thirdwave

Github Mirror

Week 12

The American Prospect: "The Airbus Advantage.. Why Europe’s mixed economy produces safer planes than America’s financialized capitalism.. Airbus’s clear leadership over Boeing in matters of flight safety stem in good measure from their differences in ownership and worker power—that is, from the European model of mitigating laissez-faire capitalism with a measure of public and worker power, and from the American model of subjecting corporate policy almost entirely to the demands of investment institutions"

Turchin, End Times: "A key development in shutting down the wealth pump [that transfers money from low income to high-income] was the passage of the immigration laws of 1921 and 1924. Although much of the proximate motivation behind these laws was to exclude 'dangerous aliens,' such as Italian anarchists and Eastern European socialists, their broader effect was a reduction in labor oversupply, something that business elites were well aware of. Shutting down immigration reduced the labor supply and provided a powerful boost to real wages for many decades to come.

Being a "Semite" doesn't automatically imply Zionist, nor you are scheming to end up in powerful positions. The majority manuevers them into those positions, just like the disproportionate Catholic presence at scotus, Jews can be overrepresented in some places. Need to understand how the private industrial-Likud-complex thinks.. They would prefer a guy who could be a little more anti-government due to his minority status (as in scotus), a little more pro-genocide, pro-Zionist due to this religious affiliation... These fuckers play the odds. Very smart.. and they've been winning the long-game aren't they?

Bama was surely accepted by the donor-controlled establishment before prez, when he redistricted in Chicago (mmmhmmm, yes he did) the regions he chose tell the tale. Affluent, rich, white collar regions were included, the Loop, Gold Coast, with Republicans, and Jewish presence (most of whom were surely Zionist dipshits).

Obamacare was rebranded Clintoncare, let's not forget

"The Obama-Biden administration" seems to have dropped the ball, missed a huge chance.

Andersen: "[The Obama] administration and the Democratic congressional leadership seem to have punted when it came to pushing for a law that included a 'public option,' some form of Medicare-for-anybody coverage that people could buy as an alternative to private insurance. For his first few months in office, Obama seemed to be all for it, as did all the Democratic chairs of all the congressional committees that would create the reform law. But the insurance industry and the physicians’ trade group, the American Medical Association, were against it. The most conservative Democrats in the House, the Blue Dog Coalition, were iffy, but only a dozen of those fifty would be required to pass a bill. Over the summer, however, Obama got publicly wobbly on the public option—as Paul Krugman wrote at the time, “weirdly unable to show passion on the issue, weirdly diffident even about the blatant lies from the right”—and by Labor Day, the Democrats surrendered.

That same summer of 2009, Democrats also gave in to big business in an important showdown with organized labor. A bill was moving through Congress that had a provision to make unionization easier—instead of winning a secret-ballot referendum in a workplace, labor organizers would just have to convince a majority of the workers face-to-face to sign up. The Business Roundtable lobbied hard against it. A few moderate Democratic senators were persuaded—and without their votes the forty Senate Republicans could kill the whole bill by sticking together and filibustering it, so despite the (theoretically) filibuster-proof majority, it got dropped. A year later big business was still making sure that the measure stayed dead: on Business Roundtable letterhead, the CEOs of Verizon and Caterpillar warned Obama’s budget director that any such change remained “foremost among our companies’ labor concerns” because it would have “a devastating impact on business” and “significantly and negatively impact global competitiveness, job creation and economic recovery.” As it happened, six weeks after he got that letter, the OMB director left the administration and soon went to work for a member of the Business Roundtable, the CEO of Citigroup, as his vice-chairman of corporate and investment banking"

Purchasing power for the bottom 40% rose under Trump fell under Biden. As data points I use salary after tax measure from FRED, for PP calculation, divide by CPI. The CPI measure represents cost of a basket of goods, the calc in essense shows how many of those baskets can people buy.

df = u.get_fred(1990, ['CXUINCAFTTXLB0102M','CXUINCAFTTXLB0103M','CPIAUCSL']).interpolate()
df['Lowest 20%'] = df.CXUINCAFTTXLB0102M / df.CPIAUCSL
df['20-40%'] = df.CXUINCAFTTXLB0103M / df.CPIAUCSL
df[['Lowest 20%','20-40%']].plot(title='Purchasing Power of the Bottom 40%')

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If WWI caused WWII then there isn't much to learn from the second war... Even the rise of fascism is, leaving aside the atrocities, a symptom, an after-effect and we won't learn much from after-effects. If people are in a bad situation economically, anything can happen.. That should not be suprising. "Preparing" for the after-effect, Nazism and such, is less effective than curing the conditions that caused it. But the corp propagandists already know that, they use misdirection, gaslighting for a reason.

Beacon 23 S1, a mix of The Expanse and Lost. The boring parts remind me of the latter. The leads were good, there were some nice scifi ideas. 3 out of 5. I will check out S2.

Algeria vetoed too..

Al-Jazeera: "The United Nations Security Council has failed to pass a United States draft resolution calling for, but not demanding, a ceasefire in Israel’s continuing war on Gaza after two permanent members chose to veto it"

Woodword was used like a chump in the process of Watergate. One of modern journalism's main job is uncovering secrets, obviously the US private complex and its surface state has the best ones.. But if you are getting secrets from such sources, who is leaking to you, why? You could be privy to info for a purpose, IMO that is exactly what the confidential source did to Woodward. He was led around by the nose, used, to take down someone who was essentially a good president. Woodword's reporting was essentially a disservice to society. He did better on his later books; but Watergate is a black mark on his record.

In the red.

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Gov could own asset just like any other entity, gov ownership could actually be cheaper for public services. #Stevenson

Government wealth decreased over the years, for most in the West it is below zero #Stevenson

From Pikkety's le blog

Axios: "U.S. accuses Apple of illegally maintaining monopoly in broad lawsuit"

Techcrunch: "India orders antitrust probe into Google’s app store billing practices"

CBC: "A new gold rush? The search for the natural hydrogen motherlode is coming to Canada.. An Alberta company searching for deposits of the gas is set to drill test wells in Ontario this summer"

Frontline #RU #UA 03/06 - 03/21

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ECNS.cn: "China's home-grown hydrogen energy urban train completes test run.. Developed by CRRC Changchun Railway Co., China's first home grown hydrogen energy urban train successfully completed its test run on a trial line at a speed of 160 kilometers per hour in Changchun, northeast China's Jilin Province on Thursday"

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"

WION: "[03/11] Barnett, who worked at Boeing for 32 years, was found dead of an apparent suicide, according to authorities in South Carolina. On Tuesday, the Charleston County coroner's office said that Barnett died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound.. Speaking to ABC News affiliate WPDE, Barnett's friend Jennifer [recounted a recent conversation] .. "I said, 'Aren't you scared?' And he said, 'No, I ain't scared, but if anything happens to me, it's not suicide.'"

CovertAction Magazine: "Based on the U.S.’s history of incredibly violent responses to labor organizing, it is probably safe to assume that, if large, powerful institutions could successfully murder their most threatening whistleblowers, they would not hesitate to do so"

BBC: "Boeing whistleblower John Barnett found dead in US"

Daily Mail: "[03/14] United Boeing 777 is forced to land after fuel leak"

"@danhulton@hachyderm.io

.. You CAN get filthy stinking rich from conning people about prime number apes... And if you owned a vast collection of media companies and prioritized getting filthy stinking rich (but I repeat myself), which would you demand your staff write about?"

Euronews: "Polluting private jets could face a 400% fuel tax increase under new Biden proposal"

#Multimillionaires #WealthTax #DW

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Vox: "[2015] Study: Politicians listen to rich people, not you.. Who really matters in our democracy — the general public, or wealthy elites? That's the topic of a recent study by political scientists Martin Gilens of Princeton and Benjamin Page of Northwestern. The study's gotten lots of attention over the past year, because the authors conclude, basically, that the US is a corrupt oligarchy where ordinary voters barely matter. Or as they put it, 'economic elites and organized interest groups play a substantial part in affecting public policy, but the general public has little or no independent influence'"

CBC: "Canada and Germany have signed a memorandum of understanding to establish a trade program to sell hydrogen produced in Canada.. Federal Energy and Natural Resources Minister Jonathan Wilkinson said the agreement is 'historic'. 'It is a huge step forward and it is something that I think people in Newfoundland and Labrador can be enormously optimistic about in terms of the creation of jobs and prosperity,' Wilkinson told CBC News on Sunday.

According to a press release from Natural Resources Canada, the memorandum.. accelerates the hydrogen trade between Germany and Canada, with exports beginning as early as next year"

"mailchimp@threads.net

Friendly reminder:

Email is still chronological and doesn't bury your content in a confusing algorithm"

Chat parrots are worse at e-mail spam detection than existing methods (SVM, LR, BERT, even Naive Bayes). Why? Because chat parrots are not intelligent.

"@brohrer@recsys.social

Oh dear. My Spidey sense tells me that humanoid robotics is going to replace LLM‘s as flavor of the week."

"@elilla@transmom.love

Techbros can't even figure out a grift that doesn't consume as much electricity as the entire country of Ireland"

"@cocoaphony@mastodon.social

[LLMs are] very expensive to run, both to train and per-query, and hard to make cheaper. I expect them to get more expensive to run. They’re currently sold at a big loss to establish monopoly power and then raise prices dramatically. That’s the stated business plan.

If you’re building your business to rely on LLM, you need to factor in what you‘ll do when they pivot to making money, or they pull back because they can’t."

"@Quinnypig@awscommunity.social

Remember, if Microsoft talks about Copilot usage numbers, what they’re really talking about is 'number of customers not sophisticated enough to modify a registry key,' because that’s the only way to disable it"

Whistleblower: "Apple's Secret Silicon Fab Next to Thousands of Homes.. In early 2015, Apple started stealth semiconductor fabrication activities in a facility located at 3250 Scott Boulevard in Santa Clara California, less than two hundred feet from thousands of homes. The factory intentionally vented its exhaust of solvent vapors and toxic gases straight from the roof and into the ambient outdoor air, with little or no abatement. The factory was only one story while the apartments were four stories tall, nearly ensuring the factory exhaust entered the apartment windows and 'fresh air intake' vents.

​Gjovik lived at these apartments in 2020 and found herself in the emergency room within one week, disabled by symptoms of solvent and gas exposure. Later in 2020, Gjovik conducted air testing and bio-monitoring which found the presence of Apple's factory exhaust inside her home, and inside her body"

Doctorow: "The Cult of Mac: You cannot reason a person out of a position they did not reason themself into in the first place...

Big Tech most assuredly steals from the news: it steals money. The ad-tech duopoly takes 51% out of every ad dollar. Social media holds news subscribers to ransom and requires "boosting" payment to reach the people who've asked to see their articles. And the mobile duopoly takes 30% out of every in-app subscription dollar:

The mobile duopoly likes to talk about the "mobile ecosystem," but it's no ecosystem – it's a pair of walled gardens:

It's a planned economy run by a pair of corporate executives who deliberate in secret and are accountable only to their shareholders. Thankfully, some regulators are alive to the hazards of this technofeudal arrangement and are taking firm measures:

These regulators couch their enforcement action in terms of defending an open market, but the benefits to app makers is only incidental. The real beneficiaries of an open app world is Apple customers. After all, it's Apple customers who bear the 30% app tax when it's priced into the apps they buy and the things they buy in those apps. It's Apple customers who lose access to apps that can't be viably offered because the app tax makes them money-losing propositions. It's Apple customers who lose out on the ability to get apps that Apple decides are unsuitable for inclusion in its App Store.

That's where the Cult Of Mac steps in to cape for the $3 trillion behemoth. The minority of Apple customers for whom their brand loyalty is a form of religious devotion insist that "no Apple customer wants these things."

This is such obvious nonsense that it can only be described as an article of faith, not a reasoned position"

"@reichenstein@mastodon.social

Americans usually look at EU laws from their by-the-letter, precedence based common law, not expecting the in-spirit approach of non-Anglo-Saxon civil law. Even Apple's response was typically American—trying to find sophist gaps in the wording, complying in a 'clever' way ('Look, I do just what you said! Happy now?'). While I don't expect American tech bloggers to understand European law or how they pedal populist anti EU propaganda, I expected more from Apple's lawyers"

I see some countries are restoring aid to UNRWA. ISR's lies are coming back to haunt it

#UNRWA #VanHollen

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The Economic Times: "Gaza world's biggest 'open-air graveyard': EU's Borrell"

"In 1987, [new junta leader supported by US] Namphy received IMF loans valued at $24.6 million in exchange for agreeing to slash rice tariffs from 150% to 50%, the lowest in the Caribbean. He opened all of Haiti’s ports to commercial activity and agreed to stop what little support the government had offered Haitian farmers. Meanwhile, Haiti’s military elite saw an opportunity to make a profit smuggling American rice.. In the United States, the passage of the 1985 Farm Bill significantly boosted subsidies to American rice growers. By 1987, 40% of American rice growers' profits came from the government. Heavily subsidized American rice could sell at prices far below the market value of Haitian rice. Haitian farmers never stood a chance against this unfair competition".. In Haiti, imported American rice is called 'Miami rice' because it is shipped from Miami in sacks stamped 'Miami, FLA.' By December 1987, Haiti’s rice production had shrunk to 75% of Haitian needs"

"James Weldon Johnson boarded a.. steamship.. on February 27, 1920, tasked by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People to investigate conditions in Haiti under US military rule.. [he] published his findings in the Nation as the four-part report Self-Determining Haiti [where] Johnson’s assessment of the US occupation (1915–1934), by then in its fifth year, was searing..

For Johnson a single institution and a single individual were responsible for the US intervention: the National City Bank of New York - the precursor to the contemporary financial services leviathan Citigroup - and its vice president Roger Leslie Farnham... [he wrote]

[T]o understand why the United States landed and has for five years maintained military forces in that country, why some three thousand Haitian men, women, and children have been shot down by American rifles and machine guns, it is necessary, among other things, to know that the National City Bank of New York is very much interested in Haiti. It is necessary to know that the National City Bank controls the National Bank of Haiti and is the depository for all of the Haitian national funds that are being collected by American officials, and that Mr. R. L. Farnham, vice-president of the National City Bank, is virtually the representative of the State Department in matters relating to the island republic"

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ETN: "Huadian Group, a Chinese government-owned undertaking, is looking to set up a $2.4 billion green hydrogen plant in Vietnam"

H2 Central: "Germany launches bidding for carbon contracts to support climate-friendly industrial production, 4 Billion Eur – Hydrogen included"

Fortune: "Tesla is now a ‘growth company with no growth,’ Wells Fargo writes in scathing downgrade"

CleanTechnica: "US Green Hydrogen Industry Kicks Into High Gear.. the new law makes room for the renewable energy chickens to come home to roost. In the latest example, the US Department of Energy has just announced a new $750 million round of BIL funding, aimed at replacing fossil-sourced hydrogen with green hydrogen from water"

Vibin we chillin.. Vibin n chillin

Infosec Exchange: "Governor Kathy Hochul has announced the allocation of more than $16 million to propel innovations in clean hydrogen technology, marking a significant step toward achieving New York State’s zero-emission electricity goals by 2040. This funding, facilitated through the Hydrogen and Clean Fuel Program, is set to support research, development, and demonstration projects across the state, emphasizing the use of clean hydrogen in sectors like industrial processes, clean transportation, and energy storage"

DTV: "Manchin announces $20.5m in funding for two WVU Research Corporation projects"

Reuters: "Morocco to dedicate 1 mln hectares to green hydrogen projects"

ABC: "NSW records two more lithium-ion battery-related fires following blazes in Bankstown and Silverwater..

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Transport Engineer: "A hydrogen-powered fuel-cell vehicle (FCEV) that is being used in a trial is showing no decrease in performance or range when operating in colder temperatures.. First Hydrogen is trialling the vehicle in collaboration with gas distribution network, Wales & West Utilities (WWU)"

WSJ: "Electric-Vehicle Startup Fisker Prepares for Possible Bankruptcy Filing.. Company has struggled with growing its sales amid stagnant EV demand in the U.S."

Chillax still..

Fortune: "Volkswagen is still ‘convinced the future will be electric’ as automaker plans to launch 30 new models this year amid gloomy sales outlook"

GN: "South Australia is well placed to lead the energy transition.. Premier Peter Malinauskas last month announced the state is bringing forward its renewable energy target by three years with a goal to source energy from 100 per cent renewables by 2027...

He said South Australia has what the world needs – abundant solar and wind resources, mineral riches including copper and iron ore, and steel manufacturing infrastructure and capability. 'That provides a platform for the opportunities we’ve been talking about today,' he said during a panel discussion titled The Hydrogen Race"