In the US, Chicago has more lead pipes carrying water than anywhere else. But don’t worry – they’ll be replaced by 2076. CC-licensed photo by Michael on Flickr.

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A selection of 9 links for you. Not thirsty, no. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

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Starmer considering new digital ID scheme to tackle illegal migration • BBC News

Paul Seddon:

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Sir Keir Starmer has confirmed for the first time the government is looking at digital ID as a way to tackle illegal immigration.

The prime minister said a new identity programme could play an “important part” in reducing the incentive to enter the UK without permission. He added things had “moved on” since the fraught debate over ID cards under the last Labour government in the mid-2000s.

But Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch said: “I think as a way of helping to control immigration, it is not really going to solve the problem.”

Speaking to political editor Chris Mason, Sir Keir said: “We all carry a lot more digital ID now than we did 20 years ago, and I think that psychologically, it plays a different part.” Asked whether a new scheme could play a role in reducing the attractiveness of the UK as a destination for illegal migrants, he added: “My instinct is it can play an important part. Obviously we need to look through some of the detail.”

He added that, two decades on from the row over New Labour’s physical ID card scheme, the public was likely to “look differently” at a digital-based scheme. He did not confirm whether any new digital ID scheme would be mandatory.

By law, employers have to check that prospective candidates have the right to work in the UK. Since 2022, they have been able to carry out checks on passport-holding British and Irish citizens by using digital verification services that have been certified by the government. A Home Office online scheme also exists to verify the status of some non-British or Irish citizens, whose immigration status is held electronically.

It is understood officials are looking at whether requiring a digital ID could provide a more consistent approach to verifying identity. They are also thought to be exploring whether the scheme could reduce the use of fake documents, and make it easier to target enforcement activity.

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What sort of non-scheme is this? Either grasp the nettle and introduce ID cards, or stop wibbling about “instincts”. You could, actually, have a (whisper it) blockchain scheme for ID: might there finally be a use? Also: the web headline here said “tackle illegal working”, and the page headline says “tackle illegal migration”. Which is it, BBC? Working and migration are very different things. Yes, it is time to “have a conversation” about digital ID. That’s been true for a decade.
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Google deletes net-zero pledge from sustainability website • Canada’s National Observer

Darius Snieckus and Rory White:

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Google’s CEO Sundar Pichai stood smiling in a leafy-green California garden in September 2020 and declared that the IT behemoth was entering the “most ambitious decade yet” in its climate action.

“Today, I’m proud to announce that we intend to be the first major company to operate carbon free — 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year,” he said, in a video announcement.

Pichai added that he knew the “road ahead would not be easy,” but Google “aimed to prove that a carbon-free future is both possible and achievable fast enough to prevent the most dangerous impacts of climate change.”

Five years on, just how hard Google’s “energy journey” would become is clear. In June, Google’s Sustainability website proudly boasted a headline pledge to achieve net-zero emissions by 2030. By July, that had all changed. 

An investigation by Canada’s National Observer has found that Google’s net-zero pledge has quietly been scrubbed, demoted from having its own section on the site to an entry in the appendices of the company’s sustainability report.

Genna Schnurbach, an external spokesperson for Google, referring to the report, told us: “As you can see from the document, Google is still committed to their ambition of net zero by 2030.” 

By tracing back through the history of Google’s Sustainability website, we found that the company edited it in late June, removing almost all mention of its lauded net-zero goals. (A separate website referring to data centres specifically has maintained its existing language around net-zero commitments.)

…“Running the global infrastructure behind our products and services, including AI, takes considerable energy,” said Google in its Environment 2025 report, which explained that it will be almost impossible to meet its erstwhile net-zero ambitions, partly due to its expansion in AI. 

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That pesky climate can just wait – we need to churn out a few school essays first.
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Making cash off ‘AI slop’: the surreal business of AI video • The Washington Post

Drew Harwell:

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Luis Talavera, a 31-year-old loan officer in eastern Idaho, first went viral in June with an AI-generated video on TikTok in which a fake but lifelike old man talked about soiling himself. Within two weeks, he had used AI to pump out 91 more, mostly showing fake street interviews and jokes about fat people to an audience that has surged past 180,000 followers, some of whom comment to ask if the scenes are real.

The low-effort, high-volume nature of AI videos has earned them the nickname “AI slop,” and Talavera knows his videos aren’t high art. But they earn him about $5,000 a month through TikTok’s creator program, he said, so every night and weekend he spends hours churning them out. “I’ve been on my couch holding my 3-month-old daughter, saying, ‘Hey, ChatGPT, we’re gonna create this script,’” he said.

Nothing has transformed or polluted the creative landscape in the past few years quite like AI video, whose tools turn text commands into full-color footage that can look uncannily real. In the three years since ChatGPT’s launch, AI videos have come to dominate the social web, copying and sometimes supplanting the human artists and videographers whose work helped train the systems in the first place.

Their power has spawned a wild cottage industry of AI-video makers, enticed by the possibility of infinite creation for minimal work. Adele, a 20-year-old student in Florida who spoke on the condition that only her first name be used because she fears harassment, told The Washington Post she is taking a break from college to focus on making money from her AI-video accounts. Another creator in Arizona who went viral with an AI airport kangaroo said he made $15,000 in commissions in three months, speaking on the condition of anonymity out of concern over online harassment.

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Um. I feel like I predicted this in August 2022:

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I suspect in the future there will be a premium on good, human-generated content and response, but that huge and growing amounts of the content that people watch and look at and read on content networks (“social networks” will become outdated) will be generated automatically, and the humans will be more and more happy about it.

In its way, it sounds like the society in Fahrenheit 451 (that’s 233ºC for Europeans) though without the book burning. There’s no need: why read a book when there’s something fascinating you can watch instead?

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On the one hand, nice to get a prediction right. On the other, is this good?
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Crypto scandal sinks Russian elite’s $8.5mn polar party cruise • FT

Polina Ivanova and Adrienne Klasa:

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More than 150 elite Russian-speaking guests were due to embark last month on a luxury cruise to the North Pole on board an icebreaker belonging to a company owned by France’s billionaire Pinault family, complete with Michelin-starred meals, saunas and Swarovski telescopes.

But the glamorous cruise from the Norwegian island of Svalbard never took place — and the Pinault-owned company, Ponant, now finds itself in court.

Ponant, which is headquartered in Marseille, has been sued in France by TRVL, the Russian-owned Dubai travel company that chartered the vessel.

The legal action followed Ponant’s cancellation of the trip after the US arrest of a Russian crypto entrepreneur whose Delaware-registered company acted as payments broker between the two, according to documents seen by the Financial Times. 

TRVL alleges that Ponant failed to refund it $5.8m of the total $8.5m chartering cost after the collapse of the high-end trip, which had attracted Russian-speaking corporate and tech executives and TV personalities. It is seeking more than €7m in damages and compensation.

The crypto entrepreneur, Iurii Gugnin — aka George Goognin, and founder of the broker Evita Investments, which handled the transaction for the North Pole cruise, according to TRVL’s court filing — was arrested by the FBI in New York in June and charged by US prosecutors with sanctions violations and money laundering.

They allege Gugnin laundered more than $500m and helped Russia acquire sensitive US technology.

Ponant and its owner, the Pinaults’ holding company Artémis, declined to comment on an ongoing legal proceeding. The court filing was shared with the FT by TRVL.

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I’m thinking five-part miniseries on a streaming service, do we know an actor who’s prepared to go bald and wear socks with sandals to play the lead role?
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ChatGPT and the Marjaʿ • Islamic Law Blog

Zahra Takhshid:

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whether an LLM-based application can eventually replace the role of marājiʿ [high-ranking Islamic cleric/scholar] is far from straightforward. For instance, can the reasoning of an LLM such as ChatGPT be regarded as a valid source of ijtihād in the same way that human reasoning (ʿaql) is? Are there meaningful parallels between following a mujtahid posthumously and relying on a non-human LLM model?

Does the fact that different LLMs may produce divergent answers pose a fundamental challenge, or is this merely analogous to the variance in legal opinions among marājiʿ? Even if an LLM replicates each step of ijtihād, does its response to a religious inquiry carry the necessary hujjiyyah—the authoritative force required for adherence? Beyond doctrinal concerns, the issue also demands a sociological perspective: why might a Muslim turn to ChatGPT for religious guidance in the first place? Is it the efficiency, accessibility, or the avoidance of human interaction—particularly when posing intimate or sensitive questions? These considerations merely scratch the surface of a broader, evolving discourse.

Many marājiʿ and research institutes are actively examining these questions.[20] At the Qom Seminary (Ḥawzah-ye ‘Ilmīyah-ye Qom), younger scholars are now offering advanced courses on the intersection of AI and Islam.[21] What is commonly referred to as “dars al-khārij”—the highest level of seminary study, undertaken by those who have completed their foundational coursework—includes discussions on AI and its implications for Islamic scholarship.

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Yes indeed: Iranian Islamic scholars are beginning to consult LLMs on questions of Islamic law, bypassing humans. Not sure this is necessarily a good thing.
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Chicago has the most lead pipes in the nation. We mapped them all • Grist

Keerti Gopal, Juanpablo Ramirez-Franco, Peter Aldhous, Clayton Aldern and Amy Qin:

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Chicago has the highest number of lead water service lines in the nation, with an estimated 412,000 of about 491,000 lines at least partly made of lead or contaminated with the dangerous metal. For the first time, Grist, Inside Climate News, and WBEZ have analyzed city data obtained through a public records request that allows Chicago’s residents to see where the problem is most acute — and how it intersects with poverty and race.

The analysis — which includes an interactive map that allows residents to search their address for information on their water lines — found that the toxic pipes plague residents throughout the city, across lines of race and class.
But majority Black and Latino neighborhoods — including Ramirez’s own — bear the biggest burden.

In majority-Latino census tracts, areas that in Chicago average around 1,500 households each,  92% of service lines require replacement. In majority-Black tracts, the figure is 89%. That compares to 74% of service lines in majority-white census tracts and 65% in the city’s nine majority-Asian tracts in and around Chinatown.

Among the worst affected are neighborhoods on the South and West sides, where residents grapple with other environmental health concerns due to the concentration of nearby industrial facilities, expressways, and freight trucks spewing air pollution. Communities there suffer from high rates of chronic disease and low life expectancy. 

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Don’t worry though! There’s a federal deadline to replace leap pipes by 2035. (Seriously?? 2035??) But Chicago is going to miss that – won’t be done, on current schedule, until 2076.
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UK Electricity Generation Map • Energy Dashboard

Energy Dashboard:

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The interactive map shows the location of the UK’s operational electricity generating stations and sites as of April 2025. Hover on a site to see more information.

The legend (top-right) alows you to toggle and filter by technology and shows total number of sites. You can switch to other data layers e.g. ‘Under Construction’, and also change the map layer (light / dark / satellite).

Operational data includes all technology types. For the other layers e.g. ‘In Planning’, only renewable energy sites are shown.

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Solar comprises almost half the generating capacity, on this. Unclear if that includes microgeneration. (Probably not?)
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Boycott the banquet, send a tweet. But ending the horror in Gaza still relies on the worst people in the world • The Guardian

Marina Hyde:

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Some of the worst people in the world – at least, some of the worst people without access to state armies – run the social media companies, and the idea that spending comfortable hours policing their platforms, working for them for free, is taking a stand or showing you care in any useful way tips beyond bizarre into cultural sickness.

Social media claimed to connect and empower people – a populist promise if ever you heard one – and yet what many of us hear our friends and family say all the time in conversations about the news is that they feel powerless. People have been atomised and narcotised by this supposedly unifying and uplifting technology, and when the great perspective of history is afforded to our descendants and perhaps even our future selves, we might well find that most of our present crises were catalysed by it rather than cured by it. This morning I saw a much-shared cut-out of Travis Kelce kissing Taylor Swift in their engagement photo, superimposed on top of a war-demolished building, above a bell hooks quote: “All our silences in the face of racist assault are acts of complicity.” Dear me. Stick it in a time capsule, along with an apology note for the cultural rubble it’ll have to be dug out of.

At operational level, however, things don’t change. The path to peace still goes through politicians with power. Many of them are still terrible people. They will still have to have unpleasant and even “toxic” conversations in which horse-trading and moral compromise are inevitable. And yet these things are still desirable, because this is the way it has always ended.

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Ostensibly about the intractable wars – Ukraine, Gaza – this observation struck me as too brutally true not to excerpt.
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America against China against America • Jasmi News

Jasmine Sun went back to China to visit her family and then travel with friends. One of her stopoffs was Shenzhen:

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Our first day in Shenzhen, we met a Chinese AI researcher at Gaga, a Western-style chain cafe that serves avocado kale smoothies and wagyu sliders (plastic gloves provided). He wore a black designer t-shirt and drove a NIO electric car that cost $70k USD. After finishing his master’s degree at a California university, he got married, moved to Shenzhen, and started work in a lab.

“What does a day in your life look like?” we asked. “I wake up and I check Twitter.”

“Do you have to work 996?” “No,” he laughed. “It’s 007 now.” (Midnight to midnight, seven days a week.)

“Do you guys worry about AI safety?” “We don’t think about risks at all.”

“Based,” said Aadil.

This was the first of several conversations that gave us a distinct impression of the Chinese tech community. Spirits are high, and decoupling policies like export controls only fuel their patriotic drive. “China feels bullied—that 100 year scar doesn’t come off. David Sacks is right about chips, but it’s too late now. You can’t slow us down.” After news of the US tariffs hit Chinese social media, netizens adopted the satirical nickname “川建国”: “Trump builds the nation,” or more elegantly, “Comrade Trump.”

Chinese engineers also seem more practical than their American counterparts. They’re here to build tech and make money; risk management is for bureaucrats; policy is only relevant insofar as it helps or hurts your work. This is something I think Westerners often get wrong. If you live in a single-party state, you are, on average, less ideological yourself. The politics have already been decided—no point wasting extra cycles coming up with something new.

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Very interesting perspective. (Via John Naughton.)
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• Why do social networks drive us a little mad? • Why does angry content seem to dominate what we see? • How much of a role do algorithms play in affecting what we see and do online? • What can we do about it? • Did Facebook have any inkling of what was coming in Myanmar in 2016? Read Social Warming, my latest book, and find answers – and more.

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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified