AI Use Note: Main body text entirely human written. Claude (Opus 4.8) helped develop models of animal life histories in the appendix.
Cross-posted from Good Structures.
Executive Summary
* Animal advocates sometimes make claims like “there are X of this animal...
“How long have you been v*g*n?”
This is one of the most common icebreakers at animal protection events. It’s a baseline assumption, and it mostly holds true: if you’re out advocating for animals not to be tortured or abused, realistically these days you are v**n, or close. And it makes for good conversation. It seems fairly safe to assume when you meet strangers.
But this assumption is hurting the movement in a way which we don’t always notice: someone new comes into the sp...
Summary
Back in November 2023 I posted here to launch Spiro and raise our first $198k. Two and a half years later this is an update and a fundraiser for the next step.
The short version: we've now reached over-5,900 people with TB preventive medicine, including over 3,000 children under five years old. Our early results have held up well an...
A big expansion of the non-defence science budget, $8B/yr->$30B+/yr, with ML/genomics/disaster prevention being among the focus areas for the additional funding - interesting! Yet less than federal national defence spending ($60B/yr)., and much less than private R&D ($400B/yr). [1]
I guess groups that are already using defence research grants (maybe AI research) or private funding would be affected to a small-to-medium extent, whereas ones that are not (disaster prevention) could feel a big difference.
1. See Fig 3 and Table 1 at https://fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/R44307.pdf