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Today's Document

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@jon-9000
Just drank a hot cup of Hava 🍵
What is hava
Hava niceday
it doesn't matter whether a writer uses an LLM or any other assistive technology. in the end, they're the ones who choose whether to a publish the final piece. as such, they're responsible for its contents. if the quotes end being fake, the arguments bad or bigoted, or the data hasn't been fact checked etc, that's on the author. how it was written doesn't matter when judging the author on the final product that they chose to put out
people can lie, misremember or find fake quotes, be bigoted, and be sloppy with data when writing without assistive technology. using speculation about the involvement of AI in the writing process to cast someone as morally bad isn't conducive to any constructive discussion of the words they chose to publish, it only serves as a way to get people to shun them as a Bad Person for reasons irrelevant what they actually chose to publish
#i mean sure#but#llms not only lie they destroy the planet and the water cycle#so yes it is on the author of the piece BUT it is more evil to use the lying liar that lies machine
no offense but 1) why do you reblog this post if you're going to completely disagree with the crux of the argument in the tags? 2) the ecological impact is absurdly exaggerated exceptionalism
when ozymandias king of kings tells u to look upon his works and despair but, boundless and bare, the lone and level sands stretch far away
the maya have the right idea but usamerican Posters get their priorities from vibes and petit bourgeoisie entitlement
Henrik Uldalen aka Henrik Aarrestad Uldalen (Norwegian-Korean, b. 1986, South Korea, raised Asker, Norway) - Veil, 2021, Paintings: Oil on Wood
ta da
on the alberta oil sands
If you want to understand the Alberta oil sands — and everyone should, at least a little, because they are among the strangest industrial artifacts in the Western hemisphere and the standard coverage of them is almost uniformly wrong — you have to start with the fact that what's in the ground is not oil. Oil, proper oil, the stuff Saudi Arabia and Texas and the North Sea have been pumping for a century and a quarter, comes out of the ground as a liquid. You drill a hole, pressure differentials do most of the work, and what comes up is roughly pourable. This is not what's in northeastern Alberta. What's in northeastern Alberta is bitumen, which is oil that has been sitting around for a hundred million years getting its light ends biodegraded out of it by bacteria, and what's left is a substance with the consistency, at room temperature, of cold molasses or peanut butter. You cannot pump it. You cannot drill it. If you cut a chunk of oil-sand out of the formation and put it on your desk it will sit there, looking like a dark sticky brick, being the least ambitious hydrocarbon in the history of hydrocarbons.
So the entire industry is, at a physical level, a workaround for the fact that the thing they're extracting is an embarrassment to the concept of petroleum.
There are two workarounds and they both cost a lot of energy. If the deposit is close to the surface — and only about a fifth of the reserves are — you can dig it. This means you strip off the boreal forest and the peat underneath it (the "overburden," in the terminology, which is one of those words like "collateral damage" or "surplus population" that you can tell was invented to not describe something) and you run the biggest trucks and shovels in the world, actually the biggest, 400-ton dump trucks that cost five million dollars each and tires that cost the price of a house, and you mine it like coal. The oil-sand goes into crushers and then into giant hot-water tumblers that separate the bitumen from the sand the way you'd separate wet paint from gravel, with a lot of help from caustic soda and even more help from steam. The water goes into tailings ponds, which are not ponds, they are lakes, they are visible from low earth orbit, and they are full of a mixture of fine clays and residual bitumen and a lot of other chemistry that is at best dubious and at worst a slow-motion environmental catastrophe nobody in Alberta can figure out how to clean up and which, by provincial law, the operators are supposed to eventually reclaim — a promise whose timeline keeps sliding to the right and whose financial reserves, if you actually cost them out, would bankrupt most of the companies that made them. That's the mining side.
The other eighty percent of the reserves are too deep to mine. For those you use SAGD, steam-assisted gravity drainage, which works like this: you drill two horizontal wells, one stacked a few meters above the other, you blast the upper one full of high-pressure steam until the bitumen down there gets hot enough to actually flow, and then you collect the flowable bitumen out of the lower well. You are, essentially, cooking the ground. To do this you need ungodly amounts of natural gas, because steam doesn't make itself, and the natural gas is piped in from elsewhere in the province, which is why the oil sands are sometimes described (accurately) as a process for converting natural gas, which is a reasonably clean fuel, into synthetic crude, which is not, at a thermodynamic efficiency that would make a nineteenth-century millwright wince.
The net energy math on this is — fine. It works. You put one unit of energy in, you get three or four out, that's the rough ratio, less than conventional oil's old ten-to-one but more than enough to make money at any oil price north of roughly fifty dollars a barrel, which the global oil price has been north of most of the time since about 2004. So it gets done. And once you've gotten the bitumen out of the ground — whether by digging or by cooking — you still can't ship it, because at pipeline temperature it's still too thick to flow, so you cut it with condensate (a light hydrocarbon imported specifically for this purpose, sometimes from the US Gulf, shipped north, used as a thinner) until it's a mix called dilbit, diluted bitumen, which is what actually goes down the pipe. About a third of every barrel of dilbit leaving Alberta is diluent. You are paying to ship the thinner.
This is, I want to stress, the normal operation of the industry. None of this is scandal. This is the regular Tuesday.
The scale of it is the part people don't absorb, because the numbers are all in units nobody has intuitions for. Canadian oil sands production is running around 3.5 million barrels a day as of 2025, which is more than every OPEC producer except Saudi Arabia and Iraq, which is almost half of all oil produced in Canada, which accounts for most of the difference between Canada being an oil-exporting country and Canada being a quiet resource backwater with a per-capita income that looks more like Ireland's. The industry is about thirty percent of Alberta's GDP. It is the entire reason Alberta's per-capita GDP is what it is. Until the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion came online in May 2024 — after twelve years of construction, at a cost of 34 billion Canadian dollars, after the federal government had to buy the project from Kinder Morgan because no private company could eat the political risk — basically all of it went to the United States, which meant Canadian producers had exactly one customer and priced accordingly, at whatever discount to WTI the American refiners felt like imposing. This was annoying to Canada in the way that having a single customer is always annoying to a supplier, and it's the thing the pipeline was supposed to fix, and fixing it is already looking like it wasn't as much of a fix as promised because production keeps growing faster than egress capacity can keep up.
Okay. That's the industrial situation. Here's the part that actually matters.
Fort McMurray is not a city in any sense that the word normally carries. It is a town of maybe 75,000 permanent residents, up near the 57th parallel, surrounded by boreal forest and muskeg, to which is attached — and the word "attached" is wrong, the word needs to be something more like "grafted" or "hosting" — a second population of roughly 35,000 workers who live in what are called camps. The camps are the actual operational engine of the industry. A camp is a cluster of prefab dormitory buildings attached to a cafeteria and a gym and maybe a movie room, plopped down in the bush near a mine or a SAGD plant, with capacity for anywhere from a few hundred to several thousand workers. Workers fly in from everywhere in Canada — Newfoundland, Cape Breton, New Brunswick, whatever backwater the post-industrial labor market has stranded them in — on two-week-on two-week-off rotations, work twelve-hour shifts, live in a room the size of a cell, and fly home to spend two weeks with their families before coming back. The term of art is "shadow population." The official census counts them separately.
And this arrangement is not incidental to how the industry works. It is the industry. You cannot run a facility the size of Syncrude's Mildred Lake mine with a labor force of people who live in the nearest city and commute to work. There is no nearest city. The nearest city is eight hundred kilometers away. You have to import the workforce, and because you have to import the workforce, you have to house them, and because you have to house them cheaply, you put them in camps, and because the camps are miserable, you pay the workers a lot of money, and because you pay the workers a lot of money, they put up with the camps, and the whole system is stable as long as the oil price is high enough to subsidize the discomfort premium. It is an entire industrial operation structured around the fact that nobody would voluntarily live where the bitumen is, and so the industry has to buy the labor's tolerance of not-living-there, over and over, shift after shift, for however many decades the deposit lasts.
Which brings me to Kate Beaton.
Beaton is from Mabou, Cape Breton, which is one of those Canadian places that the twentieth century was mostly unkind to. Cape Breton had coal, and Cape Breton had steel, and Cape Breton had fishing, and Cape Breton lost all three of these industries in the space of about forty years, and what it has now is diminished. The island's culture, which is Gaelic-inflected and absurdly musical and which has produced a shocking amount of art per capita, has as one of its load-bearing assumptions the idea that you will probably have to leave to make a living, and that this leaving will be sad but necessary, and that everyone you know will do it too, and that it's been going on since the Highland Clearances, and will go on after you. This is the Cape Breton structure of feeling. It predates the oil sands by about two hundred years. The oil sands are just the current destination.
So when Beaton graduated from Mount Allison in 2005 with an arts degree and a pile of student loans, she did what her cousins and the boys from her high school had already been doing for a decade, which was get on a plane to Alberta. She went to the camps. She worked tool cribs, she worked supply offices, she worked at Syncrude's Long Lake and at Shell's Albian Sands and at a couple of the smaller operators whose names I can't remember off the top of my head, and she kept a notebook, and eventually — many years later, after she'd become internet-famous for Hark! A Vagrant, which is a different story — she turned the notebook into a graphic memoir called Ducks, published in 2022 by Drawn & Quarterly, which won pretty much every prize available to graphic novels and landed on Obama's list that year, and which is, I think, the single best book anyone has written about what the oil sands actually are, which is a very specific kind of social machine.
The book is called Ducks because in 2008, while Beaton was there, 1,600 migratory ducks landed on a Syncrude tailings pond and died in it, which became briefly a global news story and got Syncrude fined three million dollars, which is roughly the kind of money Syncrude made every forty-five minutes that year. The ducks were the visible atrocity. The book is about the invisible one.
The invisible one is that the ratio of men to women in the camps was, depending on which camp and which shift, somewhere between 30-to-1 and 50-to-1. Beaton spent two years as one of the maybe two or three women at any given installation surrounded by several hundred men who were working twelve-hour shifts, living in single-occupancy dorms a hundred meters from hers, drinking heavily when off-shift because there was nothing else to do, doing cocaine at a rate that surprised even her, isolated from their wives and girlfriends and mothers and daughters, and — this is the part the book builds very patiently and very devastatingly — slowly losing the ability to behave like the people they used to be when they were still at home. The book is not a condemnation of the men. It is explicitly not that. The book's most painful move is that it keeps humanizing them, keeps showing how they're also trapped, also miserable, also being used up by the same machine, even as they do the things they do to her. Which, without getting into the specifics — read the book — include the full range of what several hundred isolated men will do to two women when the HR function is a phone number in Calgary that nobody is going to call.
And the thing Beaton sees, the thing she sets up with complete economy and then lets the rest of the book bear out, is that the machine is designed to produce exactly this. It's not a bug. The camp structure produces isolated men away from their social networks in exchange for money. Isolated men away from their social networks, given enough money and enough boredom, will do predictable things, and those predictable things are accepted by the operators as part of the cost of doing business, the way a mine accepts that a certain number of miners will get silicosis. It's a function of the design. Nobody up the chain at Suncor or Syncrude or Shell wants the women in the camps to be harassed. It's just that preventing the harassment would require reorganizing the entire labor-rotation structure of the industry, which would raise the cost per barrel, which would make the operation uncompetitive, and so the harassment is priced in as an externality. The women are told they have a bad attitude. The men are told to knock it off. The rotation continues. The oil flows.
What makes Ducks extraordinary, and what makes it a book about the oil sands rather than a book about harassment — though it is also that — is that Beaton also sees the men. She sees the welders from Cape Breton she grew up around, except here they're trapped in a way she recognizes because she's trapped in the same way, a way her dad would recognize from his own generation going to Boston or Toronto, a way her grandfather would recognize from the mines. The Maritime out-migration has been happening long enough that it has a folk repertoire, a whole tradition of songs about leaving, and the men in the camps are inside that tradition whether they know it or not. Some of them are actively dying inside it — there's a running count in the book, not emphasized, just there in the margin, of young men who die on the highway between Fort McMurray and Edmonton, or who kill themselves in their dorms, or who disappear. The mortality of the rotation is ambient. It's baked in. Nobody makes a particular fuss because making a particular fuss isn't what anyone there has the cultural equipment to do.
And the thing I keep coming back to, reading that book, is how precisely it maps onto earlier Canadian industrial extractions. Cape Breton exported its own men to its own mines in the 1890s and they died of black lung. Newfoundland exported its men to the Banks and they died drowning. The cod collapsed in 1992 and those men went to Fort Mac. There is a temporal rhyme here that Beaton doesn't belabor but that sits underneath the whole book: this is what Canadian industrial history is, a series of extractive operations that consume the bodies and social networks of men from places the previous extractive operation already hollowed out. The oil sands are just the current iteration. When the oil sands go — and they will go, either because the world stops buying the product or because the bitumen that's economically recoverable runs out or because a carbon regime finally prices the externalities — whatever comes next will be staffed by the grandsons of the men who died at Fort McKay, who were themselves the grandsons of the men who died at Glace Bay. Same as it ever was.
The industry knows all this, by the way. None of it is secret. The oil companies have sociologists on retainer. The turnover statistics are studied. The mental health crisis in the camps is a line item, it has a budget, there are contractors whose entire business is running crisis-response services for a workforce they know is coming apart. The 2016 wildfire — which evacuated 88,000 people from Fort McMurray in the largest wildfire evacuation in Canadian history, which burned down 2,400 homes, which briefly shut down most of the industry — revealed in passing that the regional municipality's shadow population was around 40,000 people at that moment, people who lived here but didn't live here, who were uncounted in most of the news coverage because they weren't from there, they were from somewhere else, and they all went back to their somewhere elses during the evacuation and some of them simply never came back. The 2018 post-fire census found the shadow population down fifteen percent. The oil didn't care. The oil kept flowing. The rotations restarted.
And the Indigenous piece, which I've been circling without saying directly, is that all of this is happening on land that belongs, by every reasonable reading of treaty and prior occupation, to the Athabasca Chipewyan and the Mikisew Cree and the Fort McKay First Nation and the Métis communities of the region, who have been variously co-opted, partnered-with, sued-into-submission, paid-off, or simply bulldozed over, depending on the decade and the specific negotiation. Some of the bands have significant ownership stakes in the operations now, which is a development the 1970s activist version of this story did not predict. Some are still in active litigation over water quality and cancer clusters downstream on the Athabasca River. Both things are true. The oil sands produce billionaires and elders dying of bile duct cancer and they produce them in the same watershed and if you want a tidy story about which is the real one you'll have to write it yourself because the ground doesn't offer one.
Beaton's book ends, more or less, with her going home to Cape Breton, having paid off her loans. She is permanently changed. She does not know if she is changed in a way she can live with. The book came out fourteen years after she left the camps and you can feel in it the time it took her to process what she'd seen, which tracks — it takes that long, usually, to figure out what a thing was, and sometimes you never figure it out, you just get old enough to stop being wrecked by it. She is one of the very few people who went through those camps and came out with the specific combination of linguistic ability and patience and moral seriousness to write about them. The others — the welders and the mechanics and the engineers and the heavy-equipment operators — mostly did not. They went home. They drank. They worked the next rotation. They raised kids who, statistically, also went to Alberta, because the Maritime economy did not improve. The book is as much about them as it is about her, and the fact that their version of the book doesn't exist, and won't, is part of what the book is finally about.
There is a thing you learn if you read enough industrial history, which is that the machine doesn't need you to understand it in order to keep running. Understanding the oil sands does not stop them. Beaton writing Ducks did not stop them. The 1,600 ducks in the tailings pond did not stop them. The 88,000-person wildfire evacuation did not stop them. The carbon math does not stop them. The Chipewyan cancer clusters have not stopped them. The only thing that will eventually stop them is the price, and the price is set in a market that does not weight any of the inputs I have just listed, and so the bitumen will keep coming out of the ground until it doesn't, and the men will keep flying in, and the women who work among them will keep being what they have to be to survive the rotation, and somewhere a Cape Breton teenager is right now considering her options and thinking about student loans.
Same as it ever was.
Any news from the gnomelands?
somewhere a baleful chuckle echoes on the wind
Skull with Pipe and Coat
anonymous, c. 1900
Imagining a beautiful world where we can talk about systematic abuse of power without everyone immediately just going into "new world order" mode about it. Like no this isn't a secret shadow government this is just normal government. Cannot stress enough that this is normal government and they're doing it over fucking gmail
Google says it’s no different than checking IDs at the airport.
This is just another form of censorship, control of what we can/can't see and engage with, and another means of getting our private information.
Alternative forks of AOSP (Android Open-Source Project) which are not maintained by Google and will not be affected by this:
LineageOS (I use this one)
Graphene OS
Functionally they are virtually identical to stock Android. Android began as an open-source project, and these versions are built off of that.
Fuck Google.
for those like me who cannot install alternative android forks on their phone because the phone in question is thoroughly unrootable, I would recommend downloading anyapk on your phone while you still can. In their own words:
anyapk is a lightweight Android application installer that bypasses Google's developer verification requirements by using local ADB (Android Debug Bridge) connections. Smoothly install any APK file on your device without restrictions, gatekeepers, or corporate approval.
If you're reading this after Google's lockdown date and are unable to install anyapk the regular way, there is a method outlined on the github linked above which tells you how to install anyapk on your phone by plugging it into a computer with ADB installed on it. Once you have anyapk on your phone, you will not have to do that ever again (unless you delete anyapk off your phone)
[Description for the first image:
a tweet by @/Pirat_Nation:
From September 2026, all apps, including those outside the Play Store, must come from verified developers.
No more anonymous sideloads. No quick comebacks for malware gangs.
First: Brazil, Indonesia, Singapore, Thailand.
end description]
[Description for the second image: a post from jrepin that reads:
"Sideloading" is the rentseeker word for "being able to run software of your choosing on a computing device you purchased". There is no reasonable case for an operating system developer having a say over what programs you run on your hardware.
--Eugen Rochko of Mastodon https://mastodon.social/@Gargron/115093185284473606]
Alien life with different chemistry from ourselves is a very interesting topic*, but consider: life based on different states of matter.
Organisms on Earth are built out of a mixture of liquids and solids, with chemical interactions occurring in a liquid medium. On a smaller scale, we are made out of cells, which exploit the immiscibility of lipids and water to enclose a watery salty medium within lipid membranes. On a large scale, this results in mostly solid but squishy bodies. This is a good compromise to move chemicals around while also allowing enough concentration to have them react.
Can we accomplish that in a different way?
Very low temperature life kept together by weaker atomic bonds. The lasting parts of our bodies are kept together by rather strong kinds of bonds: covalent (e.g. in fibrous proteins) and ionic (e.g. in bone mineral). Weaker hydrogen bonds are used in protein folding, making them more reversible. Since bonds are more stable at lower temperature, we could imagine organisms (perhaps in the liquid methane of Titan, or the liquid nitrogen of Triton) kept together entirely by hydrogen bonds -- effectively, living ice -- or by the even weaker Van der Waals bonds.
I already described a slime mold-like lifeform, with a body made out of isolated cells in a liquid matrix communicating through chemical tags, in my SpecBio concepts #2 and #6. May occasionally form solid structures.
Could we give up even cell membranes and have life that is truly purely liquid? We can imagine an emulsion of immiscible polar (e.g. water) and non-polar (e.g. hydrocarbons) liquids, such as we might find in pockets on a Titan-like world. The liquid with the smaller volume would form discrete chemical-concentrating droplets inside the other, perhaps switching once in a while as the relative quantities change -- living vinaigrette.
Liquid crystals are also another good way to create stable patterns without large-scale solid components. Dissolved molecules change orientation, and therefore the local properties of the fluid, in response to changes in temperature, concentration, or electric fields.
Another type of liquid (or, theoretically, gaseous) life could be based on convection cells, driven by a temperature difference (presumably geothermal at first, but the source of heat might also be exothermic reactions or radioactive decay). Bénard cells are quite regular and stable, and I can see them serving as the cells of an organism, though on a much larger scale. (There's at least one example of such life in scifi: the Qax in the Xeelee Sequence).
On the opposite end, we could imagine purely solid life, growing as extremely elaborate crystals; perhaps made of semiconductor minerals that can modulate and transport electric currents. Genetic information could be carried as patterns of doping or of imperfections in the crystalline matrix. I can imagine ecosystems of living rocks, growing mica-like photovoltaic sheets to harvest sunlight, and slowly moving by inducing magnetic fields around themselves.
It's possible that the earliest life on Earth developed on the surface of mineral layers like montmorillonite clay, using it as template for replication and as catalyzer for metabolic reactions. We could imagine life that never left this condition and developed elaborate ecosystems that are strictly two-dimensional, existing only in a one-molecule-thick film between rocks and water.
Even better: how about (partially) gaseous life? Pure gases would probably disperse chemicals too much for reactions to occur, but we could imagine living foam in which "cells" are actually high-pressure gas bubbles in a liquid medium -- or, on the contrary, living aerosol in which they are droplets of liquid suspended in a dense atmosphere, like the haze of Venus or Titan.
* Check out the links in section 3a here! Though I guess I'll have to update the links for the Astrobiology Primer 3.0 -- some asshole seems to have taken them out of free access just a couple days ago. Some interesting ideas are replacing carbon with high-temperature silicates, low-temperature silicones, nitrogen-phosphorus polymers, polysulfur, and polyoxometalates; and water with ammonia, hydrogen sulfide, sulfuric acid, low-temperature methane or nitrogen, and supercritical carbon dioxide.)
All pics from Wiki Commons. Cleander version of the atomic bonds picture from here.
can we remove "biblically accurate" from the general lexicon