I enjoy her writing too. Her piece on the threat of Facebook entering the Fediverse does a great job of making the case.

Congratulations!

It’s called Tractorbeam Earth because it’s a quarterly publication run as a sweepstakes by Tractor Beverages, Inc.

Tractor Beverages is a corporation in Coeur d’Alene, ID that sells canned beverages through Amazon and Walmart, correct?

Let’s be clear that I am anti-Putin and anti-Kim.

Ad-hominem means “to the man” – that is, instead of attacking the message, one attacks the credibility of the messenger. This also includes when instead of defending the credibility of a message, one defends the credibility of the messenger. Ad-hominem is exactly the purpose of the MBFC bot. Instead of fact-checking the individual article, it tells you if the article is credible or not based on its clearly biased assessment of the article outlet.

You are correct in that ad-hominem is generally a terrible way of judging credibility. I am not making an ad-hominem fallacy. I am responding to an ad-hominem fallacy that has been spammed in every thread in this community.

Groups like MBFC use their position as gatekeepers of the political spectrum to disguise radical ideas as centrist positions, and it’s ironic that !world using such a biased propaganda platform to tell its readers what is credible.

Bias is not the same thing as propaganda, propaganda is not the same thing as misinformation. Articles should be evaluated on how factual they are, and there are plenty of platforms that are doing the hard work of verifying information without putting their political ideology above their credibility. This bot is a mistake.

Before removing the bot, !news mods removed comments critical of the bot, and ignored the overwhelming negative feedback and the consensus that the bot should be removed when they opened the discussion up to the community.

!politics and !world now appear to be willing to change course. The vote to “Kill” – stop their bot from advertising MBFC in all of their posts – appears to be leading in both communities.

If you upvote the Kill comment so that this lead becomes a landslide, you can make it even more embarrassing and difficult for them to claim ‘bots’ or backtrack.

Voice of America (VOA) is a state media network funded by the United States of America, whose purpose is to project soft power through journalism. In 1948, Voice of America was forbidden to broadcast directly to American citizens to protect the public from propaganda by its own government. The restriction was removed in 2013 to to adapt to the Internet age.

In 2005, the Washington Post reported that suspected Al-qaeda operatives were flown into Thailand to be detained and tortured. VOA’s remote relay radio station in Udon Thani province has been widely suspected to be the torture site.

Most people do not believe that propaganda is anything that disagrees with the United States Government’s foreign policy, and find the idea that the VOA is less biased than the New York Times laughable. Lemmy.World endorses these absurdities by advertising Media Bias Fact Check in every post in their community. You have a limited time to let !politics and !world know what you think.

PTFE and chemicals used in its production are some of the best-known and widely applied PFAS, which are persistent organic pollutants. PTFE occupies more than half of all fluoropolymer production, followed by polyvinylidene fluoride (PVdF).

– Polytetrafluoroethylene on Wikipedia

Great singing, coordination, and choreography.

“You know what? I’m a grad student. I’ve got a crappy Toyota Corolla and 50 bucks in the bank. They can shoot me in the head a billion times, and only the first bullet hurts”

– Andrew ‘Bunnie’ Huang

Voice of America (VOA) is a state media network funded by the United States of America, whose purpose is to project soft power through journalism. In 1948, Voice of America was forbidden to broadcast directly to American citizens to protect the public from propaganda by its own government. The restriction was removed in 2013 to to adapt to the Internet age.

In 2005, the Washington Post reported that suspected Al-qaeda operatives were flown into Thailand to be detained and tortured. VOA’s remote relay radio station in Udon Thani province has been widely suspected to be the torture site. VOA has been conspicuously silent on the charges. Their reporters have unparalleled access to the details of the case, but none of them appear to have done any investigation.

According to David Van Zandt in MBFC’s methodology:

It’s crucial to note that our bias scale is calibrated to the political spectrum of the United States

To better understand this statement, it should be noted that MBFC regards VOA as “least biased” despite its uncontroversial status as the United States’ official propaganda outlet.

Clean energy infrastructure is desperately needed, but capitalists don’t want to pay labor a fair wage.

The stories I hear from tradespeople in clean energy work is that entry level positions are paying less, and the bonuses they were seeing when they started are drying up. Many are looking to move away from clean-energy specific labor and into electrical or construction where unions are better established.

Improperly installed solar panels short out and fail early, carelessly sealed roof mountings leak and damage the dwelling, and most importantly, pressured novice workers make often fatal mistakes while working with electricity or at significant heights. To those with the experience of prison labor as a baseline, the risks and rewards of this kind of labor may be attractive. But most tradespeople know these jobs exist, and choose not to take them.

Instead of support for labor, you see state, provincial, and national incentives to recruit new workers into these fields, as well as articles like this one touting the potential of employment in the clean energy economy. But noticeably absent from the article is any mention of labor organization or workers protections for the people doing this work. If the state was serious about building this infrastructure, they would make these fields union jobs. That’s the only way to get quality renewable energy infrastructure built at scale.

Tom Nicholas is really great in this piece. SLRPNK link

People who get angry at Just Stop Oil tactics are just showing their ignorance of civil rights and protest history.

Alex de Vries predicted that current AI technology could be on track to annually consume as much electricity as the entire country of Ireland (29.3 terawatt-hours per year). For comparison, the Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index suggests Bitcoin uses 141-160 terawatt-hours (TWhs) of electricity annually. That’s ~0.7% of the world’s consumed electricity in 2022. The process of minting cryptocurrency is a very public activity, so the numbers are difficult to fudge. The cost of bringing extremely expensive nuclear reactors back online and driving demand for environmentally destructive Uranium mining and processing suggests de Vries’ guess was conservative.

I’m reminded of Jevon’s Paradox as applied to energy generation. I hope the AI bubble pops before much more investment goes into nuclear energy.

The petro-billionaire people who brought you “The Line” are joining up with the badly conceived Octopus Crane Tower idea people to bring you something that definitely will never be built and probably has deep conceptual flaws.

The important take away from this performance art is that the people causing global warming and who stand to benefit from pumping even more carbon into the air to are working on clever solutions to reverse it, and you can continue living your life as if things will eventually return to the pre-climate crisis status quo.

ABC News is a brand of Disney Advertising.

Manufacturing Consent has this to say about Disney news media:

Ben Bagdikian notes that when the first edition of his Media Monopoly was published in 1983, fifty giant firms dominated almost every mass medium; but just seven years later, in 1990, only twenty-three firms occupied the same commanding position.

Since 1990, a wave of massive deals and rapid globalization have left the media industries further centralized in nine transnational conglomerates-Disney, AOL Time Warner, Viacom (owner of CBS), News Corporation, Bertelsmann, General Electric (owner of NBC), Sony, AT&T-Liberty Media, and Vivendi Universal. These giants own all the world’s major film studios, TV networks, and music companies, and a sizable fraction of the most important cable channels, cable systems, magazines, major-market TV stations, and book publishers. The largest, the recently merged AOL Time Warner, has integrated the leading Internet portal into the traditional media system. Another fifteen firms round out the system, meaning that two dozen firms control nearly the entirety of media experienced by most U.S. citizens. Bagdikian concludes that “it is the overwhelming collective power of these firms, with their corporate interlocks and unified cultural and political values, that raises troubling questions about the individual’s role in the American democracy.”

That looks great! Where is this?

These structural factors that dominate media operations are not alI-controlling and do not always produce simple and homogeneous results… The beauty of the system, however, is that such dissent and inconvenient information are kept within bounds and at the margins, so that while their presence shows that the system is not monolithic, they are not large enough to interfere unduly with the domination of the official agenda.

–Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky, “Manufacturing Consent”

El Pais is a brand of PRISA, an advertising and media conglomerate with headquarters in Madrid, Spain.