Cherice Bock

AI is Destroying the University and Learning Itself Students use AI to write papers, professors use AI to grade them, degrees become meaningless, and tech companies make fortunes. Welcome to the death of higher education.

I finally got around to reading this. You should read it too.

"We are exporting the very labor of teaching and learning—the slow work of wrestling with ideas, the enduring of discomfort, doubt and confusion, the struggle of finding one’s own voice."

www.currentaffairs.org/news/ai-is-d...

AI is a climate issue. AI is a climate crisis.

Yay it's fully open all the way to W Burnside!

Thanks PBOT. Good to know we can actually have nice things.

Don't miss my video on this project from a few weeks back -> youtu.be/j2zVoAf_ins?...

Zillow Removes Climate Risk Scores From Home Listings

Lol, Zillow tried to rate the climate risks facing individual properties. The real estate industry *hated* it, precisely because it worked -- it made selling risky properties more difficult. So they rebelled & Zillow caved.

Don't look up!

Rolling out the Matt Christman quote from after Charlottesville (2017) again:

Paris is getting a whole new Metro network. And it’s huge | CNN The Grand Paris Express will add four lines, 68 stations and 200 kilometers of track to the French capital’s 120-year-old Metro system, providing vital suburban links – just not quite in time for the ...

Perhaps the smartest #ClimateAction investment in cities is in public transit. While others make excuses, Paris is building a WHOLE NEW METRO NETWORK CONNECTING SUBURBS.

“…the Grand Paris Express, a new 200km system with 4 new lines & 68 new stations.”

#ActionStartsHere
@mayors4climate.bsky.social

This rhetoric is indistinguishable from the stuff you hear coming out of white nationalists. Completely identical language.

Is this the persecution of the faithful I was warned about, growing up evangelical? My nationalist co-religionists are denying it now, but these are precisely the scenarios we were breathlessly schooled on, reading stories of saints and martyrs following Jesus at all costs.

If we had the train network we ALREADY HAD 80-100 years ago, the auto industry as we know it would be decimated.

A boat being rowed through a mass of plastic bottles

Before choosing bottled water over tap water, remember it takes more than 10X the water that a bottle of water holds to make the plastic bottle and transport the water. And that’s before considering the fuel and GHGs, the 1000 year bottle life, and the RIDICULOUS amount of $ we’re paying for water.

I think entirely too much about how California’s climate plan explicitly says that converting to EVs is not nearly enough to meet our greenhouse gas reduction targets so we need to reduce VMT 25% by 2030, and then we do basically nothing to try to achieve that goal

ICE arrests McMinnville High School student during Friday lunch period Family told local news the 17-year-old is a U.S. citizen.

This is outrageous!

First this kid is a citizen! Second, this kid's a minor!

www.opb.org/article/2025...

We live in the future. It's here.

Of all the things to condemn on the house floor… they picked socialism.

Not the genocide in Gaza.
Not the government’s eugenics plan
Not ICE
Not building camps for the homeless
Not tax cuts for the billionaires
Not pedophilia.

Socialism.

And 95 Dems supported it.

Presence of SARS-CoV-2 in fetal organs via intraamniotic infection - Nature Communications Infection with SARS-CoV-2 during pregnancy may result in maternal and fetal complications. Here, the authors analyze 18 fetuses following maternal SARS-CoV-2 infection and identify distribution in fet...

Pregnancy and Cøvid aren't good companions.

@atranscendedman.bsky.social 🙏🏻

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Iowa City Made Its Buses Free. Traffic Cleared, and So Did the Air.

Iowa City made its buses free. Traffic cleared. So did the air. That's because fossil fuels are massively polluting.
Ridership jumped, people cut back on driving and, over the summer, the city extended the program another year.
www.nytimes.com/2025/11/18/c...

Leaves piled up in Portland bike lane

I have written a lot about the perils of poorly maintained (and leaf-filled) bike lanes. That didn’t stop me from wiping out in one just now, falling on my face and scraping up my knee pretty badly. This is a truly hazardous situation, @pbotinfo.bsky.social. When are you going to do something?

In a rapidly warming world, heat waves will become mass mortality events. If 2003 European heat wave were to recur with 1.5 °C of warming (we're close to that today), this study predicts 17,800 excess deaths across Europe in *one week.* With 3 C of warming, the toll rises to 32,000.

Understanding AI’s true – and ever-increasing – impacts 87%. That’s how much the emissions of NVIDIA (worth 5 trillion dollars) increased in 2024, as an article from TruthDig is one of the only sources in the world to point out. This means it became the…

NVIDIA’s emissions doubled last year and all everyone can say is "ooo, world’s most valuable company"? & their GPUs are so power thirsty that entire data centres are waiting to get hooked up with electricity, as local grids can’t supply enough 😩 bettertech.blog/2025/11/14/u... cc @ketanjoshi.co

DSM Technical/Economic Feasibility Report — NOPC - National Ocean Protection Coalition

New Report Finds Deep-Sea Mining Has No Clear Economic or Strategic Justification

www.oceanprotectioncoalition.org/dsmfeasibility

Alphabets on the Sand In Gaza, language is insufficient to describe the magnitude of our loss, but I write anyway.

Oof. This is gorgeous piece of writing.

"Words cannot keep up with what happens here. Language always follows loss. Still, I write, because forgetting is another kind of death. Writing does not save anyone; it only makes absence visible. It says, 'We existed.' It says, 'We tried.'"

U.S. Data Centers Could Consume as Much Water as 10 Million Americans by Decade's End

By the end of this decade, U.S. data centers could consume as much water as 10 million Americans and produce as much carbon dioxide as 10 million cars, a study finds. via @insideclimatenews.org

Title page of the paper "Techno-optimistic scientists take fewer climate action"

🚨Techno-optimistic scientists take fewer climate actions

In a new preprint, @colognaviktoria.bsky.social, @maiensachis.bsky.social, @jmbh.bsky.social & I examine techno-optimism among 9,199 scientists and how it relates to their civic engagement and lifestyle choices🧵

🔗 Link: tinyurl.com/hh94huzv

Millionaire Tax That Inspired Mamdani Fuels $5.7 Billion Haul in Massachusetts A millionaire levy in Massachusetts that New York City mayoral frontrunner Zohran Mamdani holds up as a model for taxing the rich has generated $3 billion more in revenue than expected without forcing...

NEW: The first two years of Massachusetts' millionaire tax has raised $3 billion more than expected.

And rather than driving the rich away, IPS researchers found that the number of millionaires has *increased.*

Tax the rich. Greg Ryan in @bloomberg.com:

U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops on Instagram: "“We as Catholic bishops love our country and pray for its peace and prosperity. For this very reason, we feel compelled now in this environment to ra... In a special message, US Catholic bishops address concerns surrounding immigrants and advocate for human dignity, highlighting the need for compassion and support in the face of evolving immigration p...

U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops has released a new direct-to-camera video of prelates reading from their new statement decrying various aspects of the Trump administration's mass deportation policy.

Interesting to see a more organized, sophisticated push here: www.instagram.com/reels/DQ_uiq...

Cop30 live: calls for ‘just transition’ plan grow as report warns world on track for 2.6C of heating Climate Action Tracker report finds pledges made in past year have not cut the forecast for global heating

Flying is the most carbon polluting way to travel but on the eve of #COP30, the UN’s aviation body said it expected passenger flight numbers to *triple* by 2050, to 12.4 billion a year

Post by me
www.theguardian.com/environment/...

Greenpeace calls on Toyota to stop greenwashing biofuel vehicles - Greenpeace East Asia As the world converges at COP30 to confront the climate crisis, Greenpeace has condemned Toyota’s misleading promotion of biofuel-powered prototype vehicles as a decarbonisation solution.

At #COP30, Greenpeace urges Toyota to end its greenwashing of biofuel vehicles. These misleading claims distract from the urgent need for true electrification in the fight against the climate crisis. Our planet can't afford false solutions! 🌏 Read more: www.greenpeace.org/eastasia/pre...

NEW: At Pope Leo’s Urging, Bishops Issue Historic Rebuke of Trump’s Raids Nearly all U.S. Catholic bishops united in Baltimore to denounce the Trump administration’s “inhumane” deportation campaign — a near-unanimous, unprecedented moral stand against a sitting president.

BREAKING: At Pope Leo XIV’s urging, U.S. Catholic bishops just delivered the strongest rebuke of a sitting president in Church history — condemning Trump-Vance raids as “inhumane” and “dehumanizing” in a 216–5 vote.

Michigan regulators move to protect Consumers Energy customers from some data center costs The Michigan Public Service Commission approves rules to shield Consumers Energy ratepayers from data center costs, while environmentalists seek stronger protections.

Good news: The Michigan Public Service Commission agreed with us that Consumers Energy needs to better protect customers from the high costs of serving data centers. We demonstrated that without further protections, serving data centers could raise household electricity rates by more than 9%.

We started Indivisible in 2016 because a future Trump appointee was talking about the WWII Japanese internment camps as a model for immigrants at the same time that Schumer was talking about finding common ground with Trump.