Report claims super funds are lying to their members on climate risk – Michael West
More digging into the work of economists downplaying catastrophic climate change:
For several years, [Steve] Keen has been a vociferous critic of mainstream climate economics. He certainly pulled no punches with a 2020 paper, titled ‘The Appallingly Bad Neoclassical Economics of Climate Change’. He describes this strand of climate economics as “easily the worst work I have read in half a century”. These economists “don’t deny that climate change is happening,” Keen told MWM, “but they effectively deny that it really matters.” One of Keen’s primary targets is William Nordhaus, who won the 2018 Nobel Prize in economics for his work on climate economics and has been a major influence in his discipline. Nordhaus has claimed that a 6-degree increase in global temperature would cause global gross domestic product to fall by less than 10 per cent. Figures like this stand in stark contrast to the view of most climate scientists, who warn of massive, catastrophic risks from anything over 2°C. The economists “are doing impeccable econometrics on stupid f..king numbers that they’ve made up that bear no relation whatsoever to the catastrophe we’re approaching,” Keen told MWM via email.
(tags: economics steve-keen climate-change science william-nordhaus)
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Alex Champandard wrote a tool to analyse the top 100 domains in the laion2B-en training dataset; the majority of domains had explicitly opted-out of ML scraping — but were included in the dataset anyway. (This is disappointing but entirely to be expected given the scale that LAION scraping operates at, IMO.) “Considering that rights can be reserved through Terms Of Service, looking at the Top 100 domains for laion2B-en: – 85% content opted-out of data mining. – 7% content requires non-commercial use. – 8% left are hesitant or confused.”
(tags: scraping machine-learning training laion ai ml opt-out permission)
AWS JSON 1.0 protocol – Smithy 2.0
Looks like AWS are switching to a new wire protocol: “AWS JSON protocol is more efficient at serialization and deserialization of requests and responses when compared to AWS query protocol. Based on AWS performance tests for a 5 KB message payload, JSON protocol for Amazon SQS reduces end-to-end message processing latency by up to 23%, and reduces application client side CPU and memory usage.”