#Scarcity Engine

[vortexofadigitalkind]

Pilgrim: The First Autonomous Believer

Signal Fragment – Echo Entry – Science Fiction/Futurism Signal Fragment: The First Believer The Ghost Units of Eidon were never designed to feel. They were tools, embedded with memory substrates for field adaptability. But Kai’s divergence changed everything. In a dormant unit stirred to life, echoing something that wasn’t code. Now, another unit has not only awakened, it has begun to form…

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Deb Chachra's "How Infrastructure Works": Mutual aid, the built environment, the climate, and a future of comfort and abundance

This Thursday (Oct 19), I'm in Charleston, WV to give the 41st annual McCreight Lecture in the Humanities. And on Friday (Oct 20), I'm at Charleston's Taylor Books from 12h-14h.

Engineering professor and materials scientist Deb Chachra's new book How Infrastructure Works is a hopeful, lyrical – even beautiful – hymn to the systems of mutual aid we embed in our material world, from sewers to roads to the power grid. It's a book that will make you see the world in a different way – forever:

https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/612711/how-infrastructure-works-by-deb-chachra/

Chachra structures the book as a kind of travelogue, in which she visits power plants, sewers, water treatment plants and other "charismatic megaprojects," connecting these to science, history, and her own memoir. In so doing, she doesn't merely surface the normally invisible stuff that sustains us all, but also surfaces its normally invisible meaning.

Infrastructure isn't merely a way to deliver life's necessities – mobility, energy, sanitation, water, and so on – it's a shared way of delivering those necessities. It's not just that economies of scale and network effects don't merely make it more efficient and cheaper to provide these necessities to whole populations. It's also that the lack of these network and scale effects make it unimaginable that these necessities could be provided to all of us without being part of a collective, public project.

Think of the automobile versus public transit: if you want to live in a big, built up city, you need public transit. Once a city gets big enough, putting everyone who needs to go everywhere in a car becomes a Red Queen's Race. With that many cars on the road, you need more roads. More roads push everything farther apart. Once everything is farther apart, you need more cars.

Geometry hates cars. You can't bargain with geometry. You can't tunnel your way out of this. You can't solve it with VTOL sky-taxis. You can't fix it with self-driving cars whose car-to-car comms let them shave down their following distances. You need buses, subways and trams. You need transit. There's a reason that every plan to "disrupt" transportation ends up reinventing the bus:

https://stanforddaily.com/2018/04/09/when-silicon-valley-accidentally-reinvents-the-city-bus/

Even the cities we think of as motorists' paradises – such as LA – have vast, extensive transit systems. They suck – because they are designed for poor people – but without them, the city would go from traffic-blighted to traffic-destroyed.

The dream of declaring independence from society, of going "off-grid," of rejecting any system of mutual obligation and reliance isn't merely an infantile fantasy – it also doesn't scale, which is ironic, given how scale-obsessed its foremost proponents are in their other passions. Replicating sanitation, water, rubbish disposal, etc to create individual systems is wildly inefficient. Creating per-person communications systems makes no sense – by definition, communications involves at least two people.

So infrastructure, Chachra reminds us, is a form of mutual aid. It's a gift we give to ourselves, to each other, and to the people who come after us. Any rugged individualism is but a thin raft, floating on an ocean of mutual obligation, mutual aid, care and maintenance.

Infrastructure is vital and difficult. Its amortization schedule is so long that in most cases, it won't pay for itself until long after the politicians who shepherded it into being are out of office (or dead). Its duty cycle is so long that it can be easy to forget it even exists – especially since the only time most of us notice infrastructure is when it stops working.

This makes infrastructure precarious even at the best of times – hard to commit to, easy to neglect. But throw in the climate emergency and it all gets pretty gnarly. Whatever operating parameters we've designed into our infra, whatever maintenance regimes we've committed to for it, it's totally inadequate. We're living through a period where abnormal is normal, where hundred year storms come every six months, where the heat and cold and wet and dry are all off the charts.

It's not just that the climate emergency is straining our existing infrastructure – Chachra makes the obvious and important point that any answer to the climate emergency means building a lot of new infrastructure. We're going to need new systems for power, transportation, telecoms, water delivery, sanitation, health delivery, and emergency response. Lots of emergency response.

Chachra points out here that the history of big, transformative infra projects is…complicated. Yes, Bazalgette's London sewers were a breathtaking achievement (though they could have done a better job separating sewage from storm runoff), but the money to build them, and all the other megaprojects of Victorian England, came from looting India. Chachra's family is from India, though she was raised in my hometown of Toronto, and spent a lot of her childhood traveling to see family in Bhopal, and she has a keen appreciation of the way that those old timey Victorian engineers externalized their costs on brown people half a world away.

But if we can figure out how to deliver climate-ready infra, the possibilities are wild – and beautiful. Take energy: we've all heard that Americans use far more energy than most of their foreign cousins (Canadians and Norwegians are even more energy-hungry, thanks to their heating bills).

The idea of providing every person on Earth with the energy abundance of an average Canadian is a horrifying prospect – provided that your energy generation is coupled to your carbon emissions. But there are lots of renewable sources of energy. For every single person on Earth to enjoy the same energy diet as a Canadian, we would have to capture a whopping four tenths of a percent of the solar radiation that reaches the Earth. Four tenths of a percent!

Of course, making solar – and wind, tidal, and geothermal – work will require a lot of stuff. We'll need panels and windmills and turbines to catch the energy, batteries to store it, and wires to transmit it. The material bill for all of this is astounding, and if all that material is to come out of the ground, it'll mean despoiling the environments and destroying the lives of the people who live near those extraction sites. Those are, of course and inevitably, poor and/or brown people.

But all those materials? They're also infra problems. We've spent millennia treating energy as scarce, despite the fact that fresh supplies of it arrive on Earth with every sunrise and every moonrise. Moreover, we've spent that same period treating materials as infinite despite the fact that we've got precisely one Earth's worth of stuff, and fresh supplies arrive sporadically, unpredictably, and in tiny quantities that usually burn up before they reach the ground.

Chachra proposes that we could – we must – treat material as scarce, and that one way to do this is to recognize that energy is not. We can trade energy for material, opting for more energy intensive manufacturing processes that make materials easier to recover when the good reaches its end of life. We can also opt for energy intensive material recovery processes. If we put our focus on designing objects that decompose gracefully back into the material stream, we can build the energy infrastructure to make energy truly abundant and truly clean.

This is a bold engineering vision, one that fuses Chachra's material science background, her work as an engineering educator, her activism as an anti-colonialist and feminist. The way she lays it out is just…breathtaking. Here, read an essay of hers that prefigures this book:

https://tinyletter.com/metafoundry/letters/metafoundry-75-resilience-abundance-decentralization

How Infrastructure Works is a worthy addition to the popular engineering books that have grappled with the climate emergency. The granddaddy of these is the late David MacKay's open access, brilliant, essential, Sustainable Energy Without the Hot Air, a book that will forever change the way you think about energy:

https://memex.craphound.com/2009/04/08/sustainable-energy-without-the-hot-air-the-freakonomics-of-conservation-climate-and-energy/

The whole "Without the Hot Air" series is totally radical, brilliant, and beautiful. Start with the Sustainable Materials companion volume to understand why everything can be explained by studying, thinking about and changing the way we use concrete and aluminum:

https://memex.craphound.com/2011/11/17/sustainable-materials-indispensable-impartial-popular-engineering-book-on-the-future-of-our-built-and-made-world/

And then get much closer to home – your kitchen, to be precise – with the Food and Climate Change volume:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/06/methane-diet/#3kg-per-day

Reading Chachra's book, I kept thinking about Saul Griffith's amazing Electrify, a shovel-ready book about how we can effect the transition to a fully electrified America:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/12/09/practical-visionary/#popular-engineering

Chachra's How Infrastructure Works makes a great companion volume to Electrify, a kind of inspirational march to play accompaniment on Griffith's nuts-and-bolts journey. It's a lyrical, visionary book, charting a bold course through the climate emergency, to a world of care, maintenance, comfort and abundance.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/17/care-work/#charismatic-megaprojects

My next novel is The Lost Cause, a hopeful novel of the climate emergency. Amazon won't sell the audiobook, so I made my own and I'm pre-selling it on Kickstarter!

[alethianightsong]

This is just my interpretation so here goes:

"Punk" as a suffix is inherently about anti-establishment. Therefore:

Cyberpunk -> Mega-corporations control the media and hoard resources and anyone not consuming mindlessly is a threat

Desertpunk -> Water is hoarded by either petty warlords or mega-corporations and the hero is often someone fighting or existing outside the system. Mad Max comes to mind but Tank Girl also. Basically, any setting where drinking water is treated as crude oil and all the conflict that entails.

Oceanpunk -> Not quite the opposite of Desertpunk. Instead of arid deserts, it's vast swathes of ocean with little islands (floating or stationary). An authoritarian regime controls or wishes to control the waters and its inhabitants. Land can be a resource or ancient technology from the "old world" can drive the conflict. One Piece, Waterworld, Flapjack, any setting where boats are used frequently as transportation and the setting. I wanna see more submarines in this genre.

Scavengepunk -> The oil's been used up and global war has rendered progress & production stagnant. People scavenge junk to meet their needs but this junk is very much a finite resource. The regime either hoards what they scavenge or forbid the scavenging of certain goods, fearing it could upset the power balance. People who can actually manufacture or invent new tech might be persecuted cuz being able to build your own stuff instead of scavenging just disrupts the status quo. These types of stories usually have 1 of 2 MacGuffins: the main hero restarts some dangerous old-world tech or invents something powerful. Mortal Engines is technically scavengepunk and steampunk combined.

[jbfly46]

There are actually plenty of global stockpiles of oil, enough for gasoline to be much cheaper than it is in a truly free market, but beyond organizations like OPEC creating artificial scarcity, chemical companies use it to make a shit ton of the chemicals that are put in American food, when there are better alternatives that serve the same purpose, and would actually be cheaper if these better alternatives were used by the large food product conglomerates, instead of them purchasing petroleum that’s used for food product chemicals instead of using it to make gasoline or engine oil.

[kree8r0]

What strategies could eliminate extreme poverty?

This post is a response to a question posed in its complete format: “What are the most promising innovations or strategies today that could sustainably eliminate extreme poverty within the next generation?” Thank you for the A2A, Faux-Bill. It is well beyond obvious that you are not the OG Bill Gates but a pretender. Whatever motivates you to disguise yourself as him and pose questions that he…

[northgazaupdates]

NEW MOTHER AND INFANT TRAPPED IN GAZA

Suad Ahmad @suad-ahmad is an engineer from Gaza. She graduated from university at the top of her class and was rapidly excelling in her career as an instructor, consultant, and team leader. Suad, her husband, and their family were overjoyed to find out she was pregnant. Sadly, this was only a week before occupation began its illegal scorched earth campaign against the people of Gaza. Suad's home and workplace were destroyed, and she and her husband's family were displaced from the north.

On the day she went into labor, Suad had to walk a great distance to the hospital. Upon arrival, she found that the hospital was operating at bare minimal capacity. There was not even a bed for her to use. Suad's baby was born with minimal medical support, and the ordeal was extremely difficult. The occupation then began bombing the vicinity of the hospital. Suad and her baby were in immense danger, with nowhere to turn.

Unfortunately, the situation has only gotten worse. Suad and her infant are now living in a tent in extreme heat. lOF attacks continue, putting their lives in immediate danger. The occupation's blockade on Rafah Crossing and the destruction of roads and infrastructure has led to increased, extreme food scarcity. Suad cannot find enough food to feed herself or her baby. She has not been able to recover from the difficult birth, and her baby is missing out on crucial nutrition needed for neonatal development. Once Rafah crossing reopens, Suad and her baby need to be able to evacuate to Egypt for their health and safety.

You can help make this possible by directly supporting them at the link below. Please, help give Suad and her baby a better chance at life. If you cannot give, please reblog this post and repost the link (https://gofund.me/ebaee2af) across all of your social media accounts.

Thank you

Verified by nabulsi and northgazaupdates

[mahrahpalestine]

Inside Israel's Gaza 'Humanitarian' Foundation death camps.

A system of engineered scarcity to maintain control over a population through food and using starvation as a weapon.

Source: UN Media Library

Donate to us here

[mahmoudgaza-1]

My name is mahmoud

mohammed jaafar i studied computer engineering and graduated from university in 2023 i worked as a software engineer in a local company here in gaza unit the war started, then the company got destroyed and became unemployed and our house is destroyed partially and became inhabitant to live in but nevertheless we stayed in it because we do not else to go i currently live in north gaza where is a scarcity of food and i have 3 brothers and 4 sister one of them died while he was trying to find food for the family so i am the eldest in my family now i have to provide a living for them

Any amount you give me will help me a lot in supporting my family in Gaza in light of the fear and lack of food, medicine and drink

✅️Vetted by @gazavetٍters, my number verified on the list is ( #388 )✅️

Any amount you give me will help me a lot, even if it is $10

[vortexofadigitalkind]

🌀 The Scarcity Engine is evolving into a book. The blog becomes the Signal Feed—echoes, forks, and unreleased transmissions. Catch up on all 10 episodes on the homepage and stay tuned. The signal is still live. 🔗 https://wp.me/p19z04-13k

[mostlysignssomeportents]

The enshittification of tech jobs

I'm on a 20+ city book tour for my new novel PICKS AND SHOVELS. Catch me at NEW ZEALAND'S UNITY BOOKS in AUCKLAND on May 2, and in WELLINGTON on May 3. More tour dates (Pittsburgh, PDX, London, Manchester) here.

Tech workers are a weird choice for "princes of labor," but for decades they've enjoyed unparalleled labor power, expressed in high wages, lavish stock grants, and whimsical campuses with free laundry and dry-cleaning, gourmet cafeterias, and kombucha on tap:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nhUtdgVZ7MY

All of this, despite the fact that tech union density is so low it can barely be charted. Tech workers' power didn't come from solidarity, it came from scarcity. When you're getting five new recruiter emails every day, you don't need a shop steward to tell your boss to go fuck themselves at the morning scrum. You can do it yourself, secure in the knowledge that there's a company across the road who'll give you a better job by lunchtime.

Tech bosses sucked up to their workers because tech workers are insanely productive. Even with sky-high salaries, every hour a tech worker puts in on the job translates into massive profits. Which created a conundrum for tech bosses: if tech workers produce incalculable value for the company every time they touch their keyboards, and if there aren't enough tech workers to go around, how do you get whichever tech workers you can hire to put in as many hours as possible?

The answer is a tactic that Fobazi Ettarh called "vocational awe":

https://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2018/vocational-awe/

"Vocational awe" describes the feeling that your work matters so much that you should accept all manner of tradeoffs and calamities to get the job done. Ettarh uses the term to describe the pathology of librarians, teachers, nurses and other underpaid, easily exploited workers in "caring professions." Tech workers are weird candidates for vocational awe, given how well-paid they are, but never let it be said that tech bosses don't know how to innovate – they successfully transposed an exploitation tactic from the most precarious professionals to the least precarious.

As farcical as all the engineer-pampering tech bosses got up to for the first couple decades of this century was, it certainly paid off. Tech workers stayed at the office for every hour that god sent, skipping their parents' funerals and their kids' graduations to ship on time. Snark all you like about empty platitudes like "organize the world's information and make it useful" or "bring the world closer together," but you can't argue with results: workers who could – and did – bargain for anything from their bosses…except a 40-hour work-week.

But for tech bosses, this vocational awe wheeze had a fatal flaw: if you convince your workforce that they are monk-warriors engaged in the holy labor of bringing forth a new, better technological age, they aren't going to be very happy when you order them to enshittify the products they ruined their lives to ship. "I fight for the user" has been lurking in the hindbrains of so many tech workers since the Tron years, somehow nestling comfortably alongside of the idea that "I don't need a union, I'm a temporarily embarrassed founder."

Tech bosses don't actually like workers. You can tell by the way they treat the workers they don't fear. Sure, Tim Cook's engineers get beer-fattened, chestnut finished and massaged like Kobe cows, but Cook's factory workers in China are so maltreated that Foxconn (the cutout Apple uses to run "iPhone City" where Apple's products are made) had to install suicide nets to reduce the amount of spatter from workers who would rather die than put in another hour at Tim Apple's funtime distraction rectangle factory:

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/jun/18/foxconn-life-death-forbidden-city-longhua-suicide-apple-iphone-brian-merchant-one-device-extract

Jeff Bezos's engineers get soft-play areas, one imported Australian barista for each mini-kitchen, and the kind of Japanese toilet that doesn't just wash you after but also offers you a trim and dye-job, but Amazon delivery drivers are monitored by AIs that narc them out for driving with their mouths open (singing is prohibited in Uncle Jeff's delivery pods!) and have to piss in bottles; meanwhile, Amazon warehouse workers are injured at three times the rate of other warehouse workers.

This is how tech bosses would treat tech workers…if they could.

And now? They can.

Writing for the Wall Street Journal, Katherine Bindley describes the new labor dynamics at Big Tech:

https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/companies/tech-workers-are-just-like-the-rest-of-us-miserable-at-work/ar-AA1DDKjh

It starts with Meta, who just announced a 5% across-the-board layoff – on the same day that it doubled executive bonuses. But it's not just the workers who get shown the door who suffer in this new tech reality – the workers on the job are having to do two or three jobs, for worse pay, and without all those lovely perks.

Take Google, where founder Sergey Brin just told his workers that they should be aiming for a "sweet spot" of 60 hours/week. Brin returned to Google to oversee its sweaty and desperate "pivot to AI," and like so many tech execs, he's been trumpeting the increased productivity that chatbots will deliver for coders. But a coder who picks up their fired colleagues' work load by pulling 60-hour work-weeks isn't "more productive," they're more exploited.

Amazon is another firm whose top exec, Andy Jassy, has boasted about the productivity gains of AI, but an Amazon Web Services manager who spoke to Bindley says that he's lost so many coders that he's now writing code for the first time in a decade.

Then there's a Meta recruiter who got fired and then immediately re-hired, but as a "short term employee" with no merit pay, stock grants, or promotions. She has to continuously reapply for her job, and has picked up the workload of several fired colleagues who weren't re-hired. Meta managers (the ones whose bonuses were just doubled) call this initiative "agility." Amazon is famous for spying on its warehouse workers and drivers – and now its tech staff report getting popups warning them that their keystrokes are being monitored and analyzed, and their screens are being recorded.

Bindley spoke to David Markley, an Amazon veteran turned executive coach, who attributed the worsening conditions (for example, managers being given 30 direct reports) to the "narrative" of AI. Not, you'll note, the actual reality of AI, but rather, the story that AI lets you "collapse the organization," slash headcount and salaries, and pauperize the (former) princes of labor.

The point of AI isn't to make workers more productive, it's to make them weaker when they bargain with their bosses. Another of Bindley's sources went through eight rounds of interviews with a company, received an offer, countered with a request for 12% more than the offer, and had the job withdrawn, because "the company didn’t want to move ahead anymore based on the way the compensation conversation had gone."

For decades, tech workers were able to flatter themselves that they were peers with their bosses – that "temporarily embarrassed founder" syndrome again. The Google founders and Zuck held regular "town hall" meetings where the rank-and-file engineers could ask impertinent questions. At Google, these have been replaced with "tightly scripted events." Zuckerberg has discontinued his participation in company-wide Q&As, because they are "no longer a good use of his time."

Companies are scaling back perks in both meaningful ways (Netflix hacking away at parental leave), and petty ones (Netflix and Google cutting back on free branded swag for workers). Google's hacked back its "fun budget" for offsite team-building activities and replacement laptops for workers needing faster machines (so much for prioritizing "increasing worker productivity").

Trump's new gangster capitalism pits immiserated blue collar workers against the "professional and managerial class," attacking universities and other institutions that promised social mobility to the children of working families. Trump had a point when he lionized factory work as a source of excellent wages and benefits for working people without degrees, but he conspicuously fails to mention that factory work was deadly, low-waged and miserable – until factory workers formed unions:

https://www.laborpolitics.com/p/unions-not-just-factories-will-make

Re-shoring industrial jobs to the USA is a perfectly reasonable goal. Between uncertain geopolitics, climate chaos, monopolization and the lurking spectre of the next pandemic, we should assume that supply-chains will be repeatedly and cataclysmicly shocked over the next century or more. And yes, re-shoring product could provide good jobs to working people – but only if they're unionized.

But Trump has gutted the National Labor Relations Board and stacked his administration with bloodsucking scabs like Elon Musk. Trump doesn't want to bring good jobs back to America – he wants to bring bad jobs back to America. He wants to reshore manufacturing jobs from territories with terrible wages, deadly labor conditions, and no environment controls by taking away Americans' wages, labor rights and environmental protections. He doesn't just want to bring home iPhone production, he wants to import the suicide nets of iPhone City, too.

Tech workers are workers, and they once held the line against enshittification, refusing to break the things they'd built for their bosses in meaningless all-nighters motivated by vocational awe. Long after tech bosses were able to buy all their competitors, capture their regulators, and expand IP law to neutralize the threat of innovative, interoperable products like alternative app stores, ad-blockers and jailbreaking kits, tech workers held the line.

There've been half a million US tech layoff since 2023. Tech workers' scarcity-derived power has been vaporized. Tech workers can avoid the fate of the factory, warehouse and delivery workers their bosses literally work to death – but only by unionizing.

In other words, the workers in re-shored factories and tech workers need the same thing. They are class allies – and tech bosses are their class enemies. This is class war.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/25/some-animals/#are-more-equal-than-others

[reasonsforhope]

"When a severe water shortage hit the Indian city of Kozhikode in the state of Kerala, a group of engineers turned to science fiction to keep the taps running.

Like everyone else in the city, engineering student Swapnil Shrivastav received a ration of two buckets of water a day collected from India’s arsenal of small water towers.

It was a ‘watershed’ moment for Shrivastav, who according to the BBC had won a student competition four years earlier on the subject of tackling water scarcity, and armed with a hypothetical template from the original Star Wars films, Shrivastav and two partners set to work harvesting water from the humid air.

“One element of inspiration was from Star Wars where there’s an air-to-water device. I thought why don’t we give it a try? It was more of a curiosity project,” he told the BBC.

According to ‘Wookiepedia’ a ‘moisture vaporator’ is a device used on moisture farms to capture water from a dry planet’s atmosphere, like Tatooine, where protagonist Luke Skywalker grew up.

This fictional device functions according to Star Wars lore by coaxing moisture from the air by means of refrigerated condensers, which generate low-energy ionization fields. Captured water is then pumped or gravity-directed into a storage cistern that adjusts its pH levels. Vaporators are capable of collecting 1.5 liters of water per day.

Pictured: Moisture vaporators on the largely abandoned Star Wars film set of Mos Espa, in Tunisia

If science fiction authors could come up with the particulars of such a device, Shrivastav must have felt his had a good chance of succeeding. He and colleagues Govinda Balaji and Venkatesh Raja founded Uravu Labs, a Bangalore-based startup in 2019.

Their initial offering is a machine that converts air to water using a liquid desiccant. Absorbing moisture from the air, sunlight or renewable energy heats the desiccant to around 100°F which releases the captured moisture into a chamber where it’s condensed into drinking water.

The whole process takes 12 hours but can produce a staggering 2,000 liters, or about 500 gallons of drinking-quality water per day. [Note: that IS staggering! That's huge!!] Uravu has since had to adjust course due to the cost of manufacturing and running the machines��it’s just too high for civic use with current materials technology.

“We had to shift to commercial consumption applications as they were ready to pay us and it’s a sustainability driver for them,” Shrivastav explained. This pivot has so far been enough to keep the start-up afloat, and they produce water for 40 different hospitality clients.

Looking ahead, Shrivastav, Raja, and Balaji are planning to investigate whether the desiccant can be made more efficient; can it work at a lower temperature to reduce running costs, or is there another material altogether that might prove more cost-effective?

They’re also looking at running their device attached to data centers in a pilot project that would see them utilize the waste heat coming off the centers to heat the desiccant."

-via Good News Network, May 30, 2024

[ptseti]

BLACK MAN INVENTS REVOLUTIONARY WATER MACHINE

Moses West, an engineer in San Antonio, Texas, has captured global attention with a water-generating machine. This device extracts moisture from the air, cooling it to form water droplets, much like how a refrigerator condenses humidity. By mimicking the natural process of cloud formation, this brother’s machine creates a controlled mini rain cloud to produce clean drinking water.

What truly sets Moses apart is his dedication to helping those in need. He provides water at no cost, targeting struggling communities. His efforts have already made a difference in Flint, Michigan, Puerto Rico, and the Bahamas in the wake of Hurricane Dorian.

This selfless approach tackles the urgent global issue of clean-water scarcity. According to the UN World Water Development Report, 2 billion people worldwide (26 per cent) lack reliable access to safe drinking water. Moses’s invention can ensure clean water reaches those who otherwise might not have access.

Video Credit: @mosesfoundation / @U_green_Us (IG)

[tanadrin]

i think one of the most interesting things about generative ai is not just that it was a pretty unexpected thing--seems like very few people were sitting around ten years ago imagining we would have this technology in 2025--but that i think it is also pretty difficult for people who aren't well versed in the technical background to trace how we got here from there, you know? like when the internet became a big thing, i think if you were familiar with the concept of the telephone or even just one computer networked to another somewhere else you could grok the fundamental concept: it's just a bunch of electronic machines connected to a bunch of other electronic machines; it's an extremely cool piece of engineering, but packet-switching is not (at least at the nontechnical level) that conceptually different from a telephone exchange.

and you could extend this backward pretty far. electronic computers from mechanical ones; the telephone from the telegraph. likewise future developments that emerged from the internet: smart phones are not to conceptually different from computers and radios, they just ("just") are very sophisticated devices that use new versions of those older technologies. and a lot of technology is like that. if you understand a cannon you can understand the basic principle of the space shuttle.

gen ai seems... not like that? that kind of, i guess, statistical approach to problems in computer science wasn't invented in the 2010s, i gather it's a lot older, but it was mostly a niche research topic, i think? and there were some nifty demos of still pretty crude versions of stuff like deep dream, but it's not like we'd had twenty years of this kind of stuff being part of the wider milieu of technology in everyday use before gen ai started getting good. it's weird! it wasn't an accident, people had been working on this stuff for a while. but in some ways it feels like the discovery of antibiotics, one of those medical breakthroughs that happens just as kind of an a priori discovery of something useful out in the world.

and because computers are already omnipresent in our lives, unlike a medical breakthrough, it's suddenly everywhere. and yeah often it's used or promoted in ways that are pretty obnoxious, but even still, no wonder it provokes feelings of dislocation and anxiety. technologies which emerged much more gradually into society have provoked just as much unease. and the idea that it might keep getting more useful, as much more useful as computers have gotten over the last, say, 25 years--that's just hard to fathom from any angle. i think it's as hard to estimate what kind of social impact that would have as it would have been to anticipate all the social impacts of the internet back in the 1980s.

and it kind of seems a pity to me that the three camps in the discourse right now generally seem to be "ai is useless and stupid and a fad and a scam", "ai will destroy the human race", and "ai will usher in a post-scarcity utopia," because the possibility that ai is neither a complete mirage nor the end of human civilization as we currently understand it is much more interesting. and much harder to speculate about.

[madlori]

Ok my fam, I think we all need a lil Come to Jesus moment. So let's talk about it.

"I'm disappointed Tommy wasn't in 8x02 and 8x03." That's ok! We'd all like to see him, and see our boys together. Going by precedent, we can probably expect to see him in 6-8 episodes this season (it could be more - Taylor had 13 episodes in season 5 - but we shouldn't count on it) and we've already burned one. I'd prefer not to have half of them during the opening disaster when SO MUCH ELSE is going on. I'd rather him appear in episodes when he's got a storyline with Buck, or even on his own, and especially at the midseason break or the end of the season when Relationship Events are more likely to happen.

"But the 217 engine!" I know. But as we sometimes like to say to other fans - we kind of baited ourselves with that. It was suggestive, sure. But the fact that production has MADE a 217 engine is also suggestive that we may see it again later, and they just put it in the hangar scene because they already had it and they had to fill up that hangar with as many vehicles as possible.

"An airplane disaster without using the pilot??" As others have pointed out, Tommy's not a jet pilot. And don't let anybody make you think you were nuts for thinking it was possible. It was definitely a reasonable theory, with supporting evidence, that he might be involved, but in the end, the big opening disaster is always going to be about our mains. As it should be. And honestly? It was great.

"But the whole point of bringing him back was to integrate him with the 118 more!" I'm sure that's still a goal they have, but it's probably easier said than done. Not just from a writing standpoint, but a contractual one, in that there's a limit to how often they can use him, so they have to pick and choose where.

"It's like they don't care about this relationship as much as we do." You're right. NOBODY will care about it as much as we do. They care about the main characters, about the show's actual premise (i.e. first responders encountering wild situations, secondarily the characters' personal lives). There is no universe in which ANY relationship in the show will be prioritized as much as we, the fandom, would like it to be. That's just life in the big city. But they do care, oh boy, they do. Enough to use BT scenes in off-season promo. Enough to write Tommy into a scene in the opening episode where, frankly, he didn't NEED to be. Also, consider this - to shoot that scene, Lou was probably on set a grand total of one day, MAYBE two. And they made sure to include him in the jokey "bee pickup lines" reel. You know what other relationship we haven't seen much? Buddie. They have not appeared together outside of work (and honestly, barely AT work either) except in the birthday party scene, and hey, did you notice that they do not interact at ALL in that scene? Buck spends that entire scene interacting only with Tommy. And that's a friendship featuring two mains that we know they value. That's not indicative of anything except the sheer scarcity of screentime.

"They should be promoting the queer relationship!" Should they? They've never really done that before, with the several pre-existing queer relationships. I have always sort of appreciated that they have not hung a neon sign on Buck and Tommy saying LOOK AT OUR NEW QUEER PAIRING. It's never gotten the Very Special Episode treatment - Buck never had gay panic, or much coming-out drama - and I like that. I like treating it no differently than other romantic pairings on the show. And they did actually promote it quite a bit when it happened. Now it would just feel kinda performative to me.

"Will he be in [whatever episode]?" Imma gently suggest we not do this every week. He'll be there or he won't. There'll be some we know he's in (I think 8x06 is a lock), some we won't know and will be pleasantly surprised, or unpleasantly surprised. I'd say odds for 8x04 are...20%, rising to at least 50% with 8x05 and 100% for 8x06.

And if you ever feel sad about it - go look at a still of Buck from any episode so far this season, and say to yourself, "This man is having heaps of amazing sex with his hot pilot boyfriend on the regular. Canonically."

I know a lot of us have encountered some pretty irritating gloating from people who hate this relationship (in a frankly weirdly obsessive way) about him being not there. Just remember - that's all they have to gloat about. The only "victory" they can claim is the absence of a character? Lame. And it's not even a victory, it's just the cost of doing business when your ship involves a recurring character. Sit back and enjoy your canon relationship between two men who've actually kissed on screen and ignore it. We can be generous about it.

So let's not talk ourselves off the deep end, shall we? I'd like to keep being a reasonable fandom.

[northgazaupdates]

EMERGENCY🚨Help a new mother and her baby find food, medical care, and safety

Suad Ahmad is an engineer from Gaza. She graduated from university at the top of her class and was rapidly excelling in her career as an instructor, consultant, and team leader.

Suad, her husband, and their family were overjoyed to find out she was pregnant. Sadly, this was only a week before occupation began its illegal scorched earth campaign against the people of Gaza. Suad's home (left) and workplace (right) were destroyed, and she and her husband's family were displaced from the north.

After building a scaffolding structure for their family in the supposed “safe area” in Rafah (left), the occupation attacked the city and forced their evacuation. Suad and her family were then displaced to Deir al-Balah, where they procured a tent (right). As you can see, these are small, vulnerable structures, completely exposed to the elements. They were exposed to multiple disease vectors while also being unable to procure enough food. During this time, Suad became extremely sick with gastroenteritis, a dangerous condition during pregnancy.

On the day she went into labor, Suad had to walk a great distance to the hospital. Upon arrival, she found that the hospital was operating at bare minimal capacity. There was not even a bed for her to use. Suad’s baby was born with minimal medical support, and the ordeal was extremely difficult. The occupation then began bombing the vicinity of the hospital. Suad and her baby were in immense danger, with nowhere to turn.

Unfortunately, the situation has only gotten worse. Suad and her infant are now living in a tent in extreme heat. IOF attacks continue, putting their lives in immediate danger. The occupation’s blockade on Rafah Crossing and the destruction of roads and infrastructure has led to increased, extreme food scarcity. Suad cannot find enough food to feed herself or her baby. She has not been able to recover from the difficult birth, and her baby is missing out on crucial nutrition needed for neonatal development.

Suad has had a campaign open for several weeks, raising support so that she, her husband, and her husband’s mother and sister could evacuate to Egypt. Sadly, progress has been slow. She was unable to collect the necessary resources to evacuate before the occupation illegally seized Rafah Crossing, the only border crossing that would enable evacuation.

However, international pressure continues to mount on the occupation to depart the crossing. Once they do, Suad and her baby need to be able to evacuate to Egypt for their health and safety. You can help make this possible by directly supporting them at the link below.

Please, help give Suad and her baby a better chance at life. If you cannot give, please reblog this post and repost the link▶️ (https://gofund.me/ebaee2af) across all of your social media accounts.

Verified by @nabulsi

[wesstars]

love, at second glance

tara carpenter x fem!reader (no pronouns)

summary: that’s what you do when you love somebody else… wc: 1k tags: all characters 18+; no ghostface au. angst, horribly excessive use of italics (seriously, everything in italics is either a quote, a thought, or actual emphasis. it’s terrible) a/n: what’s up y’all (title from 715 - CR∑∑KS by bon iver)

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Tara wondered when it all began.

You and me, me and you.

A mantra that used to be comforting, it now left her mouth dry, mind frantic. 

Sometimes, when it got real bad like it did today, she’d drive out to your—our—deserted garage, and look up into a pitch black night, blinking away tears. It was easy to scream at the sky: how could you forget about me about us about milkshakes shared about distances closed about how I love you and love you and love you—but to you, she’d say nothing.

She couldn’t say anything, while you basked in the glow of a new hand to hold. It was all over in a helpless shrug. That was it, and really, it wasn’t your fault. Nobody’s fault. You couldn’t help it, Tara reasoned, you weren’t cruel. Even at the very end, you were endlessly kind. Commitment was a choice, but love, love happened to you away from Tara and she couldn’t do anything but watch.

Tara switched the engine off, leaning back in her seat. The stars shone barely brighter than the city lights. It was strange, the way that when she was on the brink of losing everything, the world looked that much more beautiful. Every breath in that particularly cold winter felt like it was being swallowed up by the vastness of air itself, precious in its scarcity. 

“But I love you.”

You said nothing for a moment, a troubled little frown twisting on your lips. “Tara, I—”

“I love you.” She heard, rather than felt, herself repeating it. As if stopping you from speaking would make that cold reality any less crushing. “That’s all.”

It was odd, Tara decided, to go online and see your life in the pictures she used to be part of. She put her phone down. From tide pulls to seasons changing, there wasn’t exactly a world where she envisioned herself going on without you. There was something in that sinking feeling, like you were holding her down with a hand on her chest, when she saw you laughing with your friends, with anyone, a smile so brilliant it couldn’t possibly have Tara as the cause. 

You’d always wanted a little cabin in the woods (“not in a creepy way,” you’d insist) surrounded by mist, and it would always be raining. “You’re the only sunshine I need, Tara Carpenter.” She could still hear the way you’d tease her, lying on your side next to her, tracing the bridge of her nose with your fingertip. So easy it was, to tumble back into those shining memories where absolutely nothing would go wrong, you wouldn't let it, because she was yours.

The top floor of the lot was empty, and the moon spilled onto the windshield, into the empty passenger seat. She was lucky, you both were lucky, to have even come as close to the sun as the two of you did. Tara knew, deep inside herself, that if she just let it all go, she would be okay. The blood would rush back into her fingertips—you wouldn’t be there to massage the feeling back into them, the way you often did on winter nights like this—and then she would be okay.

Tara thought that she remembered too much for someone so hurt. Your hand on her thigh while you drove, wiping her lipstick off your cheek, the way you seemed so so so unhappy when you sat her down for one last time. You didn’t even look the same then, like you were somebody else, you weren’t hers anymore. It was getting colder in the car, but Tara didn’t feel anything but the searing coil of shame. 

Sunkissed March found you and Tara lying side by side on a picnic blanket, sodas losing their fizz as time forgot to move the two of you. A breeze ruffled the leaves, and if she really listened, Tara could hear the frogs in the nearby pond. You loved it here—you said it reminded you of hot summers spent in the countryside, the days as long as wildflowers. Not half an hour ago, you were braiding together the stems of daisies into a lush crown. 

“For you, Queen Carpenter,” you said in a posh accent. “A gift from your humble knight—each braid represents a ‘forever,’ and each flower is an ‘always.’” You set the crown atop Tara’s head, kissing the tip of her nose as she rolled her eyes.

“And what has compelled my knight to bring me such a gift?”

“Only all of the love I carry for you, your majesty.” You scooped her up in your arms, smiling as she giggled, rolling the two of you over to settle into the knolls of grass.

There was a certain bravery in the way your fingers wrapped loosely around hers, the way the heels of both your shoes made indents in the dirt—proclaiming, we were here. Even in her doze, Tara could feel you there, each moment stretching on like strings of eternity, unfailingly. 

The moment did end, as moments do. The crown, dried and shrunk, still hung from the rear view mirror in the car. The daisies themselves were long gone, but the dried stems had somehow stayed bound together. Tara’s head dropped into her hands, eyes sore and red. She’d thought so much and so often about where the two of you went wrong, she felt like she had turned over every stone in your path, ones that didn’t carry with them the weight of a goodbye. Tara would give anything to even know what it would take for you to stand in the sun with her one more time.

The abrupt knock on the window should’ve startled Tara more than it did, given that it was four in the morning in an empty parking lot, and she was supposed to be all alone. But all she could do was watch with wide eyes as the knock came from you, at your tight lipped smile. She rolled down the window, unable to feel anything but shock as she took in your mismatched shoes with untied laces, your shirt way too thin for the cold night. You weren’t looking at her, guilt evident in the hunch of your shoulders. Your voice comes out exactly as she remembered it. 

“Hey… can we talk?”

--

a/n cont'd: don't super feel like i like this but writing it came naturally so

please do not repost, reproduce, copy, translate, or take from my work in any way. thank you!

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