REMAIN CALM! ALL IS WELL! Rioting erupts in immigrant-dominated Swedish suburb.
Author Archive: Stephen Green
February 21, 2017
LET’S GET ON THAT: Endless nuclear power can be found in the seas.
The best way to get uranium out of salt water is to dip plastic fibers coated with an organic chemical called amidoxime into seawater. The uranyl ions stick to the amidoxime, and can later be extracted and refined into uranium fuel. The key to its practicality is how quickly ions can be capture, how much sticks and how often the fibers can be reused.
The Stanford team came up with a conductive hybrid carbon and amidoxime fiber prototype that’s better in all three of those areas. By sending electric pulses down the fiber, it was able to absorb up to nine times as much uranyl as previous fibers without becoming saturated. Over an 11-hour test at Half Moon Bay, the team captured three times as much uranium and the fibers had thrice the lifespan of standard amidoxime.
In 2012, a Japanese team estimated that their seawater extraction technique, using previous tech, could be developed for about $300 per kilogram. That was about three times the commercial price at that point, but right now, the price is around half of that. “We have a lot of work to do still, but these are big steps toward practicality,” said the paper’s co-author, Li Cui. “For much of this century, some fraction of our electricity will need to come from sources that we can turn on and off. I believe nuclear power should be part of that mix.”
Anyone serious about cutting carbon emissions has to be serious about nuclear power.
YA THINK? Former Clinton Adviser: Democratic Party’s ‘Technocratic Speak’ Turning Off Voters
Technocratic speak — talking down to the proles — is one way the Left maintains the proper pecking order. Giving that up won’t be easy, or sincere.
The “permanent campaign” was invented by (or maybe “for”) Bill Clinton a quarter century ago, and for better or worse it’s now a permanent part of our political landscape.
MARK ELLIS: Build the Wall, But Realize That We’ll Still Need Seasonal Agricultural Workers.
True, but an official guest-worker program would be much more orderly than today’s mess — and considering the 21st Century’s issues with terror and infectious disease, probably a bit safer as well.
FLY THE OVERLY FRIENDLY SKIES: Pilot Removed From United Airlines Flight, Had Boarded The Plane Out Of Uniform.
The Associated Press reports that the female pilot, who was not named, was not in uniform when boarding the plane recently, according to a spokesman for the airline. The spokesman said that another pilot was brought in to complete the flight, which was delayed for almost two hours.
The spokesman confirmed that the pilot was shown in videos posted to several social media sites talking to passengers over the aircraft intercom. Persons identifying themselves as passengers on the flight said that the woman appeared to be unstable, and was talking about the election, divorce and other matters.
Clearly not the right time for her to be piloting an airplane, or much of anything else.
BELIEVE IT WHEN YOU SEE IT: Russia’s Rostec to co-develop 5th-gen fighter with UAE.
Russia defense heavyweight Rostec will partner with the UAE Ministry of Defence to co-develop a fifth-generation light combat fighter, company CEO Sergey Chemezov said at IDEX in Abu Dhabi Monday.
Development, which is based upon its MiG-29 twin-engine fighter aircraft, will kick off in 2018, and will take an estimated seven to eight years, Chemezov said during a media briefing with journalists. He elaborated in an exclusive one-on-one interview with Defense News.
“That’s not fast, because it takes quite a long period of time to develop,” he said speaking through a translator. “We anticipate local production here in the Arab Emirates, for the needs of Emirates. And of course [we expect development to support the needs of] the neighboring countries.”
The prospect of building a fully modern, fifth-generation jet on top of a fourth-generation platform which first flew in 1977 seems dubious at best. Russia’s current effort at building a stealth fighter, Sukhoi’s PAK-FA, has proven so troublesome that Russia’s partners in India nearly dropped out of the program, and Russia herself now plans to field only a few of the jets.
DUDE, WHERE’S MY TWEET? Twitter Is Now ‘Ghost’ Deleting Offensive Tweets.
Last week we discovered Twitter was punishing accounts for using “offensive” language by removing account features for 12 hours. Now it appears they are “ghost” deleting Tweets they deem offensive.
When a Tweet is ghost deleted, the person who wrote the Tweet still sees it and does not know it is technically deleted. But everyone else trying to find the Tweet cannot see it, and even if you manually enter the Tweet’s URL, it will bring you to a page that says it was deleted.
This was first discovered by John Sweeney at SuperNerdLand whose offensive tweet was ghost deleted by Twitter.
Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey owes it to his shareholders to explain how ghost-deleting is going to bring back user growth.
CLOSE YOUR EYES: ‘Not My President’ Protesters Pepper-Sprayed, Arrested in Portland.
Just yesterday I was wondering how long the anti-Trump “resistance” could keep it cranked up to 11, and even the Portland part of yesterday’s nationwide demonstration was pretty small.
D.C. MCALLISTER: Obama’s Incompetence And Chaos Far Eclipsed What’s Coming From Team Trump.
Even the Washington Post had to admit all was not well in Obama world when they reported that the White House wasn’t ready for conflicts over policy: “President Obama’s advisers acknowledged Tuesday that they were unprepared for the intraparty rift that occurred over the fate of a proposed public health insurance program, a firestorm that has left the White House searching for a way to reclaim the initiative on the president’s top legislative priority.”
Jay Cost of RealClearPolitics was “stunned” that Obama “would be caught off guard by this,” adding that his “lack of foresight” was “absolutely inexcusable.” “How could they not have anticipated this?” Cost asked. “How could they possibly have been surprised that the left and right flanks of the party would not see eye to eye?”
Seems like things haven’t changed that much, at least rhetorically. “But Trump is worse!” many might claim. Yet that isn’t true at all. What’s worse is the way it’s being reported and repeated. The claims of incompetence are rushing like a torrent from every direction and with such hysteria that you’d think the chaos of Armageddon was upon us.
Read the whole thing, which goes a long way towards proving that institutional memory doesn’t exist where it isn’t wanted.
YOU CAN BE SURE THE INVESTIGATION WILL PROCEED FAST & FURIOUSLY: Facing sexism charges, Uber says Eric Holder will investigate.
Full background here.
THE SOCIALIST STATE DEFEATS DECADENT WESTERN OBESITY! Venezuelans lost 19 lbs. on average over past year due to lack of food.
HEADLINES FROM 2005: Venezuela Is a Ticking Time Bomb.
Mismanagement of the economy has created a humanitarian disaster beyond comprehension. The capital city of Caracas is now the most dangerous non-war zone in the world, with 120 murders for every 100,000 residents. Venezuelans live in fear knowing they are more likely to be kidnapped in their own country than are the citizens of Afghanistan, Colombia, Iraq, Lebanon, and Syria.
To combat the epidemic of food scarcity, the government put the military in charge of the country’s food management and distribution systems. Yet that only seems to make matters worse. The AP recently reported that the military is taking advantage of the country’s food shortages by profiting from food trafficking.
The deteriorating conditions in health care show just how serious the crisis is. Chronic shortages of medicine have rendered hospitals essentially useless. The World Health Organization estimates that there are shortages for 75 percent of necessary medications and medical supplies such as antibiotics, vaccines, and scalpels.
Blackouts resulting from a crumbling energy infrastructure are a daily occurrence. The death of newborns has become a common phenomenon, with one doctor saying “the death of a baby is our daily bread.” Infectious diseases once kept under control have surged. Cases of diphtheria and malaria are re-emerging, and the number of Zika infections is estimated to be “nearly 700,000,” according to a Venezuelan health organization.
For a country as ruthlessly collectivized as Venezuela, the question of collapse is a matter of when, not if.
ANALYSIS: TRUE. Trump Just Hired the Army’s Smartest Officer.
Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster’s Dereliction of Duty is one of the two best histories of Vietnam I’ve read, and his performance as a Captain at the 1991 Battle of 73 Easting in Iraq is the stuff of legend.
NO: You can now transfer money internationally through Facebook.
The money transfer startup TransferWise has launched a new chatbot that enables Facebook (FB, Tech30) users to move funds abroad using the social platform’s Messenger service.
The bot can be used to move money between the U.S., Canada, Australia and the European Union. It will also notify users via an alert when their regularly used currencies hit favorable rates.
Facebook users were previously able to transfer money within the U.S., but not between accounts in foreign countries.
Messenger is the creepy front-end of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s creepy vision of the future.
NOW WHAT? In Syria, Turkey Finds Itself Boxed In.
After months of halting and costly progress, the Turkish military and allied Syrian rebels are in a good position to take the Syrian city of al-Bab from the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL). With the capture of al-Bab, Turkey will have accomplished the clearly defined goals of its “Operation Euphrates Shield” intervention in northern Aleppo governorate: driving ISIL from the Turkish border and blocking hostile Kurdish forces from linking their territory to Turkey’s south.
But after al-Bab, Euphrates Shield has nowhere to go, and, if Turkey’s gains are to be sustainable, its forces may be unable to leave. With Euphrates Shield, Turkey may have thrown itself into a Syrian quagmire. It has no clear exit strategy and only a poor set of options for escalation. Turkey seems committed to an indefinite but precarious occupation of a piece of northern Aleppo governorate that, perversely, may further weaken Syria’s political and territorial integrity and strengthen Turkey’s adversaries.
Getting in is the easy part.
GOOD OPTICS: France’s Le Pen cancels meet with Lebanon grand mufti over headscarf.
Le Pen, among the frontrunners for the presidency, is using a two-day visit to Lebanon to bolster her foreign policy credentials nine weeks from the April 23 first round, and may be partly targeting potential Franco-Lebanese votes.
Many Lebanese fled to France, Lebanon’s former colonial power, during their country’s 1975-1990 civil war and became French citizens.
After meeting Christian President Michel Aoun – her first public handshake with a head of state – and Sunni Prime Minister Saad al-Hariri on Monday, she had been scheduled to meet the Grand Mufti Sheikh Abdul Latif Derian
He heads the Dar al-Fatwa, the top religious authority for Sunni Muslims in the multireligious country.
“I met the grand mufti of Al-Azhar,” she told reporters, referring to a visit in 2015 to Cairo’s 1,000-year-old center of Islamic learning. “The highest Sunni authority didn’t have this requirement, but it doesn’t matter.
“You can pass on my respects to the grand mufti, but I will not cover myself up,” she said.
The whole thing feels about as spontaneous as kabuki, but will likely play well with French voters.
RESIST WE MUCH: ‘Not My Presidents Day’ rallies bring thousands to the streets.
I’m so old, I can remember when “Not My President” was racist.
February 20, 2017
NEWS YOU CAN USE: All the Guns John Wick Shoots in Chapter 2.
AUTOMATION: The robot that takes your job should pay taxes, says Bill Gates
In a recent interview with Quartz, Gates said that a robot tax could finance jobs taking care of elderly people or working with kids in schools, for which needs are unmet and to which humans are particularly well suited. He argues that governments must oversee such programs rather than relying on businesses, in order to redirect the jobs to help people with lower incomes. The idea is not totally theoretical: EU lawmakers considered a proposal to tax robot owners to pay for training for workers who lose their jobs, though on Feb. 16 the legislators ultimately rejected it.
“You ought to be willing to raise the tax level and even slow down the speed” of automation, Gates argues. That’s because the technology and business cases for replacing humans in a wide range of jobs are arriving simultaneously, and it’s important to be able to manage that displacement. “You cross the threshold of job replacement of certain activities all sort of at once,” Gates says, citing warehouse work and driving as some of the job categories that in the next 20 years will have robots doing them.
I wonder what Gates would think of punitive taxes on, say, office productivity software which helped to eliminate so many inefficient office jobs.
CHRISTIAN TOTO: 5 Great Jack Nicholson Movies (After He Hit 50).
I was disappointed not to see The Departed on there, but you’ve got to draw the line somewhere — and Nicholson’s after-50 credits is a rich vein to mine.
HANG UP AND DRIVE: Smartphone Addicts Behind the Wheel Drive Car Insurance Rates Higher.
State Farm Mutual Automobile Insurance Co., the largest U.S. auto insurer by market share, said 36% of the people it surveyed in 2015 admitted to texting while driving, and 29% said they access the internet, compared with 31% and 13%, respectively, in 2009.
State Farm’s survey found that 52% of respondents in 2011 owned a smartphone, and 88% owned one in 2015.
The connection between phones and collisions surfaced in insurers’ earnings. Fourth-quarter underwriting results for personal auto insurance worsened at Travelers Cos., Hartford Financial Services Group Inc., and Horace Mann Educators Corp., and all three said distracted driving was partly to blame. The three companies insure millions of vehicles across the U.S.
“Distracted driving was always there, but it just intensified as more applications for the smartphones became available,” said Bill Caldwell, executive vice president of property and casualty at Horace Mann, in a recent interview. The insurer expects to raise rates 8% this year, on top of average 6.5% increases in 2016.
Ouch.