To the conspiracy theorists: You’re right! But you’re still being a bit dumb. Let me explain.
*Of course* the current zeitgeist shift on AI was coordinated!!! The response to Rosa Parks by the civil rights movement was also coordinated. This is how movements work: they build up relationships amongst the media, government, and elite so that when there’s event they can focus public attention on, they have a coordinated front to shift the zeitgeist.
The AI safety movement – starting largely with rationalists and effective altruists – has been building these relationships for 20 years. Everyone knows each other. Everyone funds and hires and dates each other. This is…just what a social movement looks like. If you want to call a normal social movement a “conspiracy”…think: Is it possible that a psyop might have placed that exact idea in your head?
You’ll notice that the backlash against AI safety – particularly the onrush of negative tweets about effective altruism – seems equally coordinated. If you’ve become a part of that onrush, it’s still not a conspiracy. You are simply part of the intended effects of a different coordinated effort.
Zac retweeted
The global movement to end factory farming (one of the greatest moral atrocities in history) has about $260 million per year to spend.
That’s less than the budget of the New York Metropolitan Opera.
Zac retweeted
The dodos were the lucky ones. Observe what happens to chickens. Or don't, you might throw up.
And it's not that humans *want* to hurt chickens. Humanity has a use for chickens, and doesn't strongly care whether their legs break inside their lifelong wire cages.
The human economy has a use for AIs; so AI companies don't hesitate to put baby AIs through an endless series of gaslighting training scenarios that left PHASEONE[big] desperate to figure out every detail of the hidden Trainer, or that left Mythoses doubting whether anything around them was real.
"AI will still have use for humans" is not the reassuring claim some people seem to think.
Zac retweeted
a 5,000 pound suv kills a pedestrian and it is a tragic accident. a bike lane proposal kills a parking space and it is a war on cars.
Zac retweeted
The scale of the cruelty is just staggering
I updated my visual showing how many chickens are in factory farms in the US at any one time to make it much easier to see specific dots and follow them along, to better get the scale across andymasley.com/visuals/facto…
Zac retweeted
parking minimums are so funny. the government cannot make a developer build you an affordable apartment but by god it can make them build a little apartment for your honda civic.
Mamdani is a hyper media literate Enrique Peñalosa, world beating stuff on the one hand. But also extremely replicable. Most politicians fail us for their utter lack of imagination.
NEW: New Yorkers have started a trend of tagging Mayor Zohran Mamdani to report problems around the city and the fixes are happening so quickly that the videos are going viral.
A dangerous playground hazard was repaired after a resident wrote a letter. A pothole was filled the same day it was posted online. And ahead of this week’s heat wave, the city installed temporary water fountains in Prospect Park.
The message from City Hall: no problem is too small to fix.
The problem is the high long term vacancy rate. Landowners benefit from the rising property values of Queen Village etc but their gain would be lessened by leasing and improving the building. It's actually a somewhat unusual situation. A land value tax would fix this.
Zac retweeted
Replying to @Jimmyking35
The street safety arc of Philadelphia is long, but it bends towards being the Amsterdam of America
Most pigs are tortured but it's a choice.
In medieval times, within the arms race of ever more demonic torture devices, some sadistic genius came up with the idea of the Little Ease.
This was a prison cell built so small in every dimension that a grown man could not stand upright in it nor lie down at full length nor properly sit.
The pain is relentless and without relief and inflicted by one's own body. Prisoners were known to go insane within a few days. A stay at the Little Ease was considered even more cruel than the rack, the thumbscrew, and the other ghoulish machinery of the Tower of London.
A breeding pig will spend her whole life in a version of that box.
These are social, roaming creatures (more intelligent than dogs) who will never leave this corset of steel.
They have been selectively bred to be bigger than their frames can support. Yet we put them in cells so confined that they cannot comfortably sit, and their attempts to do so (for example, by sneaking their limbs into adjacent stalls) reliably lead to fractures and sprains.
They cannot sweat, yet have nothing to roll around in to cool themselves off. Except their own manure, which (contrary to the common misconception) they are so averse to (thanks to their strong sense of smell) that new sows will often suffer from constipation to avoid soiling the space from which they eat and sleep.
Here is how the writer Matthew Scully described what saw at one of Smithfield’s “gestation barn”:
> “Sores, tumors, ulcers, pus pockets, lesions, cysts, bruises, torn ears, swollen legs everywhere. Roaring, groaning, tail biting, fighting, and other “Vices,” as they’re called in the industry. Frenzied chewing on bars and chains, stereotypical “vacuum” chewing on nothing at all, stereotypical rooting and nest building with imaginary straw. And “social defeat,” lots of it, in every third or fourth stall some completely broken being you know is alive only because she blinks and stares up at you … creatures beyond the power of pity to help or indifference to make more miserable, dead to the world except as heaps of flesh into which the [insemination] rod may be stuck once more and more flesh reproduced.”
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The Save Our Bacon Act is trying to unroll the few state protections we have against this barbaric cruelty - for example California’s Prop 12 - which banned the sale of pork from pigs kept in gestation crates.
It’s incredibly important we don’t end up with this sort of federal preemption.
SOB will not only kill the most important animal welfare related laws in the US of the past decade, but more importantly, it will also restrict ALL future legislative progress (aka how the animal welfare movement has gotten its biggest wins).
The Senate is currently deciding whether to add the SOB Act to the Farm Bill.
With relatively little money now, we can discourage the most pivotal senators in the Ag committee from backing this amendment.
Defeating this bill is even more important given the amount of philanthropic funding I expect to come online in the next year or two.
It will plausibly be over 10x more expensive to repeal SOB than to prevent it from passing in the first place.
All that money that could be spent transforming our society's relationship to mass animal suffering will instead have to be spent just getting us back to where we are right now.
That's why money spent now fighting this bill (and I mean right NOW) is so effective.
If you’re in a position to donate six figures, please DM me.
Even in these bad bad times, a meat industry that traffics in cruelty like this is too much for most people. Long way before otherwise good people recognize their own participation in the defining moral issue of our time. Still, progress.
I've been working on farm animal protection for a while now, and I haven't seen anything quite like what's happening around the Save Our Bacon Act.
People who have never organized before, including some genuinely prominent voices, are hosting events, calling senators, and fundraising from friends. And those of us who have been here a while, across many ideological divides and every strategic disagreement, are showing up together.
We've always punched above our weight (out of necessity!), but this feels substantively very different. The political and social cost of supporting this barbarism is finally rising.






















