Week 15
The Korea Herald: "Hyundai to start hydrogen vehicle trials in Guangzhou this year"
ABC: "Fortescue's $116 million Gladstone electrolyser factory has commenced operations, marking the first commercial-scale hydrogen electrolyser factory in Australia. The factory has the capacity to produce over 2 gigawatts of green hydrogen each year"
TCD: "[Italian] Government invests millions in new commitment to hydrogen-electric train technology"
Yahoo Finance: "British company hunts for white hydrogen in Cornwall and Scotland"
GM: "We will design, engineer, and develop a fleet of hydrogen fuel cell medium-duty trucks to demonstrate how the capability and strength of our fuel cells can help real-world Fleet customers"
H2 Insight: "Ballard stock rises on largest order for hydrogen fuel-cell engines in company's history.. The fuel cell manufacturer has also received $54m in tax credits for a factory in Texas"
Automative News: "China dominates U.S. in bid for hydrogen transportation supremacy"
Reuters: "EV maker Polestar posts 40% slump in Q1 deliveries"
Turchin, End Times: "Where is China today? Pretty much where it has been for the past two thousand years. It is governed by a ruling class of bureaucrats. The acronym CPC, which stands for the Communist Party of China, might as well stand for the Confucian Party of China.. Throughout Chinese imperial history, the mandarins kept the merchant class on a short leash, and the same is true for the Red dynasty. On [2021] Xi Jinping, gave a major speech in which he called for common prosperity and emphasized the need to regulate excessively high-income groups, which was interpreted by the Western press as an attack on the rich. But there is nothing new here, merely the mandarins (again) reminding the billionaires who is in charge in China"
Ars Technica: "So far, AI hasn’t been profitable for Big Tech.. Notably, [a] WSJ report claims that Microsoft's GitHub Copilot, which assists app developers by generating code, has been operating at a loss.. The cost to Microsoft exceeds $20 a month per user on average, according to a person familiar with the matter. In some cases, individual power users have cost the company as much as 80 a month."
"@mmccue@threads.net
Good evening, Tech Threads. Today was a big milestone in our quest to federate #Flipboard and tear down the walls around our own walled garden. First, we launched a new version of Flipboard for iOS and Android which brings the promise of two way federation to life. Now when a federated Flipboard user curates, people in the fediverse (soon to include threads users!) can reply, favorite, boost or follow those Flipboard users who in turn will see that activity in their usual notifications tab. Even better, Flipboard users can now directly reply to people in the fediverse"
"@zuck@threads.net
First post in the fediverse! 👋"
NYT: "A Tantalizing ‘Hint’ That Astronomers Got Dark Energy All Wrong.. The first year of [a new spectroscopic instrument's] results were designed to simply confirm what was already known.. 'We thought that we would basically validate the standard model.' But the unknown leaped out at them. When the scientists combined their map with other cosmological data, they were surprised to find that it did not quite agree with the otherwise reliable standard model of the universe, which assumes that dark energy is constant and unchanging. A varying dark energy fit the data points better"
Frontline #UA #RU - 04/07 - 04/13
"How Does the Government of Israel Treat Christians? Christian Leaders in the West Should Care" #Carlson #Gaza
The Guardian: "The Hamas leader said the attack would not change the group’s demands for a permanent ceasefire and return of displaced Palestinians from their homes in ongoing negotiations mediated by Doha and Washington"
CNN: "Israeli airstrike kills three sons of Hamas political leader in Gaza as ceasefire talks stutter"
NYT: "E.P.A. Says ‘Forever Chemicals’ Must Be Removed From Tap Water.. The rule applies to a family of chemicals known as PFAS that are linked to serious health effects"
AP News: "Biden says he’s considering Australia’s request to drop prosecution of Wikileaks founder Assange"
End Hedge Fund Control of American Homes Act. It looks like a good bill.. It currently appears stalled though.
NYT: "Democrats in Congress have introduced a bill in both houses of Congress on Tuesday to ban hedge funds from buying and owning single-family homes in the United States"
BTW according to a theory, Watergate was part of what some call a "Camelot conspiracy", the Kennedys were behind the whole thing. Matthews talks about in the book how Ted Ken used the opportunity to damage Nixon as a member of the Judiciary Commitee, perhaps there was more going on behind the scenes as well. The military-industrial complex liked JFK anyway who constantly raised their budget, an MIC/Camelot effort would not be outside the realm of possibility.
Previous Watergate timeline used some material, data from Chris Matthews' book on the subject, Kennedy & Nixon.
"@cdrc@tux.social
Have you tried @organicmaps.. A.. privacy-focused and offline navigation app. The app features no location tracking and no data collection. The map data is downloaded to the phone so search, routing, and navigation can operate without a cell phone signal, ideal for travel to locations with poor connections (hikes, remote roads). Organic Maps uses map data from OpenStreetMap. The app is free and open-source software"
Note AMZN did not use "AI" for the service, it was bunch of people eyeballing stuff
Gizmodo: "Amazon Ditches 'Just Walk Out' Checkouts at Its Grocery Stores.. Amazon Fresh is moving away from a feature of its grocery stores where customers could skip checkout altogether. Though it seemed completely automated, Just Walk Out relied on more than 1,000 people in India watching and labeling videos to ensure accurate checkouts. The cashiers were simply moved off-site, and they watched you as you shopped.. The system of scanners and video cameras in each store is... incredibly expensive"
Vanden Heuvel, The Nation: "Ties between the government and the private sector.. famously called the 'military-industrial complex' — form the foundations of our national defense. Since 9/11, between one-third and half of the nearly $14 trillion the Pentagon has spent went to for-profit defense contractors. Dozens of members of Congress and their spouses own millions of dollars’ worth of stock in those companies"
Author Michael Easter says along with long-distance travel carrying is also a fundamental human skill. The human body is built the way it is so that "we could slowly but surely run down prey for miles and miles in the heat until the animal toppled over from exhaustion". Then we’d hunt it and carry it back to camp. This is why we have two legs, sweat glands across our body, no fur, short torsos, and strong grips. IOW rucking is cool. Be a rucker, not a mucker.
The Kingdom, Falcon Rising, The Gambler 👍 Ricky Stanicky, The Do-over 👎
Road House, not bad, but i understand why it's theatre release was canceled (there was some drama there w/ director crying foul).. Entertaining enough, not that grand. McGregor has zero presence. He constantly looks like he is doing a Cornholio imitation wout the overhead shirt. The reveal lacked oomph. 3.5 out of 5.
"@jasongorman@mastodon.cloud
'That's why I use multiple LLMs, trained in different programming techniques.' Why would you even bother telling me such an obvious lie?"
"@baldur@toot.cafe
This is how Microsoft survives. Monopoly rents on margins that are only possible because your core good is non-rival and non-exclusive. The fundamental problem with generative models is that they are 10x too expensive to work with the industry’s default business models and structure"
"@baldur@toot.cafe
Tech punditry keeps harping on the notion that nobody has ever successfully banned 'scientific progress', but LLMs and generative models are not 'progress'. They’re products and we ban those all the time"
Matthews speaking some truth, post-election commentary #2016
He was fired shortly afterwards wasn't he?
Nick Bano: "[The root of a lot of the high rent problems] goes back to Margaret Thatcher and to Tony Blair because of course while it's right to point out that Thatcher dismantled rent controls what kept the landlords in check for most of the 20th century was that they were scared that whenever the Tories were generous to landlords Labor would come and turn it around again. When you have a long-term investment like land that tended to keep the landlords at Bay a bit. So when Tony Blair said rent controls are never coming back "I'm keeping what that Thatcher had", that signals to the landlords to go wild"
Third way (not to be confused with third wave) was a faux philophical cover for the left to act like right-wingers under a slick new label. It was an unplanned, clumsy mess and along with the problem leaving huge swaths of ideological spectrum unattended it naturally caused chaos, and in the long-term (today) misery. But since the proponents who pushed this ideology were also creating crises at the same time they could conveniently look like heroes fighting them with their half-assed band-aid solutions. The approach was ineffective, but during the post Berlin Wall euphoria many did not care, mostly chalking up the problems to the birth pangs of something new. It was nothing new, it was something old. Rich getting richer poor getting poorer.
The Nation: "British Prime Minister Tony Blair euphorically announced [90s], third-way thinking was.. [a] governing philosophy for the future... The third way.. proved instrumental to another key post–Cold War undertaking: discrediting and marginalizing movement-based coalitions on the left, stigmatizing them as holdovers from the recently resolved—in capitalism’s favor—postwar clash of ideologies. In many ways, the most lasting legacy of the third way may well be its determination to consign the political left to the dustbin of history, setting the stage for the new millennial age of reaction and crisis"
Of course more recently this
Aww look at that, all young and stupid
![[-]](https://cdn.fosstodon.org/media_attachments/files/112/243/071/325/681/125/original/4753aa8c4461f750.png){kind=link}
For one transgression they blockaded Greece? Those were the days. Now they would give Greece more weapons.
Unherd: "In 1847 David Pacifico, a British subject resident in Athens, had his home stormed by a mob... As that happened, the Athenian police did nothing. Pacifico immediately wrote to the British authorities in Greece to explain what had taken place. In turn they approached the Greek government asking Pacifico to be compensated. Athens refused to do anything — twice. As a result Lord Palmerston, then Foreign Secretary, instructed Sir William Parker, Commander-in-Chief of the Mediterranean Fleet, to impose a blockade of Athens and requisition the country’s navy"
#Inequality
Image 1, Image 2, Image 3, Image 4
Looking at the passage here, it becomes clear US libertarianism is not some extreme ideology for the Anglo-centric folk.
"[T]hanks to its protected position in the British Isles, once England conquered all of them, it could, and did, dispense with the standing army.. The squirearchy, which started as a military class, gradually lost its military character.. The early American Republic was an oligarchy modeled after the United Kingdom".
Libertarians are against most things military, and are for extreme free trade, right? Well those wishes have their basis in the the Anglo past. Dispensing with the standing army, check. Plutocracy, check.
Now there are negatives associated with that. The region specific, local roots makes libertarianism less universal. It has bizarre hangups some of which are vaguely applicable to today, some not. It is excessively against anything military, that would be good for curtailing excessive mil spending and defang the military-industrial complex, but can we reach a just and equitable society out of such a British Isles centric ideology? Uncurtailed capitalism is at the root of many ills today. I'm afraid its past makes this ideology a bit provencial, marginal.
"@GeePawHill@mastodon.social
One of the key facts here keeps getting sidestepped by a mixture of scam marketing and common language usage out there.
LLMs don't sometimes make shit up, they always make shit up.
That's what an LLM is: a piece of software that makes up plausible sounding shit.
What's impressive about this is the extent of improvement in the plausibility.
What's horrifying about it is the extent to which so many people don't care to distinguish between plausibility and correctness"
"Olivine, one of the most abundant silicates on earth, thermodynamically captures CO2 in relevant amounts during its dissolution. Upscaling the use of this mineral as a replacement for sand or gravel may contribute to reduce concentrations of greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere"
Forbes: "Apple Stock Is Up After Reportedly Ending $10 Billion EV Project"
Nikkei Asia: "Japan, U.S. in talks to bolster hydrogen supply chain together.. Japan and the U.S. are discussing joint efforts to promote hydrogen energy and bolster related supply chains, including by lowering costs for producers, Nikkei has learned. Clean energy is on the agenda for a summit between Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida and U.S. President Joe Biden in Washington on Wednesday. The leaders are expected to launch a cabinet-level dialogue on the issue"
Al Jazeera: "Pelosi joins US Democrats call for Biden to halt arms transfer to Israel"
PV Magazine: "India’s green hydrogen push presents a $125 billion investment opportunity by 2030"
Reuters: "[FC]EV maker Nikola beats first-quarter deliveries estimates for hydrogen trucks"
Carbon / Methane levels keep increasing
They can pay interest on the loan but that interest is still low compared to capital gains tax. The principal can be paid back with new loan.. and it keeps going. Livin la vida loca, tax free.
One of the 1000 ways the top 1% can avoid tax..
"The 'Buy, Borrow, Die' strategy has been adopted by affluent individuals who enlist the aid of financial planning specialists to maintain their lavish lifestyles while minimizing taxes... First, a wealthy person must have a high amount of wealth and use that wealth to buy assets... After acquiring assets that will appreciate, the next logical step is to take out loans secured by these assets. In other words, those resources can be utilized as collateral for borrowed money. Instead of selling your investments for cash and triggering capital gains taxes, you could borrow money by pledging your assets as a surety. Not only are you not liable for capital gains tax, but the loan proceeds will not be taxable income... [after death] those receiving your estate can use the assets you have bequeathed to settle any loans... [the heirs] pay zero taxes under current law. Or they could use the buy, borrow, die strategy on the inherited assets and repeat the cycle"
The Guardian: "Global rainforest loss continues at rate of 10 football pitches a minute"
Result of overconcentrated wealth
First Post: "It's a new record! Gold, silver prices surge to all-time highs again"
The consolidation state at work.. Don't tax wealth, cut services, then blame desparate, helpless, and angry population for being racist when they veer towards non-mainstream alternatives.
Paper: "Did Austerity Cause Brexit?.. The fiscal contraction brought about by the Conservative-led government starting in 2010 was sizable: aggregate real government spending on welfare and social protection decreased by around 16 percent per capita. At the district level, the level at which most administration of welfare spending takes place, welfare spending per person fell by 23.4 percent in real terms between 2010 and 2015.. Using data from government estimates on the expected intensity of specific welfare cuts across districts, I show that support for UKIP started to grow in areas with significant exposure to specific benefit cuts after these became effective"
Nikkei Asia: "Japan to take another shot at a homegrown airliner, eyeing hydrogen.. Public-private project will heed lessons from failed Mitsubishi jet"
Firstpost: "Rude Awakening: EV sales stagnate in the UK"
A supermarket masquerading as a country
US becomes easier to understand when you see it is a McNugget wrapped in a Quarter Pounder inside a McDouble wrapped in a Mac'n'Cheese.
Countries who are descendants of militocracies, whether current democracies or otherwise, have a hard time understanding US.. Russia, China, even many of the democracies of Western Europe... They could see US as a reflection of their past, but US had a different trajectory. The Anglo is weird, other countries should not aim to copy them.
OnLabor: "[01/30] SpaceX and Trader Joe’s are attacking the constitutionality of the [National Labor Relations Board]. While their arguments may be novel, their strategy is not. After the Wagner Act’s passage in 1935, employers across the country openly flouted the law, arguing that it was unconstitutional. They had reason to think the Supreme Court might agree: it had previously struck down wage and hour laws and defended yellow-dog contracts in the name of the Constitution. More recently, the Court had stymied President Roosevelt’s early attempts to regulate labor relations by voiding the National Industrial Recovery Act. But the Lochner era drew to a close after Roosevelt’s threats to pack the Court, and the justices finally upheld the NLRB’s constitutionality in 1937.
Undaunted by the many decades of intervening precedent, today’s employers are once again ignoring labor law in hopes of capitalizing on a sympathetic judiciary"
CBS News: "Fire at Lucid Motors HQ in Newark destroys prototype, damages 2 other EVs"
The movies mentioned are fine on their own, but we have to be careful with the long arc, always pay attention to subtext, look beyond the fireworks.
Although pro-rich ideology derived some benefits from TS doing cool things, he was nevertheless portrayed as a faulty man so naturally he would side with the government for the accords, the central theme of Civil War. TS death / sacrifice at the end was his redemption for the mistakes he'd made previously. For being vengeful perhaps (attacking a friend for avenging the death of his parents), being a jackass, showoff in general, even creating a killerbot by mistake.
The real hero of the saga, the unblemished examplar of the previous phases was Cap. He has honor, is cool, he is always on the "right side". He is so deserving of that mystic mojo he can lift Thor's hammer because he is that freaking great (a twist set up like 10 movies earlier, in Age of Ultron, it paid off in Endgame). And that guy, the shit, the man with "America's Ass" chose to be anti-government when the government asked him to sign an accord that wasn't even slightly offensive. The studios planted a subliminal message this way, they said government is no good, if it were, Captain America would be on their side (so remember that viewer when they come to tax our corporation one day, wink wink, you have to be anti-government like Steve Rodgers, so you too can have that mojo -and we continue paying no tax-).
Tony Stark sided with the government within MCU story in previous phases but pay attention, he was not the hero, "the one" of those storylines #Marvel #MCU
NYT: "[2020/03] A $60 Billion Housing Grab by Wall Street.. By 2016, 95 percent of the distressed mortgages on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac’s books were auctioned off to Wall Street investors without any meaningful stipulations, and private-equity firms had acquired more than 200,000 homes in desirable cities and middle-class suburban neighborhoods, creating a tantalizing new asset class: the single-family-rental home. The companies would make money on rising home values while tenants covered the mortgages...
Wall Street’s latest real estate grab has ballooned to roughly $60 billion, representing hundreds of thousands of properties. In some communities, it has fundamentally altered housing ecosystems in ways we’re only now beginning to understand, fueling a housing recovery without a homeowner recovery"
Over 14 million vacant units in US.
u.get_fred(2010,"EVACANTUSQ176N").tail(3)
Out[1]:
EVACANTUSQ176N
DATE
2023-04-01 15049.0
2023-07-01 15172.0
2023-10-01 14761.0
#Landlords #Bano #PoliticsJoe
"Google Is Killing.. Independent Sites.. Since September 2023, Google has hidden our site from millions of [our potential viewers], reducing our organic traffic and revenue by 85% and causing our business to be on the edge of going under... Google’s search results are no longer fair and no longer abide by their own guidelines, which they repeatedly share with website owners when they speak up, alongside Google’s spokespersons replying with cover-up quotes such as 'make better content for your readers'...
Google continuously states (and very publicly) that their goal is to show helpful content, to reduce spam, and make the search results fairer to all sized websites. But the opposite is happening, and aggressively. Google’s algorithms now favor a handful of results BEFORE 'normal' websites, results that rarely show independent websites..
Google wants to completely eradicate users leaving their search results and will now show you their own 'From Sources' answers to search terms. These answers are taken without consent from the publisher’s content and are stolen from creators’ work so that Google can give you 'their' answer instead, lowering the chances of readers exploring websites… the websites that are paying to create the exact content that Google now shows for themself"
Note most in the list are BEVs
Auto Express: "Fastest depreciating cars: top 10 worst motoring money pits"
ML Street Talk Podcast: "[I]f you look at, the AI Day presentations that effectively go into deep technical detail about how Tesla learns the world, or Andrei's talk at NeurIPS 2 years ago.. Tesla very much is trying to come up with a function that memorizes the world.. basically take all of the possible perceptual states that exist in the realm of driving, and produce the correct perceptual signals, that result from that, under all circumstances. And they're pouring massive amounts of training data and making that happen, running.. tests in shadow mode to collect, triggers that then feed more labels, back to the labeling team to run that data loop.
[The aim seems to be..] that singularity moment where the function converges and and has memorized infinity. And.. as, you know, I've kind of talked to you about, so far, I do not believe that that's possible.. Obviously, neural networks are finite machines. They operate under finite compute constraints with finite memory. It may be possible to build a neural network, that could indeed memorize infinity given, an infinite number of layers and infinite number of, you know, fully connected neurons, infinite compute and memory to execute that model. But given the compute constraints in a Tesla vehicle, I don't think that's possible to achieve"
ML Street Talk Podcast: "George [Morgan] quit Tesla because he thought that the way that they were proposing to fix autopilot, in particular to fix the "San Francisco problem" for autopilot was just way more data for San Francisco specifically and just.. throwing compute at the wall. And so.. George's thought was 'this can't be the right way to do it'.. 'I wanna take a position against scale.. It kinda feels like they're trying to memorize infinity'"
Frontline #UA #RU - 03/29 - 04/07
NYT: "Hertz Will Shrink Electric Fleet.. The rental car [Hertz] company blamed the sharp drop in the value of electric vehicles and higher repair costs for its decision to sell 20,000 cars. The rental car company Hertz will be selling about one-third of the electric vehicles in its fleet after they lost value more quickly than expected".
FT: "Carmakers hit by ‘marked slowdown’ in electric vehicle demand, says Dowlais chief"
An irrefutable (non-falsifiable) claim - black holes #Robitaille
The "rebels" who do not like the rules are like intrepid enterpreneurs, they are too cool to be at school or skooled, they are just awesome in the way they are, simply for being different, gender diverse, fluid binary or whatever.. Starfleet is like government, of course it is painted as bad because the corps who fund these shows prefer it, they are scared of any insitution that is not theirs, and is capable to tax their ass one day.
It seems they emphasized the usual message via subliminal parallels btw Starfleet and Government, brainwashing against the essence of both. Anti-government, pro-corporate ideology..
The Bulwark: "What does it mean if we can’t even trust the institutions in our imagined utopias?.. Starfleet, for those not also raised on Star Trek, is the exploratory, scientific, diplomatic, and military arm of the United Federation of Planets.. But whatever else Starfleet is, it is good.. Things are different in modern Trek [Jar Jar Ibrahim era]... Starfleet as an institution often plays a partially antagonistic role in [newer] shows. By the time of Picard, the titular paragon has quit Starfleet in a huff because it no longer lives up to his principles, and in both seasons one and three it is revealed that Starfleet has been compromised by hostile alien agents and cannot be trusted. The first season of Discovery ends with Starfleet condoning genocide, only to be stopped by our heroic crew; Season 2’s villain was an out-of-control Starfleet AI that threatened all life in the galaxy; and Seasons 3 and 4 keep the crew in near-constant conflict with Starfleet and/or Federation brass. Lower Decks is centered on the adventures of a low-level officer who routinely defies Starfleet regulations to help nearby planets in ways that Starfleet would not condone. Even Strange New Worlds, the most archetypal of the modern shows, emphasizes how unjust some of Starfleet’s rules are"
Excellent.. Here is an earlier post on this tech.
Nikkei Asia: "The Japanese government plans to start field testing clean hydrogen production using nuclear power as soon as 2028, Nikkei has learned, with the move following a successful safety test of a next-generation reactor.. The Japan Atomic Energy Agency concluded a successful safety test of the HTTR reactor on March 28"
Scientific American: "[2022] JWST's First Glimpses of Early Galaxies Could Break Cosmology.. [soon after JWST came online] dozens of galaxy candidates.. sprang into view with estimated redshifts as high as 20—just 180 million years after the big bang—some with disklike structures that were not expected to manifest so early in cosmic history... Such behemoths emerging so rapidly defies expectations set by cosmologists' standard model of the universe's evolution. In the first second after the [so called] big bang, our universe was an almost inconceivably hot and dense soup of primordial particles... This process of becoming, of the early universe's chaos giving way to the more orderly cosmos we know today, is thought to have taken about a billion years. JWST's discovery of bright galaxies in the early cosmos challenges this model"