Oligarchigal Overdrive.

DogeDiving
InTheShallowEndOfTheSelfDealingPoolVille


By now you may have heard that his most highly excellent and most exquisitely exalted US'ian government-contractor-in-chief, Mr. Elon Musk, has gone to rhetorical war against the looniest of the MAGA goonery that is calling for the mass deportation of skilled immigrants who came to the country on H-1B visas.

Ostensibly, according to Mr. Musk at least, these workers are vital to the interests of the American tech industry because:

...“The number of people who are super talented engineers AND super motivated in the USA is far too low,” Musk wrote on X on Christmas. “If you want your TEAM to win the championship, you need to recruit top talent wherever they may be.”...

But is that the real reason why companies like, say, Tesla hire huge numbers of workers through the H-1B program?

Perhaps not, as noted in an NY Times OpEd piece today by Farah Stockman:

...Most H-1B visa holders are lower-paid labor, not top talent. In May, Musk laid off more than 14,000 Tesla workers, including many H-1B visa holders. Reddit threads filled with laments by workers who had moved to the United States from India only to be let go with no warning. They were desperate to remain in the country, but because H-1B visas are owned by the employer, they had few options for doing so...

Imagine that!


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It's The Grid Storage, Stupid.

BridgeFddlin'

WhileRomeBurnsVille

'It's the economy, stupid.'

If you are old enough, you likely remember the one liner, above, that is supposed to have, especially according to the flack who coined it, James Carville, contributed to the election of the oldest living US'ian president, William Jefferson Clinton in 1992.

But never mind the bollocks, or a guy named Ross Perot, because I figure the time has come to re-work that one liner into the snowclone that is the header sitting at the top of this post because, according to those commie-pinko, tree-hugging Economist:

Energy storage for the electrical grid is about to hit the big time. By the reckoning of the International Energy Agency (IEA), a forecaster, grid-scale storage is now the fastest-growing of all the energy technologies. In 2025, some 80 gigawatts of new grid-scale energy storage will be added globally, an eight-fold increase from 2021...

{snip}

...The IEA predicts that in 2025 the combination of solar-photovoltaic generation and battery storage will be cheaper than the cost of coal-fired power in China, and new gas-fired plants in America...

And likely cheaper, too, than any of these other 'bridge' fuels we here in CanuckistanMikitaVille are constantly being told, by those who will profit most, must be extracted, shipped, exploited and burned as fast as possible before the large scale transition to renewable energy can be made economically not stupid.

OK?


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What Fresh Hell Is This?

Enshittification
OverdriveVille


Happy New Year.

Which means that it is now the year that the worsening of all things online will continue at warped speed:

Meta is betting that characters generated by artificial intelligence will fill its social media platforms in the next few years as it looks to the fast-developing technology to drive engagement with its 3bn users.

“We expect these AIs to actually, over time, exist on our platforms, kind of in the same way that accounts do,” said Connor Hayes, vice-president of product for generative AI at Meta. 

“They’ll have bios and profile pictures and be able to generate and share content powered by AI on the platform . . . that’s where we see all of this going,” he added.

Hayes said a “priority” for Meta over the next two years was to make its apps “more entertaining and engaging”, which included considering how to make the interaction with AI more social...

Now.

I know that Norm Farrell, NVG, DS, and Dr. Beer 'N Hockey are on the level because I've actually met them, in person, in real life.

And I think I met GarFish in a past life.

And I've known Danneau, and Graham, and eaf, and EE, and TB, and Scotty on Denman, and Lew E, and Chuckstraight, and JP, and Keith, and Grant G, and just about all the rest of you who have been stopping by here occasionally since the days when AI grifterians like Sam Altman were still in short pants and/or were about to quit Stanford. Thus, I'm pretty sure you all are real as well.

But what do we do when a new commenter shows up now? 

Do we have them to send us imprints of their retinas and, maybe, cheek swabs just to be sure they're something more than neural-networked gobs of goo in the machine?


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Image at the top of the post?...Header originator Dorothy Parker working her typewriter far from the madding Algonquin Roundtable crowd at her farmhouse in Bucks County PA...The guy sitting by the window is not Paul Newman. Instead, it's her then husband Alan Campbell... The photo was taken in 1937, the year the two of them worked with collaborator Robert Carson to write the screenplay to 'A Star Is Born'.

Subheader?...This!...Courtesy the brilliant Cory Doctorow.


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