Susy Kane

Hatzola felt personal. Just a few weeks ago they were on the scene to help my dad in his last minutes. And to help my mum through the hellish hours. Piece below with giftlink.

My Iranian mother collapsed on the morning of Christmas Day. The volunteers of Hatzola were with us within five minutes: their service is literally a life-saver. The thugs who firebombed their ambulances celebrate the culture of death.

It flushes out the antisemites

If your reaction to volunteer-led community ambulances being scorched is ‘why do they have ambulances anyway’ then - please - it’s time to have a firm word with yourself.

Absolutely sickened to my core by this antisemitic attack. I visited this @HatzolaNorthLDN base in December and met one of the most selfless groups of people - volunteers who do all they can to help the local community 24/7. Urgent action is needed.

Today, the Islamic Republic hanged multiple Iranian civilians, some of whom were just teenagers. Amnesty International? Silent. The UN? Silent. Human Rights Council? Silent. The Red Cross? Silent.

“We stole all your knowledge and art, and now we’re gonna put a meter on it and sell it back to you. You’re welcome.”

I sound like a conspiracy theorist when I talk about this, but if you want to be able to reliably refer back to the same text over and over you need physical books or a hard drive full of PDFs. Anything on the cloud can be ‘updated’ and ‘revised.’

#InternationalWomensDay Poem from one of my online students in Afghanistan. She can't share her name but deeply appreciates your attention.

@SkyNews Can we please remember them, rather than seeing his photo everywhere

But sure, let’s get rid of landlines, get everyone using AI for every tiny thing & put all data & currencies online… just in time to run out of resources & start having electric & internet blackouts. Great work world. no notes 👍🏻

🚨BREAKING: MIT hooked people up to brain scanners while they used ChatGPT. What they found should concern every single person reading this. ChatGPT users showed 55% weaker brain connectivity than people who didn't use it. Not after years. After just four months. Here's how they tested it. 54 people were split into three groups: one used ChatGPT to write essays, one used Google, and one used nothing but their own brain. They wore EEG monitors that tracked their brain activity in real time across four sessions over four months. The brain-only group built the strongest, most widespread neural networks. Google users were in the middle. ChatGPT users had the weakest brains in the room. Every time. Then the memory test hit. Participants were asked to recall what they'd just written minutes earlier. 83% of ChatGPT users couldn't quote a single line from their own essay. They wrote it. They couldn't remember it. The words passed through them like they were never there. It gets worse. In the final session, ChatGPT users were told to write without AI. Their brains were measurably weaker than people who never used AI at all. 78% still couldn't recall their own writing. The damage didn't go away when the tool was removed. Meanwhile, brain-only users who tried ChatGPT for the first time? Their brains lit up. They wrote better prompts. They retained more. Their brains were already strong enough to use AI as a tool instead of a crutch. The researchers also found that every ChatGPT essay on the same topic looked almost identical. More facts, more dates, more names. But less original thinking. Everyone using ChatGPT produced the same generic output while believing it was their own. MIT gave this a name: cognitive debt. Like financial debt, you borrow convenience now and pay with your thinking ability later. Except there's no way to pay it back. The question isn't whether ChatGPT is useful. It's whether the price is your ability to think without it.

@HadleyFreeman People with disabilities have always been a minority people are happy to ignore, and now openly punch down on. I just hope things like this might change things.

On the one hand, two wealthy, successful men living their lifelong dreams get called a horrible name at the Baftas On the other, a man with a lifelong, life-crippling neurological condition now held up for global mockery. Hard not to see this as the endpoint of identity politics

So moving watching these outpourings in Iran and around the world. 47 years of oppression under one of the most violent totalitarian regimes in the world. Can’t imagine what this must feel like. May they have their Iran again soon. ❤️

Golders Green right now

It’s late and this is entirely off piste, but you’ll never convince me that Fred Astaire never brought the hot sauce

Can’t stop looking at that photo of former Prince Andrew leaving Norfolk police station.

Google’s single data center in Council Bluffs, Iowa consumed 1 billion gallons of fresh water in 2024. One facility. One year. Enough to supply every home in Iowa for five days. The reason they need fresh water is pure chemistry. Evaporative cooling towers work by running water over hot surfaces and letting it evaporate. 80% of the water a data center pulls in literally vanishes into the atmosphere as steam. You can’t recycle steam. The remaining 20% becomes concentrated mineral waste. Calcium, magnesium, silica. Every cycle through the cooling loop makes the water more corrosive. After enough passes, it starts clogging pumps and eating through heat exchangers. Multi-million dollar equipment destroyed by limescale. Recycled wastewater carries even more of these minerals from the start. You could treat it, but less than 1% of U.S. water is recycled. Most cities don’t even have separate pipes to deliver reclaimed water to industrial customers. A data center wanting to use recycled water would essentially need to build its own treatment plant on site. Meanwhile, municipal potable water costs almost nothing. So they just drink from the tap. Across all its data centers, Google used 8.1 billion gallons in 2024, nearly double what it used three years earlier. The company claims its water stewardship projects “replenished” 4.5 billion gallons. Those projects aren’t even in the same watersheds where they’re pulling the water. Same playbook as carbon offsets. Consume locally, offset globally, call it sustainable. The trajectory is the real story. U.S. data center water consumption could quadruple by 2028. That’s 68 billion gallons for cooling alone, before the 211 billion gallons consumed indirectly through electricity generation. Two-thirds of new data centers since 2022 are being built in regions already facing water scarcity. Nobody’s asking why they use fresh water. They’re asking what happens to the towns sharing a water main with a facility that drinks like 50,000 people showed up overnight.

I refuse to believe the majority of Brits accept this is ok. It’s horrifying & terrifying. Brighton , Bristol & now Sheffield. Starmer must stop this.

It’s been months and I’m still trying to figure out why AI data centers need fresh water. Not used water. Not recycled water. Fresh water???