Week 42
"Airbus, Kansai Airports, Kawasaki Heavy Industries to accelerate readiness of hydrogen aircraft operations"
H2 Central: "On Tuesday the next milestone for the northern German large-scale hydrogen project HyBit was reached with the successful delivery of an electrolyzer in Bremen. The joint project by swb, EWE and ArcelorMittal Bremen aims to reduce CO2 emissions in steel production and mark the start of the decarbonization of the industry"
CNBC: "U.S. deficit tops $1.8 trillion in 2024 as interest on debt surpasses trillion-dollar mark"
No "the Chinese" do not own all US debt. At its peak they held about one trillion. Japanese also holds the same amt. That is two trillion out of the 35 trillion dollars of debt.
Not taxing and imagining some "spend until inflation" approach is a bad idea for various reasons. The main one is deficit spending of any kind increases government debt, and that debt will be held by the wealthy increasing inequality. Debt is wealth. If I own your debt, you owe me money. Where's my f-ing money? Pay up bitch!
If I hold debt I am getting the principal and the interest, guaranteed. That is a cash stream that I can hold, or sell to someone else. Especially US government debt which is still quite liquid, I can sell it anytime, get cold hard cash. 10 mil debt, 10 mil cash. Now I can buy seven homes (like that UK MP) denying purchase to others, those others will go down the latter and purchase home at someone else's reach denying them homes, and way down the line, someone ends up on the streets. ALL BECAUSE NO ONE TAXED THE UBER RICH.
BTW the interest payments appear on the budget, they must be paid annually, which means sacrifices on other parts of the budget, in this day and age that means social spending gets cut.
Pikkety: "The tax debates currently underway in France and the discussions which took place at the 2024 G20 summit demonstrate that the issue of tax justice and the taxation of billionaires is not about to disappear from the public debate. There’s a simple reason for this: the sums amassed by the world’s wealthiest individuals over the last few decades are quite simply gigantic..
Yet some people continue to reject this debate, and their arguments need to be carefully examined. The first is that these immense private fortunes are merely theoretical and don’t really exist. While it’s true that they often appear as numbers on a screen, just like public debt or salaries paid into bank accounts, these figures have a very real impact on people’s lives and influence the power dynamics between social classes and public authorities. Concretely, how would billionaires pay this 10% tax on their wealth increase? If they don’t make enough profit in a year, they’ll have to sell some of their shares – say 10% of their portfolio. If finding a buyer is challenging, the government could accept these shares as payment for taxes...
Prime Minister Michel Barnier [plans a] tax on incomes over €500,000. However, this tax will bring in €2 billion compared to the €100 billion that could be raised from a 10% tax on the wealth of billionaires"
I never said all DeFi is bad. With proper tech (left-wing politics embedded in it -automated redistribution, digital social services that are guaranteed from birth-), we can start building a Third Wave money system.
"Avalanche is a unique network thanks to the Avalanche consensus which is a variation of the Proof of Stake protocol. The protocol enables scaling, so the system allows the processing of over 4,500 transactions per second in comparison with Ethereum’s 14 TPS and Bitcoin’s 7 TPS"
Chasiv Yar is in trouble.
![[-]](https://cdn.fosstodon.org/media_attachments/files/113/329/303/983/680/184/original/aeadce8414cd1a06.jpg){kind=link}
Politico: "With the election just a few weeks away, the contest for the votes of men is heating up. Young women’s support is effectively locked up for the Democrats, but young men still seem up for grabs and the Trump-Vance ticket is making inroads, with some polls showing a double-digit advantage"
F24: "Leaders of US, UK, Germany and France say ending the war in Gaza is a 'necessity'"
F24: "On visit to Lebanon Friday, Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni slammed attacks on UN peacekeepers in Lebanon as 'unacceptable' after the UN force accused Israel of firing at their positions"
BBC: "US deploys Thaad anti-missile system to Israel after Iranian attack.. It costs around a billion dollars a battery."
Robb Report: "This Bonkers New Alpine Is a 730 HP Hydrogen-Powered Supercar.. The French automaker has just unveiled the Alpenglow Hy6, the third iteration of a concept it has been fine-tuning over the past two years. This version is easily the most potent yet, with a hydrogen-powered V-6 that makes over 700 hp"
"@j_bertolotti@mathstodon.xyz
I will believe that self-driving cars are ready to be deployed in the wild when I see one able to cross Rome from one side to the other. Until then they are just expensive toys"
The Lever: "[EPA] issued a final lead pipe rule requiring drinking water systems across the country to identify and replace lead pipes within 10 years, mandating more rigorous testing, and setting the strictest limits on the matter since federal lead standards were first created decades ago to help prevent exposure to the dangerous neurotoxin.
"@davidgerard@circumstances.run
EU declares Twitter officially too dead and unimportant to fall under the DMA"
The EU: "Today, the Commission found that the online social networking service of X should not be designated as a core platform service under the Digital Markets Act (DMA).
Today's decision comes after an in-depth market investigation launched on 13 May 2024 following the notification by X of its status of potential gatekeeper... the Commission concluded that X does indeed not qualify as a gatekeeper in relation to its online social networking service, given that the investigation revealed that X is not an important gateway for business users to reach end users"
EFF: "Cars collect a lot of our personal data, and car companies disclose a lot of that data to third parties. It’s often unclear what’s being collected, and what's being shared and with whom... G.M. [shares data] with insurance companies, sometimes without clear knowledge from the driver. If you're curious about what your car knows about you, you might be able to find out"
#WhatNow #TaNehisiCoates
But the real winners of the war are obviously arms manufacturers, private military-industrial complex.
After post 1979 removal of the mil top brass, Iran still managed to fight a war. At the time however observers were thinking Iran would not be able to engage in any conflict. In fact it is highly likely Saddam saw an opportunity, egged on a little by the Americans, he attacked Iran to exploit the situation. But Iran not only did not lose, it bested Saddam esp. near the end of the war.
Fisk, The Great War for Civilisation: "The truth was that [Clinton plan] Oslo—far from holding out the possibility of statehood for the Palestinians—allowed Israel to renegotiate UN Security Council Resolution 242. Whereas 242 demanded the withdrawal of Israeli forces from territory captured during the 1967 war, Oslo permitted the Israelis to decide from which bits of the remaining 22 per cent of 'Palestine' they would withdraw. The 'zoning' system represented this new Israeli reality. The Israelis had the maps—Oslo, incredibly, was negotiated without proper maps on the Palestinian side — and the Israelis decided which zones would be 'given' to the Palestinians at once and which would be haggled over later.
Indeed, a detailed investigation in 2000 of Israeli withdrawals under the Articles of Agreement would prove that not a single one of these accords had been honoured by the Israelis since the 1991 Madrid conference. In the meantime, the number of settlers illegally living on Palestinian land had risen in the seven years since Oslo from 80,000 to 150,000—even though the Israelis, as well as the Palestinians, were forbidden to take 'unilateral steps' under the terms of the agreement. The Palestinians saw this, not without reason, as proof of bad faith"
NBC News: "Vice President Kamala Harris said Sinwar's death 'gives us an opportunity to finally end the war in Gaza'"
Al-Monitor: "345,000 Gazans face 'catastrophic' hunger this winter: UN"
The New Arab: "I was shot by the Israeli army less than a month before [US citizen] Ayşenur Ezgi Eygi was killed. The gun Israel used was manufactured in the United States of America, the bullet paid for by my own taxes. Both of us posed no threat. In my case, I was running away with my back turned. In Ayşenur's case, as per protocol, she had stationed herself out of harm's way or any heightened risk. For her awareness, she was shot in the head. Despite my escape, I was shot in the upper thigh and hospitalised for days. Ayşenur's murder was funded by the American taxpayer"
UtilityDive: "Unlike fuels in use today, hydrogen produces no carbon when it’s burned or used as a feedstock and has applications for the industrial sector including steel, cement and chemicals. The U.S. is sitting on the potential to produce more.. For those who attended New York Climate Week and the U.N. General Assembly in September, much of the 'buzz' was around hydrogen production, whether it be from natural gas or zero-carbon resources like renewables or nuclear power...
Clean hydrogen production has the potential to scale to about 10 million metric tons annually by 2030 — which is roughly equivalent to 10 million gallons of gasoline and more than a 900% increase from current levels — to meet domestic demand... In the Middle East, Oman is planning to build an estimated 620 miles of hydrogen pipelines. In the European Union, Denmark alone is anticipated to be home to more than a third of the world’s new hydrogen pipelines between 2022 and 2026"
H2 Central: "Alpine presents Alpenglow Hy6 with the brand’s first 6-cylinder hydrogen engine"
Pivot to AI: "AI really is the new bitcoin: Google and Facebook extend coal burning in Omaha"
The irony here is the systems that were supposed to be "smart" need to be goaded like cattle. There are now books on "prompt engineering" how-to guides on directing "AI". Basically LLM AI is inherently stupid.
The site is called Pivot to AI, the byline goes "it can't be that stupid, you must be prompting it wrong" 😂
F24: "Lebanese militant group Hezbollah threatened Israel with more attacks if its offensive in Lebanon continues, after a drone attack on a military base near Israel's Haifa on Sunday killed four soldiers"
Black Bill Clinton could not convince black voters to vote for his former secretary of state (another Clinton).
NYT: "[2016] Four barbers and a firefighter were pondering their future under a Trump presidency at the Upper Cutz barbershop last week.. They admitted that they could not complain too much: Only two of them had voted... At.. [the] bustling barbershop.. talk of politics inevitably comes back to one man: Barack Obama. Mr. Obama’s elections infused many here with a feeling of connection to national politics they had never before experienced. But their lives have not gotten appreciably better, and sourness has set in. 'We went to the beach,' said Maanaan Sabir, 38, owner of the Juice Kitchen, a brightly painted shop a few blocks down West North Avenue, using a metaphor to describe the emotion after Mr. Obama’s election. 'And then eight years happened.' All four barbers had voted for Mr. Obama. But only two could muster the enthusiasm to vote this time. And even then, it was a sort of protest. One wrote in Mrs. Clinton’s Democratic opponent, Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont. The other wrote in himself"
Post-covid inflation was transitory.
CNBC: "The Federal Reserve may have pretty much just hit its 2% inflation target"
F24: "Kamala Harris intensified her efforts to reclaim Black male voters drifting towards Donald Trump as both US presidential nominees campaigned in Pennsylvania"
Chris Hedges: "The main section in the Wye Agreement was not about withdrawals, but about security. And this was liberally laced with references to terrorists, terrorist cells and terrorist organizations involving, of course, only Palestinian violence. There was not a single reference to killers who had come from the Jewish settler community... Each new accord with Israel involved a subtle rewriting of previous agreements. Madrid, with all its safeguards for the Palestinians, turned into Oslo, no safeguards at all, and a system of Israeli withdrawal that was so constructed that deadlines no longer had to be met. This turned into the 1997 Hebron Accord, which allowed Jewish colonists to stay in the town and made an Israeli withdrawal contingent upon an end to anti-Israeli violence. In 1998 the Wye Agreement even dropped the land for peace logo. It was now billed as the land for security agreement. Peace being at least temporarily unobtainable.
Peace means respect, mutual trust, cooperation. Security means no violence, but it also means prison, hatred, and as we already knew, torture. In return, the Palestinians could have 40% of their territory under their control, as opposed to 90% they expected under Oslo.. [Robert Fisk] totally captured this process by which Israel makes an agreement which was always open ended, always done in stages, and then rolls it backward, rolls it backward, rolls it backward, which, of course, we're now witnessing with the areas A, B and C in the West Bank, which have been violated. I think the Palestinians.. are allowed to control on their own, about 19% of the West Bank. But now you have the settlers making incursions into Ramallah"
"@ayoub@spore.social
And a reminder that this is from 2009. #Gaza #Genocide"
![[-]](https://cdn.fosstodon.org/media_attachments/files/113/317/774/281/258/898/original/0df08c7b4084e689.jpeg){kind=link}
Radboud University: "Don’t believe the hype: AGI is far from inevitable.. Creating artificial general intelligence (AGI) with human-level cognition is ‘impossible’, explains Iris van Rooij, lead author of the paper and professor of Computational Cognitive Science.. at Radboud University. ‘Some argue that AGI is possible in principle, that it’s only a matter of time before we have computers that can think like humans think. But principle isn’t enough to make it actually doable. Our paper explains why chasing this goal is a fool’s errand, and a waste of humanity’s resources.’.. ‘There will never be enough computing power to create AGI using machine learning that can do the same, because we’d run out of natural resources long before we'd even get close,’ [coworker] Olivia adds"
La Playa by GoldFish and Luisah #music
News 12 Brooklyn: "A significant fire broke out in Ocean Hill early this morning resulting in a major response from the FDNY. It took 60 EMS and fire personnel to put out the flames outside a building on Atlantic Avenue, the FDNY tells News 12. A lithium-ion battery was found at the scene"
Michael Dorn (Worf) was in Rocky 1? And I saw him in an early Trek movie (with orig. series cast) early 90s, as a Klingon attorney. It looks like he had more cred on that TNG set than any other actor save perhaps P. Stewart (who was in Dune earlier).
Most media missed this part - European explorer system was on the same launch, and ESA's equipment will look at all the moons of Jupiter.
ESA: "What’s better than one spacecraft on the quest to search for life-friendly ocean worlds in the Jupiter system? Two! ESA’s Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer (Juice) is set to join forces with NASA’s Europa Clipper – launched on 14 October – to tackle one of the biggest questions in Solar System science..
The Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer, or Juice for short, will look at Jupiter and its largest moons as a complete system, to understand how potentially life-friendly worlds could form around gas giants. The mission has a special emphasis on Ganymede, even spending part of its journey orbiting around the moon. This will make it the first spacecraft to ever orbit a moon in the outer Solar System"
It's been uniparty rule since the 80s; it's been Reagan, his VP, Southern Ronald Reagan, Reagan's VP's son, then black Bill Clinton. And people wonder "why o'why did we end up with Trump?".
Declassified UK: "Israel’s largest arms firm Elbit Systems is finally losing money at its drone engine factory near Birmingham, England. This follows years of campaigning by Palestine Action, a group I co-founded in 2020. Back then, Elbit’s subsidiary UAV Engines was making millions of pounds in profit with an £11m turnover.
That was until we showed up. Palestine Action has staged over 20 protests at the firm’s factory in Shenstone, blockading the gates, occupying the roof and smashing up equipment. We did this because Elbit makes 85% of Israel’s drone fleet terrorising Gaza, including the Hermes armed drones from which even British aid workers are not safe.
And although UAV Engines claim that it produces components solely for the British army, trade licence data shows it exports drone parts to Israel. For decades this business, which Elbit turned from a motorbike manufacturer to an arms firm in the mid-1990s, has been consistently profitable.
But its latest accounts show the company is now in the red"
LA Fire Department: "A big rig overturned in San Pedro near the Port of Los Angeles, causing damage to lithium-ion battery cargo and causing a fire that burned for days"
They ain't gon negotiate on those areas. "I'll give you Kursk if you give me Zaphorizhia?". Nah. These are fairy tales.
Ukraine keeps extending the frontline - incursion in Kursk, additional areas west of it.. But I don't think it matters for Russia - it is meat grinder work for them all the same, degrading Ukrainian forces, so it is de-facto demilitarized.
#Frontline #UA #RU 10/08 - 10/15
Trump: "We're going to stop autonomous vehicles from operating on American roads"
Jewish people aren't particularly smart.. no more or less than any other group anyway. Any seeming advantage is due to academic placebo. You can motivate yourself by believing to be a certain way, that can help performance. The reverse can also happen, see the Gladwell share.
Isaacson, Einstein: "By now the siren song of a unified theory had come to mesmerize Einstein... On his steamer ride through Asia, he polished a new paper and, upon arriving in Egypt in February 1923, immediately mailed it to Planck in Berlin for publication. His goal, he declared, was 'to understand the gravitational and electromagnetic field as one.' Once again, Einstein’s pronouncements made headlines around the world. 'Einstein Describes His Newest Theory,' proclaimed the New York Times. But this approach led nowhere, just like the others...
In the world of physics, where quantum mechanics was now accepted, Einstein and his fitful quest for a unified theory were beginning to be seen as quaint. But in the popular imagination, he was still a superstar. The frenzy that surrounded the publication of his January 1929 five-page paper, which was merely the latest in a string of theoretical stabs that missed the mark, was astonishing. Journalists from around the world crowded around his apartment building, and Einstein was barely able to escape them to go into hiding at his doctor’s villa on the Havel River outside of town. The New York Times had started the drumbeat weeks earlier with an article headlined 'Einstein on Verge of Great Discovery: Resents Intrusion.'..
Even before his little paper was published, he gave an interview about it to a British newspaper. 'It has been my greatest ambition to resolve the duality of natural laws into unity,' he said. “The purpose of my work is to further this simplification, and particularly to reduce to one formula the explanation of the gravitational and electromagnetic fields. For this reason I call it a contribution to ‘a unified field theory’... Now, but only now, we know that the force that moves electrons in their ellipses about the nuclei of atoms is the same force that moves our earth in its annual course around the sun.' Of course, it turned out that he did not know that, nor do we know that even now.
When [the paper] was released on January 30.. The New York Herald Tribune decided to print the entire paper verbatim, but it had trouble figuring out how to cable all the Greek letters and symbols over telegraph machines. So it hired some Columbia physics professors to devise a coding system and then reconstruct the paper in New York, which they did. The Tribune’ s colorful article about how they transmitted the paper was a lot more comprehensible to most readers than Einstein’s paper itself. The New York Times, for its part, raised the unified theory to a religious level by sending reporters that Sunday to churches around the city to report on the sermons about it. 'Einstein Viewed as Near Mystic,' the headline declared...
Theologians and journalists may have been wowed, but physicists were not. Eddington, usually a fan, expressed doubts. Over the next year, Einstein kept refining his theory and insisting to friends that the equations were 'beautiful.' But he admitted to his dear sister that his work had elicited 'the lively mistrust and passionate rejection of my colleagues.' Among those who were dismayed was Wolfgang Pauli.
[Later] he turned his attention to yet another revised approach that would make more headlines but not more headway in solving the great riddle he had set for himself. 'Einstein Completes Unified Field Theory,' the New York Times reported on January 23, 1931, with little intimation that it was neither the first nor would it be the last time there would be such an announcement. And then again, on October 26 of that year: 'Einstein Announces a New Field Theory.'.. And so it went, for another two decades. None of Einstein’s offerings ever resulted in a successful unified field theory"
After he arrived to America they turned him into a celebrity, that probably did not help his work... He'd made a mistake with GR and that mistake became entrenched, not reversed, to top it off the next generation of scientists would try to connect with that broken theory rather than go back to drawing board and try something else. Einstein's undeserved celebrity status and US culture's treatment / expectation of science held back fundamental research for nearly a century now.
Einstein was a good scientist, not 'great'.
Firstpost: "China calls for restraint in Israel-Iran tensions, urges for permanent ceasefire in Gaza"
Informed Comment: "Israelis Burn up Refugee Tents in Central Gaza, as they Plan Ethnic Cleansing of North"
Manufacturers Monthly: "Construction begins on $65 million VIC renewable hydrogen park...The Gas Appliance Manufacturers Association of Australia (GAMAA) has welcomed a milestone in renewable hydrogen as construction commenced on the 65.46 million Hydrogen Park Murray Valley near Wodonga, Victoria"
Politico: "The nation’s housing affordability crisis has become so acute that even our presidential candidates are paying attention to it...
But the number of housing units in the nation has grown faster than the number of households since the turn of the century. Something else is happening here.
That’s because demand for real estate is not just about the number of people who need homes, it’s also about the amount of money buyers are bringing into the market. People without money cannot push up prices. It’s the people with money — especially those with a lot of money — who drive up prices for everyone else"
"@andrewdessler@mastodon.world
if only scientists had been predicting this"
Schahill, Blackwater: "[Naomi] Klein, who traveled to Iraq during Bremer's tenure in the country and has written extensively on.. the effects of his edict-based governance as such:
[Bremer] enacted a radical set of laws unprecedented in their generosity to multinational corporations. There was Order 37, which lowered Iraq's corporate tax rate from roughly 40 percent to a flat 15 percent. There was Order 39, which allowed foreign companies to own 100 percent of Iraqi assets outside of the natural-resource sector. Even better, investors could take 100 percent of the profits they made in Iraq out of the country; they would not be required to reinvest and they would not be taxed. Under Order 39, they could sign leases and contracts that would last for forty years. Order 40 welcomed foreign banks to Iraq under the same favorable terms. All that remained of Saddam Hussein's economic policies was a law restricting trade unions and collective bargaining...
It seems appropriate, then, that Bremer, the senior U.S. official in Iraq, the public face of the occupation, would not be protected by U.S. government forces or Iraqi security but rather by a private mercenary company"
"@antijingoist@hackers.town
Actually yahoo search has been pretty good recently
changes defaults"
Need I remind people 1979 Iranian revolution saw expulsions and even execution of a lot of high-ranking officials in the Iranian military, yet the country was able to fight the Iran-Iraq war that would start only a year later, with what was left.
Penguin is still going strong, S01E03.
"@sluttymayo@jorts.horse
Modern technology is great. A rich guy will be like 'our new innovation is an app for ignoring the regulations around something that already exists. This will let everyone make money via a sort of petty landlordism'
Then they burn heaps of investor money for like a year while people start to depend on it because they undercut everything else, then they just take all the money that the gig workers had been making and turn those petit landlords back into serfs"
Leaders of TR, Czechia, FR have low net approvals.. -30%, -52%, -56% respectively.. Data for Sept. 25-Oct. 1.
"@nobodyinperson@fosstodon.org
Looks like the @unituebingen won't continue its #Matlab license due to the high cost and lack of state partners to share the financial load.
I very much appreciate this! This is money better spent elsewhere. Teach students #Python, #Rstats et al., not some weird proprietary software they can't use freely afterwards.
Now let the heated discussions in the institutes begin 😉 🍿
Glad that we @umphy are using #FOSS"
#MSNBCB #TaNehisiCoates
Enjoy your rules-based order
Let's note the situation is not one of ISR shoots at Hezbollah but hits UN who are also in the area. No. ISR wants UN out of there, so they shoot directly at UNIFIL soldiers, to force them out.
Hassan Jouni: "[Israel] wants the fighting space to be open to the Israeli military.. UNIFIL forces [in Lebanon] hold important and sensitive positions they could hinder the process of the Israeli military. If they withdraw, these positions could see heavy clashes between the Israeli army and Hezbollah"
The Guardian: "‘Not a normal war’: doctors say children have been targeted by Israeli snipers in Gaza"
Some pushback from SAF. Gains west of Sennar, Khartoum and around Bakhit.
#Sudan #SAF #RSF #Frontline 09/25 - 10/14
They could've performed tests.. possible. Politically time is right for it. I'm just saying it's not clear in the data.
Quakes together with NPP and other facilities.. Not sure if there is a pattern.
import json
irn = json.loads(open("iran-nuke.json").read())
irn.update(res)
u.map_coords(irn, zoom=7, outfile="map7.html")
Locations of quakes, one in the North one in the South
res = dict((k + " magnitude:" + str(v['mag']),
[v['lat'],v['lon']]) for k,v in df.iterrows())
u.map_coords(res, zoom=4, outfile="map6.html")
Data is from USGS.
There were not one, but two quakes
df = u.eq_at(35.59431085, 53.395109027, 800, 8)
df
Out[1]:
mag lat lon ago
date
2024-10-05 06:29:26 4.1 32.3247 56.4756 8
2024-10-05 22:15:34 4.5 35.3597 52.8989 7
Earthquakes in Iran.. were they nuclear weapon tests?
Al-Monitor: "'Very challenging': Israel faces Hezbollah in tricky terrain..As Israel undertakes its fourth ground offensive in southern Lebanon in 50 years, its troops again face rocky terrain mined with explosives and full of hiding places that previous generations of soldiers have battled over"
F24: "Israel's decision to begin ground attacks against Hezbollah in Lebanon has sparked a debate about the wisdom of opening up a second front and presents Israeli soldiers with a different challenge from the dense urban environment of Gaza. Analysts believe Hezbollah has built an intricate network of tunnels cut deep into the hills of southern Lebanon, a tall order for the Israeli military."
F24: "Forty nations that contribute to the UN peacekeeping force in Lebanon said in a statement on Saturday that they 'strongly condemn recent attacks' on the peacekeepers."