Week 6
Lee Fang, Unherd: "[2024/11] The battlelines on immigration have hardened predictably. Left-leaning voters proudly display 'refugees welcome' yard signs, while Donald Trump supporters cheer his pledge to implement 'largest deportation operation in the history of our country'. Amid such partisan attitudes, it has become heretical to suggest that the Democrats need to be tougher on immigration.
But they must. In the long run, progressives have no choice but to acknowledge that huge infusions of migrants stress welfare systems and depress wages for low-skill workers, while damaging social cohesion. Only by accepting this, and making the case for border security and less tolerance for migrant rule-breaking, can the Left reconnect with its blue-collar roots"
That's good - no need to antagonize Russia at this point.
Newsweek: "The U.S. attorney general has disbanded an anti-Russian oligarch sanctions task force to shift resources to anti-cartel activities."
H2 Central: "Avalon Renovables plans an investment of 8 billion euros in green hydrogen and derivative projects and the creation of 10,000 jobs in Andalusia Madrid"
Informed Comment: "Eva Lavesque at Arabian Gulf Business Insight reports that Chinese solar firms are eyeing the Middle East market to offset declining US margins. The solar giant Trinasolar shipped 240 gigawatts of solar modules worldwide in the first three quarters of 2024... The US only produced 4 gigawatts of solar panel PV modules in the first two quarters of 2024. That is, we are not even in the same league as China. We’re a podunk farm team for solar panel manufacturing and China is the winner of the world series"
Work for the goverment. Why not? Be a public servant.
What to recommend to high school students? Don't quit high school. Finish high school. Go to college. Don't be an enterpreneur, develop a skill. If there is skill, there is always some jackass who will want to start a bihness around that.. 1 in 10 in US, 1 in 100 in Europe. Most of these people have mental issues, suffer from serious control problems, that's why they are in bihness, they become bihnessman. You don't have to be one of those.
Annie Lennox - Take Me To The River
A likely astroid hit in near future (1/80 but still). Is this the start of a disaster movie?
What is up with that earthquake cloud around the island of Santorini?
u.map_eq(36.408567828, 25.43368438, radius=800, ago=8, outfile="map01.html")
Statement like that will get you shot. Oh wait, it did.
It's like he is talking to a multiracial working class coalition.
This tech needs to die. Great..
WaPo: "States trying to build a network of EV chargers are reeling after the Trump administration abruptly ordered a halt to a $5 billion program"
The Guardian: "How the roots of the ‘PayPal mafia’ extend to apartheid South Africa.. [A]s the world’s richest man insisted he wasn’t trying to be a Nazi, speculation inevitably focused on whether his roots in apartheid-era South Africa offered an insight...
[T]he 'PayPal mafia' of libertarian billionaires with roots in South Africa under white rule [are] now hugely influential in the US tech industry and politics... They include Peter Thiel, the German-born billionaire venture capitalist and PayPal cofounder, who was educated in a southern African city in the 1970s where Hitler was still openly venerated. Thiel, a major donor to Trump’s campaign, has been critical of welfare programs and women being permitted to vote as undermining capitalism. A 2021 biography of Thiel, called The Contrarian, alleged that as a student at Stanford he defended apartheid as 'economically sound'"
Elez was from DOUCHE, the racist guy
WIRED: "Elez was granted privileges including the ability to not just read but write code on two of the most sensitive systems in the US government: the Payment Automation Manager (PAM) and Secure Payment System (SPS) at the Bureau of the Fiscal Service (BFS), an agency that according to Treasury records paid out $5.45 trillion in fiscal year 2024. Reporting from Talking Points Memo confirmed that Treasury employees were concerned that Elez had already made “extensive changes” to code within the Treasury system. The payments processed by BFS include federal tax returns, Social Security benefits, Supplemental Security Income benefits, and veteran’s pay"
The man said famously "I dont know karate, but I know ka-razy". Some recommend "going karazy" on Russia to force them to give more concessions. They forget Russia showed real karazy when it invaded Ukraine. They threw down the gauntlet, risked it all for this offensive. No amount of karazy will out-karazy that one.
There is no major schism against the RU Orthodox Church among Christians. They are considered Christians, so Zelensk banning Russian OCC will raise more eyebrows in US than any other angle. Tucker Carlson has been hammering Ukraine on that one, and he is getting more traction than Ukranians are. Little tricks won't work for you at this stage, Ukraine, you should've thought about that before you became Viktoria Nuland's bitch.
IMEMC: "Israeli Army Continues its Incursions in Jenin and Tubas.. On Wednesday, Israeli forces continued their aggression against the northern West Bank city of Jenin and the Jenin refugee camp for the 16th consecutive day"
Werdmuller: "For the last few years, AI vendors have had an interesting marketing playbook: they’ve described the potential power of the technologies as being so great that it could lead to an artificial general intelligence that could either kill humanity or leave us behind and head for the stars. We ignore its power at our peril.
As it turned out, OpenAI and Microsoft’s definition of 'artificial general intelligence' was that the technologies would reach one hundred billion dollars in revenue. It wasn’t tied to capabilities around reasoning, and did not, in actuality, relate to a Terminator future. It just meant that they’d be making a lot of money from it. All the talk of humanity-destroying intelligence and the existential questions that derived from it just served to draw attention to their services"
The Verge: "'I have no idea what’s going on in this industry right now,' Ford CEO Jim Farley said during his company’s capital markets event Monday. He referenced electric vehicles .. 'Higher ranges will necessitate bigger batteries', he noted, adding, 'These batteries are huge'"
The rot starts at the top - e-jagoff is a moron.
DOUCHE is in trouble.
Department Of Unnecessary Cuts Harming Efficiency = DOUCHE
"Department of Government Efficiency [staffer] resigned on Thursday after now-deleted racist social media posts were resurfaced... Marko Elez, a 25-year-old software engineer, was working inside the Treasury Department.. 'Normalize Indian hate,' [he posted].. In July of last year, the account posted: 'Just for the record, I was racist before it was cool'"
RSF vs SAF in Sudan - which is preferable? Neither is democratic, but one is at least the official military, so given all else equal SAF is. Egypt is behind them, so that's a plus (Egypt's stability is crucial for ME).
👏 👏 👏
F24: "Donald Trump bans transgender athletes from participating in women's sports.. US President Donald Trump signed an executive order banning transgender athletes from women's sports, citing the need to protect female athletes. The order, which could strip schools of federal funding for non-compliance, was signed at the White House amid applause from supporters, including key Republicans. Trump declared the move a defense of women's sports traditions"
TASS: "Ukrainian settlement is Trump’s top priority, US diplomat says.. Russian President Vladimir Putin has previously listed the conditions for resolving the conflict, including the withdrawal of Ukrainian forces from Donbass and Novorossiya, Kiev's refusal to join NATO, the lifting of all Western sanctions against Moscow, and the establishment of Ukraine's non-aligned and nuclear-free status"
It's a long shot. Nice try, but unlikely to work.
NYT: "To Keep Aid Coming, Ukraine Appeals to Trump Allies: Conservative Christians.. A Ukrainian delegation to the National Prayer Breakfast in Washington will make the case that Russia threatens the religious freedom of Christians who don’t follow the Russian Orthodox Church"
#Frontline #RU #UA 01/31 - 02/07
"@signalstation@raggedfeathers.com
Spotted a new sticker in the neighborhood, of St. Luigi."
Where are the shit commercial codes, like Windows based ones? Micro$haft tried to compete in this space but it had its ass handed to it. FOSS coding is simply better. The code is free and open, more eyes look at it, anyone can contribute an improvement, or test.
"96.3% of the top one million web servers are running [FOSS] Linux. Among the websites that run on Linux, remarkable ones include Twitter, Yahoo, and eBay, speaking volumes about Linux popularity. The internet is increasingly dependent on Linux"
"@Grafa@mastodon.social
Pure Hydrogen delivers Australia's first hydrogen-powered garbage truck"
F24: "'Majority' of Ukrainians want ceasefire with Russia, Zelensky's ex-spokesperson [Mendel] says"
CNBC: "Apple shares slide after China reportedly considers probe into App Store practices"
SA is likely serious on their position, bcz Palestinians were ignored in the first raproachement deal of the first Trump term, and that partially contributed to October 7.
Sky News: "Riyadh has swiftly responded to Trump's comments, hardening its position and insisting on Palestinian statehood in exchange for a deal. That's not going to happen either... And so, are these faux lines of negotiation being drawn? Artificial problems being created to give the sides the spectre of something to climb down from?"
Politico: "European countries joined Arab nations Wednesday in rebuking a shock announcement by United States President Donald Trump that he wants to take control over Gaza and forcibly displace its inhabitants to neighboring countries including Jordan and Egypt"
E. M. Pugh: "If the human brain were so simple that we could understand it, we would be so simple that we couldn’t"
This is your cue to start working for the people, congressmen
TDB: "Lawmakers Face Record ‘Wide Range’ of Violent Threats.. Threats against lawmakers, their families and staff skyrocketed last year, with the numbers more than doubling since 2017, the United States Capitol Police reported Monday"
When user views the frontline maps for Ukraine on this blog, they are running Javascript code locally, on their machine... I send Javascript code to your browser to run, that code in turn fetches two more data files from my blog (before/after coordinates for the frontline, two simple text files), and displays them. Another piece of code, Leaflet, also runs on browser allows the underlying mapping to be displayed w/ dynamic zooming. It all takes place locally to the user, their CPU does the work, almost nothing happens on the server.
Javascript (code that can run in the browser) is the universal GUI now. If I was starting any UI-heavy project I would not bother with anything else. JS is deployable anywhere (bcz browsers run all platforms), and now with the addition of WebAssembly it can incorporate code from multiple languages.
#Stevenson
"I went to school with a lot of.. middle class kids who got good degrees and a lot of them went into medicine and dentistry. They became doctors and dentists. And now the doctors and dentists who make the most money, what they do is cosmetic surgery for rich people, things like Botox or like teeth whitening, teeth straightening, cosmetic stuff that is obviously not like medically essential. Or they work for private healthcare, healthcare for rich people... [Some say] "That's politics of envy". Well, what happens when you need a dentist? What happens when your kids need a dentist? And we're in a situation now in this country where it's becoming increasingly impossible to get a NHS dentists to get cheaper, affordable dental care. And as a result, people are just not going to the dentist. And it's not that the dentists are not there... just like your kids are in competition with the kids of the rich for elite university places, you and your kids are in competition with the rich for access to the dentists and access to the doctors.. "
Woke has to be corporate psyop, manufactured to force the left to spend less time talking about material issues
I see, a non-LGBTICUP person but is supportive of LGBTICUP issues, so an "ally" of the cause.
WTF is an Ally?
I hadn't realized the letter soup grew even larger..
"LGBTTTQQIAA for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Transsexual, Two-spirited, Queer, Questioning, Intersex, Asexual, Ally. Since the number of letters could be endless on a sexual and gender continuum and so as not to exclude anyone, it is also possible to opt for LGBTQ+"
Byline Times: "Keir Starmer’s Government Votes to Block UN Plan to Tackle Global Tax Avoidance.. The UK has joined with the United States and a handful of other rich nations in rejecting the UN push"
Netanyahoo has been around for a long time.. the reason is he is the linchpin of the complex. He creates the much needed "demand" for the complex in the Middle East.
Hossein-Zadeh, The Political Economy of US Militarism: "[2006] Official explanations such as weapons of mass destruction, Saddam’s threat to the United States, or his connection to Al-Qaida, can now easily be dispensed with as flimsy, harebrained pretexts for the invasion of Iraq. Critics have, instead, pointed to a number of other factors behind the drive to war. Those factors are divided into two categories in this chapter: secondary or minor factors and primary or major ones. Included among secondary reasons for the war are the role of domestic politics, the influence of the so-called neoconservative ideologues, and the role of oil. Primary or major factors include the military-industrial complex and the militant Zionist proponents of “greater Israel.” I will call the unofficial, unspoken, de facto alliance between these two major forces, precipitated by a convergence of their respective interests on war and political convulsion in the Middle East, the military-industrial-Likud alliance.
Capitalism has many blind spots. Private capital turns everyone into a wage slave, but it needs major government help to do it. If education (basically daycare) isn't public, then there is no place where kids can be dropped off while parents are at work. That means an unhappy wage slave. They could revolt!
If research is not subsidized all these high flying "tech companies" would not be able to "innovate". So on..
90% of high schools in US are public schools. That is not an easy thing to privatize.
Of course all WebAssembly tools are free and open source. In my crowd, line of work (which is where all the action is -not to boast-) it is mostly FOSS. We don't even think about it, so I sometimes forget to comment on these things, but outside observers need to know, see the power dynamic here. It's all about open source. We are the shit, the rest are losers. I haven't bought a commercial software for decades now. I use FOSS, I contribute to FOSS.. A client, company I work for can utilize software "on the cloud" serving software for money but the underlying software better f-ing be FOSS, otherwise I won't touch it.
WebAssembly tech looks promising. Compile any language into wasm and the code can be executed in the browser, as well as other wasm-able platforms.
I have some "legacy" Java code lying around maybe I will wasm enable it one day.
During debt crises era 2010s there were a lot of government-spending-of-any-kind-fixes-all economists running around in the media. "If there is no spending, someone has to, government has to step up and spend, create aggregate demand". Well government did spend during covid, gave people bunch of money, inequality still increased. Where is aggregate demand? If the flow of money is one-directional, and it all ends up in assets not owned by the middle class, you are still screwed. Gov spends, will fall further in debt, the rich will buy that debt along w/ other assets, collect interest and become richer. The cycle will continue..
u.baci_all_products("USA","China")
$ 149,199,118,616.9998
u.baci_all_products("China","USA")
$ 554,416,674,694.9995
Hardball.. it worked. Rubio executed on DJT's behalf well
"@unusualwhales@threads.net
BREAKING: Panama agrees to facilitate & offer free-passage to US Navy ships through Panama Canal following visit from Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and agrees to end China's Panama Canal deal and to leave from China's 2017 'Belt and Road initiative'"
Halton Arp: "[One galaxy I cataloged] has a large companion on the end of a luminous arm. In 1971 a spectrum revealed that this companion was 8,000 km/sec higher redshift than the central, active Seyfert galaxy. This amount of excess redshift cannot be accomodated in the conventional picture where redshifts mean velocities in an expanding universe. They could not be at such different distances and be physically interacting. When Fred Hoyle heard about this he came up from the Cal Tech campus to my Carnegie office and asked to see the original picture. In 1972 he gave the prestigious Russell Lecture at the Seattle meeting of the American Astronomical Society and outlined a theory whereby younger galaxies radiated intrinsically redshifted photons. His theory of growing particle masses was a more general solution to the conventional field equations but was physically a Machian (not Einsteinian theory). At the end of the lecture he said the NGC 7603 observation created a crisis in physics and we needed to cross over the bridge to a radically more general physics...
Over the years the evidence for non-velocity redshifts has grown enormously, both for quasars and galaxies. A number of researchers have tried to make the establishment admit the consequences of this evidence. But it has been suppressed and ignored. However, In an event of great irony, 30 years after Hoyle's talk featuring NGC 7603, two young Spanish astronomers have announced the finding of two quasar-like, much higher redshift objects imbedded in the arm which connects the low redshift galaxy to the higher redshift companion of NGC 7603. As in many past cases, this result alone should have settled instantly and finally the existance of intrinsic redshifts. Instead the paper was turned down by 'Nature' Magazine, rejected by the 'Astrophysical Journal' and only finally accepted by the European Journal 'Astronomy and Astrophysics'...
The ejection in opposite directions of material from active galaxies, including very high redshift material like quasars, has been building up now for over 37 years. Yet the radio map shown here and the notation that his object had 'two redshifts', one a 'background object', lay unoticed and unchallenged in the voluminous literature for 4 years! When it was finally submitted to the Astronomical Society of the Pacific it was rejected. In spite of my being a past President of this organization they refused other observational results and communications and I had to resign. It is particularly vexing that the A.S.P. has as a primary goal educating the public about astronomy. But since it was hijacked by fanatical Big Bang adherents, it has been exactly misinforming the public"
2022 trade data,
u.baci_all_products("Mexico","USA")
$ 424,735,465,633.9993
u.baci_all_products("USA","Mexico")
$ 302,641,331,571.0001
u.baci_all_products("Canada","USA")
$ 437,647,720,907.9995
u.baci_all_products("USA","Canada")
$ 318,301,555,958.0007
Fleming: "Einstein was stuck, in that by denying the existence of aether, or any other medium of transmission of light, he still wanted to explain clock rate slowing and hypothetical distance contraction. In order to do that, he imagined that space itself must change its spatial and time dimensions when that space is moving relative to other space. His space was not a wallless container but was physical. In order to do away with aether theory, he had to treat space like it had physical properties, including spatial and time dimensions that were variable. Therein lies Einstein’s fallacy. He claimed space is non-physical and physical at the same time...
We now know experimentally that all space contains vacuum energy consistent with Max Planck’s theory of quantum oscillators. Per his theory it is impossible for space to be empty. Planck oscillators are something physical that we can use to explain all the known physical properties of space. Quantum vacuum energy has wavelengths and frequencies that give space its spatial and time dimensionality. The quantum vacuum also gives us a standard reference frame to use when making relativistic frame transformations, as well as giving us a physical medium for light and force transmission...
Einstein had not actually solved the problem. He merely turned space into a new form of aether while still failing to provide a physical explanation for its physical properties"
Saudi Arabia UK Ambassador: "We won't accept Trump's Israel peace plan without a Palestinian state"
Cuck Schumer, Pelosi both supported the other guy. I guess we should be happy Martin got the job by that measure alone.
Politico: "[DNC] members delivered a clear message to their party’s power-brokers in picking Martin as chair: They largely think billionaire donors and big-name elected officials are out of touch with the core of the base... Suffering the biggest upset: Some Democratic billionaires who hoped to see Wikler take the top job. LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman and George Soros’ Democracy PAC kicked in $250,000 each to the FORWARD PAC backing Wikler for chair"
NYT: "Ken Martin, the Minnesota Democratic chairman, was elevated on Saturday to lead the Democratic National Committee, taking the helm of a rudderless party staring down an uncertain future. Mr. Martin, a seasoned party operator who comes across as a low-key, mild-mannered Midwesterner, ran on pledges to broaden the party’s appeal — especially among working-class voters — and to ensure its ability to compete in races up and down the ballot, and across the country"
u.baci_top_product("USA","Mexico")
$ 39,615,432,947.0
Petroleum oils and oils from bituminous minerals, not crude:
preparations n.e.c. containing by weight 70% or more of petroleum oils
or oils from bituminous minerals: these being the basic constituents
of the preparations: waste oils
u.baci_top_product("Mexico","USA")
$ 33,298,367,944.0
Units of automatic data processing machines: processing units other
than those of item no. 8471.41 or 8471.49, whether or not containing
in the same housing one or two of the following types of unit: storage
units, input units or output units
u.baci_top_product("USA","Canada")
$ 15,815,563,148.0
Petroleum oils and oils from bituminous minerals, not crude:
preparations n.e.c. containing by weight 70% or more of petroleum oils
or oils from bituminous minerals: these being the basic constituents
of the preparations: waste oils
u.baci_top_product("Canada","USA")
$ 117,401,863,409.0
Oils: petroleum oils and oils obtained from bituminous minerals, crude
"Tata Steel has become the first steel company in India to demonstrate comprehensive capabilities in developing pipes for hydrogen transportation. This is stated in a press release from the steelmaker.
As noted, the company has successfully developed hydrogen-compatible API X65 steel pipes. They were manufactured at Tata Steel’s plant in Khopoli using steel produced at the Kalinganagar facility.
The qualification tests were conducted at RINA-CSM (Italy), a leading center for approving hydrogen-related tests and characteristics. The new API X65 pipes can be used to transport 100% pure hydrogen gas at high pressure (100 bar)"
Don't get me started on Dunkirk.
Oscars, shmoscars.. No one will remember that shit in a few decades. What people will remember if the movie was any good. Fight Club is a classic. Is anything this guy ever did approach that level of quality, message, execution? Nolan IMO serves shitlibs. He is a shitlib's shitlib. The kind of jagoff people in certain circles like to like, feel obligated to like.
Oppenheimer was boring. Except a few conversations between Murphy and Damon, there was no life in it. Is this how C. Nolan plans to cement his position as a grand director? Make stuff boring, package obfuscation as smart (Tenet), and/or rely on extended dramatic music sequences that ramble on the same high exceeding its welcome but somehow comes across as a refined movie technique (Inception). It won't work. Except a few fools in the Academy his position in movie history is far from cemented. He is on shaky ground.
China is not. China is in its "consolidation" phase, says PT
Peter Turchin's approach could provide another example.. He formulated crisis, political instability in terms of inequality, and a few other parameters. According to him, yes, US is in crisis mode right now, it has been for a while.
If inequality is added to a grand model of economics, it could be as an extension of the model below, using macro variables, analyzing top-down.
Zelensky can demand all RU occupied regions back until he is blue in the face. He has no capability to achieve that. It's like, while the Red Army rolling into Berlin Hitler says "I demand to take Moscow". Just because he says that, should a peace agreement be the middle point between his demand and Russia's, and the Red Army pulls back to middle point between Moscow and Berlin? This is non-sense.
Negotiations are about finding middle point of what both sides are capable to do, not what they say they want to do. Russia is capable to prolong the war, take eastern Ukraine, take Odesa, and nuke Ukraine. Ukraine is able to put up some defense, delay Russia, play spoiler in some areas. The middle of both these capabilities is giving Russia the four regions it wants plus Crimea, and keep Ukraine out of NATO. Simple.