Notices by Gerry McGovern (gerrymcgovern@mastodon.green)

Everything is connected.

Because of the 'Green' Revolution, three billion birds were exterminated in North America between 1970 and 2020.

Staggering.

Everything is connected.

40% of insect species declined between 2015 and 2025, according to Greenpeace. Insects are "vanishing 8 times faster than mammals, birds or reptiles."

Everything is connected.

When the insects go, so do we.

Creating a 5-second AI video is like running a microwave for an hour

"This report arrives at a time in which people are using generative AI for absolutely everything. Google announced at its annual I/O event that it's leaning into AI with fervor. Google Search, Gmail, Docs, and Meet are all seeing AI integrations. People are using AI to lead job interviews, create deepfakes of OnlyFans models, and cheat in college."

https://mashable.com/article/energy-ai-worse-than-we-thought

"The mismanagement of e-waste poses an alarming threat to a variety of human rights, including the right to a healthy environment, right to health, right to a safe working environment, and the rights of children who are often used as cheap labour."

"At the Dandora dump site in Nairobi, Kenya, this tension was captured by a worker who remarked, “if you don’t go to work, you don’t eat”.18 For many, scavenging is a survival strategy."

https://www.nortonrosefulbright.com/en-us/knowledge/publications/f54afc62/environmental-injustice-how-informal-e-waste-recycling-impacts-human-rights

@ReggieHere Yeah, it's hard to see how business schools could ever embrace degrowth.

Business schools must challenge growth-focused management education.

Degrowth pedagogy encourages critical thinking and innovation.

Students show openness to alternatives to free-market capitalism.

Integrating degrowth can inspire future leaders for systemic change.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S001632872500076X

"New study reveals that when used to summarize scientific research, generative AI is nearly five times LESS accurate than humans. Many haven't realized, but Gen AI's accuracy problem is worse than initially thought."

https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/epdf/10.1098/rsos.241776

"These fierce men appeared in the forest suddenly, coming from all over the place, and quickly encircled our houses in large numbers. They were frenetically searching for an evil thing that we had never heard about and whose name they repeated unceasingly: oru, gold ... I soon understood that the gold prospectors were land eaters who would destroy everything."

Davi Kopenawa, Yanomami shaman

"Typical Chat-GPT query uses about 10 times more energy than Google search That’s just for a basic generative AI function. More advanced queries require substantially more power that have to go through an AI Cluster Farm to process large-scale computing between multiple machines."

"AI is typically deployed in 20-30 cabinet clusters at or above 40 KW per cabinet. This represents a fourfold increase in KW/ cabinet with the deployment of AI. The difference is staggering."

https://www.techradar.com/pro/security/i-sat-down-with-two-cooling-experts-to-find-out-what-ais-biggest-problem-is-in-the-data-center

Resistance is not violence.

What is violent is dumping mercury into rivers.

What is violent is strip mining mountains sacred to Indigenous nations.

What is violent is arresting children for protesting while oil CEOs collect subsidies.

What is violent is letting millions die so billionaires can keep flying to conferences about climate change.

Justin McAffee

https://collapsecurriculum.substack.com/p/total-resistance-why-we-must-learn

“Population decline is only a threat to an economy based on growth. Shifting to a model based on degrowth and equity alongside lower fertility rates will help fight climate change and increase wealth and well-being.”

https://www.deccanherald.com/opinion/depopulation-or-degrowth-3539172

“This is our ancestral land. We have the right to be here,” whispers Hortencia Zhagüi, who represents the Kimsakocha Women’s School of Agroecology, as she edges past a security guard who immediately reaches for his phone to document the intrusion. The guard shouts warnings about trespassing, but the group moves forward undeterred, their footsteps barely audible against the soft, water-laden moss underfoot. "
https://ricochet.media/indigenous/brandi-morin-in-ecuador-indigenous-water-defenders-take-on-a-canadian-mining-giant/

"Degrowth is voluntary and democratic. It can’t be achieved through violence or unjustified coercion –– though of course nature is coercive and, as Hannah Arendt puts it, so is the truth. On the road toward degrowth, citizens of settlements ranging in size from neighbourhoods and hamlets to cities will need to share a favourable understanding of degrowth, and voluntarily participate in the labour necessary to achieve it"

https://www.resilience.org/stories/2025-05-13/familiarizing-degrowth-art-and-grounded-communities/

Here's what they were saying about AI in 1976

"As a field, artificial intelligence has always been on the border of respectability, and therefore on the border of crackpottery. Many critics have urged that we are over the border. We have been very defensive toward this charge, drawing ourselves up with dignity when it is made and folding the cloak of Science about us."

https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1045339.1045340

The data centers are coming. In super, secret secret. Under no circumstances can the community be let know how much water and energy will be used.

"Residents in and around Bessemer are furious over Project Marvel, a plan to build a 4.5-million-square-foot data processing facility on 700 acres of wooded land. Public officials have been sworn to silence."

https://insideclimatenews.org/news/11052025/bessemer-alabama-proposed-data-center/

"In Spain, the tech industry is clashing with farmers and environmental activists. Amazon’s three new planned data centers in the Aragon region are licensed to use 755,720 cubic meters of water annually, enough to irrigate more than 570 acres of farmland."

“These data centers use water that comes from northern Aragon, where I am,” said farmer Chechu Sánchez, speaking to The Guardian. “They consume water — where do they take it from? They take it from you, of course.”

https://www.techrepublic.com/article/news-ai-data-centers-drought/

"Navan’s Ilan Twig fundamentally reassessed his trust of large language models after asking his virtual AI finance chief to come up with five proposals for cutting the company’s business travel expenses. When it failed, he raised the stakes and the agentic AI responded to the pressure with a surprising—and all-too-human—response. It cheated."

https://fortune.com/article/navan-ilan-twig-agentic-ai-lies/

AI has been developed by the tech bros from Valley of Pimps and Pushers. It reflects the criminal character and amoral behavior.

Musk’s xAI explores another massive methane gas turbine installation at second South Memphis data center

So, why does must so like Memphis?

"Predominantly Black communities in South Memphis are already overburdened with industrial pollution and face a cancer risk four times the national average."

The richest man in the world just can't stop making a killing.

https://www.selc.org/press-release/musks-xai-explores-another-massive-methane-gas-turbine-installation-at-second-south-memphis-data-center/

“We are told repeatedly that AI will eventually help us solve social issues, including climate change, even while AI infrastructures are right now burdening communities and undermining climate goals.”

https://www.teenvogue.com/story/chatgpt-is-everywhere-environmental-costs-oped

Hah ha. That's a good one. Big Tech is like the arsonist caught setting a house on fire, claiming that he will build more houses than he sets on fire if only we let him burn this one down. And we believe him.

AI is coming for your water

An analysis by Bloomberg in the USA found that about two-thirds of AI-driven data centers built or in development between 2022 and 2025 were “in places already gripped by high water stress.”

AI is draining demand from areas that need it most, Leonardo Nicoletti, Michelle Ma, Dina Bass, Bloomberg, 2025
https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2025-ai-impacts-data-centers-water-data/

All that money for this

AI is a scam, you know

"If I can be blunt, it is an absolute embarrassment that a technology that has collectively cost about half a trillion dollars can’t do something as basic as (reliably) check its output against wikipedia or a CNN article that is handed on a silver plattter. But LLMs still cannot - and on their own may never be able to — reliably do even things that basic."

https://garymarcus.substack.com/p/why-do-large-language-models-hallucinate