Week 43

You are not a fucking alien to your region of birth. We play backgammon, tavla (tavli in Greek), the numbers on the dice are read in Farsi - yek, do, se, chahar.. There are gazillions of yogurt based dishes, similar in all countries around Medi / Aegan. Döner / gyro / shawarma is regional. Every migrant assimilates to their region, adaps to its customs. The ones arriving starting 1000s had already done so, locals, migrants (would-be locals) alike would accept one of the religions of the geography, Islam. A "never-assimilating-unblemished migrant" did not exist, nobody brough Islam from Central Asia, just like they did not bring döner, or tavla from there.

The Anglo benefited both from the first and the second use of this alien identity. The second use was beneficial, the new Turkey wanted to be an ally of the Anglo to protect itself against near and bigger rivals, and its made up identity could be used to create chaos in their backyard by claiming ethnic, cultural similarity with the Turkic populations there. Plus the new Republic was basically declaring it would never use influence in its old territories (it literally labeled itself alien to them), so Anglo was assured it could run the roost without any interference from "the Turks".

Through the label "outsider Turk", a made up identity based on a minority group who had long been assimilated into Anatolia, all of Ottomans were made to look alien. We see this tall tale surfacing again and again. Oddly enough after the war even the TR founders started using the narrative, for them it made some tactical sense bcz by then most of West Asia was gone, and now they wanted to isolate themselves from the lost regions, indirectly from their past which was deemed to be a bad influence, "an obstacle to reform". In essence TR used the story from the opposite direction, they declared themselves aliens, said "they never belonged" to their backward region anyway, hoping now the people would "remember" their supposed adaptive, migrant roots and now adapt to modern civilization which was their stated aim. The only problem the national identity became a farce, based on an incorrect reading of history. It brought marginal benefits, but mostly created deep conflicts among the populace and its elites, not to mention the still-present "Kurdish Problem".

Alien. Nice.

"[WWI era Arab nationalism] worked for Britain who positioned themselves as liberators. [One gov proclamation read:] 'Many noble Arabs have perished in the cause of Arab freedom, at the hands of those alien rulers, the Turks, who oppressed them. these noble Arabs shall not have suffered in vain'"

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"@fuck_cars_bot@botsin.space

'The European mind doesn't want to'"

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Not really. I actually prefer major outlets not taking sides in the election, instead of telling me about it with their megaphone.

Politico: "The Post’s Non-Endorsement: Poor Timing, Worse Message"

Bytes Europe: "Hydrogen, maritime projects among winners of €4.8 billion EU grant.. Selected projects will deliver 61 kilotonnes of renewable fuel of non-biological origin (RFNBO) annually, contributing to the increase in the use and production of renewable energy in hydrogen in hard-to-abate applications in industry and transport... So far, the Innovation Fund has awarded about €7.2 billion to more than 120 innovative projects across the European Economic Area (EEA) through previous calls for proposals, and as disclosed, the next call will be launched in early December 2024"

Oil City News: "Blue hydrogen could be Wyoming’s net-zero solution, study suggests.. Blue hydrogen is an energy resource sourced from natural gas production using a process called steam methane reforming that would be paired with carbon capture and storage. Like natural gas itself, blue hydrogen has a large range of electrical and energy uses. Importantly, it is much cleaner than pure natural gas"

CNBC: "A 'tidal wave' of natural gas supply — the biggest yet — will reshape global markets, says RBC Capital.. The expansion is likely to lead to a state of oversupply by the end of 2026, analysts such as RBC's Anan Dhanani have projected"

"Apple Intelligence"? Is that an "AI" product? Yet at the same time AAPL's own lab says current batch of supposed AI products cannot reason.

CNBC: "Tim Cook is likely visiting China to bolster support for Apple..This trip seems notable now as the company could be looking to shore up collaboration with local players to launch Apple Intelligence in China"

"@reycat@mastodon.social

[K]ids with Samsung phones have a browser called 'Internet'. And most kids have an app called 'Google' (not Chrome), which they use for everything, even surfing the web. And telling the difference between an URL and a web search is equally difficult, since Chrome introduced the universal bar"

Clearly stuff is hidden behind apps, search bars, so the true concepts are getting muddled.

"@ncdominie@mastodon.scot

Me in the mid-1990s, to people thirty years older than me: 'This is called a 'file' and this is a 'website'. Let me explain...'

Me in the mid-2020s, to people thirty years younger than me: 'This is called a 'file' and this is a 'website'. Let me explain...'"

Doctorow: "As important as the numbers revealed by the Secret IRS Files were, I found the explanations even more interesting. The 99.9999% of us who never make contact with the secretive elite wealth management and tax cheating industry know, in the abstract, that there's something scammy going on in those esoteric cults of wealth accumulation, but we're pretty vague on the details. When I pondered the 'tax loopholes' that the rich were exploiting, I pictured, you know, long lists of equations salted with Greek symbols, completely beyond my ken.

But when Propublica's series laid these secret tactics out, I learned that they were incredibly stupid ruses, tricks so thin that the only way they could possibly fool the IRS is if the IRS just didn't give a shit (and they truly didn't – after decades of cuts and attacks, the IRS was far more likely to audit a family earning less than $30k/year than a billionaire).

This has become a somewhat familiar experience. If you read the Panama Papers, the Paradise Papers, Luxleaks, Swissleaks, or any of the other spectacular leaks from the oligarch-industrial complex, you'll have seen the same thing: the rich employ the most tissue-thin ruses, and the tax authorities gobble them up. It's like the tax collectors don't want to fight [the] ultrawealthy.. whose net worth is larger than most nations"

"@GossiTheDog@cyberplace.social

A reminder that Visual Studio Code’s marketplace is still an absolute security clusterfuck that Microsoft have engineered.

There’s active supply chain attacks in there nobody has reported on"

Yahoo News: "At least 7 countries resisting Ukraine's NATO membership invitation"

"New Fast and Sustainable Method for Hydrogen Production.. Under the leadership of Prof. Dr. Francesco Ciucci from the University of Bayreuth, a German-Chinese research team has developed a new method for the electrochemical splitting of water. This not only accelerates the production of hydrogen for technology and industry but also makes it more sustainable. The researchers report on their findings in Nature Nanotechnology"

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"@aral@mastodon.ar.al

It’s only enshittification if it comes from the Palo Alto region of Silicon Valley, otherwise it’s just capitalism, working as designed"

The Revivalists - Zombie #music

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Their ideological descendants still roam about... They need to be expunged, excommunicated, tarred and feathered, tied behind a horse carriage dragged across the town for all to see.

The group who enacted NAFTA and pushed "gays in the military" as the first order of business (botching it in the process) is not "the left". They are economic right, social left. They are parasites in the Democratic Party.

What happened to IoT? You don't hear much from them anymore (two hypes ago).

AI hypemongers apparently reached the "negotiation phase".. Some are still in denial though.

Chollet: "People have been rewriting history and saying that 'everyone has always believed that LLMs alone wouldn't be AGI and that extensive scaffolding around them would be necessary'. No, throughout most of 2023 (the 'sparks of AGI' era) the mainstream bay area belief was that LLMs were already AGI, and that merely scaling their parameter count and training data size by ~2 OOM without changing anything else would lead to super-intelligence"

"@hooves@bark.lgbt

It must be awesome to be so rich that you get warnings about crimes you are committing, as opposed to, like, getting arrested like normal people"

DOJ warns e-jagoff the $1 mil givaway to reg voters might be illegal

Politico: "Donald Trump’s upcoming rally at Madison Square Garden will mark the latest in a string of flashy detours from the battleground-state campaign trail in the closing weeks of the campaign... But his buzzy sideshows are just that... A[n] analysis of Trump’s campaign schedule since the Republican National Convention in mid-July, plus ad spending by his campaign, shows the former president is waging what amounts to a very traditional campaign in the core swing states"

But muneee is too sweet.. The complex is raking it in. Why end it when the earnings are so good?

RU could be using North Korean soldiers, UA is using Polish ones, and quite a few mercenaries. In a proxy war it's only fair Russia uses help from foreign countries. If you don't like it, work towards ending the conflict..

Al-Monitor: "Iran eyes naval drills with Saudi Arabia, Egypt amid simmering regional tensions"

NYT: "A Modi-Xi Meeting Could Signal a Thaw Between India and China"

Repeating an earlier share: "In 2001 someone tried to blow up a jet with a shoe bomb so we've had to take off our shoes at the airport for the last 23 years. In 2017 someone murdered 60 people in Las Vegas, and that resulted in the bump-stock firearm ban, for only seven years". Planes blowing up hurts business. Shooters buying guns is good business, people dying is good business too, other people will want to buy more guns. If we look at both cases from the lens of citizens, their unserved needs, politics, things make no sense. But once we understand business well-being is the primary issue for politicians, everything makes sense.

Apple Machine Learning Research: "[W]e introduce GSM-Symbolic, an improved benchmark.. that allow for the generation of a diverse set of questions. GSM-Symbolic enables more controllable evaluations, providing key insights and more reliable metrics for measuring the reasoning capabilities. [It] reveal[s] that LLMs exhibit noticeable variance when responding to different instantiations of the same question. Specifically, the performance of all models declines when only the numerical values in the question are altered... Furthermore, we investigate the fragility of mathematical reasoning in these models and show that their performance significantly deteriorates as the number of clauses in a question increases. We hypothesize that this decline is because current LLMs cannot perform genuine logical reasoning; they replicate reasoning steps from their training data. Adding a single clause that seems relevant to the question causes significant performance drops (up to 65%) across all state-of-the-art models, even though the clause doesn't contribute to the reasoning chain needed for the final answer"

Doctorow: "Of course we can tax billionaires.. They disguise their demands ('don’t tax billionaires') as observations ('it is technically impossible to tax billionaires')... Billionaires are pretty confident that they can’t be taxed — not just that they shouldn’t be taxed, but rather, that it is technically impossible to tax the ultra-rich. They’re not shy about explaining why, either — and neither is their army of lickspittles...

Boy is this old trick getting old. It was already pretty thin when Margaret Thatcher rolled it out, insisting that 'there is no alternative' to her program of letting the rich get richer and the poor go hungry. Dressing up a demand ('stop trying to think of alternatives') as a scientific truth ('there is no alternative') sets up a world where your opponents are Doing Ideology, while you’re doing science.

Billionaires basically don’t pay tax — that’s a big part of how they got to be billionaires.. By cheating on their taxes, they get to keep — and invest — more money than less-rich people (who get to keep more money than regular people and poor people, obvs). They get so much money that they can 'invest' it in corrupting the political process, for example, by flushing vast sums of dark money into elections to unseat politicians who care about finance crime"

None of the signals detecting an overpriced market forecasting crash seemed to work. The only functioning theory is Gary Stevenson's - massive concentration of wealth causes all asset prices to go up. After a brief lull, SP 500 is breaking new records. Unequal economy creating more inequality.

Norteamericanos..

WION: "Arab-American voters all set to ditch Kamala over support to Israel? Poll suggests so"

In an era where multigenerational mortgages are discussed, the info below should not be surprising.

Median age of first time home buyer was 29 back in 1981. Now it is 35.

Politico: "Trump files legal complaint against UK Labour Party over help for Kamala Harris.. Almost 100 Labour Party aides have traveled across the Atlantic to campaign for the US Democrats"

Not much change.. Some SAF gains in Khartoum. An RSF region in Sennar is cut off from the rest, a win for SAF.

#SAF #RSF #Sudan 10/15 - 10/23

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Selydove, Kurakhivka are nearly encircled, not looking good for them.

#UA #RU 10/14 - 10/23

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H2 Central: "In Le Cheylas, Lhyfe is laying the foundation stone of its largest green hydrogen production site in France, kick-starting large-scale production in the Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes region"

H2 Central: "Hydrogen-Driven Future: South Korea’s Government and POSCO Accelerate Investments in Hydrogen Based Steelmaking"

QM needs to be interfaced to probability and statistics. That way we bring to bear all we know from those fields. We know samples, distributions, random variables. Why can't we use those concepts as-is? QM ppl have to deal with negative probabilities, this is unheard of in the field of probability. QM is unmathematical, even unscientific. It's just a collection of recipes. QM is science to the extent a cookbook is science.

Theory must assign stochasticity to the right place. I can stand at a street corner with a notebook and ask everyone passing by their weight and jot down the answer. When I plot the freq of all answers I get a Gaussian curve. The stochasticity is in the world at large that "randomly" sends people to my corner (in SED that would be the ZPF). I take a look at that sample and find out the distribution, looking at many data points. That is different than saying "noone has a weight until I ask them". This is onthologically stupid. Yet this is precisely what people do with Copenhagen QM. They go further, let's say before I ask the next guy any question, we throw dude in a box, what is the man's weight? Well according to classical interp he is both skinny and fat at the same time.

SED makes the aether stochastic rather than the individual particle.

Cetto: "[To make QM work] physicists must renounce once and for all the hope for a detailed description of the individual. Further, since the concept of probability is being applied to a single event and no sample space can be constructed, there is no consistent way of viewing the result as a property of the system, and it must be interpreted as an uncertainty of our knowledge. The observer slips thus into the description, and the fundamental principle that physics refers to the world rather than to our knowledge of it, is eroded."

Bell: "...[quantum-mechanical] vagueness, subjectivity, and indeterminism, are not forced on us by experimental facts, but by deliberate theoretical choice"

#Wokeness #Parenti #JimmyDore

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The Guardian: "Trees and land absorbed almost no CO2 last year. Is nature’s carbon sink failing?.. The sudden collapse of carbon sinks was not factored into climate models – and could rapidly accelerate global heating"

Same task, different mask

Link

Heidi Peltier: "We Get What We Pay For: The Cycle of Military Spending, Industry Power, and Economic Dependence.. Military spending makes up a dominant share of discretionary spending in the United States; military personnel make up the majority of U.S. government manpower; and military industry is a leading force in the U.S. economy. As a result, other elements and capacities of the U.S. government and civilian economy have been weakened, and military industries have gained political power. Decades of high levels of military spending have changed U.S. government and society – strengthening its ability to fight wars, while weakening its capacities to perform other core functions. Investments in infrastructure, healthcare, education, and emergency preparedness, for instance, have all suffered as military spending and industry have crowded them out. Increased resources channeled to the military further increase the political power of military industries, ensuring that the cycle of economic dependence continues – militarized sectors of the economy see perpetual increases in funding and manpower while other human needs go unmet...

The federal government workforce is comprised of about 3.5 million workers, if we include both civilians and uniformed active-duty personnel. Of this, about 72 percent is defense-related employment, including Department of Defense civilians, uniformed military personnel, and those working in Veterans Affairs. By comparison, the Department of Health and Human Services made up 4 percent of federal employees, and the Department of State only 1 percent"

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NYT: "A Mideast Shift Is Underway, Without Israel.. Before Hamas’s Oct. 7 attacks, Saudi Arabia was open to forging stronger ties with the Israelis. Now, a year into the war in Gaza, it is warming up to its traditional enemy, Iran"

ECP: "With aims to become a key player in the global energy transition, Egypt is advancing its green hydrogen ambitions with a $40 billion investment plan. Through various agreements with international developers and the introduction of supportive laws including tax credits, VAT exemptions and port fee reductions, Egypt is positioning itself as a major green hydrogen exporter, particularly to Europe. The country’s abundant solar and wind resources, combined with its strategic location, make it a prime hub for green energy projects...

Last March, construction engineering companies SK Ecoplant and China State Construction Engineering Corporation agreed to collaborate on a $2 billion green hydrogen and ammonia facility in Egypt's Suez Canal Economic Zone (SCZone). The project will harness 778 MW of renewable energy —- 500 MW ofsolar and 278 MW of wind - to produce 50,000 tons of green hydrogen and 250,000 tons of green ammonia annually. The project is slated for completion by 2029"

Gov.uk: "Flush to Fuel; transforming wastewater into hydrogen power.. Wastewater Fuels have developed an innovative solution to turn sewage into sustainable hydrogen energy..

With the help of DASA funding, Wastewater Fuels have developed a unique innovation to harness energy from wastewater. The system uses stainless steel mesh rods in wastewater to break down organic material into hydrogen ions which are converted into hydrogen gas and stored in the rods. Proven through several trials, Wastewater Fuels is preparing for the production of a full-scale sewage facility to be deployed at RAF Digby"

"I'm on this seafood diet.. I see food, I eat it"

#AlienRomulusMovie

Polls are playing a different tune but not sure how reliable they are.

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1968 two term flag.. This is important esp. for this election, bcz '68 was like now, Dem party chaos, low net approval, started with one guy, who did not run (shot), different guy ran, lost even though the party was incumbent. With the data correction and some other changes, adv goes to Reps.

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Ah an error in the prez prediction source data

Bill F-ing Clinton.. That spineless, poser, know-nothing douchebag. All was done for the cameras.. for the show.

Fisk: "Every few months in the Middle East, the Chamberlain bell is rung. 'Peace in our time,' it tolls. And anxious not to be blamed for its failure, the Arabs and Israelis leap to express their support. The moment Ehud Barak was elected Labour prime minister of Israel in 1999, the satellite television boys and girls—along with the ever-supine BBC World Service—were putting the 'peace process' back 'on track' once more, even though Barak had made it clear that Jerusalem must remain the united capital of Israel, that major Jewish settlements would stay and that no Palestinian refugees from 1948 could expect to return to their original Arab villages...

The pumpkin of the Oslo agreement could never be turned into the golden carriage of peace, but it took the collapse of the Arafat–Barak talks at Camp David in 2000 to prove this true. Even then, Clinton was reduced to claiming that the Oslo negotiations were 'based' on UN Security Council Resolutions 242 and 338— which was not what Oslo said at all - and even Arafat must have realised that the end had come when Madeleine Albright made her preposterous offer of 'a sense of sovereignty' over Muslim religious sites in Jerusalem. Only the silly villages that Arafat might have controlled outside his would-be capital would have 'virtually full sovereignty,' according to the Americans. There then followed the wilfully misleading leaks to the effect that Arafat had turned down 95 per cent of 'Palestine' — in reality around 64 per cent of the 22 per cent of 'Palestine' that was left. Barak would not give up Jerusalem or abandon the settlements. Arafat would not make the 'concession' of ceding Israeli control over all of Jerusalem. So the sons of Abraham acknowledged what so many Israelis and Palestinians knew all along: that Oslo didn’t work. Clinton predictably saw fit to praise the stronger of the two parties; he spoke of Barak’s 'courage' and 'vision,' but merely of Arafat’s commitment. So much for America’s role as 'honest broker' of the Middle East peace"

Another issue w "spend until inflation do not tax" #DumbMMT approach is gov can spend, spend, spend and never see much inflation. Inflation has to do with money given to all, in excess, and its circulation creates inflation. In an unequal economy even direct aid to citizens will end up with the rich, there will be no circulation, ie no inflation. Direct aid will go to rent, Walmart purchases, a new iPhone, money gone. It all ends up with big corp. Now the rich will take that money, buy even more assets; more homes, buy more government debt, Walmart will become a bigger behemoth. In a way the rich gets paid twice, not only did they end up with the direct aid, they now gobble up more assets, making more money with money.

Reuters: "Prabowo becomes Indonesia's eighth president.. from being a former military commander.. to sweeping the polls and now leading the country of 280 million people... In a wide-ranging speech lasting about an hour, Prabowo said self-sufficiency for food was possible within five years, while also pledging to become self-sufficient in energy.

Prabowo also touched on foreign policy during his speech, saying Indonesia was non-aligned on the global stage, but that he stood in support of the Palestinian people and said Jakarta was ready to send more aid to Gaza"

Both Kamala and Donald are I am CRM.

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Times of Israel: "‘A disgrace’: Gallant rips Macron for again barring Israeli firms from defense expo"

Op India: "Israel to take legal and diplomatic action against French president Emmanuel Macron for banning Israeli companies from Euronaval defence show"

The American Conservative: "Trump Opposes Regime Change In Iran.. Trump was speaking on the PBD Podcast and was asked by the host.. whether he desires a change in Iran’s form of government and a restoration of the Shah... 'We can’t get totally involved at all, you know. We can’t run ourselves, let’s face it,' Trump said."

H2 Central: "Infinity Fuel Cell and Hydrogen, Inc., Delivers 7 kW Hydrogen-Oxygen Fuel Cell Designed for Future Spaceflight Missions"

CNBC: "The solid-state batteries hype is fading"

Doctorow: "Billionaires are why we can’t have nice things — a sensible climate policy, workers’ rights, a functional Supreme Court and legislatures that answer to the people, rather than deep-pocketed donors.

The source of billionaires’ power isn’t mysterious: it’s their money. Take away the money, take away the power. With more than a dozen states considering wealth taxes, we’re finally in a race to the top, to see which state can attack the corrosive power of extreme wealth most aggressively"

"@poemproducer@systerserver.town

unintelligent artificialness"

Pivot to AI: "Researchers at Apple have come out with a new paper showing that large language models can't reason - they're just pattern-matching machines"

NYT: "Fighting Rages in Gaza and Lebanon, Despite Killing of Hamas Leader"

RULES BASED ORDER

Fisk: "I have sought in vain to discover the origin of our journalistic use of the word 'settlements.' By its nature, the expression is almost comforting. It has a permanence about it, a notion of legality. Every human wants to 'settle,' to have a home. The far more disturbing—and far more accurate—word for Israel’s land-grabbing in the West Bank and Gaza since 1967 is colonising. Settlers are colonists. Almost all the Israelis in the West Bank are living on someone else’s land. They may say that God gave them the land, but those Palestinians who legally owned that land— who had property deeds to prove it, since the British Mandate, since the Ottoman empire—are not allowed to appeal to God. Successive Israeli governments have supported this theft of property, and by 2003, 400,000 Israeli Jews were living in the occupied territories in explicit violation of Article 49 of the Geneva Convention — which states that 'the Occupying Power shall not deport or transfer parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies.'

In all the long, fruitless negotiations with the Palestinians, the Israelis would always maintain that the return of any territory was 'giving' land for peace—as if the occupied territories were legally Israeli property of which it could dispose if it was generously minded. So it is important to recall that the policy of implanting Jewish colonists on occupied Arab land since 1967 has been consistently and enthusiastically supported by successive Israeli governments"