Notices by Jonathan Schofield (urlyman@mastodon.social), page 2

…but 2 years on not much has changed:

“For the third year in a row, rice farmers in southern Taiwan have not been allowed to plant their crops. Instead, the government is paying them subsidies to *not* grow rice this season, because it uses scarce water that semiconductor plants nearby need”

https://www.opb.org/article/2023/04/19/epic-drought-in-taiwan-pits-farmers-against-high-tech-factories-for-water/

The Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) is investing in water recycling but the conflict between people’s needs and the hunger for semiconductors is not abating

Hope your LLM query is worth it:

“xAI’s Colossus supercomputer consumes about 150 MW of power when equipped with 100,000 H100 GPUs. More when it is upgraded to 200,000 processors. However, last July the site near Memphis, Tennessee, could only provide 8 MW of power to the facility, so Musk’s company had to install … 35 methane gas burning turbines while only having a permit for 15”

ht @Kierkegaanks

https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intelligence/elon-musks-xai-allegedly-powers-colossus-supercomputer-facility-using-illegal-generators

…short version:
Europeans are in a deep hole.

Takeaway:
do everything you can right now to minimise your own personal dependency upon oil

#eupol
A rough guide to the intensity of the *dependency on others* for oil:

Europe:
6.1 barrels imported per year per person (bipypp)
~314% of own production (exc. Russia and Caucasus)

China:
2.8 bipypp
42.9% of own production

USA:
2.1 bipypp
2.4% of own production

Russia:
0.07 bipypp
0.3% of own production

Use this to sense check your politicians

- Riffing on: https://mastodon.social/@urlyman/114233968625224293
- Europe (not EU): https://mastodon.social/@urlyman/114116524153006437
- Further notes: https://mastodon.social/@urlyman/114235045724857385

“Substack is, just as a reminder, a political project made by extremists with a goal of normalizing a radical, hateful agenda by co-opting well-intentioned creators’ work in service of cross-promoting attacks on the vulnerable.
…
Substack’s CEO explicitly said they won’t ban someone who is explicitly spouting hate…”

https://www.anildash.com//2024/11/19/dont-call-it-a-substack/

Saw this originally via Brandon – https://mastodon.ie/@brandonhamber/113871602413909723 – but here it is with an image description.

A deliciously apt burn on the orange gulf in America’s fetish for a Gulf of America

@aral thank you for bringing codeberg to my awareness 🫡

Earlier today I was dissing the BBC for its piss-poor track record of addressing our economics conundrums.

I stand by that, because it’s not a case of whether they ever have, so much as how *infrequently* they do, and with what degrees of visibility.

Nonetheless, here is a 10-part 2016 series of 15-minutes episodes I’ve found, on Debt by the late David Graeber
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b05447pc

Coming soon to a racist, anti-immigrant country near you:

*Retailers could use shopper data to charge higher prices to people who don’t ‘look right’ or have the right documentation*
https://mastodon.ar.al/@aral/113899307158687215

…I’ve done it too. Chastised those who stay on X, *after* taking a loooong time to make the move myself.

How convenient for me.

But the world is complex and, to borrow from @pluralistic,

“We focus too much on the fire and not enough on the kindling piled up around the tree.”

https://mastodon.social/@urlyman/113899390530566614

Being on X or buying Tesla is now clearly a *direct* input into enabling what Musk has openly become: a facilitator of the rise of fascistic thinking.

But so too is buying products made with oil, and voting for governments who promise they have our backs but are overwhelmingly captured by corporate power. It’s just those are *indirect*. Harder to point an unswerving finger at.

The effects of the latter are much greater. But uncomfortable. And so we say things like https://mastodon.social/@randahl/113898735126996279

@ianb the one supports the other.

As to where effectiveness lies, the Just Stop Oil approach is a kind of “those guys are fucking stupid” strategy and overwhelmingly, because of the asymmetries, the societal response is “*you* guys are fucking stupid”.

Which I think leaves us here https://mastodon.social/@urlyman/113889391969519396

@NatureMC @TimnitGebru @emilymbender

Nicholas Shaxson wrote ‘The Finance Curse: How Global Finance is Making us all Poorer’, and a very good Guardian Long Read on the same topic.

Here, he sets out how Amazon is much worse than I already knew, and how UK Labour has embraced their mindset at the expense of you and I https://mas.to/@therightarticle/113888272771106841

…as Nicholas Shaxson and others like @pluralistic cogently point out, the Amazon tech feudalist mindset is now embedded into the UK’s Competitions and Mergers Authority (CMA), thanks to Labour’s appointment of Doug Gurr.

And here is Shaxson from 2018 on the UK’s finance curse https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/oct/05/the-finance-curse-how-the-outsized-power-of-the-city-of-london-makes-britain-poorer

…Shaxson on Amazon, part 2:

“Who ultimately pays? You do, because those [Amazon] sellers must jack up their prices to stay afloat. The fees are like private taxes that consumers and sellers pay to Jeff Bezos and Amazon’s shareholders.

Worse, Amazon’s pricing rules encourage sellers to increase their prices *off* Amazon. A lawsuit by the US Federal Trade Commission calls this a ‘one-two punch’ where sellers must ‘use their inflated Amazon prices as a price floor everywhere else’.”

…Shaxson on Amazon, part 1:

“research shows that the price of sending a standard parcel via Amazon in the UK has more than doubled since 2017.

Meanwhile, the income from the advertising fees that independent sellers must pay to stay visible to customers exploded: a nearly 17-fold rise from 2017 to 2022.

International research even shows that Amazon uses its chokehold over sellers to pocket more than half of sellers’ revenues in fees. Half!”

…then, after reading Richard ☝️, go read @pluralistic about how culturally Labour have gone from

My Little Tony™

…circa 2006 to

My Enshittifying Monopsony
https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/22/autocrats-of-trade/

This seems like hyperbole, but when you read the article
🤔😬

https://mas.to/@RichardJMurphy/113876591344582270

AI is an accelerant.

To accelerate current culture you’d have to think that the following are good long term ideas:

- oil, gas and coal extraction
- disempowering humans
- obfuscating cause from effect
- building water hungry and energy ravenous data centres in the face of growing resource scarcity

If one thinks that these are not good, one should want to engineer change *first*, before pressing the accelerator

…I use microblogging as a kind of catharsis and I’m flattered that some 1,100 people think that’s worth something.

But because it is a way for me to work shit out in public, I’m really attached to my own post history. I frequently reference it.

So starting all that again – AGAIN after Twitter – is no small thing for me.

Sure I could download an archive and host that somewhere – maybe my own instance – but then all the exchanges (the good stuff) that hangs off those posts would be gone :(