collapse of the old society

Images of drought on Amazon

Interesting read on economics, commodification, and search results gradually getting worse

cross-posted from: https://kbin.social/m/technology@lemmy.world/t/511069

When I think about how the old, good internet turned into the enshitternet, I imagine a series of small compromises, each seemingly reasonable at the time, each contributing to a cultural norm of making good things worse, and worse, and worse.

Archive

https://archive.ph/P4tGR

The death toll from dengue fever in Bangladesh crossed the grim milestone of 1,000 with 17 more lives claimed by the deadly virus in the 24 hours till Sunday morning.

Welcome to climate change. Thousand year floods every year are just the beginning of birth pangs. And - as scientists and NGOs have been warning us for years - the poorest countries have the least resiliency and their people will suffer most.

Pray for Libya. And pray Western disaster capitalists keep their filthy hands out of it.

Piped

“Canada is a major oil and gas producing company, ah, country.”

—Justin Trudeau

More than four years in the making, the report is written by the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), a body made up of more than 140 countries that provides policymakers with scientific assessments to help protect Earth’s biodiversity and prevent extinctions. A summary of the findings was approved over the weekend in Germany and released Monday, with full chapters slated to be published later this year.

The body concluded the threat from invasive species is “underappreciated, underestimated and often unacknowledged,” with only about a sixth of the world’s nations having laws or regulations on the books addressing invasive plants and animals. With new species introduced at an “unprecedented” rate of 200 a year, the problem is expected to get worse before it gets better.

Highlights from the article:

$423 billion is an extremely conservative estimate for the financial damage caused by invasive species

The authors consider the increasingly rapid spread of invasive species to be an existential threat; "One of the things that we stress that really is the tremendous threat this does pose to — and I know this is going to sound grandiose — but to human civilization"

Invasive species play a role in 60% of extinctions

Even the fucking Antarctic is in danger from invasive species - invasive grasses are taking advantage of melting glaciers to turn parts of Antarctica into grasslands

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