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Daily Archives: January 25, 2024

Plastic bag bans work

EnvironmentAmerica.org: “Well-designed single-use plastic bag bans have successfully reduced plastic bag use and associated litter and pollution. Use the Single-use Plastic Bag Ban Waste Reduction Calculator to estimate the impact where you live. Single-use plastic bags pollute communities with litter, degrade in the environment and harm marine life. The good news is that states and cities with well-designed single-use plastic bag bans have successfully reduced plastic bag use and associated litter and pollution. Bans in five states and cities that cover more than 12 million people combined – New Jersey; Vermont; Philadelphia; Portland, Ore.; and Santa Barbara, Calif. – have cut single-use plastic bag consumption by about 6 billion bags per year. That’s enough bags to circle the earth 42 times.  Adopting a ban on single-use plastic bags that’s similar to those policies could be expected to eliminate roughly 300 single-use plastic bags per person per year, on average. Download our new report, “Plastic Bag Bans Work – Well-designed single-use plastic bag bans reduce waste and litter,” for more details on how bans on single-use plastic bags are reducing waste and litter around the country. Our Single-use Plastic Bag Ban Waste Reduction Calculator uses the number of bags saved by the typical bag ban to estimate the number of bags that would be eliminated in cities and states with similar bans. If you live in a place that already has a bag ban, estimate the impact a typical bag ban would have each year. If your city or state doesn’t have a ban, estimate the impact a typical bag ban could have…”

Authors Are Fighting Amazon’s Audible

Libro.FM Blog: “Amazon’s impact on the book industry is no secret to most readers. From taking business from independent bookshops—business they depend on, unlike Amazon—to limiting accessibility of audiobooks with Audible Exclusives, the company’s dominance threatens diversity of the publishing ecosystem. According to WordsRated, Amazon “controls between 50% and 80% of the book distribution in… Continue Reading

Paying for news: What Google and Meta owe publishers

Vox EU CEPR: “…Our new research calculates what Meta and Google would owe US publishers under a fair payment for the use of their content, and we provide the methodology for calculating these payments so that others can replicate our work. We (conservatively) estimate that Facebook should provide an annual compensation of US$1.9 billion to… Continue Reading

GPT-4 Cheat Sheet: What Is GPT-4, and What Is it Capable Of?

Tech Republic: “GPT-4 is an artificial intelligence large language model system that can mimic human-like speech and reasoning. It does so by training on a vast library of existing human communication, from classic works of literature to large swaths of the internet. Artificial intelligence of this type builds on its training to predict what letter,… Continue Reading

Wyden Releases Documents Confirming the NSA Buys Americans’ Internet Browsing Records

“U.S. Senator Ron Wyden, D-Ore., released documents confirming the National Security Agency buys Americans’ internet records, which can reveal which websites they visit and what apps they use. In response to the revelation, today Wyden called on the administration to ensure intelligence agencies stop buying personal data from Americans that has been obtained illegally by… Continue Reading

GPO Completes the Law Library of Congress Historical Reports Records

“The U.S. Government Publishing Office’s (GPO’s) Library Technical Services (LTS) has completed the cataloging of the Law Library of Congress Historical Reports. GPO would like to thank the Law Library of Congress for their wonderful collaboration on this project. In April 2020, the Law Library of Congress and GPO began a multi-year project to catalog… Continue Reading

Elon Musk Is Spreading Election Misinformation

The New York Times – but X’s Fact Checkers Are Long Gone “Civil rights lawyers and Democrats are sounding alarms about Mr. Musk’s claims about voting. The Biden campaign called his posts “profoundly irresponsible.”…This month, Elon Musk, who has since bought Twitter and rebranded it X, echoed several of Mr. Trump’s claims about the American… Continue Reading