i learned that chemists have developed two plant-based plastic alternatives to the current fossil fuel made plastics. Using chemical recycling instead of mechanical recycling, 96% of the initial material can be recovered (x)
Last month, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) approved a measure that could prohibit President Biden, a devout Catholic, from receiving communion. Conservative bishops do not wish Biden to receive communion because of his support for abortion rights.
Monsignor Jeffrey Burrill, general secretary of the USCCB, was a strong supporter of the measure, but he has resigned due to allegations of “serial sexual misconduct,” as reported in The PIllar, a Catholic publication. Burrill was allegedly using Grindr for sex hookups, which goes against Catholic priests’ vow of celibacy. …
Game giant Activision Blizzard is being sued by the state of California, whose lawsuit details a horrifying environment characterized by the constant harassment of women, rape jokes, threats, retaliation, racism and blatant discrimination. At one point Activision Blizzard is described as a “frat house”, but that doesn’t begin to capture the scale and gravity of the allegations. Women punished for becoming pregnant. Women kicked out of lactation rooms. Women punished for leaving the office. African American women denied full employment and subjected to unique requirements. A woman committed suicide on a business trip with a male colleague who brought along lube and butt plugs.
In the office, women are subjected to “cube crawls” in which male employees drink copious [amounts] of alcohol as they “crawl” their way through various cubicles in the office and often engage in inappropriate behavior toward female employees. Male employees proudly come into work hungover, play video games for long periods of time during work while delegating their responsibilities to female employees, engage in banter about their sexual encounters, talk openly about female bodies and joke about rape.
Female employees are subjected to constant sexual harassment, including having to continually fend off unwanted sexual comments and advances by their male co-workers and supervisors and being groped at the “cube crawls” and other company events. High-ranking executives and creators engaged in blatant sexual harassment without repercussions.
In a particularly tragic example, a female employee committed suicide during a business trip with a male supervisor who had brought butt plugs and lubricant with him on the trip.
Activision Blizzard’s never done much to hide its reactionary corporate culture. Just months ago it made clear that improving its hiring diversity was “unworkable”. Its response to this lawsuit is libertarian dogma about “irresponsible behavior from unaccountable State bureaucrats that are driving many of the State’s best businesses out of California.”
They say you can only fix a problem from the inside out. But this is a problem to be fixed from the outside in.
Russell Holly, managing editor for commerce at CNET, was so excited about scoring an advance screening to the Denis Villeneuve’s movie adaptation of Frank Herbert’s Dune that he went on Facebook and posted a clip from David Lynch’s 1984 version, that has the crazy knife fight between Sting and Kyle MacLachlan. So Holly’s colleague, Jason Perlow (another Dune fan) commented on Holly’s post by quoting Sting’s classic line “I -WILL- kill you.“
"I even put it in quotes so that there was no question I was quoting the film,” wrote Perlow in his essay. Here’s what happened next:
I thought nothing of it. I went about the rest of my evening. About an hour later, I was notified by Facebook that I was suspended for three days due to violating Community Standards.
I was shocked. Suspended for quoting a film? Without even using any obscenities? This seems… extreme.
Obviously, I had no intention of killing Russell Holly, envious as I was that he got to see this film months before anyone else. I am also not in the practice of murdering my editorial colleagues with poisoned daggers, as anyone at ZDNet will tell you.
This miffed Perlow, especially since Facebook seems to be reluctant to do much about covidiots and antivaxxers, who lies really can lead to death. In face says Perlow, Facebook actively promotes Covid and vaccine misinformation:
Quoting movies doesn’t hurt or result in the death of anyone. But do you know what does? Spreading misinformation about vaccines and COVID-19. That absolutely will kill people.
On July 20, the internet news watchdog NewsGuard presented a report to the World Health Organization. The report’s conclusion: Not only has Facebook failed to be proactive in the removal of misinformation about vaccines and COVID-19, but the social platform is actively enabling and accelerating its spread.
How Facebook recommends vaccine and COVID-19 misinformation to its usersNewsGuard
How so? Many high-volume and extremely popular Pages on Facebook representing “Red” classified news websites (failing to meet NewsGuard basic standards of credibility and transparency) are spreading false information and are outright medically and scientifically inaccurate about COVID-19, vaccines, masks, 5G, and other health-related topics.
Many of these pages have tens of thousands of followers. When these pages are “liked” by Facebook users, other Pages that publish misinformation about these topics are recommended by Facebook’s algorithm, sending users down a never-ending rabbit hole of meme-fueled hoaxes and conspiracies.
The more you click, the more Facebook recommends similar pages.
It’s understandable why Facebook would want to take down a message saying “I will kill you.” One day it will probably have an algorithm that can distinguish between movie quotes used as a fake death threat and an actual death threat, but for now it is choosing to play it safe. And I can see why Facebook wouldn’t do much to stop antivaxxers, because Facebook’s audience is increasingly made up of people who like misinformation like this. In other words, nothing to see here folks. Move along.
It sounds more like the beginning of an apocryphal prophecy, but it appears humanity has discovered a way to extract lithium from below California’s thickening pool of toxicity, the Salton Sea, in a manner that will leave things ‘cleaner’ than when the extraction began.
The Salton Sea is a once dry ancient lake bed accidentally flooded in more recent times by early mistakes and wasteful farming practices. Filled with run-off chemical fertilizers, radioactive waste, and general trash. Briefly used as a resort, now the Sea seems to mostly be a source of toxic dust that blows into nearby communities — and a place to live off the grid.
GM just announced that it became the first investor in a project run by Controlled Thermal Resources. CTR will pump hot, salty water from deep below the Salton Sea and extract the lithium from it, along with clean thermo energy at the same time. Cleaner water goes back into the Salton Sea and the ground beneath it. It’s a win-win. You might even add another win in there when you consider the California Energy Commission’s estimate that the Salton Sea area could produce 600,000 tons of lithium per year, which is amazing since the entire world’s industry produced a mere 85,000 tons of lithium in all of 2019.
“CTR’s lithium resource at the Salton Sea in California is one of the largest known lithium brine resources in North America,” CTR said in a release. “The integration of direct lithium extraction with renewable geothermal energy offers the highest sustainability credentials available today. CTR’s closed-loop, direct lithium extraction process utilizes renewable power and steam—significantly reducing the time to produce battery-grade lithium products and eliminating the need for overseas processing. CTR’s operations will have a minimal physical footprint and a near-zero carbon footprint. The brine, after lithium extraction, is returned to the geothermal reservoir deep within the earth.”
A source of plentiful and ‘clean’ lithium would be excellent, but the history of the Salton Sea suggests we’ll get some new surprises. Perhaps a gateway to Lemuria.
The 14-year-old blogging platform is starting to add the ability for writers to put their posts behind a paywall. The feature, called Post Plus, lets creators offer a $3.99, $5.99, or $9.99 per month subscription, which will give readers access to any posts they decide to designate as for subscribers only. For now, the feature is available in a “limited beta” for select creators only. … A wide launch of the feature is planned for this fall, a Tumblr spokesperson tells The Verge. Tumblr will take a 5 percent fee from subscriptions, which is competitive compared to Substack’s 10 percent cut. If readers subscribe on iOS or Android, though, those platforms’ 30 percent app store fees will come out of what a creator gets to keep.
Tumblr’s lost much of its userbase since it was sold and sold and sold again—the price dropping from $1bn to a few million dollars along the way. And the only reactions I’ve seen to this are negative. People seem especially upset that the “creators” in the beta are now an elite class on the platform, with the usual corporate signifiers such as “verification”. A seeming misjudgment of Tumblr’s culture to say the least.
“A seeming misjudgment of Tumblr’s culture”? More like a serious misjudgment.
