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1930s Rockford Furniture Jacobean Style Handcrafted Secretary Desk

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this is so hard to articulate but i feel like a lot of the arguments around AI water use end up missing the forest for the trees, and it becomes this personal morality-focused demonstration of "i don't use AI, so i'm good, and i'm saving water" which is...really not the point?

like if we want to go down the route of placing the full weight of environmental degradation & freshwater depletion on personal consumer choices, we can do that. walk with me. opting out of eating meat or meat+dairy for a single day saves roughly the same amount of water as 600-2,200 chatgpt-4 prompts at 500 ml each. do this for a full year and you'll offset 219,000 to 803,000 chatgpt-4 prompts.

but we don't like looking at or talking about personal choices - because after a certain point we have to reckon with the fact that we will never get an entire population to shift their behavior this radically without actual, monumental changes to the landscape that produces that behavior. meat is cheap. electricity is cheap. this is true on both the consumer and the producer side - the industries that produce our food & energy do not pay for the environmental consequences of water depletion or climate change, giving way to an extreme inertia with respect to innovating & embracing new energy models

like the point that i've been trying to make and that i see other people trying to make over and over is that AI datacenters are not something that exist uniquely separate from our existing energy infrastructure. any new server-based technology that comes along will see the same problems of rising energy and water use - and so this becomes less of a one-time "AI is uniquely evil so we must kill it" issue and more of a realization that, oh, it's bad to increase our server demands to this degree, for any technology, until we actually 1) price in the externalities of these systems and 2) commit to clean energy

discourse around AI would not matter if the US energy grid were based on renewables!! and if we fucking stopped building datacenters in the middle of the american south!!! if an AI datacenter were built today, in a cold-climate country powered by nuclear energy, that would virtually eliminate the issues around energy and water use. china is already building datacenters with solar-powered microgrids to tackle the issue of energy generation - there are actual innovations that can meaningfully combat these problems.

like tldr; we were already producing runaway catastrophic climate change and depleting our freshwater before AI came along. we were already fucking up. AI is not something that is uniquely problematic within the current energy / extractive capitalist model, and instead of focusing on the personal shunning of 1 technology out of literally dozens of personal choices that have a substantially greater impact on one's carbon footprint, we need to demand renewables + nuclear yesterday to change our power generation at every level. ok thanks i'm done

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A dance that never ends

[Prints available here]

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Mid-18th century cabinet in the style of Johan Hugo Fürloh. Made in Stockholm. Walnut veneer. Four drawers below and two doors above with shelves inside.

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Coffee service of silver in three pieces by C. G. Hallberg, Stockholm, 1899

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gouache study of beautiful ancient artifacts !

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A Very Fine Bronze Chandelier. Two tiers of arms (6+ 3). Solid Bottom Ball. England, circa 1900, in Tudor revival style.

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Sergey Kuznetsov, Sunset, n.d.

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Vintage advertisement for Nairn inlaid linoleum flooring from Woman's Home Companion magazine, September 1926

This ad features color illustrations of a bourgeois American home in the early 20th century romantic style — historical nostalgia and decor dominated by real and reproduction antique furniture. In the painting there's wooden furniture with an early baroque feel, including a dark chair with turned rails and straight back, but also a Queen Anne -style grandfather clock with scroll top and an electric wall sconce in the then-popular "Colonial" or "Tudor" style (typically simple forms in imitation or actual wrought iron). Aside from the checkered linoleum in the illustration, which references stone or painted wood floors that might have been found in the past but nonetheless conveys a definite 20th-century feel, we see very narrow architectural trim, an unadorned built-in bookcase, and a very early-20th-century window treatment of a large-scale botanical print on short curtains with a simple gathered valance.

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The entire Al Jazeera crew in Gaza City was assassinated, including its reporters and cameramen:

Reporter: Anas Al-Sharif

Reporter: Mohammed Qreiqah

Cameraman: Ibrahim Zaher

Cameraman: Mo’men Alwiyeh

Crew driver: Mohammed Noufal

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slightly unusual gryphons

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Been playing lots of Animal Crossing this week Cherry be upon ye!!

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Nilda Wanderbanana.........ummmm....