Week 13

SciTechDaily: "The [Korea Institute of Energy Research] has achieved a historic milestone in Korea by successfully producing hydrogen of exceptional purity from ammonia, completely eliminating carbon dioxide emissions in the process. Dr. Jung Unho’s research team at the Hydrogen Research Department of the Korea Institute of Energy Research (KIER) has developed Korea’s first clean hydrogen production technology. This innovative approach is based on ammonia decomposition and does not use fossil fuels. The team’s breakthrough could pave the way for a more sustainable and eco-friendly energy source. This allows for the production of high-purity hydrogen that meets international standards for hydrogen-powered vehicles, without the carbon dioxide emissions produced by using fossil fuels"

Crikey: "Nobel laureate economist savages his own profession as clueless and unethical.. economist Angus Deaton has delivered a ferocious rebuke to his own profession, saying economists have failed to understand that capitalism is about power"

Moonhaven, fine scifi. 3-Body Problem, boring, trite, thumbs down.

Workers at Ski Resort town are priced out of the housing market. The rich have their nice houses but the serfs they need to serve them cannot live in that same town. Sad.

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Andersen: "A billionaire member of [the Koch] political network.. was also apoplectic about [a..] mere suggestion that private equity guys like him should pay taxes on their incomes at an income tax rate of 35 percent, as it was then, instead of the capital gains rate of 15 percent... David Koch died in 2019, but Charles remains overseer of the interconnected political operations, which are spending $100 million to 200 million a year, mainly on election campaigns. From his personal foundation’s assets of nearly 1 billion, he spends an additional 100 million a year promoting the political interests of the rich and big business.

"@EU_Commission@social.network.europa.eu

Today, we have opened five non-compliance investigations under the Digital Markets Act.

It concerns:

• Alphabet’s rules on steering in Google Play

• Alphabet’s self-preferencing in Google Search

• Apple’s rules on steering in the App Store

• Apple's choice screen for Safari

• Meta’s ‘pay or consent model’"

Drove people out of their lands to make space for sheep? Brutal.

Ben Goldsmith: "Sheep are the number one cause of the loss of rural villages, rural communities over the last 500 years in Britain. Since Tudor times it was rich people buying land clearing villages in the form of the highland clearances in order to make way for very large sheep branches. It's well documented, my mother's own ancestor the Duke of Southernland drove his tenants to the west coast of Scotland and ultimately, across the Atlantic, in order to clear the land so he could have vast numbers of sheep. They cut the trees sold the timber to the Navy, and filled the land with sheep. That's how the numbers of sheep over 200 years inflated by 80-fold. Then of course the price of wool collapsed, today sheep represent less than 1% of the total calories produced in this country"

If wealth is not redistributed what is owned by the rest, even cooperatively shared, is worth less. If you are using anything that is supplied by a larger system (such as money), you are part of that system. It is not possible to withdraw into some turtle shell and live happily ever after there.

Also need better taxation

"phil_stevens@mastodon.nz

@abetterjulie The best chance we've got is to build small, human-scale parallel systems wherever we have the audience and the agency. Grass-roots mutual aid, food sovereignty, cooperative housing arrangements"

Due to top 1% hoarding assets and/or causing their prices to rise, ppl increasingly cannot afford to buy, they pay rent to the rich. Govs are in debt held by the top 1% so even your govs pays interest (rent) to the rich. Their very presence can turn any economy into an asset economy. Excess wealth has to be placed somewhere and it goes after such investments. The econ is so tilted towards this group no matter where the money is pumped towards, it still ends up with them. Yes in 2008 banks were given money. But 2020 regular people were given direct aid even that ended up with the top 1%. All flows end up there. It needs to be reversed.

Since the 80s US let inequality run rampant (via tax policies, worker org limitations) which allowed the rich get richer and change the economy into an asset economy. Same zeitgeist gave rise to monopolies, in all areas of business, not just tech.

Feudal order goes beyond tech. Rentier economy did not start on 2008. But the ideas are generally in the right direction.

"[C]apitalists.. have turned into (very well-off) vassals, who have to pay their dues to techno-feudal lords (Amazon; Google; Apple; Meta)..

As a response to the combined effect of the privatisation of the internet on the one hand, and the nearly no-strings-attached way with which states have injected eye-wateringly large sums of money into banks and large businesses after the 2008 financial crisis on the other, rent has supplanted profit as the main driver of the global economy"

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"@Daojoan@mastodon.social

[T]he creator economy is, to be frank, a dead end, a gilded cage that places a ceiling on what you can achieve.

I like to talk about the DIY economy. The indie economy.

In the indie economy, creators build their own platforms, whether that's a website, an app, or a subscription service. They have complete control over their content, their audience, and their monetization strategies. They are not beholden to anyone else's algorithms or policies, and they have the freedom to experiment and innovate without fear of reprisal.

Building your own platform is undoubtedly harder than relying on someone else's. It requires a greater investment of time, money, and effort. But the rewards are also greater"

"@jk@mastodon.social

There's so many remakes and rereleases of everything these days, its like every media industry is caught in a kind of 'finalreport-finished_-backup-FINAL_FINALFINAL.doc' situation"

"@burgerdrome@aus.social

Hollywood and TV casting agents have a self-selecting bias for acceptable beauty standards which has over time created an 'actor class' of aesthetics, also notable in the 'iPhone face' phenomenon. the end result of this is that basically every actor looks the same to me now and I genuinely struggle to figure out who the fuck I'm looking at in any production made after 2005. in my opinion all casting should be measured against a TWINS (1988) scale of casting similarities"

Turchin, End Times: "The extent to which economic elites dominate government in the United States is very unusual compared to other Western democracies. Countries like Denmark and Austria have ruling classes that have been fairly responsive to the [needs] of their population. During the postwar period, these countries were ruled by strong center-left parties, such as social democrats and socialists. Center-left parties rotated in power with center-right parties, but a strong consensus for the welfare state was shared broadly by the ruling elites in Western European democracies. Countries such as Denmark and Austria usually occupy the top positions when UN countries are ranked for their ability to deliver a high quality of life for their citizens... On many indicators of quality of life—life expectancy, equality, education—the US is an outlier in the Western world. Why?

[After 1500s] the conditions of intense warfare [via gunpowder, perfected in Europe] favor[ed] larger, more cohesive states. Small principalities and city-states could no longer hide behind their walls, which were easily breached by cannons. Intense military competition between European states weeded out those that couldn’t raise large armies; produce muskets and artillery in quantity; and build expensive modern fortifications that could withstand cannon fire. The Military Revolution also triggered a revolution in governance and finance because successful states had to learn how to efficiently extract and use wealth from their populations... As a result, medieval militocracies gradually evolved into ruling classes that combined military and administrative functions.

Although most plutocracies rapidly went extinct, some lingered longer than others. The Republic of Venice, located on islands protected by its lagoon, lasted longer than the other Italian city-states... thanks to its protected position in the British Isles, once England conquered all of them, it could, and did, dispense with the standing army (at least within England itself). The squirearchy, which started as a military class, gradually lost its military character and became simply a class of landowners, from which members of the British Parliament were elected... Unlike the other European great powers, which had to direct most of their resources into land armies or be conquered, the British Empire poured its resources into its navy. As a result, the United Kingdom came to be ruled by an elite that combined economic and administrative functions.

The antebellum ruling class in the US was a direct offshoot of the English squirearchy. Virginia, the Carolinas, and Georgia were settled by the Cavaliers, the faction of supporters of Charles I that lost the English Civil War. They brought with them their aristocratic ways and indentured servants. The latter were soon replaced by imported Africans, enslaved for life. After they won the Revolutionary War against the British Empire, the winners set about building their own state. Southern planters and Northern merchants largely copied the cultural forms of governance with which they were familiar. The early American Republic was an oligarchy modeled after the United Kingdom, although without a monarch (who, by that point, was on the way to becoming just a figurehead in the British Empire anyway). As a result, the United States inherited plutocracy as part of its 'cultural genotype'"

It is not correct to compare US with the Romans. US is not an empire. The Roman Empire was a militocracy, US is a plutocracy.

Reuters: "France's Lhyfe wins 149 mln euro grant for green hydrogen plant"

"@ProPublica@newsie.social

In America's rush to build the #nuclear arsenal that won the Cold War, #safety was sacrificed for speed.

In 2022, we cataloged cleanup efforts at the sites where #uranium was processed to fuel this arsenal.

At least 84% of these sites have polluted #groundwater"

"@DrTCombs@transportation.social

Four years ago today my kid's school shut down and I coped by making a list of cities that were closing streets to cars so kids could play in them.

Shortly thereafter, I took to social media for help documenting what would soon be a global phenomenon.

It was a hell of a ride..

That initial post led to

1. a global database of street space changes with entries from over 1,500 cities,

2. multiple new and rekindled collaborations with brilliant people around the world,

3. some very cool papers (by me and others), and

4. a new job"

"@memory@blank.org

If they get Voyager 1 working again, this will go down in history as the absolute pinnacle of the art of debugging. You think your codebase and kubernetes cluster is hard to deal with? Motherfucker try doing this with a delay of light-hours"

Oman Observer: "Oman sees $40 – 60 bn commitment towards new hydrogen industry"

"@thomasfuchs@hachyderm.io

Society when the hundredth study shows that UBI pretty much instantly leads to a better life for literally everyone: 🤷

Society when fintech douchebros say prime numbers and bad pictures of apes are the future of the economy: 'Of course it is. Here's billions of dollars. Also, do you want a back rub?'"

Maybe the complex / globalists sent a message to their opposition via SCP. They said "watch your step biznatches!"

It would be fitting the medium for the message is a cargo ship.

The ship destroying that bridge was managed by Synergy Marine Group. New York-based private equity firm Searchlight Capital Partners acquired it on 2022. Searchlight also recently bought a controlling share in Israel's largest telecom group, Bezeq.

CNN: "Baltimore Key bridge collapses after ship collision"

"@fuck_cars_bot@botsin.space

'11 hours just to cross the street in "the nation's best place to live" (according to U.S. News & World Report)'"

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The Canary: "Palestine Action has once again shown the power of direct action – by shutting down another UK weapons factory. Meanwhile, activists in the US have stepped up their campaign, also shutting an arms company facility down. The company in question is of course Elbit – and its complicity in Israel‘s genocide continues"

The largest software project ever undertaken by mankind, the Linux kernel, was developed under GPL license btw, not commercially.

Luke Smith: "Why I Use the GPL and Not Cuck Licenses.. Every piece of software I write I license under the GNU Public License Version 3 (GPLv3) unless I have forked it from something else. The GPLv3 is the premiere copyleft license, meaning that it not only allows users to run, modify and distribute their own versions of what I write, but it also requires that no one in that chain of development restrict and close-source that software"

Reshare

"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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It is fitting the most famous anti-American novel Shibumi has its villain personified in a corporation. Mother Company? Who was its CEO, per an insider joke of that universe, "Ma". CEO was picked as female I guess the subtle message was even the caring, nurturing streotype of the female could turn into a money-grubbing conniving bitch if the scenery is global transnational capitalism.

Ha. Billions S7 made a reference to the novel Shibumi.

Evil Geniuses: "[I]n the early 2000s the Kochs and big business kept expanding what they'd begun in the 1970s and '80s, giving more money to the think tanks and nonprofits and Washington lobbyists promoting their other political economic interests. The Kochs started holding biannual meetings of their new confederacy of right-wing billionaire political donors, the active core of whom had made their fortunes in fossil fuels and finance. A new national right-wing financial organization called DonorsTrust enabled donors to remain anonymous and keep their fingerprints off their $1.1 billion in contributions (so far) to hundreds of groups dedicated to 'advancing liberty'..

In 1980, David Koch ran for vice president to Reagan's right on the Libertarian platform that then seemed crazily extreme 'abolish the EPA and OSHA, privatize Social Security, repeal campaign finance laws' and his brother Charles worried about the reaction if the general public were to learn of their 'radically different' views. But a generation later in the mid-1990s, what had once been beyond the fringe was the mass-marketable conservative mainstream. The Kochian economic right had become a tight-knit shadow national political party affiliated with and dominating the nominally independent GOP"