Category Archives: Uncategorized

Climate Shocks Are Making Parts of America Uninsurable. It Just Got Worse.

I think it is hi-larious that the first major impact making climate change real for people is insurance.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/31/climate/climate-change-insurance-wildfires-california.html?unlocked_article_code=jNqQQ3KxRnognLlf4E3o8-ksmAA0-8dXGuWxaX5XSl3X7Ziqr0aWrufjZFG9YoVucV0uYctEwOGqsBSd3VTopkiZoonX1vPqPvyocD_cUv4jPX8sBhgqlX3GYvjygj1RWem8LrkdexM25mFs-fSKPSCECFPdBYTvtXa27f7MfS8Gq1E_eYz-6A2oneU2oc8AV7P5ZWyXx_jW4yPjIh31LI19nFQjF90WSf521Jt0V5TqJOXGyFLFRhdsz2kvRyj8zIJwqnKG8c56TW0413-gcmeCt5UUqyUqxLqNlEk76AGTCIHAnzfxx8D7I0jhRBDYmwqkLLurpofTk1pVPN1MpVIYf4Zu1-rd4PCvVIbIFgFV2ibr8_cs&smid=url-share

Ok, now that I’m not laughing any more, that actually makes sense. You won’t get clobbered by sea level rise or the mother of all forest fires or hurricanes, but none of the people whose job it is to know these things will take your bet that you’re going to be fine.

Native American – Political Conquest, Assimilationist Perspectives, and Boarding Schools | Britannica

Was looking at the Wikipedia list of US military deaths (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_military_casualties_of_war) over the years and was struck by how many wars against the noble savage we engaged in during our noble expansion west in this great land of ours which we now possess.

I have always wondered how many were slaughtered, how many died of imported diseases, how many were exiled to bad land no one wanted, and how many were assimilated. Let’s read….

https://www.britannica.com/topic/Native-American/Assimilation-versus-sovereignty-the-late-19th-to-the-late-20th-century

Yikes, this is quite a list:

《Programs promoting assimilation were framed by the social and economic ideals that had come to dominate the national cultures of Canada and the United States. Although they varied in detail, these ideals generally emphasized Euro-American social structures and habits such as nuclear or, at most, three-generation families; patrilineal kinship; differential inheritance among “legitimate” and “illegitimate” children; male-led households; a division of labour that defined the efforts of women, children, and elders as “domestic help” and those of men as “productive labour”; sober religiosity; and corporal punishment for children and women. Economically, they emphasized capitalist principles, especially the ownership of private property (particularly of land, livestock, and machinery); self-directed occupations such as shop keeping, farming, and ranching; and the self-sufficiency of the nuclear household.》

This entire article seems pretty solid, btw.

Debt ceiling insanity

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/26/business/economy/debt-limit-default.html

This is insane. Three clean debt-ceiling raises by Republicans under Trump, but here we are:

《The Treasury can’t delay an interest payment without default, according to SIFMA, but it could notify Fedwire by 7:30 a.m. that the payment will not be ready for the morning. It would then have until 4:30 p.m. to make the payment and avoid default.》

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/gop-debt-ceiling-trump-presidency/

On ChatGPT

From a good thread:

@stefan@ak.lightnovel-dungeon.de 🔗 https://ak.lightnovel-dungeon.de/objects/7dd10779-0725-4200-a266-93a90a50c0ec – @funnymonkey I just had a good laugh. allow me a quote: “In addition to the possible business threat, forcing OpenAI to identify its use of copyrighted data would expose the company to potential lawsuits. Generative AI systems like ChatGPT and DALL-E are trained using large amounts of data scraped from the web, much of it copyright protected. When companies disclose these data sources it leaves them open to legal challenges. OpenAI rival Stability AI, for example, is currently being sued by stock image maker Getty Images for using its copyrighted data to train its AI image generator.” So OpenAI likely knows full-well that what it does is unlawful and they try to hide in secrecy so they not get sued, Just lovely.