Week 20
#GotMoney
Defense stocks up by 50% compared to last year. MIC is making munee hand over fist.
df = u.get_yahoo_tickers(2024, ["XAR"])
df.plot(title='State Street S&P Aerospace & Defense ETF')
(df/df.shift(252)-1).tail(3)
XAR
2026-05-12 0.519799
2026-05-13 0.505674
2026-05-14 0.488696
Native Apps Should Be Avoided Whenever Possible.. Openly refuse apps, and vocally advocate for the web instead.. Most native apps collect far more data than their website equivalents ever could. They request permissions to hardware, sensors, and background processes that browsers deliberately restrict. The third-party software embedded in these apps frequently transmits your location, device identifiers, and behavioral data to third parties before you even see a consent prompt. This data is in tandem bought, sold, and aggregated by brokers.
"@benlockwood@ecoevo.social
Capitalism provides us with an abundance of things we don’t need (pollution, micro plastics, ultra processed foods, stress, debt) and a scarcity of the things we do (free time, clean air, healthy food, relaxation). But the scarcity is artificial, and a better life beyond capitalism is possible."
"@Hex@kolektiva.social
LLMs can do a lot of the work people are tasked with doing on a regular basis, because a lot of the work people do is bullshit. The majority of what we do isn't to achieve any goal, it's a way to distribute just enough wealth to keep things calm while keeping us all too busy to actually make things better.
We aren't paid to make stuff or do things. We're paid not to riot. Elites used to know that. The fact that they've forgotten how the machine works is evident in its current implosion, and will only become more obvious as they forget the one thing that actually keeps them safe."
TDB: "Trump Leaves China and Instantly Starts Hyping Communist-Style Park"
EnerVenue: "Today's most widely deployed battery solution, lithium-ion, was not built for the long-term requirements energy infrastructure poses. The clearest indication: Large scale energy infrastructure developers are actively searching for new solutions to replace lithium-ion ESS..
In the 1980s, NASA deployed nickel-hydrogen battery technology for missions where failure was not an option and replacement was nearly impossible. That chemistry powered the Hubble Space Telescope and the International Space Station for decades, accumulating more continuous operational hours than any other battery chemistry ever built.
Stanford University's Prof. Yi Cui—one of the world's preeminent material scientists—recognized that the same proven chemistry could be refined for grid-scale deployment at a fraction of its original cost. That research became EnerVenue..
The Aqueous Metal Cell contains a nickel hydroxide cathode and a nickel alloy anode in an alkaline electrolyte. On charge, hydrogen gas is produced and stored inside a sealed, large format cell. On discharge, hydrogen reaction is reversed. The system is hermetically sealed. No liquid spillage. No venting. No thermal cascade pathway.
Lion batteries can cycle less and when they become waste, they are toxic, incredibly hard to recycle.
"[W]hen AGL Energy went looking for a battery chemistry that.. had some attractive characteristics, it chose nickel-hydrogen. That’s a chemistry that until a few years ago been used almost exclusively in space.. AGL aims to build 12 gigawatts of new renewable energy and storage over the coming decade...
Nickel-hydrogen batteries can cycle 30,000 times and up to three times a day, with very low 'degradation' – the gradual reduction in energy storage capacity. Lithium-ion batteries can cycle about 10,000 times and degrade more quickly."
PV Tech: "Construction begins on AU$72 million solar-powered green hydrogen hub in New South Wales, Australia"
Monbiot: "The poor and the middle class pay taxes, the rich pay accountants, the very rich pay lawyers - and the ultra-rich pay politicians"
"France is leading a new wave of nuclear innovation with the development of the Stellarium, an Advanced Molten Salt Reactor (AMR)... This technology utilizes a liquid fuel composed of chloride salts and fissile materials like uranium or thorium, allowing it to operate as a 'fast breeder'"
PR Newswire: "Hyroad Energy and Toyota Announce Strategic Collaboration to Deploy Hydrogen Fuel Cell Trucks"
"@seabass@social.seabass.systems
Google claim that their upcoming laptop is the 'perfect partner to your Android phone' because you can 'access files from your phone as if they live on your laptop' - but did you know that this is already possible, no special laptop model needed?
KDE Connect is completely free and open source software (FOSS) to link your devices together, supported by the @kde charity. It works on almost all phone models, and it does more than just allow you to access your phone's storage. For example, with KDE Connect your phone immediately becomes a remote control for music or videos playing on your laptop or desktop PC!
Don't get drawn in by the slick marketing - you don't need AI to make your life easier with technology, and most of the features large software companies such as Google are promoting have already been thoughtfully implemented by dedicated volunteers in the FOSS community."
"@JugglingWithEggs@mstdn.social
.. #Starmer, a former human rights lawyer and former head of the CPS has corrupted the UK judicial system at the behest of the genocidal #Netanyahu. That the current dying Labour government chose yesterday when attention was elsewhere.. to allow reporting on this official deception of a jury, was deliberate. They want to bury this story. And that for me is the icing on the cake as to why Starmer must go."
The Guardian: "Four Palestine Action activists convicted after a retrial over a violent protest at an Israeli arms manufacturer’s UK site face being sentenced as terrorists despite the jury not being told this... A Defend Our Juries spokesperson said: 'The public will be astonished to learn that in the British justice system a protester can now be convicted of criminal damage for disrupting an arms factory and then be sentenced as ‘terrorists’ without having been convicted of terror charges and with this having been kept secret from the jury'"
The Lever: "The Campaign To Turn Healthy People Into Alzheimer’s Patients.. Drugmakers, influencers, and industry-funded advocacy groups are pushing Alzheimer’s screenings that could label millions of Americans as sick — despite shaky science and dangerous treatments."
The corollary means that chaos, "everyone doing their own thing" is actually a good thing, bcz buys balance sells. As people get scared, diversity goes out the window, traders herd into few positions, they all act the same, at the same time, pushing the market over the cliff.
Increased correlation btw indexes can signify collapse.. An academic researching bubbles and financial collapses put it the best: near the crash time it is not chaos that reigns, it is precisely the opposite. As the bubble pop comes close, everyone starts acting similarly. At the apex, everyone is acting as if controlled from a single center, following a single command: SELL.
The Fear Index - correlations spiking is not a good sign.
"@mk_lobb@threads.net
I can tell we're collectively doing great because I just saw a post about how a meteor is coming for earth and all the comments were like 'good'"
"@benlockwood@ecoevo.social
The reason so many companies fight against labor unions is not necessary the financial aspect. They often spend more money fighting than they would negotiating. The primary reason is that worker organization threatens the very existence of the managerial and ownership class."
404 Media: "On Reddit, Hacker News and other places where people in software development talk to each other, more and more people are becoming disillusioned with the promise of code generated by large language models. Developers talk not just about how the AI output is often flawed, but that using AI to get the job done is often a more time consuming, harder, and more frustrating experience because they have to go through the output and fix its mistakes."
"@ashleygjovik@mastodon.social
My deposition of Apple (as a corporate 'person') went well today.
'Apple Inc' contradicted statements it previously made to agencies, & even contradicted its own court filings in this same lawsuit; didn't know what its own lawyers code-named things as, or complained I did wrong; & still doesn't know exactly which Twitter posts it fired me over.
All of which confirmed Apple firing me was simply gratuitous corporate violence."
"How Car Companies Bought and Destroyed Public Transit"
I always remember the Steve Martin scene #LAStory, he drives his car to visit his neighbor
LA Metro - sounded like an oxymoron, given LA's history
The Guardian: "The roughly 12-mile (19km) drive along Wilshire Boulevard from Los Angeles’s downtown core to its Westside region can be a soul-crushing experience... For decades, Angelenos accepted this time-eating crawl as fate. But this week, traversing this bustling corridor reached another level – about 50-70ft underground to be precise. How about Union Station to Beverly Hills in 21 minutes? That’s the travel time that LA Metro, the regional transit authority, is flaunting as it unveils the city’s first new subway stations in more than a quarter century"
"All problems in computer science can be solved by another level of indirection"
"But what about performance?"
"That's an implementation detail"
Judge Farfelle has good guests on
#PirateNation
Berletic: "While much discussion of the US war of aggression against Iran has focused on region-specific factors, including the myth that the US is fighting Iran on 'behalf of Israel,' there are far more realistic and important global factors that have led to the war and will unfold because of it...
The emerging consequences of the US war on Iran and the regional impact it is having are analogous to the US-destruction of the Nord Stream pipelines and the incremental targeting, sanctioning, and restriction of Russian energy flows to Europe, leaving only US energy exports as an option — an option that was not economically viable until the US eliminated existing, cheaper, and reliable alternatives.
With the US war open-ended — having continued from late 2024 to today — with only months of relative calm between US campaigns of military aggression, the prospects of accessing affordable and reliable energy from the Middle East for China and the rest of Asia are steadily fading.
'Serendipitously,' the US has already begun the expansion of an already massive energy production and export industry targeting Asia specifically.
In 2025, US-based energy corporation Glenfarne and its CEO Brendan Duval repeatedly mentioned the fact that their new LNG project under construction in Alaska could export energy to Asia 'through uncontested and safe shipping lanes.'
No mention was made at the time that it would be the US itself contesting shipping lanes and making them unsafe and thus enhancing the viability of both Glenfarne’s Alaska LNG project as well as the expansion of US energy export capacity in general.
It should be noted that Glenfarne had honed its expertise in exporting/importing LNG through a project in Colombia made possible only by the US sanctioning of neighboring Venezuela and the closure of pipelines that would have otherwise supplied Colombia with gas. Only because of the US-imposed pipeline closure in Venezuela did the importing of Texas LNG to Colombia by Glenfarne make any economic sense."
"Zohran Mamdani to permanently fund NYC libraries and parks. Libraries will no longer have to plead for funding each year."
Whatitdo Archive Group - The Return of Beaumont Jenkins #music
It is claimed BeiDou is unjammable
Al-Jazeera: "Could Iran be using China’s highly accurate BeiDou navigation system?.. Intelligence experts have suggested China has made its satellite navigation system available to Iran."
"@campuscodi@mastodon.social
The Kenyan government halted talks on a Microsoft AI data center after it became clear that the project would consume half the country's daily power output"
#GoToBed
The date on that is wrong.. The key mention was SOTU 91
![[-]](https://s3.us-west-1.wasabisys.com/normal-media/media_attachments/files/116/393/135/006/695/622/original/a4637b8bb443a0a9.png){kind=link}
#Israel #Lobbies
I guess Bell wrote a book, but did not understand what he himself wrote in that book.. Boomers owning a second home while 13% of youth owns only one points to a distribution problem not lack of supply.
Peter Holmes: "Torsten Bell’s work, published in June 2024, focuses on a major British malaise: inequality.. Bell’s work opens with a harrowing analysis of the British position: unequal, unprosperous and stagnating... [O]ne in six baby boomers owning a second home compared to the thirteen percent youth ownership rate in London is striking."
Supply-sider ideology.
"[2024] Labour Growth Group: What is it and who are the 54 MPs who have joined?.. More than 50 Labour MPs have formed a new group calling on the Prime Minister to 'unlock Britain’s untapped potential' and spur economic growth.
The Labour Growth Group has called on the government to deliver on its manifesto commitments to reform planning policy and build 1.5 million new homes across the country, in a letter to Keir Starmer sent over the weekend. The 54 MPs include.. Torsten Bell"
The neoliberal order has been using psy-op tricks on the population for ages. By creating culture war where they posed social issues within prohibition / freedom context, they were able to create conflicts that appeared more important then they were, while destroying the working class in material terms. People's eyes were glued to the show because the faux conflict transmitted to their emotional brain bypassing their intellect.
Culture is emo brain, culture codes form via generational experience and change very slowly (and transmitted subconciously). By marketing social help as freedom, you will help marketing left-wing ideas to the public.
Rapaille, Culture Code: "Every culture is composed of an endless number of archetypes and of the tensions between each archetype and an opposing one. For example, one of the primary tensions in the American culture is the one between freedom and prohibition. We consider freedom an inalienable right. We have fought numerous wars to protect it, and our citizens are willing to die to maintain it. At the same time, however, our culture is very strongly inclined toward prohibition. We believe we shouldn’t drink too much, play too much, or exhibit too much wealth. While the axis itself never changes, where a culture stands on a particular axis varies from era to era. At various times in our history, for example, our culture has found itself in different places on the freedom–prohibition axis (leaning heavily toward prohibition in the 1920s and far in the opposite direction during the late 1960s and early 1970s), but the opposing force was always evident (bootleggers in the 1920s, the Silent Majority in the latter period). This tension is a constant in our culture"
Notice how Gerstle stresses social democracy can be seen as a version of liberalism, that focuses on freedom, where it "frees a person from corporate control", frees them from poverty, joblessness. The word freedom is key here, and might be preferred to a word like "justice", as in social justice, climate justice. The word justice conjurs up visions of a judging structure that brings down the hammer on everyone. The word freedom has a better connotation in the US.
US GDP growth QoQ
2025-07-01 4.375396
2025-10-01 0.482248
2026-01-01 1.989722
"The degree to which [Republican] Eisenhower accepted New Deal programs and his reasons for doing so have occupied historians and biographers since the 1940s. The consensus is that Eisenhower embraced the reforms as a political necessity. The New Deal had won broad acceptance from the American public. Higher expectations of the state were a political reality"
GINI calculation shows some of the same patterns as the compute below. How? GINI looks at wealth distribution, its data is wealth of key percentiles. Living standard index uses income for one group, and looks at what they would spend their money on. Why would the rich getting richer effect the median price of your house? Well.. it does. When all assets become investment vehicles for the rich, the price of your house will rise, your living standard will fall.
Failed the litmus test
Bains is hitting Valadao on the Medi-Cal thing but she's got some problems on her own.
David Hogg: "Follow the money, and it's clear that big business, special interests, and the political status quo are backing Jasmeet Bains.
We need Randy @villegas_ca22 in Congress."
Cal Matters: "California Rep. David Valadao has some explaining to do... Nearly two-thirds of constituents in his Central Valley district — approximately 527,000 Californians — are enrolled in Medi-Cal, the state Medicaid program that provides health care coverage to low-income Americans and those with disabilities. At 64%, Valadao’s district has the highest Medicaid enrollment rate of any Republican seat in the country.
Yet last year, the Republican cast what would become the decisive vote to pass President Donald Trump’s domestic policy megabill, a law that slashed more than $1 trillion from Medicaid and other programs that help the poorest Americans to pay for tax cuts that will mostly benefit the country’s richest."
Things have been going badly ever since 1992, 92-00 looks flat with some gains, but that era laid the groundwork for all the fail that was to follow (deregulation, NAFTA, oligapolies in various sectors). Then the catastrophe started and lasted until 2016, gains afterwards. After 2020 decrease, some increase later, not much difference before/after (Biden). Post 2024, FRED does not have incomes for 2025/6, I used linear interpolation, the results do not look good. There is a stupid war, US is spending money for all the wrong things. GINI confirms this.
targets = ['MSPUS','HLTHSCPCHCSA','CUSR0000SEEB','CPIAUCSL']
income = ['MEHOINUSA646N']
df = u.get_fred(1992, income + targets)
df['MEHOINUSA646N'] = df['MEHOINUSA646N'].interpolate(method='linear')
df = df.interpolate(method='linear')
ratios_df = df.copy()
for col in targets:
ratios_df[col] = ratios_df[income[0]] / ratios_df[col]
normalized_df = ratios_df[targets] / ratios_df[targets].iloc[0]
ratios_df['super_index'] = normalized_df.mean(axis=1)
ratios_df['super_index'].plot(title='Living Standards Index', grid=True)
From FRED (econ indicator database)
MEHOINUSA646N - Median Household Income in the US
MSPUS - Median Sales Price of Houses Sold
HLTHSCPCHCSA - Health Expenditures per Capita
CUSR0000SEEB - Tuition
CPIAUCSL Consumer Price Index, for regular items
If you divide household income by each of these measures, you would get "units of that measure that can be bought by a regular person". If median income in 2010 is 100, education is 10, I could buy 10 units of education for that year, same for housing etc. The result might not make sense on its own but comparatively the measures can point to some trends.
CPI has a housing component too, but I wanted a seperate measure for that and have all combined equally, groceries, health, education, real estate.
It's time to develop a living standards index
Is this what the seasteading movement turned into? At least before they were thinking about building livable structures on water, there could be interesting engineering there.. Now they just want to hole up in some giant steel cage like a rat.
Another libertard bizarro experiment.. it was a nice read
The Guardian: "[2021] The disastrous voyage of Satoshi, the world’s first cryptocurrency cruise ship.. Last year, three cryptocurrency enthusiasts bought a cruise ship. They named it the Satoshi, and dreamed of starting a floating libertarian utopia. It didn’t work out"
There is a story in the book Titan, the J. D. Rockefeller biography. They are discussing a business issue, and a debt related subject comes up, certain amt of interest needs to be paid, Rockefeller does the calculation in his head really fast, and gives the answer. Then he silently pats himself in the back because he calculated it faster than the Jew banker sitting at that table. He is like "I beat a Jew calculating interest". Why would that person be different, better on this matter though..? The calculation is just another aspect of computation, arithmetic.
Jews learned modern finance from Europeans. I've seen some yield chasing mfkers in Europe that would run circles around the finance guru Jew.
The 1992 event of shorting the British pound and "breaking the Bank of England" is usually attributed to Soros, when in fact the idea and the execution of it was Druckenmiller's. Is it because Soros is Jew and it is assumed they are good at "money stuff"?
There are words like "pressure", "tackling the challenge" in the article because a massive trade deficit is not a good thing. Even globalisation-friendly EU does not enjoy trade deficits.
"China recorded its largest-ever trade surplus with the European Union in the first quarter of 2026... China’s industrial production has been growing faster than both its GDP and its domestic demand. This reflects a broader pattern of supply-side expansion that continues to seek global outlets, regardless of US policy. Even a significant rollback of US tariffs would not by itself relieve the structural pressure this creates for European markets... Meanwhile, subdued Chinese domestic demand limits the scope for offsetting the deficit with an increase in Chinese consumption of European goods."
Schuller's idea sill does not explain why there is gravity. The $G,\Lambda$ are free parameters. You could set $G=0$ then there is no gravitational pull. The theory does not say what the value is supposed to be causing the actions we observe around us.
But it is an improvement of sorts, it shows a clear transition from Maxwell to Einstein with minimal assumptions.
🤣 🤣 🤣
Me: "Could you summarize Frederic Schullers theory on gravity? How is gravity derived from electromagnetism?"
LLM: "This is not part of Schuller's framework. Gravity is not derived from electromagnetism in GR or in Schuller's lectures."
Me: "I am literally looking at a Youtube video right now with title 'Frederic Schuller: The Physicist Who Derived Gravity From Electromagnetism'"
LLM: "You're right to push back, and I appreciate the correction! Let me look that up rather than speculate.... [searches] My apologies for the confident but wrong answer earlier! Now I can give you a real summary."
You muck with people's oil they muck with your oil. US has been engaged in some shady biz as of late..
AP: "[There was] an explosion and a fire at a refinery in the New Orleans area on Friday"
Mastodon User: "Boy I was wrong about the Fediverse.. See I had forgotten the one golden rule of capitalism. To thrive in capitalism one must be amoral. Now you can be wildly sickeningly successful with morals but you cannot reach that absolute zenith of shareholder value. Either you accept a lower share price and don’t commit atrocities or you become evil. There is no third option.
So of course media corporations became bargaining chips for the oligarchs' actual businesses. Why fight a defamation suit when you can settle it by running favorable coverage and maybe bankrupting the media outlet you bought as a stocking stuffer? Suddenly I couldn’t find any reliable reporting about anything in the US...
It was somewhere in the middle of DMing with someone who had forgotten more about Greenland than I would ever know and someone who lived close to an RAF base in the UK that it clicked. This was what they had been talking about. Actual human beings were able to find each other and ask direct questions without this giant mountain of bullshit engagement piled on top of it. Meta or Oracle or whoever owns TikTok this week couldn't stop me.
I never expected to find my news from strangers on a federated social network that half the internet has never heard of. I never expected a lot of things. But there's something quietly beautiful about a place where people just... share what they know. No brand deals, no engagement metrics, no algorithm nudging you toward rage. Just someone who spent twenty years studying Arctic policy posting a thread at 2 AM because they think you should understand what's happening. It's the internet I was promised in 1996. It only took thirty years and the complete collapse of American journalism to get here."
NYT: "[2023] The Return of Tony Blair.. Blair is suddenly, and rather remarkably, back in favor. For Mr. Starmer, embracing Mr. Blair sends a political message"
Starmer was Blair's boy, they conspired against Corbyn.. The latest election is a major blow to them both.
#Taken
Paul Graham: “[2007] Eventually the open source world won, by producing Javascript libraries that grew over the brokenness of Explorer the way a tree grows over barbed wire.”
Israel is gnawing on your country bit by bit and you are condemning Iran?
???
"Syria condemns Iranian attacks on UAE"
Greens did well. The message, overall campaign clicked with the voters.
Following the same worn out centrist playbook will not work. The electorate will keep choosing "the other" at every election if their well-being does not improve. UK corporate interests caused this. They attacked Miliband with their "Red Ed" attacks... They attacked Corbyn with antisemitism charges... Now this is what they get - Reform is surging.
CNBC: "UK PM Starmer says he plans to remain in office despite crushing local elections defeat"
IC: "Labour Suffers Heavy Election Losses, Reform UK Soars"
Le Monde: "Inequality reaches record levels in the UK.. Britons now live in one of the most unequal countries in the world, according to a new report based on six years of research. These disparities are evident both geographically and in terms of public health."