"Can A.I. ameliorate the inequities of our world other than by pushing us to the brink of societal collapse?
"If A.I. is as powerful a tool as its proponents claim, they should be able to find other uses for it besides intensifying the ruthlessness of capital.”
You may have noticed that capitalists only consider technological solutions to the ecological problems that #technology has caused.
Can the incentive to make a profit save #capitalism from capitalism?
“Ultimately the practice of modern farming is not sustainable because the damage to the soil and natural ecosystems is so great that farming becomes dependent not on the land but on the artificial inputs into the process, such as fertilizers and pesticides."
Why we’re all likely screwed no matter what we do…
Yes, each one of us should cut our carbon footprint as individuals. It’s the right thing to do. We can stop flying, stop eating meat, and stop using Amazon. We can also vote Green, go to protests, even get arrested for the cause. Perhaps we should go that far — but the truth is no matter what you and I do, it won’t make a big difference.
That’s because decisions about the future of the planet are taken far above street level, far above voting level, far above legislatures or the UN.
The choices that matter most come from capitalist industrialists and investors in the United States and in China. Some decisions of consequence are made in Russia, India, and Brazil, but those are largely taken along paths already laid out in New York and Beijing.
First, let’s look at China…
China’s carbon dioxide emissions have relentlessly grown, more than quadrupling from 1990 to 2020. Since 2019, China’s emissions have exceeded those of all developed countries combined and presently account for 33% of total global emissions. Paradoxically, China leads the world in the production of installed capacity of both wind and solar electricity generation. Yet, 85% of China’s primary energy consumption in 2020 was still provided by fossil fuels.
Far from transitioning to a green and low-carbon mode of development, China is developing the most carbon-intensive large industrial economy in the world. The Party-State has abandoned the transition to renewables in favour of an ‘all of the above’ approach to energy generation: more solar and wind, but even more fossil fuels.
There are insuperable technical barriers to decarbonising China’s economy, especially in any time frame that matters for human survival. China is home to the world’s largest concentration of carbon-intensive, hard-to-abate industries like steel and cement. Thermal electricity generation (90% from coal, 10% from gas) accounts for 32% of China’s total carbon dioxide emissions. Replacing coal-fired power plants with solar and wind-powered generators could cut China’s emissions by about one-third — a huge gain if this transition can be implemented. But electricity generation is the low-hanging fruit of carbon mitigation — one of the very few sectors in which economic growth can be decoupled from emissions growth.
At least 47% of China’s GHG emissions come from hard-to-abate manufacturing and other industries, most of which cannot be significantly decarbonised with current or anticipated technology either at all or in time to avert runaway global warming and climate collapse. Steel, aluminium, cement, aviation, shipping, heavy road transport, chemicals, plastics, synthetic textiles, and electronics stand out. Decarbonising those industries has defied all efforts to date both in China and in the West.
Although I’ve chided Joe Biden for this (to make the point that when it comes to the climate and the environment, mainstream Democrats really are no better than Republicans), the choice was never actually his. That’s above his pay grade.
Decisions like these are made in corporate boardrooms, then passed down to politicians owned by the fossil fuel industry and their investors. If Biden had any intention of standing up against such plans, he never would have been allowed to run for President, let alone win.
The truth is that our future is in the hands of a small minority who care about nothing except making more money and gaining more power — at any cost.
Our capitalist owners are not interested in what happens to you or me. They don’t care what we think, what we say or do, whether or not we protest, or how we vote. None of that has any effect on them, and is beyond their concern.
...banned from any trading on financial markets whose decisions might influence their decisions.
Last but not least, #CitizensUnitedVsFEC must be reversely codified.
All #US allies must be given the same most-favored nation treatment. Further clashes w/ authoritarian systems are already on the horizon. #Capitalism won the #ColdWar, now it is part of the problem.
A #NewDeal 3.0 must be developed and the #US must become more of a social-democracy like..
Are you a capitalist, a shareholder? Do you invest your money in blue-chip companies? Then we have excellent news for you!
A new analysis shows that 20 of the world’s biggest food corporations – the largest in the grain, fertiliser, meat and dairy sectors – returned a total of $53.5 billion to their shareholders in the last two financial years.
To put that into perspective, the UN estimates that it needs $51.5 billion to provide life-saving support to 230 million people deemed most at risk worldwide.
What’s more, the corporations ‘earned’ these profits during a period of turmoil – a global pandemic, and a full-scale war in Ukraine – when global supply chains were disrupted and millions of people went hungry.
While readers in wealthier countries may have noticed higher prices for the weekly shop, the impact in developing countries has been devastating. Food prices rose by between 3% and 5% in the UK, Canada, and the US in the first few months of the pandemic – but by 47% in Venezuela.
The World Food Program estimates that the number of people facing acute food insecurity more than doubled from 135 million people before the pandemic to 345 million. Countries in the Horn of Africa as well as Afghanistan and Yemen have been particularly badly hit.
So how were 20 companies able to get their hands on this amount of money amid two major crises?
By literally owning the market. The new report from Greenpeace International shows how this small group of companies are able to wield wildly disproportionate control, not only over the supply chains for food itself, but over information about those supplies.
When supply chains were disrupted and food prices rose, the profits rolled in. Cash dividends and shareholder buyback programs allowed them to transfer an astronomical amount of money to their shareholders, while further amplifying their power over the sector’s industry and governments.
It's an outrage. 😡
But only to us. NOT to the capitalists. To them, this is business as usual, and a cause for celebration. 💵
A dystopian #VideoGame centred around the theme of end-stage #capitalism. Of course conservatives go against the authors, saying they're "attacking capitalism".
The author's response:
"It's like saying my grandma has a terminal disease – it doesn't mean I hate my grandma. It just happens to be the end stage of capitalism, it's an ill creature at the moment. Does it make me a lefty to point that out? Is a doctor trying to heal somebody 'woke' now?"
@simon_brooke the thing is, what Marx did predict was #capitalism being constantly caught in a crisis ridden circuit where the magnitude of value expands through the production of relative surplus value over absolute surplus value, because the latter is limited by the number of hours workers can work in a day, necessitating that production be oriented towards the former, which requires the investment in productivity-enhancing capital, which is necessarily at various points outstrips the productivity of living labor itself. So for Marx, capitalism is riddled by an imbalance between "variable capital" ie living labour, which is the source of value, and the need to produce fixed capital, which necessitates layoffs in order to sustain productivity when the rate of profit falls. Relative surplus value becomes relative surplus populations, the unemployed reserve army of labor, which can be bargained down amidst mass unemployment to accept depleted wages.
Sounds to me that #Marx's actual analysis — which few people understand, because few really read #Capital full-and-through — was actually pretty spot on, and while not perfect, definitely speaks to our times.
We can either have a society that tolerates millionaires and billionaires polluting the planet and destroying the biosphere. Or we can have a planet with a healthy biosphere but with fewer millionaires and no billionaires at all.
This is from a recently published peer-reviewed scientific paper titled “Millionaire Spending Incompatible with 1.5 C Ambitions”...
Much evidence suggests that the wealthiest individuals contribute disproportionately to climate change. Here we study the implications of a continued growth in the number of millionaires for emissions, and its impact on the depletion of the remaining carbon budget to limit global warming to 1.5°C.
Our findings suggest that the share of millionaires in the world population will grow from 0.7% today to 3.3% in 2050, and cause accumulated emissions equivalent to 72% of the remaining carbon budget. This significantly reduces the chance of stabilizing climate change at 1.5°C.
The concentration of wealth at the top means that a significant share of the remaining carbon budget to 1.5°C is depleted by a very small share of humanity. This comparably small group is also likely to invest its wealth in ways that further increase emissions.
Continued growth in emissions at the top makes a low-carbon transition less likely, as the acceleration of energy consumption by the wealthiest is likely beyond the system's capacity to decarbonize. To this end, we question whether policy designs such as progressive taxes targeting the high emitters will be sufficient.
Like I said, we can have one thing or the other — but not both.
I posted a version of the toot below late last year, shortly after I started on Mastodon. At the time I had maybe a couple of hundred followers. Now that I have more than that, I’d like people to see this who haven’t seen it before…
＄ ＄ ＄ ＄ ＄ ＄ ＄ ＄ ＄ ＄
It can be difficult to understand just how un-equal our modern human society really is.
We often talk about the 1% versus the 99%, but that’s not even close to an accurate ratio for the true scale of inequality — because the “haves” in our society (our owners, our rulers) do not possess a mere one hundred times more power and wealth than the rest of us. The disparity is FAR greater than that.
> See the video below for a good explanation of this.
Through consolidation and monopolies and lobbying and bribery and corruption, within the past four decades the wealthy and powerful have achieved complete dominance over us and over the world we live in. It’s not an exaggeration to say they own and control virtually EVERYTHING.
They own the corporations. They own the resources. They own the governments. They own the major media. They own (most of) the Internet.
And what are they doing with all that wealth and power? Simple. They’re grabbing more. And more and more and more. They will never have enough.
In the meantime, while they continue hoarding, our owners are also working to convince you and me that everything is okay, that the status quo is just fine, that there’s nothing to worry about. They want to keep the stores open, the factories running, the airlines flying, and the cruise ships sailing.
The longer our rulers can keep assuring everyone that Business As Usual is the way to go, the more money they will make. And they believe (though it's likely a delusion) that with enough money and enough power, they and their descendants will be able to survive and even thrive in the 3°C to 5°C world of the future.
I’m not sure at this point if anything can be done about all this. It may be too late. But I hope I’m wrong.
Question posed to Lockheed Martin's Board of Directors: Do you care about global heating and climate breakdown?
Their emphatic answer: Not just no, but HELL NO!
Lockheed Martin’s cash cow, the F-35 fighter jet, costs the US taxpayer $1.7 trillion. The F-35 uses a significant amount of fuel — about 2.37 gallons of fuel for every mile, and around 1,340 gallons per hour. One F-35 tank of fuel produces the equivalent of twenty-eight metric tons of carbon dioxide. These emissions heavily pollute air and water sources in locations in the United States and abroad.
Pollution? Screw that. Climate chaos? Ask somebody who cares.
People keep going, “How is #Mastodon hostile to Black people??!!??” in utter confusion and bewilderment, and meanwhile, I just saw someone, in all smug sincerity, insist to a Black woman that “capitalism” was a slur just like the n-word. Y’all.
A lot of people don't know the difference between capitalism and ... having markets and shopping and little coops and companies in non-super-essential economic sectors that operate independently.
Markets existed before capitalism and will exist after.
I really think you'll be interested in this informative thread on how we got here (the imposition of markets and the demolition of society). Spoiler alert, it didn't just happen randomly:
@TruthSandwich@floatybirb@futurebird 🥥 Other parts of the economy that I would argue are poorly suited for #Capitalism (beyond prisons and law enforcement): Health and medical care, education, roads, railroads, utilities, the judicial system, the legislature and law-making, disaster relief, insurance, food safety, fire fighting, the internets, news coverage and social media.
How do you suppose the #SupremelyCorruptedCourt got that way? 🥥
There's nothing more obviously profiteering to me than #Casinos, #SportsBetting, and #Ads for sports betting at casinos.
Come #Gamble ie algorithmically lose to the house for entertainment! We'll make millions and you'll get to dream of being rich. At least paying for a movie or a book about someone becoming super rich would provide more world building, if not delusions, as to a reality where you are one of the forever elusive "wealthy enough".
The future is a casino planet where most people do not own anything, they spend their life selling their time and attention for access to the things they need to live packaged as cheap entertainment.
It is a curse that robber barons steal our time and attention and literally our lives from us. We are a populace crippled by #capitalism of its potential.
"It’s increasingly looking like this may be one of the most hilariously inappropriate applications of AI that we’ve seen yet." I am riveted by the extensive documentation of how ChatGPT-powered Bing is now completely unhinged. @simon has chronicled it beautifully here: https://simonwillison.net/2023/Feb/15/bing/
...This said, I might also as well say that I see little chance for this happening, the globe being ruled by #oligarchs following the principal of #plutocracy and #capitalism (no, I am not a #Marxist;)) and #autocrats
Even a non-#superintelligence with access to the sensors of the #IoT will easily be aware of any threat to its existence and will find ways to circumvent the #LawsOfRobotics.