"Applying a conservative estimate of four indirect deaths per one direct death to the 37 396 deaths reported, it is not implausible to estimate that up to 186 000 or even more deaths could be attributable to the current conflict in Gaza. Using the 2022 Gaza Strip population estimate of 2 375 259, this would translate to 7·9% of the total population in the Gaza Strip."

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(24)01169-3/fulltext

I genuinely have no words for the evil of Israel, the US and its allies. I would even write something about it, but it's completely useless. I hope there's a hell for every single person who approved, promoted, defended this, from the people in the IDF, to every single liberal voter who spends their days defending genocide.

RPTU University of Kaiserslautern-Landau has shown for the first time, in a joint study with BOKU University, that permaculture brings about a significant improvement in biodiversity, soil quality and carbon storage.

Permaculture uses natural cycles and ecosystems as blueprint. Food is produced in an agricultural ecosystem that is as self-regulating, natural and diverse as possible. For example, livestock farming is integrated into the cultivation of crops or the diversity of beneficial organisms is promoted in order to avoid the use of mineral fertilizers or pesticides.

https://phys.org/news/2024-07-permaculture-sustainable-alternative-conventional-agriculture.html

The world we live in today is not just the one created by the likes of Tiberius of Rome, or even Emperor Wu of Han. Until surprisingly recent times, spaces of human freedom existed across large parts of our planet. Millions lived in them. We don’t know their names, as they didn’t carve them in stone, but we know that many lived lives in which one could hope to do more than just scratch out an existence, or rehearse someone else’s script of ‘the origin of the state’ – in which one could move away, disobey, experiment with other notions of how to live, even create new forms of social reality.

Sometimes, the unfree did this too, against much harder odds. How many, back then, preferred imperial control to non-imperial freedoms? How many were given a choice? How much choice do we have now? It seems nobody really knows the answers to these questions, at least not yet. In future, it will take more than zombie statistics to stop us from asking them. There are forgotten histories buried in the ground, of human politics and values. The soil mantle of Earth, including the very soil itself, turns out to be not just our species’ life support system, but also a forensic archive, containing precious evidence to challenge timeworn narratives about the origins of inequality, private property, patriarchy, warfare, urban life and the state – narratives born directly from the experience of empire, written by the ‘winners’ of a future that may yet make losers of us all.

https://aeon.co/essays/an-archeological-revolution-transforms-our-image-of-human-freedoms

Israel IDF Hannibal Directive

IDF Ordered Hannibal Directive on October 7 to Prevent Hamas Taking Soldiers Captive
'There was crazy hysteria, and decisions started being made without verified information': Documents and testimonies obtained by Haaretz reveal the Hannibal operational order, which directs the use of force to prevent soldiers being taken into captivity, was employed at three army facilities infiltrated by Hamas, potentially endangering civilians as well

https://archive.ph/WuAgT

Green Corridors - Medellín, Colombia

The $16.3 million initiative led to the creation of 30 Green Corridors along the city’s roads and waterways, improving or producing more than 70 hectares of green space, which includes 20 kilometers of shaded routes with cycle lanes and pedestrian paths.

These plant and tree-filled spaces — which connect all sorts of green areas such as the curb strips, squares, parks, vertical gardens, sidewalks, and even some of the seven hills that surround the city — produce fresh, cooling air in the face of urban heat. The corridors are also designed to mimic a natural forest with levels of low, medium and high plants, including native and tropical plants, bamboo grasses and palm trees.

Heat-trapping infrastructure like metro stations and bridges has also been greened as part of the project and government buildings have been adorned with green roofs and vertical gardens to beat the heat. The first of those was installed at Medellín’s City Hall, where nearly 100,000 plants and 12 species span the 1,810 square meter surface.

The 72 species of plants and trees selected provide food for wildlife, help biodiversity to spread and fight air pollution. A study, for example, identified Mangifera indica as the best among six plant species found in Medellín at absorbing PM2.5 pollution — particulate matter that can cause asthma, bronchitis and heart disease — and surviving in polluted areas due to its “biochemical and biological mechanisms.”

The groundwork is carried out by 150 citizen-gardeners like Pineda, who come from disadvantaged and minority backgrounds, with the support of 15 specialized forest engineers. Pineda is now the leader of a team of seven other gardeners who attend to corridors all across the city, shifting depending on the current priorities.

The project’s wider impacts are like a breath of fresh air. Medellín’s temperatures fell by 2°C in the first three years of the program, and officials expect a further decrease of 4 to 5C over the next few decades, even taking into account climate change. In turn, City Hall says this will minimize the need for energy-intensive air conditioning.

A separate study estimated that in just one of Medellín’s corridors, the new vegetation growth would absorb 160,787 kg of CO2 per year and that over the next century 2,308,505 kg of CO2 will be taken up – roughly the equivalent of taking 500 cars off the road.

In addition, the project has had a significant impact on air pollution. Between 2016 and 2019, the level of PM2.5 fell significantly, and in turn the city’s morbidity rate from acute respiratory infections decreased from 159.8 to 95.3 per 1,000 people.

There’s also been a 34.6 percent rise in cycling in the city, likely due to the new bike paths built for the project, and biodiversity studies show that wildlife is coming back — one sample of five Green Corridors identified 30 different species of butterfly.

https://reasonstobecheerful.world/green-corridors-medellin-colombia-urban-heat/

England's privatised water system

Lindt, Mondelēz, and Nestlé together raked in nearly $4 billion in profits from chocolate sales in 2023. Hershey’s confectionary profits totaled $2 billion last year.

The four corporations paid out on average 97 percent of their total net profits to shareholders in 2023.

The collective fortunes of the Ferrero and Mars families, who own the two biggest private chocolate corporations, surged to $160.9 billion during the same period. This is more than the combined GDPs of Ghana and Ivory Coast, which supply most cocoa beans.

https://www.oxfam.org/en/press-releases/media-advisory-oxfam-and-cocoa-farmers-world-cocoa-conference-brussels

Hostages tortured to death. Parents executed in front of their children. Doctors beaten. Babies murdered. Sexual assault weaponised. No, not Hamas crimes. This is part of an ever-growing list of documented atrocities committed by Israel in the five months since 7 October – quite separate from the carpet bombing of 2.3 million Palestinians in Gaza and a famine induced by Israel’s obstruction of aid.

Accusations against Hamas are endlessly reheated to paint a picture of a supremely dangerous and bestial militant group, in turn rationalising the slaughter and starvation of Gaza’s population to “eradicate” it as a terrorist organisation. But equally barbarous atrocities committed by Israel – not in the heat of battle, but in cold blood – are treated as unfortunate, isolated incidents that cannot be connected, that paint no picture, that reveal nothing of import about the military that carried them out.

Israel's torture of doctors, its sexual assaults of Palestinian women, it's leaving premature babies to die after its forces stormed a hospital. Where is the outrage? This is part of a pattern of behaviour by the western media that leads to only one possible deduction: Israel’s five-month-long attack on Gaza is not being reported. Rather, it is being selectively narrated

https://www.middleeasteye.net/opinion/war-gaza-israel-torture-executions-babies-die-sexual-abuse-crimes

"A week and a half ago, Goldman Sachs put out a 31-page-report (titled "Gen AI: Too Much Spend, Too Little Benefit?”) that includes some of the most damning literature on generative AI I've ever seen. And yes, that sound you hear is the slow deflation of the bubble I've been warning you about since March.

The report covers AI's productivity benefits (which Goldman remarks are likely limited), AI's returns (which are likely to be significantly more limited than anticipated), and AI's power demands (which are likely so significant that utility companies will have to spend nearly 40% more in the next three years to keep up with the demand from hyperscalers like Google and Microsoft)."

"The report includes an interview with economist Daron Acemoglu of MIT (page 4), an Institute Professor who published a paper back in May called "The Simple Macroeconomics of AI" that argued that "the upside to US productivity and, consequently, GDP growth from generative AI will likely prove much more limited than many forecasters expect.""

"The training data crisis is one that doesn’t get enough attention, but it’s sufficiently dire that it has the potential to halt (or dramatically slow) any AI development in the near future. As one paper, published in the journal Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, found, in order to achieve a linear improvement in model performance, you need an exponentially large amount of data.

Or, put another way, each additional step becomes increasingly (and exponentially) more expensive to take. This infers a steep financial cost — not merely in just obtaining the data, but also the compute required to process it — with Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei saying that the AI models currently in development will cost as much as $1bn to train, and within three years we may see models that cost as much as “ten or a hundred billion” dollars, or roughly three times the GDP of Estonia"

"One particular myth Covello dispels is comparing generative AI "to the early days of the internet," noting that "even in its infancy, the internet was a low-cost technology solution that enabled e-commerce to replace costly incumbent solutions," and that "AI technology is exceptionally expensive, and to justify those costs, the technology must be able to solve complex problems, which it isn't designed to do.""

"In essence, on top of generative AI not having any killer apps, not meaningfully increasing productivity or GDP, not generating any revenue, not creating new jobs or massively changing existing industries, it also requires America to totally rebuild its power grid, which Janous regrettably adds the US has kind of forgotten how to do."

"The remaining defense is also one of the most annoying — that OpenAI has something we don't know about. A big, sexy, secret technology that will eternally break the bones of every hater.

Yet, I have a counterpoint: no it doesn't.

Seriously, Mira Murati, CTO of OpenAI, said a few weeks ago that the models it has in its labs are not much more advanced than those that are publicly-available."

https://www.wheresyoured.at/pop-culture/

The analysis, published Friday, is called “Consent in Crisis: The Rapid Decline of the AI Data Commons,” and has found that, in the last year, “there has been a rapid crescendo of data restrictions from web sources” restricting web scraper bots (sometimes called “user agents”) from training on their websites.

Specifically, about 5 percent of the 14,000 websites analyzed had modified their robots.txt file to block AI scrapers. That may not seem like a lot, but 28 percent of the “most actively maintained, critical sources,” meaning websites that are regularly updated and are not dormant, have restricted AI scraping in the last year. An analysis of these sites’ terms of service found that, in addition to robots.txt restrictions, many sites also have added AI scraping restrictions to their terms of service documents in the last year.

This change has happened almost entirely within the last year, the researchers found. In mid 2023, about 1 percent of websites in the researchers’ sample had fully restricted AI scraping. Now, they estimate about 5-7 percent do, and say that the number only captures “full restricted” domains meaning their robots.txt file does not allow for any AI scraping.

The study, led by Shayne Longpre of MIT and done in conjunction with a few dozen researchers at the Data Provenance Initiative, called this change an “emerging crisis” not just for commercial AI companies like OpenAI and Perplexity, but for researchers hoping to train AI for academic purposes. The New York Times said this shows that the data used to train AI is “disappearing fast.”

https://www.404media.co/the-backlash-against-ai-scraping-is-real-and-measurable/