@jmoiron.bsky.social I went digging regarding what we currently know about AI's environmental impact, and while the picture is not entirely unproblematic, it's not nearly as dire as often depicted: jmoiron.net/blog/on-ai-e...
jmoiron plays the blues
@jmoiron.bsky.social I was very vocal in my opposition to the Iraq war before it started, and if this is where things are going, I'm strongly against the extrajudicial killings in the Caribbean and any escalation into war with Venezuela.
@jmoiron.bsky.social These claims were always transparently hypocritical projection and an excuse for thought policing, and if you reported them as anything else then you're a mark and should not be in journalism.
www.cnn.com/2025/12/15/p...
@jmoiron.bsky.social There's definitely a class of people who recognized their own dark frustrations and prejudices in MAGA's xenophobic rhetoric, relishing the thrill of validation, but seeing the horrific consequences of the followthrough laid bare they are nonetheless disgusted.
@jmoiron.bsky.social I wrote about housing preferences, suburban sprawl, and the way that centrist liberalism on the topic of housing serves to reinforce a conservative worldview tied to all sorts of problematic historical baggage.
jmoiron.net/blog/sublurb/
@jmoiron.bsky.social I've searched far and wide for a "Valencia Latte" outside of Japan and have been disappointed, so it's great to be back in Ebisu at the café where I had my first one.
@jmoiron.bsky.social My year-end shing mun river walk from Tai Wai out to the harbor is going to feel bittersweet this year.
The fire in Tai Po has now claimed 159 lives, more than twice as many live as the Grenfell Tower Fire, and it's made thousands homeless. Devastating. 💔
@jmoiron.bsky.social I have a theory that if we had cars that would not function if your abv was over the legal limit then the desirability of car centric suburbs would plummet overnight.
@jmoiron.bsky.social I went to Portugal a lot in the 90s to visit family, and it's still shocking to me when I go that it's basically a Nordic country now in terms of English proficiency.
@jmoiron.bsky.social replied: Surely fear of the airborn pandemic was also a factor. How do you untangle them?
I live in the most dense urban environment in the country but since many there have second homes it was practically empty mar~aug 2020. They didn't all decide city life wasn't worth it.
@jmoiron.bsky.social replied: > In downtown Minneapolis, rent concessions are still available, but they’re not as common — or generous — as they were a year ago because demand has been strong and vacancies are falling.
The article is mostly about how the demand is continuing to increase but there's no new su...
@jmoiron.bsky.social Due to the distorted framing of US politics, centrists think they are straddling some enlightened middle, but they are actually just ordinary conservatives. You can tell this is true because there is no electoral result for which their answer is not "Democrats should move to the...
@jmoiron.bsky.social TIL that the words dale (meaning valley) and dollar ($) are related.
The late medieval silver coins minted in the mining town Joachimstal ended up being called "taler/thaler", from which we get the word dollar. The "tal" in Joachimstal is the German form of dale.
@jmoiron.bsky.social replied: Teach a man a fancy AI text editor and they can hate it for a day, but teach a man vim and he can hate it for a lifetime.
@jmoiron.bsky.social replied: Basically all astrophotography is not what your eyes can see but it is still pretty awesome.
@jmoiron.bsky.social I know he is more famous for the late Kurosawa films he did, but I always liked Tatsuya Nakadai's performance in Dai-bosatsu Toge (called "Sword of Doom" in the west).
RIP to a real legend of Japanese cinema.
@jmoiron.bsky.social replied: Ezra Klein is a smart guy, but he's too credulous of people who want to smuggle extremist positions through moderate language (eg. he likes Douthat) and he's incapable of judging a game of checkers because he thinks all board games are 4d chess.
@jmoiron.bsky.social replied: Sadly I think he'd have a good chance, even though voting against him again would be fun.
@jmoiron.bsky.social AMOC shutdown is unfathomably catastrophic. You know how Toronto is the latitude of Marseille, but much colder? Imagine European latitudes with Canadian climates.
During the last AMOC shutdown, the winters in Paris were similar to Winnipeg, UK summers similar to Reykjavik.
@jmoiron.bsky.social replied: I'm not sure why, but we still don't fully understand the false efficacy of deploying state violence against protests.
The dispersal may have ended the news story and killed the media attention, but people don't somehow become convinced just because they were silenced.
@jmoiron.bsky.social replied: Columbia, in NYC, was the epicenter.
Students took to their campus quads to protest complicity in what is plainly a genocide, and they got a fascist crackdown as reward.
Student leaders here on visas were detained and threatened with deportation for thought crimes.