From the Nashville Zoo’s fb page! Here’s the petition, please please please take a moment to add your name (even if you’re not from Nashville!). If you are from Tennessee, contact your representatives and make it clear that the people do not want this data center. This is an AZA accredited zoo which is home to several species of critically endangered animals, we NEED to protect it. Make your voice heard!
Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
✓ Live Streaming✓ Interactive Chat✓ Private Shows✓ HD Quality
Anya is LIVE right now
FREE
Free to watch • No registration required • HD streaming
Why aren't we talking about the real reason male college enrollment is dropping? (Celeste Davis, Oct 6 2024)
"White flight is a term that describes how white people move out of neighborhoods when more people of color move in.
White flight is especially common when minority populations become the majority. That neighborhood then declines in value.
Male flight describes a similar phenomenon when large numbers of females enter a profession, group, hobby or industry—the men leave. That industry is then devalued.
Take veterinary school for example:
In 1969 almost all veterinary students were male at 89%.
By 1987, male enrollment was equal to female at 50%.
By 2009, male enrollment in veterinary schools had plummeted to 22.4%
A sociologist studying gender in veterinary schools, Dr. Anne Lincoln says that in an attempt to describe this drastic drop in male enrollment, many keep pointing to financial reasons like the debt-to-income ratio or the high cost of schooling.
But Lincoln’s research found that “men and women are equally affected by tuition and salaries.”
Her research shows that the reason fewer men are enrolling in veterinary school boils down to one factor: the number of women in the classroom.
For every 1% increase in the proportion of women in the student body, 1.7 fewer men applied.
One more woman applying was a greater deterrent than $1000 in extra tuition! (…)
Since males had dominated these professions for centuries, you would think they would leave slowly, hesitantly or maybe linger at 40%, 35%, 30%, but that’s not what happens.
Once the tipping point reaches majority female- the men flee. And boy do they flee!
It’s a slippery slope. When the number of women hits 60% the men who are there make a swift exit and other men stop joining.
Morty Schapiro, economist and former president of Northwestern University has noticed this trend when studying college enrollment numbers across universities:
“There’s a cliff you fall off once you become 60/40 female/male. It then becomes exponentially more difficult to recruit men.”
Now we’ve reached that 60% point of no return for colleges.
As we’ve seen with teachers, nurses and interior design, once an institution is majority female, the public perception of its value plummets.
Scanning through Reddit and Quora threads, many men seem to be in agreement - college is stupid and unnecessary.
A waste of time and money. You’re much better off going into the trades, a tech boot camp or becoming an entrepreneur. No need for college. (…)
When mostly men went to college? Prestigious. Aspirational. Important.
Now that mostly women go to college? Unnecessary. De-valued. A bad choice. (…)
School is now feminine. College is feminine. And rule #1 if you want to safely navigate this world as a man? Avoid the feminine.
It's also interesting to look at the way the gender-shift in roles changes how the roles are perceived.
Secretaries are a perfect example. Back in the day, secretary was a prestigious position, usually the right hand of a figure of authority. The term comes from the 1400s, or thereabout, and the fact that high political offices are still referred to as Secretary of Defence and Secretary of State show how important the position was.
There were, of course, women doing the secretarial tasks - for example Marie Maitland transcribed the family folio in the 16th century though skeptical Victorians insisted a woman couldn't have so fair a hand and Dido Belle wrote her uncle's correspondence in the 18th century, which was noted to be unusual for a woman to do such a task - but secretarial duties primarily fell to men.
However, outside governmental roles, as more and more women entered the workforce, especially during and after the World Wars, and were very good at secretarial work, the gender dynamic shifted.
The number of male secretaries diminished rapidly and with it, the respect due. Misogyny coloured how secretaries were treated, no matter how skilled or professional the women in question were, and even now, there are still the stereotypes of the sexy bimbo secretary.
When I was a kid first getting accustomed to the wonderful world of computers and the internet, one of my favorite things to do was download print-out coloring sheets and mangle them in MS Paint.
This one was my favorite I think. I was 11 going on 12. Also I had no idea how much a pizza cost.
This is absolutely fascinating. I've now been looking at Alex Colville's paintings and trying to work out what it is about them that makes them look like CGI and how/why he did that in a world where CGI didn't exist yet. Here's what I've got so far:
- Total lack of atmospheric perspective (things don't fade into the distance)
- Very realistic shading but no or only very faint shadows cast by ambient light.
- Limited interaction between objects and environment (shadows, ripples etc)
- Flat textures and consistent lighting used for backgrounds that would usually show a lot of variation in lighting, colour and texture
- Bodies apparently modelled piece by piece rather than drawn from life, and in a very stiff way so that the bodies show the pose but don't communicate the body language that would usually go with it. They look like dolls.
- Odd composition that cuts off parts that would usually be considered important (like the person's head in the snowy driving scene)
- Very precise drawing of structures and perspective combined with all the simplistic elements I've already listed. In other words, details in the "wrong" places.
What's fascinating about this is that in early or bad CGI, these things come from the fact that the machine is modelling very precisely the shapes and perspectives and colours, but missing out on some parts that are difficult to render (shadows, atmospheric perspective) and being completely unable to pose bodies in such a way as to convey emotion or body language.
But Colville wasn't a computer, so he did these same things *on purpose*. For some reason he was *aiming* for that precise-but-all-wrong look. I mean, mission accomplished! The question in my mind is, did he do this because he was trying to make the pictures unsettling and alienating, or because in some way, this was how he actually saw the world?
omf i never thought i'd find posts about alex colville on tumblr, but! he's a local artist where i'm from & i work at a library/archives and have processed a lot of documents related to his art. just wanted to give my two cents!
my impression is that colville did see the world as an unsettling place and a lot of his work was fueled by this general ~malaise?? but in a lot of cases, he was trying to express particular fears or traumas. for instance, this painting (horse and train) was apparently inspired by a really tragic experience his wife had:
iirc she was in a horrible automobile crash, as the car she was in collided with a train. i find it genuinely horrifying to look at, knowing the context, but a lot of colville's work is like that? idk he just seems to capture the feeling you get in nightmares where everything is treacle-ish and slow and inevitable.
Text of tweet under the cut because it is loooong.
But... Stochastic Parrots.
Timnit Gebru was fired from Google in December 2020 for refusing to retract a research paper, and every single warning that paper made about large language models has now happened at a scale the industry spent 4 years trying to make people forget about.
Her name is Timnit Gebru.
She co-led the Ethical AI team at Google. She co-wrote a paper called "On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots" with Emily Bender at the University of Washington and two other researchers. The paper was 14 pages long. It was submitted to a top AI ethics conference. And it was the reason Google decided that one of the most senior Black women in AI research could no longer work there.
The story Google told publicly was that she resigned. The story she told, confirmed by 2,695 of her colleagues in an open letter, was that she was fired by email while on vacation because she refused to either retract the paper or remove her name from it.
The paper had not even been published yet.
Here is what she actually wrote, and why every prediction inside it has now come true.
The first warning was about scale itself. Bender and Gebru argued that training ever-larger models on ever-larger scrapes of the internet would produce systems that appeared fluent but had no actual understanding of language. They called these systems stochastic parrots because they would repeat patterns from training data with statistical confidence and zero comprehension. The paper predicted that this apparent intelligence would fool both users and developers into trusting outputs that were structurally incapable of being reliable.
This was 2020. GPT-3 had just come out. The paper predicted the hallucination problem before anyone had a word for it.
The second warning was about bias amplification. The paper documented in detail that internet-scale training data contains systematic overrepresentation of dominant viewpoints and underrepresentation of marginalized ones. The models would not just absorb this bias. They would amplify it, because the optimization process rewards confident outputs, and confidence in language patterns tracks frequency in the training set.
The prediction was that hiring tools built on these models would discriminate against women. That healthcare triage tools would underperform on Black patients. That loan approval systems would entrench inequality while presenting their decisions as neutral algorithmic judgment.
Every one of those things has now been documented in deployment.
Amazon's hiring algorithm penalized resumes that contained the word "women" in any context. Healthcare risk scoring algorithms used by major US hospitals were found to systematically underestimate the medical needs of Black patients. Apple Card's credit algorithm gave wives credit lines 10x lower than their husbands for the same financial profile.
The third warning was about environmental cost. The paper calculated that training a single large language model produced emissions equivalent to the lifetime output of 5 cars. The prediction was that the race to scale would create an environmental footprint that would eventually rival entire industries.
In 2024, Google's emissions were up 48% from 2019, and the company explicitly blamed AI infrastructure. Microsoft's were up 29%, same reason. Both companies have now quietly abandoned the climate commitments they were publicly celebrating the year Gebru was fired.
The fourth warning was about documentation. The paper argued that the training datasets being assembled were too large for anyone to actually audit. Nobody at Google, OpenAI, Meta, or any other lab could tell you with confidence what was in the data their models were trained on. This was not a temporary problem to be solved later. It was a permanent feature of the approach.
In 2023, researchers discovered that the LAION-5B dataset, used to train Stable Diffusion and other major image models, contained thousands of images of child sexual abuse material. The companies that had trained on the dataset had no way of knowing. The paper predicted that category of failure 3 years before it was found.
The fifth warning was the one Google cared about most.
Bender and Gebru argued that the deployment of these systems would centralize linguistic and cultural power in the hands of the small number of companies that could afford to train them. The internet would become a place where the dominant voice was a statistical average of dominant voices, presented as a neutral assistant. Languages underrepresented in the training data would degrade over time as more web content was generated by these systems and fed back into the next training run.
This is now happening in real time. A 2024 study found that 57% of new web content in English is AI-generated or AI-assisted. Researchers studying low-resource languages have documented active degradation in translation quality, because the synthetic content fed back into training is itself worse in those languages.
The paper Google fired her for predicted the model collapse problem before model collapse had a name.
The mechanism behind why this all happened is the part of her work that nobody quotes.
Gebru's argument was not that AI is dangerous in some abstract sci-fi sense. Her argument was that AI is dangerous in a very specific structural sense. The technology was being built by a small group of researchers who shared similar backgrounds, worked at similar companies, and were rewarded for shipping products faster than competitors. The incentive structure made it impossible for safety, ethics, and bias concerns to slow anything down. Anyone inside the system who raised those concerns was either ignored, sidelined, or removed.
She was making that argument from inside Google.
Then Google proved her right by removing her.
The team Google had built to make sure their AI was safe was dismantled in 90 days because they did the job they had been hired to do. Margaret Mitchell, the other co-lead of the Ethical AI team, was fired two months after Gebru for searching through her own emails for evidence of how Gebru had been treated.
Gebru did not stop. She founded DAIR, the Distributed AI Research Institute, in 2021. The mission is to do AI research outside the control of the companies that have a financial interest in not hearing the answers.
Every prediction in the Stochastic Parrots paper has now been validated by deployment. Hallucinations are an industry-wide problem the largest labs cannot solve. Bias amplification has been documented in hiring, healthcare, lending, and criminal justice. Environmental costs are larger than entire small countries. Training data audits remain impossible. Model collapse is an active research crisis at every major lab.
The question worth sitting with is the one almost no one in the industry will say out loud.
Every researcher with the technical credibility to call out these problems watched what happened to her in December 2020 and made a calculation about their own career. The number of people willing to speak publicly about safety and ethics issues inside the major AI labs collapsed after that firing and has not recovered.
The researcher Google fired for warning about exactly what is now happening was right.
The company that fired her is now the second-largest deployer of the technology she warned about.
And the people inside that company who agree with her are not allowed to say so.
Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
✓ Live Streaming✓ Interactive Chat✓ Private Shows✓ HD Quality
Anya is LIVE right now
FREE
Free to watch • No registration required • HD streaming
Imagine if we did the “public libraries are punk” thing for other subcultures. Imagine if people made shirts that said “Soup kitchens are grunge” or “Mixed Use Urbanism is Juggalo”.
"While those working at private companies can at least earn a little money, they face possible punishment if they refuse, from being denied family visits to being sent to higher-security prisons, which are so dangerous that the federal government filed a lawsuit four years ago that remains pending [note: article is from 2024], calling the treatment of prisoners unconstitutional.
Though they make at least $7.25 an hour, the state siphons 40% off the top of all wages and also levies fees, including $5 a day for rides to their jobs and $15 a month for laundry.
Turning down work can jeopardize chances of early release in a state that last year granted parole to only 8% of eligible prisoners — an all-time low, and among the worst rates nationwide — though that number more than doubled this year after public outcry."
No state has a longer, more profit-driven history of contracting prisoners out to private companies than Alabama.
the fact that davy jones probably could’ve rocked my shit if he really wanted to pisses me off so bad. I feel like if you’re 5’3” and widely known to the world as the musical theater monkee I should be able to punt you like a football. and yet
Sorry for us politics posting, but we have until May 22, 2026 to submit public comment to the FCC:
More info from GLAAD:
https://glaad.org/fcc/
They have some good tips about writing a comment and protecting your privacy which, fuck it, I'll just paste here:
Providing an email address is optional. If you have concerns about privacy, you may use your initials or public address in your local area, such as City Hall. Do not use a joke name. It diminishes the comment’s credibility.
Your submission does not need to be long. A single, well-reasoned paragraph is sufficient.
Do not copy/paste a template comment. The FCC values unique perspectives, and an original comment carries significantly more weight in the public record. You can explain why this matters to you without revealing private or sensitive personal information.
Here's what I said:
“Free speech is a fundamental American freedom. I do not need a warning about seeing queer people, much like I do not need a warning about women, veterans, or any other group of people.”
Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
✓ Live Streaming✓ Interactive Chat✓ Private Shows✓ HD Quality
Anya is LIVE right now
FREE
Free to watch • No registration required • HD streaming
BREAKING: Humanitarian activists from the GLOBAL SUMOOD FLOTILLA are being ZIP-TIED and ABUSED while being forced to listen to Israel’s national anthem.
Even if they stop the boats and arrest those trying to help us, you can still help directly here. I am in Gaza suffering from unbearable tooth pain with no treatment. Please donate or share to help me get treatment and survive.
The sign many left wingers have subconsciously accepted moving right on covid and embraced lowering public health standards is when people seem to think “masks should be mandatory in healthcare settings /airplanes “ is somehow a radical position to take in an ongoing pandemic
its so fucking weird because "masks in healthcare" should be the default all of the time. Doctors and nurses are literally employed to go from sick person to sick person, treating immunocompromised people especially often.
Hey y'all. Bad news. Google is getting worse in a very short amount of time. If you haven't already heard, starting July of this year, 2026, Samsung messages will officially close. And they are all pushing android users to download a google messaging app... that isn't great because Google and Israel are in bed together. They have a 1.2 billion dollar contract with google to monitor messaging.
And in September of this year google is rolling out an update that will nonconsensually block every Android app whose developer hasn't registered with Google, signed their contract, paid up, and handed over government ID. Y'all shit's getting worse and worse. If you need to get a new phone avoid these big names. Make sure it ain't in bed with these giants like Google or Apple of you can. More info on this here:
Your phone is about to stop being yours. In September 2026, Google will block every Android app whose developer hasn't registered with them.
Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
✓ Live Streaming✓ Interactive Chat✓ Private Shows✓ HD Quality
Anya is LIVE right now
FREE
Free to watch • No registration required • HD streaming
CeCe Rogers on Facebook writes: "Two Black Tennessee lawmakers were physically escorted out of chambers this week while Republicans quietly held a hearing to approve gerrymandered maps that would eliminate the state's only majority-Black congressional district.
No referendum. No special election. No public vote.
Because they know what happens when voters actually get a say — just look at Virginia, where the people spoke so loudly that Republicans had to drag the courts in to override them.
This isn't new. During Reconstruction, Black Americans held more congressional seats than at any point in the prior 90 years of American history. And white supremacists spent the next several decades tearing that down, through gerrymandering, poll taxes, and voter intimidation.
150 years later, the same tools. Different suits.
The audacity of escorting Black lawmakers out of their own chambers while dismantling Black political representation, and then telling us the courts aren't political, is breathtaking. These are the same courts they're counting on to make it stick.
This is a coordinated, multi-front assault on Black Americans. And we need to say it exactly that plainly."
"When Dennis, Carl, and I lived in Hawthorne as kids, we all slept in the same room. One night, I sang the song ‘Ivory Tower’ to them, and they liked it. Then a couple of weeks later, I proceeded to teach them both how to sing the harmony parts to it. It took them a little while, but they finally learned it. We then sang this song night after night. It brought peace to us. When we recorded ‘In My Room,’ there was just Dennis, Carl and me on the first verse… and we sounded just like we did in our bedroom all those nights. This story has more meaning than ever since Dennis’ death." - Brian Wilson, Surfer Girl/Shut Down, Vol. 2 reissue liner notes (1990)
