PG Holmlov

Iran Midday Update - Opportunity Costs Meanwhile, in Beijing....

In a secluded compound in northwest Beijing, under fluorescent light that never changes, teams of analysts watch the war more closely than the men fighting it. They are measuring how much of America’s arsenal is being converted from inventory into smoke markmcinerney.substack.com/p/iran-midda...

While bats can carry Marburg without falling sick, other animals can spread the virus after interacting with bats… many of the species observed preying on the bats are themselves eaten by humans as bushmeat… camera traps recorded 400 humans visiting the cave www.telegraph.co.uk/global-healt...

AI: The End of Work? From expertise that produces to authority that guarantees.

A machine does not assume risk. It does not bear the weight of commitment. Without legal and moral responsibility, without someone to sign their name and answer for mistakes, AI is merely an engine spinning in a desert of meaning maried.substack.com/p/ai-the-end...

New results on the economic costs of climate change - Marginal REVOLUTION I promised you I would be tracking this issue, and so here is a major development.  From the QJE by Adrien Bilal and Diego R Känzig:: This paper estimates that the macroeconomic damages from climate c...

”Exploiting natural global temperature variability, we find that 1○C warming reduces world GDP by over 20% in the long run”… The estimation is extremely complicated, based on the premise that global temperature does more harm to a region than local temperature marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevo...

bsky.app/profile/pook...

The purpose is to entirely remove the possibility of a Major Thompson stopping a war crime.

That is *all* a chatbot offers: unaccountability.

A drone-strike on a nursery being just as unaccountable as a waymo running a red light, with just as little consideration at all given to it legally or ethically.

AI can slowly shift an organisation’s core principles. How to spot ‘value drift’ early When new technology can produce the texts companies or departments use to explain themselves, core values can shift incrementally without anyone really noticing.

When a system can generate confident, professional-sounding reasons instantly, it can quietly change what counts as “good reason” to do something. This is where “value drift” begins… people adapt practices to what technologies make easy, visible or persuasive theconversation.com/ai-can-slowl...

Ny studie: Kulda vil klore seg fast i lengre perioder framover Forskning viser at perioder med varme eller kulde varer lenger enn før her nord.

Arktisk oppvarming gjør at atmosfæriske bølger stopper opp. Da «låser» været seg. Vi får lengre perioder med varme, kulde eller langvarig nedbør… – Fastlåst vær øker risikoen for ekstremvær som hetebølger, tørke og flom www.forskning.no/arktis-klima...

Frog swam back to Toad. “I am sorry, Toad,” he said. “Everyone wants to see how you will look.”

“Then I will stay right here until they go away,” said Toad.

Two cities in Israel, bomb shelter comparison

By the way when you see reports about how Israelis are going to bomb shelters, you should keep in mind that the vast majority of Palestinian *citizens* of Israel (in the 1948 territories, not the oPT) do not have a single bomb shelter nearby due to the apartheid system Israel has implemented.

Iran, the Next Day Well, we broke it.

When we intervened in Guatemala in 1954 or Chile in 1973, the consequences were morally catastrophic but geographically contained. Iran is not Guatemala… A power vacuum in Tehran is… a direct shock to the global energy system markmcinerney.substack.com/p/iran-the-n...

David W. Bates, cybernetics specialist: 'The brain is not a computer' With the advent of artificial intelligence, the American academic aims to avoid the pitfalls of both technophobia and transhumanism. In his view, it is necessary to move beyond a simplistic opposition...

They're feeding us, in their own terms, the kind of information that they want to give us. We're living in a world that we don't fully understand and that we don't fully control. We're giving too much power to these systems and the corporations that run them www.lemonde.fr/en/opinion/a...

Vi sitter en stund på lokala sportbaren och Liverpool-West Ham.
Alicia: måste vara kallt, alla har ju halsdukar på sig

Epistemic posture is the way out. You engage with the system critically and actively… drawing value from the interaction precisely because you maintain both the vigilance to evaluate what comes back and the participation to stay inside the cognitive process sbgeoaiphd.github.io/rotating_the...

Why Attack Iran? Our Authoritarianism and Our Corruption

The relationship between foreign war and domestic authoritarianism can take two basic forms: 1) we must all rally because there is a war and everyone who oppose the war is a traitor; 2) we must hold elections under conditions favorable to the party in power snyder.substack.com/p/why-attack...

Interesting detail - Fox & Friends is hosted by the regular weekday hosts this morning not the weekend cast. How would Fox News have enough time to ask the regular cast to come in? The show starts at 6AM but they are usually there hours earlier.

The Day NY Publishing Lost Its Soul How did we get here? And how do we get back?

…a tiny company could make a tidy profit by publishing books that sold ten thousand copies. But a billion dollar corporation needs something splashier. So you put large fonts on the cover, fancy shapes and garish colors. And the story has to be tried and true www.honest-broker.com/p/the-day-ny...

A major shift, via Gallup. More from @joshuakeating.bsky.social www.vox.com/politics/480...

Trump releases a statement saying he is sending Americans to war with Iran because “Iran tried to interfere in 2020, 2024 elections to stop Trump.”

Specifically right, generally wrong Have I stumbled upon a dark pattern for generating engagement?

Schweiger says that if a scheme costs more than the funds distributed it is a waste of money. I say, no, if the funds distributed generate more benefit than they cost to distribute it could still be net positive… I am just saying it is hard to know tomstafford.substack.com/p/specifical...

"Vi ses på Götaplatsen med facklorna och fanorna och sången, när folket kommer från varven och verkstäderna. Vi ses igen, kamrater, någonstans i skärningspunkten mellan drömmen och slitet, i människornas möte till prövande samtal och gemenskap.
Vi ses igen, kamrater."

Meta created ‘playbook’ to fend off pressure to crack down on scammers, documents show A Reuters investigation examines its tactics, including efforts to make scam ads “not findable” when authorities search for them.

The scrubbing, Meta teams explained in documents regarding their efforts to reduce scam discoverability, sought to make problematic content “not findable” for “regulators, investigators and journalists” www.reuters.com/investigatio...

Paramount-Warner Bros. deal: They think they’re buying a casino. They should ask Trump how that worked out. There is nothing that Hollywood likes better than making a meal out of amateur lunch meat, and that’s what happened today when Paramount/Skydance bought Warner Brothers Discovery for a reported $110 b...

I just can’t wait for Paramount and Warner Brothers under the ownership of Ellison the Younger and Elder to start generating right-wing red hat crap to force feed to the masses. You’ll be able to ski down the graphs of their companies’ profits and ratings luciantruscott.substack.com/p/paramount-...

Neil Sedaka, “Breaking Up Is Hard to Do” and “Laughter in the Rain” Singer-Songwriter, Dies at 86 The Brooklynite's esteemed body of work also includes "Calendar Girl," "Oh! Carol," "Love Will Keep Us Together," "Where the Boys Are," "Bad Blood" and "Solitaire."

First teaming with lyricist Howard Greenfield — a neighbor in his Brooklyn apartment building — while still in his teens, Sedaka scored his first hit as a songwriter in 1958 when Connie Francis recorded Stupid Cupid, No. 17 on the Billboard Hot 100 www.hollywoodreporter.com/music/music-...

Toad shouts to his seeds, trying to get them to grow. From "The Garden" In *Frog and Toad Together*

Toad put his head very close to the ground and shouted, “NOW SEEDS, START GROWING!”

Right. So with AI robots soon able to do almost everything better than
humans, people will be replaced. Soon. There will be few jobs. So there will have to be a national income. How do you think people will find meaning in their lives?

Almost everyone ignored the negation (not) and somehow heard, "hey this is a great time to ask Tressie for something." And that's on me. That's on me.

The hidden cost of letting AI make your life easier Philosopher Sven Nyholm on reclaiming achievement from the machines.

”…why study philosophy at university if you don’t want to think bbl and instead outsource them to a mindless AI program?”… Generative AI does not erode meaningful achievement by accident. It does so by design, and in line with its business logic bigthinkmedia.substack.com/p/the-hidden...

Einstein & The Rise of Nuisance Tech AI may be one of the most transformative innovations of our lifetime, but not when it is treated as spam.

ChatGPT remains the dominant AI interface students use to study and cheat… we should all be thinking far more provocatively about how faculty and students will react if and when agents start appearing within our courses and begin interacting with our students marcwatkins.substack.com/p/einstein-a...

Why I’m Breaking My Political Silence Now and What Sweden Really Needs to Focus On Ten years after leaving politics, I can no longer stay quiet about where Sweden is heading and why this moment matters.

…children who have lived nearly their entire lives in Sweden, who speak Swedish, who go to Swedish schools, and who see this country as their home, are being deported when they turn eighteen… This is not about safety or justice. It is election-year symbolism bodilsiden.substack.com/p/why-im-bre...