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If we are serious about the economy, building a better future, we need to own up, acknowledge and address division. Division is economically and socially corrosive. The battles include young vs old, homeowner vs those aspiring, haves vs have-nots, landlord vs renter, rural vs urban, Māori vs non-Māori, respect/disrespect for the law and business owners…
America is a naval empire. It, like the old British empire, rests on being able to keep the shipping lines open and on using naval power (and air power) to hurt nations while those nations can’t fight back. In the 19th century the Brits would park ironclads off the coast and just pound cities, and…
In New Zealand it’s the TPU (all their astro-turf-one-person-PR-pimping sock puppets)…
Getting to town planning and Ballardian milieus this quickly is unusual. Crypto for example, despite being 4 years older (the Satoshi Moment was 2008) seems to have been stuck in a late Settler/Lovecraftian phase for the last few years. It is struggling to switch gears to town planning and Ballardian banality. https://studio.ribbonfarm.com/p/a-map-for-ai-town-planners-2024-29
In forming the new Government, the National Party forged alliances with smaller, more extreme parties intent on amplifying their power, entering dangerous territory. With its immoderate attacks on the media, te reo, women and the environment, New Zealand First plays upon ethnic, gender and rural-urban polarities to increase its influence far beyond its 6 percent…
NASA’s team has finally managed to pry off the last two stuck fasteners on the container that holds some incredibly valuable stuff: materials the agency’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft sampled from asteroid Bennu, over 100 million miles away. The samples, tucked inside a special landing capsule, were dropped off in the Utah desert in September. The treasure was quickly delivered to a special…
Low power longevity FTW… thou this whiffs on unintended consequences HARD. Chinese company Betavolt has announced an atomic energy battery for consumers with a touted 50-year lifespan. The Betavolt BV100 will be the first product to launch using the firm’s new atomic battery technology, constructed using a nickel-63 isotope and diamond semiconductor material. Betavolt says its nuclear battery will…
I use Chat GPT daily as a software engineer and love it… but this gets a HARD FUCK NO. Up until January 10, OpenAI’s “usage policies” page included a ban on “activity that has high risk of physical harm, including,” specifically, “weapons development” and “military and warfare.” That plainly worded prohibition against military applications would seemingly rule…
Apple’s most valuable intangible asset isn’t its patents or copyrights – it’s an army of people who believe that using products from a $2.89 trillion multinational makes them members of an oppressed religious minority whose identity is coterminal with the interests of Apple’s shareholders.
If effective altruists actually cared, they’d follow this advice. Billions of people alive today (the majority of whom are women) are in the same situation today, with their potential unrealised through lack of access to education and resources to express themselves. Rather than adding to their numbers, or diverting yet more resources away from them,…
“The A.I.-generated image doesn’t appear to be faithful to Haring’s style, which often included images of human figures,” writes Julia Binswanger at Smithsonian.com. “These kinds of figures are visible in Haring’s original piece, but the image generator wasn’t able to replicate them.” The algorithmically filled-in Unfinished Painting may be without aesthetic or intellectual interest in itself, but consider…
The world’s largest public relations firm has used insights from its lauded annual global survey of consumer trust and corporate credibility to help fossil fuel and petrostate clients to promote climate obstruction. According to a new briefing from the Clean Creatives, an advocacy group focused on cutting the public relations industry’s ties with fossil fuels,…
Archaeologists have known for some time that ancient pre-Hispanic settlements likely lay hidden deep within the Amazon. However, the dense rainforest has made the discovery of these ancient cultures and their artifacts particularly difficult. In fact, the release announcing this latest discovery openly concedes that although an expanding body of research has begun to shed light on…
A new Chinese rocket just blasted its way into the record books. The Gravity-1 vehicle, built by Chinese company Orienspace, lifted off for the first time ever Thursday (Jan. 11). The squat, burly rocket rose off the deck of a ship stationed in the Yellow Sea at 12:30 a.m. EST (0530 GMT), sending two big plumes of…
Welcome to Edition 6.26 of the Rocket Report! We’re just 11 days into the new year, and we’ve already had two stunning rocket debuts. Vulcan soared into space on Monday morning, and then a medium-lift rocket from China, Gravity-1, made a picture-perfect launch from a mobile pad in the Yellow Sea. It feels like this…
Here’s a supreme irony: nearly all of the beneficial applications for AI require that AI be used to help workers, not replace them, which is absolutely not how AI is used in the workplace. An AI that helps radiologists by giving them a second opinion might help them find tumors on x-rays, but that’s a tool that reduces the…
The resulting sculpture connects through a tangled, textured knot of octopus tentacles, of which the eight arms correspond to the eight notes of the octaves available within the keyboard. Chiseled into the bodies of both pianos—the right features a lively Minoan-style marine illustration on its surface—the mollusk camouflages a miter joint, or an angled cut between two…
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