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Sonori

@ sonori @beehaw.org

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2 yr. ago

  • 2 Canadians killed in Lebanon, Global Affairs Canada confirms

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  • Perhaps, but to people who have spent the last few decades in the halls of power surrounded by members of a western style military who take it as given that they are a western nation just as formidable as their close allies in Europe and Asia, the idea that the nation itself could falter in such a way is certianly far from many of their minds. Doubly so for a party that is used to bulldozing its way through critical media outlets, courts, and public protests.

    They’ve had general success in previous wars with most if not all of their neighbors, and something tells me the focus in their telling is not on the massive amounts of foreign aid they received in the lead up or duration.

    They may often talk about how any given threat may be an apocalyptic end of the nation, but I don’t think they actually believe it, at least when it comes to the court of public opinion in some far off foreign lands.

    Could a senior politician be so disconnected from the basic reality of their situation by yes men, loyalists, and wishful thinking? Well by all accounts Putin did honestly believe the FSB’s reports that Ukrainians would welcome any Russian forces in droves as liberators, and that any conflict would be over before well before the west could respond, so I’d say yes.

  • 2 Canadians killed in Lebanon, Global Affairs Canada confirms

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  • The path they are seeing is the path for Benjamin Netanyahu and his far right party to hold on to power for a few more years, all else be dammed.

    His far right campaign and political messaging pre October 7th focused hard on how he was the only one strong enough to control Hamas, and on how he could ensure the fires of conflict would burn just hot enough that they would never find common ground and unite with the West Bank (the pretense that Isreal and the US demands they do before the West Bank authority can be recognized as a nation by the UN) but never got enough to possibly harm Isreal itself.

    Between constant legal battles and scandals with Isreal’s supreme court, he was just bearly able to hold onto power when Hamas demonstrated that they clearly weren’t actually under his perfect control, and so now he needs a win a war to play the strongman and distract everyone from what he had been saying up until that point. He needs a reason to shut down media outlets criticizing him, and war powers to run over the opposition.

    He also needs the votes of the farthest right of his far right party, and thusly needs to appear amenable to their position of complete Israeli annexation of the West Bank and Gaza.

    All of this means that the IDF must be seen fighting a great war for the very survival of the nation, not a series of hostage rescue or series of commando raids to capture high value targets and more importantly intel. It’s also why he cannot let this end in a ceasefire or give into Hamas original terms of a hostage exchange for the Palestinians being held without charges for years in Israel, but must fight on until whatever passes to the far right as a total victory.

    Little things like burning though most of Isreal’s foreign support and international reputation are at best problems for the future, and maybe even opportunities for campaigning, because when the world turned its back on Isreal only he and his party of strong men are going to be able to keep things going for the average citizen.

  • U.S. to ban Chinese, Russian software and hardware used in autonomous vehicles

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  • Why should I be afraid of a foreign company learning my information, and instead trust a local one that proudly sells it on the open market to anyone that wants it?

    This proposal puts no fetters on what information amarican companies gather or sell to the Chinese.

    And yes, the largest nation in the world definitely stole all their technology, all thouse technology transfer agreements, companies outsourcing their manufacturing lines to it, and of course the hundreds of billions it’s government poured into the R&D of new energy technologies at a time when most western countries were slashing or eliminating their own subsidies and investments had nothing to do with it. Nope, none at all./s

    Don’t get me wrong, fuck the CCP. They are authoritarian imperialists who constantly cultivate racism and xenophobia while openly punishing anyone who speaks out against them, and are far, far more interested in protecting the power of the party’s leadership than even appearing to try and appear actually left wing, but this does nothing to protect american consumers.

    The only practical effect is to shield amarican manufacturers from competition with companies that have not colluded to focus exclusively on the largest, highest profit gas guzzlers they could fit on the roads during the last two decades the instant it looked like their customers might actually have had an option but to bend over and take it.

    Chrysler and GM could have focused their efforts on building cheaper EVs instead of half assing compliance cars and then selling them for enough to ensure that sales would never get big enough to divert manufacturering lines from their high profit margin Trucks and SUVs, but instead actually chose not to.

    Now the government is actively protecting them from competition on a thin pretense, and say it with me now, we know it’s a thin pretense because the government has no problem with Amarican, european, Japanese, and Korean companies doing the literal same exact thing and then selling the same recordings to the Chinese government.

    If the government was actually even the slightest bit concerned about amarican car buyers privacy, it would not allow a company like Tesla where employees regularly pass around clip compilations of the funniest things they’ve seen on the car’s internal cameras to have cellular modems, internal cameras, or over the air updates.

    Instead it says if you want a car with bluetooth speakers or over the air security updates, you must buy the land yacht from the good amarican company that just donated to our campaign and is making a killing on the margin shortly after it looked like even a hundred percent tariff might not be enough to protect amarican car manufacturers from the consequence of their own direct choices.

  • U.S. to ban Chinese, Russian software and hardware used in autonomous vehicles

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  • Boy, it sure is a good thing that there is only risk from low cost Chinese vehicles, could you imagine if security researchers had been demonstrating that these theoretical attacks have actually been trivially done on American and european vehicles for decades now? Thankfully all other car companies are bastions of cybersecurity best practices, near impossible to hack or slip malicious code into via an over the air update.

    Also could you imagine if a Chinese company could spy on you directly and learn personal infomation though your vehicle, instead of buying that same information on the open market from a good american car company instead? The horror.

    It’s just a convenient coincidence that this comes at the same time as the american car industry risked actual competition with competitors that didn’t spend the last two decades building half assed compliance EVs while focusing on selling the public on the largest, highest markup truck and SUV that can still theoretically fit on the road.

    Ohh well, guess Amaricans are just going to have to pay three times as much for new vehicles than the rest of the world for vehicles with similar manufacturing costs, wouldn’t want to risk GM or Fords profit margins after all.

    I sure am glad that the government may not be willing to provide social housing without a five year wait list while you to live in a tent under the freeway and get all your worldly possessions, photos, and documents thrown out by police, but is always proactive about ensuring that billion dollar companies never have to worry about facing even the slightest consequence of their own active decisions to undermine the fight against climate change.

    Biggest /s possible.

  • Three Mile Island Plans to Reopen as Demand for Nuclear Power Grows

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  • Hopefully they’ve fixed the printer .(a really good talk on systemic failures by the way).

  • Chinese solar panel boom threatens Pakistan’s debt-ridden grid | Industry rushes to switch to clean energy as cost of state power network becomes crippling

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  • It will probably happen eventually for gas stations in very rural areas, but keep in mind that you only really need one gas station in a given county staying open to keep gas vehicles viable, and you don’t really need all that much traffic to keep a pump open, especially if there arn’t any other options and as such you can increase margin drastically.

  • "Stalin starved his population!”

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  • Personally I tend to think that the Bengal famine is better compared to the Holodomor, as it is closer in time, area, and effect. If there is a lesson to these things though, I think it’s that it doesn’t matter what economic system you use of the people in charge are fans of eugenics, and that’s why it’s so important that there be strong independent checks on the government and politicians, minority representation, multi-party rule, etc…

  • Oregon’s Largest Natural Gas Company Said It Was Going Green. It Sells as Much Fossil Fuel as Before.

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  • Precisely, their a gas company. Helping the planet means just turning everything off and never turning it on again, so you know the only green promise they want to keep is the green in their share price.

  • It's a pretty solarpunk fact that small, distributed wind turbines use steel more efficiently than big centralised ones

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  • No shit, in a fossilized economy everything emits carbon, and low co2 new steel production is still in its infancy. Nevertheless it emits far, far less carbon than running a natural gas plant for the same power, and as the article points out, can and is continually reused forever with no new carbon emissions beyond that of the enegy used to transport the material and power the arc furnace.

    The startup cost in carbon just means there is a delay in between when a turbine is built, and when it is produceing zero carbon energy. Studies show that even the most steel intensive offshore turbines repay this debt in under a year, and again, this is why we need to be getting as much wind energy online as soon as possible.

    If going to a smaller turbine design means that you save four months worth of startup carbon, but means a wind farm only captures two thirds as much wind energy over its three hundred month design lifespan then going with the smaller design will have effectively cost nearly a hundred months worth of output to save four. While that two thirds number is going to very by project constraints, the reduction doesn’t need to be very large to work out to a net carbon savings, even if you couldn’t recycle steel at all.

    As things like available project land, projected ongoing maintenance budget, and most often capital availabllity ultimately constrain a given projects size and net generating capacity, it makes sense to go for the larger turbines that more efficiently make use of these limited resources, instead of the practically unlimited in this context supply of steel.

    In short, optimizing for steel use is effectively producing kilotons of ongoing co2 emissions to save tons of co2 once.

  • Rule

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  • I mean they’re using an effectively off the shelf reactor which if outputted as promised would fatally irradiate anyone in the area, so i’m not sure the’re really set up to do much beyond separation of fools and money.

  • Oregon’s Largest Natural Gas Company Said It Was Going Green. It Sells as Much Fossil Fuel as Before.

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  • I mean they did go green. An average of ten percent growth in earnings per year over the last five years, seems like things were pretty green over there to me. I mean it’s a gas company, what other kind of green could they have been talking about?

  • U.S. is cracking down on Shein and Temu by closing a loophole that makes their cheap goods exempt from tariffs

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  • I’m not the one who said making China’s suppply chains as transparent as the US’s would end the system of using minorities as prison labor in Xinjiang, just the one who pointed out that the implementation of said transparency here on the same problem has not lead to the end of said practice.

  • It's a pretty solarpunk fact that small, distributed wind turbines use steel more efficiently than big centralised ones

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  • Precisely, good stable wind blowing when we need power is not something we have an unlimited amount of, like times we can recycle steel. The steel in todays wind turbine is the steel in a thousand years from now’s turbine, where as the co2 that got pumped into the atmosphere because that turbine wasn’t enough is also the co2 killing people in a thousand years. The higher you get a turbine above the ground, the less turbulence it will see, and the more constantly it will be in the right range to generate power.

    The more you can count on it, the less battery and hydro you need to cover when the winds not blowing, and thusly the less space and turbines you need.

    As for labor efficiency, i’ve always though of the goal of solarpunk to be a world where we’ve settled out into a way of life that can be maintained long term and where people are free to do what they want and help out where they can instead of worrying about if they’ll earn enough from the megacorp to have heat and food next month.

    While you still need someone to do dangerous and unpleasant things like climbing turbines, ideally you’re only asking as few people as possible to do so as you need.

    And given that even in that future people will still be paying the price in lives for the GHGs we emit today, we owe it to them and possibly us if we live long enough to shrink the river of co2 we’re putting out as fast as we can, as every fossil plant that is replaced by clean energy today is decades of that’s plants cost gone.

  • U.S. is cracking down on Shein and Temu by closing a loophole that makes their cheap goods exempt from tariffs

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  • I mean the transparency available in the US still hasn’t resulted in an end the same system of minority prison labor here at home.

  • U.S. is cracking down on Shein and Temu by closing a loophole that makes their cheap goods exempt from tariffs

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  • Ya, I agree people should be getting a fair wage, I just don’t see how a tax on products sold more directly helps with that in this case. People will just shrug, say it’s still cheaper than the same model on Amazon, and buy it all the same. A company is always going to try and pay the lowest price they can while pocketing the rest, and the best you can typically do is help the workers bargain for more.

    I mean things like BDS can work, but they have to be targeted very carefully and specifically to get a board of directors to take a specific action, and the wider the net you cast the more dilute it gets and the more likely companies will call it the cost of doing busines.

    US condemnation of the system would probably also have a bit stronger effect if it wasn’t using the same system of minority prison labor farmed out to various companies and saying it’s perfectly ethical fine so long as the people you arrested on thin pretext for race get a few dollars an hour that they then spend right back at the prison.

    Put another way, if the EU put the same import tax on products and companies that made things in Mississippi on us because of the general prevalence of undocumented black prison labor in the region, do you think that the we would suddenly change things?

  • U.S. is cracking down on Shein and Temu by closing a loophole that makes their cheap goods exempt from tariffs

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  • This predisposes that much more expensive one sold locally is not also the same model and manufactured in the same factory. When so much of what is sold at Amazon or Walmart originates from Alibaba or bulk orders from said factory, the only difference in the exploitation is if Bezos gets a cut on top.

    Functionally, I think you’ll have a lot more luck pushing for and requiring supply chain transparency from the Amazons and Walmarts of the world, or directly using national economic and political pressure, than focusing on increasing the cost on the small market of people going direct to the source.

    Admittedly though this is less true as it has become more widely known that Temu and the like have the same product selection as Amazon, and indeed that seems to be the actual reason this legislation has been proposed.

    Nevertheless I can’t see the US government taking slightly more of a cut having much of an effect when most of the products which heavily involve Uyghur labor are meant for internal use or export to the third world. You would need to propose serious practical consequences for the leadership of the CCP and follow though on those consequences to force external end to a political project that’s popular domestically like this, or at least a very closely and precisely targeted BDS campaign, and not just continuing business as usual but with higher taxes.

  • It's a pretty solarpunk fact that small, distributed wind turbines use steel more efficiently than big centralised ones

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  • They use steel more effectively, but use other resources like wind, land, labor, and electronics less effectively, and all of which are harder to recycle. It also didn’t mention household or village scale as much as was still comparing very large grid scale systems, which is important as once you get much smaller than that energy efficiency falls off a cliff.

    Finally, while a detailed look into a specific resource can be very interesting, it’s important to take a holistic look at how energy sources compare and not just evaluate on one figure.

    Ultimately, as our ability to manufacture steel is not currently a major constraint to decarbonization, more important limitations like installation and maintenance costs are going to be dominant at least for the next few decades. Similarly as the low hanging fruit like electricity generation make up less and less of our collective GHG emissions, we’ll have more resources like plentiful wind energy to throw at problems like decarbonizing steel, as its still a problem will have to solve sooner or later.

  • Democrats seek to tax fossil fuel companies over climate change

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  • The problem is that people are conditioned to blame the president for the current cost of gas, and that gas should always cost the same. If not, then inflation is too high, never mind that keeping the cost the same means the real cost is falling. Or that right now gas costs two cents lower than it did in 2013 pre inflation.

    Amaricans would absolutely blame the current government for gas going from $3.52 a gallon to the sill subsidized to an extent EU average $7.31 a gallon. Throw in the more realistic costs of actually cleaning up said co2 with direct air carbon capture at a $100 a ton and you get $8.20 a gallon, which is actually nowhere remotely near as bad as I expected it to be, though that would require someone to actually do carbon capture at scale. Electricity of course beats the pants off of all of the above at an US average cost of about $1.90 per gallon equivalent.

    You also have the inflationary effects of the US being very dependent on trucks for most goods transport, due in no small part to rail companies entering a state of ‘managed decline’ and looting said infrastructure for scrap at a time where everyone from China and India to Ethiopia and North Korea were electrifying, and thusly being stuck with trains that cost nearly twice as much to run as electric lines run by an industry of managers who think that their customers are going to replace a single train with gravel with several thousand trucks any day now so might as well sell the tracks off.

    That being said, a high vehicle registration tax on gas and diesel vehicles combined with an effectively free one on new energy vehicles seems to have demonstrated more of an effect, though admittedly places that have tried that have also tended to have a far less subsidized cost of fuel in the first place so it may only have an potent effect in combination.

    Functionally the US also needs an equivalent to or allow import of the French Ami and similar such cheap city cars as well as Canadian style legislation demanding that landlords must install L2 chargers if asked if it wants for cars to still be an option for poor rural people, which unfortunately given the need to cut carbon now and the demonstrated ability of US cities to take a decade and millions of dollars to put in a bus lane it probably does. City dewellers will of course just use bikes if they can get their city to stop wasting money on far more expensive to maintain per person-mile car lanes.

    All in all this problem needs a lot of complex legislation to solve, but I sopose the benefit of WAITING THIRTY FUCKING YEARS AFTER IT DECIDED THAT CONTINUED EMMISIONS WERE A CLEAR AND PRESENT DANGER TO THE VERY EXSISTANCE OF THE NATION is that most of the possibilities have already been tried before so you can pick what works and skip what doesn’t.

  • Jet Fuel

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  • Note, since the 80s the vast, vast majority of piston driven aircraft engines have been able to operate on unleaded fuel. We know this because for decades GA pilots have been filling out the paperwork for an experimental fuel variance and then running these engines unmodified on the cheaper unleaded they got from the gas station down the street without any apparent issue or rise in engine maintenance/failures among pilots that do this. The main hurdles being the necessary and not insignificant paperwork as well as concern over insurance rates.

    From my understanding there was a problem with one series of engine in the seventies that was suspected to be due to unleaded fuel among the more modern product line of a major manufacturer, and while the engine was modified to fix it neither Lycoming nor Continental, the two primary piston engine manufacturers who make up the vast majority of the market, saw significant pressure to drop the official recommendation for unleaded until relatively recently.

    Since the US finally started to get serious about phasing out leaded avgas in the 2010s, and the aditude of its been fine so far so why risk any change has run up against said pressure, both have to my knowledge dropped the requirement retroactively with no modification necessary for the majority of their historical and current product line.

    You might need to re-engine or more likely just get an exemption for flying history aircraft, but the benefit to the hundreds of thousands that live near GA airports in terms of reduced damage to children’s nervous systems far outweighs the nebulous cost of switching the default form of avgas.

  • India’s solar pump market set to expand

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  • The biggest concern in this place is the effect on collapsing the aquifer like has happened across the border in Pakistan. Overuse of water rights is difficult to enforce, but at least farmers had to trade one valuable liquid for another. By contrast with solar your only cost is upfront, and as such farmers are effectively penalized for turning off the pumps and not taking all they can to an even greater extent.

    Now obviously it’s better to not be burning diesel and this was still a problem before electrifying, but it’s still seems bittersweet in this case.