Week 19
Sarah Miller: "The Ridiculous 'Everything’s Gotten Better' Guys.. Globalized capitalism may be destroying the world, but it has a great PR department. It’s astounding how many people still accept Steven Pinker’s distorted claim that everything has gotten better under capitalism..
It’s true that life expectancy has doubled in the US since the 1880s. But that was thanks mainly to cleaner water and better sewage systems, and then to antibiotics, vaccines, and perhaps blood pressure reducers. Most of that had worked its magic by 1960 and resulted from government-sponsored programs. Since then, life expectancy gains first slowed and have now gone into reverse.
If things have indisputably gotten better over the last 70–100 years, how come we’re all ready to vote out practically anybody who’s in power? How come life expectancy is falling again in the US? There’s a war in Europe? We’re looking for escapes from reality everywhere from sports to meditation? Globalization is collapsing?"
ScienceBlog: "Australian researchers have developed an innovative system that transforms ordinary human urine into clean hydrogen fuel at significantly lower energy costs than traditional methods... Scientists at the University of Adelaide have created two groundbreaking electrolysis systems that harness urea found in urine to produce hydrogen while reducing electricity consumption by up to 27% compared to water-based hydrogen production. This approach not only makes green hydrogen economically competitive with fossil fuel-derived alternatives but also creates an elegant solution for wastewater treatment, potentially revolutionizing renewable energy production while addressing environmental challenges."
"@arstechnica@mastodon.social
Europe launches program to lure scientists away from the US.. EU will spend over $500 million to recruit researchers and scientists"
The quaternion rule $ijk=-1$ as axiom seems somewhat arbitrary. That statement needs to be tied to something else... Fletcher Dunn and others had a good idea, $i,j,k$ are 4 x 4 special matrices forming a basis, whose square, multiplication gives the results in Hamilton's rules. Selecting a basis is more natural than declaring a random statement, and coming up with two new imaginery numbers.
NYT: "Leo XIV’s Service to Poor Propelled Him to Papacy, Cardinals Say"
CNBC: "Trump's deal with the UK sends a clear message: 10% tariffs are here to stay.. Tariffs of 10% at the very minimum could be the best deal other countries and trading blocs will achieve, according to analysts"
Politico: "Gail Slater, the head of the DOJ’s antitrust division, will show how serious the right is about bringing big tech companies to heel."
Politico: "GOP trims Trump’s sails after spending cuts falter.. On the chopping block could be a litany of Trump demands, including a permanent extension of the tax cuts passed during his first term."
If these numbers are correct, Indian airspace is defenseless against Pak attacks. PAF has 50 of these things and want to buy more, including 5th gen J-20s.
The exchange was not a dogfight, Pakis shot the missiles outside of the visual range. That means their integrated radar, recon systems were better than the other side's, they detected and shot first. The missiles worked they have their own guidance and were not fooled by evasion measures. Pak arsenal is better integrated whereas India's are a patchwork of different solutions put together. The planes lost on their side were Rafales, SU-30 and a Mig-29. Both J-10C and Rafale are 4.5 gen.
According to reports Pakistan's J-10C fighter planes, with PL-15 missiles (bought from the Chinese) downed 5 Indian fighter jets. Proof Chinese mil tech is not to be trifled with.
Financial Times: "The west’s shameful silence on Gaza.. After 19 months of conflict that has killed tens of thousands of Palestinians and drawn accusations of war crimes against Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu is once more preparing to escalate Israel’s offensive in Gaza... This would be a disaster for 2.2mn Gazans who have already endured unfathomable suffering. Each new offensive makes it harder not to suspect that the ultimate goal of Netanyahu’s far-right coalition is to ensure Gaza is uninhabitable and drive Palestinians from their land. For two months, Israel has blocked delivery of all aid into the strip. Child malnutrition rates are rising"
Abramson, The Guardian: "[2016] The Clintons turned the Democratic party over to donors. Can it recover?..[H]edge fund managers and media titans.. had built the most formidable fundraising network ever seen in American politics. They pumped more than $4bn into various Clinton campaigns and related political and charitable groups over four decades. Many of them have been cutting huge checks since Bill Clinton’s first presidential campaign in 1992. In 2016, they expected their 1.2bn dollar infusion to catapult Hillary Clinton back into the White House and were astonished, like the rest of the country’s elite, to see all that money go down the tubes...
Back in 1991, I was one of the only reporters with Bill Clinton at one of his early Hollywood shakedowns. I saw how he loved schmoozing with rich people, how his body language literally changed as he mixed with the ultra-rich.. Bill and Hillary Clinton are the people responsible for turning the Democratic party into the party of Wall Street and their glitzy friends. During his time in office, Bill Clinton did little to change a campaign finance system that has always been fundamentally at odds with the party’s egalitarian message"
"@ktdoggett@c.im
'What radicalized you?
Nothing.
Not wanting people to starve and suffer is not radical, it's normal. Stop saying it is radical to be base level empathetic, and start asking what made people into sadists. Call out sick behavior, because kindness should be the default"
"French prime minister François Bayrou signed a $169 million grant supporting the construction of a water electrolysis plant in Normandy’s Le Havre port area that will produce 34 metric tons (t) per day of hydrogen when it starts up in 2029. The company receiving the funding is Lhyfe, which builds onshore and offshore green hydrogen plants. Under the agreement, the French firm will receive 20 million dollars by June and the rest over the next 4 years as reimbursements"
FCW: "China’s Green Hydrogen Surge: 2025 Electrolyser Orders Already Outpace Entire 2024"
Ba dum tss!
"This guy doesn’t just understand sin. He understands cos."
Has some technical chops, nice.
Wiki: "Prevost earned a Bachelor of Science degree in mathematics at Villanova University in 1977"
Commie Pope
👍
Wiki: "In his famous 1891 encyclical Rerum novarum, [Pope Leo XIII] outlined the rights of workers to a fair wage, safe working conditions, and the formation of trade unions"
The selected name gives some clues on how new Pope wants to lead, right? If he is 14th, we need to look at the 13th?
NPR: "Cardinal Robert Prevost becomes the first American pope, choosing the name Leo XIV"
The irresistable appeal of the wunderwaffe.. there is a certain culture around this stuff in US, elevated by corporate media, and neocon think-tank sponsored "fluffers". Guess who benefits from it? Of course the military-industrial complex. They make money, at the same time bottom 50% of Americans hold just 2.4% of total wealth.
Jake Sullivan: "Regardless, despite Ukrainian tactical successes of using these [advanced] weapons beginning in October 2023, Sullivan said they were not game-changers... 'We ended up providing Ukraine with a very significant number of these systems down to the level where, again, we basically have no more to give,' Sullivan surmised. 'And the idea that they made a major difference operationally in the war has not been borne out by the evidence. So I think a lot has been put on this ATACMS decision to suggest, "Oh, if only you’d given ATACMS, the war would have turned out totally differently." And yet, the experience of the use of ATACMS by Ukraine on the battlefield, I think, suggests that that is not, in fact, the case'"
Ledbetter, Unwarrented Influence: "One reason the [MIC] debate has moved so little in the past twenty-five years is the lack of a clear alternative to the MIC. The problem isn’t theory—there’s plenty of theory. But the most visionary work on converting to a civilian economy has usually come from expectations—always dashed—that changing geopolitics would bring about large cuts in military spending. It may be time for critics of the MIC to abandon that fantasy. Barring some extremely unlikely events—a dramatic reduction in perceived threats to the United States, a wholesale rejection of the role of global superpower, or a protracted economic crisis that makes military spending impossible—it is difficult to see how the United States would be sufficiently motivated to eliminate its MIC, let alone replace it with something superior. The United States for the foreseeable future will continue to spend hundreds of billions of dollars every year for military purposes.
Scandals that spotlight ugly issues of military procurement—such as the $1,868 toilet seat and similar outlandish spending that surfaced during the 1980s—often create temporary impetus for limited reform. Such scandals tend to flare up either when the country is relatively at peace or after a military engagement becomes protracted. Many legislative remedies have been passed in the wake of scandals, such as increased requirements for competitive bidding and limits on the revolving door between departing Defense Department personnel and contractors. But scandals have been a recurring feature of the political and military landscape at least since the 1930s, and their reform power recedes as soon as another large conflict looms.
Hence, in the view of many critics, the size and sins of the MIC have grown, not shrunk. As has been shown repeatedly in recent decades, it is exceedingly difficult for the government to take even such seemingly simple actions as closing a few military bases. It is one of the pernicious features of a military-industrial complex that it is nearly impervious to democratic reform"
Anglo-friend Israel threw in their support immediately.
India always had a balanced approach but it is a right rope to walk on at the moment.
Was India perceived as too buddy-buddy w/ the Anglo and somebody wanted to give a message..? There were attempts on upgrading rels with US recently, and right after the India response to Kashmiri attack, IN signed a massive trade deal w UK. Major powers of Brics all have issues with US at the moment.. The attack is obscene in its daring that it has to be some kind of message.
BBC: "UK and India agree trade deal after three years of talks"
"The 2025 Pahalgam attack was.. in the Indian-administered Jammu and Kashmir.. This incident is considered the deadliest attack on civilians in India since the 2008 Mumbai attacks"
Let's see how ticket sales turn out.. Heard TB is not too Woke, I might go see this one
Is MCU back from the dead?
u.rottentomatoes("Thunderbolts")
Out[1]: {'critics': '88', 'audience': '94'}
Hughes: "Instead of wallowing in chaos, as if our job is to give the market what 'it' demands, we can harness markets to work for our needs. 'Capitalism needs to be cared for by policymakers,' Secretary of State Marco Rubio recently wrote. 'Our economy is supposed to work for our nation; our nation does not work for our economy'"
Hughes, Marketcrafters: "The stubborn persistence of the language of 'market failure' and 'government intervention' reinforces a faulty vision of how the economy works. There is no sequence where markets exist first, before a governance structure. Just as there was no state of nature where humans existed without a social order, there was never a time when markets flourished without a political order. The core flaw of the 'market failure' paradigm is that it casts the government as a reactive parental figure—one who merely corrects missteps or offers aid after harm has occurred. In this view, the government’s role is limited to 'intervening' in markets only after problems arise, much like a parent scolding a child for misbehaving on the playground. This notion of state interference with natural market forces reinforces a false market-government dichotomy, sets up the state in the role of nefarious nanny, and constrains its capacity to foster widespread prosperity"
The impression I get is US agreed not to attack Houthis in return US Navy not being a target. But ISR shipping continues to be a target.
Reuters: "US-Houthi ceasefire deal does not include Israel, says Houthi spokesperson"
NBC News: "Second fighter jet crashes into the sea after landing failure on USS Harry S. Truman"
Bessent: "[W]e’re reading every day what’s happening with factories in China. And from an academic point of view, I can tell you that the history of trade battles, we are the deficit country. The surplus country always has the most to lose"
CNBC: "China announces sweeping measures to ease policy in bid to boost trade-war hit economy.. China will cut its key policy rate by 10 basis points and lower the reserve requirement ratio by 50 basis points"
Dessler: "This study focuses on the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) electricity market in Texas and demonstrates how the increase in temperature due to climate change is already driving large increases in electricity demand and total electricity costs. Results show that, compared to a 1950–80 baseline climate, electricity demand in 2023 was 1.9 GW (3.9%) higher because of the extreme temperatures of that year - climate change contributed 47% of this increase, with the rest coming from short-term climate variability"
Creative regurgitation, making one thing look like another, based on examples the net is already full of? Converting programming code from language to another is such a task, LLMs fittingly do fine at this.. Just don't ask them to think.
"@peter@thepit.social
'AI is just like the early web!' ok but did Netscape ever do this"
Reuters: "TotalEnergies seeks permit for $16 billion green hydrogen project in Chile"
ProPublica "[The] slashing of budgets and staff have Great Lakes scientists concerned that they have lost the ability to protect the public from toxic algal blooms, which can kill animals and sicken people."
Jack Diéval et Le Paris Jazz Quartet - Green Water #music
#Unzicker #Kundt
If singularities are eliminated from the field equations, black hole hypothesis is automatically debunked.
Wolfgang Kundt: "There is now a group of young theorists in the world who think that the ultimate field equations should not allow for singularities, because they describe measurements, and our measurements never get something singular. Our measurements get something finite, otherwise it's not a physical. So good theories are free of singularities, [the ones with singularities] must not be admitted. And we notice now we don't need them, we don't need them because our neutron stars stay regular. Our measurements.. will stay regular, and finite"
The Times of Israel: "Waltz’s coordination with Netanyahu on Iran strike contributed to his firing.. Washington Post quotes US officials saying that ousted security adviser pushed policy ‘in direction Trump wasn’t comfortable with’"
Doctorow: "To make a computer ignore its owner.. the manufacturer has to build in a bunch of software countermeasures to stop you from reconfiguring or installing software of your choosing on it. And sure, that software might be able to withstand the attempts of normies like you and me to bypass it, but given that we’d all rather have the final say over how our computers work, someone is gonna figure out how to get around that software. I mean, show me a 10-foot fence and I’ll show you an 11-foot ladder, right?
To stop that from happening, Congress passed the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Despite the word “copyright” appearing in the name of the law, it’s not really about defending copyright, it’s about defending business models. Under Section 1201 of the DMCA, helping someone bypass a software lock is a felony punishable by a five-year prison sentence and a $500,000 fine (for a first offense). That’s true whether or not any copyright infringement takes place"
Whoever advocated / initiated the use of this version of Signal knowingly provided ISR, therefore the military-industrial-Likud complex, a backdoor into US gov communications.
404 Media: "The Signal Clone the Trump Admin Uses Was Hacked.. A hacker has breached and stolen customer data from TeleMessage, an obscure Israeli company that sells modified versions of Signal and other messaging apps to the U.S. government to archive messages, 404 Media has learned. The data stolen by the hacker contains the contents of some direct messages and group chats sent using its Signal clone, as well as modified versions of WhatsApp, Telegram, and WeChat. TeleMessage was recently the center of a wave of media coverage after Mike Waltz accidentally revealed he used the tool in a cabinet meeting"
Kennedy was good to MIC, it would be unlikely they were behind his death, but on Lyndon Johnson and Texas oil interests arranging for the assasination they would have been a tentative yes. They were happy with the status quo, but after JFK with LBJ they would still get their earnings. Historically we know LBJ escalated the war in Vietnam and via MIC stocks he owned, made himself a billionaire in today's dollars, the only president to do so while on the job. Overall things worked out for the complex.
Hossein-Zadeh wrote about the pecking order here.
The launch of Sputnik unsettled the Eisenhower WH, and the military-corporate interests immediately pushed for more spending, a hoax was created, "US is falling behind", ergo the need for increased military budgets. JFK exploited the issue too before his election, he kept talking about a "missile gap" (btw US and USSR) but there was no such gap, it was a lie.
ProPublica: "Gavin Kliger [of Douche] helped oversee mass firings at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau while holding stock in companies that experts say likely stand to benefit from dismantling that agency — a potential violation of federal ethics laws."
Earth.com: "World’s largest natural hydrogen deposit discovery is worth a staggering $184 billion"
Ledbetter: "Since the early 1950s, anyone who has expected American military spending to shrink significantly in absolute terms has nearly always been disappointed. Many commentators have concluded that America’s military and political elite have exaggerated or even manufactured threats to national security so as to maintain high levels of military spending. While such theories can veer into conspiracy, they were not unknown in the Eisenhower White House. At any rate, the spending numbers speak for themselves. Robert Higgs has calculated that in the period from 1948 to 1989, real military spending in 2005 dollars came to an amount just shy of $13 trillion. The overall trend during this period was for military spending to rise every year, a trend that holds true more or less independently of any assessment of increased threats to national security. Simply put, the fact of the United States being relatively at peace has little impact on how much it spends on its military—which strongly suggests that other forces are at work..
Military spending under Obama (taking into account not only the budget line for the Defense Department but also interest on military-related debt, spending on Iraq and Afghanistan, military spending from other departments, and veterans’ benefits) [was] more than a trillion dollars a year"
Ledbetter, Unwarrented Influence: "The decades-long criticisms demonstrate beyond doubt that.. excessive cost is built into the Pentagon contracting process. In one classic case, a 1979 review of major weapons systems by the General Accounting Office could not locate a single instance since 1969 in which the Defense Department had not underestimated its costs. In the 1990s, MIC critics began focusing on 'add-ons' — money that Congress approves for weapons systems and construction projects even though the Pentagon has not requested it. Perhaps the most notorious example is the C-130 transport plane, manufactured by Lockheed Martin. For decades, Congress approved the purchase of new versions of this plane even though no one from the executive branch had requested them. Over a twenty-year period, only 5 such planes were commissioned by the Air Force; Congress paid for 256"
NYT: "Australia’s Prime Minister Clinches Second Term in Remarkable Comeback.. It was a resounding defeat of the conservative opposition led by Peter Dutton."
UN News: "Gaza: ‘Worst-case scenario’ unfolds as brutal aid blockade threatens mass starvation.. Two months into a devastating aid blockade of Gaza food has run out and people are fighting over water amid relentless bombing, the UN’s humanitarian affairs coordination office (OCHA) said on Friday"
#Ukraine 04/25 - 05/03