Tootfinder

When it comes to international conflict, Donald Trump learns everything the hard way.
On issue after issue
—North Korea, Venezuela, Ukraine, Gaza, and more
—Trump begins by bucking conventional wisdom and insisting that a bold new approach will yield breakthroughs.
Implied, and often said outright, is that past officials who worked on the matter were feeble, inept, and craven.
Trump insists that his determination and powers of persuasion will force seismic change—…

Ahead of His U.N. Speech, Remember That Trump Is Learning Geopolitics in Real Time
A guide to pushing the U.S. president more quickly up his learning curve.

#3goodthings
1. Having a lovely caring family who came together yesterday to give my uncle an incredibly fond farewell 😔
2. Having an amazing husband in @… who always does whatever's needed no matter what the cost to himself ♥️
3. Bloody…

So in another dream I just woke up from, I was talking to someone about "the idea problem" (that it's becoming harder to monitize ideas, from a vox article written by an AI cooked reporter).
https://www.iheart.com/podcast/105-it-could-happen-here-30717896/episode/executive-disorder-white-house-weekly-46-313675864/
Basically, I was arguing that the majority of inventions target men because patriarchy puts economic control in men's hands. As men have started to help more with childcare, there have been more inventions related to childcare. (I don't have any idea if this is true. Seems legit, but I'm just relating my dream. I think I was also oversimplifying a bit to "men" and "women" because of my audience, but anyway it was a dream.) There's actually more low-hanging fruit, I pointed out, related to making care work easier.
So I argued that the real problem was a failure to invest in research into solving that problem. Today there are all these boondoggles built around killing people. What if, instead of all this government research into killing people, we dumped a ton of money into making it easier to support a household? That would be great for the economy. (Being asleep, I seem to have forgotten that working people need money.)
In the blur of being just awake I started thinking about how you could kickstart the US economy by taking the money from the AI boondoggle and other autonomous murder bots and create something like a program to build robots for housekeepers. You'd still be funding tech with government money, so the same horrible people get paid, but you're now actually solving real problems. It wouldn't even matter if it was a boondoggle, honestly. Just dumping money into something other than murdering people is good enough.
I imagined first if there was a program to fund a robot housecleaner, like robot dog with AI some laundry pickup, that would be provided, free of charge, to help people with children. It would work the same as the military boondoggle where a private company makes the government buy a piece of hardware from them and then also pay them to service it for some number of years. But instead of that hardware sitting around waiting to kill someone, it would be getting brought to people's houses to help them.
Then I thought, hey, you could even boost the economy more if you just had government funding for doulas and housecleaners and paid them a living wage. Hey, you could really kickstart the economy by nationalizing healthcare and including doula support as part of all births. Oh, and you could also just include the optional household help for families with children until the kids turn 18.
None of this is perfect (I don't actually think most of this is possible from any state), but the point is that it's actually wildly easy to figure out all kinds of ways to invest in the economy and monitize ideas as long as you aren't entirely focused on the same old "make money from spying on people and killing them." Funny that. Like they said in the podcast, maybe "finding ideas" isn't the problem.
Hope you enjoyed the weird semi-awake brain dump/rant.

from Reece Martin Transit
The Transit "Experts" That Derail Transit.
My Grand Theory of North America's Transit Expansion Failures.
"saying that if Montreal was building major transit again in the 21st century it wouldn’t build a metro, because no city would is laughable, or painful, depending on ones state of mind when you read that."

The Transit "Experts" That Derail Transit.
My Grand Theory of North America's Transit Expansion Failures.

Fuc*ing lawnmower timing belt shredded itself again, mere minutes after fitting the replacement, suggesting buggered pulleys or similar 🤬 All this on what I hoped would be the last grass-cut of the year, long delayed as a result of all the damn rain.
Considering one of:
* sheep
* a robot mower with a direct motor-to-blade design
* paving the entire bloody garden

So I grew up next to #Chernobyl and this is, well, TERRIFYING.
A story for y’all: I’m from a city called Zhytomyr, 2 hours west of Kyiv in the North of #Ukraine. We were downwind of the Chernobyl #nuclear power plant when the 1986 disaster happened.
I wasn’t born for another 12 years, but my childhood was filled with stories and the aftermath of it all. Things like:
- My grandmother worked as a head doctor in a hospital and rehabilitation facility exclusively for children of Chernobyl victims to treat the extremely high prevalence of Tuberculosis and other severe health complications. (To specify: these were SECOND GENERATION of exposure).
- A lot of the kids in that facility were orphans, because their parents died young from health problems.
- My uncle’s wife was born in Pripyat. She was 1 year old when the disaster happened. Her parents were told to evacuate while given no information about what happened. They had to pack up their things and rush out to an unfamiliar city with their baby, never to see the rest of their belongings, apartment, or hometown again.
- When I was a kid, it became so common to see weirdly mutated animals and insects that even 2-3 year olds would make jokes about “Chernobyl mosquitos” and I wouldn’t even flinch seeing occasional giant bugs, dark frogs, weird-looking dogs.
- We’d frequently hear of nearby farms having issues with their animals being born too mutated to survive or random outbreaks from contaminated water / food. Crops would randomly fail. People would get poisoned on a regular basis. This all got less common as I grew up.
- My mother still remembers being a little girl, 10 years old, and looking outside from their balcony at the clouds blowing over from Chernobyl that day. People were told to not go outside and to shut all the windows, but not given an explanation as to why. My mother swears that the rain looked different. They weren’t able to go and buy more food for the kitchen for multiple days.
Anyway - nuclear safety isn’t a joke. I don’t understand how this level of carelessness can happen after Chernobyl and Fukushima.

https://www.404media.co/power-companies-are-using-ai-to-build-nuclear-power-plants/

Guten Morgen,
ein wenig fußladiert von knapp 1100 Meter Auf- und Abstieg, aber happy über das wunderschöne Herbstwetter gestern im Allgäu.
Schönen Sonntag :coffeepot: 🙂
#silentsunday

Sources: DeepSeek is developing its new AI model using several thousand Nvidia Blackwell chips, which were smuggled into China via third-party countries (The Information)
https://www.theinformation.com/articles/deepseek-using-banned-nvidia-chi…

DeepSeek is Using Banned Nvidia Chips in Race to Build Next Model
DeepSeek, the Chinese AI startup, has been developing its next major model using several thousand Nvidia’s state-of-the-art Blackwell chips which the U.S. has forbidden from being exported to China, according to six people with knowledge of the matter. The chips DeepSeek is using were smuggled ...

“How did it feel for the man who built a home, only to watch it turn to the rubble? How does a farmer stand before the land he tended year after year, now lying barren—no scent of soil, no whisper of harvest? How does a father tell his son the school he loved is gone, that the garden where he played is now only a rumor in the rubble? How does a mother walk through the ghost of a playground, finding a small shoe, a torn notebook, a toy she once mended? How do neighbors look at one another, wo…

Help Sehwel family with their medical treatment
I'm Joe in the UK, I've been in touch with Aseel from the Sehwel family for over a year now and have been following their difficult struggle to afford medication, shelter and food in Gaza. I'm creating this Chuffed campaign for the family to help afford these things and hopefully help them get out of Gaza when the opportunity arises. Here's Aseel's writing:

Behold, the 1200 meter tall "Labyrinth" ice wall/fall at Morteratsch, Bernina group, Engadin. September 2024.
(A special place if you ever wanted/needed to feel real small, surrounded by majestic fourthousanders...)
#MountainMonday #MonocrhomeMonday