Cross posted from https://thelemmy.club/post/52531263

• Alpr.wtf - Every US jurisdiction using ALPR, plus how to file info requests.

• EyesOnFlock.com - Crowdsourced map of Flock cameras and city contracts.

• Deflock.me- Nationwide ALPR map tracking Flock deployments, removals and resistance.

• DontGetFlocked.com - Plots your route, counts ALPR Flock cameras, and suggests surveillance-free alternatives.

The study looks at AT&T coverage to determine iPhone availability from 2007 to 2011 and how that correlated with fertility. The authors suggest the correlation could be caused by the iPhone "reducing in-person interactions, increasing pornography use, and reducing sexual frequency" according to national-survey evidence.

We've found it incredibly useful for figuring out what is going on with a codebase.

A list of projects that pledged not to use AI or are disrupting it. Very useful for finding software that either isn't or won't be 'AI' tainted, even if they're forks of those that are.

Cross posted from https://lemmy.zip/post/64472009

Even if an employer doesn't require the new ID, remember the UK government said that all IDs will soon have to be verified digitally. That suggests the employer will send the ID image or data to a government server which will respond with whether the person is allowed to work. So all IDs will essentially be turned into digital IDs and the government can make individuals unemployable if they do something the government doesn't like.

Unverified allegation that local communities are powerless to stop it on account of it being a military operation: https://xcancel.com/VigilantFox/status/2051456867075784838

In this text I want to analyze the relationship of fascism and what is called “AI” these days. Is this “technology” that keeps being used to reshape the world around us (for better or worse but dominantly worse) in some way connected to fascism? Or is it just something fascists like to use? Is it neutral?

“AI” is built by scraping the Internet and any other data source one can find and most of that data is heavily racialized, is based on a colonial, sexist, heteronormative understanding of the world and the past. There literally is no police data that’s not racist. If you base your image generator on the images available, LGBTQIA representation, representation of people not conforming to the social expectations of acceptability is lackluster at best for example.

But there is another aspect of “AI” usage that fuels the right’s enjoyment of using “AI”: It hurts the people they want to hurt. “AI” is currently mostly used to generate media (think images, illustrations, music or text). But traditionally people in those creative industries are more left leaning, more inclusive. Fascists just can’t create good and interesting art. Using “AI” to take that groups’ jobs, their livelihood, their creative expression away is exactly why using “AI” to create an image is so enjoyable by right wingers: It’s a vulgar display of power.

The above are just cherrypicked paragraphs from a long and well argued article. Give yourself the gift of reading it in full, rather than having a bullshit generator summarize it 🙂

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.today/post/50862848

Aside from knights, kings and jesters, when someone mentions the middle ages you probably think of chamber pots being emptied out of windows into unsanitary streets, deadly diseases like smallpox and typhoid and women dying in childbirth. However, you were probably never told that the unsanitary conditions and diseases were mainly in urban areas which only around 10% of Europe lived in at the end of the middle ages. In fact, academics came up with a term to describe the fact towns and cities were so much more deadly than the rural countryside: the urban penalty.

Until the twentieth century, death rates were generally higher in urban areas compared with rural ones, a phenomenon dubbed the ‘urban penalty’. Urban death rates were high partly as a consequence of factors that can be considered as structural features of cities and towns.1 High population densities favoured the transmission of infectious diseases, and trade and migration promoted the importation of animal and human diseases. In addition, before the twentieth century most cities provided inadequate facilities for the disposal of the volumes of wastes generated by such densities and numbers of humans and animals, and for the prevention and treatment of gastrointestinal diseases associated with these living conditions.

The best mortality data we have is the infant mortality data from England and Wales, which shows in 1550 babies were about twice as likely to die in London than the most rural areas, while in the 1700s as the industrial revolution began and towns got bigger babies were three times as likely to die.

Figure 1b shows infant mortality rates rather than life expectancies, because the latter require much more data and are rarely available for urban populations before the mid-nineteenth century. However, levels of infant mortality were so high in early modern towns and cities that mortality in the first year of life was a major driver of life expectancy levels, at least in the eighteenth century. In London infant mortality was around 300–400 deaths per 1,000 births in the mid-eighteenth century, compared with the national average of c. 180 per 1,000. While London was then the largest city in Europe, with a population of perhaps c. 700,000, even small market towns seem to have experienced a severe ‘urban penalty’ in this period. In the towns of Alcester, Banbury, Gainsborough, and Lowestoft, with populations of 2,000–3,000, infant mortality was in the range 209–270 per 1,000 in the period 1675–1749, compared with infant mortality rates below 100 per 1,000 in the most remote rural parishes.

Did they ever teach you this in history? If you're like me then they didn't. Instead they taught you that if you lived in the middle ages a third of your children would die in infancy and you would probably die in your 30s. That last part is yet another lie based on misleading use of life expectancy estimates. In truth, the most common age of death was around 70, but due to infant mortality (and war) the life expectancy gets estimated at 35-40. Personally I think this life expectancy is much too low because of urban-centric information and how commonly past conditions are exaggerated, especially for the middle ages.

As can be seen from the graph it wasn't until around 1920 that urban infant mortality reduced to what rural levels had been in 1550. Earlier in the middle ages urbanization was even less, so what this suggests is that most people may have been as healthy as the average urban Englishman in 1920. But scaring people about how bad things used to be is much more profitable for big pharma and its a useful way for governments to keep people dependent on and subjugated to modern technology.

Source: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/ehr.12964

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.today/post/50462470

Lack of social interaction causes stress and boredom in birds, especially more intelligent ones like parrots, leading to pterotillomania - plucking out their own feathers. How much more then do humans need social interaction to stay healthy? Wikipedia claims feather plucking has similar characteristics to trichotillomania - humans pulling out their own hair. This is often caused by anxiety.

Since the industrial revolution technology has been a disaster for human social interaction. First we replaced our fellow workers and even work animals with machines. Then we made trains to get further away from our own communities. Then transport became individualized and isolated with cars. Human interaction was removed from entertainment through radio, television and eventually personal smartphones. And worst of all, socialization itself became mediated via the phone then the internet, and finally it lost all humanity when people began to talk with AIs.

Is it any wonder that anxiety, depression and mental illness have been sharply rising in the 21st century, and have been rising even since 1938? The coming crisis of AI-induced psychosis is just the latest in a long line of mental health disasters caused by modern technology.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.today/post/49749386

If the video isn't working, try these links:

• https://cdn.videy.co/8f2f25e11.mp4
• https://streamable.com/0xj1ni (slightly better quality but only up for 2 days)

Clipped from full hour long video (around 49 minutes in): https://www.bitchute.com/video/jmhFAjqbxnQ

Europol report: https://www.europol.europa.eu/cms/sites/default/files/documents/The-Unmanned-Future-Report.pdf

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.today/post/49663892

Does technology provide more jobs than it takes away? In the modern world where most industries are constantly changing, most jobs are completely unnecessary, many are unproductive and people can move countries to find work it can be difficult to judge this claim. But we can go back before benefits, government-funded useless jobs, international travel and chaotic job markets. If we do that we can see more clearly how technology has affected the availability of jobs.

The Second (or British) Agricultural Revolution provides one example of technological change. Did it lead to more jobs or less? Here's what I learned about this today. Most of this information comes from here and the pages it links to.

This revolution wasn't an overnight technological development which led to a temporary wave of unemployment that ended as new jobs were invented. This was a gradual change over hundreds of years which led to rising unemployment and poverty that didn't go away.

The lead up to it began in the 1400s with enclosed farms that were able to make better use of the land and crop rotations. This became more common into the 1500s and meant that fewer people needed to work on the farms, causing some to slide into poverty. The government and nobles of the time were apparently unfamiliar with non-temporary unemployment except as a result of laziness or disability. It was a totally alien concept to them. In reaction to increasing numbers of beggars and vagrants the government passed laws to punish them. At the time making poverty harsh was seen as a way to motivate people to get jobs. This approach didn't seem to work as by the end of the 1500s the government decided to change their approach and begin making Poor Laws. The first (Old) Poor Laws provided housing, money, food and clothing to those who were unable to work because of age or illness, but at the same time the able-bodied could be made to work in houses of correction as punishment for being a "persistent idler".

The British Agricultural Revolution really started to take off in the mid-1600s and by the end of the century unemployment and poverty had increased further, leading to the workhouse movement. These gave housing and employment to the poor and reserved houses of correction for punishment. But put poverty didn't end and around 1 million Britons may have relied on poor relief by the end of the 1700s. The number of able-bodied males taking poor relief was rising and again this has been attributed to the enclosure movement that increased agricultural productivity.

Because machines were taking people's jobs, there were widespread riots that destroyed machines in 1830, known as the Swing Riots. The existing system of poor relief wasn't able to handle all the poor people so in response to this and the riots the New Poor Law was passed in 1834. This made it harder for the able-bodied to get relief and made workhouses harsher to discourage leeching. The new system was a complete failure because the unemployed either went without any provisions or suffered in prison-like workhouses. There was no attempt to undo whatever had caused all the jobs to disappear in the first place.

In the end the Poor Laws gave way to country councils providing public housing, government pensions and eventually the full UK welfare state. The Poor Laws were an early example of a European welfare program that influenced the development of welfare states beyond the UK.

So considering all this, do we really think technology has helped or hurt the public's ability to get jobs?

Before the 1500s it was unheard of to be unemployed unless it was temporary or you were too old or sick to work. Now find one developed country where that's the case today. I'd wager you can't. And what could possibly be responsible for that? Is it the increased population? Globalization? I don't think so. More people means more mouths to feed and more jobs. Globalization didn't take away the jobs in Britain between 1500-1900. The most reasonable explanation is that technology and efficiency improvements have caused the lack of jobs by taking over more and more of the productive work, leaving humans with pointless jobs or no work at all. And what good are efficient systems if they put us out of work so we can't afford anything? Maybe efficiency can be bad and sometimes it's good to do things the hard way?