Week 15
TNR: "The editor in chief of Christianity Today is warning that evangelical Christianity is moving too far to the right.. Russell Moore resigned from the Southern Baptist Convention in 2021, after years of being at odds with other evangelical leaders. Now he thinks his religion is in crisis.
Moore told NPR in an interview released Tuesday that multiple pastors had told him they would quote the Sermon on the Mount, specifically the part that says to 'turn the other cheek,' when preaching. Someone would come up after the service and ask, 'Where did you get those liberal talking points?'..
'What was alarming to me is that in most of these scenarios, when the pastor would say, "I’m literally quoting Jesus Christ," the response would not be, "I apologize." The response would be, "Yes, but that doesn’t work anymore. That’s weak,"' Moore said. 'When we get to the point where the teachings of Jesus himself are seen as subversive to us, then we’re in a crisis'"
"@ProPublica@newsie.social
NOAA Scientists Are Cleaning Bathrooms and Reconsidering Lab Experiments After Contracts for Basic Services Expire.. A Seattle lab has lost janitorial services, hazardous waste support, IT and building maintenance as it waits for the Commerce Department secretary to personally approve all contracts over $100,000"
"Airline Demand Between Canada & United States Collapses, Down 70%+"
"@GossiTheDog@cyberplace.social
I’ve just been looking at Copilot+ laptops to get prepped for wider degree of Recall testing, and one thing I’ve noticed is they’re heavily discounted on Amazon, and many of them are flagged by Amazon as a high number of customers return them"
Recall is a major security vulnerability esp. for Winblows machines running on government computers. USG needs to switch to FOSS.
Ars Technica: "That groan you hear is users' reaction to Recall going back into Windows.. Snapshotting and AI processing a screen every 3 seconds. What could possibly go wrong?"
BNN: Alberta Bill Enables Hydrogen Home Heating, Electricity Market Remodelling.. Alberta's government is looking to give the green light to hydrogen as a home and commercial heating fuel in a move it says will boost demand and reduce emissions.
.. the former being closer to a parrot, the latter to an actual human.
Chollet: "Generating code using a statistical prior about which token sequences are more likely is a fundamentally different task than generating programs by searching directly in the space of program dynamics"
Mining.com: A new ironmaking process with a projected capacity of three tons of hot metal per hour based on the Hydrogen-based Fine-Ore Reduction (HYFOR) and Smelter technology is being progressed by a consortium of companies.
China Daily: Wang Zihao has been very busy receiving foreign clients recently. His employer, Hygreen Energy, a Beijing-based company engaged in electrolysis and hydrogen production, has seen its alkaline electrolyzer products exported to nearly 30 countries, including the United States, Germany and Spain, and the export volume has continued to grow. "I just received customers from Portugal and Belgium a few days ago, and Spanish clients are set to come soon," said Wang, assistant general manager of the company.
More than 200 hydrogen energy enterprises have set up shop in Beijing's Daxing district, and the industrial cluster effect has begun to emerge. The application scenarios of hydrogen energy have covered transportation applications, such as cold chain logistics and passenger transport.
Increased wealth inequality caused mortgages to double from $5.3 trillion to 10.6 trillion btw 2001-2007, causing the GFC. Mortgage based securities held by foreigners reached abt 700 billion at that time, so most of that debt was held by US rich and corps. Skewed distribution is causing price instability, asset hoarding creates a loss of living standards for the middle class.
Cornell Chronicle: "Sunlight and seawater lead to low-cost green hydrogen, clean water.. A Cornell-led collaboration has hit the trifecta of sustainability technology: The group developed a low-cost method to produce carbon-free 'green' hydrogen via solar-powered electrolysis of seawater. A happy byproduct of the process? Potable water"
"Geologic hydrogen offers twice as much energy as natural gas"
Wired: "In.. Tariff Era, the Right to Repair Will Be More Important Than Ever.. It’s time to keep the stuff you already have running longer"
FCW: "Energiequelle Plans a Green Hydrogen Park in Oulu, Finland.. The European renewable energy group Energiequelle is reserving a site for a new hydrogen project to produce hydrogen in Oulu, northern Finland. When all three stages of the project are fully completed, the plant could produce hydrogen by electrolysis with a capacity of over 500 megawatt (MW)"
FCW: "New 3.5-Mile Pipeline Approved as Scottish Green Hydrogen Progresses"
Meron Rapoport: "Israel’s latest vision for Gaza has a name: Concentration camp"
Meron Rapoport: "Unable to immediately expel Gazans en masse, Israel seems intent on forcing them into a confined zone — and letting starvation and desperation do the rest."
Haaretz: "Report: Israel is annexing Rafah, a fifth of Gaza, into its buffer zone. 'The area includes the city of Rafah & its surrounding neighborhoods.' Residents will not be allowed to return, & Israel is considering demolishing buildings. 'Soldiers who served in other sections of the buffer zone are raising concerns about the dangers posed to troops, Palestinian civilians & the hostages'"
Bus-News: "In France, the Urban Community of Dunkirk and the Grand Annecy Agglomeration have ordered hydrogen-powered H2 city buses from IVECO BUS"
ZNet: "What Would a General Strike in the US Actually Look Like?.. Calls for a general strike in the US are growing... Calls for mass disruptive action are coming from unlikely places, like Anthony Romero, executive director of the ACLU, an organization normally associated with legal action through the courts.. Some in organized labor are also entering the fray"
#NovaraMedia
"New Research Reveals How AI 'Thinks' (It Doesn’t)"
"@rafial@hackers.town
Transformational technologies like microcomputers and smartphones were so obviously useful that rank and file workers were smuggling them into their workflows despite the best efforts of CEOs to stop them.
The 'transformational' technology of LLMs is so obviously anti-useful that CEOs must resort to threats and coercion to get their rank and file workers to go anywhere near them.
"@pushcx@ruby.social
Microsoft allowed me to opt-out from having my data used for LLM training. And also opts me back in after a few tenths of a second, so I can be allowed to opt out again and again"
Mesquita, FP Analysis and Rational Choice Models: "Although the opportunity for a negotiated agreement exists, a few disputes nevertheless become wars. This seems puzzling, much as labor strikes or lawsuits seem puzzling. Of course, from the perspective of the welfare of a nation-state, by which I mean the welfare of the majority of the citizenry, war, like strikes and litigation, is always ex post inefficient. That is, knowing how a war turned out, there must have existed an ex ante, Pareto improving outcome, an outcome that at least could have avoided the transaction costs for each side associated with conducting and concluding the war.
As James Fearon has argued, war, looked at from the perspective of states, can only arise rationally if at least one of three conditions exists: an asymmetry of information, a commitment problem, or a dispute over an indivisible good so important a contributor to the danger of war that it is sometimes argued that all the other rationalist explanations are just special cases of this condition: that war is, in Gartzke’s (1999) memorable phrase, in the error term. Bueno de Mesquita and Lalman (1992) and Slantchev (2003), in a more general setting, provide models in which war can arise without uncertainty because of commitment problems. Commitment problems arise when one or the other party cannot trust the rival’s statements because the rival has incentives to renege on promises.
Indivisibility means that the contest is necessarily a winner-take-all affair so that there is no room for compromise, probably leaving the dispute to devolve into a war of attrition. Civil wars and other disputes over governing a given territory sometimes are indivisible. Naturally, if there is not some way to compensate a player for a loss of this sort, the problem does not have a bargaining range. One side wins and the other loses. Impatience can come into play as a source of commitment problems or uncertainty about when the expected future stream of benefits from behaving aggressively now will be sufficiently large that it is worth tolerating the short-term costs of war"
Would warring parties fight a war if they knew the outcome beforehand? The answer can sometimes be yes. One IR researcher had better language around that, see above
UA/RU war might have some life in it yet. It can go on for another 3-4 months until one side gets its ass throughly kicked. That side likely won't be Russia.
H2 Central: "A new wave of hydrogen powered projects have been shortlisted today to help cut emissions and create thousands of jobs in the UK’s industrial heartlands – driving growth as part of the government’s Plan for Change"
Fuel Cells Works: "Viking and Fincantieri Announce World’s First Hydrogen-Powered Cruise Ship and Two New Ship Orders"
"@ArchaeoIain@archaeo.social
@SmudgeTheInsultCat the good news is that everyone realised what a disaster privatisation has been. The bad news is that it is probably too difficult to do anything about it without a revolution"
"@SmudgeTheInsultCat@mas.to
It's really funny how America and the UK stopped investing in infrastructure in the 1980s because the free market will pave potholes and make the trains run on time and now literally nothing works and you cannot go anywhere or do anything but like 4 people are richer than God."
Why MMT Is a Ruse
I liked most of his movies. VK had a good career, did not get pigeonholed in that general jock type ala Iceman, played everything under the sun, a singer, gunslinger, space mechanic...
I'll never forget the interview VK gave to a TR journo back in 2000s, said he dated the ex-wife of a Cypriot-TR bidnessman A. Nadir, and when he went to her house saw the place was full of weapons, and (stolen) Roman artifacts. Kilmer said he bought a few from her and the local media and gov went into a tailspin, bcz he inadvertantly outed historical artifact smuggling and trade. It was hilarious.. He came across as a free spirit kinda guy, no inhibitions.
Val Kilmer RIP
Right after the Civil War... I knew the mainstay gun of Western movies, the Colt, is army issue, a US government service revolver. The same type of gun shows up in Civil War movies too.
BBC: "Most westerns are set in the 'Old West' (or 'Wild West'), a surprisingly short period from about 1865 to the end of the 19th Century"
"Zoom sucks, we started having editorial meetings in Red Dead Redemption instead. It's nice to sit at the campfire and discuss projects, with the wolves howling out in the night"
More goodies from Douche
WaPo: "Retirees and disabled people are facing chronic website outages and other access problems as they attempt to log in to their online Social Security accounts, even as they are being directed to do more of their business with the agency online... The technology staff did not test the new [supposed fraud check] software against a high volume of users to see if the servers could handle the rush, these officials said."
Can Canada join the EU?
Over! Done!
Politico: "Canada says its friendship with the US is ‘over.’"
#Frontline #Ukraine 03/31 - 04/07
Richardson: "[A] reactionary mindset came to dominate the Republican Party after Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980. Republicans began to insist that anyone who embraced the liberal consensus of the past several decades was un-American and had no right to govern, no matter how many Americans supported that ideology... The idea of a small government that serves the needs of a few wealthy people, Lincoln warned in his era, is 'the same old serpent that says you work and I eat, you toil and I will enjoy the fruits of it. Turn in whatever way you will—whether it come from the mouth of a King, an excuse for enslaving the people of his country, or from the mouth of men of one race as a reason for enslaving the men of another race, it is all the same old serpent'”
Richardson: "Lincoln had watched his town of New Salem die because its settlers—hard workers, eager to make the town succeed—could not dredge the Sangamon River to promote trade by themselves. Lincoln later mused, 'The legitimate object of government is to do for the people what needs to be done, but which they can not, by individual effort, do at all, or do so well, for themselves'… as public roads and highways, public schools, charities, pauperism, orphanage, estates of the deceased, and the machinery of government itself'"
IOW if you modify copyleft licensed software, you have to make your modification public, you cannot make it closed source. The license enforces this. The copyleft license has been challenged in court and it worked. This is a sneaky way of spreading openness. After a while the network effect kicks in, good software is open, more people use it, contribute to it, which means more good software becomes open.
GNU: "Copyleft [as opposed to copyright] is a general method for making a program.. free.. and requiring all modified and extended versions of the program to be free as well. The simplest way to make a program free software is to put it in the public domain, uncopyrighted. This allows people to share the program and their improvements, if they are so minded. But it also allows uncooperative people to convert the program into proprietary software.. In the GNU project, our aim is to give all users the freedom to redistribute and change GNU software. If middlemen could strip off the freedom.. instead of putting GNU software in the public domain, we 'copyleft' it. Copyleft says that anyone who redistributes the software, with or without changes, must pass along the freedom to further copy and change it"
CleanTechnica: "In addition to domestic production, the EU is leaning on overseas markets to feed its green hydrogen hunger... Canada is laying plans to export its green hydrogen to Europe through Belgium, and stakeholders in northern Africa are eyeballing a pipeline to the EU through Italy... Bloomberg reports that TotalEnergies is planning to import green hydrogen from Brazil to supply its petroleum refineries in Europe...
Among those other value-driving projects is the company’s massive green hydrogen facility in Saudi Arabia, attached to the country’s ambitious NEOM planned city. 'The NEOM green hydrogen project in Saudi Arabia is approaching 80 percent completion, with green ammonia production expected to commence at the end of 2026', Air Products notes. Saudi Arabia has already lined up Germany as an off-taker for its green hydrogen. Word of the deal with Germany surfaced in February, and last week it became official...
Belgium tasked its Monarch, King Philippe, to travel to Vietnam with a large entourage for some deal-making in a number of areas including green hydrogen. The leading Belgian electrolyzer firm John Cockerill took a preliminary step towards investing in a Vietnamese electrolyzer factory during the trip. 'A spokesman for the Belgian firm said the agreements were the first step for a possible investment in a Vietnam factory to manufacture pressurised alkaline water electrolysers,' Reuters reported"
Gary Stevenson: "At the moment the story we have about.. what a wealthy economy is, is about individualism. It is about entrepreneurism, it is about every man for himself. I think there are good sides to this but the fact is the only power the poor and the ordinary working people have ever had to protect themselves against the rich is power in numbers, and when you make ordinary people extremely individualistic, they lose that.
I have a YouTube channel that says very clearly "listen, your kids and your grandkids are going to live in really bad poverty and the only way to stop that is to fight together to tax the rich more". I've been doing that for years and the number one most common comment I get on the channel by a million miles is "how do I make more money?". I'm not against one person going out [saying] "I'm going to make money, I'm going to get rich for me and my family". I'm not against that. But we send this message out like success is all about what you put in, when in reality success in today's society is 90% dad.. 10% which you put in"
"@codinghorror@infosec.exchange
I wondered why the history of civil rights was so especially brutal in Birmingham, AL, versus other southern cities (historians consider it the most brutal). Then I learned it was a company town. Now go look up why healthcare is so historically screwed up in the USA. We should be teaching the root causes first"
Retirement money. On the stock market.. People do not seem to the realize the stupidity of that. Take the thing that u want most safe, and put it on the most unsafe assets with legendary volatility.
#AlJazeera #ZionistDox
Jalopnik: "Honda Is Shipping A Hydrogen Fuel Cell With Lunar Ambitions To The International Space Station.. As humanity ventures back to the Moon.. space agencies and their contractors will have to devise methods to use available resources as efficiently as possible. Honda is bringing its hydrogen fuel cell expertise to the table with a new circulative renewable energy system. The automotive conglomerate plans on sending the core of its water electrolysis system to the International Space Station to verify its efficiency and reliability in microgravity. Honda's ultimate goal is to use its technology to support a lunar outpost"
Flight Global: "Partners hail success of hydrogen helicopter first flight [at Bromont airport in Quebec, Canada].. Unither Bioelectronique (UB) is claiming several aviation firsts following the first flight of a piloted hydrogen fuel cell-powered helicopter"
Scott Galloway: "There would be no SpaceX without Nasa, its largest customer. Tesla built its Fremont factory with a $465m DoE loan in 2010, and its first 200,000 cars benefited from tax credit subsidies of up to 7,500 dollars. For years the company was able to report profits thanks to the ‘sale’ of emissions credits to other carmakers. All told, the company has accepted an estimated 2.5bn in government support. And all of those subsidies went through the federal payments machine"
The Guardian: "Climate crisis on track to destroy capitalism, warns top insurer.. 'The world is fast approaching temperature levels where insurers will no longer be able to offer cover for many climate risks', said Günther Thallinger, on the board of Allianz SE, one of the world’s biggest insurance companies. He said that without insurance, which is already being pulled in some places, many other financial services become unviable, from mortgages to investments."
Same issue, would US defend Taiwan commiting all its forces?
u.beckley("United States","China")
10.68
That said, the measure IMO assumes all-out war. Sending troops, tanks, etc. Would US commit those forces to an Iranian fight? I highly doubt it.
US / Iran is terribly disadvantageous for Iran, but Iran's GDP probably does not capture their true innovation capacity because they cannot trade freely due to sanctions. However I would not go crazy to give them too much credit either, they are probably at a TR level, which means 100 to 1 against US.
Code below returns, for country A,B, Beckley measure for country A divided by country B. If it is larger than 1, country A wins.
u.beckley("Russian Federation","Ukraine")
35.81
RU has over 35 times war making capacity of Ukraine.
Mil hardware comparison between countries shows their current build up but not their potential. Strategist Michael Beckley says that potential is captured in a country's GDP per capita that is a stand-in variable for innovation. His combined measure for war fighting effectiveness is GDP per capita x GDP. Backtest on history shows the measure works well.
FYI all our ME maps take its raw data (w/ some TW preprocessing) from Suriyak.
Suriyak: "In response to the ground operation in southern Daraa, local forces attacked Israeli troops yesterday, wounding some of their ranks. Meanwhile, insurgent forces and civilians killed eight people, who were buried today in the town of Nawa.
The insurgency against Israel is taking shape. The so-called Islamic Resistance Front in Syria is gaining followers since its creation on December 17, 2024.
Unlike the Alawite-majority Coastal Shield Brigade, the IRFS is an amalgam of Sunni-majority groups composed of former members of the SAA and SSNP militias as well as rebel factions from southern Syria which have been moving closer to Iran since the Israeli invasion after the fall of the Syrian government.
Indeed, Tehran is trying to maintain its influence in Syria by financing and creating a strong anti-Zionist resistance in the south of the country similar to that of southern Lebanon. Moreover, given the passivity of HTS and allies in the face of Israeli attacks during the last 48 hours the IRFS will continue to gain strength within the Southern Operations Room which could gradually become yet another front questioning the authority of Damascus similar to that of the Druze"
Jim Cramer declares "I'm not a free trader!" only to make the globalist case against tariffs a second later..
I took out my 401k after I left United States. It was 2003 and another stupid, endless war had just started... Sucks to be you if your 401k was on that sham market, fed by the money of the wealthy.
The Buffett Indicator is at 180%, the stock market is still overvalued.
Everyone's digging up anti-Trump quotes now, it's that kind of time..
"@Meyerweb@mastodon.social
'If we nominate Trump, we will get destroyed ... and we will deserve it.'
—Lindsey Graham, 2016"
Middle East Eye: "[T]rade relations between the two countries [TR,US] are already quite balanced.. Turkey recorded only a $200m trade surplus with the US last year, exporting 16.4bn dollars worth of goods and importing 16.2bn"
Only 10% tariff on TR
OSS rules
"@bgergely0@mastodon.social
Just got my first patched merged into the #V8 #javascript engine today. It was a very small change in code, but caused serious performance uplift - an average of ~4% over a number of #webassembly benchmarks, some of which was even over 20%!"