Notices by Jonathan Schofield (urlyman@mastodon.social)

@rgarner prescience is a thankless gift

@aral

This might be the stupidest sentence I read today, but it’s not 9am yet.

It’s by Keir Starmer:

“Both artificial intelligence and the creative industries – which include news media – are central to this government’s driving mission on economic growth.”
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/oct/28/keir-starmer-journalism-lifeblood-british-democracy-labour

As Valencia prepares itself for more rain https://mastodon.energy/@Sustainable2050/113417885855937114

the rest of us would do well to understand that we are *daily* pushing ourselves outside what Johan Rockström calls “the corridor of life”, especially the geological ribbon of the Holocene in which human civilisation has been possible.

The graphic shows the 14°C average that climate scientists use as the ‘zero’ baseline of the last 3 million years. The Holocene has been within +/- 0.5°C of that.

Until now, when we are +1.45°C

@aral I do that consciously. It’s become a habit. I’m not sure why. It makes me feel like I said ‘fuck’ without actually saying it

Got some offshore capital stuffed in a *British* tax haven to invest, but only on terms that fk over UK people some more?

Get Rubber Stamp Boy to give it the green light.

Got a deranged right wing ethnic cleanser that needs carte blanche to bomb 5 other countries in the last year and counting?

Get Rubber Stamp Boy to parrot whatever armourer Uncle Sam says

Starmer is exactly the kind of prick it was abundantly clear he would be as PM. Well done everyone

A small indicator of the level of semantic understanding and accuracy of LLMs:

the number of times autocorrect invokes “it’s” when it should be “its”.

Now imagine that manner of ‘understanding’ being applied to, say, whether you should be considered for an interview or whether your face matches a criminal suspect

#AI

The following is a transcription of James Meadway linked to above. It draws extensively on the writing of Ed Conway:

“We do know that warm ocean waters make hurricanes more destructive and the Gulf of Mexico is currently an exceptional 2 degrees above its average temperature.

The loss of life and the destruction of communities are incomparable losses for those directly affected, but the implications of Helene’s destruction in our interconnected world are broader than the US context…

…the image above is drawn from this article about Spruce Pine being flooded
https://www.opb.org/article/2024/09/30/spruce-pine-just-got-hit-by-helene-the-fallout-on-the-tech-industry-could-be-huge/

#climateDiary
Let 6 minutes of James Meadway’s Macrodose (from 1:30 minutes to 7:30) eloquently walk you through how

“Our wildly complex industrial capitalist economy, developed over the last 200 years, and refined – as in the semiconductor supply chain – into systems of exceptional complexity, was built for times of environmental stability and abundant resources. Those times are now coming to an end.“

https://overcast.fm/+8dw9eN_jY

…“Spruce Pine is a tiny rural community deep in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina, and home to just over 2,000 people.

It is also the site of the purest quartz ever found on planet Earth. Once treated as a near worthless byproduct of mining, by the 1980s ultra pure quartz had become an *essential* ingredient in the production of silicon chips…

…“But because this vast system is so complex, it is also vulnerable.

We have covered before how a drought in Taiwan back in 2021, restricted production at a TMSC facility there, where 90% of the world’s most advanced silicon chips are made.

Or how, in the very same year, an exceptional cold snap held up production at a semiconductor fabrication plant in Texas.

Storm Helene is exposing another of those vulnerabilities, a critical pinch point in the entire global supply chain…

…“As we know, capitalism today rests upon an immensely complex set of structures and processes that turn human labour and raw materials into a vast wealth of material production.

One of the most complex, and arguably the most complex thing ever constructed by humans, is the global semiconductor supply chain, turning sand, through some of the most sophisticated engineering and chemical processes ever devised, into the silicon chips that are now completely ubiquitous in our electronic devices…

…“The deposit at Spruce Pine was formed close to 400 million years ago, from the grinding of tectonic plates that melted rock which then, deep underground, steadily cooked and crystallised into quartz. The exceptional purity of the deposits there comes from the unusual absence of water in their formation.

Only a few other ultra pure quartz mines operate on the planet. One in Norway, another at Chelyabinsk in Russia, and a third in Jiangsu in China…

…“Only quartz can withstand those high temperatures and only quartz specifically mined at Spruce Pine, North Carolina, is pure enough to be used as a crucible for the silicon.

Meanwhile, the other use for exceptionally pure silicon is in producing photovoltaic solar panels. The extraordinary expansion of solar energy in the last few years depended *critically* on the supply of high quality quartz to the solar industry…

…“The silicon has also to be formed into crystals with the precise molecular arrangement needed to make the silicon function seamlessly as a building block for electrical circuits.

So after the silicon has been obtained from sand and chemically purified, it is melted and extruded into the wafers that have this internal crystalline structure. This melting and extrusion has to happen at very high temperature in a crucible that itself has no impurities…

…“But Spruce Pine has the purest product, which sells at about $10,000 a ton, and dominates production globally.

Silicon chips require silicon of exceptional purity, since any imperfection damages the tiny circuitry they contain. The wafers of silicon that are sliced and etched into individual chips can’t contain more than one atom of any other substance per billion silicon atoms…

…“A few years back, one golf course in Dubai bought 4,000 tonnes of the stuff.

And here I just want to pause and contemplate that.

Dear listener, we live in a world where one of the purest and most essential substances known to humanity is being used to *simulate* sand for golf courses built in a desert. It feels like somewhere, at some point, something really has gone terribly wrong…

…“particularly in China, which last year installed more solar panels than the rest of the world combined.

Because it is so pure, quartz mined at Spruce Pine is a dazzling crystalline white. In large quantities, and even when it is lower grade, it resembles the whitest of white beach sands. And that means it has one other use too. It is much sought after by golf courses the world over to build aesthetically appealing golf bunkers…

#climateDiary

I heard Alok Sharma on the radio this morning and his rhetoric gave rise to this linked observation https://mastodon.social/@urlyman/113151427444744509