Week 17
"All credit is printed money". Guy thinks he discovered the 8th wonder of the world w/ that observation. That doesn't solve the problem. Money, printed or not, can pile up on someone's account, now the wealthy, causing massive inequality reducing everyone's living standards. Excess wealth will chase assets, if it buys mortgage debt it will increase the price of the underlying asset which is precisely what happened before the GFC. Now the median house nearly costs half a million freaking dollars.
Governments must tax for rebalancing. Useless observations like one above are so inane they create opportunities for ideological arbitrage which the wealthy will happily exploit. They will push faux leftist spending wout taxation - all printed money flows to them anyway, and they remain wealthy.
#Ukraine 04/15 - 04/25
Economic Times: "Vincent Lyne, a researcher from the University of Tasmania's Institute for Marine and Antarctic Studies, claims to have located the missing Malaysian Airlines flight MH370. The plane, which disappeared in 2014 with 239 people on board, was allegedly flown intentionally into a 20,000-foot-deep chasm in the Indian Ocean known as the Broken Ridge. Lyne's research.. suggests that the disappearance was a result of meticulous planning and not an accident... [Lyne] believes the plane was intentionally flown into a deep chasm in the Indian Ocean. [He] suggests that previous searches missed the mark due to incorrect assumptions about the aircraft's final moments... Lyne identified a 6000-meter hole at the eastern end of the Broken Ridge as the likely resting place of MH370. He described the area as a hazardous ocean habitat filled with deep pits of fine sediments and narrow, steep sides surrounded by enormous hills.
Lyne's theory contradicts the earlier notion of a rapid plunge due to lack of fuel. Instead, he proposed a 'controlled ditching' akin to Captain Chesley 'Sully' Sullenberger's 2009 landing on the Hudson River, with the plane's wings, flaps, and flaperon damages supporting this scenario"
Researcher Lyne disputes the last moments of the plane, the data on the "7th arc" (which most pre-2018-data analysis used), says that last ping should not be trusted.
They were going to search the Godfrey and Lyne points, plus that white region in the map.
import json, requests
qr = requests.get("https://trise5631.github.io/areas2.js").text
jres = json.loads(qr.replace("parseAreas(","").replace("})","}"))
cs = {"Lyne": list(reversed(jres["areas"]["LYNE"][0]))}
atsb = u.flip_c(jres["areas"]["ATSB"])
OI2018 = u.flip_c(jres["areas"]["OI2018"])
GCM = u.flip_c(jres["areas"]["GCM"])
a = u.flip_c(jres["areas"]["OI2025A"])
b = u.flip_c(jres["areas"]["OI2025B"])
polys = {"atsb": atsb, "OI2018": OI2018, "OI2025A": a, "OI2025B": b, "Godfrey": GCM}
u.map_coords(cs, polys, zoom=4, colors={"Godfrey": "#FFFFFF", "OI2025A": "#FFFFFF", "OI2025B": "#FFFFFF"}, outfile="map07.html")
Found its raw data, almost in json
This was the tracking page for the MH 370 search
Oh well..
Arab News: "Search for long-missing flight MH370 suspended.. 'They have stopped the operation for the time being, they will resume the search at the end of this year' Transport Minister Anthony Loke said"
Mining Weekly: "Hydrogen combustion truck undergoes proof-of-concept trials.. equipment manufacturer Komatsu has partnered with German hydrogen engine startup KEYOU to develop a conceptual 'world’s first' 12-cylinder, hydrogen-powered rigid-frame mining haul truck"
"The pope would often end his speeches calling people to pray for him, a sinner, he would say, like anyone else"
The Telegraph: "Trump to let Putin keep land seized from Ukraine.. The condition is part of a seven-point plan to end the war.. Point three requires Ukraine to refrain from seeking membership of Nato, though the country would still be free to join the EU. Point four covers territory, with America offering de jure recognition of Russian sovereignty over Crimea.. [T]he nuclear power station at Zaporizhzhia, the largest in Ukraine and currently held by Russian forces, would be transferred to American control. Under point six, Ukraine would sign the minerals deal allowing US companies access to the country’s natural resources. Point seven raises the possibility of a new relationship between America and Russia, saying that all US sanctions would be lifted and the two countries could begin to co-operate on energy"
Semafor: "Bannon warned the alternative was someone like Luigi Mangione, the man charged with killing United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson last year. 'He’s treated like Robin Hood,' Bannon said. 'That should scare you to the marrow of your bones, because that’s the alternative if the system keeps going like it is'"
H2 View: "Doosan Fuel Cell and KOSPO Team Up to Deliver Dynamic Grid Solutions with Hydrogen Fuel Cells"
H2 View: "Haffner promises sub-€3/kg hydrogen from new biomass reforming unit"
H2 Fuel News: "BYD Enters Hydrogen Fuel Cell Market with Launch of Hydrogen-Powered Bus.. BYD is making waves again—this time by rolling out its very first hydrogen-powered bus. Known around the world for leading the charge in electric vehicles, BYD’s foray into hydrogen fuel cells shows it’s not just sticking to batteries. Instead, the company’s broadening its game plan with a bigger focus on zero-emission technology"
Business Insider: "A new class action lawsuit accuses Tesla of intentionally manipulating the mileage shown on its electric vehicles' odometers to more quickly void its warranties. Other Tesla drivers not involved in the litigation have told Business Insider they believe they've experienced the same phenomenon..
California driver Nyree Hinton filed the class action lawsuit against the company on April 2, accusing Tesla of using algorithms and energy consumption metrics to manipulate and misrepresent the actual mileage traveled by Tesla vehicles"
The Asashi Shukimbun: "The Japan Atomic Energy Agency said it plans to start producing clean hydrogen using heat from its High Temperature Engineering Test Reactor (HTTR) in Ibaraki Prefecture close to Tokyo by 2028..
The national nuclear research and development agency is hoping to start producing hydrogen at the HTTR, an experimental high-temperature gas-cooled reactor (HTGR), in the second half of fiscal 2028. There are hopes that HTGRs can produce hydrogen in voluminous amounts on a stable basis because heat at higher temperatures can be extracted from an HTGR compared with a light-water reactor, which is the mainstream nuclear reactor"
"@stroughtonsmith@mastodon.social
The European Commission finds Apple’s Core Technology Fee is against the law. It's also too onerous on developers, and too complicated for users, and Apple has not proved these measures are just and valid. Apple now has a chance to defend its reasoning before a final ruling on fines & consequences"
AAah now we find out why they included the scene. It's anti-deportation, pro-open-border propaganda. No wonder the show sucks.
The Holywood Reporter: "Andor dared to go to the darkest places Star Wars could offer. An Imperial Officer abusing his untouchable status to [assault] an undocumented migrant, while his troops are rounding up other undocumented citizens. This is the real world seeping into Star Wars storytelling; this is the world WE live in, reflected in the galaxy far, far away, this is Star Wars at its most political, its most potent"
There was a scene in ep 3 where an imperial officer abused a woman?
Watched one ep, it still sucks
New Andor season..?
The Guardian: "The world’s coral reefs have been pushed into 'uncharted territory' by the worst global bleaching event on record that has now hit more than 80% of the planet’s reefs, scientists have warned.
Reefs in at least 82 countries and territories have been exposed to enough heat to turn corals white since the global event started in January 2023, the latest data from the US government’s Coral Reef Watch shows"
Pope RIP
Fault line from paper
All near the fault line.. Nothing to worry about. All dandy.
fl = u.get_json().loads(open("tr_faultline1.json").read())
u.map_coords(dfq, lines=fl, zoom=9, outfile="map07.html")
There's been much talk about "the big one" that is predicted to hit Stanpoli at some point. Are these the signs of the big one?
Homie got shook?
#Earthquake
dfq = u.eq_at(41, 29, 500, 3); u.map_coords(dfq, zoom=9, outfile="map06.html")
Zeihan: "[T]he absolute lowest grade for silicon as an actual industrial input is 99.95 percent pure. Getting there requires a blast furnace, which typically requires a lot of coal. Overall, the process isn’t all that complicated—you basically just bake the quartz until anything that is not silicon burns away—which means some 90 percent of this firststep processing tends to be done in countries like Russia and China, countries with a lot of surplus industrial capacity that don’t [care] about environmental issues...
The 99.95 percent purity of 'standard' silicon isn’t anywhere enough [for solar panels]. A second round in the blast furnace gets the silicon up to 99.99999 percent pure. Round two is far more sophisticated than round one’s bake-it-pure. China’s GCL Group is the only Chinese entity that can manage such precision at scale, making it responsible for one-third of global supply. The rest comes from a smattering of developed-world companies. This pure silicon is incorporated into the solar cells that make solar panels do their thing"
CleanTechnica: "China’s coal-fired electricity generation took an unexpectedly sharp turn downward in the first quarter of 2025, signaling a potentially profound shift in the world’s largest coal-consuming economy. This wasn’t merely a seasonal dip or economic distress signal; rather, it represented a clear and structural turning point. Coal generation fell by approximately 4.7% year over year, significantly outpacing the overall grid electricity supply decline of just 1.3%. However, electricity demand, a better measure, went up by 1%. What gives?...
China put in place a Whole County Rooftop Solar Promotion Program. Developers had to bid on an entire county’s rooftop solar at once, committing to putting solar on 50% of government buildings, 40% of public institutions, 30% of commercial and industrial rooftops, and 20% of rural homes. That’s paid off massively in the densely populated southeast of the country where demand is highest and free space is lowest...
As a result, tens of terawatt-hours (TWh) of electricity generated by these rooftop systems are effectively invisible when interpreting China’s national grid-supplied electricity data. This has profound implications: the reported 1.3% decline in grid electricity generation does not represent true reduced consumption, but rather a substitution effect—electricity generated behind the meter directly displacing grid-supplied power... Given that China’s reported 1.3% drop in grid-delivered electricity in early 2025 equates to roughly 30 TWh less generation, it’s reasonable to conclude that this hidden solar growth alone might account for much, if not all, of the decline"
BBC: "US sets tariffs of up to 3,521% on South Asia solar panels"
"@luckytran@med-mastodon.com
From the first #EarthDay: Students in St. Louis marched wearing masks to protest smog and air pollution.
The inaugural 1970 protests drew millions, and led to the creation of the EPA and clean air standards"
Firstpost: "Far-right Reform UK to beat Labour to be largest party if elections are held today: Survey"
YNet: "The Houthi rebels were positioning landmines around the port of Hodeidah and other populated areas in anticipation of a ground offensive by Yemen's government forces, with the support of the United States, the Saudi-owned Asharq Al-Awsat reported on Saturday"
Left to their own devices businesses will become monopolistic, globalize, employ slave labor, destroy nature while doing so, cheat, steal, tax-evade.. It is in their nature.
Scared of being in the "kill zone" - I believe that is the definition of monopolistic power.
Kurt Andersen: "[2020] Google does more than 90 percent of all Internet searches, forty times as many as its closest competitor. As far as venture capitalists are concerned, digital start-ups looking to compete with the Internet colossi, no matter how amazing their new technology or service or vision, ultimately have two alternatives: to be acquired by Google or Facebook, or to be destroyed by Google or Facebook. If the latter seems likelier—being in the 'kill zone,' in the Valley term of art—the VCs tend not to invest in the first place"
Politico: "This week marks a moment of truth for Washington’s push to rein in Big Tech — a yearslong and often fruitless battle to curb the power of the world’s richest companies... After years of empty threats from Congress, two major antitrust cases have landed two companies in court at once"
Dems need to ditch Clinton and Obama as examples to be followed and stop pretending they were good Presidents.
Politico: "Doug Sosnik is a longtime Democratic strategist best known for being a top adviser to Bill Clinton. He’s a self-described member of the party’s centrist wing. But he says it’s now time for Democrats to take a page from the progressive left’s playbook.. 'We’re out of power. We can’t get anything done,' he said. But at least we need to be able to articulate a coherent narrative about the future that can appeal to the middle class.'"
CNBC: "China vows retaliation against countries that follow U.S. calls to isolate Beijing"
Arab News: "China on Monday hit out at other countries making trade deals with the United States at Beijing’s expense, promising countermeasures against those who 'appease' Washington in the blistering tariff war. While the rest of the world has been slapped with a blanket 10 percent tariff, China faces levies of up to 145 percent on many products"
Ledbetter, Unwarranted Influence: "The last years of [Ike's] presidency were marked by deep, often bitter conflicts with Congress over the military and national security... These conflicts came to a head in the fall of 1957, with the one-two punch of the Soviet Sputnik launch and the near-simultaneous release of a report arguing that the United States would soon fall behind the Soviets in the production of atomic weapons...
The launch of the Sputnik satellite on October 4, 1957, hit the Eisenhower White House like a targeted missile. Whether it represented a scientific breakthrough for the Soviet Union is a matter that can still be debated. But as a public relations coup, it unsettled the administration more than any other event...
While the public was focused on the two Sputnik launches, Washington’s elite was arguably more devastated by the release of an exceptionally well-timed panel study — delivered four days after the second Sputnik orbit — that appeared to show the Soviet military threat was even greater than the administration thought. Entitled 'Deterrence & Survival in the Nuclear Age,' it was known informally as the Gaither Report, after its panel chairman, H. Rowan Gaither of the RAND Corporation. The report —classified top secret— cited 'spectacular progress' in Soviet military development after World War II. The Soviets, the authors claimed, had enough fissionable material for fifteen hundred atomic weapons and had 'probably surpassed' the United States in the production of nuclear-tipped intercontinental missiles. They proposed a massive military spending program that would... match the alleged Soviet offensive capabilities..
The period following the Sputnik-Gaither crisis demonstrates Eisenhower’s military-industrial-complex critique in its early stages. [W]ho was behind the faulty intelligence and calls for military buildup in the Gaither Report? The leadership consisted of known and trusted Eisenhower advisors, but there could be no hiding the fact that the billions in increased military spending called for by the panel would benefit many of the very people making the recommendations. Two of the report’s principal directors were Robert C. Sprague, who headed his own business of military electronics, and William C. Foster of the Olin-Mathiesen Chemical Company, a producer of gunpowder and ammunition"
The supposed Tishrin Dam handoff (from SDF to HTS) is not yet visible.
#Frontlines #Syria - 03/24 - 04/19