Week 21

PML Daily: "Volvo to launch hydrogen-powered trucks"

"@kevinriggle@ioc.exchange

The ongoing erosion of my ability to tell where information I enter into any random text box on my computer is sent and stored has me increasingly tempted to switch back to a 386 and WordPerfect 5 whatever for MS-DOS"

Gov flexing its muscle, fantastic... Any anti-trust action with results is a win. The public then can get used to similar acts later, Live Nation is a great place to start - gov can ride Taylor Swift's popularity and the protests of those crying "Swifties" towards victory. I am waiting to see the scoreboard, hopefully Government 1: Bidness: 0.

AP News: "Government sues Ticketmaster owner and asks court to break up company’s monopoly on live events.. Ticketmaster and its owner, Live Nation Entertainment, have a long history of clashes with major artists and their fans, including Taylor Swift and Bruce Springsteen"

Arne Schirracher is a science historian, and a physics PhD himself.

Hilbert was one of the top mathematicians of his time w emphasis on physics, the story goes after hearing bits and pieces of Einstein's work-in-progress on GR, he plowed through on the rest of theory and nearly beat Einstein to it for the final product (bcz his grasp of math fundamentals and its relation to physics were so strong, he could crush it even as a complete outsider). But he withheld his claim and let Einstein have his deserved glory.

A lot hinges on Kirchoff's Law to be correct; if not, everything from gaseous Sun theory to Hawking radiation is in question. Cosmologists will be phucked. Well even more than they already are..

.. and the proof provided later turned out incorrect. No experimental result can prove KL either.

Arne Schirracher: "[2013, David] Hilbert concluded [in 1912] that Kirchhoff’s law on heat radiation, which had represented complex experimental results in a relation as simple and persuasive as Ohm’s law, had not been made plausible, even in the most simple, special cases. For more than fifty years, physicists had failed to provide a proof for one of their most precious laws"

Does that mean Sefanik as the VP pick?

TDB: "[02/24] Trump’s New York roots—as well as Republican Lee Zeldin’s surprisingly close defeat in the state’s 2022 gubernatorial race—actually have him musing about the possibility that he could win his home state. He continues to talk about doing a rally in Madison Square Garden. If he adds Stefanik to the ticket, at the very least the campaign believes it will force Biden to spend money in a state where TV spots are not cheap"

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DJT competing for New York.. Wild

Politico: "‘Biden didn't come to the Bronx’: Trump makes a foray into Democratic turf"

After decades of elevating businessmen to such great heights, the uniparty machinery got bamboozled by a legit businessman in 2016, the very figure they themselves brought to God-like status. That was the great irony of Trump's victory. If you did not like that situation ponder your role in his rise to power, not to mention creating the economic condition leading to working class abandoning the Democrats in droves for a guy who never rode in public transit in his life. Shitlibs got what they deserved.

What is the context for 1979? Could it be 1953? Western supported Shah? Savak? Take your pick.

The military-industrial-uniparty complex likes its decontextualization - the Palestinian issue started on October 7, West Asia (the Middle East) has been a "hotspot" since 9/11, Iran "went crazy" in 1979, and problems of US democracy started with Trump. As if there are no revolving doors, congressional members are not on the take, they always vote for the benefit of the majority, but Trump! He messed it all up.. If we address that mistake of 2016, undo that specific time, it will all be well again! Remember that for 2024 dear voters!

"@BradRubenstein@infosec.exchange

Good Lord.

Every WiFi network access point that has ever been in range of an iPhone has its network name (SSID) and GPS location (taken from the iPhone) stored and used by Apple"

Military rule as in every morning you'd have to step outside to be counted m..f..ker. Your number will be called and you'll say "present" otherwise they send a search party after you. When you go to the supermarket, or school it will be in batches, you will walk there in a single file, while a drill sergeant screams in your ear you aren't good enough. I'm talking order, discipline. This is what you need right now.

Every other villain in Doctor Who seems to be a heavy-handed militaristic society.. The nation of "budding enterpreneurs" where money runs all, whose companies can cut off fingers in remote lands for a buck are surely fascinated by that concept. It makes me think US/UK could use a little military order. They need to be invaded, and placed under military rule, just for a little while until their excessive pro-bidness leanings are cleansed.

"@Indyposterboy@mastodon.scot

.. In England, the only country in the world to have fully privatised water & sewerage systems, raw sewage was discharged into rivers and seas for more than 3.6m hours in 2023. More than double 2022. Meanwhile Scottish Water, publicly owned, has invested nearly 35 per cent more per household in infrastructure since 2002 than the privatised English firms, charging 14 per cent less and not paying out dividends"

Despite appearances, Kalanick, e-jagoff are part of the club - the one George Carlin described all too well for us.

Boehs: "[I]n Spotify’s 2019 Play Fair campaign, Spotify alleges that Apple has placed itself at an unfair advantage, as they do not need to offer 30% of their revenue to themselves. By competing in Spotify’s court, while forcing Spotify to conform to their rules, Apple subjects Spotify to a playing field that is certainly not level..

[Y]ou might be shocked to learn that in 2017, Uber was granted the [allow explicit graphics] entitlement. This entitlement gives Uber’s app direct access to the IOMobileFramebuffer. This means that, for some amount of time, Uber had the ability to directly read and write to the iPhone’s framebuffer, including in the background, meaning that they could record the screen at any moment..

[T]he App Store disallows single letter app names. For some reason.. [they carved] an exception in the App Store policy out for [Musk]...

If Cook cares so much about privacy, why did Uber get the framebuffer? If all apps play under the same rules, why is Twitter now named X? Is it possible? Did Tim Cook commit a felony? All signs point to yes...

Yesterday, in a blog post laden with resentment, Apple Inc. announced the measures they are taking to comply with the European Union’s Digital Markets Act.. [DMA] is a piece of legislation aimed at big tech operating in EU jurisdiction. The intention of the bill is to provide room for businesses to operate and compete in fields dominated by these companies"

"@ccferrie@mastodon.ie

It's not that long ago that the British establishment would equate being Irish with being in the IRA, so when Israel equates Palestine with Hamas in an attempt to stop Ireland from recognising the state of Palestine it only reinforces the importance of that recognition.

The Irish government is doing the right thing today and will be seen to be on the right side of history"

NYT: "Spain, Norway and Ireland Recognize Palestinian State, Further Isolating Israel"

"Plug Power has developed a Class 6, medium-duty fuel cell electric truck powered by hydrogen. Suitable for middle-mile deliveries, the vehicle can travel up to 500 miles utilising an 'industry-proven' electric propulsion system powered by Plug’s ProGen fuel cell technology"

NGT News: "AiLO Logistics, a major drayage carrier operating in the Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, has placed a 100-truck order for Nikola Corporation’s hydrogen fuel cell vehicles.. . Deliveries are scheduled for 2025"

PR Newswire: "Ballard launches 9th generation high-performance fuel cell engine for heavy-duty vehicles at ACT Expo 2024"

"Symbio, in partnership with Michelin, presents its first Hydrogen-powered heavy-duty truck at ACT EXPO 2024"

Scientific American: "There Is Too Much Trash in Space.. Derelict satellites pass within 1,000 kilometers of each other 1,000 times a year, and any collision would instantly double the amount of space debris. A space rush is filling up orbit with unregulated satellites, mostly from private companies, and we need better protections"

"@tante@tldr.nettime.org

This should basically be a legal requirement.. If you sell a piece of hardware that requires a cloud service to run you need to also provide a replacement that users can use when your company fails/shuts down/pivots whatever. It doesn't need all the fancy features but should keep the object in question's basic functionality working"

"@mattis@eupolicy.social

Big fan of this: smart curtains company Slide is shutting down, but they offer one last update which enables its consumers to keep their curtains running through a local API. Great solution for an increasingly prevalent situation in which consumers are left with IoT devices that no longer function because the manufacturer stops existing (see VanMoof, Gigaset, and more)"

"@winter@translunar.academy

[I]ntellectual property is a very recent invention, and without state violence enforcing it, art would go back to the way it's always worked and flourish as it always has"

"@RanTLaw@aus.social

Data retained by MS recall will absolutely be subpoenaed. It will also likely be discoverable by litigants.

I might have to amend my usual warning to clients to not write anything they would not want to have to explain to a court to not doing anything on a computer they don't want to explain under oath"

"@nixCraft@mastodon.social

Personal and corporate nightmare for all Windows users because they are going to take screenshots and store it locally. Every one knows how bad actors get locally stored data. Also From Microsoft’s own FAQ: 'Note that Recall does not perform content moderation. It will not hide information such as passwords or financial account numbers' 🤡"

"@arstechnica@mastodon.social

Microsoft’s new 'Recall' feature will record everything you do on your PC

Recall uses Copilot+PC features 'to take images of your active screen every few seconds'"

Deaton: "I could list many similar improvements that would [improve wages].. repealing antiunion laws, weakening the growing pro-business bias of the courts, and perhaps—though many economists would disagree—a reduction in immigration. In 2021, 13.6 percent of the U.S. population was born abroad, compared with 4.7 percent in 1970. The Gilded Age a century ago was the last time that the foreign-born share of the American population was as high as it is today. Many working-class Americans believe that their wages would be higher if there were fewer immigrants and that today’s high level of foreign-born population is buoying up inequality, just as it did in the original Gilded Age"

Sunak always had the "dismal task" of leading cons into an election defeat, he was ok as caretaker PM, the markets trusted him, at least the country did not burn. He got something out of it, the first Indian-origin PM of UK, now recorded in the history books. Not a shabby deal.

Good news.. it was about time.

BBC: "Rishi Sunak announces UK general election for Thursday 4 July"

Deaton: "Wages are being held down by.. faulty social arrangements [too]. One is the disastrous effects of healthcare financing on wages and jobs. Most working Americans’ health insurance is provided by their employers, money that would otherwise be available for wages. In this system, workers’ wages are essentially paying for profits and high salaries in the medical industry, as well as for a much larger healthcare system than we need. Every year, the United States wastes a trillion dollars—about $8,000 per family—more than other rich countries on excessive healthcare costs and has worse health outcomes than nearly all of them. Any one of several European financing alternatives could recoup those funds, but adopting any of them would trigger the fierce resistance of those profiting from the status quo"

H2 View: "Accelera showcases next generation hydrogen fuel cells at ACT Expo""

Marketwatch: "Tesla Inc.'s weak stock performance so far this year stands out — so much so that the name is the second-worst performer in the S&P 500 for 2024 to date"

Carsales: "Australia's EV sales boom falters.. Electric vehicle sales drop for first time in three years"

"@FantasticalEconomics@geekdom.social

We really need to rethink our capitalistic obsession of running things like a business. Cutting costs to increase profits obviously doesn't make sense in areas of education, healthcare, public utilities, and prisons, to name just a few. Hell, Boeing is making a strong case that it doesn't even make sense for businesses to be run like a business, much less these public goods"

A former sparring partner says first time he got hit by Beterbiev he was massively shook. "The hardest I was punched in my life". Usyk-Beterbiev would be a great match.

Usyk has been beaten before, by a Chechen boxer Artur Beterbiev. I'd like to see that pairing again, but one of them needs to change weight class.

#UA #RU #Frontline 05/15 - 05/21

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A morale boost for Ukraine for sure, and the guy is a fantastic boxer. But grouping heroic figures, fine fighters together or through the morale obtained via their acts thereof does not win wars. If your country is overtaken by American-controlled oligarchs, I don't care how smart, tactical you are on your own, your country will go down in flames.

We have a new undisputed heavy-weight champ, Usyk from Ukraine.

UCI News: "UC Irvine-led team uncovers ‘vigorous melting’ at Antarctica’s Thwaites Glacier. Satellite radar data show kilometer-scale seawater intrusion, causing ice to rise and fall"

Link

"@scottsantens@hachyderm.io

Universal basic income mitigates tunneling, meaning that people are more able to think beyond just one focus. The need to earn survival income tends to function like blinders that block out everything else but your focus on basic needs. Until they're obtained, we can't think beyond"

Al Jazeera: "Ostracising Israel at the UN should be a priority.. When apartheid South Africa came under growing international pressure at the UN, [the General Assembly] initiated.. boycotts.. It suspended South Africa, stripping it of its Member State rights & privileges... [The apartheid regime] could no longer be seated, speak or vote at the General Assembly & other UN organs. [A]partheid South Africa changed course because it became a pariah & isolated regime"

The Globe and Mail: "The rail giant CPKC is trialling a new hydrogen train in Alberta, that it hopes can replace diesel-fuelled freight locomotives in delivering goods across the continent."

Data Center Frontier: "Bloom Energy Expands Fuel Cell Power Generation for Intel's Santa Clara Data Center"

"Hydrogen buses have demonstrated steady increase in ridership in Sarawak [Malaysia], carrying a total of 57,764 passengers to date between September 2020 and March this year, said Transport Minister Dato Sri Lee Kim Shin"

Robitaille: "The laws of thermodynamics play a central role in scientific inquiry, guiding physics as to the validity of hypothesized claims. It is for this reason that quantities of thermodynamic relevance must retain their character wherever they appear. Temperature, for example, must always be intensive, a requirement set by the $0^{th}$ law. Otherwise, the very definition of temperature is compromised. Similarly, entropy must remain extensive, in order to conform to the $2^{nd}$ law. These rules must be observed whenever a system is large enough to be characterized by macroscopic quantities, such as volume or area...

[Hawking radiation equation $T_H = \hbar c^3 / 8\pi k_B GM$] is etched into the gravestone of Stephen Hawking in Westminster Abbey. However, temperature is an intensive property so it cannot be made to depend on the mass of a system, an extensive property, without an associated extensive property, like volume, which in combination with $M$ leads to an intensive property. The left side of [the equation] is intensive but the right side is not, because it varies as 1/M. The equation for Hawking temperature violates the laws of thermodynamics and is, therefore, invalid"

You don't have a democracy, you have a corporatocracy.. You are living in an oligarch haven, eg Russia of 1996. You need a Putin-like figure to clean that shit up.

Threat to what democracy?

"Trump is a threat to democracy"

Al Monitor: "Amal Clooney helped ICC weigh Gaza war crimes evidence"

TASS: "US rejects ICC’s legitimacy but uses it against enemies — Russian ambassador"

Arab News: "ICC seeks arrest warrant against Israeli PM Netanyahu for alleged war crimes"

AIN: "Airbus this week announced the launch of the Ground Operations of Liquid Hydrogen Aircraft (GOLIAT) project to demonstrate how handling and refueling technologies can be developed for airport operations. The work is backed by a €10.8 million ($11.7 million) grant from the European Union’s Horizon Europe Framework Program"

Renewables Now: "Plug lands 3-GW BEDP contract for Australian green ammonia project"

Reuters: "US hydrogen company Plug Power is set to receive a $1.66bn loan guarantee from the US Department of Energy (DOE), which would be used to develop and construct up to six new green hydrogen projects across the country utilising the company's own PEM electrolysers"

Houston Chronicle: "Spacecraft company SpaceX and its contractors are overdue on bills from builders and suppliers for work done in South and Central Texas. It’s led to dozens of outstanding liens since 2019. In total, Reuters reports that more than two dozen companies have filed 72 liens, 41 of which were filed this year, adding up to more than $2.5 million due in payments"

EFF: "Big Tech to EU: 'Drop Dead'.. The European Union's new Digital Markets Act (DMA).. aims to make it easier for the public to control the technology they use and rely on... DMA is meant to push us toward a world where you decide which software runs on your devices, where it's easy to find the best products and services, where you can leave a platform for a better one without forfeiting your social relationships, and where you can do all of this without getting spied on.

If it works, this will get dangerously close to better future we've spent the past thirty years fighting for. There's just one wrinkle: the Big Tech companies don't want that future, and they're trying their damndest to strangle it in its cradle"

"@jasongorman@mastodon.cloud

When I was a kid, I used to assume that whatever the problem in the world, smart people somewhere were figuring out a solution.

Now that I'm a grown-up (well, more grown-up) I realise that, yes, smart people somewhere really are figuring out a solution, while rich and powerful people are figuring out ways to shut them up"

Firefox browser is basically showing which sites not to use

#EnhancedTrackingProtection

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It looks like customer data is being fed into some fuck-LLM where it can be reverse-engineered with proper massaging.

"@Quinnypig@awscommunity.social

I'm sorry Slack, you're doing fucking WHAT with user DMs, messages, files, etc?"

The Guardian: "Toxic 'forever chemicals' ubiquitous in Great Lakes basin, study finds"

Hindustan Times World: "Yemeni Houthi rebels have shot down another US MQ-9 Reaper drone, six in the last 12 months"

NYT: "Xi Jinping Embracing Vladimir Putin in Defiance of the West.. Western leaders looking for signs that the Chinese leader used his influence on President Vladimir V. Putin to end the war in Ukraine are likely to be disappointed"

F24: "Gantz threatens to quit Israeli War Cabinet over postwar plans for Gaza.. On Saturday, Benny Gantz, a member of the War Cabinet and Netanyahu's main political rival, said he would leave the government on June 8 if it did not formulate a new war plan including an international, Arab and Palestinian administration to handle civilian affairs in Gaza"