A Penguin jumped on this boat to escape a seal, so they took him to the iceberg where his friends were waiting for him.

RE: https://social.treehouse.systems/@ariadne/117063592703392163

Most city dwellers don't know how much of the night sky has already been stolen by billionaires, because poorly planned, wasteful city lights have already drowned out the stars for them.

@mcc

I see the same cognitive disconnect with people who just lost their homes in wildfires or lost people to extreme heat...

... still voting for Koch Network funded Republicans who are killing the move to low cost renewable energy

... still driving huge gas-guzzling trucks

... still heating their homes & cooking with natural gas

... still supporting oil pipelines "for the jobs"

.... still believing lying technofascists promoting six-acre AI data centers

... still drilling for oil

Hey @HailsandAles, it's on.

SpaceX obviously struggles with making rocket launches financially beneficial, so they invent every shit they can to find more rocket customers. The energy needs for this endeavor are hilarious, and energy use equates to environmental pollutions and impacts. Perfect illustration of why capitalism as a system to organise society is not sustainable. #Space #Environment

https://theconversation.com/spacex-aims-to-use-rockets-to-quickly-transport-cargo-across-the-earth-and-into-orbit-moves-that-would-expand-the-global-cargo-system-287557

“I don’t need a stair-climbing wheelchair that costs $30,000 and requires a maintenance crew. I need better doorknobs and or a ramp…”

sightlessscribbles.com/disability-d...
https://sightlessscribbles.com/disability-dongle/

RE: https://glammr.us/@overholt/117049333496122205

Back in 1999 or so, I was on the team that helped Minnesota Public Radio choose a long-term storage format for their (extensive and valuable!!) audio archives, which they were about to digitize.

The conclusion we came to was that there was •no• storage medium that met their long-term preservation goals — true then, and almost certainly still true today. The best approach is perpetual and redundant forward copying of the data, from one physical storage device to another.

An archive isn’t a physical thing; it's a process.

I just cannot for the life of me figure out what folks who question the rush to shove ai into every nook and cranny of modern life are so concerned about

RE: https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:eclio37ymobqex2ncko63h4r/post/3msgnsnwtwa2n

So a quadcopter drone with a semtex bomb was placed in the German airport of Leipzig near a Ukrainian cargo plane, and it only failed its mission because of a faulty detonator… only days after a Russian cruise missile left a huge crater in Poland.

But we are totally not in any way at war with Russia.

At all.

Thought for the Day: Anyone who wants to be president of the United States should be disqualified from the position.

British Columbia is logging its last old growth. Protesters are sleeping in the road to stop it. https://cheknews.ca/british-columbia-is-logging-its-last-old-growth-protesters-are-sleeping-in-the-road-to-stop-it-1340473/

#environment #OldGrowthForests #logging #foresty #nature #VancouverIsland #BritishColumbia

We learn from the past & we press on into the future. We don't get to know if we'll ever "get it right", but we can try to pass something on at least.

I'm going to die in an infuriatingly unjust world & so will you. That doesn't mean we make no difference. It's a long fight. It's very important that we don't give up. It's very important that we keep trying to make a better future happen by making a better present.

But we have to continuously help new people take up the work & move it forward.

This is going to be a long thread... said Ariadne to Theseus.

Question for any blind person who has successfully passed Introductory Statistics in college. Just how exactly did you do it? Which accommodations have worked for you? Please boost for reach.

#Physics Yet again, teaching students Newton's 2nd and 3rd laws and (for sometime now) I have not been surprised at how difficult students find it to wrap their heads around these.

I mean it's easy to say relativity or quantum is tough, but that forgets the difficulty students find getting to grips with foundational ideas that lead them there!

Okay I'm a teacher. So let me explain this to you in as simple a way as I can.

Let's say I want to buy a cake. But not just any cake. A specialty cake for my nieces quinceañera. A cake like that costs at least $100 bucks. But I don't have $100 bucks. What do?

Well, I could save up to buy the cake. But that might take a long time and by then her quinceañera would be long over and gone. I could go take out a loan for the $100 bucks. But I don't want to take out a loan because it might make my credit look bad to have that much debt. So what's the solution?

Well if I'm particularly creative and not overburdened by an abundance of morality, the solution is easy. I make another me. A special me. A me designed for one purpose only - to saddle with debt.

So I create another Lana. A legal fiction. Let's call her Twona. Twona's only purpose in life is to get a bunch of credit cards and then cakes for my niece's quinceañera. Twona gets a MasterCard and a Visa, and puts $50 on each. When the cake arrives, Twona gives me the cake, and keeps the debt. And if the IRS or the banks ever come calling asking pesky questions about how I managed to afford a special quinceañera cake, I can legally and truthfully tell them I do not have any quinceañera credit card debt.

And you may be asking why the credit cards would do this. Why just give Twona those lines of credit, knowing that she was just going to buy a quinceañera cake with it. It's not like they can repossess a giant 5-tiered specially cake with "Congratulations Niece on Your Quinceañera" written on it in bright pink fluffy icing. No one would ever buy that from them. It's worthless as a repossessed asset. And the reason is that I signed an agreement with MasterCard and Visa saying that if they ever had to come collect on the debt, that I would pay them a certain amount of interest on the debt for the next 100 years.

So let's recap.
- I got: the cake, and no record of debt on my financial documents
- Twona got: the debt
- The credit agencies got: promise of residual income for the next century

Congratulations, now you understand how all these enormous data center buildings in rural places are being funded. Just take the quinceañera numbers and multiply them by 10 orders of magnitude. Meta and Amazon and Oracle and the rest of the tech companies are set to invest almost a trillion dollars in AI buildout just this year alone. And none of it is going on their financial documents. Because technically, none of them have taken out any loans. The loans are being held by shell companies created specifically for this purpose, with names like (I am not making these up) Beignet and Sopaipilla. These shell companies own the debt. And in return, Meta gets to build a $27 Billion dollar specialty data center building in the middle of rural Louisiana. And then Beignet rents that building to Meta. Nobody except Meta will ever use that building. It exists for one purpose only. But legally, Meta does not carry the debt on constructing it. Beignet does.

And the big burning question here is why. Why would Meta do this?

The reason is because if Meta had that debt on its own books, $27 billion dollars of debt looks like exactly what it is - the biggest financial gamble in the history of modern finances. Bigger than the housing bubble of the late 2000s. Bigger than the dot-com bubble of the 1990s. Bigger even than the stock market bubble of the roaring 1920s. And we all know how well that one went.

So what's the fallout here? Nobody knows. What I'm saying is that you, the public, are not getting the full story. It's being deliberately hidden from public view. But now that you know it exists, you know what to look out for. This is a bubble. And when it bursts, there will be almost no warning. And some people stand to lose everything.

The new king was a tyrant and the people lived in fear. The king's first advisor, a magician of a new religion claimed that he would make the stones speak, and that that those who listened to the stones (any merchant, bard or lord) might unlock endless wealth.

The magician made an offering to all: for 100 barrels of pitch any man could own a speaking stone.

And so fleets of ships set sail heavy with pitch. Since the new king was a tyrant they were waylaid by pirates. They would never arrive.

Happy birthday to trailblazing American computer scientist Frances Elizabeth Allen (1932 – 2020) who made foundational contributions to optimizing compilers, optimizing programs and parallel computing. She was the first woman to become an IBM Fellow, where she worked from 1957 to 2002 and as an emeritus fellow afterwards. She was the first woman to win the Turing Prize.

🧵1/

https://minouette.etsy.com/listing/1086564033

#printmaking #womenInSTEM #histSTM #computing #mathematician #sciart #compsci

Got milk? We're going to make more whether you want it or not.

https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2026/08/04/farm-politics-not-something-i-ever-thought-id-get-into/