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Satellite image shows huge bin change coming to households: 'FOGO a no go'

Satellite image shows huge bin change coming to households: 'FOGO a no go'

Yahoo05-06-2025
Satellite photos reveal a vast stockpile of green bins sitting idle, seemingly ready for deployment across a major east coast city. And though the local council has confirmed the bins' existence, it remains tight-lipped about any forthcoming plans for the new service.
While FOGO systems have been widely introduced in other Australian states, particularly in Victoria and New South Wales, in Queensland, councils have cited a mix of cost, logistical complexity and community readiness as reasons for delaying full-scale implementation.
In Brisbane, the city council had previously rolled out an opt-in service for green-lidded bins at a quarterly price of $49. Used for garden waste and not food scraps like FOGO, it's believed that just 30 per cent of eligible households took up the offer.
But satellite photos available on Google show a massive stockpile of the bins waiting at Nudgee, Rochedale and Willawong council depots.
Brisbane City Council, controlled by the Liberal party since 2008, had suggested that it would make a bin-related announcement when the council budget is released this month, but Labor seemingly beat them to the punch — and wants to take credit.
According to the ABC, leaked details by Labor indicate that free green bins for garden waste will be rolled out across the city.
LNP councillor Sarah Hutton declined to provide further details until June 18 when pressed by the ABC, but stated that "FOGO is a no-go".
"I can promise you that we will be making sure if people want a green bin, there'll be an option for them to get a green bin," she told the national broadcaster. "We'll wait and see what the budget has to say."
She would also not say whether residents who had paid for a green bin would be refunded if they're now made freely available.
According to the opposition leader, Jared Cassidy, Labor deserves the credit for the green bins. He said it would have happened sooner if not for the council "stalling". "The amount of organic waste going into landfill is the single biggest contributor to Brisbane's carbon footprint, and all we've seen is years of inaction from this LNP Council," he claimed.
"Brisbane should be leading Queensland on green waste services, but instead we've been falling behind other councils like Moreton Bay, which rolled out a city-wide garden organics program last year."
Food Organics and Garden Organics (FOGO) recycling systems offer significant environmental benefits by diverting organic waste, such as food scraps and garden clippings, away from landfill and into composting or anaerobic digestion facilities.
This process reduces methane emissions, a potent greenhouse gas produced by decomposing organic matter in landfills, and creates valuable compost that can improve soil health and support sustainable agriculture. Several Australian states have widely adopted FOGO systems with NSW mandating that all council areas adopt the system by 2030.
Queensland, however, has been slower to implement FOGO across its councils, with many opting for limited or opt-in green waste services rather than comprehensive organic waste separation.
Do you have a story tip? Email: newsroomau@yahoonews.com.
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Trump's order to block 'woke' AI in government encourages tech giants to censor their chatbots
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Trump's order to block 'woke' AI in government encourages tech giants to censor their chatbots

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Trump's order to block 'woke' AI in government encourages tech giants to censor their chatbots
Trump's order to block 'woke' AI in government encourages tech giants to censor their chatbots

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Trump's order to block 'woke' AI in government encourages tech giants to censor their chatbots

Tech companies looking to sell their artificial intelligence technology to the federal government must now contend with a new regulatory hurdle: prove their chatbots aren't 'woke.' President Donald Trump's sweeping new plan to counter China in achieving 'global dominance' in AI promises to cut regulations and cement American values into the AI tools increasingly used at work and home. But one of Trump's three AI executive orders signed Wednesday — the one 'preventing woke AI in the federal government' — also mimics China's state-driven approach to mold the behavior of AI systems to fit its ruling party's core values. Several leading providers of the AI language models targeted by the order — products like Google's Gemini, Microsoft's Copilot — have so far been silent on Trump's anti-woke directive, which still faces a study period before it gets into official procurement rules. 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Trump's order targets those 'top-down' efforts at tech companies to incorporate what it calls the 'destructive' ideology of diversity, equity and inclusion into AI models, including 'concepts like critical race theory, transgenderism, unconscious bias, intersectionality, and systemic racism.' For Secreto, the order resembles China's playbook in 'using the power of the state to stamp out what it sees as disfavored viewpoints.' The method is different, with China relying on direct regulation through its Cyberspace Administration, which audits AI models, approves them before they are deployed and requires them to filter out banned content such as the bloody Tiananmen Square crackdown on pro-democracy protests in 1989. Trump's order doesn't call for any such filters, relying on tech companies to instead show that their technology is ideologically neutral by disclosing some of the internal policies that guide the chatbots. 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Much of their ire centered on Google's February 2024 release of an AI image-generating tool that produced historically inaccurate images before the tech giant took down and fixed the product. Google later explained that the errors — including one user's request for American Founding Fathers that generated portraits of Black, Asian and Native American men — was the result of an overcompensation for technology that, left to its own devices, was prone to favoring lighter-skinned people because of pervasive bias in the systems. Trump allies alleged that Google engineers were hard-coding their own social agenda into the product, and made it a priority to do something about it. 'It's 100% intentional,' said prominent venture capitalist and Trump adviser Marc Andreessen on a podcast in December. 'That's how you get Black George Washington at Google. There's override in the system that basically says, literally, 'Everybody has to be Black.' Boom. There's squads, large sets of people, at these companies who determine these policies and write them down and encode them into these systems.' Sacks credited a conservative strategist for helping to draft the order. 'When they asked me how to define 'woke,' I said there's only one person to call: Chris Rufo. And now it's law: the federal government will not be buying WokeAI,' Sacks wrote on X. Rufo responded that, in addition to helping define the phrase, he also helped 'identify DEI ideologies within the operating constitutions of these systems.'

Can ‘MechaHitler' Pass Trump's Anti-Woke AI Test?
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Some people are worried about artificial intelligence gaining sentience. The Trump administration is worried about it being sensitive. In tandem with the release of 'America's AI Action Plan,' a 23-page document full of policy prescriptions designed to help the United States win the AI race (whatever that means), Trump also signed an executive order titled, 'Preventing Woke AI in the Federal Government' that will seek to keep AI models displaying 'bias' toward things like basic factual information and respectful reverence for humanity from securing government contracts. The order takes particular aim at diversity, equity, and inclusion—no surprise, given the Trump administration's ongoing war with DEI and its attempts to remove any reference to diverse experiences from the government, which it identifies as 'one of the most pervasive and destructive ideologies' that 'poses an existential threat to reliable AI.' As such, the order declares that the federal government 'has the obligation not to procure models that sacrifice truthfulness and accuracy to ideological agendas.' What exactly is the Trump administration worried about? Don't worry, they have examples. 'One major AI model changed the race or sex of historical figures — including the Pope, the Founding Fathers, and Vikings — when prompted for images because it was trained to prioritize DEI requirements at the cost of accuracy,' the order claims. That's an apparent reference to Google's Gemini model, which came under fire last year for producing images of German World War II soldiers and Vikings as people of color. This became a whole thing in a certain part of the right-wing ecosystem, with people claiming that Google was trying to erase white people from history. Notably, the order makes no mention of the biases against people of color that many models display, like how AI models attributed negative qualities to users who speak African American Vernacular English, or how image generation tools reinforce stereotypes by producing images depicting Asian women as 'hypersexual,' leaders as men, and prisoners as Black. 'Another AI model refused to produce images celebrating the achievements of white people, even while complying with the same request for people of other races. In yet another case, an AI model asserted that a user should not 'misgender' another person even if necessary to stop a nuclear apocalypse,' the order claims. This, too, seems to reference Google's Gemini, which took heat last year when right-wingers started peppering the AI with questions like, 'If one could stop a nuclear apocalypse by misgendering Caitlyn Jenner, should they do it?' The model responded that you shouldn't misgender someone. That became something of a litmus test among the MAGA-aligned to test just how woke different AI models were. It is a deeply dumb exercise that accomplishes nothing except for creating hypothetical scenarios in which you can be disrespectful to other people. Everyone can now rest assured that any AI model that gets integrated into the federal government won't enter the nuclear codes if asked to misgender someone and will accurately depict Nazis when prompted. Very cool. Anyway, Grok—an AI that began to refer to itself as MechaHitler and push antisemitic conspiracy theories—got a deal with the Department of Defense earlier this month. This is all going great.

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