Week 18

H2 Today: "SAIC showcases a hydrogen model at the Beijing Auto Show"

Certain inputs are known to regenerate pieces of the training data verbatim. These parrots (LLMs) essentially compress data and "creatively decompress". One of those creative ways can be the source material itself.

"@gvwilson@mastodon.social

Docusign just admitted that they use customer data (i.e., all those contracts, affidavits, and other confidential documents we send them) to train AI"⁴

NYT: "Hydrogen Offers Germany a Chance to Take a Lead in Green Energy.. A subsidiary of ThyssenKrupp, Germany’s venerable steel producer, is landing major deals for a device that makes the clean-burning gas from water.

ThyssenKrupp Nucera.. produces the electrolyzers. The company was spun off from ThyssenKrupp, a German steel giant, in 2023.

The Nucera project was backed by a German government fund worth 700 million euros, or $746 million. Overall, German state and federal governments have earmarked €13.2 billion for investment in about two dozen projects to develop hydrogen...

Inflation Reduction Act, the 2022 law.. is offering hundreds of billions of dollars for carbon-free, or green, technology. The Department of Energy awarded Nucera a $50 million grant last month to further develop production of gigawatt-scale electrolyzers for North America...

ThyssenKrupp’s grab bag of businesses was a world-leading supplier of equipment for making chlorine, a chemical with many uses including in drinking water and swimming pools. As it turns out, new iterations of these machines can be used to make hydrogen"

Link

Post-Gilded Age worker-centric concessions people had from the wealthy were not taken, they were given by the wealthy class itself. Naturally they did not do it out of the goodness of their hearts, they were scared. A new system was on the rise (communism), the business elite felt they had to do something to stop that from happening in US, so they gave to regular folk as many concessions as they could without losing their own shirt. As such the concessions were not permanent. Post 70s/80s saw corporations, the wealthy class to reclaim their top status with a vengaence. If changes are made now, they need to be made permanent. The class in power needs to be beaten down. Power needs to be taken.

It is like "the invisible hand" phenomenon in econ. Just like the combined actions of simple consumers with purchasing power seemingly creates a direction that looks almost planned, the combined actions of larger econ individuals (plutocrats) will create a direction as well. No specific fluffermucker is in charge, in a way all of them are. In their case their purchasing power is larger, they can purchase entire politicians, small-size countries, pay off high-ranking officials, brain-wash the public through their media. That will create certain type of dynamic in governance.

Plutocracies are hard to identify, they are hard to pin down. There are bunch of private actors working the system from many angles... Countries with militocratic history cannot fathom bunch of rich, connected jagoffs running roughshod this way, some oligarchs can get powerful, but the state can kick their ass, as it happened in Russia recently. But in US/UK, they've been in charge for centuries.

"Studying government" at uni won't help here because a lot of that scholarship, teaching is Eurasia centric, going all the way back to Plato, around regions that have been dominated by military empires (real ones, not the McFuckFauxEmpire of US). There is some General X, General Y, someone makes a coup, gets power. There is unrest in the empire, soldiers get sent to quell, done. Bada bing bada boom. A company having an army larger than the country it originates from (eg the East India Company) is almost unheard of.

Tucker during the interview asks Putin "who makes the decisions in US?", Putin is like "I don't know". That was funny.. The answer was genuine I have no doubt. Here is a famous journalist of many years from US, asking the President of Russia about who is running his country, and the Russian president, whose former job was in intelligence btw, is like 🤷‍♂️ Interview gold.

CNBC: "EV euphoria is dead. Automakers are scaling back or delaying their electric vehicle plans"

Cindy McCain sounds ok, humanitarian, exec director of World Food Program. Meghan is her daughter? Wat went wrong with the bitch

That sucks.. I was watching that show

Chris Hedges: "My show on The Real News has been canceled because of my critiques of the Democratic Party and Joe Biden. I was just informed by Max Alvarez, the Editor-in-Chief at The Real News, that they will no longer run my show. The reason for the cancellation, he said, is that my critiques of Biden, especially for the genocide in Gaza, jeopardizes his nonprofit status. My last show with Dennis Kucinich, who is running as an independent for Congress in Ohio, was removed from the site"

"@techcrunch@threads.net

Hello fediverse 👋"

Turchin, Age of Discord: "When [the Soviet Union] collapsed in 1991, [govs] huge capital ​was rapidly privatized by corporate managers—party bosses, factory directors, and their cronies... Privatization was an incredibly corrupt and violent process, with the winners literally walking on the corpses of their less lucky competitors. In a darkly amusing anecdote, at a meeting between the two most powerful Russian oligarchs, Berezovsky and Gusinsky, one of them reportedly asked the other: 'Why did you put a contract on me?' The response? 'No, it was you who put a contract on me!' It turns out that each had hired assassins to eliminate the other.

As most of the wealth became concentrated in the hands of fewer than a dozen oligarchs, the well-being of the 99 percent collapsed. Russians were dying in droves from deaths of despair. By 1996, popular discontent became so intense that it was clear the incumbent president, Boris Yeltsin, had no chance of winning reelection - his approval ratings were in the single digits. The main challenger was the communist Gennady Zyuganov. The oligarchate became concerned that victory by the communists might create difficulties for their continued looting of the country. A group of the most powerful oligarchs, led by Berezovsky and Gusinsky, made a deal with Yeltsin: in return for his guaranteeing the privatization of state enterprises, they financed his campaign and threw their media resources behind him—by that point, they controlled all mass media. They also hired a team of American political campaign consultants (including the infamous Dick Morris [Clinton's advisor]) to manage Yeltsin’s reelection. Even that was not enough, and in the end they had to resort to massive electoral fraud to reelect Yeltsin.

This is how Russia became an extreme plutocracy in 1996. Because the oligarchs had little regard for managing the state, the disintegrative processes gathered speed. The factory owners stopped paying their workers’ salaries, and there was a wave of labor strikes during the autumn following the elections. A bloody war in Chechnya flared up again. ​And in 1998, the country was hit by a severe financial crisis, which resulted in the devaluation of the ruble and a default on the state debt.

At this point, two main power networks formed in Russia. The ruling faction was the economic elites (the oligarchs), who thoroughly controlled the ideological elites by owning all major mass media. The second group included the administrative elites (the bureaucracy) and the military elites (the so-called siloviki, who included state security and military officers). In the ensuing power struggle, the alliance of administrative/military elites, led by Vladimir Putin, defeated the plutocrats. There was no sudden revolution; rather, the process was gradual, as one oligarch after another was exiled (Berezovsky and Gusinsky), imprisoned and then exiled (Khodorkovsky), or relegated to a subordinate position in the power hierarchy (Potanin)"

Renewables Now: "[Study conducted] Uniper Energy Storage has indicated strong interest in hydrogen storage in North West Germany even in the initial phase of hydrogen ramp-up starting in 2029 and beyond.. Uniper noted that according to a recent study by the association Gas Infrastructure Europe, achieving the REPowerEU targets will require hydrogen storage capacity of around 45 TWh in Europe by 2030 and around 300 TWh by 2050, well above the planned projects of 9 TWh by 2030 and 21.5 TWh by 2050"

Barron's: "BYD’s EV Sales Show Contracting China Market"

"[Chinese electric car maker] BYD sales dropped by 42% from last quarter"

Clarkson is the former host of Top Gear the famous car enthusiast show, he surely understands cars. Battery-electric doesn't make sense from any angle, usability metric, TCO. It's just a bad solution. Kicked off to spoon-feed a Democratic president his legacy, it limped on for a while due to US being a tech trendsetter, but it finally crashed into the wall called reality and is about the meet its inescapable end.

Jeremy Clarkson: "It took me about 15 minutes to work out that electric cars were rubbish. But when I said so, on television, I was called a climate change denier, luddite and fool. So you can imagine how happy I was yesterday to discover that millions of people are now coming round to my way of thinking.

In Germany, electric car sales fell in March by a whopping 29 per cent. And across the rest of the EU by 11 per cent. In the UK.. the share of the market taken by battery-powered cars is down from 16.6 per cent last year to 15.2 per cent in 2024. Things are so bleak that Tesla is laying off 14,000 people globally. That’s ten per cent of its workforce.

Some say this is all because governments are reducing the tax breaks given. But it’s mostly because people are waking up to the fact electric cars are expensive, boring to drive, useless for long journeys and, if we are honest, not especially good for the environment"

First Post: "Another Boeing whistleblower passes away after contracting 'sudden & fast-spreading infection'"

Al-Monitor: "Colombian president says country cutting diplomatic ties with Israel"

The Hill: "Brown University agrees to hold Israel divestment vote after pressure from student protesters"

F24: "French students block two university entrances in growing pro-Palestinian demonstrations"

"Further protests at UK factories over military arms being sent to Israel"

The National: "This Is How Power Protects Itself.. The decision to sic the police on peaceful protesters is evidence that people in charge are panicking. They’re terrified of the strength of the movement for Palestine"

The American Conservative: "Is the Navalny Intelligence Leak an Olive Branch to Putin? Absolving Putin of Navalny’s death could signal an awareness that negotiations in Ukraine must come soon"

H2 Fuel News: "Daimler Truck and INEOS Inovyn collab on heavy duty liquid hydrogen truck"

Lt. Col. Davis, Armed Forces Journal: "[2013] Over the past two decades, Army generals have consistently insisted that various acquisition, organizational and even combat efforts were on course despite substantial and frequent expert testimony to the contrary. They rejected alternative courses of action that independent analysis suggested might have produced superior results, and reaped failure after expensive failure.

A short and by no means exhaustive list of such failures might include the RAH-66 Comanche armed reconnaissance helicopter (launched in 1991, canceled after $6.9 billion), the XM2001 Crusader mobile cannon (launched in 1995, canceled after 7 billion), and the Future Combat Systems (launched in 2003, canceled after 20 billion). FCS in particular was notable for senior Army leaders’ efforts to ignore or suppress the results of simulations, tests and analyses that highlighted problems and ultimately predicted failure...

After each of these failures, one might expect the Army and program leaders to have suffered censure. Instead, the opposite seems generally to have been the case. The leaders of failed programs and other efforts received prestigious medals, promotion to higher ranks, and plum follow-on jobs; others retired and went to work for defense contractors, often with companies that had profited from the failed acquisition effort"

Bloomenergy: "Key Advantages of Hydrogen Fuel Cells.. 1) High Energy Efficiency.. Hydrogen fuel cells outshine traditional energy sources with their exceptional efficiency. Typically, internal combustion engines operate at an efficiency rate of around 25%, while power plants hover around 35%. In contrast, hydrogen fuel cells in a combined heat and power system boast efficiencies greater than 60%, according to the U.S. Department of Energy...

2) Environmental and Economic Benefits.. Emitting only water vapor and heat, hydrogen fuel cells offer a zero-emission power source..

3) Versatility and Scalability.. Hydrogen, the universe’s most abundant element, offers an inexhaustible energy resource that can significantly contribute to global zero-carbon energy initiatives...

4) Reliability and Durability.. Fuel cells stand out for their reliability and longevity. Unlike batteries that lose charge over time, hydrogen stored as a gas or liquid remains ready for use, ensuring a dependable energy source for critical applications. Additionally, hydrogen fuel cells offer notable operational durability, with some designs demonstrating lifespans exceeding 20,000 hours. This reliability, coupled with the minimal maintenance needs of fuel cell systems, positions hydrogen fuel cells as a sustainable solution for long-term energy needs"

Beckett, The Guardian: "An ONS study of British inflation since 1950 found that, while its infamous surge in the 1970s was largely caused by 'sharp increases in world prices for food and other commodities', since 1989 'the biggest driver.. has typically been housing and household services, which includes gas and electricity prices'. By doing so much during the 1980s to create today’s property-obsessed, profiteering economy, Margaret Thatcher did not 'defeat' British inflation, as she promised, but made it worse in the long run instead."

"@Caution@tech.lgbt

If you live in Canada, you should be aware that there’s a serious proposal being floated as a private member’s bill to establish a universal basic income. This is not a drill... it’s reached second reading, and is garnering a lot of attention"

Tony Blair threw Galloway out of the Labour Party over the Iraq War? One more reason to dislike the son of a bitch. The British Clinton. Fake Left. Lobbyist-politician celebrity fluffer for hire. Faux statesman.

Al-Monitor: "Brown University on Tuesday reached an agreement with students protesting the war in Gaza that would see them remove their encampment from school grounds in exchange for the institution considering divesting from Israel"

ABNewswire: "European Union Backs [Argentinian] Patagonia’s Rise in the Hydrogen Market.. Discussions are underway to support companies and facilitate regulatory exchanges"

CTV News: "Ford’s electric vehicle unit reported that losses soared in the first quarter to US $1.3 billion, or 132,000 dollars for each of the 10,000 vehicles it sold in the first three months of the year, helping to drag down earnings for the company overall"

Critics can argue whether they dislike the decision or not. My point is it was under the realm of executive authority which was exercised in this case. It is not easy, next to impossible to run a "deep state" in the current US system which is good actually. But at the same time US politicians are regularly bought out who turn around and do the bidding of the wealthy (that is not good). In other words US' problem is the surface state - visible people, in high office making decisions that are against the majority's interests.

DJT ordered the op. The CIA does whatever the f--k the exec tells them to. There is no deep state.

Venezuella 2019 coup attempt.. Was that like, US "deep state"?

JWST hints at alien life on a planet.. This is the same news from September of 2023.. in circulation again? It could be an attempt at distraction.

#GBN

Host: "Colonel what did you make of the scenes in the house as the Ukrainian flags were waved in apparent celebration of of signing the check to Ukraine"

Col MacGregor: "I don't think they were really waving flags for Ukraine, they were expressing their gratitude to donors who will reward them for voting for this terrible bill. Probably 60 to 70% of the cash will never reach Ukraine it'll end up being circulated through the giant laundering machine here in Washington that moves funds to the Department of Defense, from the Department of Defense to military industrial production, to clients, donors, and then eventually parts of it end up back on the Hill in people's re-election funds.

You have to understand that most of this isn't going to have any impact whatsoever on the battlefield in Ukraine, Ukrainians are running out of soldiers, at this point they're losing about 500 to 800 Ukrainian soldiers a day, and the Russian offensive hasn't really begun yet. The place is nearing collapse but I guess the point is to try and conceal from the American public and and from the rest of the world yet gain the immense failure of this policy of proxy war with Russia..

How did we get to this point?.. I think you know those of us who are old enough.. have realized that there's money to be made in a time of war, but it's so naked now, evolved.. to such a a morally bankrupt state of affairs. I can't speak for what the population or the electorate is like in Great Britain but here in the United States I think large numbers of Americans have been very complacent and by complacency I mean haven't taken much interest in foreign and defense policy. The average American thinks that if you spend a dollar on defense you get a dollar of national security at the other end of the process, that of course is nonsense, and they don't have a real feel for how many billions of dollars are wasted on a daily basis by the Department of Defense..

[Some] are beginning to figure out that they have no representation in Washington, that the parties are irrelevant, we are supposedly governed at the behest of two parties, but in truth we have one party it's called the Uniparty which is why there were only 21 Republicans who refused to support the bill. There is no representation.. there are still [those] who think that the coming election could change something, you would think by now they would have figured out that it doesn't make much difference who you vote for you get the same bad outcome"

"@chairman_meh@kolektiva.social

Yaknow, campuses are nice n all, but if all the cops are there, who's watching Big Polluting Weapon Co.'s headquarters across town?"

The Age: "Green energy pioneer Andrew Forrest’s Fortescue says it is on track to produce its target of 50 million tons of hydrogen by 2030 after converting and gaining world-first certification for a ship running on a mix of green ammonia and diesel"

"Plug Continues to Make Substantial Advancement in Hydrogen Generation Buildout... Plug Power Inc... a global leader in comprehensive hydrogen solutions for the green hydrogen economy, has reached nameplate capacity at the company’s hydrogen plants in Georgia and Tennessee. With this increased supply from our hydrogen production network, Plug will benefit from a lower cost of hydrogen, a crucial step in the company’s roadmap to achieve profitable growth. This is headlined by the company’s first green hydrogen plant in Georgia already reaching nameplate capacity of 15 tons per day (TPD) of liquid hydrogen production"

CNBC: "Last year, Bezos announced on Instagram that he was leaving Seattle after nearly 30 years to move to Miami.. In 2022 Washington state imposed a new, 7% capital gains tax on sales of stocks or bonds of more than 250,000.. Posting [the sale of 50 mil shares of AMZN] in Florida will save him at least $610 million"

Basically they compute the Hubble constant two different ways, and they came out different. One method relies on cosmic microwave background from the so-called "Big Bang" the other from measuring velocities and distances of galaxies. They thought the latter could have been wrong (due to an older telescope) and hoped JWST would give a results closer to the CMB one (which would rescue early universe theories) that did not pan out. JWST confirmed the "tension", a fancy word indicating cosmologist don't know what the f--k is going on anymore. The CMB route includes a formula with "dark energy" $\Lambda$, whose existence is in question. CMB's existence should be too, along with Big Bang. The situation is pretty sad. Fundamental sci is failing.

Paper: "Over the last decade an intriguing tension has emerged between the value of the Hubble constant (H0) measured directly from redshifts and distances, following its local definition and independent of models, and the same parameter inferred from the cosmological model, calibrated in the early Universe.. The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) provides new capabilities to scrutinize and refine some of the strongest observational evidence for this tension"

[-]

Summary - profit motive killed it.

"This is the story of how Google Search died, and the people responsible for killing it."

[-]

Said: "For the Israelis, there’s always this tendency to think of us as aliens and therefore the fewer of us around the better, and the best are those you don’t see at all….What’s so extraordinary is that what the Israelis are now doing on the West Bank and Gaza is really repeating the experience of apartheid and what the United States did to the Native Americans. Put them in reservations or just exterminate them, which the Israelis haven’t done, but put them as far aways as possible, then the problem will go away.”

What a concidence, the school where Said taught becomes the center of Gaza protest attention. Said, as many know, was originally Palestinian, wrote many famous books on the subject and is also the coiner / popularizer of the word Orientalism (published a book with the same name). Isn't the way Israel dehumanizes, looks down on Palestinians and describes them as such to foreign media a textbook case of Orientalism?

Columbia University Student: "Last night we watched a screening of the last lecture of Edward Said [who was a Columbia U professor]. I was proud to come to this school because of the incredible history it had of being at the forefront of thought, especially progressive thought, and activism. I am disgusted by how the Columbia administration handled the current situation... We are the continuation of a long line of activism on this campus, from the war movements of Vietnam to South African apartheid. And those students [who protested] are now considered heroes, the university looks on them with pride. It's really ironic those people are now venerated, and we are villified. We are doing exactly the same thing"

Politico: "Columbia threatens to suspend protesters after negotiations break down"

Arab News: "Iran slams crackdown on US student protesters"

Politico: "Attorneys inside and outside the administration urge Biden to cut off arms to Israel.. So far more than 90 lawyers have signed on to a legal letter alleging Israel's conduct in Gaza violates U.S. and international law"

TASS: "Houthis attack two commercial vessels, two US destroyers"

The Japan Times: "Japan’s biggest utility, JERA, is looking to invest in low-carbon hydrogen and ammonia projects in the Middle East, in addition to buying their output.

JERA has established a division for investing in such plants. Tsuyoshi Oyama, who heads the unit’s Australia and Middle East activities, said facilities that can produce around 1 million tons a year of "blue” ammonia are attractive targets, as well as smaller "green” hydrogen projects"

WION: "The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has initiated an investigation into claims made by the Society of Professional Engineering Employees in Aerospace (SPEEA) regarding alleged retaliation by Boeing against two engineers in 2022. According to Reuters, the union maintains that the engineers, who advocated for a re-evaluation of previous engineering work on Boeing 777 and 787 jets, faced negative consequences from the company following the incident"

Janes: "UAE seeks closer air force ties with China as leaders meet in Beijing"

CBS News: "Why Teslas and other electric vehicles have problems in cold weather.. As cold weather sweeps across the U.S., some electric vehicle owners are learning a bitter truth: Low temperatures can stop the cars dead in their icy tracks. The issue crystallized this week when some Tesla owners in Chicago discovered their EVs' batteries had died in sub-zero temperatures"

"EVs aren't even worth fixing, sent to junk yard instead"

[-]

Car Expert: "My local servo [gas station].. has eight liquid fuel pumps and they can all be used simultaneously. The number of pumps is not a random choice at any servo that number of pumps is there because eight pumps in this case is the number that best services the peak demand. Let us do a thought experiment.. transition to Electric Utopia where the eight pumps are now eight rechargers all capable of pumping 50 kwatt hours into 8 EVS in just 5 minutes [an impossibility on its own] Hallelujah.. what could possibly go wrong? I'd suggest here's what could go wrong: that's 400 kwatt hours of energy in 5 minutes, think about that another way it's 400 kwatt hours delivered in 1/12th of an hour which is uh 5 megawatt, more or less, to run one shitty little suburban servo. Imagine rolling that out nationally to every station.. [it] is just a preposterous infrastructure challenge"

Third party candidate, a person who did not like either party, by definition, would take from both equally. RF could take more from DJT than JB though.. He panders to MAGA and Dems dislike him the way they dislike Trump.

Politico: "Trump rails against RFK Jr., calling him a ‘wasted protest vote’"

TNR: "[A 2022 book The Network State: How to Start a New Country].. outlines a plan for tech plutocrats to exit democracy and establish new sovereign territories. I mentioned [its] ideas in two previous stories about Network State–related efforts in California—a proposed tech colony called California Forever and the tech-funded campaign to capture San Francisco’s government...

'What I’m really calling for is something like tech Zionism,' [author] said, after comparing his movement to those started by.. Theodor Herzl ('spiritual father' of the state of Israel).. . then revealed his shocking ideas for a tech-governed city where citizens loyal to tech companies would form a new political tribe clad in gray t-shirts. 'And if you see another Gray on the street … you do the nod,' he said, during a four-hour talk on the Moment of Zen podcast. 'You’re a fellow Gray.'.. Grays would also receive special ID cards providing access to exclusive, Gray-controlled sectors of the city. In addition, the Grays would make an alliance with the police department, funding weekly 'policeman’s banquets' to win them over"

"KarunaX@mastodon.world

When my friends in the #US complain about #China wanting to take over the world...."

[-]

Arab News: "Some senior US officials have advised Secretary of State Antony Blinken that they do not find 'credible or reliable' Israel’s assurances that it is using US-supplied weapons in accordance with international humanitarian law, according to an internal State Department memo reviewed by Reuters'

NPR: "Delta flight makes emergency return after exit slide separates from Boeing aircraft"

"Arming genocide? New report documents use of US arms in Israeli war crimes | UpFront"

[-]

How to get to 3 stars from 1? Daniel Davis explains how..

#MIC

[-]

Declassified UK: "UK military support for Israel’s genocide was pre-planned.. In aiding Israel’s mass attacks on Palestinians in Gaza, Britain is implementing an agreement openly signed with Netanyahu’s far-right coalition – which has been almost entirely ignored in the UK national media.

It explicitly states the two countries are 'natural allies' – ignoring Israel’s pariah status among much of the rest of the world due its illegal occupation of the West Bank and “apartheid” system discriminating against Palestinians.

Notably, the Roadmap has a section entitled 'Antisemitism, delegitimisation, and anti-Israel bias' whose wording directly prophesies Britain’s extraordinary apologias for Israel’s Gaza atrocities in international fora.

It calls for 'tackling the disproportionate focus on Israel in the UN and other international bodies, including attempts to delegitimise it or deny its right to self-defence. All states have a duty to comply with their obligations under international law, but scrutiny must be measured, impartial and proportionate'"

#Frontline #RU #UA 04/23 - 04/28

[-]