Week 49
ESPN: "F1, FIA announce hydrogen working group with rebranded series"
Arab News: "US reviewing Amnesty International report that said US-made munitions have killed civilians in Gaza"
Mother Jones: "The Biden administration pledged on Saturday to phase out coal power plants alongside dozens of other countries"
"@baldur@toot.cafe
This would be at least the second time that Google has been caught faking an AI demo, right? Or are there more beyond Duplex and the dodgy Nemesis video?"
Techcrunch: "Google’s new Gemini AI model is getting a mixed reception after its big debut yesterday, but users may have less confidence in the company’s tech or integrity after finding out that the most impressive demo of Gemini was pretty much faked"
Fuelcellsworks: "Floating Power Plant Sign Groundbreaking EU Innovation Fund Grant For 26m€"
Hot Cars: "According to a newly filed patent, Toyota's "Hydrogen Sharing Network" would enable safe hydrogen fuel creation and storage at home"
Macro Polo - I dig the name
Macro Polo: "Unbeknownst to many, China already makes more than 40% of the world’s electrolyzers. When it comes to alkaline electrolyzers, China is even more dominant with more than 60% of the global manufacturing capacity..
One factor behind China’s impressive electrolyzer production capacity is that long [.. ago] China was already using hydrogen extensively to produce polysilicon, a key input for photovoltaic cell manufacturing. It comes as no surprise, then, that some of China’s biggest electrolyzer producers are also major solar companies such as LONGi and Sungrow Power"
"'Do-Not-Track' privacy setting gets legal backing in Germany Legislators are finally paying attention to concerns about how our digital data is tracked, collected, and stored"
Yes but that presupposes a system of law that is abided, agreed upon by all parties and the society in general. Where that exists, the outliers can be subject to a certain procedure... For ISR/Palestine no such backdrop, agreement exists. Israel does not follow UNSC resolutions, international law. UNSC Res 446 (stop settlement activity), or 2334. UNSC Res 478, 497.. UNSC does not recognize the situation created in Jerusalem and Golan Heights. Israel is an apartheid state which is a crime. "The ICC provides for individual criminal responsibility for crimes against humanity, including the crime of apartheid". With the absence of any law, proper conduct, you have jungle law, and people, esp victims of that jungle will act in all sorts of ways to change their existing situation. You will get animal behaviour if you keep treating people like animals. To address that, you need context.
"Decontextualization is bad but isn't national crime enforcement an example of that? You do a crime you do the time?'"
The Guardian: "UK spends more financing inequality in favour of rich than rest of Europe, report finds.. Inequalities of income, wealth and power cost UK £106.2bn a year compared with average developed OECD country"
What is the breakdown of total wealth in US? Top 10% hold about 100 trillion $. All companies under SP 500 are worth 38 trillion, all land, real estate is about 44 tr. Total gold is 14 tr, US probably has 1-2 trillon of that... Numbers are adding up. Combine all commodities, cash (foreign, domestic), and bonds, you can reach 130-140 easy. Most of that is held by the top 10%. Bottom 50% has nothing.
"North eastern Syria suffers from lack of water amid desertification" FRANCE 24 English
Foreign Affairs: "Collective Punishment Won’t Defeat Hamas"
"Dieselgate, but for trains"
Matt Ferrell: "In the summer of 2023, the Rijnstate hospital of Elst, The Netherlands opened its doors. What makes this particular campus interesting is how it generates its energy... The building collects energy from over 1,300 solar panels located on both the roof and the ground floor. When there’s a surplus of solar, that energy goes toward electrolysis, the splitting action that produces hydrogen. This then allows for hydrogen fuel cells to kick in as a form of reserve power when the sunnier supplies are low..
The Rijnstate isn’t the only hospital that integrated hydrogen into its energy generation this year. Just recently, the Viamed San José Hospital located in Murcia, Spain, installed a system that involves powering the creation of hydrogen through its 289 solar panels. The resulting hydrogen feeds into a boiler for space heating. Meanwhile, the oxygen produced as a byproduct of the electrolysis is then repurposed as a critical resource for medical procedures
That’s insanely cool. Those hospitals are good examples of how green hydrogen is already getting used today..
A while back, I covered a new form of electrolyzer by the Australian company Hysata. Its design is really promising, with an efficiency rating jumping from about 75% to a whopping 95%..
There’s also Sparc Hydrogen, a collaboration between Sparc Technologies, the University of Adelaide, Flinders University, and Fortescue Future Industries.14 Unlike typical setups, Sparc’s hydrogen production method doesn’t require an electrolyzer or electricity pulled from renewable energy infrastructure. Instead, it’s based on photocatalytic water splitting, or PWS"
SciTechDaily: “Over 12,000 participants, aged 45 to 74, were followed for 20 years in the #Singapore Chinese #Health Study.. Higher caffeine intake was associated with lower odds of physical frailty, regardless of the source”
A rise in homelessness, same thing. If anything trickle-down economics occurs only here - one percenter buys homes in excess snatching it away from upper middle class, who do the same for middle class, down and down it goes, and all of a sudden lower income person can't buy or rent (rent price is a reflection of purchase price), ends up on the streets. This is clear to see in the statistics, the modern homeless isn't some random bum, half of these people are actually employed!
Ergo "housing crisis" is not about shortage in overall housing. The crisis is a reflection of the society's inequality, there are enough homes but the rich are buying them, as investment, end most end up with no affordable housing. Middle class buys bread, wealthy buy assets. If they have too much money, distribution is skewed, there will be a bubble in the prices of those assets.
Stevenson: "[2023/05] Most people in ordinary financial positions or poor financial positions tend to spend all of their income over the course of their life on goods and services. They generally die without any accumulated assets, which means that they've spent everything on goods and services. Ordinary people buy goods and services that drives wages. Rich people, on the other hand, especially very rich people, tend to spend the majority of their income on buying more assets.
So that means if wealth inequality increases in society, ordinary and poor people have less, rich and very rich people have more. Society as a whole will start to want more assets and less goods and services. And that is because we're moving purchasing power away from ordinary people, who like goods and services, towards rich and very rich people who like to buy assets. So as inequality increases, asset prices naturally go up. Goods and services and wage prices naturally go down.
But if you remember, our central banks are trying to ensure that goods and services prices specifically keep going up at 2, 2.5, 3% a year. Because we have rising inequality, those goods and services prices, they want to go down because ordinary people who drive those prices are losing their purchasing power. That means that for most of the last 20, 30 years, central banks have been trying to convince ordinary people to spend money by cutting their interest rates. But remember those cutting interest rates, not only do they drive up ordinary prices, they also drive up asset prices for the rich. But asset prices for the rich are going up anyway, because the rich people are getting more and more and more money. So what's happening is this inequality is driving down wages, driving down the price of goods and services, and that forces action from central banks and governments, central banks to cut interest rates, governments to spend more money to try and support the economy. And a side effect of that is the rich get even richer and asset prices go up even more.. so in a sense, what you're seeing is another one of these.. death spirals of the economy"
Talking about death and despair in that uppity college voice.. kudos to people who can sit through these news conferences. #US #spox
"@wilbr@glitch.social
The insult on top of the injury of Israel's genocide is that they're proving conspiracy theorists right. I can hardly look around without seeing a billionaire or media conglomerate or government bending over backwards to support Israel or silence opposition. Critique of the Israeli military is, according to the US House of Representatives, anti-Jewish, despite being false on its face. All our allies and the UN are giving Israel free reign to do whatever it wants with only weak protest"
Siasat Daily: "Abu Dhabi launches first hydrogen-powered taxi.. This taxis will refuel at the region's first high-speed green hydrogen pilot fueling station in Masdar City"
Al Monitor: "COP28 President.. announced a deal to cut methane emissions from the fossil fuel industry, with ExxonMobil and Saudi Arabia's state-owned oil firm Aramco being among the 50 businesses that signed up"
We need to stop seeing excessive wealth accumulation as something 'benign'. Even if money does not trickle down (and it won't), the money will be used to buy assets which poses a big problem for regular people.
"French hydrogen project developer Lhyfe has announced plans to build a 800MW green H2 project in Lubmin, Germany"
Imagine giving an alien living in a completely different physical environment all the text ever written by mankind, us. They decipher the text, are able to read it. But would they, without seeing any of the physical environment that gave rise to that text, understand what it is to be human? They cannot. "I woke up saw the garden, walked in the hills". If the aliens were non-solid, aethereal beings living in a f-ing plasma mist, they could not get that reference. They'd put it together, match it with other references of that kind, but they would not truly know what it is meant on that text. Language is code. We communicate through that code. Code signifies, is a shorthand for something larger that is not present in that text, the whole human experience.
JH is the creator of the ULMFiT on which all modern language models are based.
Hah.. Jeremy Howard basically says of LLM tech "u ain't gettin advanced AI w this shit". Development apparently stagnated already even with the farcical parameters ppl judge these things meaning the future does not look good. Improvements now resemble an S curve rather than an exponential. If you sank money in this field you are fukked.
.. if you can find real wasabi that is.. 95% wasabi out there is fake, made with horseradish.
WION: "Japan's traditional spice Wasabi has potential memory-boosting properties: Study"
Politico: "Russian oil price cap has largely failed, new report finds.. An analysis shared with POLITICO reveals that sanctions cheats, gaping loopholes and widespread circumvention mean oil revenues are still filling Moscow’s war chest"
CNBC: "Swiss bank Banque Pictet admits hiding $5.6 billion of Americans' money from IRS.. Banque Pictet agreed to pay about 122.9 million as part of an agreement with U.S. prosecutors"
Al Monitor: "Qatar emir slams 'shameful' inaction on Gaza war"
Informed Comment: "This is a War on Children, and 'Safe Zones' are Death Traps: UNICEF"
#Gaza
Arab News: "France calls at UN for ‘a truce leading to a ceasefire’ in Gaza"
The Times of Israel: "Achieving the 'total destruction of Hamas' would mean 'the war will last 10 years,' Macron said at a press conference on the sidelines of the UN’s COP28 climate talks in Dubai"
NYT: "The U.S. says Israel must do more to protect civilians. Experts see little change."
Neocons, US militarism, Israeli Likud party, all there. All serving the interests of the private war lobby..
Hossein-Zadeh: "[2006] Huntington’s theory of 'the clash of civilizations' is essentially a subtle version of Richard Perle’s strategy of 'de-contextualization.' Perle, a leading neoconservative militarist (and a prominent advisor of the Likud Party, the hard-line Zionist party of Prime Minister Arial Sharon of Israel) coined the term 'de-contextualization' as a way to explain both the desperate acts of terrorism in general and the violent tactics of the Palestinian resistance to occupation in particular. He argued that in order to blunt the widespread global criticism of the Israeli treatment of Palestinians, their resistance to occupation must be decontextualized; that is, we must stop trying to understand the territorial, geopolitical, and historical reasons that some groups turn to terrorism. Instead, he suggested, the reasons for the violent reactions of such groups must be sought in the arenas of culture and/or religion—in the Islamic way of thinking. Like the 'clash of civilizations' theory, decontextualization strategy has been part of a well-orchestrated effort to divert attention from the root causes of terrorism and attribute it to 'pathological problems of the Muslim mind'"
"Masdar and PLN.. announced green hydrogen projects to go along with their floating solar plans"
Beyond the illegality issue the main problem is the fundamental weaknesses of this tech. It cannot be scaled up, must be handled with kid gloves (read: high TCO) and even at its best comes with massive range issues when deployed on cars.
ABC Australia: "There are growing calls for batteries to be declared dangerous goods as illegally dumped lithium ion batteries are causing nearly 40 fires a day at recycling facilities and landfills"
Stevenson's take on money: if I loan you 100 dollars, how much money do you have? Some say 100, this is wrong. Add assets and liabilities, you end up with zero. You have 100 but you owe me 100, you have zero dollars. All money is printed by Central Banks, and loaned to individual banks. It's their debt, central bank's credit. If we add all debts and all credits in a system at any point in time it always adds up to zero. This is how the modern money system is constructed. It follows that if a certain section of the economy is saddled with too much debt, another part of econ must have accumulated too much money.
The graph below is somewhat different than GINI, but catches interesting patterns. It suggests ineq has been getting worse since 90s (and likely 80s, no data there) save for a few brief downticks it kept increasing and the bad state has recently solidified.
Percentage of Wealth Held by Top 10%. Around 69%.. Bottom 50% holds <3% of the assets. Looks unequal.
Inequality leads the 1% buying more and more assets, their price skyrockets. Eventually the rich end up buying assets the middle class could use who are priced out of the market. They do that bcz this is how they spend their money, lower income folk spend on goods and services (shows up in CPI), the rich buy assets. GS solution, fix inequality, tax the wealthy on their assets. Money does not represent absolute level, it represents a distribution. Middle class can get extra 1000 and be happy but if some get millions via subsidies, easy credit, bailouts, comparatively speaking middle class is losing money.
Good points by former Citibank trader Gary Stevenson on the problems with the current econ.
"Banksters: HSBC, the Untouchable Titan of Global Finance"
#Subsidy #BritishRail
Conflicts with the Army Chief Zalushny, the previous President, now this.. Current gov's critics are increasing in number.
Yahoo News: "Kyiv Mayor Vitali Klitschko has told Der Spiegel that Ukraine is moving towards authoritarianism, seemingly making a veiled criticism of President Volodymyr Zelensky"
Venezuella referandum on annexing neighboring Guyana.. Here's an earlier share about Guyana's oil major find. Exxon is there, and the consortium also includes China. Even Cuba seems to be against any annexation.
NYT: "Vice President Kamala Harris said on Saturday that the United States fiercely opposes forcibly relocating Gaza residents outside the enclave..
She also rejected an idea suggested recently by some Israeli officials that the borders of Gaza could shrink after the war is over to accommodate a security 'buffer zone' between the interior of Gaza and Israel. The statement said the United States would not permit 'the redrawing of the borders of Gaza.'..
'Palestinians need a hopeful political horizon, economic opportunity and freedom. And the region more broadly must be integrated and prosperous. And we must work toward that'"
Munee, give us mo muneeeee
Politico: "Pentagon: US arms industry struggling to keep up with China"
The dubious 'Hamas beheading' news during Oct 7 attack apparently started in French BFM TV who took the news from Israeli i24news channel. And what a coincidence, both channels are owned by the Israeli businessman Patrick Drahi.
Euractiv: "The EU's Hydrogen Bank has begun operations.. By 2030, Europe wants to produce 10 million tonnes of renewable hydrogen annually. To get companies to switch, Brussels is footing the difference between their ability to pay and the high prices charged by producers of clean-burning gas"
"@EU_Commission@respublicae.eu
Hydrogen is going to be a key technology to decarbonise Europe's industry and help meet our climate targets. Today, we've launched the first auction under the European Hydrogen Bank to support the production of renewable hydrogen in Europe"
"@gdeihl@spore.social
Thacker Pass, Nevada, is a place where a massive lithium mine is taking place. It runs over the human rights of Native American tribes in the area, displaced decades ago by genocide and forced retreat to reservations on land thought to be of no value. Now these people, among the poorest in the US, are being abused again. In addition to mining's traditional destruction, one ton of lithium requires 500,000 gallons of water to harvest"
"Cambridge researchers' device can turn contaminated water or seawater into clean hydrogen and purified water, anywhere in the world.. [The researchers] deposited a photocatalyst on a nanostructured carbon mesh that is a good absorber of both light and heat, generating the water vapour used by the photocatalyst to create hydrogen. The porous carbon mesh, treated to repel water, served both to help the photocatalyst float and to keep it away from the water below, so that contaminants do not interfere with its functionality.
In addition, the new device uses more of the Sun's energy. 'The light-driven process for making solar fuels only uses a small portion of the solar spectrum - there's a whole lot of the spectrum that goes unused,' said [one researcher]"
Ethiopia is landlocked which is a big problem for them. If there was proactive conflict resolution there would be mechanisms to ensure ETH sea access.
BBC: "Ethiopia is abuzz with rumours of a new war .. As well as importing weapons and mobilising his army, [PM] Mr Abiy.. has been saying that access to the sea is an existential question... Ethiopia's most obvious target is the Eritrean Red Sea port of Assab, which was part of Ethiopia until Eritrean independence more than 30 years ago"
Another movie of his The Dictator belittles Middle Eastern countries, supports the view that ppl living in such places along with their dictators are backward losers. This will lead to the thought well bomb the shit out of them why not, with, you know, our very latest awesome new Motherbomber 2040+. The last part the viewer had to infer himself obvously but hey, leave some stuff to the imagination. Such is art.
Sacha BC is a shitlib, it makes sense. Shitlibs are Woke, pro-Zionist, and anti-Russian, which helps the private industrial complex (more animosity more bombs more money). Woke shifts the discussion from the economy, gaslights away from extreme inequality, Russia Russia Russia, Hamas Hamas Hamas helps with weapon sales... This ideology is manufactured from ground up for the interests of the war lobby.
He plays a person from "Kazakhistan" but the type is generally from Caucuses, Eurasian looking.. Shown as brash, crass, little stupid - not much different from how Russians were portrayed in US movies for decades.
Borat movies are anti-Russian propaganda
Did not watch the debate hosted by Cardigan Shananigan for Newsom-RDS, no. I'm sure it was interesting.. I read some excerpts tho - "we have one thing in common.. neither of us will be the nominee for our party in 2024”.
TDB: "[F]ive weeks after Mike Johnson was elected speaker, and nearly eight weeks since the attack, Congress doesn’t appear any closer to passing an aid package—for Israel or for Ukraine, the latter of which has been 'weeks' away from running out of weapons for months now"
Al Jazeera J Bays made a good point, Lula / Brasil put forward a UNSC resolution weeks ago to halt Gaza violence, US vetoed it. Then 29 days later they allowed a similar resolution by abstaining. In those 29 days there were thousands of additional deaths.