Week 38
FT: "Oil and gas groups spend $500bn a year 'to stand still' as fields decline, says IEA"
8NewsNow:"'Immediate and substantial reductions' in Colorado River water use could be needed much sooner than anyone predicted, according to a study published last week. The problem: People are using more water than the amount that has been coming down the river, and it could reach a tipping point by the end of next summer. That’s the conclusion of a study involving research and collaboration among four universities.. That means hard choices are ahead unless a very wet winter rescues 40 million water users along the river."
Stevenson: "If you were running a construction company in this economic context of a collapsing middle, collapsing government, collapsing poor, absolutely skyrocketing wealth of the rich, what kind of housing are you gonna build? You are gonna build super luxury housing for super rich people because they are obviously the guys with the money. And then when it comes to ordinary people's housing, you're gonna give them the cheapest possible thing, because you know that they have very very little money, and they basically have to buy whatever they can, [paying with] whatever they can give you.
We we need to deal with this absurdly simplistic view of economics which says things like build build, grow grow, as if that is not what every government for the last 30-35 years all over the world has been constantly trying to do. The problem is inequality... The problem here is not not enough building, the problem here is not not enough growth, the problem here is rapid and aggressive changing in [wealth] distribution, and changing in your relative power position. If you are not a super rich, you are the group that is losing, and that means you get less housing, it's as simple as that.
Build build build, it's not gonna work I often think when I hear politicians say build build build, when I go back to the house I grew up in. There's a massive block of flats now. I grew up in sort of a traditional terraced small row houses, there's a massive block of flats there now blocking out the sun and the you know, that the street I grew up in is basically a slum.. I always wonder when they say build build build, these politicians, are they gonna build massive blocks of flats overlooking their houses? Or are they gonna build massive blocks of flats of extremely low quality housing overlooking your house?"
???. Don't worry about anyone's dominance.. The tech already stalled (if we are talking abt LLMs). Other deep neural net approaches eg vision perform what they can, their ability has been increasing gradually ever since 2010s like anything else.. But everyone has access to that know-how.
"Dave McCormick: ‘We should be deeply worried’ about China’s AI dominance"
Parampil, Corporate Coup: "For multinational corporations seeking favorable rulings against sovereign governments for the 'crime' of reclaiming their land and resources, the venue of choice was the DC-based International Center for Settlement of Investment Disputes tribunal (ICSID).. 'ICSID is not an independent arbitrator of justice,' [an economist] explained to me. 'ICSID is a neocolonial gatekeeper of transnational corporate impunity.'..
The tribunal’s deference to international capital was baked into its structure. The ICSID was established in 1966 as a subsidiary of the World Bank Group, and the president of the World Bank—historically a former US official or banking executive—also served as president of the tribunal. At ICSID, investor-state disputes were overseen and resolved by three arbitrators: one selected by the state, one selected by the investor, and a third typically selected by the World Bank president.
'Arbitrators are heavily biased toward commercial—not public—law, and are mostly from law firms heavily associated with transnational corporations,' explained Arauz. 'The cases are almost always against states of the Global South.'
Arauz noted that according to ICSID treaties, corporate entities are allowed to initiate arbitration against states, yet states cannot file arbitrations against corporations, arguing such rules 'structurally demonstrated that ICSID is intentionally designed to exclusively attend to the interests of transnational corporations.'
Crystallex initiated arbitration against Venezuela’s government at ICSID in February 2011, asserting Caracas owed it $3.16 billion plus interest for its expropriation of Las Cristinas despite the fact that the mine was never operational. ICSID sided with Crystallex and ordered Venezuela’s government to pay the company 1.2 billion plus interest in April 2016, declaring Caracas’s decision to nationalize its natural gold supply was made 'for purely political reasons.'"
Artificial Superintelligence is coming for you. Run for your lives
Big fail
Martin Bauer: "this is what a Transformer found after looking at 10M solar systems"
Chollet: "A student who truly understands F=ma can solve more novel problems than a Transformer [neural net] that has memorized every physics textbook ever written."
F24: "Zucman tax’: Push to tax the super-rich could make or break France’s next government.. As Emmanuel Macron looks for an elusive path out of France’s political deadlock, left-wing lawmakers have made their support conditional on approval of a tax on the country’s wealthiest households named after economist Gabriel Zucman, whose recipe for more progressive taxation would be a bitter pill to swallow for the French president"
Brutal...
#FreePalestine
The point on radicalism is easy to refute: when Assad was in power (secular, non-jihadi) Israel still bombed Syria. They will simply attack anyone who is near. There is no need to look for terrorists roaming about in the region - the biggest terror threat in the Middle East is Israel itself.
Ryan Grim: "[Israel] commissioned an American polling firm to perform a sweeping battery of surveys and focus groups, coupled with message-testing, aimed at rehabilitating Israel’s image in both the United States and Europe... the research found Europeans in particular 'agree with the language of Israel being a genocidal, apartheid country'.. Israel’s best tactic to combat this, according to the study, is to foment fear of 'Radical Islam' and 'Jihadism,'.. research finds"
IC: "There are moments in history that strip away every illusion we carry about ourselves. Gaza is one such moment. For nearly two years, the world has witnessed a genocide live on its screens. We have seen children pulled from rubble, families starving in tents, hospitals turned to dust. We cannot say we did not know. Every image, every cry, every number has reached us in real time. And yet the killing goes on, the silence goes on, life goes on.
The truth is unbearable but undeniable: we have failed Gaza, and in doing so, we have failed ourselves as human beings."
IC: "European Parliament asks for Recognition of Palestinian State, Upholds halt to Aid to Israel"
Netan personally installed the device under the guise of going to the bathroom? Zio have gone bonkers.
Politico: "[2024/10] Netanyahu bugged my bathroom, Boris Johnson suggests.. Ex-prime minister says his security team 'found a listening device in the thunderbox' after the Israeli PM visited."
#Carlson #Kirk
Charlie Kirk: "[04/03] It’s going unnoticed because so much other news is happening, but the war drums are beating again in D.C. The warmongers worry this is their last chance to get the white whale they’ve been chasing for thirty years, an all-out regime change war against Iran.
A new Middle East war would be a catastrophic mistake. Our military stockpiles are depleted from three years of backing Ukraine. Our effort to reshore manufacturing has only just begun and will take years to bear fruit. War would worsen our already immense deficit and national debt. Iran is larger than Iraq, Syria, and Afghanistan combined. A war would not be easy and could easily become a calamity.
Thanks to President Trump’s restraint during his first term, America has a golden opportunity to pull away from Middle East quagmires for good. We shouldn’t throw that opportunity away so that sone D.C. has-beens can feel tough by sending young Americans to die yet again."
The Economic Times: "Candance Owens has made startling claims against billionaire hedge fund manager and Trump ally Bill Ackman and.. Seth Dillon. Owens alleged a 'high-stakes intervention' involving the two and Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk took place just weeks before his tragic assassination... Owens alleged that.. Ackman,.. Seth Dillon participated in an 'intense intervention' where 'threats were made' to influence Kirk's stance on Israel."
#HarrisonSmith #Israel
#Kirk #GenZ
The American Conservative: "Charlie Kirk Was an Important Antiwar Voice..In the ongoing intra-conservative debate over foreign policy, he championed America First... progressive reporter Ryan Grim posted, on the day after conservative pundit Charlie Kirk was fatally shot, 'There are many layers of tragedy to the assassination of Charlie Kirk, first and foremost for him and his distraught family, and then also for our country which only gets ripped further apart.' Grim added, 'But a third layer of tragedy is that Charlie was genuinely grappling with our ironclad support for Israel in a serious way, and now that journey for him has been cut short.'
Grim shared these thoughts with a month-old video of Kirk being interviewed by Megyn Kelly, in which they discussed being attacked as anti-Semites for merely questioning Israel’s leadership. 'I have less ability sometimes online to criticize the Israeli government without backlash than actual Israelis do,' Kirk observed. ''That's really really weird, isn't it?' Both Kirk and Kelly acknowledged they were on Israel’s side, but also said that its government should not be beyond reproach.
On other topics, Kirk’s anti-war, America First views were undeniable. Six months ago, Kirk, a vocal opponent of the U.S. sending aid to Ukraine, said of America’s role in that country’s war with Russia, 'You have to ask the very simple question: Who benefits from peace and who benefits from war?... The people of Ukraine benefit from peace. The people of America benefit from peace. Humanity benefits from peace.'
'But then who benefits from the war?' he asked. 'The military-industrial complex, oligarchs of the ruling class of Ukraine.' These were not one-off, random foreign policy thoughts from Kirk, who was assassinated on Wednesday."
#Kirk #Israel
How about this Tony: your Labor implodes bcz of that New Labor centrist shit you started along with your buddy Bill Fucking Clinton, there will be no one left in the party to care about you or Peter Mandelson, life goes on, you go down in history as the man who destroyed an entire political organization.
Hah! Learn to love.. that's f-ing great.
BBC: "Tony Blair once said the New Labour project would only be complete when party members had 'learnt to love Peter Mandelson'".
"I want the country I was born in back. I was born in 1955 into social housing. We kids had a great comprehensive education. Most of the boys moved into apprenticeships and learned a trade. Others went on to higher learning to become our doctors, teachers, lawyers, etc. All of our council rent and energy costs were nationalised, everything went back to the government and councils. This country was destroyed by privatisation and capitalisation."
Programmer: "Why I’m Writing Pure HTML & CSS in 2025.. Imagine a web page that loads instantly, deploys effortlessly, and never needs a security update.. I’m using pure HTML and CSS to accomplish all that and to build things in a fraction of the time.
Building HTML pages is easy.. As software engineers, I think we have a tendency to over-engineer things. If you’ve built web pages recently, you probably used HTML and CSS, but you probably also used a complex framework, over-engineered JavaScript, crazy deployment routines, and more.
By contrast, for me, building pure HTML and CSS pages is a breeze and a joy... Bloated web pages are too slow.. In 2024 a study looked at over eight million websites and found the normal page size to be 2.65MB and growing at a rate of 8% per year."
Counterfire: "In the decade from 2014-2024, when our prisons were filling up and Britain recorded the highest level of incarceration in Europe, more than twenty Dutch prisons were closed as their prison population decreased by more than 40%. How? By tackling health issues, particularly mental health, both inside and outside jail, and by focussing on rehabilitation rather than retribution"
The Grayzone: "Charlie Kirk rejected an offer earlier this year from.. Netanyahu to arrange a massive new infusion of Zionist money into [his organization], America’s largest conservative youth association, according to a longtime friend of the slain commentator... The source told The Grayzone that the late pro-Trump influencer believed Netanyahu was trying to cow him into silence as he began to publicly question Israel’s overwhelming influence in Washington and demanded more space to criticize it...
In the weeks leading up to his September 10 assassination, Kirk had come to loathe the Israeli leader, regarding him as a “bully,” the source said...
According to Kirk’s friend, who also enjoyed access to President Donald Trump and his inner circle, Kirk strongly warned Trump last June against bombing Iran on Israel’s behalf. 'Charlie was the only person who did that,' they said, recalling how Trump 'barked at him' in response and angrily shut down the conversation.. By the following month, Kirk had become the target of a sustained private campaign of intimidation and free-floating fury by wealthy and powerful allies of Netanyahu..
[F]ew American gentiles had proved more valuable to the self-proclaimed Jewish state than Charlie Kirk... But as Israel’s genocidal assault on the besieged Gaza Strip drove an unprecedented backlash within grassroots right-wing circles, where only 24% of younger Republicans now sympathize with Israel over the Palestinians, Kirk began to shift"