Week 8

Defense Mirror: "Singapore to be a Hub of Future Hydrogen-fueled Large Commercial Planes.. Singapore plans to strategically pioneer hydrogen-fueled aviation by assessing feasibility, infrastructure, and technological advancements"

Here is how a realistic movie would be like. An AK shoots 600/min, in 120 minutes 72K bullets. So the movie could be about just one guy, he shoots an AK non-stop, from beginning until the end, constantly reloading, and by the end of the movie, maybe he'd have taken out one enemy soldier.

Belfast Telegraph: "[2011] US forces have fired so many bullets in Iraq and Afghanistan - an estimated 250,000 for every insurgent killed - that American ammunition-makers cannot keep up with demand"

The lone gunman among unarmed civilians, or the stock bullshit Holywood war movie is based on a myth. The hero sprays bullets around, shoots 100 and kills 100. Reality is going after people who are just as intent on killing you, and that is hard. Read: "During World War II it was estimated that 45,000 rounds of small arms ammunition was fired to kill one enemy soldier. In Vietnam the American military establishment consumed an estimated 50,000 rounds of ammunition for every enemy killed".

Personal weapons are the perfect market for arms co. The demand fit with the politics of the times (anti-government, buy guns to "protect yourself"), they sold these essentially useless products by the millions.

Arms manufacturers would like personal weapon demand to be at consumer product level, everyone buying one or two, w/ contracts on maintanance, some ammo purchases here and there. "Consumers" shoot their little toy around for a little show, nothing more. When things get serious arms co could get worried, real war is serious business. All of a sudden you need ammunition in the millions, production needs to ramped up for certain things not for others.. Producing little gadgetry is different from war-time production, and not necessarily as profitable.

Three-dimensional chess my ass... It's more like one-dimensional checkers.

US is not an empire and it does not have a deep state - even the shadiest shit is known to the decision makers, some of whom are naturally bought out by moneyed interests. Some geniunely might think they are involved in deep strategery hence they are favored by the donors because their stupid moves will still help the complex, whose only time horizon is the next quarter.

Government is a huge organization, there are all kinds of people in it, it is tough to make it go totally fascistic. I would be more worried of Coca-Cola then some imagined "deep state".

"@baldur@toot.cafe

.. 'I use GPT to generate SQL queries I barely understand but I’m sure that I catch all of the security bugs and exploits reading over the code myself'"

"@baldur@toot.cafe

One of my new year’s resolutions was to stop debating the incoherent AI claims MBA and tech bro types on private Slacks or mailing lists, but they just keep saying so much dumb stuff that it’s hard to just sit on your fingers and ignore them"

Watched California Senate debate; my picks, Barbara Lee #1, Porter #2. Schiff made some suprising noises on taxation, not bad. But there is too much big money behind him, not clear he would be a reliable vote on important issues.

That is hilarious he uses that word too, according to the book Evil Geniuses the real asshole was his father, John Sununu, described exactly in those terms. Apparently noone in US politics did more damage to the climate cause than him. Excerpt below:

The surname Sununu is familiar today mainly because of a pair of recent New Hampshire politicians, a governor and a U.S. senator, but the most significant Sununu was their father, John H. Sununu, himself a former New Hampshire governor and the first President Bush’s first chief of staff. In several important ways, he was another prototypical Republican for the new age: an asshole personally, a conservative hard-liner, and a critical figure in turning the party toward full-bore denial of climate change.

He just mad the candidate he supported did not win in his home state. What do youngsters say these days? CRINGE.

Politico: "‘Assholes come and go’: Trump isn’t the future, Sununu says"

You can't bitch about Navalny if you had anything to do with Assange's current condition.

Arab News: "Dutch PM Rutte in strong position to become NATO chief after getting US, UK backing"

NYT: "As Gaza Death Toll Nears 30,000, Israel’s Isolation Grows"

China Hydrogen Bulletin: "China now arguably controls world electrolyzer manufacturing capacities, especially alkaline electrolyzers, with over 50 per cent global nominal capacities located in China by the end of 2023.. China will have over 40GW electrolyzer production capacity by the end of 2024, which alone far exceeds foreseeable global demand of around 10GW in 2025. However, latest developments shows that Chinese electrolyzer producers didn’t halt their expanding pace-at least five companies have announced inauguration of new plants or beginning of construction of GW scale production facilities just within first two months of 2024. Through these cases, we may realize that even the most aggressive forecasts by world leading consultancies may underestimate the capacity building of China’s electrolyzer sector"

It makes sense for Disney to go Woke, they are deeply embedded in the complex. They need to gaslight, that means taking part in the Woke debate. They are essentially pursuing this non-issue to escape the pitchforks.

Here is Disney. With a little browsing I found two connections already.

There are some interesting connections there... You can play a version of Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon with this data, start with one conglomerate and find out how many board member connections it takes to reach another.

"They Rule is an interactive visualization of the interlocking directories of the largest US companies. It shows that 87 of the top 100 US companies in 2021 were connected through shared directors on their boards... A few companies control much of the economy and oligopolies exert control in nearly every sector of the economy. The people who oversee these companies swap on and off the boards from one company to another, and in and out of government positions. These people run the most powerful institutions on the planet, and we have almost no say in who they are"

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Ukraine looks like it can be Winchester... Watch out

"Being Winchester" is clearly not good.. #LOB

Land of Bad ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐

Kurt Andersen: "In the 1960s and ’70s, Daniel Moynihan had been pigeonholed as a moderate or a conservative, but as a U.S. senator during the 1990s, when the rest of his party went Republicanesque on the political economy, Moynihan was a kind of heroic last left-winger standing...

At the start of his presidency, Clinton tried to legislate an expansion of the private U.S. health insurance system to make it cover more people. 'Mr. Clinton and his allies,' a Times analysis explained in 1994, 'were trying hard to redefine the Democratic Party away from traditionally liberal approaches to domestic policy; they were almost inevitably drawn to the ideas of managed competition. Though still largely theoretical, the concept relies on market forces, not government, to hold down costs and expand access to health insurance.' That is, Clinton tried and failed to pass a version of Obamacare sixteen years before Obama succeeded..

[Moynihan said of Clintoncare back then] 'He hated unnecessary government complexity' and the Clinton plan.. was complex and hard to explain (as Obamacare would be as well). Also, Moynihan 'could see the [so-called reform] policies' proposed by Clinton would 'not perform as promised'"

"@somcak@cutie.city

.. When Congress says we can’t afford universal healthcare, they are saying, 'We can’t afford to not make the insurance companies money because they fund our campaigns'"

Reuters: "Germany earmarks up to $3.8 bln for future green hydrogen imports"

"@h_thoreson@mastodon.world

In the future we will all wear an Apple Vision pro for 15 minutes before returning it"

"Why the European Basic Income?.. The EBI is more than a policy; it's a vision for a truly European Social Union that supports citizens directly. Modelled on a negative tax system, it guarantees that those earning below a certain threshold receive a financial boost, instead of facing tax burdens"

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"Rotten Apple.. The European Union’s Digital Markets Act is being enforced and Apple aren’t happy about it... Instead of graciously acknowledging that this is what’s best for users, Apple are throwing a tantrum... As of the next update to iOS, users in the EU will no longer have homescreen apps. Those web apps will now launch in a browser window. Presumably they’ll also lose the ability to send push notifications: being a homescreen app was a prerequisite for that functionality"

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Digital Cosmonaut: "Superfest – Innovation through necessity.. What sounds like a German music festival, is actually the name of a genius east German glass invention, a glass which could last up to 15 times longer than normal glass. The origins of Superfest.. were twofold. East Germany was always a frugal country with a mindset of not wasting the limited resources it had, and it was driven by technological advances...

[But d]espite their commercial success in East Germany, the production plant in Schewpnitz was shut down on the 1st of July, 1990. After German reunification, the plant was sold off and scrapped piece by piece – as no manufacturer had any interest in the technology, or in a product which would actually 'slow down' sales"

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"@TechExplorer@flipboard.social

German car manufacturer BMW is introducing a pilot fleet of BMW iX5 Hydrogen fuel vehicles in South Africa"

Russia is not part of ISDS, neither is Brazil and many other countries. Intl trade is possible without it.

When the cat is away the mouse will play. Gov needs to put business, ultra-wealthy in check.

NYT: "[2009] Putin arrived here by helicopter on Thursday to publicly chastise the three businessmen who jointly own the city’s lone factory, which has not paid its workers for the last three months. He saved his sharpest criticism for Oleg Deripaska, once Russia’s richest man... Mr. Deripaska hung his head like a schoolboy. Meanwhile, $1.5 million in back wages flowed into citizens’ bank accounts, and snaking lines appeared in front of cash dispensers all over the city"

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Russia is mostly a free-market economy today but people remember the naughty 90s when the country's resources were plundered by the oligarchs. The state became weak, businessman ran amok and the country was nearly destroyed, situation was turned around by Putin and his cohorts. VP can still fire a zinger or two today on profiteering, it must be due to memories of those times.. like after that Wagner debacle saying "hopefully they did not steal a lot of money". Or the factory payment event, late 2000s, see image. A businessman standing by the table, hat in hand getting burned..

Nicola Conte - Trappola Mortale #music

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HouseFresh: "How Google is killing independent sites like ours.. And why you shouldn’t trust product recommendations from big media publishers ranking at the top of Google"

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PV Magazine: "Europe’s 8.5 GW electrolyzer auction attracts 132 bids.. The European Hydrogen Bank’s pilot auction has drawn 132 bids, exceeding the available budget, while Australia has finalized an agreement to build a hydrogen hub"

Zucman, The Triumph of Injustice: "[2019] The only category of income that does not benefit from any exemption, deduction, reduced rate, or any other favor is wages. At any income level, wage earners are thus more heavily taxed than people who derive income from property. More broadly, people with identical incomes can have wildly different tax bills depending on the legal (and often arbitrary) classification of their income. The tax changes of the last twenty years have done away with a core principle of tax justice: the notion that people with the same income ought to pay the same amount of tax. It’s no longer the case. The explosive cocktail that is undermining America’s system of taxation is simple: capital income, in varying degrees, is becoming tax-free. This process is not uniform: some capital taxes are disappearing faster than others. The profits of big multinational companies bear less tax than those of domestic businesses. Dividends bear less tax than interest income. Depending on the nature of their wealth, rich people thus benefit in varying degrees. The ultra-wealthy, whose income mostly derives from owning shares in big companies, have so far been the primary winners"

Mirror: "[2018] Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt saved almost £100,000 in stamp duty on his purchase of seven flats after exploiting a Tory loophole.. Stamp duty rules changed in 2016 so anyone buying a second home or buy-to-let property pays a 3% surcharge... But bulk purchases of six properties or more are exempt, meaning Mr Hunt will have saved at least £94,500 by buying the seven homes at once"

"@samir@functional.computer

.. More code is not your friend, it’s your enemy.

Don’t add the dependency. Don’t generate 8000 lines of JavaScript. Write more CSS. Don’t accept the digital grey goo spewed out of tools such as Copilot.

Code is a liability. Anything that helps you make more, quickly, with no effort, is leading you down a very dark path"

"@jasongorman@mastodon.cloud

'The trick to using LLMs, Jason, is to precisely describe the code you want them to generate'. Anyone else tasting the 'Instant water: just add water!' flavour to this?"

Looks terrible #Woke

u.rottentomatoes("Madame Web")

Out[1]: {'tomatometer score': 13, 'audience score': 54}

There is no spoon. There is only propaganda.

Remember "you give me that juris-my-dick-tion crap... you can cram it up your ass". One of the first conversations in that movie isn't it, an argument between the local and the federal.

Part of anti-goverment feeling (propaganda) in US can be fueled by a certain Southern seperatism.. Per history we know the South lost the US Civil War and some people there surely were / are never happy to be part of the larger Union. Art can be marketed towards that, and esp. for corporate power, it can be used to further their anti-government pro-rich agenda.. But the angle can be an explosive mix - Firefly dabbled in it but got canceled after one season. What was the backstory? The captain had fought in an galactic civil war, his side had brown coats (Confederacy, hello?), the opponent was the Union of Allied Planets.. Good show generally, but it would give some people some crazy ideas.. Big co does not want to rock the boat that much.. It is their boat after all.

"Plug rolls out its portable liquid hydrogen stations in the USA.. The stations concerned can carry 1,500 kg of liquid hydrogen. They are equipped with a vaporisation system and a pump that enables vehicles to be fully and directly refuelled, at a pressure of 350 or 700 bars. 'With minimal upfront costs, mass transit authorities, logistics companies, and retailers can now quickly pop up low-carbon hydrogen refueling infrastructure to support their fleets,' stated Andy Marsh, Plug CEO. The portable station can also be used to refuel buses, trains and ferries"

A big reason for the GFC was claimed to be "investments products built on real-estate made the (wrong) assumption their price would always rise". But we know due to wealth inequality all asset prices always rise save a few dips here and there. Why did GFC happen then? Did the complex want to bog down the incoming administration with crisis fighting rather than doing anything new? We already know for fact Lehman Brothers was allowed to fail by TreasSec Paulson (ex-CEO of Goldman Sachs) to scare the Congress into funding the banks. The complex demonstrated they can dabble in shady business to get what they want, I would not put it beside them to engage in shadier business.

Cuck Schumer and McConnell are always on the same side, on issues that matter. They are both economic right and foreign policy hawks = big money for weapon manufacturers, pro-rich. They could disagree on "trans bathrooms" but that is a mere dressing, a show to make it look like there is real politics going on, instead of shafting one group over another in economic terms, which is their actual day-time job.

Politico: "How McConnell and Schumer became Ukraine-aid allies"

Instead of chewing them out why appoint these Clintonite types in the first place? I guess Obama wanted to be the one to chastise economic rightists when they went too far towards right rather be the leader to push center left towards more left.. Chastising underlings from the left, as easy as it is, must have been more satisfying.

Blast from the past #Bair, 2009 AIG execs gave themselves massive bonuses, Geithner knew about it, the boss didn't, he learned it from the press. Her book tells a scene where Geithner and Summers are in the Oval Office getting their ass chewed out by Bama. Like heads down, schoolboy level shit.

"How the war machine took over the Democrats w/ Dennis Kucinich" The Chris Hedges Report

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Jeffrey Sachs: "Only an exceptional president could resist the endless war-profiteering of this mammoth war machine; alas, Biden doesn’t even try... When it comes to foreign policy, the president of the United States has two essential roles. The first is to rein in the military-industrial complex, or MIC, which is always pushing for war. The second is to rein in U.S. allies that expect the U.S. to go to war on their behalf...

Ukraine is big business for the MIC—tens and potentially hundreds of billions of dollars of arms contracts, manufacturing facilities across the U.S,, the opportunity to develop and test new weapons systems—so Biden keeps the war going despite the destruction of Ukraine on the battlefield, and the tragic and needless deaths of hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians. The MIC, and hence Biden, continue to shun negotiations, even though direct U.S.-Russia negotiations regarding NATO and other security issues (such as U.S. missile placements in Eastern Europe) could end the war"

TAZ: "6.9 billion for hydrogen.. The EU Commission approves a new funding project: up to 6.9 billion euros will flow into more than thirty hydrogen projects"

"@MikeElgan@mastodon.social

Following Google Maps directions in rural Tasmania and encountered this sign"

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"@ben@werd.social

It's kind of impressive to see Ghost become a real open source alternative to WordPress. Many people have said it couldn't be done - but by focusing on a certain kind of independent creator (adjacent to both Medium and Substack), they've done it. It's a pretty amazing feat"

Dune director wants to make a movie based on C. Clarke's Rama? That's great.

Financial Review: "[Former competition tsar Rod] Sims said [Australia has] large reserves of magnetite ore, the raw material most suitable for making green iron using hydrogen rather than coal"

"Thyssenkrupp Steel has issued a call for tenders to supply hydrogen to the first direct reduction plant in the tkH2Steel decarbonization project. Hydrogen use is planned to start in 2028, with 100% hydrogen operation to follow in 2029. Tender process consists of three phases.. Requirement for 143,000 metric tons of hydrogen is to be covered"

"@axbom@axbom.me

The electricity and water use required by data centres is becoming cause for concern. Iowa and Ireland are calling for moratoriums on new development projects"

Nation World: "Ansaldo gas turbine can burn 100% hydrogen.. First successes of the European FLEX4H2 project.. The GT34, Ansaldo Energy's first H-class gas turbine, can operate by burning only hydrogen. A declared success whose merit is due to the new design of the combustion chamber and the commitment of the eight partners who will launch the initiative in January 2023"

A comedian of Palestinian descent, Atheer Jacoub

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The Lever: "Real estate is a huge force in New York’s economy.. Many of these real estate interests hide their ownership information; in Manhattan, 37 percent of the 41,000 total properties are owned by secretive limited liability companies.. These property owners are contributing to a housing crisis. The state ranks in the top five of highest average home prices and has a severe housing shortage, pushing up rents and rates of homelessness. This scarcity in housing is only exacerbated by the fact that huge financial institutions are buying up single-family homes and apartment buildings across the country"

#Tax #Exemptions #Stevenson

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They can build more housing thinking there is a shortage, but new ones too will get snapped up because housing is an investment device. Remember the infamous CDOs of 2008 crisis, they were built on mortgage debt with varying degrees of risk, sliced up to various other stakeholders. Someone holds that debt, and a big chunk of the real-estate until it is paid off. This is one of the ways how big money gets involved in housing. If you are holding a mortgage loan you own a large chunk of an house.

"Sixteen million homes currently sit vacant across the U.S. Despite how many houses are in the U.S., millions remain empty across the country while hundreds of thousands of Americans face homelessness."

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Open Web Advocacy: "We are a group of software engineers from all over the world who have come together to advocate for the future of the open web.. What is at stake? The entire future of Application Development.. Without regulatory or legislative change, we risk losing a universal, free and open, write once, deploy anywhere, application distribution and deployment system which will dramatically lower costs for businesses and consumers. Without these changes, funding will shift to proprietary ecosystems and gatekeepers can extract heavy taxes. It will lock in their control and reduce innovation for mobile apps for many years to come"

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"It’s Official, Apple Kills Web Apps in the EU.. [Apple says] 'to comply with the DMA’s requirements, we had to remove the Home Screen web apps feature in the EU'.. This is emphatically not required by the EU’s Digital Markets Act (DMA).. the idea that users could install safe and secure apps that Apple can’t tax, block or control is terrifying to them"

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Belfast Telegraph: "Almost two-thirds of people in Northern Ireland would vote to rejoin the European Union if another referendum were held today, according to a poll"

LA Times: "Opinion: I'm an American doctor who went to Gaza. I saw annihilation, not war"

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In a blockade scenario Kinmen would be blocked off along with Taiwan. It is even closer to CH mainland than Taiwan so it can be attacked short-range weapons, and any deployment there would not last IMO without continuous supplies.

Too close for comfort. But does the deployment make strategic sense? Or is it another one of those McDonalds-like franchise US military deployments? "We're here bro (give us money)". "Would you like fries to go with that HIMARS?"

u.map_loc(["Kinmen, Taiwan"],6,"map1.html")

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Kinmen eh?

Newsweek: "[02/08] US Army Special Forces Train Taiwan Troops Near China's Coast.. The instructors were sent to the Penghu or Pescadores islands closer to Taiwan proper, but also to Kinmen, a group of islands visible from the port city of Xiamen in eastern China"

Frontline 02/10 - 02/17 - Avdiivka has fallen. RU gains near Chasiv Yar, Novovodiane, Synkivka.

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