"The irony was hard to miss: the same month our union received layoff threats, OpenAI’s education evangelists set up shop in the university library to recruit faculty into the gospel of automated learning. The math is brutal and the juxtaposition stark: millions for OpenAI while pink slips go out to longtime lecturers. The CSU isn’t investing in education—it’s outsourcing it, paying premium prices for a chatbot many students were already using for free."
AI is Destroying the University and Learning Itself
Students use AI to write papers, professors use AI to grade them, degrees become meaningless, and tech companies make fortunes. Welcome to the deat...
"AI's rapid growth is depleting local water reserves around the world, from drought-stricken Chile to South Africa. Its physical footprint reflects a new form of colonial extraction; instead of silver and soy, now it is the cooling water that keeps the digital economy running." "These community struggles highlight a familiar pattern in which corporations and governments present data centres as engines of modernisation while downplaying their environmental costs." https://www.bangkokpost.com/opinion/opinion/3144490/ais-growth-is-depleting-water-reserves.
"So, when we arrived here at COP30, we were abandoned. We didn’t have access to water. We had a hard time finding meals. It was very difficult for our people, who had traveled for so long to get here. And the people wanted to be heard. We came in a large delegation, and we wanted to speak, and we wanted to be heard. But we were blocked."
Democracy Now!
Indigenous Amazon Defender Alessandra Korap Munduruku on Saving the Amazon Rainforest
Full interview with Alessandra Korap Munduruku, who led an Indigenous protest outside the U.N. climate summit in Belém, Brazil.
"Degrowth offers a counter-narrative. By deliberately reducing consumption, scaling back wasteful production, and prioritizing sufficiency over excess, societies can redistribute resources more fairly. Degrowth is not about poverty or stagnation; it is about shifting priorities. Luxury consumption, speculative finance, and high-emission production are curtailed, while public services, social welfare, and environmental protection are expanded."
The Asian Age
The Equality Hidden in Degrowth | The Asian Age Online, Bangladesh
In today’s world, growth is celebrated as the ultimate measure of success. Nations boast of rising GDP, corporations want to reach record profits...
Google Strives To Keep Data Center Water Use Secret After Judge Orders Records Released A Roanoke judge has ordered the Western Virginia Water Authority to release information related to a potential Google data center.
The Roanoke Rambler
Google Strives To Keep Data Center Water Use Secret After Judge Orders Records Released
A Roanoke judge has ordered the Western Virginia Water Authority to release information related to a potential Google data center.
 All over the world, Google tries to keep secret its water use
Serious $1 Trillion Crypto Price Crash Warning Sparks Panic As Bitcoin Drop Suddenly Accelerates "The bitcoin price has fallen almost 30% from its peak last month, plunging bitcoin into bear market territory and wiping $1 trillion from the combined $3.2 trillion crypto market, with traders panicking over a bitcoin crash nightmare scenario that could be suddenly coming true."
Forbes
Serious $1 Trillion Crypto Price Crash Warning Sparks Panic As Bitcoin Drop Suddenly Accelerates
Analysts are warning the crypto market could be about to lose another $1 trillion...
Informal recycling can involve washing the e-waste—often using bare hands—in acids such as “nitrates, sulfates, hydrogen fluoride, etc., to create slurry. Gold is extracted by mixing sodium cyanide to run off gold cyanide. Lots of toxic wastewater results from this process. The remaining slurry is dried and buried or burned. It’s very toxic and problematic to handle. Burying causes terrible leaching 10 or 20 years later, poisons the land and makes large areas unfarmable.
Gerry McGovern
Nature will recycle us
Data centers are driving up electricity bills "The reasons for price increases are often complex and vary by region. But in at least three states with high concentrations of data centers, electric bills climbed much faster than the national average during that period. Prices, for example, surged by 13% in Virginia, 16% in Illinois and 12% in Ohio."
CNBC
Data centers are concentrated in these states. Here's what's happening to electricity prices
Residential utility bills rose 6% on average nationwide in August compared with the same period last year, according to the Energy Information Admi...
"The plans formally surfaced in July. Four months later, they have the green light, a deal with Michigan’s largest utility to draw more power than a million homes and Gov. Gretchen Whitmer heralding them as the largest one-time investment in state history. The project? A sprawling warehouse filled with servers to fuel Big Tech’s rising demand for cloud computing and artificial intelligence."
mlive
As AI ‘arms race’ and data centers hit Michigan, rural farm town feels left in the dust
As tech firms speed past local opposition toward construction of the state's first "hyperscale" data center, some are pushing for a careful review ...
“We are just making these reports pretty much in the dark — since there’s almost zero information,” said Shaolei Ren, an AI researcher at UC Riverside and co-author of the report. “We have extremely little information about data centers in California.”
CalMatters
Data centers are putting new strain on California's grid. Here's the best estimate yet
California’s data centers have doubled their use of electricity and demand for water , and are polluting more, even as lawmakers stall on oversight.
 Big Tech wants to know absolutely everything about us. It works incredibly hard so that we know as little as possible about them