Week 10
NYT: "F.A.A. Audit of Boeing’s 737 Max Production Found Dozens of Issues.. The company failed 33 of 89 audits during an examination conducted by the Federal Aviation Administration after a panel blew off an Alaska Airlines jet in January"
Bloomberg: "United Plane Veers Off Runway in Third Boeing Incident This Week"
By the time of the second Watergate break-in, Nixon knew he would be running against McGovern, an easy candidate to beat. Why would he spy on the DNC to supposedly ensure his re-election?
The money found on the burglars were too easy to trace back to the Nixon campaign. Raises a red flag, looks suspicious. Did someone want that connection to be made?
Note Woodward started to use a key confidential source while the Soviet détente and opening to China were taking place, it is as if the source, who was unhappy with those events, wanted to prep a relationship with a journalist before "the big event started" (Watergate), so he could continue using this journalist to leak further info in the future.
Time for a Watergate Timeline
It is likely the complex, the private interests along with the US mil cooked up something to unseat Nixon, therefore Watergate.
NY Post: "[02/27] Google’s parent company lost more than $70 billion in market value in a single trading day after its 'woke' chatbot’s bizarre image debacle stoked renewed fears among investors about its heavily promoted AI tool. Shares of Alphabet sank 4.4% to close at 138.75 in the week’s first day of trading on Monday"
NPR: "Biden unveils a budget that would cut costs for families and hike taxes for the rich.. The plan would raise taxes on large corporations and make billionaires pay a minimum 25 percent rate, which would help reduce the federal government's budget deficit by some $3 trillion over a decade, the White House said. 'Congressional Republicans are on notice: You can't give your friends on Wall Street tax cuts, add to the debt, while middle-class and working families suffer,' [OMB director] Young said"
u.boxofficemojo("Aquaman The Lost Kingdom")
Out[1]:
{'Domestic Opening': '$27,686,211',
'Domestic': '$124,436,589',
'International': '$309,900,000',
'Worldwide Total': '$434,336,589',
'Release Date': 'December 20, 2023'}
u.mov_profit(215, 434)
Out[1]: -62.1
Too bad
Aquaman II wasn't bad.. but it was choppy, its story didn't always make sense, had a weird flow.. Did the reshoots make it worse? Dolph L says the script he signed up to do was better than the final story.
China Daily: "Government pushes hydrogen technology up nation's agenda.. Development of alternative fuel for road vehicles a top task for China this year, urges report"
"@scottsantens@hachyderm.io
We worry about providing Universal Basic Income because people might stop working, but here's a thought: maybe, just maybe, with a little financial security, people might actually pursue work they truly choose rather than work to just not die. Imagine that world for a moment"
Materials Today: "[2020] Thermoset plastics.. typically cannot be easily recycled or broken down after use, because the chemical bonds holding them together are stronger than those found in other polymer materials, such as thermoplastics.
Chemists at [MIT..] have now developed a way to modify thermoset plastics with a chemical linker that makes them much easier to break down, but still allows them to retain the mechanical strength that makes them so useful.. In a paper in Nature, the researchers describe producing a degradable version of a thermoset plastic called pDCPD, breaking it down into a powder and then using this powder to create more pDCPD"
"@miguel_pacheco@masto.pt
10 GW green hydrogen viable for Project Nour in Mauritania according to study:
-
Driven by Chariot Energy and Total Eren
-
Aiming to make Mauritania a green steel hub for EU
-
First phase: 3 GW of renewable generation, 1.6GW of electrolyzers, producing 150,000 ton/year of H2"
Businesswire: "Ohmium International.. a leading green hydrogen company that designs, manufactures, and deploys advanced Proton Exchange Membrane (PEM) electrolyzers, today announced it has been awarded second place out of 250 companies included in TIME’s inaugural list of America’s Top GreenTech Companies 2024"
It's clear why affordability went down after covid; money infusion went from people to the rich creating more inequality, the wealthy used their new money to invest in real-estate, increasing all prices. "Building new homes" will not fix this problem. The solution is redistribution of wealth.
ABC AU: "The proportion of rentals that cost less than 25 per cent of household income is at the lowest level in records going back to 2008.... Almost no rental properties are considered affordable for the lowest-income 30 per cent of households.. Rental affordability is at its lowest level in at least 17 years, having swung dramatically from record levels of affordability during the early stages of the COVID pandemic"
#Password
One viewpoint blames Germany and Austria-Hungary but France-Russia had their own worries to partake in a war. A-H had annexed Bosnia, which angered Serbia whose big daddy was, as it is now, Russia who wanted access to the seas. The Balkan Wars were likely encouraged by Russians, Serbia ended up with more territory w Ottomans losing it, and Serbian nationalistic dislike against A-H never went away. Basically the Balkans were contested territory for the empires, who were by now armed to the teeth and with new industrialised mobilization techniques were afraid if you did not mobilize first you would lose. And everyone feared the rising power Germany. The perfect storm.
World War 2 was caused by the unfinished business of World War 1.
Then why did WW1 start?
MarineLink: "Adapted ME-GI Gas Engine Runs on Hydrogen.. MAN Energy Solutions’ licensee, MITSUI E&S Co. Ltd., has announced that it has successfully tested a 50-bore MAN B&W two-stroke engine up to 100% load at its Tamano facility while running on hydrogen, a world-first for the maritime industry"
US is closer to a McDonalds franchise rather than an empire; bases instead of restaurants, Himars instead of Mac'n'cheese. Not much thought is given to the expansion process, except a general idea where the next batch of profits will come from, or expands usually for the sake of expanding, like McDonalds.. A new restaurant/base in the Balkans, Africa, why not? Would you like fries with that?
"@ianbetteridge@writing.exchange
Another thing that US pundits get wrong about EU antitrust action: the EU doesn't tell companies how to comply, the companies propose solutions and the EU tells them if it complies. They don't design your products for you. If a company goes for a browser ballot, say, it's because that's what it wants to do, not because the EU is making them do it that way"
"@rgarner@mastodon.social
LLMs are not AGI and will not become so in my lifetime. Water shortages will be here soon, however, and LLMs use a lot of water. Would you like all your art to be generated, all your code to be subtly incorrect, or would you prefer to eat and drink? This is not a false dichotomy"
Robert Miles - Miniature World #music
"@the_cheis@mstdn.social
In my area, due to gentrification, there are already problems finding rentals all year round, to the point that it makes it difficult for companies to bring and hire workers.
This is crazy.
Rarely have I been so disgusted by tourism as I am now. I no longer care about the economic engine, in fact since tourism exploded in Galicia it has become increasingly difficult to live if you are from here.
Those of us from my generation and younger are tearing our hair out, and everyone is looking for their own solution. It's often leaving here"
Catholic Herald: "[03/01] Pope talks of ‘courage to negotiate’ to end war in Ukraine.. Pope has said he believes 'the strongest one is the one who looks at the situation, thinks about the people and has the courage of the white flag, and negotiates.. there is always some geographical or historical situation that causes a war but behind a war, there is the arms industry, and this means money'"
Hossein-Zadeh: "It does not follow.. as some critics argue, the U.S.–Israeli relationship represents a case of 'tail wagging the dog,' that is, the U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East is shaped by the Israeli/Zionist leaders. Nor do I subscribe to the hoary anti-Semitic canards that are used to put forth a specious case for Jews trying to run the world. While, no doubt, the powerful Jewish lobby exerts considerable influence over U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East, the efficacy and the extent of that influence depend, ultimately, on the real economic and geopolitical interests of U.S. foreign policy makers. In other words, U.S. policy makers in the Middle East would go along with the demands of the radical Zionist lobby only if such demands also tend to serve the special interests that those policy makers represent or serve—not necessarily the interests of the American people, or collective U.S. 'national interests' in general. The fact that, as pointed out earlier, U.S. foreign policy during the Cold War era was less accommodating to the territorial desires of militant Zionism than in the post–Cold War period is an indication of this point. Another corroborating indication of the point is that as the military-industrial complex has been gaining more and more influence over U.S. foreign policy, that policy has, accordingly, been more and more geared to the wishes of hard-line Zionism because, as has been frequently pointed out in this chapter, the interests of the U.S. military establishment converge with those of militant Zionism over war and political convulsion in the Middle East"
Some leftovers here
Break time.. laters readers
Waber, Harvard Business Review: "Is GenAI’s Impact on Productivity Overblown? Generative AI like LLMs have been touted as a boon to collective productivity. But the authors argue that leaning into the hype too much could be a mistake. Assessments of productivity typically focus on the task level and how individuals might use and benefit from LLMs. Using such findings to draw broad conclusions about firm-level performance could prove costly. The authors argue that leaders need to understand two core problems of LLMs before adopting them company-wide: 1) their persistent ability to produce convincing falsities and 2) the likely long-term negative effects of using LLMs on employees and internal processes"
Financial Times: "How Germany’s steelmakers plan to go green.. Europe’s biggest producer [Salzgitter] is moving away from carbon-intensive blast furnaces and towards hydrogen-powered processing..
Global steel production today accounts for at least 7 per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions. In Germany, it emits more than a quarter of the country’s total industrial carbon dioxide...Salzgitter has said that once its revamped steel plant is run entirely on green hydrogen, its annual CO₂ emissions, which currently stand at 8mn tonnes, will drop by a staggering 95 per cent"
This is not DEI, it is GDM - gaslight, deflect, misdirect.
Apple has woke shows.. Monarch was terrible. Foundation too, partly.
"@rustyshelf@mastodon.social
China: 'Remove all VPNs'
Apple: 'Sure thing'
China: '…and podcast apps'
Apple: 'Can do boss!'
China: '…and also hand over all iCloud data for our citizens'
Apple: 'I mean why wouldn’t we? Here you go!'
EU: 'Allow alternate app stores, and do it fairly'
Apple: 'Ahhh hell no! This is so unfair you guys are bullies! Malware! Privacy! We have standards! Unlike you we care about our users!'"
ABC News Australia: "Two killed in NSW house blaze [in a] lithium-ion battery-related death.. Fires associated with the batteries are on the rise.. According to Fire Rescue NSW statistics, there have been 45 lithium-ion battery-related fires recorded in NSW so far this year"
"@thomasfuchs@hachyderm.io
The thing is, the tech industry always has a hype or two brewing but it’s relatively rare that everyone completely succumbs to it"
François Chollet: "When you hear about 'human-level AI' being just 'one LLM training run away', it's as if people building 3D printers (the kind that makes small, flimsy plastic objects) were telling you that they've nearly built an infinite matter replicator, capable of scanning and cloning any object -- be it steel, gold, or diamond, be it minuscule or building-scale. 'We're just one iteration away! Just need to increase spatial resolution a bit!'
As long as you have absolutely no idea what 'matter' is and how 3D printers work, it might sound sort of plausible. But if you do, it's absolutely clown shoes. The way to navigate such claims is to have a proper, formal definition of intelligence"
"@evanprodromou@threads.net
Hello, fediverse! 👋🏼 I am part of the new beta testing program in Threads for publishing out to the wider world. I am extremely excited!!!"
#Vonnegut
Stevenson, The Trading Game: "[The presenter] had a bunch of charts. He went through them one at a time. On each one was the fiscal situation of a single country. Italy. Spain. Greece. Portugal. Ireland. Also the United Kingdom, the US, Japan [around 2011]. They were all variations on the same story. All these governments were spending more than their income year after year and their debts were growing... I couldn’t get it out of my head.. a sense of similarity. It was the same. The government of Spain, the government of America, the government of Japan. The situation was just like [a friend's] mum.. Outgoings more than their income. Losing the ability to borrow money. More and more income going into servicing debt. Losing their assets. The situation was the same. It wasn’t just [another friend] with holes in his shoes, it was the world.
But it came up against the economics though.. [w]e’re in a monetary system. The whole thing always has to be in balance. For everyone who’s in debt, there’s someone who’s in credit. For everybody losing money, there’s somebody who’s gaining. The whole system is designed to be in balance. Not only that, but what about the houses? What about the stock market that was rising and rising? These assets weren’t disappearing. But if we didn’t own them, if the people didn’t own them, and the governments didn’t own them...Then who did?
And that was it, I think, that was the moment that it hit me, surrounded by millionaires.. I looked to the left of me. Pink shirt, pink shirt, white, sky blue. I looked to the right of me. White shirt, white shirt, pink, ooh, pinstripes, don’t see much of that nowadays. There, in string, sewn into a collar, four letters: 'A.I.E.Q.' Who the fuck’s surname begins with a Q?"
Streeck, How Will Capitalism End?: "Oligarchic redistribution and the trend toward plutonomy, even in countries that are still considered democracies, conjure up the nightmare of elites confident that they will outlive the social system that is making them rich. Plutonomic capitalists may no longer have to worry about national economic growth because their transnational fortunes grow without it; hence the exit of the super-rich from countries.. take their money – or that of their fellow citizens – and run, preferably to Switzerland, Britain or the United States. The possibility, as provided by a global capital market, of rescuing yourself and your family by exiting together with your possessions offers the strongest possible temptation for the rich to move into endgame mode – cash in, burn bridges, and leave nothing behind but scorched earth.
Closely related to this is the third disorder, the plundering of the public domain through underfunding and privatization. I have elsewhere traced its origin to the twofold transition since the 1970s from the tax state to the debt state to, finally, the consolidation or austerity state. Foremost among the causes of this shift were the new opportunities offered by global capital markets since the 1980s for tax flight, tax evasion, tax-regime shopping and the extortion of tax cuts from governments by corporations and earners of high incomes. Attempts to close public deficits relied almost exclusively on cuts in government spending – both to social security and to investment in physical infrastructures and human capital. As income gains accrued increasingly to the top 1 per cent, the public domain of capitalist economies shrank, often dramatically, starved in favour of internationally mobile oligarchic wealth. Part of the process was privatization, carried out regardless of the contribution public investment in productivity and social cohesion might have made to economic growth and social equity"
Taxing the rich, trickle-down econ parts were good #SOTU
It didn't look much of a union to me #SOTU, with potus firing zingers arguing with some in the crowd, live. That's ok.. But it shows previous appeals to unity were bunk, a waste of time, it is not about unity, it is about your ideology gaining power and pushing through its agenda. You can usually find a middle ground between A and B, but constant appeals to "going bi" was not about that, it was about the left being pushed preemptively to some middle and from there they would be pushed towards further right still. The "preemptive middle-ground seekers" were essentially asked to fall in line, not be part of a larger solution.
The new motto is "if it is Boeing, I'm not going"
ABC News: "Tire falls off United Airlines flight after takeoff from San Francisco.. The tire was one of 12 on the Boeing 777-200's two main landing gear struts, according to United"
Stoller, The Guardian: "[2019] Boeing's travails show what's wrong with modern capitalism.. Boeing used its political connections to monopolize the American aerospace industry and corrupt its regulators. In the 1990s, Boeing and McDonnell Douglas merged, leaving America with just one major producer of civilian aircraft. Before this merger, when there was a competitive market, Boeing was a wonderful company. As journalist Jerry Useem put it just 20 years ago, 'Boeing has always been less a business than an association of engineers devoted to building amazing flying machines'"
It's true the McDonnell Douglas merger screwed Boeing. Guess which admin allowed the merger?
#Boeing #JonOliver
"Reuters:
-
Water samples reveal levels of microplastics up to 18 times more than 2017-18
-
2020 report found tyre dust contributes 78% of the total mass of microplastics
-
Chemicals and particles from worn tyres leaching into water linked to salmon die-off
-
Forthcoming Euro 7 standard will tighten up microplastic abrasion limits for tyres"
Stevenson's new book is out, a great guide to understand inequality. Highly recommended.
Reshare
Ad News: "X (formerly Twitter) has reportedly had 75% of fake traffic to its advertising clients' websites during the weekend of the Super Bowl, according to data from cybersecurity firm CHEQ that tracks bots and 'fake' users. In a press release X claimed it has 'completely smashing key metrics from last year, with impressions, user posts and video views rising 31%, 41% and 75% respectively YoY1'".. But according to CHEQ, majority of the traffic was bots and fake users. Guy Tytunovich, CHEQ founder and CEO, said he's never seen anything even remotely close to 50%, not to mention 76% of faked traffic. 'I'm amazed…I've never, ever, ever, ever seen anything even remotely close,' Tytunovich told Mashable"
Politico: "EU hits Apple with €1.8B antitrust fine for abusive app terms.. It’s the first time the tech giant has been fined by the European Commission"
"@anildash@me.dm
A challenge to tech media: do a day of stories once a week where none of them originated from an announcement by one of the same 5 companies you cover every other day of the week.
Corollary: business press do even just one story originating from labor for every ten you do originating from a company those people work for"
The Detroit News: "A fire and series of thunderous explosions at a.. vape supply facility shot debris as far as two miles away.. Vapes, like cellphones and other electronics, contain lithium-ion batteries. Those batteries can overheat and explode. [official].. said a fire in the facility could set off a chain reaction of battery explosions"
Marco Alvera's book has good info on perovskites.
Electrek: "An MIT-led team revealed a 'guidebook' for how to tune surface properties of perovskites, a silicon alternative – here’s why that’s huge for solar... Perovskite solar cells, inspired by the mineral with a similar crystal structure, have been a serious topic of research within the renewable energy sector for some years now. Their potential to redefine the solar energy landscape is vast, offering a tantalizing combination of high efficiency, low manufacturing costs, and the unique ability to be applied to a variety of substrates, from rigid glass to flexible materials"
Streeck, How Will Capitalism End?: "Neoliberal ideology supports migration and open borders in the name of personal liberty and human rights, knowing that it provides employers in the receiving countries with an unlimited labour supply, thereby destabilizing protective labour regimes. Ethnic diversity is welcomed, not only by the liberal middle class, but also by employers desiring docile workers that are grateful for being allowed to be where they are, and anxious to avoid deportation for becoming unemployed or engaging in militant activities. Immigration thus makes the collective organization of workers difficult, especially in low-income occupations. It can also be used propagandistically to enlist indigenous workers’ sense of solidarity for neoliberal policies aimed at abolishing minimum wages and employment protections, by accusing trade unions of racist discrimination against ‘outsiders’ for the benefit of ‘insiders’. If then the labour market interests of the indigenous working class are articulated by right-wing populist parties and movements, labour protection suffers further de-legitimation while the working class becomes even more divided"
#Frontline #UA #RU 02/29 - 03/06
AP News: "Nuland will be replaced temporarily as under secretary by another career diplomat, John Bass, a former ambassador to Afghanistan who oversaw the U.S. withdrawal from the country. He is currently the undersecretary of state for management"
Great news.. Her "Ukraine support" btw was there for the complex to rake it in.. If US really wanted to help UA and itself it would not have fanned the flames for war, starting in 2014.
Reuters: "US diplomat Nuland, strong supporter of Ukraine, to step down"
"@Wolven@ourislandgeorgia.net
I genuinely never thought I would see the day. Literally just 11 years ago, one of the first papers I ever had published was through ACM, and if I had wanted it to be open access, it would have cost $1500. To an adjunct junior academic, you might as well be asking for a kidney. This is genuinely huge"
Communications ACM: "CACM Is Now Open Access.. More than six decades of CACM’s renowned research articles, seminal papers, technical reports, commentaries, real-world practice, and news articles are now open to everyone, regardless of whether they are members of ACM or subscribe to the ACM Digital Library"
It's not just abt the exec surely, let's not forget the Congress, numbers there need to increase..
DJT 16-20 at least changed the discussion, challenged parts of the global capitalism (unfettered access to cheap labor at home -migration- and abroad -globalisation-), questioned NATO, indirectly militarism. He beat a Clinton and a Bush, we should all be grateful for that. But we cannot expect an FDR like figure from the Republican party.. Democrats, or another party, will have to do the bulk of the work.
Zucman: "In 2018, for the first time in the last hundred years, the top 400 richest Americans have paid lower tax rates than the working class.. This looks like the tax system of a plutocracy. With tax rates of barely 20% at the top, wealth will keep accumulating with hardly any barrier. And with that, so too will the power of the wealthy accumulate, including their ability to shape policymaking and government for their own benefit..
It’s always possible to shrug off the risk of an entrenched plutocracy. To believe that whether a few super-rich own a large fraction of the country’s wealth is irrelevant. That America’s institutions are so strong that they cannot be captured by special interests. That from Boston to Los Angeles, democracy will always and forever beat plutocracy. And certainly, democracy has overcome plutocracy in the past. It triumphed over the slaveholding plutocracy of the South. It beat back the nascent industrialist plutocracy of the Gilded Age. In one case it took a war; in the other a tax revolution"
"@avuko@infosec.exchange
@tilde I still think the modus operandi we named capitalism in economics, we’d call parasitic in biology"
"@tilde@infosec.town
Capitalism interprets resilience as inefficiency and tries to erode it. Capitalism will not stop until every aspect of society is so 'just-in-time' that an unexpected stiff breeze causes widespread shortages."
"@debcha@mastodon.social
To capitalism, sustainability always looks like underutilization"
H2 Central: "Thiozen, the first company ever to produce clean hydrogen from 'sour gas' waste streams, today announced that it has received $1.18 million in grants from the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) to help the company commercialize its breakthrough technology that replaces traditional hydrogen production methods"
Wired: "Amazon has become the second company ever to have its lobbyists banned from the European Parliament, amid accusations that the company does not take the institution seriously"
Brookings: "Saudi Arabia has spent a fortune buying arms from America to prosecute [the war in Yemen].. In the five years before the war, U.S. arms transfers to Saudi Arabia amounted to $3 billion; between 2015 and 2020, the U.S. agreed to sell over 64.1 billion worth of weapons to Riyadh, averaging 10.7 billion per year..
"@imajeanpeace@infosec.exchange
Next time your boss tells you to 'work as a team', start a union."
Financial Post: "Next-Generation Climate Technology Sees Surge in US Spending.. Investments in carbon capture, hydrogen and other nascent technologies rose tenfold in 2023"
These hypothetical head-to-head match-ups..
NBC News: "[2016] Poll: Hillary Clinton Holds National Lead Over Donald Trump.. Clinton holds a 46 percent to 40 percent lead"
A potential Dem replacement Gallego is for M4A.
Politico: "Sinema announces she won't run for reelection"
"@rayckeith@techhub.social
'Why are things expensive?
4 companies control 55% to 85% of the meat market.
4 airlines control 80% of air travel.
3 companies control 92% of the soda market.
3 companies control 73% of the cereal market.
Why don't I hear about it?
6 companies control 90% of the news'"
What a coincidence on average the wealth of top 10% is increasing by the same amount.
df = u.get_top10(2010)
df['ahead'] = df.top10.shift(-1)
df['inc'] = df.ahead - df.top10
"%0.2f trillion" % df.inc.mean()
Out[1]: '1.01 trillion'
CNBC: "The U.S. national debt is rising by $1 trillion about every 100 days"
Fires.. there are some bad ones in TX, NE of Amarilo?
u.modis_fire('fire1.html')
It's true. Expressive, concise computer languages (or APIs) are better than ones that require you to type boilerplate code.
"@pikesley@mastodon.me.uk
'BUT THE #LLM HELPS ME CHURN OUT BOILERPLATE' I am once again begging you to try to imagine working towards a world where we don't need the boilerplate"
Ground News: "Depreciation is hitting EVs harder than most other vehicles. A combination of technology upgrades, price fluctuations on new cars, and lack of demand has meant a rapid drop in value for many electric models. This phenomenon is especially dramatic for Porsche’s Taycan EV, with high-spec Turbo models losing almost $100,000 in value within four years"
Status Coup News: "BREAKING: NYPD Police are attacking and arresting pro-Palestinian Ceasefire Now protesters. VERY ugly scene"
Chris Hedges: "Aaron Bushnell, when he placed his cell phone on the ground to set up a livestream and lit himself on fire in front of the Israeli Embassy in Washington D.C., resulting in his death, pitted divine violence against radical evil. As an active duty member of the U.S. Air Force, he was part of the vast machinery that sustains the ongoing genocide in Gaza..
'Many of us like to ask ourselves,' he posted shortly before his suicide, 'What would I do if I was alive during slavery? Or the Jim Crow South? Or apartheid? What would I do if my country was committing genocide? The answer is, you’re doing it. Right now.'..
Bushnell’s self-immolation — one most social media posts and news organizations have heavily censored — is the point. It is meant to be seen. Bushnell extinguished his life in the same way thousands of Palestinians, including children, have been extinguished. We could watch him burn to death. This is what it looks like. This is what happens to Palestinians because of us"
Al Jazeera: "[02/26] US airman dies after setting himself on fire outside Israeli embassy.. Aaron Bushnell yelled 'Free Palestine!' then lit himself on fire near the Israeli embassy in Washington, DC"
Unanimous.
First Post: "The justices unanimously overturned a Colorado Supreme Court ruling from December 19 that disqualified Trump from running for the state's Republican primary on Tuesday, citing the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution"
"@Elizafox@treehouse.systems
People who aren't from Seattle hear how much I pay for rent and I think they spit out their drinks.
$1995/mo for a 2 bedroom 2 bath 79 m²/850 ft² apartment in Chinatown by the way"
The only place he could not walk was between South Am and Antartica as it is open ocean, they used airlift for that small piece. Good enough.
Pat Farmer (Oz) walked from North Pole to South Pole. Crazy.
H2 View: "H2SITE Has Commissioned a Membrane Separator Capable of Extracting 5 to 20% Hydrogen Blends at +99% Purity From the Gas Distribution Network
-
Located in Zamudio (Bizkaia), the separation unit is installed on a natural gas distribution network and operates with hydrogen concentrations ranging from 5 to 20%
-
It’s the first installation using palladium-alloy membrane separators reaching 97% hydrogen recovery rate at +99% purity"
Nature: "Direct solar-driven water splitting by photocatalysis or photoelectrolysis offers a very promising route to produce green hydrogen. Among different configurations of photoactive materials, the bioinspired concept of 'Z-scheme photoactive film' enables visible-light-driven water splitting by combining two different photoactive materials in series to separately produce H2 and O2 in tandem photoelectrochemical (PEC) cells or photocatalytic panels has demonstrated its great effectivenss. Their scale-up and commercial applications though require low-cost, stable, efficient, and scalable photoactive films...
Inspired by the cellular structure of the thylakoid membrane of chloroplasts in plant cells.. in this study, a facile and scalable particle-implanting (PiP) fabrication technique of embedding semiconductor particles in low-melting-point (LMP) liquid metal matrixes was developed to produce bioinspired photoactive films"
The Ghost in the Machine #Chomsky #2023
I axed one of those chat parrots to categorize a text about a criminal getting a sentence due past hard crimes in an actor-action-actor format, like GDELT does for news items, basically asking for "A does B to C" type of output. Chat parrot totally made up one side of the action, said "families of the victims" brought the guy to court, the text had none of that. Related news on that exact event elsewhere had none of that. That answer was likely computed based on the gobs of texts it ingested earlier on similar stories, which led the parrot to hallucinate.
"@sil@mastodon.social
Apple have backed off; they will no longer be breaking web apps in the EU next week"
"@jasongorman@mastodon.cloud
I'm beginning to think gen A.I. prompting's a bit like TV street magic: amazing, until you see all the takes where the trick didn't work.
I abandon sessions twice as often as I get what I need from them"
Bullet to the Head, Criminal (2016). 👍 Code 8 Part II, somewhat average but fine.
First Post: "A few months ago, a Mozilla study titled 'Privacy Not Included,' revealed that almost all major carmakers collect data from their users and sell it to advertisers"
Anatolian News Agency: "[01/21] Protest against British defense company BAE for selling arms to Israel"
BBC: "George Galloway is back in Parliament with a resounding win in the Rochdale by-election after a campaign in which the Gaza war was a running theme... Winston Churchill [was] the only MP to represent four separate towns and cities in the House of Commons"
The ultra Orthodox vote extremist nuts into office who cause mayhem and war, then they won't fight in the wars created by their vote. I can see that can anger some people.
Al Monitor: "War spurs anger over Israel military exemption for ultra-Orthodox"
First Post: "Ladakh standoff: India, China in 'constructive communication' to resolve border issues, says Chinese military"
Quora: "'Why is the depreciation curve for BEVs steeper? What's with this rationale that BEV technology ages faster?'..
My guesses for why BEVs depreciate faster:
-
Battery longevity past eight year warranty is still up in the air..
-
BEV-exclusive components / parts are more expensive
-
Longer wait time for repairs and fewer options
-
Reduction in driving range due to inevitable degradation..
-
(empty?) promises in upcoming battery chemistry improvements..
-
Less demand - significant premium over ICEV, limited form factors, creeping insurance premiums
Massive gulf between the public and corporate media.. Sad #LBC
Al-Monitor: "Gaza famine 'almost inevitable': UN"
Labour kneecapped its own candidate over Israel, and lost the seat to a bigger anti-genocide candidate.. It is poetic justice.
Al-Jazeera: "George Galloway who campaigned against Gaza war wins UK by-Galloway won the seat in the northern English town of Rochdale after a fractious campaign, which saw the Labour Party withdraw support from its candidate over his anti-Israel comments"
Arab News: "Maverick left-winger Galloway, an advocate of a free Palestine, wins in English town"
NYT: "‘This Is For Gaza’: George Galloway, Leftist Firebrand, Wins Rochdale By-Election"
TASS: "Putin signs annual decree to call up reservists for training"