We'll take it under advisement :)

Surveillance capitalism

 

Artwork by Shira Inbar

Everything has a cost but you already know that, right? In this case, Facebook, as prime example, applies as their siphoning of your personal data for profit has given rise to a trillion dollar business but FB is not alone in the capitalist surveillance business by any stretch of the imagination. 

Facebook is not just any corporation. It reached trillion-dollar status in a single decade by applying the logic of what I call surveillance capitalism — an economic system built on the secret extraction and manipulation of human data — to its vision of connecting the entire world. Facebook and other leading surveillance capitalist corporations now control information flows and communication infrastructures across the world.

These infrastructures are critical to the possibility of a democratic society, yet our democracies have allowed these companies to own, operate and mediate our information spaces unconstrained by public law. The result has been a hidden revolution in how information is produced, circulated and acted upon. A parade of revelations since 2016, amplified by the whistle-blower Frances Haugen’s documentation and personal testimony, bear witness to the consequences of this revolution.

End result ...

The world’s liberal democracies now confront a tragedy of the “un-commons.” Information spaces that people assume to be public are strictly ruled by private commercial interests for maximum profit. The internet as a self-regulating market has been revealed as a failed experiment. Surveillance capitalism leaves a trail of social wreckage in its wake: the wholesale destruction of privacy, the intensification of social inequality, the poisoning of social discourse with defactualized information, the demolition of social norms and the weakening of democratic institutions.

Read Zuboff's insightful essay, it's the smart thing to do.

Being a bastard ...

 PWB = Being a bastard applies. 

Ebb & Flow

Ebb & Flow is a constant at any beach in the world as life, water and the environment is in a constant state of flux with energy transitioning from potential to kinetic depending on the particular entity in question.

In comparison ...

 Credit: CC0 Public Domain

We all know it's getting warmer, the question to ask is, how fast is the earth heating up? Researchers are now finding out the answer and it's disquieting to say the least.

University of Arizona-led effort to reconstruct Earth's climate since the last ice age, about 24,000 years ago, highlights the main drivers of climate change and how far out of bounds human activity has pushed the climate system.

The study, published this week in Nature, had three main findings:

• It verified that the main drivers of climate change since the last ice age are rising greenhouse gas concentrations and the retreat of the ice sheets.
• It suggests a general warming trend over the last 10,000 years, settling a decade-long debate about whether this period trended warmer or cooler in the paleoclimatology community.
• The magnitude and rate warming over the last 150 years far surpasses the magnitude and rate of changes over the last 24,000 years.

"This reconstruction suggests that current temperatures are unprecedented in 24,000 years, and also suggests that the speed of human-caused global warming is faster than anything we've seen in that same time," said Jessica Tierney, a UArizona geosciences associate professor and co-author of the study.

Credit: CC0 Public Domain

When looking at the temps of the last ice age, compared to today, the difference is most revealing.

A University of Arizona-led team has nailed down the temperature of the last ice age—the Last Glacial Maximum of 20,000 years ago—to about 46 degrees Fahrenheit (7.8 C).

In context ...

Tierney is lead author of a paper published today in Nature that found that the average global temperature of the ice age was 6 degrees Celsius (11 F) cooler than today. For context, the average global temperature of the 20th century was 14 C (57 F).

"In your own personal experience that might not sound like a big difference, but, in fact, it's a huge change," Tierney said.

The temperature differential in the Arctic is most telling.

"In North America and Europe, the most northern parts were covered in ice and were extremely cold. Even here in Arizona, there was big cooling," Tierney said. "But the biggest cooling was in high latitudes, such as the Arctic, where it was about 14 C (25 F) colder then today."

The loss of albedo in the Arctic, due to global warming, is key to why this is so. 

Any questions?

Echos of the Bauhaus

 

The Bauhaus style tends to feature simple geometric shapes like rectangles and spheres, without elaborate decorations as does the defunct Gilbert & Bennett Wiremill Factory in Georgetown, CT. Factoid: 

Both entities were founded in 1919. Enjoy

Peregrinate

Peregrinate - to travel especially on foot : walk. - Enjoy :)

You can't do both ...

 

Sounds like a plan

Save as

Image by OpenSea/Futurism

This apt pix depicts the absurdity of NFTs - Non Fungible Tokens - whereby fools spend astronomical funds on digital images in order to say that they "own" them. In light of the fact screen grabs are ubiquitous on the net makes this absurd copyright play moot IMHO. It's tulip time on the web without question.

In a mystifying new trend, people are willing to spend an astonishing amount of money on digital pieces of artwork in order to own exclusive rights to them.

Non-fungibles tokens, or NFTs, have become a mainstay of the cryptocurrency world, offering those who have plenty of cash or crypto to spare a way to “reinvest” it in what they say is exclusive ownership over what often amounts to not much more than a cartoon image of an angry ape or a whale wearing a top hat.

In short, it’s not exactly about the artistry — it’s about making claims over ownership using blockchain. What exactly are crypto-heads getting when buying an NFT? Beyond often dubious resale value, it’s a surprisingly difficult question to answer.

Some NFT collectors are upset that vandals are right-clicking on their newly-purchased digital assets and hitting “save as.” After all, copying an NFT is often as simply as that.

Exactly