Week 15
H2 Fuel News: "MIT and DMI to develop first open-source hydrogen fuel cell powered motorcycle.. The MIT EVT hopes that the hydrogen fuel cell motorcycle development will help to overcome a range of challenges associated with BEVs while addressing concerns regarding shortages and environmental issues associated with lithium mining
H2 View: "US multinational Honeywell announced its new Liquid Organic Hydrogen Carrier (LOHC) solution to enable the long-distance transportation of clean hydrogen. The Global Hydrogen Flows report predicted that of the 660 million tonnes of hydrogen needed to meet global Net Zero by 2050, 400 million are expected to be transported over long-distances, with 190 million tonnes set to cross international borders"
Culture does not care about how it is labeled.. it will be transmited via osmosis, people-to-people, one-on-one through the land and its people no matter what. Cannot change your culture by labeling it differently, or by wearing funky hats, telling stories or following rituals. The duty of an intelligentia is to pinpoint this fact, argue around the true source of culture, lest be responsible for generating neurotic behavior in their students.
Herodotus was eating yoghurt in 800 BC; he didn't need some punk from Asia riding in on a donkey to teach him about it (who hadn't even arrived by then, that would be a thousand years later).
Turks arriving into Anatolia were assimilated, they melted away culturally and genetically. 1920s TR nationalization, "Turkification" merely performed a labeling trick. The founders wanted to create historical amnesia so they picked an exotic, irrelevant ethnicity (somewhat innocuous meaning simply Muslim as most founders were from the Balkans), and everyone in Anatolia were rebranded. Muslims were transitioned, history was rewritten so that all culture before "the arrival" was made to look like was brought by that irrelevant group, not pre-existing before their arrival. This is how Byzantian music became 'Turkish art music", Greek/Balkan/Arab food became "Turkish food", and Yemenese coffee became "Turkish coffee".
Therein lies the fallacy of the "we need more younger workers to support older population" argument.. Would more "young people" going into soft drink industry generate value, real benefits, in the long run? The problem is money creation is too tied to businesses (as credit), it needs to be tied in large part to salaries (which can later become credit).
Money, credit generated for this business segment is for useless production. Zero benefit for the humankind.
Statista: "Revenue in the Soft Drinks segment amounts to US$0.85tn in 2023"
Unemployment falling
UNRATE U6RATE REAL_UNRATE REAL_UNEMP_LEVEL
DATE
2023-02-01 3.6 6.8 7.863111 13072.5
2023-03-01 3.5 6.7 7.686033 12815.0
Inflation
2023-02-01 6.035613
2023-03-01 4.984974
"EU Hydrogen Bank could bring renewable hydrogen costs below €1/kg... ICIS data shows that renewable hydrogen could be sold for below €1/kg ($1.09/kg) if a producer obtains the maximum support provided by the European Hydrogen Bank"
H2 View: "UK delivers £23bn in low carbon investment in 2022.. The UK invested £23bn in new low carbon investment in 2022 encompassing hydrogen, renewables, carbon capture and storage"
Oil Price: "Sinopec Has Big Plans For Green Hydrogen.. Sinopec is set to build China's first 'West to East' green hydrogen transmission line to transfer hydrogen from renewable energy projects in Inner Mongolia's Ulanqab to Beijing. The company aims to produce 100,000 to 200,000 tonnes of green hydrogen annually, helping China transition towards renewable energy"
TFI Global: "US sidelined as Iran and Brazil forge a lasting alliance.. Lula, is back in the news again for stirring up controversy by setting up a direct shipping route with Iran"
CNBC: "Fed expects banking crisis to cause a recession this year, minutes show"
The Guardian: "Swimming pools of the rich driving city water crises, study says"
H2 Central: "1000-km Range Liquid Hydrogen Storage System Unveiled by Weishi Energy.. The company launched its 'gas hydrogen + liquid hydrogen' dual technology route in the field of hydrogen storage, along with its vehicle-mounted liquid hydrogen storage system called “Jupiter,” which has a mass hydrogen storage density of ≥8wt% and a cruising range exceeding 1000 km"
Crowd Wisdom works only for subjects the crowd has an expertise in eg gauging the general acceptability of politician as leader, or guessing the weight of an ox. That sort of judgement is likely ingrained; averaging can lead to better results. But even that fails sometimes, remember 1960 or 2000.
H2 Insight: "An Anglo-Spanish company says it could produce naturally occurring hydrogen from a giant underground reservoir in the foothills of the Pyrenees for €0.75 ($0.82) per kilogram — about half the current cost of producing grey H2 from unabated fossil gas"
Job growth slowing cld indicate less growth less growth in wages will imply less inflation, meaning less risk for bonds, so they buy bonds, their price rises, yields fall. Simple.
"Treasury yields fall after data shows U.S. job growth slowed in March"
The Geopolitica: "The United Arab Emirates, Egypt, and Germany Will Invest $34 billion In a Green Hydrogen Project in Mauritania.. [A] German investment company, Conjuncta, along with the United Arab Emirates renewable energy firm Masdar, and Egypt’s renewable energy firm Infinity have signed an agreement with the Mauritanian government to build a 34 billion green hydrogen plant with an electrolyzer capacity of up to 10 gigawatts near the Mauritanian capital, Nouakchott. Every year, the green hydrogen plant will produce 8 million tonnes of ammonia or other hydrogen-based products along with green hydrogen. The plant’s first phase will be going to be completed by 2028 with a planned capacity of 400 megawatts"
"@Hypx@mastodon.social
Strasbourg orders 60 hydrogen buses from CaetanoBus"
Modern system is not built for direct democracy. Half-assed attempt to coexist within the current system will make things worse. Good leadership has better chance for improv rather than crowd wisdom (!) at policy level.
WSJ: "Direct Democracy Dies in California.. Progressives want to stop voters from challenging state laws via referendum"
H2 Fuel News: "BAE Systems to provide Rochester’s first hydrogen buses with drive systems"
Clean fuel hitjob movie got plastered. With a budget of 40 mil, it lost money. I love it.
😂 😂 😂
u.boxofficemojo("Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery")
Out[1]:
{'Domestic Opening': '$9,400,000',
'Domestic': '$13,280,000',
'International': '$13,280,000',
'Worldwide Total': '$13,280,000',
'Release Date': 'November 23, 2022'}
Keynes' idea for a world currency Bancor did not use gold either.
Some news suggest the new BRICS currency could be backed by gold; if true gold would be there to provide convertibility assurance to non-BRICS currencies. A global, dominant currency does not need gold - Nixon's petrodollar did not need it, he was like I have my military and an agreement with the top oil producer to keep it legit.
Kubrick apparently used Arthur C. Clarke's story as a front to get funding, but visually hid / encoded a less rosy picture about the future in it.
"2001: A Space Odyssey - How Kubrick fooled us all"
Story has down days, up days, ends up in the same place.. -10 plus +10 equals zero. But all kinds of drama in between, that surely benefits some.
NBC News: "The Nashville Metropolitan Council voted Monday to return Justin Jones to the state Legislature after he was removed last week by Republicans for protesting gun violence on the House floor"
If the abortion issue was so important Dems could've codified Roe in law with 2009-10 supermajority. They didn't because it was better to exploit the issue firing up the donor base taking their money rather than solving the problem. It's still the Dick Morris plan, on major issues it is uniparty, for others manufactured heated "debates", schisms, abt "5G" issues - Guns Gays Gender God Green.
Let's not forget about the self-reinforcing effect of inflation, excess wage increases is not the only culprit.
FONOP (Freedom of Navigation Op) in South China Sea count, 6 by Obama 11 by Trump.
RU advance, last 7 days
cs = ["Bakhmut","BM Railway","BM River"]
u.sm_plot_ukr1('ukrdata/fl-0411.csv','ukrdata/fl-0404.csv',cs,clat=48.59,clon=37.98,zoom=0.005)
That ship was last spotted at a Japanese base; major firepower piled up over there BTW, occasionally a ship from the base takes a little trip, does a little moonwalk up and down someone else's backyard, goes back to port.
sh = np.vstack([np.array(u.usnavy()[['name','lat','lon']]), ['Taiwan',23,120]])
u.sm_plot_list1(29, 131, 2.0, sh)
TASS: "'On April 10, the USS Milius guided-missile destroyer illegally entered the waters around the Meiji Reef near China’s Nansha islands without the approval of the Chinese government,' China Central Television [said]"
Chomsky: "[NYT Opinion] The False Promise of ChatGPT.. OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Bard and Microsoft’s Sydney.. have been hailed as the first glimmers on the horizon of artificial general intelligence — that long-prophesied moment when mechanical minds surpass human brains.. That day may come, but its dawn is not yet breaking.. [as long as] machine learning programs like ChatGPT continue to dominate the field of A.I...
The human mind is not, like ChatGPT and its ilk, a lumbering statistical engine for pattern matching, gorging on hundreds of terabytes of data and extrapolating the most likely conversational response or most probable answer to a scientific question. On the contrary, the human mind is a surprisingly efficient and even elegant system that operates with small amounts of information; it seeks not to infer brute correlations among data points but to create explanations..
It summarizes the standard arguments in the literature by a kind of super-autocomplete.. In short, ChatGPT and its brethren are constitutionally unable to balance creativity with constraint. They either overgenerate (producing both truths and falsehoods, endorsing ethical and unethical decisions alike) or undergenerate (exhibiting noncommitment to any decisions and indifference to consequences). Given the amorality, faux science and linguistic incompetence of these systems, we can only laugh or cry at their popularity"
Al Monitor: "Saudi delegation in Yemen for peace talks with rebels.. The delegation's arrival comes roughly a month after China helped broker a surprise rapprochement between Saudi Arabia and Iran"
Bloomberg: "China Energy Investment Corporation signed an agreement with French state utility Electricite de France SA to construct an offshore green hydrogen facility for energy storage, according to a statement posted on the Chinese company’s website"
NYT: "French Visit Undercuts U.S. Efforts to Control China"
Bakhmut became strategically key, both due to its location (at a gateway to the rest of Donbas), also bcz Ukraine decided to take a stand there and make it important. Looking at its topo I can see why - has two funky mountain systems going into it from South, and another ranging along its West. Surely UA exploited that structure to set up staggered defense lines, and delayed RU for as long as they could. But it looks like the game is nearing its end.
A lot of ignorant people are commenting on things they don't fully understand.
"@timnitGebru@dair-community.social
Because we were looking for more things to do when these clowns decided to write 'the letter,' [about so-called 'AI pause'] and cite our #StochasticParrots paper while saying the opposite of what we write, we.. wrote a statement in response.. It is dangerous to distract ourselves with a fantasized AI-enabled utopia or apocalypse which promises either a 'flourishing' or 'potentially catastrophic' future. Such language that inflates the capabilities of automated systems and anthropomorphizes them, as we note in Stochastic Parrots, deceives people into thinking that there is a sentient being behind the synthetic media. This not only lures people into uncritically trusting the outputs of systems like ChatGPT, but also misattributes agency"
NATO was useful for Asia Minor for a while but the Western alliance has not been doing well - it is mostly the instigator of chaos now, creating much damage offering little in return.
It will all be fine. NATO is just great.
Reuters: "Finland joins NATO in historic shift"
The Sound Stylistics - Soul Dynamite #music
At least WH is owning up to a good decision to pull out from AFG when it did. But it is possible WH was way too embarrassed about the situation earlier, and went cowboy with Ukraine to offset it, to "show strength", also trying to deter "certain countries" who might get funky ideas later. That did not work too well for Ukraine.
PBS: "U.S. report on Afghanistan evacuation blames intelligence failures, Trump administration"
Quick reminder on which countries are responsible for CO2 emissions
NL could turn into a "seasteading nation" by then, as in most houses will be floating.
Checked flooding levels using tool here. Below is the result of simulated 7m rise. Red parts will be regions under water.
Map 1, Map 2, Map 3, Map 4, Map 5.
NYC, South Florida, Venice, Shangai, Netherlands are in trouble.
DK was the Chief Scientific Adviser to the UK Government 2000-07.
David King: "Once the ice on Greenland is gone, global sea levels will be up to 7.4 metres higher"
Informed Comment: "The last time there was this much CO2, there were Sabertooth Tigers, California Monsoons and an Undersea Florida"
WGRZ: "[University of Buffolo] is part of New York State's team — along with 6 other Northeast states — to seek $1.6 billion in federal tax dollars for a 'hydrogen hub'"
H2 Fuel News: "Conversions from diesel to hydrogen trucks are drawing interest.. Researchers from the University of New South Wales have developed a system that converts up to 90% of diesel operations, with an efficiency boost of 26%. This system does not require high-purity hydrogen fuel, as it uses a stratification technique to form pockets of higher and lower H2 concentrations, reducing nitrous oxide emissions"
Informed Comment: "Netanyahu Brought Israeli Extremists to Power and Seeks more Arab Recognition; He can’t have Both"
WION: "Coronavirus led to brain damage in two infants infected during pregnancy: Study"
When it was on, the game was great. You could even do variations; you could say "Democrats and Republicans need to come together" even when the schisms they experienced were manufactured and subpar, but the uniter narrative offered some brownie points.. You could pretend to hate the game, while being a much loved player in it (at least for one side)..
The gun issue became deadly of course due to neglect, in a sane political discourse it could have been solved. Now it is hot-button material, untouchable, member on each side need to be fanatical about it to affirm their party allegiance.
The establishment is dying to go back to that narrative (great for ratings, makes politicians look like they are actually discussing something, albeit second-rate, usually agreeable stuff). At the same time both sides offer bipartisan support to a war that could be ended in a day, letting a legit journalist rot in jail and healthcare issue kept MIA. The guy who says he signed up to military to fight in useless wars because he was poor and had no healthcare gets no traction. That shit is just too real - not part of the plan.
Ah the good ol' gun issue is back, with racial overtones this time #Tennesee. Culture war, the next phase. Throw in some abortion, "trans issues", with little toxic masculunity on the side the picture would be complete. Continuing on the Dick Morris plan.
"We go to the moon because I'm haaahd"
NYT: "China to Do Military Drills Around Taiwan"
The Japan Times: "U.S. deploys nuclear submarine in Mideast amid Iran tension.. The USS Florida — capable of carrying as many as 154 Tomahawk land-attack cruise missiles — began transiting the Suez Canal from the Mediterranean Sea"