Week 5
NYT: "[Gates] recently brought out his second Netflix series, 'What’s Next? The Future With Bill Gates.' The fourth of the five episodes, 'Can You Be Too Rich?' had people, including Senator Bernie Sanders, the democratic socialist from Vermont, saying definitively yes. It was a mild but real form of self-criticism that few other billionaires would subject themselves to... he supports a tax system that is more progressive. Every year, he adds up the taxes he has paid over his lifetime. He figures he has paid $14 billion.. Under a better system, he calculates, he would have paid 40 billion"
Gretchen Whitmer is great on clean energy. I remember the post below.
Good for you, Shapiro. It looks like he has some positive attributes
AP: "Gov. Josh Shapiro said Thursday that he wants to fast-track the construction of big power plants in Pennsylvania and offer hundreds of millions of dollars in tax breaks for projects that provide electricity to the grid and use hydrogen.. Shapiro, a Democrat, said he wants to start the 'next chapter in Pennsylvania’s long story of energy leadership'.. 'Pennsylvania, it’s time for us to be more competitive. It’s time for us to act. We need to take some big and decisive steps right now, build new sources of power so Pennsylvania doesn’t miss out,' Shapiro said at a news conference at Pittsburgh International Airport"
MarineLink: "Yanmar to Accelerate Hydrogen Engine Production.. Yanmar Power Technology has received Japanese government approval for its production plans for hydrogen-fueled engines and fuel cells."
Offshore Energy: "German specialty chemicals company Evonik has signed a term sheet with Dutch energy company VoltH2 to advance green hydrogen production at the Delfzijl chemical park in the Netherlands"
Marche, The Next Civil War: "The Patriotic Millionaires formed in 2010 with two extraordinary goals: to lobby politicians to increase their taxes.. [Some..] rich know what historians know: every society in human history with levels of inequality like those in the United States today has descended into war, revolution, or plague. No exceptions. There are precisely zero historical precedents that don’t end in destruction"
Higher inequality causes lower growth, see below. There is a reverse correlation between GINI and GDP increase, and, since we shift one series back in time, the correlation suggests causation.
# Get GINI, GDP
df = u.get_fred(1980,['SIPOVGINIUSA','GDP']).interpolate()
df['Growth'] = df.GDP.pct_change().shift(-3)
df[['SIPOVGINIUSA','Growth']].corr()
Out[1]:
SIPOVGINIUSA Growth
SIPOVGINIUSA 1.000000 -0.283214
Growth -0.283214 1.000000
Whose fault is it... Can we also ask why is the military running training flights over heavily populated areas, near known flight routes, close to both the White House and the Pentagon? The military-industrial complex is a sprawling enterprise.. it intrudes into everyone's space. The public does not need more helicopters, more training flights, more weapons, more bombs.
RSF is getting its ass kicked.. They lost most of Sennar and its connection to their main area. They are losing in Al Jazirah, Khartoum, South Kurdufan...
#Sudan #RSF #SAF - 11/24 - 01/31
MV Times: "Amid rumors and speculation that federal immigration enforcement agents would conduct raids [in Martha's Vineyard] on Thursday, schools and local businesses reported widespread absenteeism because undocumented immigrants were staying at home.
Lumberyards have been eerily empty. Some Martha’s Vineyard schools have reported nearly double their normal absentee rate, which officials say is likely because parents — and their children — are staying home over fears of being deported. A proprietor of a large Island business reported that 20 percent of their staff have not shown up to work, what they believe is over fear of deportation"
HotCars: "AVL RACETECH, the motorsport arm of AVL, took a massive leap forward in 2022 by unveiling [a 2.0-liter hydrogen-powered internal combustion engine (H₂-ICE) prototype. With water injection technology and a turbocharged design, the engine delivers performance figures that rival modern gasoline racing engines while offering the promise of zero tailpipe..
AVL RACETECH Hydrogen Engine Highlights
- 150 kW per liter
- Up to 369 lb-ft between 3,000 and 4,000 RPM
- Up to 410 horsepower at 6,500 RPM
Key to this achievement is AVL’s innovative water injection system. By injecting water into the intake air, the system increases boost pressure.. This allows the engine to generate up to 369 lb-ft between 3,000 and 4,000 RPM. The design is backed by AVL’s expertise in advanced simulation modeling and 3D flow calculations, ensuring maximum efficiency without compromising safety or reliability"
Just like you cannot formulate physics by running regression on physics datasets, language, human thought can not be formulated via language data alone. Larger scale produces interesting answers, but no real-world deployable solutions that include planning.
Chomsky is uniquely qualified to comment on LLMs, as he was the creator of formal language theory, worked at MIT, aware of computational issues, approaches in the field.
Paper: "How should the advancement of large language models affect the practice of science?.. Downstream, LLMs threaten the notion of scientific expertise, shift incentive structures, and undermine trust in the literature. Notions of systematic review are undercut by the randomness inherent in LLM output. And most importantly, when someone uses an LLM to generate a literature review, the claims generated are not directly derived from the manuscripts cited. Rather, the machine creates textual claims, and then predicts the citations that might be associated with similar text. Obviously, this practice violates all norms of scholarly citation. At best, LLMs gesticulate toward the shoulders of giants"
Status Coup: "Liza Star, a pregnant fisherwoman.. lives with her family about 1,000 feet away from the Moss Landing lithium plant fire that has sickened residents near and far. Black particles--that seem to be ash—have blanketed the boat that she and her family live in and she and her daughters have been suffering with various health symptoms since the fire nearly two weeks ago"
"@mosseri@threads.net
Threads has reached 320M monthly actives and is going strong with more than 100M daily actives. There’s still so much more to do, but we’re excited about the progress"
People who are paying mortgages (mortgagors?) should not be counted as "home owners". If you paid 1 year of a 10 year mortgage you still don't own a home, you own 10% of a home. 90% of that house is owned by someone else, the bank or someone wealthy who can hold that debt and collects interest on it. The statistics should capture this, eg 10 people owning 10% of a house adding up to home ownership of 1.
u.rottentomatoes("Star Trek Section 31")
Out[1]: {'critics': '20', 'audience': '17'}
#Frontline #UA #RU - 01/26 - 01/31
Marche, The Next Civil War: "You know the problem of inequality is serious when rich people have started to worry that they’re too rich. In the United States, the wealthiest of the ultrawealthy, the kind who wouldn’t notice $10 million one way or another, are forming political action committees opposed to the concentration of wealth in their own hands. The Patriotic Millionaires formed in 2010 with two extraordinary goals: to lobby politicians to increase their taxes, and to explain to ordinary Americans how unjust the economic order is. Two of the richest men in the world, Bill Gates and Warren Buffett, have publicly called on the government to raise their tax rates. 'I have a message for my fellow filthy rich, for all of us who live in our gated bubble worlds,' warned early Amazon investor Nick Hanauer in 2014. 'Wake up, people. It won’t last.' He couldn’t be more right. The Koch brothers have recently shifted their charitable endeavors from libertarian politics to the problem that the new generation will be worse off than the old.
The rich know what historians know: every society in human history with levels of inequality like those in the United States today has descended into war, revolution, or plague. No exceptions. There are precisely zero historical precedents that don’t end in destruction. Since 1980, inequality has been growing globally, but in the United States the growth is most dramatic. In 2015, the top 1 percent of American families made 26.3 times what the 99 percent did, garnering 22 percent of all income—the highest share since the peak of 23.9 percent before the Great Depression. In 1965, a CEO made roughly twenty times the typical worker’s pay. Now it’s 271 times. From 1980 on, the poorest 50 percent of the population has consistently seen a decline in their share of income. American inequality is now worse than it was in 1774"
Europe to the rescue.. They could be the antidote to crass Anglo capitalism.
"@rra@post.lurk.org
In light of US tech oligarchy setting its sights on Wikimedia Foundation, a historical detail I did not know before: #Wikipedia became the non-profit it is today partly as the result of a labour strike of Spanish Wikipedia editors who disagreed with the proposed inclusion of advertisements. Initially, it was not clear what revenue model Wikipedia would get, and Wales moved towards a for-profit model already a year after launch. However, rather than working for free, so Jimmy Wales could profit from their labour via advertising, Spanish contributors forked Spanish Wikipedia as the Encyclopedia Libre Universal. Under the threat of losing the editorial community of such a large language, Wales conceded and set up the non-profit"
Based on all the previous info, everything needed for the law of centripetal force is there, $m,r,v$, plug those reverse engineer Sun's mass, and density. That result ain't the mass of plasma.
But then how far is Earth from the Moon in kilometers? Again DIY old school, time the lunar eclipse, and form a relation with the variables seen here. Aristrarchus did that 270 BC and got a pretty close answer.
The article on Sun's density required prev knowledge of Sun-Earth distance, how to DIY know that from first principles based on basic measurements? This was doable even in ancient times, when it's half-moon we know the 2D placement. There is a right triangle, measure $\varphi$ w/ basic instruments, it's like 87 degrees, cosine is $L/S$, reverse that,
np.round(1./np.cos(np.deg2rad(87)),2)
Out[1]: 19.11
The Sun is roughly 19 times further to Earth than Earth is to the Moon.
Note "the reduction in the velocity of light" statement - with the scheme below the speed of light is variable.
Puthoff: "Textbook presentations treat General Relativity (GR) in terms of tensor formulations in curved space-time.. One [different] approach that has a long history in GR studies.. is what can be called the polarizable-vacuum (PV) representation of GR. Introduced by Wilson and developed further by Dicke, the PV approach treats metric changes in terms of equivalent changes in the permittivity and permeability constants of the vacuum, $\epsilon_o$ and $\mu_o$..
In brief, Maxwell's equations in curved space are treated in the isomorphism of a polarizable medium of variable refractive index in flat space; the bending of a light ray near a massive body is modeled as due to an induced spatial variation in the refractive index of the vacuum near the body; the GR reduction in the velocity of light in a gravitational potential as compared to a flat-space reference frame at infinity is represented by an effective increase in the refractive index of the vacuum, and so forth"
Puthoff: "Gravitational theory.. is recognized to be essentially phenomenological in nature. As such, it invites attempts at derivation from a more fundamental set of underlying assumptions, and six such attempts are outlined in the standard reference book Gravitation, by Misner, Thorne, and Wheeler. Of the six approaches presented.. perhaps the most far-reaching in its implications for an underlying model is one due to Sakharov; namely, that gravitation is not a fundamental interaction at all, but rather an induced effect brought about by changes in the quantum-fluctuation energy of the vacuum when matter is present. In this view the attractive gravitational force is more akin to the induced van der Waals and Casimir forces.. In this paper we explore the Saharov viewpoint on the basis of a conceptually simple, classical model"
Louis de Brogli was JPV's mentor we mentioned earlier. Big shot.
Jean-Pierre Vigier: "The evidence from.. six experiments that bear on the question of the speed of gravity is unambiguous in excluding answers as slow as lightspeed... no serious claim of experimental support for gravity propagating at lightspeed has been advanced in modern times. Attempts to do so have seriously confused changes in gravitational force fields with gravitational radiation (an effect of changes in potential fields), the latter of which unquestionably would propagate at speed c..
When a source mass accelerates, that induces changes in its gravitational force field. The lack of detectable aberration (propagation delay) for those changes means that the distant gravitational field accelerates when the source mass accelerates, in lockstep. To avoid direct violation of the causality principle, the propagation delay must be finite, even though much smaller than the corresponding propagation delay for photons. Because special relativity (SR) forbids propagation speeds faster than lightspeed in forward time, the customary interpretation of that theory is in conflict with, and is potentially falsified by, this result. GR has always implicitly recognized these facts through its equations of motion, which use instantaneous coordinates and momenta rather than retarded ones. That and its reliance on a single frame to define ‘‘coordinate time’’ mean that GR is based as much on Lorentz’s interpretation of relativity (LR) as on SR. These two theories, LR and SR, both employ the relativity principle and the same math (Lorentz transformations), but LR adopts a preferred frame and lacks the reciprocity between frames postulated by SR. Interestingly, no experiment testing SR or LR confirms frame reciprocity. Therefore, because LR is consistent with all experiments, it remains just as viable as SR as a model for the relativity of motion. It follows that the falsification of the SR interpretation in favor of the LR interpretation has no immediate mathematical consequences for GR. The main physical consequence is negation of the proof that faster-than-light propagation is impossible"
As Chomsky said these things are "lumbering statistical engine[s]" for pattern matching which "gorg[e] on hundreds of terabytes of data and extrapolating the most likely conversational response or most probable answer to a scientific question". They are not efficient. So it should be no surprise some found ways of optimizing it. But the optimization is like optimizing an hammer that constantly, wrogly seeks nails to hit, in other words a better wrong tool for a misanalyzed problem.
Chollet: "o1 does represent a paradigm shift from 'memorize the answers' to 'memorize the reasoning', but is not a departure from the broader paradigm of improving model accuracy by putting more things into the pre-training distribution"
Same as o1..? o1 itself was not good enough.. And even o3 will likely fall short of the new ARC 2 test.
Nature: "DeepSeek-R1 performs reasoning tasks at the same level as OpenAI’s o1.. DeepSeek emerged from relative obscurity last month when it released a chatbot called V3, which outperformed major rivals, despite being built on a shoestring budget. Experts estimate that it cost around $6 million to rent the hardware needed to train the model, compared with upwards of 60 million dollar for Meta’s Llama 3.1 405B, which used 11 times the computing resources"
Politico: "Secretary of State Marco Rubio halted spending Friday on most existing foreign aid grants for 90 days. The order, which shocked State Department officials, appears to apply to funding for military assistance to Ukraine"
Here's a simple rule - do not use lithium-ion tech.
This plant was seperate from the wildfires BTW, the shit just ignited, and turned into hellfire.
LA Times: "‘Horrifying’ fire at California lithium battery plant sparks calls for new clean energy rules"
Carbon Credits: "Vistra Fire and Teslas Burning in California: Is it a Wake-Up Call for Battery Storage Safety?"
Lithium-ion batteries likely contributed to the spread of LA wildfires.. if they burn longer and almost impossible to put out, they would contribute to the spread more than any other material.
VICE: "Burning EV Batteries Are Delaying LA Wildfire Clean-Up... lithium-ion batteries.. have complicated the fight against LA wildfires. When those batteries catch fire, they become a raging inferno nearly impossible to put out. A Tesla-related car accident back in 2018 is a tragic example of this. The car crashed, bursting into flames and killing everyone inside. It took emergency responders almost 300 gallons of water and foam to extinguish the fire. After everyone thought the blaze was subdued, responders were loading the Tesla for removal when the battery ignited again, entirely on its own. The fires are so intense and difficult to combat that a common tactic for battling them is to not battle them at all — just let them burn until there’s nothing left.
Bloomberg: "Burning Teslas in LA Add to Toxic Mix Hindering Wildfire Cleanup.. As the smoke clears from devastating Los Angeles wildfires, efforts to clean up the affected areas are being complicated by burnt-out electric and hybrid vehicles and home-battery storage systems.
Lithium batteries from Tesla Inc., along with those from other carmakers, have added to the mix of toxic materials requiring specialized removal in the wake of the fires, delaying the fire victims’ return to their properties.
'A lot of the cars in the evacuation area were lithium batteries,' said Jacqui Irwin, a state assembly member representing the Pacific Palisades, one of the neighborhoods hardest hit by the fires. 'We’ve heard from firefighters that those lithium batteries burned fires near homes – like those with power walls – for much longer.'.. Fires in lithium batteries can require large amounts of water to put out"
Wendell Pierce is the new Perry White. I have to see this.
The National: "In a statement marking the one-year anniversary of the ICJ saying that Palestinians’ right to be protected from genocide faced a 'plausible' risk from Israel, Amnesty International said the UK Government had 'contributed to Israel’s impunity and risked British complicity in serious crimes against international law'"
Section 31 was not part of Roddenberry canon, it was added later, during the Deep Space Nine era where the storylines also displayed frequent usage of munee, capitalist Ferrengi were normalized, and other weirdo shit was there... DS9 is the worst of the bunch IMO until its record was beaten by ST Discovery.
#Burr #Kimmel
There is no deep state in US today
#FreeLuigi
The movie is about "Section 31" the deep state of the Federation. Today's corporate power via their movies would rather have you think about a futuristic deep state which evokes images of bureucratic opression, this way you fear government structures today, with that fear tell the gov not to tax the rich (anything gov does is bad), and the current privatized dystopia, a fascistic corporate control mechanisms continue. Thankfully the movie sucks so it will likely create the opposite effect.
Critic: "The only thing Star Trek about this [movie] is some of the names of the alien races, a few references here and there, and some familiar sound effects. There's no boldly going anywhere here, there's no interesting sci-fi concept, no highbrow ideas, no moral or ethical dilemma, no intelligent plot, no exploration, no optimism, and no hope. It's bland, bleak, dark, joyless, and dreadful"
One of those degenerate ones... Jar Jar Ibrahim / Kurtzman type. The reviews aren't good.
There is a new Trek movie?
No Shit
Paper: "In this paper our aim is to show that an increase in wealth inequality is associated with a slowdown in economic growth"
Sriskandarajah, LSE: "The rest is not just politics: how inequality is trumping democracy.. In essence, the exponential accumulation of wealth and power by the 'private few' reduces the capacity of the 'public many' to exercise the freedom to make the choices that shape our lives. The promise that each of us in a democracy has an equal vote and equal say in how our society functions then begins to ring hollow.
Those earning less than a minimum wage are the least likely to be civically engaged... inequality lowers an individual’s sense of trust in others: not in family or friends but in unspecified persons. Again, this kind of generalised trust is a core component of social capital. We tend to have less trust in people who are dissimilar to us, which might explain the striking correlation observed in countries like the US between an increase in income inequality and a sharp decline in trust.
Central to neoliberalism is the push to shrink the size of the state – to see little or no need for social security provisions or any other transfers of resources from richer to poorer groups of society. Neoliberals are steadfastly against such 'redistribution'. But a study by the non-partisan RAND Corporation found an eye-watering level of redistribution in the US in the period between 1975 and 2018 – just not in the direction that progressives were calling for. During this era in which Reagonomics and neoliberal policies were let loose, the bottom 90 per cent of America’s income earners saw a hit to their combined incomes of $2.5 trillion each year relative to the case where their incomes had grown in line with the average(per capita) income trend for the country as a whole over this period"
#Davis #Baud #Ukraine
Doom CAPTCHA
RR's acting took a dive after he became a bidnessman.. it's a long-running sarcastic shtick now rather than anything of substance.
The wife is one of those "entrepreneurial" stars too apparently. When these people are on screen you are not sure whether they are selling products to make a movie, or making a movie to sell a product.
Guy felt up Ryan Reynold's wife, RR is jealous trying to cancel him? 🤣
It is supposed to be 1 person 1 vote. Thanks to inequality now it is "1 dollar 1 vote".
#Frontline #UA #RU - 01/19 - 01/26