Category Archives: Food

Energy, Food, Security

“In the United States there are no Peugeot or Renault cars!”

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Here’s how a Peace Corp veteran tries to illustrate the presence and effects of French colonialism.

I shall never forget a Comorian friend’s reaction to his first trip to the United States. Arriving back in Moroni, rather than enthusiastically describing skyscrapers, fast food, and cable TV, his singular observation was that in the United States there are no Peugeot or Renault cars! This piece of technology, essential to Comorian life, had always been French, and this Comorian was shocked to learn that there were alternatives.

Why would anyone ever expect someone with access to daily delicious fresh fruit and fish to ever enthusiastically describe… fast food?

Yuck!

Skyscrapers?

Wat.

The French passed draconian laws and did worse to require colonies (especially former ones) to only buy French exports. I get it, yup I do. So Comorians lived under artificial monopoly, and only knew French brands. Kind of like how the typical American who visits France says “I need a coffee, where’s the Starbucks?” Or the American says “I need to talk with my family and friends, where’s the Facebook?”

Surely being forced by frogs into their dilapidated cars, however, still rates quite far above entering into a health disaster of American fast food. A Comorian losing access to the delicious, locally made slow high nutrition cuisine is nightmare stuff.

But seriously…

“This piece of technology, essential to Comorian life” is a straight up Peace Corp lie about cars.

Everyone (especially the bumbling French DGSE) knows a complicated expensive cage on four wheels is unessential to island life, inefficient, and only recently introduced. Quality of life improves inversely to the number of cars on a single lane mountain road.

Motorbikes? That’s another story entirely, as an actual “unexpected” power differential, which the Israelis, Afghans, Chinese and lately Ukranians very clearly know far too well (chasing British and Japanese lessons).

Go home Peace Corp guy, your boring big car ride to a lifeless big skyscraper box filled with tastless Big Mac is waiting. Comorians deserve better. American interventionists should try to improve conditions locally and appropriately, not just drive former colonies so far backwards they start missing French cars.

Energy, Food, Security

Used Coffee Grounds Mixed Into Concrete Significantly Increases Strength

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Grounds for celebration? Just in case you weren’t already using old coffee grounds as compost or pest management for your garden…

…the team experimented with pyrolyzing the materials at 350 and 500 degrees C, then substituting them in for sand in 5, 10, 15 and 20 percentages (by volume) for standard concrete mixtures.

The team found that at 350 degrees is perfect temperature, producing a “29.3 percent enhancement in the compressive strength of the composite concrete blended with coffee biochar,” per the team’s study, published in the September issue of Journal of Cleaner Production. “In addition to reducing emissions and making a stronger concrete, we’re reducing the impact of continuous mining of natural resources like sand,” Dr. Roychand said.

Suddenly cities full of espresso machines have an entirely new construction supply chain model. The scientists claim they were trying to solve for waste and not just hoping to justify drinking 10 cups of coffee per day.

…inspiration for our work was to find an innovative way of using the large amounts of coffee waste…

And so they conclude 100% of the 75,000 tonnes of waste that coffee drinkers produced in Australia can become a source for structural concrete. Worldwide there’s allegedly upwards of 6 million tonnes available. That means plenty of room still for innovations like powering public transit or making milk and mushrooms.

Food, History, Security

ChatGPT is Fraud, Court Finds Quickly and Sanctions Lawyer

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For months now I have been showing lawyers how ChatGPT lies, and they beg and some plead for me to write about it publicly.

“How do people not know more about this problem” they ask me. Indeed, how is ChatGPT failure not front page news, given it is the Hindenburg of machine learning?

And then I ask myself how do lawyers not inherently distrust ChatGPT — see it as explosive garbage that can ruin their work — given the law has legendary distrust in humans and a reputation for caring about tiny details?

And then I ask myself why I am the one who has to report publicly on ChatGPT’s massive integrity breaches? How could ChatGPT be built without meaningful safety protections? (Don’t answer that, it has to do with greedy fire-ready-aim models curated by a privileged few at Stanford; a rush to profit from stepping on everybody to summit an artificial hill created for a evil new Pharoah of technology centralization).

All kinds of privacy breaches these days will result in journalists banging away on keyboards. Everyone writes about them all the time (two decades after regulation forced their hand, 2003 breach disclosure laws started).

However, huge integrity breaches seem to be left comparatively ignored even when harms may be greater.

In fact, when I blogged about the catastrophic ChatGPT outage practically every reporter I spoke with said “I don’t get it”.

Get what?

Are integrity breaches today somehow not as muckrackworthy as back in The Jungle days?

The lack of journalist attention to integrity breaches has resulted in an absurd amount of traffic coming to my blog, instead of people reading far better written stuff on the NYT (public safety paywall) or Wired.

I don’t want or need the traffic/attention here, yet I also don’t want people to be so ignorant of the immediate dangers they never see them before it’s too late. See something, say…

And so here we are again, dear reader.

A lawyer has become a sad casualty of fraud known as the OpenAI ChatGPT. An unwitting, unintelligent lawyer has lazily and stupidly trusted this ChatGPT product, a huge bullshit generator full of bald-faced lies, to do their work.

The lawyer asked the machine to research and cite court cases, and of course the junk engineering… basically lied.

The court was very displeased with reviewing lies, as you might guess. Note the conclusion above to “never use again” the fraud of ChatGPT.

Harsh but true. Allegedly the lawyer asking ChatGPT for answers decided it was to be trusted because it was asked if it could be trusted. Hey witness, should I believe you? Ok.

Apparently the court is now sanctioning the laziest lawyer alive, if not worse.

A month ago when presenting findings like this I was asked by a professor how to detect ChatGPT. To me this is like asking a food critic how can they detect McDonalds. I answered “how do you detect low quality” because isn’t that the real point? Teachers should focus on quality output, and thus warn students that if they generate garbage (e.g. use ChatGPT) they will fail.

The idea that ChatGPT has some kind of quality to it is the absolute fraud here, because it’s basically operating like a fascist dream machine (pronounced “monopolist” in America): target a market to “flood with shit” and destroy trust, while demanding someone else must fix it (never themselves, until they eliminate everyone else).

Look, I know millions of people willingly will eat something called a McRib and say they find it satisfying, or even a marvel of modern technology.

I know, I know.

But please let us for a minute be honest.

A McRib is disgusting and barely edible garbage, with long term health risks.

Luckily, just one sandwich probably won’t have many permanent effects. If you step on the scale the next day and see a big increase, it’s probably mostly water. The discomfort will likely cease after about 24 hours.

Discomfort. That is what nutrition experts say about eating just one McRib.

If you never experienced a well made beef rib with proper BBQ, that does not mean McDonalds has achieved something amazing by fooling you into paying them for a harmful lie that causes discomfort before permanent harmful effects.

…nausea, vomiting, ringing in the ears, delirium, a sense of suffocation, and collapse.

This lawyer is lucky to be sanctioned early instead of disboweled later.

Sorry, meant disbarred. Autocorrect. See the problem yet?

Diabetes is a terrible thing to facilitate, as we know from what happened from people guzzling McDonalds instead of real food and then realizing too late their life (and healthcare system) is ruined.

The courts must think big here to quickly stop any and all use of ChatGPT, with a standard of integrity straight out of basic history. Stop those avoiding accountability, who think gross intentional harmful lies for profit made by machines (e.g. OpenAI) should be prevented or cleaned up by anyone other than themselves.

The FDA, created because of reporting popularized by The Jungle, didn’t work as well as it should. But that doesn’t mean the FDA can’t be fixed to reduce cancer in kids, or that another administration can’t be created to block the sad and easily predictable explosion in AI integrity breaches.

Food, Security

FDA Loophole for American Candy Gives Cancer to Kids

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A NYT report highlights something I’ve been seeing a lot lately in American generative AI logic.

…many chemicals are approved under a provision known as Generally Recognized As Safe, which states that a food additive can forego review by the F.D.A. if it has been deemed safe by “qualified experts.”

Qualified experts is an obviously shady phrase that can enable private companies to self-regulate, a political process meant to directly corrupt safety for profits.

If a doctor at Stanford will go on the record saying smoking is good for you, in exchange for him getting lavish gifts, American tobacco companies will absolutely use that to deny science. True story.

So too with American candy companies, which seem to use giant safety regulation loopholes to act like cancer isn’t the predictable outcome of known carcinogens they serve children.

One point of contention is that the vast majority of the research on these additives has been done in animals because it is difficult (and unethical) to conduct toxicology research in humans. As a result, “It’s impossible to say that eliminating Red 3 or titanium dioxide from the American diet will reduce the number of people who suffer from cancer by a certain amount with total precision,” Mr. Faber said. “But anything that we can do to reduce our exposure to carcinogens, whether known or suspected carcinogens, is a step in the right direction.”

This is probably a good time to remember that the FDA was created as a reaction to labor abuse complaints in Chicago, as captured in The Jungle. Instead of directly improving rights for workers, the government sought to improve perception of the food quality from places with exposed inhumane working conditions.

At some point these discussions should start to push forward a realization that America often seems to embrace obvious graft and oppose quality, even in cases of children getting cancer.

One rotten apple spoils the bunch is a saying that seems to entirely escape anti-regulation zealots tying the hands of the FDA. And this behavior is having a profound impact on generative AI learning, which parrots inane ideas like science is evasive and pluralist because (hypothetically speaking) some candy oligarch sent her kid to medical school to keep them on family payroll as a dissenting “qualified expert”.

Related: Lege packt aus: Miese Maschen im Snack-Regal