Notices by Miguel Afonso Caetano (remixtures@tldr.nettime.org)

Quase metade das casas em Lisboa não têm como finalidade a habitação e tanta gente à procura de casa na Área Metropolitana de Lisboa. Depois digam mal dos okupas, digam. Especulai à vontade enquanto que o pessoal sem casa dorme na rua ao frio e à chuva...

"Before 2008, gentrification was largely absent from many central Lisbon neighbourhoods – areas primarily inhabited by poor, elderly residents living in deteriorating buildings. Investment certainly brought building rehabilitation, but it didn’t translate into residential stability. Despite the improvements, the centre of the city lost 25% of its population between 2011 and 2021. Across the municipality, of the dwellings built or renovated between during this period, only 56.5% serve as primary residences. The rest are either vacant, used as second homes, or converted into short-term rentals.

All this contradicts the neoliberal supply and demand story as the escalation of property prices is not linked to an actual demand for homes to live in and the formation of new households. Instead, what we see is that Lisbon is now on the radar of investors who use housing as a financial asset: a process where real estate is produced not to meet residential needs, but to maximise returns. In a context shaped by a flexible rental law, local landlords have capitalised on this shift, engaging in rentier practices by steadily raising rents and extracting increasing value from a shrinking pool of habitable homes.

The result is a city that welcomes foreign wealth but excludes many of its own citizens, prioritising the desires of global consumers over the needs of local communities. The current housing crisis reflects a stark disconnect between wages and property prices – with housing costs approaching those of global cities in a country where salaries remain among the lowest in Europe."

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/jun/25/lisbon-europe-portugal-golden-visa-capital-investors-short-term-rentals

#Portugal #Lisboa #Inequality #Lisbon #Housing #Tourism #Capitalism #Neoliberalism #Financialization

"A massive data center for Meta’s AI will likely lead to rate hikes for Louisiana customers, but Meta wants to keep the details under wraps.

Holly Ridge is a rural community bisected by US Highway 80, gridded with farmland, with a big creek—it is literally named Big Creek—running through it. It is home to rice and grain mills and an elementary school and a few houses. Soon, it will also be home to Meta’s massive, 4 million square foot AI data center hosting thousands of perpetually humming servers that require billions of watts of energy to power. And that energy-guzzling infrastructure will be partially paid for by Louisiana residents.

The plan is part of what Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said would be “a defining year for AI.” On Threads, Zuckerberg boasted that his company was “building a 2GW+ datacenter that is so large it would cover a significant part of Manhattan,” posting a map of Manhattan along with the data center overlaid. Zuckerberg went on to say that over the coming years, AI “will drive our core products and business, unlock historic innovation, and extend American technology leadership. Let's go build! 💪”"

https://www.404media.co/a-black-hole-of-energy-use-metas-massive-ai-data-center-is-stressing-out-a-louisiana-community/

#AI #GenerativeAI #DataCenters #Meta #Louisiana #Energy #USA

Quando a produtividade cresce mais que os salários ao longo de um determinado período de tempo num país específico, pode-se concluir claramente que alguém anda a roubar aos trabalhadores.

Quando esse mesmo fenómeno acontece em vários países com economias muito parecidas, pode-se concluir que estamos perante um sistema concertado de gamanço sistemático dos trabalhadores.

Conclusão: se os factos validarem que a produtividade tem crescido mais do que os salários, como é que alguém que se considere racional e cuja sobrevivência depende de vender a sua força de trabalho pode ser outra coisa que não de Esquerda?

"Israel broke the fragile truce, murdering civilians with increased frequency. The Israeli army shot at close range over a dozen marked medical rescuers and a UN worker, then buried their bodies along with the ambulances. It bombed the last standing school buildings and hospitals. It has starved thousands of Palestinian children, maintaining an almost complete blockade of international humanitarian aid for twelve weeks.

It took the levelling of over 70 per cent of Gaza for Germany’s leader to make such a groundbreaking declaration as “what’s happening in Gaza can no longer be justified by the fight against terrorism.” Merz added that he had “stopped understanding what Israel is trying to achieve,” though Netanyahu and his people openly state that the goal of the ongoing “military operation” is the annexation of the Gaza Strip.

The German government even considered such “radical” steps as stopping weapons shipments to Israel – as reported by Israeli public television Kan 11, Tel Aviv undertook intensive diplomatic efforts against such ideas. With positive results – Johann Wadephul, head of Germany’s Foreign Ministry, has already assured that deliveries are not under threat."

https://socialistproject.ca/2025/06/even-germany-now-condemns-israeli-crimes/

#Germany #Israel #Palestine #Gaza #Genocide #HumanRights

"This is a simple story, one that should be all too familiar to European publics if they were educated in their own histories.

For centuries, Europeans spread outwards - driven by a supremacist zealotry and a desire for material gain – to conquer the lands of others, to steal resources, and to subordinate, expel and exterminate the natives that stood in their way.

The native people were always dehumanised. They were always barbarians, "human animals", even as we – the members of a supposedly superior civilisation – butchered them, starved them, levelled their homes, destroyed their crops.

Our mission of conquest and extermination was always divinely blessed. Our success in eradicating native peoples, our efficiency in killing them, was always proof of our moral superiority.

We were always the victims, even while we humiliated, tortured and raped. We were always on the side of righteousness.

Israel has simply carried this tradition into the modern era. It has held a mirror up to us and shown that, despite all our grandstanding about human rights, nothing has really changed.

There are a few, like Greta Thunberg and the crew of the Madleen, ready to show by example that we can break with the past. We can refuse to dehumanise. We can refuse to collude in industrial savagery. We can refuse to give our consent through silence and inaction.

But first we must stop listening to the siren calls of our political leaders and the billionaire-owned media. Only then might we learn what it means to be human."

https://www.middleeasteye.net/opinion/greta-thunberg-tried-shame-western-leaders-and-found-they-have-no-shame

#Israel #Palestine #Gaza #HumanRights

One of the last true Libertarians. I'm sure I will totally agree with him during half of the text and absolutely disagree with him in the other half.

"In Defending Technological Dynamism & the Freedom to Innovate in the Age of AI, Adam Thierer argues that human flourishing, economic growth, and geopolitical resilience requires innovation—especially in artificial intelligence. Overzealous regulation threatens to undermine this progress. If policymakers adopt a governance philosophy of permissionless innovation over the precautionary principle, however, they can foster an environment that tolerates and protects creativity, experimentation, and risk-taking."

https://www.civitasinstitute.org/research/defending-technological-dynamism-the-freedom-to-innovate-in-the-age-of-ai

#AI #GenerativeAI #AIRegulation #PermissionlessInnovation #Geopolitics #USA #China

"With old J.R.R. in his grave since 1973, there’s no way to be certain, but it seems likely he would have been deeply disturbed to see the words “Anduril” or “Palantir” inscribed on a cruise missile or an AI targeting system.

In other letters, Tolkien wrote that “My political opinions lean more and more to Anarchy (philosophically understood, meaning the abolition of control not whiskered men with bombs)—or to ‘unconstitutional’ Monarchy.” This is obviously contradictory and eccentric, and literature scholars have spent decades debating exactly what he meant by it. But we get a clue a few sentences later, when Tolkien writes that “The most improper job of any man, even saints (who at any rate were at least unwilling to take it on), is bossing other men. Not one in a million is fit for it, and least of all those who seek the opportunity.” I take that to mean that Tolkien liked the idea of “unconstitutional monarchy” in theory, if a purely benevolent king like his fictional Aragorn could be found, but he didn’t trust any actually existing leader to fill the role, and so opted for anarchy and the “abolition of control” as a lesser evil. (Other readers will, doubtless, disagree.) At any rate, the bit about “those who seek the opportunity” to wield power being the least fit of all is another clear rebuke to people like Thiel, Vance, and Yarvin, whose entire lives seem devoted to becoming more wealthy and powerful. In fact, we could call that the moral core of Tolkien’s entire mythos.

It’s especially ironic, when you know the ins and outs of Middle-Earth, that Peter Thiel chose to name his surveillance company “Palantir.” In The Lord of the Rings, a palantir is not a good thing to have. Actually, almost everyone who lays a hand on one is cursed and driven to their destruction by the experience."

https://www.currentaffairs.org/news/how-the-right-abuses-tolkien

#USA #Libertarianism #FarRight #Thiel #Tolkien #Literature #Anarchism #Authoritarianism

"As part of a sweeping reorganization of the State Department, the Trump administration is creating an Office of Remigration. Remigration is an immigration policy embraced by extremists that calls for the removal of all migrants—including “non-assimilated” citizens—with the goal of creating white ethnostates in Western countries.

The details of the plan are contained in a 136-page notification document sent by the State Department to six Congressional commitees—including the House Foreign Affairs and Appropriations Committees and the Senate Foreign Relations Committee—for approval by July 1, according to a copy reviewed by WIRED.

“The Office of Remigration will serve as the [Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration]’s hub for immigration issues and repatriation tracking,” the document reads. “It will provide a policy platform for interagency coordination with DHS and other agencies on removals/repatriations, and for intra-agency policy work to advance the President’s immigration agenda.”

The notification says that the Office of Remigration “will also actively facilitate the voluntary return of migrants to their country of origin or legal status,” which is a key aim of remigration ideology.

The document, which was first reported on by Reuters and The Handbasket, also outlines dramatic changes to the US diplomatic services, including the elimination of much of the Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor Bureau, and the addition of a new deputy assistant secretary position to oversee “Democracy and Western Values.”"

https://www.wired.com/story/trump-office-remigration-state-department-europe-far-right/

#USA #Trump #FarRight #Remigration #Immigration #Deportation #Xenophobia

"Two hikers trying to tackle Unnecessary Mountain near Vancouver, British Columbia, had to call in a rescue team after they stumbled into snow. The pair were only wearing flat-soled sneakers, unaware that the higher altitudes of a mountain range only some 15 degrees of latitude south of the Arctic Circle might still be snowy in the spring.

"We ended up going up there with boots for them," Brent Calkin, leader of the Lions Bay Search and Rescue team, told the Vancouver Sun. "We asked them their boot size and brought up boots and ski poles."

It turns out that to plan their ill-fated expedition, the hikers heedlessly followed the advice given to them by Google Maps and the AI chatbot ChatGPT.

Now, Calkin and his rescue team are warning that maybe you shouldn't rely on dodgy apps and AI chatbots — a piece of technology known for lying and being wrong all the time — to plan a grueling excursion through the wilderness.

"With the amount of information available online, it's really easy for people to get in way over their heads, very quickly," Calkin told the Vancouver Sun.

Across the pond, a recent report from Mountain Rescue England and Wales blamed social media and bad navigation apps for a historic surge in rescue teams being called out, the newspaper noted."

https://futurism.com/ai-chatbots-hikers-danger

#AI #GenerativeAI #Chatbots #ChatGPT #AISafety

"Given these and many similar observations in the last several months, I’ve realized many of us working on AI in the classroom have made a collective mistake, believing that lazy and engaged uses lie on a spectrum, and that moving our students toward engaged uses would also move them away from the lazy ones.

Faculty and students have been telling me that this is not true, or at least not true enough. Instead of a spectrum, uses of AI are independent options. A student can take an engaged approach to one assignment, a lazy approach on another, and a mix of engaged and lazy on a third. Good uses of AI do not automatically dissuade students from also adopting bad ones; an instructor can introduce AI for essay feedback or test prep without that stopping their student from also using it to write most of their assignments.

Our problem is that we have two problems. One is figuring out how to encourage our students to adopt creative and helpful uses of AI. The other is figuring out how to discourage them from adopting lazy and harmful uses. Those are both important, but the second one is harder."

"I am an administrator at New York University, responsible for helping faculty adapt to digital tools. Since the arrival of generative AI, I have spent much of the last two years talking with professors and students to try to understand what is going on in their classrooms. In those conversations, faculty have been variously vexed, curious, angry, or excited about AI, but as last year was winding down, for the first time one of the frequently expressed emotions was sadness. This came from faculty who were, by their account, adopting the strategies my colleagues and I have recommended: emphasizing the connection between effort and learning, responding to AI-generated work by offering a second chance rather than simply grading down, and so on. Those faculty were telling us our recommended strategies were not working as well as we’d hoped, and they were saying it with real distress.

Earlier this semester, an NYU professor told me how he had AI-proofed his assignments, only to have the students complain that the work was too hard. When he told them those were standard assignments, just worded so current AI would fail to answer them, they said he was interfering with their “learning styles.” A student asked for an extension, on the grounds that ChatGPT was down the day the assignment was due. Another said, about work on a problem set, “You’re asking me to go from point A to point B, why wouldn’t I use a car to get there?” And another, when asked about their largely AI-written work, replied, “Everyone is doing it.” Those are stories from a 15-minute conversation with a single professor.

We are also hearing a growing sense of sadness from our students about AI use. One of my colleagues reports students being “deeply conflicted” about AI use, originally adopting it as an aid to studying but persisting with a mix of justification and unease."

https://www.chronicle.com/article/is-ai-enhancing-education-or-replacing-it

#AI #GenerativeAI #Universities #HigherEd #Education #Writing

"Bloomberg News found that about two-thirds of new data centers built or in development since 2022 are in places already gripped by high levels of water stress. While these facilities are popping up all over the country, five states alone account for 72% of the new centers in high-stress areas.

Tech giants are racing to expand with new — and larger — data centers to support AI, consuming more resources, including water. That only adds to concerns that communities facing water shortages will have to compete with data center operators to access clean water.

The problem has been years in the making. Some tech companies are trying to find ways to address it, without creating other environmental drawbacks. Meanwhile, the proportion of data centers in water-stressed regions is at a record high.

Even before ChatGPT launched in late 2022, communities complained about data centers guzzling up millions of gallons of water every day from cities that didn’t have all that much to spare. The problem has only deepened in the years since ChatGPT kicked off an AI frenzy."

https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2025-ai-impacts-data-centers-water-data/

#AI #GenerativeAI #DataCenters #Water #WaterScarcity #BigTech #Drought

RT @RnaudBertrand
This is a terrifying phenomenon that should be spoken about much more: insects are quite literally disappearing.

The Bugs Matter citizen science survey (https://buglife.org.uk/news/bugs-matter-survey-shows-ongoing-decline-in-uk-flying-insects/), which lets 1000s of people record insect splats on their vehicle number plates after journeys, reports that the number of insects recorded in the UK between 2021 and 2024 fell by an astounding 63%.

Anyone who's been driving a car for a long time has witnessed the phenomenon.

When I was a kid over 30 years ago, during even short journeys in the French countryside our car's windshield would be absolutely littered with insects splats.

Last year, I drove from Paris to the South of France and my windshield was pristine when I arrived: not a single insect.

https://www.buglife.org.uk/news/bugs-matter-survey-shows-ongoing-decline-in-uk-flying-insects/

"The promise of realtime deepfakes for fraudsters is that they can use the tech to engage with a victim in the moment. Rather than some scripted video which may or may not be tailored to the victim, realtime deepfakes allow a scammer to talk directly to their mark and improvise on video calls or livestreams. They can appear just as human as the person they are impersonating, potentially fooling not only people but also the automated systems that require someone to prove their identity to open an account with a financial institution, for example.

For months 404 Media has monitored the spread of deepfake technology throughout fraud-focused Telegram channels. For much of that time, the results were not impressive. Some involved using AI to animate a photo in an attempt to bypass cryptocurrency exchanges’ identity verification processes and the videos were stilted and unnatural. Others looked more realistic, but it was unclear whether the advertisements were scams—fraudsters on Telegram asked for hundreds of dollars for access to their tool that allegedly bypassed know-your-customer (KYC) verification checks. Some fraudsters also advertised access to tools that let a phone user replace their camera’s input with a file from their phone’s gallery, meaning they could upload the deepfake video to services that ask for a selfie. 404 Media has also seen Instagram accounts where a real person consistently deepfakes themselves to appear as a different gender in order to catfish people."

https://www.404media.co/the-age-of-realtime-deepfake-fraud-is-here/

#AI #DeepFakes #OnlineFraud #Scams

"A fire in the south-west of France, on the Alaric mountain, which damaged a high-voltage power line between Perpignan and eastern Narbonne, has also been identified as a possible cause, Portugal's national electric company REN said.

Reports on a rare atmospheric phenomenon which have also been circulating have been denied by REN to private channel SIC.

Meanwhile, the Spanish National Intelligence Centre has not ruled out the possibility of a cyberattack, while the Portuguese government has also suggested the same.

However, "no evidence has yet been identified that points to a cyberattack" to justify the blackout, Portugal's National Cybersecurity Centre (CNCS) said in a statement on Monday.

"Such a widespread grid failure is extremely unusual and could be caused by a number of things: there could be a physical fault in the grid which brings down power, a coordinated cyber attack could be behind it, or a dramatic imbalance between demand and supply has tipped the grid system over the edge," Taco Engelaar, managing director at energy infrastructure experts Neara told Euronews."

https://www.euronews.com/my-europe/2025/04/28/spain-portugal-and-parts-of-france-hit-by-massive-power-outage

#Portugal #Spain #PowerOutage #Apagao #EnergyShutdown

"In Finland, manufacturing accounted for 24 percent of GDP. By 1991, it had declined to 17. In Sweden, manufacturing as a share of GDP declined from 21 to 16 percent during the same period. But by the early 2000, Finland brought its manufacturing share of GDP back up to 24 percent, and Sweden raised its manufacturing share of GDP to 20 percent.

The same trend can be observed in Singapore. Singapore experienced quite a significant decline in manufacturing in the mid-1980s, from 27 percent to 20 percent. But by the mid-2000s, it had recovered back to 27 percent. By the way, Singapore, despite what people think, is one of the most industrialized countries in the world: in terms of per capita manufacturing output, it ranks in the top five globally. There’s an interesting myth about it being a service economy.

The most industrialized country in the world is Switzerland. You think that the Swiss are dealing in the black money from Third World dictators and selling cow bells and cuckoo clocks to American and Japanese tourists. Actually, it is literally the most industrialized country in the world, if you count in terms of manufacturing output per person.

These countries have managed to revive their manufacturing industry, and since then they have declined a bit. But the lesson here is that these countries could do that only because they had a deliberate policy to revive manufacturing. What Donald Trump is trying to do is wishful thinking. Countries that have successfully increased their manufacturing output have deliberate policies to support manufacturing. In the Swedish and Finnish case, it also extended to retraining the workers made redundant because of the decline in traditional manufacturing sectors and then turning them into workers for new industries."

https://jacobin.com/2025/04/tariffs-protectionism-manufacturing-industrial-policy

#USA #Trump #Manufacturing #Reindustrialization #Automation #ClassWarfare #Tariffs #Protectionism #FreeTrade #IndutrialPolicy

"The reason that the so-called China shock was so much more damaging in the United States was because of the nature of America’s political economy. Sweden and Finland of course faced competition from cheap Chinese imports, but their corporations kept investing in raising productivity and diversifying. This allowed them to partly fend off competition, partly by moving into new areas. Workers in these countries also enjoyed the security of an extensive welfare state and what economists call an active labor market policy.

These workers were retrained and relocated and got help with finding new jobs. In the United States, you don’t have that. Instead you have this parasitic financial market. I think that given the US’s actual political economy, tariffs are going to deliver pain rather than gains."

"According to Wynn-Williams, Facebook actually built an extensive censorship and surveillance system for the Chinese state – spies, cops and military – to use against Chinese Facebook users, and FB users globally. They promise to set up caches of global FB content in China that the Chinese state can use to monitor all Facebook activity, everywhere, with the implication that they'll be able to spy on private communications, and censor content for non-Chinese users.

Despite all of this, Facebook is never given access to China. However, the Chinese state is able to use the tools Facebook built for it to attack independence movements, the free press and dissident uprisings in Hong Kong and Taiwan."

https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/23/zuckerstreisand/#zdgaf

#SocialMedia #Facebook #Meta #BigTech #Oligopolies #Surveillance #Censorship #Privacy #HumanRights

"You may find China’s approach to its financial elite harsh. It is harsh, in some ways, especially if you’re used to the United States’ more hands-off approach. There have even been cases where Chinese bankers have been sentenced to death for things like bribery, which does cross a line into the draconian. But then again, most of the “ex-billionaires” who’ve fallen under Xi Jinping’s regulatory hammer are still around, and still extremely rich—just less so than before. And you have to ask yourself: which is worse, being too harsh on billionaires and their activities, or not harsh enough?

Consider a counterfactual: what if the U.S. government had done to Elon Musk what the Chinese government did to Jack Ma? Say, in 2022, when Musk’s plans to buy Twitter and remake it in his own image started to move forward? There was some discussion back then about American regulators suing to prevent the $44 billion sale, but nothing came of it. But suppose U.S. antitrust watchdogs had blocked the deal, and a little later, made it clear to Musk that there would be serious consequences if he kept meddling in American politics. Imagine someone had arrested him when he openly bribed Pennsylvanians with entry in a $1 million raffle in exchange for registering to vote in 2024, for instance—or when he did the same thing in a Wisconsin judicial race this year."

https://www.currentaffairs.org/news/china-knows-how-to-deal-with-its-billionaires

#China #Billionaires #USA #Musk

"There is an old maxim that ‘every model is wrong, but some models are useful’. It takes a lot of work to translate outputs from models to claims about the world. The toolbox of machine learning makes it easier to build models, but it doesn’t necessarily make it easier to extract knowledge about the world, and might well make it harder. As a result, we run the risk of producing more but understanding less.

Science is not merely a collection of facts or findings. Actual scientific progress happens through theories, which explain a collection of findings, and paradigms, which are conceptual tools for understanding and investigating a domain. As we move from findings to theories to paradigms, things get more abstract, broader and less amenable to automation. We suspect that the rapid proliferation of scientific findings based on AI has not accelerated — and might even have inhibited — these higher levels of progress."

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-01067-2

#AI #Science #ML #MachineLearning #Leakages #Statistics #Research