UN chief António Guterres urges global fossil-fuel advertising ban. Yes but what's really needed is an uprooting of car culture and dependency along with air-travel. There's no doubt the media is deeply embedded in all of it. Advertising, yes, but the entertainment industry also perpetuates the problem. It all works together.
“Many governments restrict or prohibit advertising for products that harm human health, like tobacco. I urge every country to ban advertising from fossil-fuel companies. And I urge news media and tech companies to stop taking fossil-fuel advertising.”
Hamas wants a permanent ceasefire, Netanyahu and the Israeli government do not. Their goal is the elimination of Hamas. According to a Pew poll conducted March and April, released last week, 76% of Jewish Israeli society believes that Israel will achieve its war aims.
Vox reports on what happens if Gaza ceasefire talks fail:
Israel is continuing its assault on Rafah as well as its ground and air operations in other parts of Gaza.. Unless the war ends soon and humanitarian aid can enter Gaza, many more Palestinians — not just the 3,500 projected in the analysis — will die this summer.
The intensification of the climate emergency by tech, particularly AI, should be front and center in the reporting but it's not. An exception: Nvidia's Computex 2024 keynote terrified TechRadar's John Loeffler.
There was something that Huang said during the keynote that shocked me into a mild panic. Nvidia's Blackwell cluster, which will come with eight GPUs, pulls down 15kW of power. That's 15,000 watts of power. Divided by eight, that's 1,875 watts per GPU.
The current-gen Hopper data center chips draw up to 1,000W, so Nvidia Blackwell is nearly doubling the power consumption of these chips.
Regardless of an accelerating climate emergency the entitled white middle class of the US and the Global North will refuse to act.
The Nation: The Canadian Wildfires Are Once Again Sounding the Alarm About What’s to Come:
Catastrophic climate change is no longer just a future dystopian possibility; it’s a present, inescapable reality.
While fires blaze across Western Canada, spreading smoke, making it harder to breathe, and diminishing air quality for people living as far away as South Dakota and Iowa, millions of people in Brazil are recovering from severe floods in Rio Grande do Sul…
Against a world without Palestinians – Mondoweiss
When I was five, my father told me that I was Palestinian. I don’t know if he understood what he did, but that little piece of knowledge started a chain of consciousness in my then-child’s mind that would continue for a lifetime. Eventually, it led to the bitter realization that I now cannot escape — the awareness that we Palestinians live in an international system that has no place and no wish for us as a people.
Explainer for the middle class white people who are confused about climate activists “defacing” art that is protected behind glass:
Riposte Alimentaire has claimed responsibility for several attacks on art in attempts to draw attention to the climate crisis.
Activists are desperate:
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The political processes are utterly broken and too little is being done to legislate change.
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The public blames lawmakers and corporations BUT the public also goes about flying, driving, consuming.
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There’s NO PROTESTING and a lot of pretending there is no problem
This is a CLIMATE EMERGENCY.
Imagine this being worse because it will be.
Why?
We’re not even trying to change course.
‘Unliveable’: Delhi’s residents struggle to cope in record-breaking heat | The Guardian
As the water tanker drove into a crowded Delhi neighbourhood, a ruckus erupted. Dozens of residents ran frantically behind it, brandishing buckets, bottles and hoses, and jumped on top of it to get even a drip of what was stored inside. Temperatures that day had soared to 49C (120F), the hottest day on record – and in many places across India’s vast capital, home to more than 29 million people, water had run out.
A good take on the iPad and iPadOS for computing.
@thatchriscarley COULD Apple give it macOS? Maybe… I don’t think it’s likely. #ipad #tech #apple #fyp #foryou #ios #tips #rant ♬ original sound - Chris Carley
We don’t really have a choice but sadly we’re deep in denial and thus far shown no interest in making an effort. I fully expect worst case scenarios playing out.
The Collapse Is Coming. Will Humanity Adapt? - Nautilus
In this corner, the biosphere. We’ve spent a solid year higher than 1.5 degrees Celsius; we’re wiping out species at a rate of somewhere between 10,000 and 100,000 annually; insect populations are crashing; and we’re losing the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, no matter what we do at this point. Alaskapox has just claimed its first human victim, and there are over 15,000 zoonoses expected to pop up their heads and take a bite out of our asses by the end of the century. And we’re expecting the exhaustion of all arable land around 2050, which is actually kind of moot because studies from institutions as variable as MIT and the University of Melbourne suggest that global civilizational collapse is going to happen starting around 2040 or 2050.
The myth of the over-powered iPad
I came upon iPad enthusist Riley Hill’s website Slate Pad a couple days ago via his post about the new M4 iPad Pro. He asks: What Does iPad Pro Taking Advantage Of the M4 Even Mean? – SlatePad
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. “The iPad has class leading hardware, but we’re just waiting for software that takes advantage of
”. No matter what changes and improvements Apple makes to iPadOS, they are still not enough to make proper use of the hardware. I come across this idea so frequently on social media, more so since the M4 iPad Pros were released. The idea got me thinking…what does “taking advantage of the hardware” really mean?
Yep.
We Need to talk about Zionism | The Listening Post - YouTube
In the coverage of Israel-Palestine in the Western media, an ideology that is central to the story - Zionism - rarely gets discussed. Instead, we hear a debate about whether opposition to it - anti-Zionism - is anti-Semitic. The Listening Post’s Daniel Turi reports on Zionism, the confusion that surrounds it, and what it tells us about the world’s longest-running occupation.
“I would like them to stop gaslighting and speak truthfully about what is happening,” says Smith, who says USAID must do more than acknowledge famine is happening in Gaza. “We need to take the next step of saying it is illegal and who is doing the starvation intentionally.” Smith condemns the Biden administration for silencing U.S. experts while supporting Israel, which claims there is no famine in Gaza.
We are making our planet uninhabitable. How long before we see a mass death event?
Delhi temperature may break record for highest ever in India: 126.1 degrees - CBS News
A temperature reading collected in Delhi, India’s capital territory, may have broken national records as the country grapples with a blistering heat wave. The reading — 52.9 degrees Celsius or 126.1 degrees Fahrenheit — was preliminary and technically an outlier compared with others taken in Delhi on the same day, officials said. But, if confirmed, it would be the highest temperature ever registered anywhere in India.
Biden is Alone Amid Global Demand for Gaza Ceasefire | Democracy Now!
It seems the Biden administration has no “red line” that would force him to halt arms shipments to Israel, nor take any other significant punitive action to align the US government with almost every other nation on earth.
ICC Prosecutor Karim Khan included in his Gaza war crimes petition that he “will not hesitate to submit further applications for warrants of arrest.” President Biden and his enablers have the power to end Israel’s war on Gaza and the slaughter of civilians there. Their decision not to is criminal.
There is no red line for Biden.
Mehdi Hasan on the lack of condemnation of Israel’s deadly airstrikes in Rafah.
We live in a world where non-existent images of imaginary beheaded Israeli children can help launch a genocidal war, but actual images of real-life beheaded Palestinian children don’t force the entire world to bring an immediate halt to that war.
A decapitated toddler, a massacre of Palestinians in tents, and a complete rejection of an order from the top U.N. court demanding Israel halt its operations in Rafah – none of it led to the U.S. saying much at all.
My Siri Confession
Amongst the Apple nerds and pundits, Siri is one of the most disliked Apple technologies. It’s been a constant complaint for years. “I found this on the web, check it out” is the most commonly repeated quote to deride the experience of using Siri. I’ve certainly gotten that response more than a few times.
But I still use Siri everyday with generally excellent results. Unlike popular AI chatbots that suggest eating rocks and glue, Siri actually performs simple tasks effectively and provides helpful facts and information when I request it.
I’ll illustrate with the following Siri exchange I had yesterday afternoon. I was on a walk and my neighbors were sitting outside so I stopped for a few minutes to visit. During the conversation they asked if I’d watched any interesting movies or shows recently. At some point in the ensuing conversation about movies and tv shows something they said reminded me of a Denzel Washington movie I couldn’t remember the title of. After sharing a few things about the movie with them the title had not come to me so, via Air Pods to my iPhone I said “Siri, Denzel Washington was in a movie around 2005 that was set in New Orleans and involved time travel, what was it?”
Thousands in the streets of London rally for Gaza - YouTube
“I don’t understand how everyone isn’t here right now in the streets demanding that this ends.” Thousands of Londoners took part in Tuesday’s protest to voice their condemnation of Israel’s war on Gaza and the complicity of western countries following two deadly Israeli strikes on camps for displaced Palestinians in and near Rafah. A Palestinian official said an Israeli strike on a camp west of Rafah killed at least 21 people after a similar strike on Sunday killed 45, sparking global outrage.
Many Americans still pretend that the US is a democracy.
And they’ll also go along with the worst possible “choices” given to them claiming they are not in a position to change anything.
They’ll claim they are powerless to change anything.
That’s some democracy you have there America.
America: Founded in genocide and violent settler colonialism. And in 2024, Americans refuse to see who we are. We’re still the same.
Burning the Indigenous Population up in their Tents is an old Colonial Technique of Genocide
Burning the tents of the indigenous population has a long history in colonialism. When the Dutch ruled “New Amsterdam,” the capital of the New Netherlands, they brought in more and more settlers who were hungry for land and wanted to displace the Mohawks and Mohicans, who did not take kindly to being pushed around…
The Democratic Party should be scrambling right now to replace Biden as their candidate for president. He has no redline and he is complicit it Israel’s war crimes and genocide.
Fuck Trump. Fuck Biden. Fuck the Democratic and Republican Parties.
America is complicit in war crimes and genocide.