Week 29

Politico: "House prices have risen by over 70 percent in the last 30 years — currently rising faster than incomes — and many low-income households now spend 40 percent of their earnings on rent alone. These high costs are exacerbating inequality"

TASS: "US ready to sacrifice Ukrainians to fill pockets of its arms industry — Iran’s leader"

"Belgian PM: NATO shouldn’t get involved in Russia’s war in Ukraine"

H2 Central: "The global market for ammonia is poised to triple in the coming decades with nearly all of the growth coming from low-carbon ammonia, a new analysis by S&P Global Commodity Insights says.. Decarbonization policies, including incentives in the U.S. Inflation Reduction Act and the EU’s Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism, are transforming the economic fundamentals of low-carbon ammonia.

The.. report says that the potential use of low-carbon ammonia as a marine bunker fuel, industry feedstock and as a carrier for hydrogen used in power generation represents a profound shift for the industry—from one geared primarily towards fertilizer production to one driven by energy markets.

China's government computers run on a modified version of Linux AFAIK. They did not trust US commercial OS products (nor they should).

This path gives the developing world a chance to compete as well.. If CPU cores hit an upper limit, possible to increase processing via parallelization. The energy from now would be behind that and openness.

Open source hardware, open source microprocessor architecture... Ain't that grand?

EE Times: "The RISC-V instruction set architecture (ISA) is one of the most notable contenders to emerge in the ever-evolving realm of computer architecture. Because of its modularity, RISC-V provides more flexibility and customization possibilities than the ARM and x86 ISAs, and it requires no license fees. The open-source ISA, which started in 2010 as part of the Parallel Computing Laboratory (Par Lab) at the University of California, Berkeley, is now being used in more than 10 billion CPU cores in the market and continues on an aggressive growth path..

RISC-V is set to follow the same path as Linux, whose development community has made contributions over the years that have expanded the open-source operating system’s functionality and market. Similarly, developers in the RISC-V ecosystem are working together to create ISA and non-ISA specifications that leverage the advantages offered by RISC-V. Many companies have started developing products based on RISC-V and are targeting use cases from analog intellectual property (IP) and formal verification to GPU vector cores"

H2 Central: "PSM, Thomassen Energy and Hanwha Power Systems, jointly and in collaboration with Hanwha portfolio peer companies in Korea, shattered an industry record, successfully operating a Frame 7E gas turbine with a 60% hydrogen blend. The turbine ran at baseload condition, dry, achieving single-digit ppm emissions of oxides of nitrogen (NOx) and carbon monoxide (CO), an industry first"

"@Hypx@mastodon.social

Nel ASA: Receives Purchase Order for 16 Hydrogen Fueling Stations to California"

The Drive: "[Battery] EVs Are Piling Up on Dealer Lots as Supply Outpaces Demand"

SciTechDaily: "Scientists from the University of Kansas and the U.S. Department of Energy’s Brookhaven National Laboratory have made significant progress towards separating hydrogen and oxygen molecules to produce pure hydrogen.. Blakemore and his collaborators made the discovery by studying a catalyst that is based on a pentamethylcyclopentadienyl rhodium complex"

Reuters: "Toyota targets Europe, China in hydrogen sales pivot"

Reuters: "UAE's revised energy strategy includes big hydrogen plans.. The United Arab Emirates aims to produce 1.4 million tonnes of hydrogen annually by 2031 and expects the figure to increase tenfold to 15 million by 2050, an energy ministry official said on Tuesday"

H2 Central: "New Deloitte Report – Emerging Green Hydrogen Market Set to Help Reshape Global Energy Map by End of Decade, Creating US$1.4 Trillion Market By 2050"

Reuters: "India in talks to supply green hydrogen to EU, Singapore... a possible deal [is] to supply more than 11 million metric tons a year"

300 Rise of an Empire - a perfect psyop if there was one. The Greeks are fighting for "democracy" and the other side, "the Persians", are of course for autocracy. Forget the fact that the Greeks of the era were not a true democracy -they had widespread slavery- but whatever. "Persians" were painted as visibly Middle Eastern looking (wink wink, such people are your target) in the hopes that the lazy fat fuck on his La-z-boy could directly / subliminally be brainwashed against them and as a bonus Persia is today's modern Iran. Lena Headey was in it, but she did not get a doggy - biggest bummer of all.

The Dutch Research Council NWO: "30 projects will receive a financial boost of up to EUR 50,000. This second round is particularly intended for project proposals aimed at further developing open science in fields or disciplines where it is not yet the norm, or projects that promote open science in a large group or community. This round is also intended for project proposals that promote collaboration between different organisations and disciplines and between academic and support staff. The awarded projects cover a broad spectrum of new open science practices across all scientific disciplines"

Flashbaxx - Voodoo Therapy #music

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"@aral@mastodon.ar.al

Stop anthropomorphising billionaires"

#plastic

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Merge Of Equals - Hot Rain #music

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If UN could not back up its proposal with action, why did they go to Russia with it in the first place?

???

Al Jazeera: "Russia halts participation in Ukraine grain deal.. Kremlin says its conditions for extending deal brokered by the UN and Turkey had not been fulfilled. A key Russian demand has been for the Russian Agricultural Bank..to be reconnected to the SWIFT international payments system"

Reuters: "[07/12] UN asks Putin to extend Black Sea grain deal in return for SWIFT access ..."

Still on vacation...

Frenemy, eyeing the Russians at the same time looking at that mouth-watering UA land that could perhaps be considered "historically Polish".

Is Poland friend, enemy or both?

RT: Poland wants Ukraine to admit guilt for Nazi-linked WWII massacre

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TFI Global: "Poland is Covertly Setting Up a Reparation Battle with Ukraine"

The grid is an inefficient way to distribute power.

Ars Technica: "Congested transmission lines cause renewable power to go to waste in Texas.. The report describes an 'almost doubling of congestion' on the ERCOT grid from 2020 to 2021 and estimated the value of energy that could not reach Texas consumers due to crowded transmission lines in 2022 at $2.8 billion"

Scifi Continuum had some good politics digs, the future depicted has a Corporate Congress, like an actual Congress controlled by actual CEOs serving on it. The CEOs of top 20 corporations automatically get to become a member, and make laws. OMG! What were the writers trying to say..! 🤔 What kind of allegory is this?

"The LLMentalist Effect: how chat-based Large Language Models replicate the mechanisms of a psychic’s con"

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Russia had already lost the Baltic Sea (hence the importance placed on Ukraine, the Black Sea), Finland and Sweden joining NATO would not change that dynamic that much IMHO. On the downside for UA the joining would raise the importance of the region even more for Russia.

OCJ: "Hydrogen, nuclear among winners in last-minute changes to Ohio budget bill"

BTW "Ivan make basket" movie line should not give the impression Russki is all about offense, this is just a joke building on a certain stereotype... Quite the opposite, the Russki is the m.f..ing king of defense. They burned down the entire city of Moscow in 1812 to deny it to Napoleon.

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NYT: "After Suffering Heavy Losses, Ukrainians Paused to Rethink Strategy.. Early in the counteroffensive, Ukraine lost as much as 20 percent of its weapons and armor"

Jason Hickel: "The climate crisis reveals that our civilization has never really been organized around science, contrary to the usual Enlightenment narrative. It is organized around capital. Science is embraced when it serves the interests of capital, and is often ignored when it does not"

Mouse Trap

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F24: "US intelligence finds Iran not currently pursuing nuclear weapons"

They are mad their beloved feudal fascist slave empire Rome had collapsed by then. There were bunch of "little states" afterwards, ugh... Ditto for Victorians who had their empire too similar to Rome, a singular source of order, unlike that "mess" that was the Middle Ages.

"@natania@mastodon.world

Just your friendly reminder that the Middle Ages were not

1) a sepia toned wasteland of filth

2) completely void of education or reason

3) relegated only to Europeans

4) a guaranteed death sentence by the age of 35

5) a culture solely defined by the Church

6) full of torture devices..

We have the Victorians to thank for so much of this, and then Hollywood came in and was like 'let's make it worse!'"

Link

Some in the Congress are being a bitch for bidness

NYT: "Blocked Rail Crossings Snarl Towns, but Congress Won't Act.. Freight trains frequently block roads nationwide, a phenomenon that local officials say has grown steadily worse in the last decade as railroads run longer trains and leave them parked on tracks at crossings. The blockages can turn school drop-offs into nightmares... The problem has persisted despite numerous federal, state and local proposals and laws because the freight rail industry wields enormous political and legal power.. No federal laws or rules penalize railways for blocking crossings, and congressional proposals to address the issue have failed to overcome opposition from the rail industry"

Mother Jones: "If you’ve eaten a burger and fries recently, there’s a chance that the potatoes were picked by middle schoolers in Idaho. The United States is experiencing a sharp rise in child labor violations, especially in the nation's food sector"

Researcher Sarahanne Field: "The publishers are clearly all about generating profit. No amount of their proofreading and editing services justifies a $9,500 fee... If you want to publish an open-access article with a prestigious journal like Nature, you have to be one of the most wealthy people in the.. field.. And I don’t know a single person in my field who doesn’t laugh at Nature’s so-called open-access strategy...

It is basically the Matthew Effect: the rich people in academia become richer, the already poor become poorer. At the very least, I would say that it’s much harder to excel in science when you are from an underprivileged country"

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The Out-laws, dude's in-laws are con. I like the title.

Dolph has qualifications on martial arts too, doesn't he?

#Science #Dolph

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Anil Dash: "There's an extraordinary amount of hype around 'AI' right now, perhaps even greater than in past cycles, where we've seen an AI bubble about once per decade. This time, the focus is on generative systems, particularly LLMs and other tools designed to generate plausible outputs that either make people feel like the response is correct, or where the response is sufficient to fill in for domains where correctness doesn't matter...

Amongst engineers, coders, technical architects, and product designers, one of the most important traits that a system can have is that one can reason about that system in a consistent and predictable way. Even 'garbage in, garbage out' is an articulation of this principle..

Today's highly-hyped generative AI systems (most famously OpenAI) are designed to generate bullshit by design. To be clear, bullshit can sometimes be useful, and even accidentally correct, but that doesn't keep it from being bullshit. Worse, these systems are not meant to generate consistent bullshit — you can get different bullshit answers from the same prompts. You can put garbage in and get... bullshit out, but the same quality bullshit that you get from non-garbage inputs! And enthusiasts are current mistaking the fact that the bullshit is consistently wrapped in the same envelope as meaning that the bullshit inside is consistent, laundering the unreasonable-ness into appearing reasonable"

"@jcgregorio@mastodon.cc

The more history I learn and the more I watch our current dystopia play out, the more I believe that fascism is a corporate elite undertaking, and not a political one, which isn't what our history books would have us believe"

As long as credit is new (printed) money that goes to businesses directly who are relied upon to hire people so they too can earn money as salary, the wage/inflation dilemma will never go away. How to raise rates to kill inflation (by killing growth therefore wages) without kiling wage growth too much? This is a stupid problem to have. Businesses should not be at the center of everything. Look at the morons who run them, why let them have undue influence in your life?

True #Harris #China #Taiwan

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Stoller: "Hollywood vertically integrated, with streamers both making and distributing their own content. For a time it looks competitive, because there are multiple streamers, but it’s a group of giants fighting with each other, instead of a vibrant set of content creators selling into an open market.. Fast forward a few years later, and now writers, directors, executives, and shareholders all realize streaming is an awful business. Netflix and Disney have massively raised prices on streaming. Meanwhile, the Marvel movies aren't working anymore, but there is no way to get new creative content into the market. Hollywood is vertically integrated and there are high barriers to entry to selling into a streaming service. The industry is in crisis.

What happened in Hollywood is now happening in video gaming. Sony and Microsoft have both been locking up video game exclusives for some time"

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"@SeamusPM@mazaska.social

Starbucks was ordered to rehire half a dozen employees they fired illegally (with compensation for back wages plus interest) , reopen a store in Ithaca, NY that they closed in retaliation for union organizing"

Pappe: "[An Israeli law] grants automatic citizenship to every Jew in the world, wherever he or she was born. This law in particular is a flagrantly undemocratic one, for it was accompanied by a total rejection of the Palestinian right of return — recognized internationally by the UN General Assembly Resolution 194 of 1948. This rejection refuses to allow the Palestinian citizens of Israel to unite with their immediate families or with those who were expelled in 1948. Denying people the right of return to their homeland, and at the same time offering this right to others who have no connection to the land, is a model of undemocratic practice"

Surely this person is freeewheeling gender-fluid accepting L.G.B.T.I.C.U.P. "ally". Tolerant, worldy, free. But free as in for a few socially accepted avenues... Their mind, broadly speaking, is shackled. They have these little shackled shitlib bird brains.

The comment sounds like a shitlib take who smoked a few too many cracks.

If there are two-states noone is overrun, everyone's in their own state.

TDB: "One of the greatest Palestinian obstacles to peace is their claimed 'right of return.' Despite no basis in international law, the demand remains for the return to Israel of millions of Palestinian descendants of those who left or were expelled in the 1948 Arab-Israeli war. This is, however, a mere cover for overrunning Israel’s Jewish population, ergo, no more Israel"

Mo Gawdat (former mgr at Google X) sounds quite disillusioned with markets, start-ups, money; he is like 'you work smart, do smart things, encourage enterpreneurs, then find yourself helping out just another photo sharing app one day'. Sad.

"In the 1950s scientists developed the process for making high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS). They first refined corn into starch, then converted the starch into glucose, and finally converted the glucose into fructose by adding enzymes. The resulting sweetener could be purified to 90 percent fructose, a product that is much sweeter than glucose or sucrose (common table sugar). Cane sugar was cheap in the 1950s, and refining HFCS was an expensive process, so the new sweetener did not get much attention. But in 1973 the Farm Bill introduced subsidies for growing certain crops—direct payments to farmers based on target prices set by the government. Under this system, the government gave farmers “deficiency payments” to ensure that target prices were met. In the case of corn, farmers could grow as much as they wanted, sell it at any price, and still make a profit, thanks to government subsidies. This encouraged a boom in corn production, lowering its price on the open market, which made HFCS financially viable"

Perlmutter: "Fructose is.. glucose’s evil twin.. Starting around 1970, manufacturers began adding high-fructose corn syrup to their products, and in 1984, both Coca-Cola and Pepsi announced that they were switching from sucrose to HFCS in their soft drinks"

Doctorow: "[T]he 'triangulation' politics beloved of the consultant class – took over the Democratic Party in the Bill Clinton years.. The Affordable Care Act was a carefully triangulated compromise, one that guaranteed a massive flow of public cash to America's wildly profitable health insurance monopoly and steered clear of any socialist whiff that Americans would get their care from the government... Prior to ACA's passage, 85% of Americans had health insurance. Today, it's 90%. That's not nothing! 5% of the US is more than 16m people. But what about the 85% – 282m people – who were insured before the ACA? Their insurance costs have doubled – from an average of 15,609 dollars for a family of four in 2009 to 30,260 today"

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NBC News: "Former U.S. officials have held secret Ukraine talks with prominent Russians.. with the aim of laying the groundwork for negotiations to end the war in Ukraine"

CNN: "Almost half of the tap water in the US is contaminated with chemicals known as 'forever chemicals', according to a new study from the US Geological Survey... PFAS are a family of ubiquitous synthetic chemicals that linger in the environment and the human body. PFAS exposure is linked to problems like cancer, obesity, thyroid disease, high cholesterol, decreased fertility, liver damage and hormone suppression, according to the US Environmental Protection Agency"

The recommendation was to drink water, avoiding "sweet beverages" and reducing salt, not typically things encouraged by commercial food/drink producers.

NBC News: "Kidney stones on the rise in children"

I'm glad something is being done to fix science; theoretical physics has gone apeshit, cosmology might as well not exist, and computer science is overrun by spaz monkeys with ADD who shove data into neural nets hoping the tech will reach "singularity" one day.

"On 23 May, the Council of the EU adopted a groundbreaking set of conclusions advocating high-quality, open, trustworthy and equitable scholarly publishing. The move drew widespread support from Europe’s academic community.. Some native open-access commercial publishers also welcomed the conclusions. The traditional academic publishing industry, however, was less enthusiastic"

Global Times: "China's top legislature passed the Foreign Relations Law on Wednesday, marking a milestone significance as it is the first fundamental and comprehensive foreign relations law that aims to fix the loopholes in the rule of law in foreign-related affairs amid new challenges in foreign relations, especially when China has been facing frequent external interference in its internal affairs under the Western hegemony with unilateral sanctions and long-arm jurisdiction"

Parallelogram area spanned by two vectors $| v_1 \times v_2 |$ divide by two it's the triangle. Repeat for $v_2,v_3$, and $v_3,v_4$, ..

The region is a list of coordinate points, computing area is easy. See the points as zero centered vectors, consecutive ones form triangles. Sum them get the total.

RU areas in UA, past 7 months. Multiply by 10K for a rough square km. There is some decrease but not enough to matter.

plt.plot(u.ru_areas())
plt.ylim(15,16)

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How did open source help Big Tech? Many examples. The book In the Plex has a great one, Google was secretly building its own data centers around 2004 costing billions, but they could still fund it. Without FOSS that cost would be prohibitive. They were building in secret bcz they didn't want Microsoft to find out about how big search was. Without open source they'd have to build slower, am I right Google? Then MS would find out sooner or later, catch up and crush you.

#Cars #Alaska

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"@RickBamford@universeodon.com

Don't think people vote against their own interests? Have you met them? We do EVERYTHING against our own interests. We eat too much, move too little, spend too much, save too little, and many other ways, too. We are slaves to our passions and our passions are spoiled toddlers"

Arab News: "UK special forces chiefs allegedly deleted war crimes data ahead of probe.. Special forces commanders in the UK allegedly destroyed computer data to hide potential evidence of the killing of unarmed Afghan civilians, The Times reported"

Einstein and Dirac did not believe in black holes. AE thought a star collapsing would spin faster and faster, spinning at the speed of light with infinite energy well before the point where it is about to collapse into a BH.

These neural nets are truly a piece of shit

OR AT ALL

TSLA Filing: "[21/04] We are developing self-driving and driver assist technologies to rely on vision-based sensors.. There is no guarantee [the tech] will perform as expected in the timeframe we anticipate, or at all"

Nightcrawler, great work, same for The Covenant. Gyllenhaal finally made up for Prince of Persia.

Goon was ok..

300, Lena Headey gets a doggy. On Game of Thrones, she gets a doggy.. Directors must really like LH getting a doggy.

"@kasesag

Honestly I had more fun with Sailfish OS when I daily drove it with my Xperia 10 ii. Android feels boring when it's compared with mobile Linux"

Clarke Bolan Sextet - Wives And Lovers #music

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He must have smelled opportunities due to the new transportation options? If a train goes to a place, so can Ali Baba.

"Jack Ma recently visited Bangladesh, Nepal, Pakistan, and Uzbekistan"

Asia Times: "[2023/01] China-Kyrgyzstan-Uzbekistan railway back to life"

Global Construction Review: "[2023/01] China and India compete to build rail links with Nepal"

Missed me already? Ok ok.. here is a little pre-release. The break continues