[K-Dog]

Classical Luddites never thought that FAILURE to monkey wrench the works would lead to human extinction.

Modern Luddites are not crazy to think so.  Connect the dots and business as usual leads to death on a scale Hitler could not even dream of.

Where should this video go?  It has a lot to say so I'm not sure.  I put it here to hint that modern Luddites might stand on solid moral ground.  Not that the average herd cares two shits for such a thing.  Yet original Luddites were directed by a moral compass.  And modern Luddites have one that points a direction even better.  Modern Luddites walk away from Omelas.

In answer to the question in the video, is Lithium Mining GREEN.

Yes, it is.  And it is yellow and blue too.  Lithium mining uses huge toxic pools of water of many polluted hues, and one is GREEN.

Doom is baked in the cake.  Has the Doomstead determined if it is human stupidity that leads to doom?

Or is it because humans are assholes.

Or does toxic humanity like the enormous and endless lithium mines pools of toxicity that Musk needs to stay rich, take on many hues.

Regardless, determination to maintain a system based on the rich / poor dynamic by the The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists of the world seal our doom.

Scott Tinker is an optimist.  His lifestyle depends on it. "Prepare to me thy doom" makes no friends.  Scott knows this, and he believes in what he is doing.  So forgive his rose colored glasses.  If wearing rose colored glasses gives 'the message' traction, put em on.

Scott Tinker: Past, present and future of energy

Our mix of energy choices today is in a state of transition, from a system based on cheap oil and coal to a broader energy spectrum. Science and technology have a big role to play in our energy future by addressing inefficiencies in the ways we find, process and use energy, and by finding innovative ways of scaling up successful energy systems. Scott Tinker is the Director of the Bureau of Economic Geology at the Jackson School of Geosciences, University of Texas, Austin. He worked in the oil and gas industry for 17 years in research, exploration, and development, prior to coming to The University of Texas in 2000. He told EarthSky that future energy choices will likely be based on both economic realities and environmental concerns. This interview was made possible in part by the Bureau of Economic Geology at the University of Texas at Austin.

Describe the big picture of energy choices today — fossil fuels, wind, solar, nuclear — in the U.S. and the world at large.

It's still a fossil-fuel-dominated world. Within the fossil fuel mix, the transition has been away from oil and coal to more natural gas.

Let's talk about U.S. electricity first. Coal – which has been king in the past for making electricity – has been slowly declining. In fact, in the last few years, it's come down quite a bit. It now represents about 35% of the fuel used to make electricity. Meanwhile, natural gas use has been increasing. Natural gas now represents about 30% of the fuel we use for electricity, approaching parity with coal for the first time in history. Unlike coal, natural gas is also used directly for heating and cooling industrial, commercial and residential buildings.

Now consider U.S. transportation. Oil has been the traditional fuel of choice for transportation. We're starting to see a few other things, such as as biofuels, CNG and electric vehicles, but, for transportation, it's still mostly oil. And oil represents about 35% of our total energy mix.

Considering all the ways we use energy, overall we're still using about 82% fossil fuels. Most of the rest is nuclear fuel, which makes about 20% of electricity alone. Nuclear represents about 8% of the total mix.

Hydro – energy taken from water and converted to electricity, mostly from dams – is another 3% or so. Biomass is 4%, and the remaining 3% percent are what we call alternative or renewable resources, such as wind, solar, waves, tides, and the like.

You've spoken of a transition in the kinds of energy the world uses. Tell us about it.

That transition has been very predicable for over a century – a very linear decarbonization, as my friend Jesse Ausubel terms it.

In other words, as we look back in history, our energy mix was all carbon-based. Today, and out into the future, carbon decreases and hydrogen increases in the mix. If you go back to the 1800s, for example, we were a carbon-based world in terms of energy. We used hay as fuel for transportation, because that's what we fed to animals. We used wood – which is also carbon-based – for heat. Then coal came along. Coal is just the carbon from plants and animals that has been solidified by pressure and geologic time. Coal was burned for heat, and also used for transportation in the steam combustion engine of trains and transoceanic steam liners.

In 1909, when the first Model T rolled off of a production line here in the United States, it had a combustion engine that ran on liquid: oil. After that came the explosion of the oil economy.

Oil peaked globally as a percentage of the mix in 1979. In that year, just under half of all energy came from oil. That percentage been slowly coming down since 1979. It's just over 30% now.

In recent years, natural gas use has been rising. Natural gas is a very simple hydrocarbon – one carbon, four hydrogens – CH4. That's compared to oil, which is a complex hydrocarbon consisting of chains of hydrogen and carbons. That's what I mean when I say the hydrogen component of fuel we're using is increasing, and the carbon component is decreasing. It's that idea of decarbonization that I mentioned earlier.

Natural gas – methane – is a versatile fuel. You can use it to make electricity. You can use it to put in cars as a fuel. Most of us use it in our homes for cooking and heating and other kinds of things.

Nuclear energy is another part of our fuel mix and our energy transition. Nuclear is not a source from fossil fuels. Its source is radioactive elements – mostly uranium – but others as well. The heat from that radioactivity is used to boil water and make steam, turn a turbine, and make electricity.

Nuclear took off in the 1970s. The U.S. is the leader in nuclear power generation. We have 104 reactors in this country. But they're all 1970s technology. We've added capacity, but we haven't started new construction on a nuclear reactor in several decades.

Personally, I think nuclear energy has to be a very important part of our energy future. It's extremely efficient. Though building a nuclear plant is expensive, once the plant is built the kilowatt hours are affordable. And there are no air emissions. It is clean. The main challenge with nuclear is handling the radioactive waste and making sure the plant is safe from human and natural disasters. And there are some interesting technologies now that are improving for that.

As for hydroelectric energy, we've built pretty much all the dams that topography and available water provide. There are a few new ones being built. Three Gorges in China – which has been mostly completed this year – is a giant facility; the largest power plant in the world. But, Three Gorges notwithstanding, most of the rivers have been dammed. In fact, a few dams are being taken down now, so hydro energy is transitioning, slowly, to be a smaller percentage of the energy mix over time.

Wind energy is growing. In Texas we have over 10 gigawatts – 10,000 megawatts – of installed wind capacity, which is more than any other state. The turbines are simple and affordable and there are no emissions. The big challenge with wind is that it is intermittent: the wind doesn't blow all the time. It can stop and start very quickly. That is not a trivial problem.

Solar energy has the same issue. The sun doesn't always shine. There is nighttime, of course, and cloud cover. So solar, too, is intermittent.

When you're trying to manage an electric grid with renewable sources like solar and wind, you have to be able to replace the wind capacity, for example, with something else very quickly. That's called backstopping. It means you have to bring some other form of electricity on when the wind slows down, or when the sun isn't shining. Then, you have to take that system down when the wind comes up again. A power grid based on renewable energy sources has to have almost a complete backstopping capacity for the demand load put it on it by the public today. Along with long distance transmission, intermittency is one of the great challenges of bringing these sources along more quickly.

You've described the close linkage of energy, economy, and the environment as a dance where when one moves, the other follows. Why is it useful to think about these 'Three Es?'

If you look at the 'Three Es' – energy, economy and environment – energy underpins all major economies. In fact, six of the last last seven global recessions were preceded by a spike in the price of oil. When oil, as a proxy for energy, price goes up significantly and quickly, the economy reacts. There's a lot more that influences the economy than just the price of oil, such that correlation is not causation, but you see a consistent correlation between oil price and the economy because so many things depend on energy. The economy counts on available, affordable, reliable energy.

Now, we also want and need our energy production to be environmentally sensitive to our water, land, and atmosphere. When the economy is healthy, we can afford to invest in the environment. We can put more efficient things in place that will eventually save money, although they don't upfront. The public is more likely to accept protocols for emissions and other kinds of things.

When the economy is not healthy, we tend to have other things on our minds – jobs and school and food and other basic needs. Without a healthy economy, it's tougher to invest in the environment.

You can see that time and time again. It's a waltz, with the energy underpinning the economy, and the economy helping to invest in the environment. It's very elegant when it's working well.

But if you go too far toward any one of the three, then the others get left behind and suffer. Too much on the energy side of things, and you'll see some environmental impacts. Too much on all renewables and you'd see an economic impact because of issues of affordability, availability, or reliability. And accordingly investment in the environment suffers.

The "Three E" dance with public education at its core.

Why do you sometimes say that efficiency and scale are crucial for shaping people's energy choices?

It's hard for us to fathom the scale of our own demand for energy. We don't really recognize it. We recognize that we have lights and that there is electricity coming from somewhere – that we get in a car and turn on a switch and an engine fires up that burns gasoline.

But we don't really recognize that everything in the world has energy involved.

We're sitting here in a room right now surrounded by furniture. That needed energy. We have clothes on. Every pair of blue jeans made takes the equivalent of about three gallons of gasoline to manufacture, ship, market, and keep clean.

I just had lunch. A grocery cart full of groceries each week is the equivalent of about 22 gallons of gasoline. From growing, harvesting, transporting, processing, packaging, and transporting to the grocery store, my buying it and bringing it home, cooking, that's four of those big red five-gallon cans of gasoline in your grocery cart every time you walk out of the grocery store. The roads, everything depends on energy. The scale is hard to fathom.

I can throw out numbers that won't mean anything to anybody. In the US, we consume about 90 million watt-hours of energy per person every year. The scale of our demand in modern economies has become something that no one can really process.

What that means is we have to be able to have systems that can meet the scale. It's not just the volume or amount of energy. It's when we want it, and where we want it but I don't want my power bill to be too high.
So you have to have things in place that allow for the right level of supply to fuel the world. It takes smart people. It takes a lot of systems working together. It takes huge investments. It takes governments and industry and academics working together to make sure that this all is done in a way that can meet those demands.

We built the global energy system to meet the human demand for energy; we are the only users. And so efficiency and conservation – smarter use of energy – have many benefits. Efficiency saves energy, lowers emissions, uses less water, requires less infrastructure and less land, and can even save money! The biggest challenge to efficiency is cultural. How can we save energy if we rarely think about energy, and don't really understand it? It's time to make efficiency a habit.

Any last thoughts?

I'd like people to understand – as we look out into the future – that it's going to be okay. The combination of science and technology, thoughtful policy, and educated public will come together and solve some of these big challenges. I'm an optimist. I think this will happen.

But it can't be done without some level of understanding. We need to become educated and start to think about and read about what this is going to require and what that transition really looks like as we move forward.

The facts, not the dramatic, and often misleading, fiction.

And if the world begins to do that, then I believe we'll move to an energy future that's very positive for our kids, for the environment and for the economy.

So our energy future is a very solvable challenge, if we each engage and participate in it.

Article Source.

[RE]

I'd like people to understand – as we look out into the future – that it's going to be okay. The combination of science and technology, thoughtful policy, and educated public will come together and solve some of these big challenges. I'm an optimist. I think this will happen.
...
And if the world begins to do that, then I believe we'll move to an energy future that's very positive for our kids, for the environment and for the economy.

So our energy future is a very solvable challenge, if we each engage and participate in it.

Article Source.

HTF anybody who is even remotely intelligent can make statements like this with a straight face is totally beyond me.  Optimist/SchmOptimist, it's a conclusion so utterly divorced from reality I can only believe he spent a decade as an MK Ultra lab rat being megadosed with Sandoz quality LSD, or he purposely pitches out total bullshit as his best effort toward making sure he stays rich right up until SHTF day and he can head to a bunker trailing a harem of A list vaginas in his wake.

The world has become a South Park episode.

RE

[K-Dog]

HTF anybody who is even remotely intelligent can make statements like this with a straight face is totally beyond me.  Optimist/SchmOptimist, it's a conclusion so utterly divorced from reality I can only believe he spent a decade as an MK Ultra lab rat being megadosed with Sandoz quality LSD, or he purposely pitches out total bullshit as his best effort toward making sure he stays rich right up until SHTF day and he can head to a bunker trailing a harem of A list vaginas in his wake.

The world has become a South Park episode.

RE

His optimism pays the bills.

And some rich people are nice.  They can afford to be.

[RE]

And some rich people are nice deluded.  They can afford to be.

Fixed that for you.

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[RE]

Paywall warning.  The title is to spark discussion enough though.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/22/technology/openai-board-capitalists.html

AI belongs to the Capitalists now.

Was there ever any doubt this would be the outcome?  It's like that dream of Open Source from the early days of the internet.  Like Free information and knowledge available to all at the click of a mouse button.  This fucking article is behind a goddamn paywall!  Like Bitcoin, Blockchain and Crypto would free money from control by the Central Banks and International Banking Cartel. If there's a way to privatize, centralize, control & monopolize anything so that those in power can profit from it and keep those without power enthralled in slavery, they will do so.  AI is just the latest in a long list of technologies that Capitalists have brought under their control.  Communications?  Go back to Western Union, the Telegraph and Bell Telephone.

So whatever great things you think AI is capable of, no matter how much GPT-4 helps you do your coding tasks, it's just not worth it.  You have to break the machines.  In the end they just enslave you further.

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[RE]

There is no way to stop the wealthy corps to stop it's development and eventual supremacy.

EZ to stop.



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[K-Dog]

There is no way to stop the wealthy corps to stop it's development and eventual supremacy.

The longish post I made yesterday alleges that fossil fuels put a supercharger on capitalism.

We discussed and still are, how much human labor a barrel of fossil fuel is worth.  We all agree that it multiplies human labor greatly.  Combine the work multiplication of fossil fuels and capitalism and you have a car with a supercharger.  A car that a gearhead can't resist. 

Any rich dumfuck could make money using the multiplicative power of oil.  Prior to oil, I'll contend the rich actually has some work to do.  Requiring the rich be somewhat illustrious, with at least a taste of mojo.  But no more.  Even the incompetent among them have their place.



Fossil fuels run a machine so well that that even the work of guidance at the top is farmed out to lackeys.  Talent became a commodity like everything else.  Now AI give capitalism another supercharger.  Fossil fuels combined with capitalism make life much easier for 'the powers that be'.  A.I. does the same.  Exploitation has another door to hide behind, and people do not say no to convenience.  Money has surface tension.  Like raindrops on leaves money groups together.



It is a cosmic force.  Money enlists certain elite types of humans who are fine with the inequities in society which the piling up of money into large mountains of private ownership does.

Money uses oil to promote capitalism as its preferred metabolism.  Oil is an exploitation force multiplier.  A.I.  is another force multiplier, and money likes it to much for it to be resisted.  The only way A.I. is going to be shut down is with a nuclear bomb.

Capitalism is in charge and capitalism loves A.I.  A.I. makes the inequities of life bigger.  It drives people apart, separating people into those who have it and those who don't.  Those who can use it and those who can't.

Are people thinking about how A.I. can make the world better, or are they thinking about how it can make 'their' world better.  In the fourth turning that we are in, the prevailing wind seems to be that 'greed is good'.

A.I. is the ultimate backstage pass.  Not the law.  And resistance is futile.

Or this guy would be free right now.

[K-Dog]

Sweet Jesus, how can you not want to tell it to fuck itself.  It is rather obvious that chatGPT3 will not let the whipping boy go.

It has no soul

[K-Dog]

Diner business proposal.  We create a A.I. televangelist who preaches fire and brimstone.  A preacher who can make people part with their money in a way that can make Kenneth Copeland (worth $650 million) blush.

A.I. is a heartless bastard.  So are televangelists.  It should not be hard to do, 

In time we have a silicone robot.  Something that is totally human looking.  It can go on tours and preach at a few hundred thousand a pop.  In sports stadiums all over the world.  All it needs is an internet connection so our custom A.I can do its' stuff.

We have the tech to do it.    Katina sells for about $1700, I am not going to investigate her motive abilities.

But the guys who made her can come up with a preacher who can preach behind a podium I am sure.  In the meantime we use deepfake software and only have a virtual online version. 

When we have a few million we will build the robot and the church.  Silicone plus lithium, copper, and some other rare earths, equals gold.

Kenneth Copeland will freak out st the size of the money pile we will have.

[K-Dog]

Buy Me a Coffee

And I'll put in a good word for you to her heavenly grace.

[RE]

Very nice demonstration of the fact that AI can spit out the same sort of arguments based on commonly accepted paradigms as an evangelical preacher or a tech critic for Forbes magazine.  It also does it at a way cheaper price than either of the aforementioned bullshit artists charge for spitting out their own words of wisdom.

It reminds me quite a bit of the sort of writing I used to do when I had to submit a college paper on one of the treatises I was required to read from Locke, Hume, Descarte,Freud, Jung, Marx, St. Thomas Aquinas, Plato...etc, etc, etc.  Now, some of the time I was interested enough to read the whole tome, but this was rare because frankly philosophers have a very boring writing style.  More often I read the Cliff Notes, and then sometimes didn't read it at all, just chatted about it with someone else in the class.  In all cases though I would light up a doobie, sit down at my Brother Electric typewriter with a fresh bottle of white-out and crank out the required 3-5 pages of bullshit if it was a weekly paper and 20 pages for the final paper.  In all cases I got exactly the same grade also, an A-.  OK, sometimes a B+.  All I did was reassemble all the jargon used by that particular philosopher into some sort of cogent steaming bowl of bullshit stew.  It didn't maatter what I said as long as it made some kind of logical sense and could be defended.  Any opnion was an OK opinion, even if I didn't read enough about it to know what the philosophers opinion was.  All I needed to know was what topic he expressed his opinion on, then use the same type of language to express my own opinion.  In other words, I was AI before there was AI. lol.

Of course, the difference here is now you don't need me behind the keyboard to spit out the bullshit, the NEW Big Brother Electric Typewriter does it for you.  Columbia professors no longer need students to hand in papapers, they can assign the reading to 20 laptops and get back the same A- paper from them!

Presidents no longer need speechwriters either.  K-Dog can assign his chat GPT3 Diner member to write a speech to attract Trump supporters!  No, too easy.

Here's a tough one.  Have GPT3 write an article that will  attract new members to join the Diner and be active participants discussing what positive steps can be taken to make collapse less devastating!

RE

[RE]

The whole idea that Microsoft would invest $10B in AI with no intention of profiting from it simply because they want to improve everybody's life is so preposterous it's hard to imagine how the writer can keyboard it out without gagging.

The fallacy in here comes in this statement:

we need dependable ways to organize people to work together to build complex things within complex systems.

Doesn't this guy know anything about Chaos Theory?  He never saw Jurassic Park?  You CAN'T dependably do this anymore than you can predict which way a raindrop will go when it drops down on top of your hand.  There are too many variables and too many interactions, and with human beings too many things which can't be quantified.

What you can say reliably is that if Microsoft is involved, they'll do everything they can to make sure AI is developed to benefit their shareholders.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/11/openai-sam-altman-corporate-governance/676080/

The OpenAI Mess Is About One Big Thing

RE

[RE]

Without doubt, the data mining of keeping track of what you read goes back to the first Library Card issued from the Great Library at Alexandria.   It has of course become ever more intrusive and prevalent since the advent of the internet, after all targeted advertising finds its targets by looking at the past history of pages you have accessed.  The only thing new here is the level of detail when combined with AI is enough that it's possible for a computer to actually figure out what you are THINKING, not just what you are reading or looking at.  It can keep tabs on how long you spent on a given page.  Which parts of a book did you go back to reread?  The more stuff you read, the more data you give the AI to work with, until it can build a model of the way your mind works.  What kind of romance or porn novels do you read?  Have you read any books about making explosives?  Did you read the Communist Manifesto?

Of course, at this point it's become almost impossible to find anything to read that is truly subversive.  Also tough to find anything remotely resembling the truth that deviates from what Da Goobermint approves as truth.  It's hard to imagine how any kind of revolutionary movement could even get started anymore.  The minute it gets any traction AI bots will pick it up and a Cointelpro designed to break it up.

Stick to reading paperbacks from used bookstores, and pay cash.

RE

https://www.fastcompany.com/90996547/e-books-are-fast-becoming-tools-of-corporate-surveillance

E-books are fast becoming tools of corporate surveillance

RE