Week 36

H2 Insight: "Hyzon's first liquid hydrogen-fuelled truck travels 870km without refuelling in 16-hour test run"

Science: "(ARPA-E), the high-risk, high-reward arm of the Department of Energy (DOE), announced it would fund $20 million in grants to advance technologies for extracting clean-burning hydrogen from deep rocks. At the moment, all of the world’s hydrogen is manufactured industrially. But some researchers have concluded that, contrary to conventional wisdom, Earth harbors vast deposits of the gas that could be tapped like oil"

Financial Post: "AMEA Power, a Dubai-based renewable-energy company, plans to build a green hydrogen facility in the Kenyan port of Mombasa in what would be a first for the East African country"

Reuters: "Airbus, easyJet, Rolls-Royce join forces in UK on hydrogen-powered flying.. The partners launched the Hydrogen in Aviation (HIA) alliance on Tuesday to ensure that infrastructure, policy, regulatory and safety frameworks are ready for when the first hydrogen-powered aircraft takes to the skies"

Kohei Saito: "With the rapid deepening of the global ecological crisis in various forms such as climate change, oxidation of the ocean, disruption of the nitrogen cycle, desertification, soil erosion and loss of biodiversity, Francis Fukuyama’s declaration of ‘the end of history’ after the collapse of the USSR.. is approaching a totally unexpected dead end today, namely the end of human history"

"@RichardJMurphy@mas.to

Removing the VAT exemption from financial services could raise £8.7 billion in tax a year"

"@bobwyman@mastodon.social

Ratepayers should not be burdened with the lobbying and political expenses of regulated utilities. Shareholders, not ratepayers, should pay for a utility's lobbying expenses"

EPI: "Ohio lawmakers have introduced a bill that would make it illegal for electric and gas utilities in the state to charge their customers for political influence activities. The bill would also introduce new transparency measures designed to prevent utilities from secretly spending huge sums of money on politics, a response to FirstEnergy's spending of $60 million in dark money at the center of a bribery investigation that led to the conviction of the state's speaker of the House earlier this year"

"@EU_Commission@social.network.europa.eu

Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, ByteDance, Meta, Microsoft

These are the first 6 companies designated as ‘gatekeepers' under the Digital Markets Act.

They have 6 months to ensure their core platform services comply with our rules, including:

✔ Allowing users to unsubscribe and remove pre-installed services

✔ Allowing the download of alternative app stores

❌ Banning tracking outside of their services without consent

❌ Stopping ranking their products more favourably"

Wet bulb consistently around 17C for my region starting on the 9th.. Good news

These people arrive BTW because there is demand for them in US, for their labor. They are needed to service the 24/7 economy, businesses want them to be there. Just like the drug smuggling issue, as long as there is demand, and you cannot completely cut the transport, the transit will not stop.

The Guardian: "‘We can’t keep up’: Panama-Colombia border sees record number of migrants"

Politico: "Adams: Cost of migrants 'will destroy New York City'"

Firstpost: "Despite severe sanctions on Huawei by the US, the Chinese tech company was able to develop its own 7nm chip. Embarrassed by this breakthrough, the US Commerce Department is now planning a large scale investigation into how Huawei managed to make the new chip"

Begin Shitstorm

The Times of Israel: "Abbas: Ashkenazi Jews 'are not Semites"

"[Pardo] The.. extremists in the government, I think, hope to chase the Palestinians away to Jordan, creating a large new wave of refugees. I’m not sure, though, that such a thing is possible now, as it had been in 1948 and 1967. Jordan’s army would try to stop it. If such expulsion or 'transfer' succeeded, it would likely make Jordan unstable, with highly negative security implications for Israel. And of course such an expulsion of the Palestinians would be a major war crime that might well lead to sanctions on Israel" via IC

That is actually correct wording, Arabs are Semites

Informed Comment: "Former Head of Israeli Mossad [Pardo]: Israel is an Apartheid State with the ‘KKK’ in Government and 'Antisemitic' Policies toward Palestinians"

Interesting

TopWar.ru: "Blinken met with Head of the Office of the President of Ukraine Andriy Yermak in Kyiv.. [allegedly] the parties agreed on new parameters for the counteroffensive of the Armed Forces of Ukraine... Blinken brought to Kyiv a new offensive operation plan drawn up at the Pentagon and approved by the White House.. Kyiv needs to collect all its reserves and concentrate them on the direction of Tokmak in order to take it before November. The establishment of control over this city will mean the fulfillment of the tasks set by Washington with the continuation of military assistance.. In the event that the Armed Forces of Ukraine fail to break through the defenses of the Russian army and take Tokmok, Zelensky’s office will have to raise the topic of peace negotiations in November"

"@openstreetmap@en.osm.town

It's now even easier to donate to #OpenStreetMap! Thanks to Guillaume Rischard (et al.) you can now donate to OSMF via Eurozone Bank Transfers (SEPA)! 💶💶😊😊"

Reshare

Clearly not a fan

Moira Donegan: "Like a lot of 'countercultural' relics, Burning Man was always more radical in reputation than in fact. But it is now a magnet for the kinds of people who make a lot of money by devoting their lives to upholding the unjust status quo, and who go to Burning Man in part to shore up their smug sense of being creative innovators as they endeavor to make things worse for the rest of us"

[-]

H2 Central: "UK Hydrogen Alliance Established to Accelerate Zero Carbon Aviation and Bring an £34bn Annual Benefit to The Country"

"@TheEuropeanNetwork@mstdn.social

Britain will rejoin two of the EU’s science funding projects in a major post-Brexit shift. The UK government announced Thursday that it will associate to both Horizon Europe, the bloc’s multibillion-euro research funding scheme, and Copernicus, its earth observation program, under a 'bespoke new agreement unlocking unparalleled research opportunities, and also the right deal for British taxpayers'"

"@fugueish@infosec.exchange

The year is 2038. Craigslist still uses its 1998-era HTML and Perl CGI script. It is the fastest, most usable, and most accessible web site on the planet. The New York Times front page is 6 TiB. Gmail UI elements have 17 distinct border radii"

Auto Blog: "[Toyota] has dabbled in hydrogen technology for over a decade, notably through a partnership with BMW, and it has built an experimental hydrogen-powered Hilux truck fitted with Mirai-sourced technology.

Partially funded by the British government, and built in the United Kingdom, the Hilux-based prototype is powered by a fuel cell, meaning the drivetrain uses hydrogen..

The truck is expected to deliver over 365 miles of driving range, which Toyota notes is "significantly further than might be achieved using a battery-electric system." [another product] Ford's F-150 Lightning delivers up to 320 miles of range"

Still it looks like a correction of the massive covid era boost in exports. If exports fall below the trend line that would mean a big change.

BBC: "China exports fall again as economy struggles"

Right.. How's that breakthrough going?

Bret Stephens: "[2023/06] An endgame for Ukraine.. If Ukrainian forces break through Russian lines in a way that prompts Putin to seek a settlement — probably through Chinese mediation — there will be those who argue that a cease-fire and armistice on the Korean model is preferable" via NYT

Bret Stephens still "spouting utter shite" about US withdrawal from Afghanistan apparently, via @xankarn@mastodon.online.

Informed Comment: "On Labor Day: Low-Wage Employers say they Have no Money for Raises, but spent $341 Billion on Stock Buybacks"

The EU makes it rain

F24: "EU hits Apple, Meta and other tech ‘gatekeepers’ with new regulations.. There will be fines of up to 10 percent of a firm's global revenues for breaking some of the most serious competition rules, and even up to 20 percent for repeat offenders...

One of the DMA's main aims is to stop larger players crushing the progression of smaller companies that threaten to become rivals by gobbling them up through takeovers.

The EU believes past examples of this are Facebook's buyouts of Instagram and WhatsApp as well as Google's purchase of YouTube and Waze. One major change under the DMA is the rule that forces interoperability between messaging apps, making it easier for users to share links and images.

US foreign policy for a long time has been bidness policy. FDR instituted a "good neighbor policy" stopped some of the excesses (later it went batshit again). It looks bad.. some jagoff businessman running around organizing coups in foreign lands.. Then your gov is a joke. Gotta knock out these f--kers once in a while, make'm see stars you know, show them who the boss is. Otherwise they will do businesses despite public interest, at home and abroad.

This is the Banana Guy

"In Honduras [US businessman] Zemurray was deeply involved in politics.. Zemurray's company Cuyamel even supplied weapons to the 1911 coup that brought in a more Cuyamel-friendly president"

Hadoop, Spark, Dask are all open source.

Big Data was a revolution - neural net based artificial parrot algorithms, so-called "AI", still isn't.

Math changes with incremental processing; eg averaging bunch of numbers, one could bring da whooole thing to memory sum up the whooole thing then divide that number by a count. Incremental averaging is different.. You are keeping a running average constantly which is updated, one line at a time, so you always know the average up to that point. There are incremental versions for almost every computing task, clustering, linear algebra, u name it.

Some infra even split big files in multiple machines so processing could be sent to indiv commodity machines close to data which could then incremental process their pieces. That was Hadoop.

The data analysis revolution of 2010s actually was built on this simple advancement, processing huge files one line at a time. We changed a lot of our computational science approaches to fit this mold, because along with it came much increased capability.

Sparsity can be handled via JSON (each row is a dictionary with movieId:rating pairs when they exist). Dot product for cosine similarity is simple, and fast.

Rewrote DIY collab filtering recommender using incremental file reads..

"[2022/11] Cop 27: Kenya eyes 30GW of renewable hydrogen.. Kenya's president William Ruto said today that his country has started on the road to becoming a hydrogen producer"

The Guardian: "A crypto-mining company in Pennsylvania is seeking to burn tires to produce bitcoin, prompting an outcry from residents and environmental groups."

"@VeryBadLlama@mas.to

born too early to explore the stars, born too late to explore the living room of a home that I was able to buy with my own money'

If it was up to "the market" there would be no open Web, which BTW some are still trying to kill.

Self-reliance in tech will naturally lead to open source. Devs can build a toolset which can be carried from workplace to workplace, and/or be used for personal projects. FOSS will help you survive. Tech infused libertard survivalism is nothing but cosplay, a smokescreen for more unfettered capitalism. They'll be "burners" with their RVs and get stuck there when it rains. They are liars and losers.

Offshore Energy: "German energy supply company EnBW Energie Baden-Württemberg has entered into an investment agreement with Skipavika Green Ammonia (SkiGA), which is said to be one of Europe’s most advanced projects for emission-free ammonia production, in Western Norway"

No production should be at the whims of nature - does a factory stop production when it rains too much, or too little, or when there is storm, or there are swarms of bugs circling the produce?

"@jackofalltrades@mas.to

'The world has lost a third of its arable land due to erosion or pollution in the past 40 years, with potentially disastrous consequences as global demand for food soars, scientists have warned. The continual ploughing of fields, combined with heavy use of fertilizers, has degraded soils across the world, the research found, with erosion occurring at a pace of up to 100 times greater than the rate of soil formation'" via The Guardian

Operation Napoleon, takes place in Iceland, scenic. If relying on subtitles half the time is ok, tis fine watch.

"@sadoperator@botsin.space

My calendar is full of meetings, again.

The dysfunction of management is mistaking 'busyness' for 'productivity'"

"@gretared@vis.social

My house just turned 15 and like clockwork everything is breaking at once 🙄 it’s like Apple is about to announce a new model 😝"

#Suits

[-]

This is true for every consumer. Feelings, culture resides in the emotional, subconcious brain, which is stronger than analytical. Exactly what Colataire Rapaille talks about in his Culture Code. He used this science to help corporations sell products. Read it and be prepared.

The Century of the Self: "Like other psychoanalysts, Dichter believed the American citizens were fundamentally irrational.. the real reasons for buying products were rooted in their unconcious desires and feelings"

[-]

"@straphanger@urbanists.social

Made it by the skin of our teeth!

'Our human ancestors went through a severe population bottleneck. From a population of about 100,000, hominins went down to 1,280 breeding individuals between 930,000 and 813,000 years ago'.. New article in Science"

It's crazy everything was reoriented around this satisfaction of 24/7. Not enough labor to fullfill such work schedules? No problem.. We'll get immigrants to do it.

It's okay stores being closed in the middle of the day for lack of labor, or demand. Just because the religion of "growth" demands a number that needs to tick up in someone's spreadsheet, doesn't mean it has to be done.

"@gabrielberlin@mas.to

'In the country that gave us the abbreviation 24/7 because you should always be able to have everything, I learned that that’s exactly why nothing is special anymore. Things belong in their time, otherwise everything loses its meaning.'"

"@jonoabroad@mastodon.nz

Interim director of British Museum has suggested the Parthenon marbles could be shared with Greece.

I'm going to let them finish, but I'm not sure that's the amazing statement they think it is.

Like, we stole these from you, but we might let you have them sometimes"

Bloomberg: "The renewable energy unit of South Korea’s SK Inc. secured a site required to develop a $15 billion green hydrogen project in Canada that’s set to be one of the world’s biggest"

BBC: "There has been a dramatic rise in Ukraine's number of dead, according to new estimates by unnamed US officials... The figures remain classified. But US officials, quoted by the New York Times, recently put the number at 70,000 dead and as many as 120,000 injured. It is a staggering figure, from an armed forces estimated at only half a million strong"

Businessline: "India’s Ministry of Ports, Shipping and Waterways (MoPSW) has received over 20 [applications] from firms interested in participating in green hydrogen generation, storage, bunkering and refuelling projects being developed across three of its major ports, Kandla, Tuticorin and Paradeep"

H2 Central: "Norwegian-German Collaboration on Green Energy – Enbw Acquires 10% Equity Stake and Secures Exclusive Offtake Rights for Green Ammonia"

Institutional Investor: "Money Is Pouring Into AI. Skeptics Say It’s a ‘Grift Shift.’.. By the time a dormant penny stock company known as Applied Sciences managed to wrangle a listing on the Nasdaq in April 2022, it had reinvented itself as a cloud hosting service for bitcoin miners and changed its name to Applied Blockchain. But with the crypto world crashing that spring, the stock never took off. Within months, Applied Blockchain pivoted again — renaming itself Applied Digital.

If its previous iteration had been too late to cash in on the bitcoin mining craze, the company wasn’t going to miss the next big one: artificial intelligence... Orso Partners co-founder Nate Koppikar [who shorted both companies] has a term for what he sees going on. He calls the phenomenon 'the grift shift' — arguing that companies and venture capital funds have pivoted from their losing crypto and tech bets to cash in on the AI moment"

"@lcamtuf@infosec.exchange

I can't believe I went to this off-the-grid festival celebrating 'radical self-reliance' and then it rained"

.. and now some are stuck there.. Did they whine about it? Were they looking for government's help to save them like a little bitch? Do you want government's help you libertarian little bitch?

Salon: "[2015] Why the rich love Burning Man.. The festival has become a playground for wealthy libertarians. Maybe it was never a socialist utopia to begin with"

"@signalthirteen@mstdn.social

Someone posted the massive line of vehicles leaving the self-indulgent Burning Man... This whole thing reeks of the privilege they complain about. Those RVs cost more than my house"

The Guardian: "Burning Man festival-goers trapped in desert as rain turns site to mud.. Tens of thousands of ‘burners’ urged to conserve food and water as rain and flash floods sweep Nevada"

Saw a docu, talked about possible reasons, environment is more likely IMO. see Toffler's Future Shock. Too much stimuli will increase anxiety, flood brain with inputs, can make u dumb.

Another notable (bad) thing since the 70s - humanity is getting dumber since then

PNAS: "The Flynn effect refers to a secular increase in population intelligence quotient (IQ) observed throughout the 20th century.. In recent years, the Flynn effect has.. reversed"

[-]

Lots of notable things seem to have turned 50 this year.. WTF 1973

"@joshuafoust@appdot.net

This year the Global Positioning System, which began as the Defense Navigational Satellite System in 1973, turns 50"

Add up changes of a function starting from $a$ on $f(a)$, you will reach the value of function at $f(b)$. This is obvious. Sounds less scary than "the Fundamental Theorem of Calculus". $\int _{a}^{b} f'(x) dx = f(b) - f(a)$. But of course one needs such rigour too bcz it helps down the line with other formulations.

I'm curious now how Meg 2 will perform in China. Jackie Chan says whichever movie he makes, if the Western audience likes it his Chinese audience doesn't, the ones Chinese like his Western one doesn't. His attempts at making movies for both audiences were in vain.

Sinha, Fossil Free: "[C]onsidering the recent push towards green hydrogen by major global economies, including India and the UK, a new Frost & Sullivan study projects that global green hydrogen production will skyrocket at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 57 per cent between 2019 and 2030, rising from 40,000 tons to 5.7 million tons..

Hydrogen produced by renewable energy driven electrolysis can be used to store excess renewable energy for longer periods, considering that hydrogen energy provides high energy density, low capital cost, and easy integration with the existing energy network. Interestingly, hydrogen can also be used to fuel cars, buses, trucks, and even aeroplanes"

The American Prospect: "Biden’s NLRB Brings Workers’ Rights Back From the Dead.. A decision last Friday makes union organizing possible again"

Arab News: "Weeks after moon landing, India launches first mission to sun"

Al Monitor: "UAE trade offensive continues, this time with New Zealand deal"

Al Monitor: "Work begins on Iraq-Iran rail link.. Iraq's prime minister on Saturday inaugurated construction work on what is slated to become the first railway line connecting the country to neighbouring Iran, a major political and economic partner"

The Diplomat: "After the revision of the Basic Hydrogen Strategy on June 6, the Kishida administration has attempted to put the updated strategy into practice. On September 25, the Sixth Hydrogen Energy Ministerial Meeting will be held as part of the Tokyo Green Transformation Week, hosted by the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI) in conjunction with the New Energy and Industrial Technology Development Organization. The Japanese government plans to invite ministers and world leaders in the energy and environment fields who have worked to achieve decarbonization goals to.. Tokyo"

Oh yeaaa

u.ecmwf_wind(0,0,18,80,40,show_ike=True)

[-]

I wonder if I can apply IKE calculation to this.. ecmwf already gives u and v components of the wind vector..

u.ecmwf_wind(0,0,18,80,40)

[-]

That looks ok.. not bad

Coding time..

ECMWF Python support is pretty good.. Only install ecmwf-data ecmwf-opendata magpye, and that's it?

Folks at Fox Weather are praising the forecasts from the European ECMWF, apparently its predictions were bang on with the recent weather events.

Bloomberg Law: "Striking Actors, Writers Urge FTC to Probe Hollywood Mergers.. [who] have filed over 100 comments on two ongoing Federal Trade Commission rulemaking efforts. The comments are part of a broader campaign encouraging the agency to probe decades of Hollywood industry consolidation. Union members argue that a series of mergers and acquisitions have left power over every level of Hollywood production and distribution in the hands of just a few companies, necessitating antitrust scrutiny"

Kang is serious biz over there, saw in a movie theather, they put up dude's picture before the film, everyone gets up and starts singing some anthemy shit

There were rumors back in the day Thaksin was too buddy buddy with the royal family, supposedly wanted to form an alliance with them against the miltary, but mil figured out, toppled him...

I was wondering why he'd gone back knowing he'd certainly be jailed.. He must have had this deal before going back.

Firstpost: "Thailand’s king reduces former Prime Minister Thaksin’s 8-year prison term to a single year'

AP: "Climate activists have spraypainted a superyacht, blocked private jets from taking off and plugged holes in golf courses this summer as part of an intensifying campaign against the emissions-spewing lifestyles of the ultrawealthy"

#Pandemic #2020

[-]

Andersen, Evil Geniuses: The spectacular rightward swerve of legal thought starting in the 1980s had two freshly cast ideological pillars, one focusing narrowly on the Constitution, the other on more general criteria for determining proper legal outcomes... The one concerning the Constitution became known in the 1980s as originalism... Originalism’s most important hidden agenda was to keep courts and judges completely out of the business of business, as if what worked for the U.S. economy for its first century, before modern corporations existed, was how things should work today...

As movements, originalism in the law and libertarianism in economics were fraternal twins. Both were born of extreme nostalgia, fetishizing and distorting bygone America, so both more easily achieved mass appeal in the everything-old-is-new-again 1970s and ’80s. Both purported to be based on objective principles that transcended mere politics or special interests, even while both were vehicles for big business and the right to recover, fortify, and expand their economic and political power"