In the middle of this very goofball article about AI porn is a footnote that shows genuine concern with getting the numbers right on deaths by coal pollution
Jeff Maurer is truly a renaissance man's renaissance man
"The internet did for porn what the printing press did for the bible."
Well, some of the earliest items published via the printing press was porn. Pretty much every form of mass communication developed is quickly adapted by the purveyors of porn (with the possible exception of radio). It is still argued VHS won out over Betamax because of the porn industry.
And yeah, I can see there is a type of synergy between wind farms and certain types of porn. So, why not.?
“smite green energy projects that someone else is paying for”
Yeah, that someone was the taxpayer- have you seen how crazy fat the PTC and ITC credits were for solar and wind? Somehow these “inexpensive” windmills never seem to get built without tax credits and everywhere they get installed electricity prices rise.
Cancelling them after they were already permitted is shitty and illiberal, but taking away their “golden shower” tax strategy is totally fair. Live by the subsidy, die by the subsidy…
They used to be, but people who are in a place to know say that now that the technology has matured, solar and wind are cheaper than coal without subsidies.
I think they are not so much in a place to know, but more in a place that requires subsidies to get paid. They always use “levelized cost of energy” as a metric, but that assumes coal and wind are the same- they aren’t. One is dispatchable and one is not- they don’t provide the same value to the system. An infinite wind farm on a calm day provides zero value.
If they are cheap, why does killing subsidies make all investments stop? Look at the UK and German markets for wind if you don’t want the orange man taint- same issues over there.
Wind stopped in Germany because Russia stopped paying for it. Russia, of course, likes it when natural gas is used, and the more wind you put in the system, the more natural gas you buy (as opposed to nuclear energy, which really can put natural gas in the grave).
Wind's a bad move. So's solar, they're both erratic producers, and that means you need MORE natural gas (because we cannot store anything substantial on our grid), and it runs LESS efficiently than if you didn't have wind or solar. So, on net, you're burning more greenhouse gases with wind and solar, not LESS.
You're not wrong at all - the moment you explain to guys that porn is involved, we really will move mountains (or in this case, leave mountains alone for once and harness the power of a star).
This gives me a horrible flashback: A young woman, lining up a selfie shot in a big mirror, with the care of Ansel Adams, holding the phone in one hand. Meanwhile, the other hand was doing various nasties with various orifices, and she was wound up like a pretzel to get the angle to work. I was awed at the diligence involved but have always wondered why she was bothering.
This is precisely the type of outside-the-Beltway messaging that this country needs more of to accomplish its goals, even if I generally find the green energy argument exhausting. You son of a bitch, I'm in!
Trump is so solipsistic that he has no vision for anything which he won't live to see and potentially take credit for. His campaign slogan might as well have been "Trump 2020: If I'm Going to Die Soon, You're All Coming With Me".
As I'm sure you're aware, Trump scarcely even mentioned Operation Warp Speed in his 2024 campaign because his base is full of MAHA anti-vax nimrods. Which was ironic, but a perfect example of why—as the Nobel Prize committee will discover as they field credulous nominations for Trump while the secondary consequences of his lackadasical inattention become apparent—intentions do matter.
You see, as was readily apparent to anyone paying close attention to Trump in 2020, his desperation to create a vaccine as quickly as possible was motivated by wanting to get past the pandemic before the election, not saving lives. He constantly whined about how "unfair" it was to him, downplayed the whole thing while vaccines were being developed, and tried to rush through the clinical trials. So sometimes he does the right thing for the wrong reasons, but that matters because it leads to him mishandling other aspects of it.
But even Trump isn't stupid enough to actually think the vaccines killed anyone; he gets his boosters just like every one of these pandering Republican pricks. After all, he'd have died from it if he hadn't gotten top of-the-line care from our best doctors, and he knows full well he didn't get treated with hydrochloroquine or ivermectin.
He just doesn't give enough of a fuck about people like you to level with you and denounce all of this anti-vax bullshit if it's going to cost him the votes of his dumbest supporters. Because they're far more numerous than the marginal fraction of shlubs who ended up getting themselves killed or saddled with long COVID because they actually believed the junk the Republican Party is happy to let people think if it keeps them in power.
So yeah, solipsism. Just not in the way you apparently think of it.
Or are you just upset at me for making fun of you?
A little self-diagnosis here?
"The secondary consequences of His. Lackadasical Inattention?"
Seriously, you DARE say that our current President is inattentive? After having fielded a 4 year braindead drooling idiot, who can't be allowed to piss on his own for fear that he'd go back to his Senate office?
Let me know the next time you go running down the street nude, okay? Try to run into the most populated area... (Don't you just LOVE being symptomatic? You can get away with the Weirdest Shit.)
Turns out you can find someone online who knows more than you do. Might want to listen next time.
I don't give a shit about you making fun of me, because you're quite apparently an idiot. The joke is also unfunny, so that didn't redeem the underlying implication of your brain-dead remark.
The idea that you know more than me is, I suppose, funny in the way that Trump is funny when he says something moronic. Biden went running down the street naked? What cesspool of right-wing stupidity did you trawl that one out of?
And yeah, I DARE, because I've paid attention to the two men over the years. Biden could field questions at a press conference and answer them knowledgeably. Trump shows his utter ignorance and obliviousness every time.
And yes, Trump's famously inattentive and unwilling to actually do work once public fanfare dies down. Biden worked his ass off for the American people while low-information mouth-breathers took potshots at him mostly for mispronouncing words, or saying the wrong names of people, things that lots of people, including Trump, do all the time.
Even with a failing memory at times, Biden ran a competent administration, while Trump's administration, full of sycophants and cronies, would be a joke if it weren't so dangerously corrupt.
Who said anything about Biden running down the street naked? I was discussing symptoms of covid19. Apparently reading comprehension isn't your forte.
You do not want to admit that you elected someone in 2020 who was showing signs of being unable to compartmentalize. That is to say, someone who spills State Level Secrets because They Forgot You Weren't Supposed to Know That. Joe Biden wasn't supposed to mention Dark Winter. Later, Joe Biden wasn't supposed to mention using military planes on right wing militia (that's another "inability to compartmentalize" issue).
Yes, A competent neocon administration that admits there are black (biologic? chemical?) labs in Ukraine in Congressional Testimony -- from a softball question!
My comprehension is just fine when the person writing is at all competent at communicating and makes any sense. What running down the street naked has to do with COVID19 symptoms is beyond me. Unless you're telling me you heard some story about someone running naked in public and blaming long COVID, so that you can discredit the disease, in which case ... I shouldn't even need to finish that sentence.
And nobody admitted Ukrainian "black" bioweapons labs in Congressional testimony. Nuland mentioned biological research facilities (as in public health research, like our CDC, which doesn't develop bioweapons). That's another piece of anti-Ukraine Russian propaganda that's been around for decades, and was debunked almost immediately after that hack Glenn Greenwald tweeted it and Russian and Chinese state media began amplifying it.
And believe me, you don't even want to start talking about data spillage if you're going to be a defender of Donald Trump. The guy is a walking security vulnerability. He leaked info exposing Israeli intelligence to a Russian ambassador. He waved around secret military contingency plans to a bunch of journalists because he thought they were his former Joint Chief's plans to start a war. Mar-a-lago was a rats' nest of bad OPSEC and foreign agents looking for intel, which would've been readily available after Trump stole reams of classified documents and had them lying around in boxes. I could go on at length.
And this is only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to Trump. Whatever minutiae you want to gather about Biden's memory lapses is easily dwarfed by Trump's carelessness and at times outright disregard for national security in pursuit of his own petty narcissistic ends. I'll take someone who forgets things over someone who just doesn't give a shit.
this is a funny and smart article and the premise is disturbingly on point
one can’t message to the general public that green energy will make porn holograms appear in your bedroom as jesusy types will push back on that. but approaching sam altman and other tech overlords with these possibilities may just be the ticket. It will happen for people as other tech advances have without a lot of input from your average joe.
The og problem with messaging about climate change was those constant headlines about tipping points and no turning back zones and poop we should have started 40 years ago and oh fuck no matter what we are screwed. It’s not so much that most ppl don’t care. It’s just that they think it’s inevitable and they literately can’t do much of anything that is useful
My argument for green energy is security. If you can run based off of tidal/wind/solar etc, than your energy production is not a target for adversaries unless they're willing to strike your soil. They can't target tanker ships halfway around the world, they can't impose trade measures to make fuel more expensive.
Energy independence, which should naturally include green energy sources, is a very hard argument to take the opposite side on.
I’m thinking The Matrix, but the connection is at the crotch rather than the head.
In the middle of this very goofball article about AI porn is a footnote that shows genuine concern with getting the numbers right on deaths by coal pollution
Jeff Maurer is truly a renaissance man's renaissance man
That is an aces footnote BTW and reminded me (retired actuary) to never make assumptions about what others understand about data analysis
This sounds like a topic for Paula Fox. I'm sure someone with her talents will be eager to explore the subject in depth.
Because she's our tech reporter? Good point.
Centaur Porky-Pigging it. Disgusting
"The internet did for porn what the printing press did for the bible."
Well, some of the earliest items published via the printing press was porn. Pretty much every form of mass communication developed is quickly adapted by the purveyors of porn (with the possible exception of radio). It is still argued VHS won out over Betamax because of the porn industry.
And yeah, I can see there is a type of synergy between wind farms and certain types of porn. So, why not.?
“smite green energy projects that someone else is paying for”
Yeah, that someone was the taxpayer- have you seen how crazy fat the PTC and ITC credits were for solar and wind? Somehow these “inexpensive” windmills never seem to get built without tax credits and everywhere they get installed electricity prices rise.
Cancelling them after they were already permitted is shitty and illiberal, but taking away their “golden shower” tax strategy is totally fair. Live by the subsidy, die by the subsidy…
They used to be, but people who are in a place to know say that now that the technology has matured, solar and wind are cheaper than coal without subsidies.
I think they are not so much in a place to know, but more in a place that requires subsidies to get paid. They always use “levelized cost of energy” as a metric, but that assumes coal and wind are the same- they aren’t. One is dispatchable and one is not- they don’t provide the same value to the system. An infinite wind farm on a calm day provides zero value.
If they are cheap, why does killing subsidies make all investments stop? Look at the UK and German markets for wind if you don’t want the orange man taint- same issues over there.
Wind stopped in Germany because Russia stopped paying for it. Russia, of course, likes it when natural gas is used, and the more wind you put in the system, the more natural gas you buy (as opposed to nuclear energy, which really can put natural gas in the grave).
If wind is so good why don't Germans pay to develop more
Wind's a bad move. So's solar, they're both erratic producers, and that means you need MORE natural gas (because we cannot store anything substantial on our grid), and it runs LESS efficiently than if you didn't have wind or solar. So, on net, you're burning more greenhouse gases with wind and solar, not LESS.
You're not wrong at all - the moment you explain to guys that porn is involved, we really will move mountains (or in this case, leave mountains alone for once and harness the power of a star).
i don’t think one can get away with saying that overtly
“Smartphones made it possible to photograph your junk without having an awkward exchange with the one hour photo person at Walgreens.”
Jeff, is there something you want to tell us?
Now I want to know what's the latest birth year for understanding what "one hour photo" means. 1990? 1995?
I worked at Ritz Camera and One Hour Photo in my younger days. I saw some… very personal pictures.
I heard that the photobooths would keep copies of the best things they saw. Did that happen at your workplace?
I’m ashamed to admit that yes, that definitely happened at least at my location.
Hadn’t these folks heard of polaroids?
Yes, for the love of god, it was polaroids which were the "for personal (nude) photos".
This gives me a horrible flashback: A young woman, lining up a selfie shot in a big mirror, with the care of Ansel Adams, holding the phone in one hand. Meanwhile, the other hand was doing various nasties with various orifices, and she was wound up like a pretzel to get the angle to work. I was awed at the diligence involved but have always wondered why she was bothering.
This is precisely the type of outside-the-Beltway messaging that this country needs more of to accomplish its goals, even if I generally find the green energy argument exhausting. You son of a bitch, I'm in!
Trump is so solipsistic that he has no vision for anything which he won't live to see and potentially take credit for. His campaign slogan might as well have been "Trump 2020: If I'm Going to Die Soon, You're All Coming With Me".
Oh, very good! That works wonderfully with the whole "vaccinate to kill" methodology! Operation Warp Speed -- straight to the Sun!
Yeah, don't quit your day job, Carrot Top.
As I'm sure you're aware, Trump scarcely even mentioned Operation Warp Speed in his 2024 campaign because his base is full of MAHA anti-vax nimrods. Which was ironic, but a perfect example of why—as the Nobel Prize committee will discover as they field credulous nominations for Trump while the secondary consequences of his lackadasical inattention become apparent—intentions do matter.
You see, as was readily apparent to anyone paying close attention to Trump in 2020, his desperation to create a vaccine as quickly as possible was motivated by wanting to get past the pandemic before the election, not saving lives. He constantly whined about how "unfair" it was to him, downplayed the whole thing while vaccines were being developed, and tried to rush through the clinical trials. So sometimes he does the right thing for the wrong reasons, but that matters because it leads to him mishandling other aspects of it.
But even Trump isn't stupid enough to actually think the vaccines killed anyone; he gets his boosters just like every one of these pandering Republican pricks. After all, he'd have died from it if he hadn't gotten top of-the-line care from our best doctors, and he knows full well he didn't get treated with hydrochloroquine or ivermectin.
He just doesn't give enough of a fuck about people like you to level with you and denounce all of this anti-vax bullshit if it's going to cost him the votes of his dumbest supporters. Because they're far more numerous than the marginal fraction of shlubs who ended up getting themselves killed or saddled with long COVID because they actually believed the junk the Republican Party is happy to let people think if it keeps them in power.
So yeah, solipsism. Just not in the way you apparently think of it.
So, um, is the joke actually bad?
Or are you just upset at me for making fun of you?
A little self-diagnosis here?
"The secondary consequences of His. Lackadasical Inattention?"
Seriously, you DARE say that our current President is inattentive? After having fielded a 4 year braindead drooling idiot, who can't be allowed to piss on his own for fear that he'd go back to his Senate office?
Let me know the next time you go running down the street nude, okay? Try to run into the most populated area... (Don't you just LOVE being symptomatic? You can get away with the Weirdest Shit.)
Turns out you can find someone online who knows more than you do. Might want to listen next time.
I don't give a shit about you making fun of me, because you're quite apparently an idiot. The joke is also unfunny, so that didn't redeem the underlying implication of your brain-dead remark.
The idea that you know more than me is, I suppose, funny in the way that Trump is funny when he says something moronic. Biden went running down the street naked? What cesspool of right-wing stupidity did you trawl that one out of?
And yeah, I DARE, because I've paid attention to the two men over the years. Biden could field questions at a press conference and answer them knowledgeably. Trump shows his utter ignorance and obliviousness every time.
And yes, Trump's famously inattentive and unwilling to actually do work once public fanfare dies down. Biden worked his ass off for the American people while low-information mouth-breathers took potshots at him mostly for mispronouncing words, or saying the wrong names of people, things that lots of people, including Trump, do all the time.
Even with a failing memory at times, Biden ran a competent administration, while Trump's administration, full of sycophants and cronies, would be a joke if it weren't so dangerously corrupt.
Who said anything about Biden running down the street naked? I was discussing symptoms of covid19. Apparently reading comprehension isn't your forte.
You do not want to admit that you elected someone in 2020 who was showing signs of being unable to compartmentalize. That is to say, someone who spills State Level Secrets because They Forgot You Weren't Supposed to Know That. Joe Biden wasn't supposed to mention Dark Winter. Later, Joe Biden wasn't supposed to mention using military planes on right wing militia (that's another "inability to compartmentalize" issue).
Yes, A competent neocon administration that admits there are black (biologic? chemical?) labs in Ukraine in Congressional Testimony -- from a softball question!
My comprehension is just fine when the person writing is at all competent at communicating and makes any sense. What running down the street naked has to do with COVID19 symptoms is beyond me. Unless you're telling me you heard some story about someone running naked in public and blaming long COVID, so that you can discredit the disease, in which case ... I shouldn't even need to finish that sentence.
And nobody admitted Ukrainian "black" bioweapons labs in Congressional testimony. Nuland mentioned biological research facilities (as in public health research, like our CDC, which doesn't develop bioweapons). That's another piece of anti-Ukraine Russian propaganda that's been around for decades, and was debunked almost immediately after that hack Glenn Greenwald tweeted it and Russian and Chinese state media began amplifying it.
And believe me, you don't even want to start talking about data spillage if you're going to be a defender of Donald Trump. The guy is a walking security vulnerability. He leaked info exposing Israeli intelligence to a Russian ambassador. He waved around secret military contingency plans to a bunch of journalists because he thought they were his former Joint Chief's plans to start a war. Mar-a-lago was a rats' nest of bad OPSEC and foreign agents looking for intel, which would've been readily available after Trump stole reams of classified documents and had them lying around in boxes. I could go on at length.
And this is only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to Trump. Whatever minutiae you want to gather about Biden's memory lapses is easily dwarfed by Trump's carelessness and at times outright disregard for national security in pursuit of his own petty narcissistic ends. I'll take someone who forgets things over someone who just doesn't give a shit.
"The internet did for porn what the printing press did for the bible." great stuff Jeff
this is a funny and smart article and the premise is disturbingly on point
one can’t message to the general public that green energy will make porn holograms appear in your bedroom as jesusy types will push back on that. but approaching sam altman and other tech overlords with these possibilities may just be the ticket. It will happen for people as other tech advances have without a lot of input from your average joe.
The og problem with messaging about climate change was those constant headlines about tipping points and no turning back zones and poop we should have started 40 years ago and oh fuck no matter what we are screwed. It’s not so much that most ppl don’t care. It’s just that they think it’s inevitable and they literately can’t do much of anything that is useful
Go all the way and add one of those shakey hand-powered flashlights to the next generation of Vibrating Fleshlights. The future is now!
Staying firmly ahead of the content ChatGPT is capable of generating.
Wow.
Sex sells.
Shocking.
My argument for green energy is security. If you can run based off of tidal/wind/solar etc, than your energy production is not a target for adversaries unless they're willing to strike your soil. They can't target tanker ships halfway around the world, they can't impose trade measures to make fuel more expensive.
Energy independence, which should naturally include green energy sources, is a very hard argument to take the opposite side on.