Trump tariffs, these controls have a clear goal: to prevent or at least delay Beijing’s attempts to produce advanced semiconductors, which are of crucial military as well as economic importance. If this sounds like a very aggressive move on the part of the United States, that’s because it is.
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But it needs to be put in context. Recent events have undermined the sunny view of globalization that long dominated Western policy. It’s now apparent that despite global integration, there are still dangerous bad actors out there — and interdependence sometimes empowers these bad actors. But it also gives good actors ways to limit bad actors’ ability to do harm. And the Biden administration is evidently taking these lessons to heart.
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Obviously it didn’t work. Russia is led by a brutal autocrat who invaded Ukraine. China appears to have retrogressed politically, moving back to erratic one-man rule.
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As Traditional Bulbs Fade Out, LED Lights Keep Improving - The New York Times - 0 views
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LEDs are now dimmable, with their light available in a range of colors, some warmer, some cooler. They are stealthy and can assume the familiar forms of old-fashioned bulbs or disappear altogether into the fixture, manifesting themselves only as bright beams.
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. LEDs use 90 percent less energy and last up to 25 times longer than incandescent bulbs.
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In the early days, when LEDs lasted a mere 25,000 hours, they couldn’t be swapped after burning out, making the entire lamp defunct. Now they have life spans of 50,000 hours and are more likely to be replaceable.
AI Is the Technocratic Elite's New Excuse for a Power Grab - WSJ - 0 views
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it seems increasingly likely that whatever else it may be, the AI menace, like every other supposed extinction-level threat man has faced in the past century or so, will prove a wonderful opportunity for the big-bureaucracy, global-government, all-knowing-regulator crowd to demand more authority over our freedoms, to transfer more sovereignty from individuals and nations to supranational experts and technocrats.
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If I were cynical I’d speculate that these threats are, if not manufactured, at least hyped precisely so that the world can be made to fit with the technocratic mindset of those who believe they should rule over us, lest the ignorant whims of people acting without supervision destroy the planet.
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Nuclear weapons, climate change, pandemics, and now AI—the remedies are always, strikingly, the same: more government; more control over free markets and private decisions, more borderless bureaucracy.
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Climate Anxiety | Harvard Medicine Magazine - 0 views
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A global survey published in Lancet Planetary Health in 2021 reported that among an international cohort of more than 10,000 people between the ages of 16 and 25, 60 percent described themselves as very worried about the climate and nearly half said the anxiety affects their daily functioning.
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Since young people expect to live longer with climate-related crises than their parents will, “they feel grief in the face of what they’re losing,” Pinsky says.
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Young survivors of weather-related disasters report high rates of PTSD, depression, sleep deficits, and learning issues.
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France is falling apart at the seams | The Spectator - 0 views
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Writing in the wake of the 2008 financial crash, Slama asked ‘whether our old democracies, faced with an economic, sociological, demographic and intellectual shock unprecedented in the last 70 years, are in danger of evolving in a direction comparable… to the tribal and arbitrary model that is hampering the development of most Third World countries.’
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The 2008 crash was just the first shock of many to strike the West, each one weakening further its foundations. The overthrow of Colonel Gaddafi in 2011 precipitated the first great migrant crisis, and Angela Merkel provoked the second four years later by opening Europe’s borders to more than a million migrants; Islamic terrorism has left hundreds dead; Covid lockdowns caused irreparable economic, mental and social damage; environmental obsessiveness is reawakening class divisions; progressive radicalism is stoking identitarian tensions and the war in Ukraine has sent energy prices and inflation soaring.
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France is at the epicentre of these shockwaves, and a growing number of prominent thinkers and commentators are warning that culturally and economically the country is in grave danger. In a recent interview the economist Agnes Verdier Molinié cautioned that ‘France is on the verge of bankruptcy’ and that the annual cost of its debt will hit €70 billion in 2024
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'There was all sorts of toxic behaviour': Timnit Gebru on her sacking by Google, AI's dangers and big tech's biases | Artificial intelligence (AI) | The Guardian - 0 views
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t feels like a gold rush,” says Timnit Gebru. “In fact, it is a gold rush. And a lot of the people who are making money are not the people actually in the midst of it. But it’s humans who decide whether all this should be done or not. We should remember that we have the agency to do that.”
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something that the frenzied conversation about AI misses out: the fact that many of its systems may well be built on a huge mess of biases, inequalities and imbalances of power.
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As the co-leader of Google’s small ethical AI team, Gebru was one of the authors of an academic paper that warned about the kind of AI that is increasingly built into our lives, taking internet searches and user recommendations to apparently new levels of sophistication and threatening to master such human talents as writing, composing music and analysing images
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How the Shoggoth Meme Has Come to Symbolize the State of A.I. - The New York Times - 0 views
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the Shoggoth had become a popular reference among workers in artificial intelligence, as a vivid visual metaphor for how a large language model (the type of A.I. system that powers ChatGPT and other chatbots) actually works.
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it was only partly a joke, he said, because it also hinted at the anxieties many researchers and engineers have about the tools they’re building.
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Since then, the Shoggoth has gone viral, or as viral as it’s possible to go in the small world of hyper-online A.I. insiders. It’s a popular meme on A.I. Twitter (including a now-deleted tweet by Elon Musk), a recurring metaphor in essays and message board posts about A.I. risk, and a bit of useful shorthand in conversations with A.I. safety experts. One A.I. start-up, NovelAI, said it recently named a cluster of computers “Shoggy” in homage to the meme. Another A.I. company, Scale AI, designed a line of tote bags featuring the Shoggoth.
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