Week 1

FuelCellsWorks: "Alstom To Supply First Hydrogen Trains To The Italian Region Of Puglia And Second Order Of Trains In The Framework Agreement With Lombardy"

ProPublica: "The story of one #Indiana store demonstrates how the more than 60,000 gun retailers in America have little financial incentive to say no to questionable buyers and face limited penalties for failing to prevent illegal transactions"

Kimbal looks nearly as inbred as his brother.

JE clearly had an high-end service along the one with young girls.. One-stop shop for the military-industrial-Likud complex (you can bet your ass JE, Maxwell was theirs, Eps was always througt to be an asset, the bitch, and her father had long links to intel).

Business Insider: "[2020] Jeffrey Epstein, the multimillionaire sex criminal, introduced Kimbal Musk.. to a woman in his entourage"

"@jasongorman@mastodon.cloud

Research emerging detailing the degradation of the GPT-4 model as it drifts further and further from the training data cut-off... The 'I' in its 'A.I.' is human. And when they train GPT-5, it'll be eating the output of LLMs. Like in Human Centipede. (But not as funny)"

Democracy

The Intercept: "The US State Department encouraged the Pakistani government in a March 7, 2022, meeting to remove Imran Khan as prime minister over his neutrality on the Russian invasion of Ukraine, according to a classified Pakistani government document.. One month after the meeting with U.S. officials documented in the leaked Pakistani government document, a no-confidence vote was held in Parliament, leading to Khan’s removal from power. The vote is believed to have been organized with the backing of Pakistan’s powerful military"

Using genocidal language against Palestinias.. you know what they call that in Israel? Tuesday.

ISR ambassador to UK is in hot waters again? There is a petition for her removal - "The Ambassador is now using openly genocidal language and is advocating for a genocidal act to take place"

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#Hedges #Palestine

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Dersh is a douche.. Has shady connections to the "complex". He was ambushed recently by a Youtuber, had himself a new asshole torn up. It was hilarious to watch. Zionist douche.

TDB: "The government of South Africa filed a case in December with the International Court of Justice in The Hague, accusing Israel of committing war crimes in Gaza. On Tuesday, it was widely reported that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu wants the lawyer sometimes known as 'Dersh' to represent Israel at The Hague"

SValley and similar companies are more like the "last mile of tech", they can only build upon existing research, they need lots of free stuff made available to them, low hanging fruits so they can pick those fruits, put them together to create a product as a last mile of service. We should not expect much from them by way of basic science, vision and surely not regulatory advice. iPhone would not exist wout billions of government funded research and existing tech.

"Ballard announces new Long-Term Supply Agreement with NFI and purchase order for 100 fuel cell engines for bus deployments in North America"

No wonder these apps are so f-ing bloated.. they have a whole freakin browser in there!

Apparently when you click on a link in their app, another, embedded Tiktok browser takes over, not the phone's default browser. They can use this stealth browser to track what user does on the external site being visited, log keystrokes, they could capture passwords, anything they wanted.

NYT: "[2022/08] The web browser used within the TikTok app can track every keystroke made by its users, according to new research that is surfacing as the Chinese-owned video app grapples with U.S. lawmakers’ concerns over its data practices"

Politico: "Hydroxychloroquine could have caused 17,000 deaths during COVID, study finds"

"@mastodonmigration@mastodon.online

[For Substackers who want to leave] Good news, WordPress.com, known for hosted WordPress Blogs (that now attach to the fediverse!), now has full-featured hosted WordPress Newsletters"

Bair: "The year 2009 brought with it a new president, Barack Obama. I was desperately hoping that the new administration would rethink some of the bailout policies we were pursuing and would do more to help distressed homeowners. Unfortunately, that was not to be. President Obama promised to launch stronger programs to prevent foreclosures, and I really think that helping these families was a priority for him. But I do not believe that the people he picked for major economic positions in his administration shared those priorities.

Much to my surprise and disappointment, he picked Tim Geithner to replace Hank Paulson as the new secretary of the Treasury. Throughout the crisis, Tim’s singular focus had been to bail out the big banks, and in particular, Citi. He had shown little interest in foreclosure prevention or any other kind of direct help for Main Street. He viewed the big banks as the center of our economy, and equated helping them with helping the broader economy. He did not understand that their interests and Main Street interests were separate, and that helping big banks did not necessarily help struggling American families.

President Obama also picked Larry Summers, another close associate of Bob Rubin, to head the National Economic Council, or “NEC,” which was responsible for developing economic policy for the White House. Summers had also once served as secretary of the Treasury and had been a supporter of legislation to block regulation of the derivatives markets. In addition, he had backed legislation to repeal a Depression-era law called “Glass-Steagall,” which for decades had prohibited FDIC-insured banks from engaging in risky securities activities. Based on Summers’s record, I also viewed him as highly sympathetic to the big banks"

Perusing Sheila Bair's book, The Bullies of Wall Street. Does not look good for Geithner. Nor Summers, but we already knew he was a jackass.

Unfettered immigration is problematic on many fronts.. First is the mentality of who arrives. Most people fled from a place likely did not like the government of the place they are from, so they arrive in US not liking the concept of government. An anti-government sentiment can spread through immigrants. Plus when they arrive they are happy to be working at all, they do not ask anything, they are either low-wage earners who don't complain undermining local unions, or they become "enterpreneurs" becoming ultra pro-business jackasses of which US does not need more of either. Any way you look at it, unfettered immigration is a net negative.

"@SafeStreetRebel@sfba.social

[..2023] was a big year for transit. Working together with many different groups, we won over a billion dollars for transit. The fight for transit in California is far from over but we're headed in the right direction..

Here are some things we did in 2023..

Demonstrated self-driving cars don't work. Cruise no longer operates in California
A lot of guerilla infrastructure, including taking inspiration from @crosswalksLA"

The Baltic Times: "Six gas transmission operators develop the cross-border hydrogen transmission infrastructure from Finland through Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Poland to Germany, namely the Nordic-Baltic Hydrogen Corridor. The goal of the project is to create the connection between green energy production regions in Northern Europe with the main consumption centres in Central Europe. This project is expected to be implemented by 2030"

GlobeNewswire: "NewHydrogen.. the developer of ThermoLoop a breakthrough technology that uses water and heat rather than electricity to produce the world’s cheapest green hydrogen, today announced.. the potential use of graphene in catalysts for green hydrogen production and fuel cell technologies"

What is The Matrix? It is corporate control. The Matrix is a privately generated dream world, built to keep us under control in order to change a human being into this.

"@jasongorman@mastodon.cloud

The 10 wealthiest people in the world are worth a combined $1.2 trillion. In real terms, that's 6x what the 10 wealthiest were worth 30 years ago"

Vox: "The science is in: exercise won’t help you lose much weight"

Aloha 2015, Fracture, very good.. Get Him to the Greek, I'll give it a 4.

Scientific American: "Vaccination Dramatically Lowers Long Covid Risk.. Several new studies reveal that getting multiple COVID vaccine doses provides strong protection against lingering symptoms"

Black holes, as theorized, have no volume, so they cannot have vibrational lattice, cannot generate blackbody spectrum, radiation.

They engraved the formula for "Hawking radiation" on there..

[-]

Stephen Hawking is buried next to Isaac Newton in Westminister Abby. I.N. is turning in his grave for who was buried next to him.

Link

You bake a cake, cut it into two pieces. Those two pieces would have the same temperature right? I could not double the temperature by cutting the cake into two. The commentary is bizarre.

Sounds baseless

"The radiation temperature is inversely proportional to the black hole's mass"

"@fedijedi@mstdn.cool

Japanese disaster prevention X account can’t post anymore after hitting API limit (another reason why governments and critical agencies and nonprofits should have their own Fediverse instances to disperse essential emergency info...)"

TDB: "During one of Bill Clinton’s jaunts around the world with Jeffrey Epstein in 2002, the former president enjoyed a six-course meal in Singapore with [him]... Now photos of the occasion—which were scrubbed from the National Archives of Singapore (NAS)—are resurfacing"

Of course he won't.. He is Anglo's bitch and BRICS is an alternate grouping to the Anglo. This guy is firmly in line with military-industrial-Likud complex.

The Guardian: "Milei says Argentina will not be joining Brics bloc in policy reversal"

NYT: "New Spin on a Revolving Door: Pentagon Officials Turned Venture Capitalists...The New York Times has identified at least 50 former Pentagon and national security officials, most of whom left the federal government in the last five years, who are now working in defense-related venture capital or private equity as executives or advisers. In many cases, The Times confirmed that they continued to interact regularly with Pentagon officials or members of Congress to push for policy changes or increases in military spending that could benefit firms they have invested in.“There’s panache now with the ties between the defense community and private equity,” said Ellen M. Lord, a former under secretary of defense for acquisitions"

Mondoweiss: "The reason Israel’s die-hard supporters in the United States have tried to ban, or even criminalize, the campaign for Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) is not that it is illegitimate or anti-semitic. It is precisely because boycotting, sanctioning ,and divesting from Israel may be an effective strategy to help bring down its genocidal, expansionist, and unaccountable regime"

Mondoweiss: "Following the previous U.S. veto of a ceasefire at the Security Council, the UN General Assembly took up the global call for a ceasefire, and the resolution, sponsored by Jordan, passed by 120 votes to 14, with 45 abstentions. The 12 small countries who voted with the United States and Israel represented less than 1% of the world’s population. The isolated diplomatic position in which the United States found itself should have been a wake-up call..

After the United States again slammed the Security Council door in Palestine’s face on December 8, the desperate need to end the massacre in Gaza returned to the UN General Assembly on December 12. An identical resolution to the one the U.S. vetoed in the Security Council was approved by a vote of 153 to 10, with 33 more yes votes than the one in October. While General Assembly resolutions are not binding, they do carry political weight, and this one sends a clear message that the international community is disgusted by the carnage in Gaza"

Haaretz: "[2006] IDF Commander: We Fired More Than a Million Cluster Bombs in Lebanon.. Phosphorous and cluster bombs heavily used; unexploded munitions litter wide area of Lebanon. 'What we did was insane and monstrous, we covered entire towns in cluster bombs,' the head of an IDF rocket unit in Lebanon said regarding the use of cluster bombs and phosphorous shells"

ABC AU: "Feasibility study into hydrogen fuel-powered freight 'HyWay' between Adelaide and Melbourne.. As businesses look to reduce their carbon footprints, one company is exploring a multi-million-dollar project to transport freight between South Australia and Victoria with zero emissions. Countrywide Hydrogen has launched a feasibility study into the construction of a "Hydrogen HyWay" between Adelaide and Melbourne"

Fortune: "Toyota’s bet on hybrid cars seems to be paying off as it rides consumer skepticism of an all-EV future to maintain its lead as the world’s top selling automaker"

With a budget of 340, gross 704 mil, Fast X

u.mov_profit(340, 704)

Out[1]: -87.6

lost money according to my formula's estimate..

Really? WTF

"@Wolven@ourislandgeorgia.net

.. [Steven Pinker] aided Jeffery Epstein's legal defense"

Reshare

Annual changes in the housing stock (percentage), on average, looks higher than population change. There are enough housing units, but top 10% is likely hoarding them, some people cannot find places to live. We can regulate home ownership - mandate so that noone can own more than one home, or a patch of land bigger than enough to live on, for individuals or business alike, including farming. The rest becomes public property.

df = u.get_fred(1980,["TTLHHM156N","POPTOTUSA647NWDB"])
df.columns = ['housing','population']
df.asfreq(freq='A',method='bfill').pct_change().mean()*100

Out[1]: 
housing       1.142863
population    0.893067
dtype: float64

71 bil.. they are not making that money back. Even if they made 30 profitable movies with that new IP it still would not be enough.

Homer Simpson as an Avenger.. great idea. Marvel already cannot sink any lower.

NPR: "[2019] Homer Simpson probably won't become the newest member of the Avengers, but anything's possible now that Disney owns 21st Century Fox. One year after the Walt Disney Co. announced the $71.3 billion merger, it's official"

Latent space is usually a reduced dimension, sometimes a decomposition of another space. I could decompose 6 into 3 times 2, maybe that tells us something.. Can decompose a matrix, we can look at individual pieces for more clues, each piece could be seen as a latent space.

LLM can be useful for a sort of glorifed search where "chatting" with the thing actually searches in "a latent space" as Howard calls it, a likely useful compressed space of knowledge that might give you better results compared to a regular search. LLM is not thinking, it is merely indexing knowledge, that could be useful in limited, focused applications.

"@baldur@toot.cafe

Two points [on 'AI and Lossy Bottlenecks']..

A lot of previously sensible people are being swept up by the AI bubble.
The ideas in this post are literally a mechanism for taking away your right to vote and replace it with a software-mediated plutocracy...

The bubble will only get more ridiculous before it pops. We’re still in early days yet. That somebody who is ostensibly a political “moderate” outright advocates a system that would replace voting with an opaque system that would inevitably be built and designed by multinational corporations and implicitly favour their interests is not even close to the peak of this nonsense marathon"

Listen to this guy

"AI and Lossy Bottlenecks [Schneier on Security]... Removing democracy’s bottleneck.. the lossy bottleneck that has the largest effect on society is in politics. It’s the same problem as the restaurant. As a complicated citizen, your policy positions are probably nuanced, trading off between different options and their effects. You care about some issues more than others and some implementations more than others. If you had the knowledge and time, you could engage in the deliberative process and help create better laws than exist today.. Imagine a system where AI removes this lossy bottleneck.

CNBC: "Oil prices rise as Iranian warship enters Red Sea after U.S. destroys Houthi boats"

Great.. reducing reasons to go to war.. For a while it looked like one would start soon too.

The Guardian: "Ethiopia has signed a 'historic' deal granting it naval and commercial access to ports along Somaliland’s coast, in exchange for recognition for the breakaway republic’s independence"

"@paulisci@mstdn.ca

A List of Predictions Made in 1924 About 2024"

Photo

DNA India: "Amazon begins to produce own hydrogen fuel to power vehicles.. The one-megawatt (MW) proton exchange membrane electrolyser is the first for Amazon and is producing low-carbon hydrogen to fuel more than 225 hydrogen fuel cell-powered forklift trucks at the site"

Human Right's Watch: "Meta’s policies and practices have been silencing voices in support of Palestine and Palestinian human rights on Instagram and Facebook in a wave of heightened censorship of social media amid the hostilities between Israeli forces and Palestinian armed groups"

"@fuck_cars_bot@botsin.space

'Reject Tradition, Embrace Progress'"

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"@EtiOst@mastodon.world

#COVID19 is a leading cause of death in children and young people in the US⚠️ 😟"

NewScientist: "NFTs died a slow, painful death in 2023 as most are now worthless"

Vox: "To explain leveraged buyouts in easier-to-understand terms, let’s say you buy a house. Under normal circumstances, if you can’t pay for the mortgage, you would be in trouble. But by the LBO rules, you’re only responsible for a portion. If you pay for 30 percent of the house, the other 70 percent of the asking price is debt placed on the house. The house owes that money to the bank or creditor who lent it, not you. Of course, a house can’t owe money. But under the private equity model, it does, and its assets — its factories, stores, equipment, etc. — are collateral.

The idea, in theory, behind private equity is that the endeavor will be worth it — for both you and the house. 'There are many companies that, if not for private equity, would not be able to get access to the kind of capital they need to scale, to transform, to turn around, and to have succession planning,' said one industry source, who requested anonymity to speak candidly for this story.

But because of the debt companies end up owing creditors as part of a deal, they sometimes find themselves with such high interest payments that they can’t make the investments necessary to be competitive or even stay afloat. Plus, companies often take out additional loans to pay private equity investors dividends, and then they pay a fee if and when they are sold. If they can’t pay off the debt, the companies are on the hook, and their employees and customers are the ones to suffer the consequences.

And private equity’s No. 1 priority isn’t the long-term health of the companies it buys — it’s to make money, and as is the case in so many facets of investing today, to make money fast.

'Some of the larger private equity firms, they’re not retaining investments in the long-term. They are designed to produce short-term returns, and if there is nothing left of the company at the end, that’s okay,' said Rep. Katie Porter (D-CA) in an interview.

Corporate power built the ISDS system to avoid having to entice their lapdog politicians to invade countries left and right for them. This shady arbitration system is active, ready-for-use 24/7, every day of the year. Corps can always drag a country to court for minor disgressions, even the threat of it can make countries roll over and roll out the red carpet for you. No need for colonization in this day and age. The post-colonial system is more insidious and underhanded.

ISDS vs South Africa

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The Nation: "Who Is Funding Canary Mission? Inside the Doxxing Operation Targeting Anti-Zionist Students and Professors.. Americans who give money to Canary Mission are potentially committing a serious crime by acting as agents of a foreign power.. Canary Mission [is] a massive blacklisting and doxxing operation directed from Israel that targets students and professors critical of Israeli policies, and then launches slanderous charges against them—charges designed to embarrass and humiliate them and damage their future employability"

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"@EU_Commission@social.network.europa.eu

The wait is finally over. From 2024, USB-C will be the common standard for electronic devices in the EU – and we have already seen the impact!

It means

🔌The same charger for all phones, tablets and cameras

⚡ Harmonised fast-charging technology

🔄Reduced e-waste

One charger to rule them all.

Now, a reality"

"The Web is Fantastic.. The real web is built on links. Hyper ones, in fact. Links you can share on your website. Links you can send to your mates. Links to pages that can be indexed by search engines so you can find things again..

The big social media sites have decided that actually no, we don't like links. Just sort of "find" things and if you don't find it well tough shit. Sharing interesting websites, blogs, and articles on your own site is the way to go. Make a blogroll. Make a podroll. Share links on your Mastodon account...

Blogs and RSS never died. Some of us just took a little break from it while we all shitposted on Twitter for likes, retweets, and validation. While we wrote long, unfindable threads instead of blog posts. I'm as guilty of this as anyone"

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WION: "The Hamas-run Gaza Strip's health ministry said Wednesday the death toll from the war with Israel now tops 21,000"

"@forrestbrazeal@hachyderm.io

Did someone say 'AIOps'?"

[-]

NYT: "[C]ritics both within Israel and outside have questioned whether resolving to destroy such a deeply entrenched organization [as Hamas] was ever realistic. One former Israeli national security adviser called the plan 'vague'. 'I think that we have reached a moment when the Israeli authorities will have to define more clearly what their final objective is,' President Emmanuel Macron of France said this month. 'The total destruction of Hamas? Does anybody think that’s possible? If it’s that, the war will last 10 years.' Since it first emerged in 1987, Hamas has survived repeated attempts to eliminate its leadership. The organization’s very structure was designed to absorb such contingencies, according to political and military specialists. In addition, Israel’s devastating tactics in the Gaza war threaten to radicalize a broader segment of the population, inspiring new recruits"

.. and modern cosmologists don't understand empirical evidence.

"@medigoth@qoto.org

One common feature of various anti-science ideologies is that their adherents lack a sense of scale. FlatEarthers don’t understand distance, creationists don’t understand time"

Andersen: "As antitrust enforcement was discredited and enfeebled starting in the 1970s, big corporations were able to get so big and dominant in their business or regions that they had ever fewer companies directly competing with them to hire workers. More and more of them became the only games in town. One of the scholars who has helped expose this particular bit of rigging and its unfairness over the last several decades is the influential, idiosyncratic University of Chicago law professor Eric Posner. As he and his economist co-author Glen Weyl explain, antitrust laws were enacted to make sure that businesses compete in every way—not just as sellers setting the prices they charge for products and services, but also as buyers of labor setting the salaries they pay.

The appeal of antitrust for citizens was to make sure competition kept prices lower and salaries higher. Enforcement of our antitrust laws, however, has come to focus entirely on consumer prices, particularly since the definitive Borking of the field in the late 1970s. The antitrust enforcers at the Department of Justice and Federal Trade Commission, because they rely 'on the traditional assumption that labor markets are competitive,' and that it wasn’t their jobs to protect workers anyhow, 'have never blocked a merger because of its effect on labor,' and they don’t even employ experts who could calculate those effects"

TDB: "I Served in the IDF in the 2014 War in Gaza. The Friends I Lost There Should Have Been the Last Ones. Almost every old friend I run into talks to me about Gaza. Most of them are in therapy to help them let go of what they experienced there—most of them unsuccessfully. We are the soldiers who served the Israeli concept of 'managing the conflict' and the endless rounds-of-fighting policy"

"@brucelawson@vivaldi.net

Stop making fun of older kids who still believe in Santa Claus, there are grown men who still believe in trickle down housing and that market can solve the housing crisis"

Trailers look good Land of Bad, The Bricklayer, Civil War

"@blogdiva@mastodon.social

if all streaming services in the United States are now charging you to watch ads, then they aren't streaming services. they are cable TV channels. FCC needs to do their job and regulate these fake internet companies as they are supposed to regulate cable & legacy broadcast tv stations"

#Gaza

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TASS: "Israeli military assaulting Jalazone refugee camp"

Al-Monitor: "Tehran said it had finalized an agreement with Moscow to eliminate the US dollar from bilateral trade"

Al-Monitor: "South Africa files ICJ case accusing Israel of 'genocidal acts' in Gaza"

NYT: "Israel-Hamas War: Deadly Strike Hits Southern Gaza Area Where Many Are Sheltering"