Simp

Fun fact the populations of medieval Ethiopia/Eritrea were so addicted to playing chess that the Church had to ban the game every year during the holy month of fasting.

Happy Solar Pessimism Chart Update Day to all who celebrate

SystemD has added birth date storage in order to comply with Brazil and California Age Verification laws. Let that sink in. A Linux init system now handles Age Verification. github.com/systemd/system…

⚡️ NEW: Block, Inc. has quietly rehired some of the 4,000 employees it laid off last month, with some workers receiving offers to return after the cuts were linked to clerical errors.

@DanBurmawy @amasad What have you invented since you became a Christian besides 2006 Iraq War talking points slop

This dude is from Jordan. He recently became a billionaire, primarily because of what Jews and Christians have offered the world, just like every successful Muslim who has ever existed. If it weren’t for Jews and Christians, they wouldn’t have extracted their oil, nor would they have excelled in anything, because historically Muslims didn’t even invent a needle. Yet because Islam informs his worldview, he can’t help but find a way to manifest hostility toward Jews (and, in the right context, toward Christians too), while cloaking it under a different justification. You know, he hates Israel because it’s a destabilizing force, not because his religion taught him that they are the enemies of Allah, the descendants of pigs and monkeys, and Muslims will eventually kill all of them.

This was so controversial to say last year. Now it’s basically a fact—they’re adding to the Python stdlib.

The biggest fumble in business ever might be Philips spinning off ASML, TSMC and NXP Philips co-founded ASML in 1984, then co-founded TSMC in 1987, then they founded NXP They sold each of them for short term profits in the 2000s ASML is now worth $545B TSMC is worth $1.76T NXP is worth $50B Philips today is worth just $27B If they'd never sold, Philips would be the largest company in the EU today, worth $650B Philips CEO Cor Boonstra called it "making money with the success of the past" 🤡

@CJHandmer when should we see Terraform start pumping natural gas

Some thoughts on destruction of oil and gas infrastructure in the Gulf. It is not exactly a new insight that modern economies operate on oil. Oil access, synthesis, and interdiction was a major theater of WW2. 100 years ago oil-poor nations spent heavily and participated in terrible wars over oil. See, for example, the Combined Bombing Offensive, Operation Tidal Wave, and the destruction of the Leuna synthetic fuel plants, not to mention the effectiveness of the submarine war in the waters around Japan. In 2022, energy producer Russia invaded Ukraine, instantly throwing into stark relief the idiocy of European energy policy, where an unholy alliance of heavily regulated energy contractors and astroturfed "green" activists managed to get Germany to shut down their nuclear industry. Even as solar panel production, largely initially developed and funded in the West, grew to overwhelming proportions, Europe insisted on sending roughly $1b *per day* to Russia for access to their oil and gas. If Europe had adjusted course in early 2022, then they would be able to support their power grids and probably some synthetic fuel production by now. The US built nuclear weapons from scratch in 2.5 years in the 1940s in competition with other national priorities at the same time. It's been more than four years since Ukraine's invasion. But no, they did sweet fuck all about ensuring energy sovereignty. Indeed, they even went in the other direction. Britain concentrated government resources on cracking down on free speech and stopped drilling for oil. The continent continued their ill-informed blanket ban on fracking, and working age people continued to pay the price, in the form of ever higher costs, ever higher taxes, ever poorer public services, ever dropping fertility. What about the rest of the oil importing developed world? France and Japan maintained their nuclear industry, their navies, their shipping industries and the fungibility of their supply - to an extent - even as they continued to actively burn up their economies in other more insidious ways. New Zealand shut down their last refinery. Australia exports a lot of crude and gas but mostly lacks the ability to close their supply chain in their own borders, and fuel prices have almost doubled. California continued to ban new drilling and continues to wage open regulatory warfare against their oil refineries, perversely increasing oil-related air pollution in the state from foreign oil tanker imports and pushing gasoline prices ever higher. More of the world has attempted to switch to natural gas supply, with investments exceeding $1t on gas import and export terminals, as though it's some fundamental law of nature that hydrocarbons must cross an ocean before they're used. As though the US fracking boom will last forever, or Asian demand growth won't see European prices continue to increase, further crushing their economic dynamism. I have been in the room with various Asian and European energy ministers and have asked them point blank: What's your plan? I have never gotten a better answer than a shrug, as though they'll muddle through and soon it'll be someone else's problem. The best time to get serious about domestic energy supply chains was four years ago. The second best time is today. The pain will ease just as soon as you say the magic words: I must increase my own energy supply! And yes, it is totally possible to produce synthetic oil and gas pretty much anywhere that people live with a solar-based process we've spent four years developing at @TerraformIndies, it is future proof, it is strategically robust, it is price-linked to solar manufacturing cost, which continues to fall like a rock. It's not entirely trivial to do but, given that Europe spends about 100,000x more on Russian oil and gas imports than they do on (privately funded) synthetic fuel development, I am on safe ground when I accuse Europe's leaders of committing gross capital misallocation. Imagine what the synthetic fuel industry could achieve with $1b/day! If you are an energy minister, now is a good time to reflect on fates worse than losing an election. Get back to work!

@PaulSkallas No Greece though

This is a good balance. I'll take it.

@policytensor too early to make such a statement, Turkey can still play a balancing role.

@AlanDersh you should have invited him to your boss's island, he can speak his mind because there are no photos with minors.

Neo Nazi, Jew hating, Israel-basher quits administration. Good riddance to bad garbage. open.substack.com/pub/dersh/p/ne…

@pashadelics they were probably as juvenile back then, but no access to instant social media posts. henry ford even purchased a whole newspaper to JQ post in the Dearborn Independent

People are getting sick of this right-wing coded irreverence and self-deprecation, and the cultural backlash will demand the return of sober, serious no-nonsense professionals as social and material decline accelerates. But we may not have enough of them left. We no longer know how to be those people. The Borg prevailed. Compare these VC clowns to the pioneering greats of industry, science, and technology in the 20th century. Perhaps the real question is how serious men allowed weak and infantile men like this to claim their legacy and use it as a skin-suit for their gambling operations. A succession failure that will haunt the annals of western civilisation for generations to come.

New Acemoglu et al. paper: AI may boost short-term decision quality but can erode the learning incentives that sustain collective knowledge in society, creating a risk of long-run knowledge decline or collapse.

There are a million Paul Ehrlichs of solar.

There is a reason everyone in the third world became socialists and communists in the 20th century. Socialism was all about progress. Socialism is the destruction of the ignorant feudal old ways to make way for the Machines and Factories and the High Modern Rational Society and Mass Education under the iron fist of a vanguard enlightened intellectual ruling elite. It is a society of massive megaprojects, mass housing, infrastructure, and electricity. Compare this to the shithole sugar plantations and malaria of Java, in which the greedy Dutch colonizers and their regional indigenous feudal goons didn't really promise any better dream other than such eternal servitude and humiliation as an inferior race of subhuman inlanders. Socialist central planning under a bureaucratic committee of experts feels and seems rational, obvious, and right when compared to the previous arbitrary order of feudal privileges, aristocratic landowner rent-seeking ruled by snobbish nobles, and an unscientific, directionless, ragtag governance of the Old Society. These reactionary order of things are supposed to be swiftly and violently exterminated in a genocide under the vastly more industrially productive and efficient New Modern Society of Socialism. Had I been born in the sad exploited shithole and plantations of the Dutch East Indies I will almost have certainly been ensnared by Socialism. The old feudal order is extractive and visionless and ignorant. Compared to them, surely we, the sons of the New Forces, are Super-High-School-Level Geniuses who will succeed in building the Kingdom of God on Earth using Reason and Empirical Science and quickly catch up to our colonizers, with extreme violence and terror killings if necessary. Karl Marx predicted that Feudalism is followed by Capitalism, which is then followed by Socialism, which is then followed by Communism. This prediction had been completely wrong. In practice, Socialism is what happens when you failed to transition away from feudalism. When the aristocracy of Imperial Russia succeeded in crushing the natural development of a bourgeois industrial democracy in Russia, the result was not the victory of the aristocracy, but the annihilation of the aristocracy in Russia. The failure end states of capitalist societies are either a centralized kleptocratic oligarchy like Russia or a decentralized kleptocratic oligarchy like Ukraine / Latin America.

@teortaxesTex Interesting how she memed third worldism into prestige discourse, something to learn about it next time you want to buff up your ethnic feud.

Zineb spits facts: only Jews are truly White. If you don't want to support Israelis in their Middle Eastern feuds, you're woke, gay and brown! …seriously though, this is all such stupid exploitation of goys oscillating between kinds of negative polarization. Demeaning.

The stuff the og predicted. Without state control and subsidies, communities will have to find such optimizations.

@CJHandmer This will always be the case, each model pushes the project timeline a few days. I remember the first versions were good at making a landing page, but nothing else, now you can make functional apps but not good enough to handle large loads.

Claude code is derping tonight. It took 3 weeks but it doesn't feel magical anymore. 3 weeks for the scope of my projects to rise and the precision of my communication to fall enough to get to the point of annoyance. For context, I have about 1000 legacy projects that I'm re-excavating for new insights or better graphics.

Paul Ehrlich is the reason why China isn't the highest GDP country yet. The one child policy was inspired by his work.

@_alice_evans Lmao that's hilarious, you would have been a superstar in the 18th century writing about the natives.

As I read my notes from qualitative research, I am forever indebted to the communities across the world who invited me to their homes, shared their lives, and helped me understand global cultural diversity. This is me heading to fajr, staying at an Islamic boarding school. 🕌