Tag: Social Change

  • Windowless Housing

    In this post on his Substack, The Column, Adam H. Johnson discusses the problems with real estate developers building windowless housing under the guise of solving the homelessness crisis. Johnson points out that over the last few years “calls for gutting regulations” in construction have become “not only mainstream, they’re elite conventional wisdom in Democratic-aligned media circles.”

    Importantly, this is not something new. “Real estate interests have said regulations stand in the wage of housing supply, and kept rents artificially high, since the dawn of government regulation.”

    One such regulation that seems to have become a target is the requirement for windows in bedrooms. Windowless abodes are passed off as necessary to solve the housing shortage. As Johnson writes:

    “Like much of the housing discourse, one is baffled by how quickly the discussion goes from the perfectly sensible—albeit generic—axiom of “we need more housing” to the idea that maintaining standards for windows in bedrooms is a pro-homelessness policy.

    The whole thing feels like a hostage situation, and in many ways it is. Taken to its logical end point, this reasoning means any housing standard that is a notch above homelessness would therefore be acceptable so long as it drove down development cost for real estate interests.”

    Read the full article here.

  • US Media's Coverage of the Latest IPCC Report and the Willow Project

    Media Matters has put out this piece condemning the coverage (or lack of it) in US corporate TV news on the latest report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the controversial Willow project, an oil drilling project in Alaska. The report claims  “national TV news mostly failed to contextualize the Willow project’s recent approval within the framework of the IPCC report.”

    Talking of the expected role of the media in such matters, the report says:

    “National TV news has the potential to shape public opinion and drive action on climate change and therefore has a crucial role to play in holding the fossil fuel industry and politicians accountable for their role in exacerbating the crisis. Making these connections is one of the key actions climate correspondents can take whenever they are asked to discuss major climate news.”

    The main conclusion of the report is that “the overall lack of coverage of the IPCC report and the failure to connect it to the Willow project represents a missed opportunity to demand accountability from the fossil fuel industry and the Biden administration for its continued support for new fossil fuel infrastructure.”

    Read the full article here.

  • Preventing Harm Caused by Machine-learning

    “As a leading researcher on the ethics of artificial intelligence, Timnit Gebru has long believed that machine-learning algorithms could one day power much of our lives,” writes Emily Bobrow in this profile for the The Wall Street Journal.

    “Because machine-learning systems adopt patterns of language and images scraped from the internet, they are often riddled with the internet’s all-too-human flaws” and Gebru is well-known for her work in trying to change that. As Bobrow points out:

    “For years, Dr. Gebru earned notoriety as an in-house AI skeptic at big tech companies. In 2018, while she was working at Microsoft, she co-authored a study that found that commercial facial-analysis programs were far more accurate in identifying the gender of white men than Black women, which the researchers warned could lead to damaging cases of false identification. Later, while working at Google, called on companies to be more transparent about the errors baked into their AI models.”

    Gebru “hopes for laws that push tech companies to prove their products are safe, just as they do for car manufacturers and drug companies.”

    At Distributed Artificial Intelligence Research Institute (DAIR), a non-profit she launched in 2021, “Dr. Gebru is working to call attention to some of the hidden costs of AI, from the computational power it requires to the low wages paid to laborers who filter training data.”

    Read the full article here.

  • The Problem with Effective Altruism

    This video essay/tutorial by Youtuber and artist Abigail Thorn for her channel PhilosophyTube is a good introduction to effective altruism and the main problems with it.

    Watch the complete video here.

  • Rich Nations Trying to Control Sunlight?

    Climate journalist Sara Schonhardt penned an important report on concerns about how “[r]adical climate interventions — like blocking the sun’s rays — could alter the world’s weather patterns, potentially benefiting some regions of the world and harming others.” 

    The main concerns: 

    “Climate scientists are, by and large, wary of such intervention. While limiting the amount of sunlight that reaches the Earth could rapidly cool the planet, they say, such efforts wouldn’t address ocean acidification and other harms associated with burning fossil fuels, the primary cause of global warming. 

    It’s also unclear how solar radiation management, or SRM, would affect global weather patterns, such as the monsoon rains that are crucial in some regions of the Global South. While it could ease climate impacts in one area of the world, SRM might reduce crop yields or threaten water supplies in another area.” 

    Understandably then “any research on such methods must consider those risks and involve the countries that already bear the greatest impacts from a warming planet.” 

    A United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) report “recommends a scientific review process based on models and observations that could guide potential research and future governance. If such an assessment determines that SRM deployment would lead to negative consequences, ‘consideration of deployment could be taken off the table,’ the report concludes.” 

    Read the full article here.