In my experience people don't like being told their diet is bad.

Nearly three-quarters of expected flood damage to American homes is currently uninsured, according to new data released by the Federal Reserve — and Republicans and those who don’t believe they’re personally threatened by climate change are more likely to be among those underinsured.

In a new Federal Reserve working paper, researchers estimate that there will be $24.4 billion in future annual financial losses as a result of flood damage to single-family homes — and more than $17 billion of that potential damage is currently uninsured. What’s more, 80 percent of households at risk of flood damage do not have adequate coverage, with the average home needing roughly $7,000 more in insurance to cover potential damage.

In areas known to face the most acute threat of flooding, such as those affected by hurricanes and other areas prone to flooding, more than half of the expected damage to homes remains uninsured. The study also found that more than 90 percent of those in the lowest income brackets lack adequate flood insurance — a problem that will likely become more acute as flood insurance premium rates continue to increase.

Taken together, the findings suggest that without emergency government bailouts, many Americans could face the prospect of enormous out-of-pocket costs, bankruptcy, or homelessness in the wake of expected floods.

“Understanding the magnitude of this insurance crisis is necessary to identify potential solutions for the mitigation of financial losses from physical climate risks,” the authors wrote.

The report also examined the role of people’s beliefs in their insurance decisions. In their study of millions of single-family households, researchers found that “a 10 percent higher share of survey respondents perceiving personal harm from global warming is associated with 26.7 percent lower underinsurance.” They also found that “a 10 percent higher share of Republican voters is associated with 14 percent higher underinsurance.”

According to the study’s authors, “our results suggest that household beliefs regarding future climate risks may be a larger determinant of underinsurance” than “policies that change the price of flood insurance.”

The findings suggest more research is needed to parse how partisan political battles over climate change could be impacting environmental action. A recent New York University study of 60,000 people in 60 countries, including the United States, found that despite different opinions, liberals and conservatives worldwide take action to address climate change at roughly the same levels, such as supporting the construction of EV charging stations and raising carbon taxes.

The new warnings from the Federal Reserve also come at a time when 33 out of the poorest 50 counties nationwide are in states governed by Republicans. This includes counties in hurricane-affected areas such as Mississippi, Louisiana, Alabama, and South Carolina.

Flood insurance premiums are rising, with almost a quarter of people surveyed in 2022 by the mortgage financing company Fannie Mae saying that flood insurance is not affordable. ZIP codes in Louisiana, Kentucky, Ohio, and Texas — states at a particularly high risk of flooding — will see significant premium spikes in the years to come, according to data collected by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which helps Americans prepare for, respond to, and recover from disasters.

As climate change wreaks havoc on the country’s insurance safety net, the repercussions could set the stage for the next financial disaster. A new report from the Senate Budget Committee that extensively references The Lever’s reporting warns that “we must speed the transition to clean energy and eliminate carbon pollution” to avoid triggering “a full-scale financial crisis similar to what occurred in 2008.”

Feral horses are a problem in the American plains and west with one of the issues being the fact their carcasses will attract grizzlies or black bears which can then encroach on humans. Hiking out, digging a massive pit, and then burying a horse really isn't an option so they blow them up to increase the speed of decomposition.

They also degrade and destroy native grassland and the whole problem could be easily solved with a cull of the herds, but some dipshit-wanabe-cowboys are obsessed with "saving" "wild" horses so now the federal government has to spend over a $100 million on horse contraception to keep the population vaguely in check.

TDLR: We blow up a bunch of horses corpses every year because of a politically connected nonprofit.

Its worse than that.

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, calling the treatment of prisoners unconstitutional.

Don't eat the onion.

/c/collapse is perhaps a good place to drop this.

Antibiotics might be overused in humans, but as the article states, the amount used in animal agricultural is astronomically higher.

Animals are kept in appalling conditions to lower the cost of meat and this causes rampant infections, so antibiotics are used prophylactically leading to increasingly resistant bacteria.

A better solution than limiting human usage is to ban their use in agriculture.

Bug in my Lemmy app. It should be fixed now.

Fellas, is it gay to speak Gaulish?

I'm all for sanctioning them too. Economic sanctions are the bare minimum we should be doing to genocidal authoritarians.

Political agenda is a funny euphemism for imperialist invasion and genocide.

“But when you conflate those two usages, it becomes dubious, because it's suggesting that these are posts coming from real humans, when, in fact, it's maybe getting posted by a real human, but it's not written by a real human,” Lewis told me. “It's written and generated by an AI system. The lines start to get really blurry, and that's where I think ethical questions do come to the foreground. I think that it would be wise for anyone looking to work with them to maybe ask for expanded definitions around what they mean by ‘authentic’ here.”

In another video demo Impact shows how a fake organization named “Pro-Democracy” can share a video in support of Kamala Harris with users and ask them to share it to TikTok alongside an AI-generated caption. 0:00 /4:39

“These AI tools are so new that we don’t yet have clear norms surrounding when it’s acceptable to use AI in the democratic process,” Josh A. Goldstein, a research fellow at Georgetown University's Center for Security and Emerging Technology, said when 404 Media showed him the Pro-Democracy demo video. “If AI can help someone articulate a view they truly hold, it could empower people who might not otherwise participate and increase involvement in civic discourse. But there are also risks. People may become overly reliant on AI models and passively share AI-generated content that they haven’t checked themselves.”

The “Impact platform” has two sides. There’s an app for “supporters (participants),” and a separate app for “coordinators/campaigners/stakeholders/broadcasters (initiatives),” according to the overview document.

Supporters download the app and provide “onboarding data” which “is used by Impact’s AI to (1) Target and (2) Personalize the action requests” that are sent to them. Supporters connect to initiatives by entering a provided code, and these action requests are sent as push notifications, the document explains.

“Initiatives,” on the other hand, “have access to an advanced, AI-assisted dashboard for managing supporters and actions.”

In the Stop Anti-Semitism demo, Thielen directs supporters to this tweet, about a July 19 International Court of Justice Advisory Opinion that Israel’s presence in the occupied Palestinian territories is illegal and should stop, an opinion it also shared in 2004.

In the Impact demo video Thielen doesn’t instruct supporters to correct any misinformation in the tweet and instead asks supporters to “provide additional context and set the record straight.”

Specifically, it gives supporters the following “talking points.”

The ICJ has a known history of anti-semitism
There are lots of accusations that are not vetted or fact-checked, and a lot of misinformation is damaging public opinion of Israel
Where is the ICJ ruling on Hamas?
The ICJ and ICC have zero jurisdiction over Israel or the United States. There [sic] rulings mean absolutely nothing. 

“Think of these as the core substance of the response that you want,” Thielen says in the video, and explains that some of the responses that will be AI-generated based on those talking points may include just one of them, more than one, or a synthesis of several.

In the “additional context” box Thielen writes that the target audience should be “People who have been seeing a lot of misinformation about Israel and the war online, and find themselves increasingly sympathetic to Gaza. Encourage them to do more research.”

Impact then generates a “seed” for each supporter. “This is what makes the messages all appear to be coming from different perspectives and angles.”

An example of one seed shown in the demo reads: “Informative and calm, longer, providing historical context, link to reputable sources.”

“Frustrated and urgent, medium, highlighting double standards, use caps for emphasis,” reads a seed to another supporter. The demo video also shows what the push notification each supporter would get is based on the seed, as well as the “Draft message” Impact is asking them to share. According to the video, the push notification this supporter would get would read: “Dana, respond to the tweet about the ICJ ruling on Israel. Add context and correct any misinformation.”

The draft message for this user reads:

“Where’s the ICJ ruling on Hamas? The court’s history of anti-Semitism is CLEAR. So much misinformation out there is warping public opinion. Before jumping to conclusions, DO YOUR RESEARCH. The ICJ has ZERO jurisdiction over Israel anyway!”

“Meme-like, very short, pointing out hypocrisy, include trending hashtag,” another seed says. The generated draft message based on that seed is: “ICJ ruling on Israel but silent on Hamas? 🤔 Make it make sense. #DoubleStandards.”

“The goal is to create a well-rounded yet consistent narrative in a way that makes it easy for your supporters to just tap ‘copy,’ paste this in, and then they’re good to go,” Thielen says in the video.

When I asked Thielen why the demo showed Impact directing users to flood a factual tweet with replies trying to undermine it, he said that he did not give the specifics of the demo a lot of thought.

“That was just me being lazy,” he told me. “I just typed ‘Israel’ into Twitter search and clicked on the top thing without looking at it.”

Twitter’s “platform manipulation and spam policy” states that “You may not use X's services in a manner intended to artificially amplify or suppress information or engage in behavior that manipulates or disrupts people’s experience or platform manipulation defenses on X.” Twitter also says that prohibited behavior includes “coordinated activity, that attempts to artificially influence conversations through the use of multiple accounts, fake accounts, automation and/or scripting.” However, it’s unclear if what Impact proposes would violate Twitter’s policy, which also states that “coordinating with others to express ideas, viewpoints, support, or opposition towards a cause,” is not a violation of this policy.

“Coordinated groups of people can show up and help, or coordinated groups of people can show up and harass,” Shapiro said. “We don't think coordination is in any way a bad thing. We think it’s a great thing, because you can get stuff done, and if you're doing good, truthful things, then I don't see any problems.”

Twitter did not respond to a request for comment.

“If social media users aren’t transparent about their own AI use, others may lose trust in online forums as it becomes harder to distinguish human writing from synthetic prose,” Goldstein said in response to the Pro-Democracy demo video.

“I think astroturfing is a great way of phrasing it, and brigading as well,” Lewis said. “It also shows it's going to continue to siphon off who has the ability to use these types of tools by who is able to pay for them. The people with the ability to actually generate this seemingly organic content are ironically the people with the most money. So I can see the discourse shifting towards the people with the money to to shift it in a specific direction.”