Good morning! A big news story this week has been wildfires in Oklahoma and Kansas, with one burning about 300,000 acres and the towns of Englewood and Ashland being evacuated in Kansas. This picture is taken in Big Basin Prairie Preserve looking south into the area where this fire took place. The far horizon is about 8-10 miles away and Englewood about 5 miles past that.
American Farmer has a message about GMO crops
“GMO means it has been genetically modified — what that really means is they modify the genes of it so that when we spray glyphosate, AKA Roundup on it, it doesn't kill it. So you can modify it so we're able to spray a herbicide across the field that will kill the weeds but not kill that particular crop, kill anything but that crop”
“A lot of people think it's made, uh, genetically altered for yield. It's not. It's genetically altered to be resistant to worms. I was gonna say bugs, really it's worms — there is something in the genes of it what will kill that worm. So the worm won't go out there and destroy cotton fields or destroy corn fields. The worm will actually die when it takes its first bite of the corn or cotton”
You need to know how dangerous this is
Here are documented facts about pesticides and herbicides:
Worldwide, pesticides cause about 3 million cases of acute poisoning and 200,000 deaths annually, mostly in developing countries.
Chronic pesticide exposure is linked to increased risks of various cancers, including non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, leukemia, brain, breast, prostate, and ovarian cancers.
Prenatal pesticide exposure has been associated with a significantly higher risk of childhood leukemia
Certain pesticides act as endocrine disruptors, leading to reproductive harm including infertility, birth defects, stillbirths, and developmental abnormalities in wildlife and humans
Pesticides are a major driver of biodiversity loss, causing sharp declines in insect, bird, and pollinator populations
Glyphosate exposure has been associated with a 30–41% increased risk of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma in some meta-analyses
Organophosphate pesticides can cause acute nervous system effects similar to nerve gas, including convulsions, respiratory failure
and death
Over 90% of pollen samples from bee hives in agricultural areas and over 90% of tested streams are contaminated with multiple pesticides
Pesticide exposure is linked to neurological disorders such as Parkinson’s disease, up to 250% increased risk in some studies and Alzheimer’s
Pesticides contribute to widespread water, soil and food contamination, leading to chronic health effects like neurotoxicity, kidney/liver damage, and immune system disruption
There has to be a better way
Some people use the Force… 🤨 I prefer a well-timed toast and a five-year mission. 🥂
May the Fourth be with you… if you must but let’s be honest; I’ve been boldly going since before it was cool. 😉🚀
California Homelessness Executive making $430,000 per year, funneled million of dollars into her husband’s NGO three separate times, and has taxpayers pay for open bars at her parties. She paid $800,000 to silence whistleblowers
@5149jamesli “Her name is Dr Va Lecia Adams Kellum. She's the former CEO of the LA Homeless Services Authority”
- She paid herself a monstrous salary, $430,000 a year.
- Then she funneled millions of dollars into her husband's sham organization, allegedly three separate times
- She also really tried to booze it up at her holiday party by demanding that taxpayers pay for her open bar, and when an associate of hers said that, hey, that is an improper use of public funds, she got visibly angry and then terminated her employment
“This is not only very petulant behavior, but also very illegal. After that, she started hiring her friends with whistleblowers, alleging that she pushed out staff in experienced staff to hire unqualified friends and former subordinates from her previous job into high level, high salary positions within the LA Homeless Services Authority.
And when people caught wind of this and started reporting, she tried to cover her tracks by destroying public records and also arranging to pay hush money, $800,000 to silence whistleblowers.”
This is why the homeless problem in LA will never get solved. It’s a business and the people who run the business, the politically connected NGOs, are all getting filthy rich. They are quite literally paying themselves half a million dollar salaries and living like kings
How have no Democrats who have allowed this gone to prison
@Kristin_Mae That's a gorgeous shot, no reason to be bummed other than it wasn't what you planned, but sometimes that works for the best. I don't know if I have seen a moonburst like that before.
Mark Cuban just compared the most powerful AI on earth to a two-year-old in a high chair.
The toddler won.
Cuban: “A two-year-old on a high chair with a sippy cup knows that when she pushes that cup off, Mom’s going to come running and the baby’s going to be laughing its ass off. It knows the consequences of its actions.”
Then he named the thing no one building AI wants to say out loud.
Cuban: “If you ask ChatGPT or any of them something and it gives you bad advice, it has no idea what’s going to happen because you took that bad advice.”
A system that passed the bar exam. Aced medical boards. Still can’t grasp what a child who can’t tie her own shoes already knows.
The child understands cause and effect.
AI understands pattern and prediction.
They sound similar.
They are not even close.
A pattern tells you what comes next in a sequence.
Consequence tells you what happens to the person standing at the end of it.
One is math.
The other is meaning.
Cuban went further.
Cuban: “If you were blind at an intersection and had the choice between your seeing-eye dog or holding up a phone with AI, I’m taking the seeing-eye dog every time.”
Because the dog understands something no language model on earth understands.
Stakes.
The dog knows a wrong step means its owner gets hurt.
The app knows a wrong step means a revised output.
Hundreds of billions spent building systems that can write, reason, and diagnose.
Not one of them loses sleep when the answer is wrong.
A toddler pushing a cup off a tray runs a tighter feedback loop than every foundation model combined.
The child doesn’t just predict the outcome.
The child wants the reaction.
Pushes the cup off the edge, watches it fall, watches Mom come running.
Laughs.
Because the child knew what would happen before the cup ever hit the floor.
That gap between prediction and consequence isn’t a bug.
It’s not getting patched in the next update.
It is the unsolved problem of artificial intelligence.
We didn’t build minds.
We built mirrors.
Mirrors don’t flinch when you walk into traffic.
People don't realize how absurd this view actually is.
A camera. On a robot. On Mars.
Built by humans on a planet 140 million miles away, launched on a rocket, landed using a sky crane, and now driving across an alien desert taking pictures so detailed you can count the rocks.
100 years ago, your great-grandparents thought airplanes were a miracle.
You are scrolling past Mars on your phone.
“You can see the surface of the Moon…we just went sci-fi.”
On flight day seven, images from our @NASAArtemis II crew amazed, turning science fiction to reality. From the lunar far side to a solar eclipse from the Moon, the views are EVERYTHING. No pressure to pick a favorite.
@8ntmuch GM Garrick!
I have to disagree with your quote to a degree. Yes, absolutely you will get self esteem with achievement. However, that's putting a big burden on yourself every day.
On a much smaller scale on an every day basis, just make sure you are making progress on your plan!
@donrisi@DividedSkyDC@NikonUSA Excellent advice. I would add the Z5ii in there. I got one last year and it is amazing. I also have a ZF. Between the two the ergonomics of feel, weight and balance with a long lens go to the Z5ii. And it costs less.
Reset your X feed: The algorithm watches dwell time — how long you pause, read, or stare.
That pause tells it: "Show more of this." (No like needed.)
Drop an eye-popping image below to create pause & retrain the algo!
Reset your X feed:
The algorithm watches dwell time — how long you pause, read, or stare.
That pause tells it: "Show more of this." (No like needed.)
Drop an eye-popping image below to create pause & retrain the algo! 🌅📷<👀