she is home!! and I am on a train to philadelphia to do a panel and them come right back home because I could not back out of it!! extremely not hyped to do this lol
https://buttondown.email/perfectsentences/archive/perfect-sentences-42/ this week in sentences: imps, grief, banquet of culpability, a wild animal, everything we accrued
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w_JEezynhrc obsessed with this iPhone ad that emphasizes the cosmic origins of phone metals, extremely tragic for the asteroid that its apotheosis is...becoming a phone
https://buttondown.email/perfectsentences/archive/perfect-sentences-41/ this week in sentences: soil, vertigo, a strange bird, less interested, barista, beloved Silver Lady, eager to outlive
found out from a friend that her friend who very recently left Vice loved our episode on reading their bankruptcy docs and that she was sharing it with all her former colleagues! it is nice when the people affected by the story you're telling are into it https://ripcorp.biz/episodes/rip-docs-the-vice-bankruptcy
“Companies have been trying to hide the full footprint of their data centers because they know the public could turn against them if they knew the reality. In The Dalles, Oregon, Google was found to be using a quarter of the city’s water supply to cool its facilities. Tech companies have been facing pushback elsewhere in the United States, but also across the world in places like Uruguay, Chile, the Netherlands, Ireland, and New Zealand. Now opposition is growing in Spain too, where droughts are wiping out crops and people are wondering why they’d give their limited water resources to Meta for a data center. But adopting generative AI will require a lot more of those data centers to be built around the world.
The tech industry is constantly incentivized to increase the computing power we use as a society, because that works for their business models — especially when Amazon, Microsoft, and Google have massive cloud computing divisions. But we never seem to stop and ask whether that additional computing power is necessary to improve our lives. As Hugging Face climate lead Sasha Luccioni told The Guardian, “we’re seeing this shift of people using generative AI models just because they feel like they should, without sustainability being taken into account.” Everyone’s jumping on the bandwagon, but it’s not clear that’s actually in anyone’s interests but those of founders and investors who are hoping to cash in on the latest AI bubble.”
Paris Marx reminds us that the
.minor semi-positive housing update
(an additional wrinkle in this is THEY OWN ANOTHER HOUSE in Vermont, which probably won't fetch as high a price as their Carroll Gardens building, but idk if I were in my 70s I would liquidate that for whatever I could get and hold onto the property with the passive income in the neighborhood my daughter and grandkids are still in??)
minor semi-positive housing update
it's still baffling to me that they've decided to sell the building and think they can buy an apartment in the neighborhood--which is a way, way more competitive market and after all the closing costs they will barely have the cash to buy outright; like you guys can have a nest egg or a home in Brooklyn but not sure you can have both!
minor semi-positive housing update
trying to not get my hopes up that their realizing the asking price is way too high might open them up to the offer we made to buy out our floor in a co-op conversion--probably won't happen, but I think their hope for a big quick payout is fading and maybe at least paying off the mortgage and cutting their share of building costs will become more appealing?