Week 47

DIW: "[Our study shows e]nvironmental zones have positive effects on school performance and mental health – More primary school students make the jump to high school – Antidepressant prescriptions, depression and anxiety disorders are declining – Sustainable transport policy should not only be promoted with an eye on the environment"

"Environmental Zones (Umweltzonen) in Germany.. There are three different stickers: a green one certifying that the vehicle is environmentally acceptable; a yellow one for less acceptable vehicles and a red one for those that are still less acceptable... Gasoline- and diesel-powered vehicles without catalytic converters will be unable to get any kind of a sticker and will not be permitted in the environmental zones. All gasoline-powered cars with catalytic converters will get a green sticker. The first environmental zones were established on January 1, 2008 in Berlin, Cologne and Hannover"

He said this over 50 years ago.. Many ppl today voice similar predictions, they too will be wrong.

A.I guru Marvin Minsky: "In from 3 to 8 years we will have a machine with the general intelligence of an average human being"

CNBC: "Walmart's same-store sales rose 5.3%, while Target's increased only 0.3% year over year."

Dune Prophecy not good

Academic degrees should play a lesser role, also, they way degrees are judged needs to change. We need to go back to a fail/pass based education where student study the subject until a pass grade, however long that takes. The system can be turned upside down, pre-recorded videos deliver the lecture, pass/fail judgement will require an actual person, that professional/expert would be part of a DOED team of expert test adminstrators. Exam would be scheduled at will whenever a student feels ready.

MSNBC: "'The diploma divide': David Brooks calls for redefining success beyond SATs and GPAs"

Borrell: "EU says ICC arrest warrants for Netanyahu, Gallant.. is a binding decision and all states, all state parties of the court, which include all members of the European Union, are binding to implement this court decision"

Latest frontline map (below) shows this clearly

TASS: "Russian servicemen control 30% of Chasov Yar in DPR — expert"

TASS: "State Department says US-India relations hit some headwinds due to Russia, BRICS"

#UA #RU 11/15 - 11/23

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Richard Murphy: "What are we going to do when the water runs out? Water is critical to life, but neoliberal economics is threatening water supplies for differing reasons in many parts of the globe, including in London.. it is apparent that [private company] Thames Water.. because of its desire to maximise profits at cost to the consumer [has not] been undertaking the sorts of repairs that are necessary to its kit"

"@monstercollie@blimps.xyz

Never register for a protest

Never register for a protest"

♪♬ Weapons not food, not homes, not shoes ♬

♬ Not need, just feed the war cannibal animal ♪

Good cover.. That's crazy wah wah in the beginning

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One scifi episode has three characters deciding who should do a risky task, one of them says let's decide by short stick, they prepare the sticks. The super duper scientist character, who doesn't want to do the task, tells one "you go first". But whoever goes first has the least chance of picking the short stick, 1/3. After he picks a long one, the others have 1/2 of picking the short stick. Whoever wrote for this series did not know probability all that well.

"Flint’s Mass Transportation Authority will receive $11 million to help add to its fleet of fuel-cell buses and to expand its hydrogen production facility... Gov. Gretchen Whitmer announced the investment and others tied to a clean hydrogen hub project in a news release on Wednesday, Nov. 20"

The Guardian: "More than one in three children in poverty as UK deprivation hits record high.. Study finds almost quarter of UK population living in poverty, reaching the highest level this century"

"Why I Left U.K For Better Life In Russia"

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Al-Monitor: "US isolation deepens with ICC’s Netanyahu arrest warrant"

The warrant probably has something to do with the US UN veto again, the rest of the world keeps trying, and US keeps sending them back empty handed.

NYT: "The International Criminal Court on Thursday issued arrest warrants for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel and his former defense minister, Yoav Gallant, for war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza, dealing an extraordinary blow to Israel’s global standing as it presses on with wars on multiple fronts"

The Guardian: "Israel was told ‘you are not alone’ – but year of war has left it isolated"

The EV Report: "Daimler Truck Secures Major Funding for Hydrogen Trucks.. Daimler Truck has received funding approval for the development and production of 100 fuel cell trucks. The funding, totaling €226 million, is provided by the Federal Ministry for Digital and Transport (BMDV) alongside the German states of Baden-Württemberg and Rhineland-Palatinate"

GlobeNewsWire: "Gulf Coast Hydrogen Hub Officially Launches.. U.S. Department of Energy to award up to $1.2 billion to deliver low carbon hydrogen and benefits to Texas and Gulf Coast communities"

“How Ivy League Admissions Broke America:” David Brooks Explains

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#Ajax #Maccabi

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Understanding Ireland's solidarity with Palestine #AndyClarke

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1996 "welfare reform", who were for, who were against? Bruce Reed, f-ing Rahm -of course- were for it, S12S, Bob Reich against. According to S12S, Bill was mostly delusional about his place in history during discussions ("the poor need me to be prez, I need to pass this bill to remain prez"), like batshit cuckoo. That triangulation stuff truly must have messed up his brain.

SB was seen as an extreme partisan, I believe most of today's Democrat vs Republican, Red vs Blue incessant warfare that is weak in ideology but replete with dirty attacks can be traced to people like him. The uniparty gave rise to this shit, if you don't disagree on economic ideology, how else can you differentiate yourself?

Hart connections again. An "Atari Democrat" as they were called back then, became Clinton advisor.

Wiki: "[Sidney] Blumenthal played a major role in Gary Hart's bid for the 1984 Democratic presidential nomination. Although Hart's bid was ultimately unsuccessful, Blumenthal wrote a speech that was considered a positive 'turning point' that established Hart's viability, and he wrote a cover story on Hart in The New Republic. Discomfort with Blumenthal's political involvement contributed to The Washington Post reassigning him to its 'Style' section"

McGregor, The American Conservative: "The Russian Foreign Ministry recently announced that 'negotiations on the strategic security partnership between Russia and Iran are ongoing… with a particular focus on military cooperation.' China’s President Xi Jinping has assured Iran of China’s support in the defense of Iranian national sovereignty and security."

"@GossiTheDog@cyberplace.social

Anonymous for Justice claim they have hacked “‘ministry of economy and industry’, ‘ministry of finance’, ‘Central Bank of Israel’ and stock exchange” and have started dumping data.

It does look credible that at least some of these orgs have a security issue. It is potentially embarrassing for the Israeli government as it is includes orgs who were tasked with briefing about how to defend against Anonymous for Justice...

Anonymous for Justice have been kicked off both X and Telegram, in a speed run of getting booted off unbootable social media platforms..

Anonymous for Justice reposted some alleged Bank of Israel data using a new channel and got booted off Telegram again"

CleanTechnica: "The massive Chevron Questa molybdenum mine in New Mexico was an environmental disaster of epic proportions until it closed in 2014, and now an intricate, decades-long remediation effort is under way. In the latest development, plans are in the works to produce green hydrogen at the site, with the ultimate goal of enabling the local utility to fill a critical storage gap in its renewable energy profile...

KCEC has been relying on lithium-ion battery technology for energy storage. However, typical BESS (battery energy storage systems) only last a few hours. In contrast, the US Department of Energy is targeting a bare minimum of 10 hours for long duration systems on up to the range of weeks or even months, enabling grid managers to call upon stored-up renewable energy when solar or wind resources fall short, day or night.

With that in mind, KCEC plans to add locally produced green hydrogen to its portfolio. Though hydrogen tends to attract media attention as a input for fuel cell electric cars, it is also regarded as a transportable, scalable energy storage medium. Hydrogen can sit in storage tanks indefinitely, until called into use. KCEC anticipates that its green hydrogen network will provide up to 16 hours of storage, about 4-6 times more than it presently gets from its battery arrays. The hydrogen will also be used to as fuel for the heavy-duty remediation vehicles plying the site"

SWPL author actually ridicules the white-collar types, the PMC, professional managerial class, the yuppie/shitlib "new Democrats". He wrote over 100 posts about them, I liked "Oscar Parties" and "Ivy League".

Stuff White People Like: "Since all white people consider themselves to be 'creative,' they are constantly in need of products and accessories that will allow them to capture their thoughts. One of the more popular products in recent years has been the Moleskine notebook.

This particular type of notebook is very expensive and was quite popular with writers and artists in the olden days. Needless to say, these are two properties that are highly coveted in the white community. In fact, it’s a good rule of thumb to know that white people like anything that old writers and artists liked: typewriters, journals, suicide, heroin, and trains are just a few examples.

Much like virtually everything else that white people like, these notebooks are considerably more expensive yet provide no additional functionality over regular notebooks that cost a dollar. Thankfully, since white people only keep their most original and creative ideas in the Moleskine, many of them will only be required to purchase one per lifetime"

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The only reason this branch of Democrat ever found a breathing room for itself was due to a unique, toxic mix of Soviet collapse, a few initial PR success of high-tech, and a good economy. These events created the environment for anti-worker, pro PMC, pro-business, Republican (now called RINO), Gary Hart politics to take hold in the Democratic party. The situation was unique, almost an outlier. But now Dems are stuck with a leadership that are manufactured to fit that outlier. These people are cancer. They need to be treated as such. Radiation therapy. Bombard the f--kers.

If Ruffini's account of the 2000 election is correct, then Donna Brazil did better as campaign manager than seemed at first. Looking purely at the numbers it was natural to conclude Gore had an advantage but lost, campaigning had to be the culprit. The deeper story seems to be the perception of Gore was so bad he could actually suffer a bigger loss even with that advantage. Only a renewed focus on working class rhetoric alleviated the initial setback pushing Gore within a few hundred votes in Florida.

The protections he undid were proposed by the New Deal to combat the effects of the Great Depression. That's why the "reforms" proved ineffective to combat the aftermath of GFC, the Great Financial Crisis (which, BTW, Bill is also responsible for creating).

"Transforming politics" my ass... he f--ked it all up. Clueless buffoon

Frank: "Whether [1996 welfare reform] was the right thing to do with poor moms and impoverished children was of little interest in Washington. What thrilled the pundit class was the sheer counter-scheduling genius of it all. Welfare reform was the glorious moment when Bill Clinton arrived at the end of his long search for himself; when he and the world knew for sure that he was a New Democrat and he was announcing it, loud and proud. 'When he signed the bill, the final cornerstone of our Clinton revolution was in place,' rejoiced DLC chieftain Al From. 'There would never again be a doubt that he was a different kind of Democrat.' John Harris, the founder of Politico, interpreted it in the same way: 'With his signature Clinton had proven that he was indeed an authentic New Democrat, ready to break with old liberalism, even at personal cost.'

It had all the elements of the magic formula. Welfare reform 'triangulated' between the positions of the two parties, to use the term made famous by Clinton’s advisers. It erased one of the fundamental achievements of the New Deal. It harmed an important constituency of Clinton’s party, meaning the poor, and simultaneously it negated one of the GOP’s most potent issues, thus allowing the president, as his aide Sidney Blumenthal put it, to 'undercut the Republicans and begin transforming politics.'

"End welfare as we know it!". "The era of big goverment is over!". I think it's your legacy that is over, poser fool.

Vox: "[2016] 'If the goal was to get rid of poverty, we failed': the legacy of the 1996 welfare reform.. Ten years after signing the bill, [Clinton] took an enthusiastic victory lap in the pages of the New York Times. 'Welfare reform has proved a great success,' he declared... But another 10 years later, the mood.. changed.. New research had showed that in fact welfare reform fell short in the depths of the Great Recession — substantially increasing deep poverty and leaving families who can’t find work without any cash safety net"

The Obamas are on their 3rd, 4th château now..? Black Bill Clinton gives them valuable speeches too, the business community must really like. But the Obamas are fine... they need to "represent", we'll turn a blind eye to that. Bama is not doing anything his patron saint Bill would not do anyway...

CNN: "[2016/02] Hillary Clinton and her husband, former President Bill Clinton, combined to earn more than $153 million in paid speeches from 2001 until Hillary Clinton launched her presidential campaign last spring, a CNN analysis shows... In total, the two gave 729 speeches from February 2001 until May, receiving an average payday of 210,795 dollar for each address. The two also reported at least 7.7 million for at least 39 speeches to big banks, including Goldman Sachs and UBS, with Hillary Clinton, the Democratic 2016 front-runner, collecting at least 1.8 million for at least eight speeches to big banks"

Speaking fees are a form of corruption.. While in office pol executes pro corporate policies that benefit a business, after leaving office gets invited by that same business to give "speeches" with a price tag upwards of a quarter mil.. No one gives speeches that valuable.. but the value was delivered beforehand, while in office. Now corrupt politician gets paid in kind.

Robert Solow: "You see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics."

The IT revolution wasn't much of a revolution. It ended up being fairy dust on the existing system, inequalities remained the same, and some became entrenched because of a new group that gained "class conciousness" and captured a big chunk of the Democratic party. The shine really started to come off when the "Twitter Revolution" went bust in lands of Arab Spring, and with meager growth in the developed world it became clear tech was not driving anything except a phony rise in stock prices. Krugman was right on this one, as far as output is concerned, "the Internet's impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine". There is a spiffy "web site" for health insurance, yet 85 million people in US are uninsured or underinsured. What did the tech deliver? Nothing except an illusion, the mirage of progress.

Bill Clinton is the figure to destroy because he was the first prez elected after the fall of Berlin Wall, at the same time an IT "revolution" of sorts took place seemingly confirming the "vision" of these fucktards, the followers of Gary Hart. The wall fell, and everything that followed was assumed to be "the new world order", a bizarre concoction of anti-worker, pro-capital, globalisation-ran-wild sentiment/politics... All of that culminated in Bill presidency and most Dems afterwards adapted this blueprint. Sadly, the approach, and the man had glaring deficiencies. Dems need to remove this fudge from their collective worldview, as the eclectic ideo clearly, visibly stopped working. Dems who followed it just lost a key demographic. Somebody needs to pay the price for that.

I have to admit until Peacemaker I liked nothing Gunn had ever done.. But a lot of ppl like his movies so I relied on others' views in further commentary (you need these tricks when you are an all-around shoot-the-shit commentator like me, to remain objective). PM showed me personally he could actually pull off a grander project. From DCEU perspective a lot hinges on the new SM, it is supposed to kick off a whole new cinematic universe.

Great, Gunn federated his Threads, can now follow him on Mastodon. JG is the director currently working on the new Supes movie, the reboot.

"@jamesgunn@threads.net

Sam McCurdy won a well-deserved Emmy for his cinematography on Shogun - now he’s here killing it on Peacemaker."

FuelCellsWorks: "The US Department of Defense is scouting for new clean power resources on its vast and numerous bases. The aim is to cut dependence on off-base civilian electrical infrastructure. New, enhanced geothermal energy systems are beginning to offer that opportunity, and the US Air Force is already exploring how to deploy them for producing green hydrogen...

In September, the Air Force put out the call for vendors to come up with a next-generation geothermal system that can be deployed to produce green hydrogen for fuel cells, with the entire operation taking place on federal property..

The Defense Department stepped up its search for alternative fuels during the Obama administration with a focus on biofuels, only to face pushback from Republican members of Congress. To this day, the transition to biofuel still faces a long, slow road. Now the one-two punch of green hydrogen and geothermal energy is poised to give the Army, Navy, and Air Force what they wanted all along: a non-fossil, zero emission, sustainable, resilient, and secure energy resource"

Barron's: "Brazil's left-wing President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva issued a scathing broadside against 'neoliberalism' on Saturday, ahead of hosting leaders at a G20 summit aimed at economic cooperation.

'Neoliberalism has worsened the economic and political inequality that is currently plaguing democracies,' Lula said at the close of a pre-summit event bringing together NGOs, minority groups and climate activists"

"@ayoub@spore.social

37 towns have been destroyed in #Lebanon by #Israel in 4 months.

Do I need to tell you how the world would have reacted if a single Israeli town was even close to being destroyed?

Every single day we are reminded that our lives do not matter to the so-called international community"

The future can be stagdeflationary rather than stagflationary. Rates will be low and growth will be meager. Corporate Democrats along with Republicans did away with the social assistance that helped society, supplying the free stuff capitalism needs to produce its gadgets and trinkets, they killed growth. The root of growth is know-how (not capital). You can only get know-how by concentrated areas of skill/capability, that requires some form of social harmony, as in safety net where people are not fighting tooth and nail to get basic essentials.

Andersen writes "when Hart ran a second time for president in 1988, one of his tax policy advisers was Arthur Laffer, the inventor of supply-side economics.. and Laffer himself says he voted for Bill Clinton".. A supply-sider... Let that sink in.

White collar professional class likes bidness bcz they see running one as the ultimate professional white collar undertaking. It is about shifting numbers around, shuffling papers and shit, reading/writing, handling departments, esp. if the biz is "high-tech" there is a lot of clickety-click, you can tell someone "walk with me" in the corridor while you pass documents around, spit out some spaz jargon that means nothing, and "look cool".

SCMP: "Chinese scientists says they have developed a significantly more efficient system for separating oil and water in complex emulsions, which could transform the sustainability of waste water treatments and other industrial applications."

They built suburbia, built cars to reach them, built parking lots to park those countless cars in, but home ownership fell out of reach for many they became 'RV homeless' who ended up using those parking lots..

Well some of it is used by the poor, a good use, at least..

"In California, Safe Parking Lots Offer a Haven for the 'Mobile Homeless'"

This is an area larger than the entire country of Switzerland. Larger then the island Cyprus. Montanegro. Belgium.

"America has 2 billion parking spaces. That's [50,170 square kms] of parking"

"@SecurityWriter@infosec.exchange

When I said that LLMs wouldn’t scale well, the AIBros said I didn’t know what I was talking about and this was the path to superintelligence.

Now that Microsoft et al are saying it they 'always knew this was the case'.

Grift."

If that wasn't convincing, look at who is on the other side; opposite of Russia: the Anglo. Opposite of Palestinians: the Anglo. Like late Chavez said once at the UN: "The devil came here yesterday, and it smells of sulfur still today". If you catch the smell of sulfur from the opposite side, you know you are on the right side.

This is the stupidest comment I've ever read. Ukraine was and is a state, Palestinians never had one. The only thing Ukraine had to do act like a responsible state, measure your strength, check your near neighbors, form alliances (yes with Russia, and it was possible) to neutralize them, think ahead for the worst. Ukraine did not act like a state, it acted like a plutocratic hellhole that is in control of US/UA oligarchs. We can't compare that with Palestine.

"Israel's war mongering is similar to Russia's, Ukraine is like Palestine"

#Israel #Lebanon - 11/02 - 11/18

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Doctorow: "While there are many independently maintained servers that provide services to Bluesky and its users, there is only one Bluesky server. A federation of multiple servers, each a peer to the other [like Mastodon], has been on Bluesky's roadmap for as long as I've been following it, but they haven't (yet) delivered it.

That was worrying when Bluesky was a scrappy, bootstrapped startup with a few million users. Now it has grown to over 13 million users, and it has taken on a large tranche of outside capital..

Plenty of people have commented that now that a VC is holding Bluesky's purse-strings, enshittification will surely follow (doubly so because the VC is called 'Blockchain Capital,' which, at this point, might as well be 'Grifty Scam Caveat Emptor Capital')... A VC that understands that they can force you to wreck your users' lives is always in danger of doing so"

How can a decentralized service have a global outage?

"Bluesky is a decentralized microblogging social media service"

He called himself "liberal libertard" at CATO.. ??? So he is left-libertard, against private ownership of natural resources? He probably has no idea... His ideology is being a douche.

There he is, the ultra-capitalist outsider..

Reuters: "[09/06] Argentina's Milei sees gravity-defying poll numbers start to fall"

Kennard: "Keynes.. proposed an International Clearing Union (ICU) with its own independent currency called 'the bancor'. The bancor would be a universal unit of accounting that countries across the globe could use that would track trade deficits and surpluses. An 'objective' unit would ensure that equal pressure fell on both the creditor and the debtor to balance their trade. But such a body would constrain the powerful creditor nations like the US, which were using their loans and export capacity as a method of control. For this reason, the ICU never happened; [Harry Dexter] White [from US] opposed it. Instead, he wanted an International Stabilization Fund and the IBRD. The purpose of the Stabilization Fund would be to reduce foreign exchange controls, maintain steady exchange rates and lend money to nations in deficit. The bank would provide the capital that was desperately needed by faltering countries to rebuild after the war. And this was the formulation that was eventually agreed upon. It completely took the burden off the creditor nations (like the US) in terms of balance of trade. Put simply, there was now no restriction on the amount of surplus a successful exporting nation could enjoy. As a country borrowed more and more, interest rates just rose and rose. This formula was perfect for accelerating the racket’s dominance. Foreign countries became markets for American goods and started to rely, heavily, on US capital.

Not DJT but maybe someone around him..? Someone at the same level as Soleimani, a high-ranking official. If Pompeous was picked for the next cabinet, he'd likely be in the bulls-eye, as he was also instrumental in the Soleimani assasination itself.

NYT: "Iran Told U.S. That It’s Not Trying to Kill Trump"

Rahm Emanuel 😂 If Dems pick that son of a bitch they are finished for another decade, at the minimum.

Politico: "The race for chair — the party’s first real reckoning with its brutal Election Day outcome up and down the ballot — is wide open, with nearly a dozen names floated as possible successors to replace Jaime Harrison, who is not expected to run again. Potential contenders include some Democrats with formidable resumes, including Wisconsin Democratic Party leader Ben Wikler, Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party Chair Ken Martin, ex-White House infrastructure czar Mitch Landrieu and U.S. Ambassador to Japan Rahm Emanuel, among others."

Politico: "As they begin to dissect their collapse in the presidential election, some Democratic National Committee members are concluding that the party is too 'woke,' too focused on identity politics and too out of touch with broad stretches of America...”

Hernandez: "Ukraine President Zelensky laughs at the idea of Trump bringing Russia and Ukraine to the table to negotiate peace..

He says Ukraine is independent and should be treated as such..

Alright then pay for your own damn war, we are done flipping your bill"