This week's comic: The dangers of solar panels

#solar #energy #SolarPower

LA Times: For the first time, a warm winter just wiped out SoCal’s little-known cherry harvest

" In May, Leona Valley is usually bustling with families who arrive from across Southern California for an annual tradition: U-pick cherries.
But this year has been so warm that the trees produced no fruit. Orchards that usually attract hundreds of visitors on weekends now sit empty.

...In Los Angeles County, average temperatures in the six months from October through March were 4 degrees warmer than the 30-year average, and the warmest on record in 131 years. The winter brought unprecedented warmth across the western United States. ..."

(paywall)
https://www.latimes.com/environment/story/2026-05-19/cherry-season-record-warmth

#agriculture #foodsupply #climateemergency #climate

RE: https://mstdn.social/@jschauma/116610268796045193

So many levels of wrong here. Google’s newest reCAPTCHA “experiment“ tells people to scan a QR code in order to verify that they are human. Yeah, like scanning a QR code displayed by some random website is a good idea in the first place.

But of course your ability to scan the code isn’t what verifies your human nature. That QR code merely tells you that you need the reCAPTCHA app (on iOS) or newest Google Play services (on Android). In other words, you have to verify that you own a mobile device and are providing data to Google. Which they promise not to share with the website, like that’s what I’m worried about.

This obviously excludes people who don’t have a smartphone, have a de-Googled smartphone or simply don’t want to feed their data to Google. And it again ties a large chunk of the web to Google services. If reCAPTCHA wasn’t evil before (a questionable statement), it definitely is now.

The person who invented the "knock-knock" joke is finally being recognized.

They're getting a no-bell prize.

By the way, the reason this happens is because three FDP affiliated politicians created a company (So Done GmbH) that turned this into a business model. They say their goal is "to cancel hatespeech", but really, they're just monetizing it.

It's basically a subscription service. Their AI based crawler will find actionable "insults" against you, and auto-sue everyone involved for compensation. The money will then be shared between the politician and this company.

This creates completely perverse incentives.

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