Week 38

CleanTechnica: "ABB has secured a complete power, propulsion and automation systems order for Samskip Group's hydrogen-powered container vessels.. which are among the first in the world to demonstrate the potention of hydrogen fuel cells"

AP: "Boeing and a key supplier find a new manufacturing issue that affects the 737 Max airliner"

This book is great work, every page is full of useful information.

Anderson, Evil Geniuses: "Ever easier borrowing was the fundamental change that allowed the financial industry to take over more and more of people’s lives and ever more of the economy. 'I think we hit the jackpot,' President Reagan kvelled in 1982 as he signed one of the first big financial deregulation laws, which the Democratic House had passed by three to one... In 1978 the credit card business became much more attractive thanks to a Supreme Court decision that allowed banks to charge credit card interest rates as high as they wanted..

That 1980s wave of financial industry laissez-faire helped trigger a disaster immediately.. America’s S&Ls collapsed in less than a decade, and the government had to provide the equivalent of a quarter-trillion dollars to make good on their losses.. Money got easy for people in the middle and toward the bottom, for suckers with credit card and mortgage payments they could barely afford—but also, of course, for people at the top, the financial speculators and middlemen who had other innovating to do. Such as leveraged buyouts of companies, or LBOs..

Companies are supposed to borrow money in order to grow their businesses.. The whole point of a modern LBO, however, is quite often not the business as a business at all.. The federal tax provision that makes LBOs work is shockingly simple: income is taxable, but interest payments are deductible on tax returns, so when you start using almost all of the LBO’d company’s income to make interest payments, you get to stop paying corporate taxes. Of course, that’s a perversion of the tax code, given that Congress makes interest deductible so that businesses can more easily expand and hire and prosper.. [but] what often happens with LBO’d companies is the opposite: in order to afford their huge interest payments on their huge new loans, they lay off employees, sell whatever they can, cut research and development"

Its sad seeing such loss of control at this level .. some jagoff decides to update ur watch from afar and the common user is screwed.

"@sophie@social.lol

Welp, the new Apple Watch update has completely tanked my watch battery. It doesn’t last a day now"

Blue Beetle likely will not recoup its cost, but the new WB regime accepted it as canon so the character will appear again? The Flash, BB movies were all from the old regime, they were sort of lingering out there, in limbo. The only leftover from that era that can probably make any money is Aquaman II.

Wayne is a corporatist, so sure, he could be seen as one.

"Batman is a fascist" -- character in the movie Blue Beetle

Chevron made life a living hell for the environmental lawyer Steven Donziger let's remember.. Donziger kicked their ass in Ecuador making them pay for the pollution in an area known as the "Amazon Chernobyl", then corporate backlash started. Donziger was sued in NY via RICO, judge presiding is known as a "Chevron judge" (he held mutual funds that held shares of Chevron which he did not disclose), SD ended up being disbarred. Then further prosecution followed, the Chevron judge asked a private law firm to do dirty deed, the judge for that was not chosen randomly, Chevron judge chose some right-wing nut from the libertard Federalist Society to which Chevron regularly contributes money. Donziger was placed in house arrest, finally released some time later but he truly went through the wringer.

N. Perry: "Ukraine has Europe's third-largest shale gas reserves at 42 trillion cubic feet... On Nov. 5, 2013 (just a few weeks before the Maidan demonstrations began in Kiev), Chevron signed a 50-year agreement with the Ukrainian government to develop oil and gas in western Ukraine... [During Maidan] U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for Europe Victoria Nuland spoke at an international business conference sponsored by Chevron on Dec. 13, 2013, after just returning from Kiev where she handed out cookies and sandwiches to demonstrators on the Maidan"

Design Boom: "Euro Airship is developing Solar Airship One, a whale-shaped aircraft that plans to fly around more than 25 countries for 20 days without stopping using solar power and hydrogen. Its plan to take off in 2026 is looming, and the team is hustling to make sure that the first non-stop world tour flight without fossil fuels will meet its deadline. Euro Airship believes that its aircraft will be flying without any noise, fossil fuel, or carbon emissions..

The aircraft, powered by solar and hydrogen, is expected to be 151 meters long with a rigid airship and a helium expansion volume of 53,000 m3. Almost its entire surface will be covered with 4,800 m2 of solar film to fully capture sunlight. By day, it collects the sun’s energy; by night, the surplus electricity is stored in fuel cells that produce hydrogen via water electrolysis"

H2 Central: "H2U Technologies, a next-generation electrolyzer developer, has performed durability tests on new, lower-cost, iridium-free catalyst materials that demonstrate a projected lifetime of 25,000 hours"

Railtech: "Irish Rail to trail Europe's first locomotive to combust hydrogen instead of diesel"

New Telegraph: "[Director Benkhadra said] Morocco is studying transporting green hydrogen via the anticipated Nigeria-Morocco gas pipeline project (NMGP). Speaking on the sidelines of the World Power-to-X Summit, Benkhadra further told Bloomberg Asharq that the NMGP will include two pipes, the first is for natural gas and the second for green hydrogen"

#AdBlock #Trek

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Focker himself was involved too.. You are a walking disaster, Focker.

Rumor has it after having insider information Thiel acolytes drove around the Bay area telling everyone banking with Silicon Valley Bank to run for the hills, causing, well, the bank run. Is that legal?

The Christian Science Monitor: "In California, there’s been an anti-bank run law on the books since 1917"

WaPo: "Many of today’s unhealthy foods were brought to you by Big Tobacco.. For decades, tobacco companies hooked people on cigarettes by making their products more addictive. Now, a new study suggests that tobacco companies may have used a similar strategy to hook people on processed foods"

Singer: "Tech libertarians consider government intrusion online an outrage—but what about corporate surveillance? When companies gather data about consumers, is that simply an inevitable precursor to online advertising and internet corporations’ soaring profits?"

Interesting.. Slavic style sauerkraut does not require a mash step? They just add salted water on top, wait and that's it. The other method ferments in its natural brine. Which one makes better SK? Needs testing.

Be gone.. and when you're gone, stay gone

Fuuuck off..

"Rupert Murdoch Finally Stepping Down From Fox and News Corp"

The Lost Supper - nice

The Vancouver Sun: "Flavours of the past could help with the future of food and well-being.. New book The Lost Supper travels back in time to serve up a full meal of alternatives to industry-produced foods"

FuelCellsWorks: "Haffner Energy Wins The Energy Decarbonization Prize At The INOVANA Regional Contest For Its HYNOCA® Solution"

Vanity Fair: "[08/05] Ron DeSantis’s Largest Donor Closes His Wallet, Citing Abortion 'Extremism'.. Robert Bigelow donated $20 million to a pro-DeSantis Super PAC—more than 10 times the fund’s second-largest donation. But he says he won’t be giving any more until the Florida governor moderates his campaign"

The new abortion angle can work, it has some basis within Reps.

Politico: "Trump steamrolls anti-abortion groups.. Donald Trump’s recent moderate turn on abortion has boxed-in the deep-pocketed anti-abortion groups... In just the last week, Donald Trump called Florida’s six-week abortion ban 'terrible,' refused to endorse national restrictions, blamed abortion opponents for Republicans’ 2022 election disappointments and pledged to compromise with Democrats on the issue if elected. Anti-abortion groups can’t agree on what to do about it"

Green Car Congress: "DOE to award nearly $48M to 16 projects to advance clean hydrogen technologies"

The Sydney Morning Herald: "A group of Australian politics, backed by the Prime Minister, are calling for Wikileaks founder Julian Assange to be freed from US prison".

Fox News: "A cross-party delegation of Australian politicians met with U.S. officials, members of Congress and civil rights groups in Washington, D.C., Wednesday to urge the U.S. government to abandon efforts to prosecute WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.. The delegation brought a letter signed by more than 60 members of parliament calling on the U.S. to drop charges against Assange"

AP: "Poland is done sending arms to Ukraine, Polish leader says as trade dispute escalates"

Financial Post: "VW lays off workers at key EV factory over cratering demand"

"In The EV Transition Explained (published by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers), Robert Charette reports that charging an electrical vehicle (EV) can overheat a transformer—and shorten its typically 30-to-40-year lifespan to three years. (Transformers reduce electricity’s voltage when it’s transmitted from a substation to a residence or business; above-ground transformers look like trash cans mounted on utility poles.) When I shared Charette’s report with an LA friend, he told me that the underground transformer 50 feet from his house exploded last April on a Saturday morning—a time he considered low-demand for electricity.

'Is it low-demand,' I wondered, 'if a handful of neighbors charge their vehicles Friday night?'..

Different batteries have different constructs and chemistry. Tesla batteries are held together by 'an almost indestructible polyurethane cement.' Nissan’s Leaf battery can take two hours to dismantle. Recycling batteries can release toxins and pose fire hazards. By 2035, we’ll have 150 million unusable, toxic EV batteries"

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"I’ve read about lithium extraction’s prodigious water use in Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Tibet—and at the U.S.’s first lithium mine, in Silver Peak, Nevada. In 2017, research led me to Lithium Americas Corporation’s (LAC’s) plan to turn part of the Great Basin—a biodiverse and exquisite ecosystem between Boise and Reno known as Thacker Pass—into an industrial extraction zone stretching over more than 17,000 acres. Thacker Pass holds the U.S.’s largest known lithium deposits. The corporation’s open pit alone would cover two square miles in the mine’s first stage, and it could triple in size. Tailings piles, processing facilities and treatments ponds would sprawl across yet more land. The mine would burn 11,000 gallons of diesel fuel per day and rely on more than 75 semi-truck loads of sulfur (oil refinery waste) to process the ore. It would consume and pollute more than 1.5 billion gallons of water per year, dropping water tables and potentially drying out fourteen springs"

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"@CarbonBubble@mastodon.energy

Antonio Guterres: 'G20 countries are responsible for 80% of GHG #emissions. They must lead & break their addiction to #FossilFuels'"

FuelCellWorks: "Hexagon Purus Opens New Hydrogen Cylinder Manufacturing Hub In Kassel, Germany"

#Monopoly

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Good one by Neeson, Retribution. Hidden gem Transit.

Algorithm Watch: "Automated navigation systems are still wreaking havoc on small towns’ streets.. Apps like Google and Waze are redirecting traffic to secondary roads that are not equipped to handle the traffic, disrupting their infrastructure. Small cities have little capacity to change this"

Businessline: "The India-Middle East-Europe Corridor rail-sea link will provide strategic, economic gains for India and member nations.. The expected cost of the proposed corridor will be $20 billion on laying a dedicated rail network, contiguously supported by state of art optical fibre network and a hydrogen pipeline.

Initially, the existing UAE-Saudi-Amman rail network with construction of additional 300 km of network connecting Amman with port Haifa, Israel will be operationalised. As the UAE foresee rich business dividends from this project, it is willing to finance the remaining stretch of 300 km on a priority basis. The network will support the seamless movement of goods under a digital and single trade document, harmonised transport rules and will be far cheaper operationally than the Suez Canal route, considering its high charges for vessel towing, tug-boat services, pilotage,transit fee etc"

New Atlas: "Researchers have used a low-emissions method to harvest hydrogen and graphene from waste plastics... 'When we first discovered flash Joule heating and applied it to upcycle waste plastic into graphene, we observed a lot of volatile gases being produced and shooting out of the reactor,' [lead researcher at Rice U project] Wyss said. “We wondered what they were, suspecting a mix of small hydrocarbons and hydrogen, but lacked the instrumentation to study their exact composition'.

After acquiring the equipment needed to analyze the vaporized contents thanks to funding from the US Army Corps of Engineers, the researchers found their suspicions were correct: the process produced hydrogen gas"

PV Mag: "Fortescue Future Industries’ planned facility, officially proposed at the Willow Cale Industrial Park in Prince George, should produce roughly 140,000 tonnes of hydrogen and 700,000 tonnes of ammonia per year, which would be used for both domestic use and export. The USD 2 billion ($3.11b) ‘Project Coyote’ would need 1,000 MW of power from BC Hydro to create the green hydrogen by electrolysis, which would then be processed into green ammonia"

The accord allowed Israel to hang on to pre-defined military zones, so Israel just defined any random place it wanted as an MZ effectively gutting the accord. OA had holes in it like swiss cheese.

Of course the Oslo Accords was flawed, it was a Clinton plan

Informed Comment: "30 Years after Arafat-Rabin Handshake, clear Flaws in Oslo Accords doomed peace Talks to Failure... Thirty years later, it is clear the Oslo Accords have achieved neither peace nor a two-state solution. So far in 2023 alone, over 200 Palestinians and nearly 30 Israelis have been killed. Israel has the most right-wing, nationalist government in its history..

[T]he Oslo peace process failed because the framework itself was deeply flawed in three key ways. First, it ignored the power imbalance between the two sides. Second, it focused on ending violence by Palestinian militant groups while overlooking acts of violence committed by the Israeli state. And third, it sought peace as the end goal, rather than justice.

#GDP

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WaPo: “Food, beverage and dietary #supplement industries are paying dozens of registered dietitians that collectively have millions of #socialmedia followers to help sell products and deliver industry-friendly messages”

WION: "Crypto exchange JPEX suspend trades amid investigation into suspected fraud"

"@gdeihl@spore.social

Pretending metals such as lithium are going to sustain our indulgent Global North lifestyles is a sham. Batteries depend on mining copper, nickel, cobalt and rare minerals as well, in lands where we exploit human beings. Metals and minerals will never adequately replace the bubble that was fossil fuels, anyhow, and mining will beget yet more environmental harm... Those who say there are endless metals and minerals wish to mine our dying oceans as well, for profit, not humanity. It’s a sham, so billionaires can become trillionaires. Mining causes enormous ecological destruction.. drains and pollutes precious groundwater even as historic drought increases. One metric ton of lithium requires 500,000 gallons of water to process"

Electrive: "In the Spanish city of Barcelona, Metropolitans de Barcelona (TMB) has awarded Solaris the contract to provide the city with 36 new hydrogen fuel cell buses for a sum 23 million euros"

It is likely the latter. If we had to guess the disagreement likely had to do with Taiwan, Zee Ping Ping wants to "do" it, some in the top brass and the party are resisting. Taiwan would be a tough nut to crack so I'm not surprised.

F24: "Questions swirl around Xi’s motives after a second top minister disappears in China.. For some observers, Li's vanishing is likely linked to corruption, while others see it as a sign of intense political battles hidden from outside eyes"

TASS: "Kiev to sue Hungary, Poland, Slovakia in WTO over extension of ban on Ukrainian grain"

Politico: "NATO chief warns Ukraine allies to prepare for ‘a long war’"

Haley was ok on paper, but she went mega neocon in the last debate, clashed with Ramasmarmy who was channeling Trump, IMO lost any chance she might've had on VP.

WION: "Donald Trump hinted at choosing South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem as his running mate for the upcoming 2024 Presidential election"

That is the TRUTH

"@realDonaldTrump@truthsocial.com

The all Electric Car is a disaster for both the United Auto Workers and the American Consumer. They will all be built in China and, they are too expensive, don’t go far enough, take too long to charge, and pose various dangers under certain atmospheric conditions. If this happens, the United Auto workers will be wiped out, along with all other auto workers in the United States. The all Electric Car policy is about as dumb as Open Borders"

J. Geuter: "I have argued for a while that I see the current LLM craze as a bit of a weird path of innovation. Neural networks can do certain things very well. Like for example reducing heterogenous input data from the real world down to a limited model suitable for algorithms to work on. They can be an interface level to glue software/hardware to the chaos that is physics and people. But a lot of the actual things we want to do need to be deterministic, testable, verifiable, auditable. So the future of that space lies probably more in smaller, focused models that give certain guarantees with regards to fault tolerance and quality that then will be used as building blocks to build often very traditional software on. That will enable us to use these statistical systems for the things they can do while allowing us to build proper systems for the things they cannot"

Vlogger lady says this is how they preserved meat during World War II wout refigration. Wow.

Cooking food in a jar, once done, keep it closed, it is preserved as is. Bacteria in the jar died while cooking, and as long as container is kept closed, new ones will not enter, plus the meal is now precooked.

Bonn, DE apparenly. The greenery is a nice touch

"@fuck_cars_bot@botsin.space

'Nearest tram station to my new home 🥰'"

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The Age: "Amsterdam was choked with cars until mass protests in the 1970s against their dominance and vehicular 'Kindermoord' (child murder) forced that to change"

The late Shah's son is on, talking about how opressive the current Iranian regime is... His father was surely toppled but the Shah himself came into power via a British and US plot who did not want the nationalization of Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (today's BP) by left-wing democratically elected prime minister Mosaddeq. Now he is whining boo hoo, boo hooo, current regime is so opressive, me sad. Well your f-ing father was worse. Stop whining.

When gov does not interject, and "people buy what they want (a want that can be guided, through marketing, addictive compounds)", junk food will rule the day. That's why you have a fat ass brother.

Singapore gov subsidizes healthy food, taxes junk food too doesn't it? It's a good idea.

Vox: "[2018/04] Mexico and Hungary tried junk food taxes — and they seem to be working.. The case for a junk food tax in America"

Temperature is key for sour cabbage.. Ferm wont work for <15C. The good bacteria likes it all warm and toasty, gotta heat those muckers up.

Building a world model my ass.. this shit is mega stupid #LLM #SoCalledAI

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"@sophie@social.lol

This chatbot could’ve been a form"

Hickel: "When essential goods are privatized and expensive, people need more income than they would otherwise require to access them. To get it they are compelled to increase their labour in capitalist markets, working to produce new things that may not be needed (with increased energy use, resource use, and ecological pressure) simply to access things that clearly are needed, and which are quite often already there.

Take housing, for example. If your rent goes up, you suddenly have to work more just to keep the same roof over your head.  At an economy-wide level, this dynamic means we need more aggregate production — more growth — in order to meet basic needs.  From the perspective of capital, this ensures a steady flow of labour for private firms, and maintains downward pressure on wages to facilitate capital accumulation. For the rest of us it means needless exploitation, insecurity, and ecological damage"

"@pezmico@mastodon.nz

If you ask me, I'd say what we most urgently need to do is less.

Less of almost everything.

Less work, less consumerism, less travel, less buying, less waste, less stress, less pollution.

'Slowing down is the Revolution.'

It wouldn't be a solution for everything but it would be a good start"

Clustering methods are unsupervised, learning with labels (what most neural net "AI" does these days) is supervised. NNs are not very good at the former. Nothing to parrot on

There are many clustering algorithms

How to write a "[app] serverless recommender" (movies, songs). Tranmismitting the whole ratings database to the browser would be slow. But you could cluster all users' movie ratings beforehand, and send the browser only the cluster centers. User code then finds its similarity to a cluster (10-20 of them) which should run fast, and starts asking for the users in that cluster piece-by-piece, in small chunks, uses their top ratings for its recommendations.

There you go - no complicated server structure, "cloud", only static files. Good stuff eh?

German rocketry was crucial for US landing a man on the moon and let's not forget, the Soviets were to first to send a man in space. The Soviets were also the first to land spacecraft on the Moon, Venus, and Mars. By way of inventor origin, the world's two most popular computer languages hail from Denmark and Netherlands, the world's most commonly used operating system's creator is from Finland. There has been much sci/tech activity thanks to fureigners.

CNBC: "Multnomah County in Oregon is suing oil and gas companies Exxon Mobil, Shell, Chevron, BP, ConocoPhillips and related organizations for the damages caused by the 2021 Pacific Northwest heat dome... The heat caused 69 people to die, property damage and was a draw on taxpayer resources, Multnomah County says."

"@encthenet@flyovercountry.social

Good to see that California is looking at passing a bill to allow striking workers to receive unemployment. This will help ensure that management comes to the table to negotiate in good faith instead of hoping to force the union to take a worse deal because they are starving"

Maritime Executive: "Hyundai Partnership Designs Hydrogen System for Ship Transport"

H2 Central: "TECO 2030 and Pherousa Green Shipping sign supply agreement to realize ammonia powered zero-emission deep-sea shipping. A 12 MW fuel cell system will be utilized for full propulsion onboard each of the six vessels, enabling 100% emission-free operations. Each vessel will be about 63,000-deadweight tons and the first vessel is targeted for delivery Q1 2027"

There was no Big Bang. There are no black holes. The Sun is liquid, not gaseous. The universe is not expanding.

For more, see Junk Science.

Now NYT picked up on the story - the broken nature of the Standard Model is reaching a wider audience.

NYT: "[09/02] The Story of Our Universe May Be Starting to Unravel.. According to the standard model, which is the basis for essentially all research in [cosmology], there is a fixed and precise sequence of events that followed the [supposed] Big Bang.. The Webb data, though, revealed that some very large galaxies formed really fast, in too short a time, at least according to the standard model. This was no minor discrepancy. The finding is akin to parents and their children appearing in a story when the grandparents are still children themselves...

Two serious issues with the standard model of cosmology would be concerning enough. But the model has already been patched up numerous times over the past half century to better conform with the best available data — alterations that may well be necessary and correct, but which, in light of the problems we are now confronting, could strike a skeptic as a bit too convenient...

Physicists and astronomers are starting to get the sense that something may be really wrong. It’s not just that some of us believe we might have to rethink the standard model of cosmology; we might also have to change the way we think about some of the most basic features of our universe — a conceptual revolution that would have implications far beyond the world of science"

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Sounds like a billionaire from 2023. #1381 #PeasantsRevolt

King Richard II: "You wretches detestable on land and sea: you who seek equality with lords are unworthy to live. Give this message to your colleagues: slaves you were, and slaves you are still; you will remain in bondage, not as before, but incomparably harsher. For as long as we live we will strive to suppress you, and your misery will be an example in the eyes of posterity.'" via @HeavenlyPossum@kolektiva.social

"I'd do a lot better just giving all my money away because if I really wanted to end crime, I should end poverty"

The truth! #DC #Batman

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Dunkirk, what bowl of crap. But stylishly so.. Vintage Nolan.

"@rxbrad@social.rxbrad.com

.. I'm a clinical pharmacist with over two decades of experience in a large hospital setting. I actually know stuff about drugs.

When some online rando says that pharmaceutical companies are only out for profits; and that they don't have the well-being of patients as the forefront of their objectives...

checks notes

...that rando is right. Totally right. Pharmaceutical corporations actually are the worst"

Changes of the past two weeks #UA #RU

geo = [['Main'],['Andriivka','Klischchiivka'],['Bilohorivka','Verkhnokamianske'],
       ['Opytne'],['Bakhmut','Yahidne','Berkhivka'],['Novomykhailivka','Stepne','Marinka'],
       ['Synkivka','Kupiansk','Lyman Pershyi'],['Urozhaine','Staromaiorske'],['Robotyne','Novoprokpivka']]

u.sm_plot_ukr4('ukrdata/fl-0916.csv','ukrdata/fl-0830.csv',geo,3,3,zoom=0.03,fsize=(10,10),)

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