I am Pagliacci.

After this, I think I'll read something by the "Irish Mabanckou" (i.e. Beckett) 🙄

Archived version

The Ministry of Economic Affairs, Trade Council of Denmark, Finland Trade Center and the Swedish Trade and Invest Council staged the 2025 Nordic-Taiwan Sustainable Energy Forum Dec. 3 in Taipei City.

Central to discussions at the meeting was energy transition, with specific focus on carbon reduction technology, geothermal energy and offshore wind power, the MOEA said, adding that over 200 experts, industry representatives and researchers participated in the event.

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Israel’s largest defence company, Elbit Systems, has been suspended by NATO’s procurement agency amid a major corruption probe, Follow the Money and its media partners La Lettre, Le Soir, and Knack can reveal.

The NATO Support and Procurement Agency (NSPA) is at the centre of a wide-ranging graft scandal, with current and former staff under investigation for bribery. Several suspects were arrested in May in police raids across seven nations, including Belgium and the U.S.

FTM has also learned that a key figure associated with Elbit – an Italian citizen identified as Eliau E. – is wanted internationally for his alleged role in bribing NSPA staff.

Elbit is Israel’s biggest arms manufacturer, with a turnover of almost 7 billion dollars in 2024. The Haifa-based company – which makes drones, tanks and ammunition, among other military equipment – ranks 25th on the list of the world’s 100 largest defence companies compiled by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI).

French President Emmanuel Macron said he had threatened Beijing with tariffs during his state visit to China if there was no action taken to reduce the country's ever-widening trade deficit with the European Union.

During Macron's visit earlier in December, he urged China to boost cooperation on "unsustainable" global trade imbalances, geopolitics and the environment.

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"I tried to explain to the Chinese that their trade surplus is unsustainable because they are killing their own customers, particularly by no longer importing much from us," Macron said in an interview published on Sunday by French daily Les Echos.

"I told them that if they do not react, we Europeans would be forced, in the coming months, to take strong measures following the example of the United States, such as imposing tariffs on Chinese products," he added.

The EU's goods trade deficit with China has ballooned by nearly 60% since 2019, while France's trade balance with the $19 trillion economy continues to widen.

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I thought this Pynchon essay was fantastic and more relevant than ever in our current moment of Artificial "Intelligence" mania and ever-increasing fascistic consolidation.

Nuclear engineer Lonnie Johnson worked on NASA's Galileo mission, has more than 140 patents, and invented the Super Soaker water gun. But now he's working on "a potential key to unlock a huge power source that's rarely utilized today," reports the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

Waste heat... The Johnson Thermo-Electrochemical Converter, or JTEC, has few moving parts, no combustion and no exhaust. All the work to generate electricity is done by hydrogen, the most abundant element in the universe. Inside the device, pressurized hydrogen gas is separated by a thin, filmlike membrane, with low pressure gas on one side and high pressure gas on the other. The difference in pressure in this "stack" is what drives the hydrogen to compress and expand, creating electricity as it circulates. And unlike a fuel cell, it does not need to be refueled with more hydrogen. All that's needed to keep the process going and electricity flowing is a heat source.

As it turns out, there are enormous amounts of energy vented or otherwise lost from industrial facilities like power plants, factories, breweries and more. Between 20% and 50% of all energy used for industrial processes is dumped into the atmosphere and lost as waste heat, according to the U.S. Department of Energy. The JTEC works with high temperatures, but the device's ability to generate electricity efficiently from low-grade heat sources is what company executives are most excited about. Inside JTEC's headquarters, engineers show off a demonstration unit that can power lights and a sound system with water that's roughly 200 degrees Fahrenheit — below the boiling point and barely warm enough to brew a cup of tea, said Julian Bell, JTEC's vice president of engineering. Comas Haynes, a research engineer at the Georgia Tech Research Institute specializing in thermal and hydrogen system designs, agrees the company could "hit a sweet spot" if it can capitalize on lower temperature heat...

For Johnson, the potential application he's most excited about lies beneath our feet. Geothermal energy exists naturally in rocks and water beneath the Earth's surface at various depths. Tapping into that resource through abandoned oil and gas wells — a well-known access point for underground heat — offers another opportunity. "You don't need batteries and you can draw power when you need it from just about anywhere," Johnson said. Right now, the company is building its first commercial JTEC unit, which is set to be deployed early next year. Mike McQuary, JTEC's CEO and the former president of the pioneering internet service provider MindSpring, said he couldn't reveal the customer, but said it's a "major Southeast utility company." "Crossing that bridge where you have commercial customers that believe in it and will pay for it is important," McQuary said...

On top of some initial seed money, the company brought in $30 million in a Series A funding in 2022 — money that allowed the company to move to its Lee + White headquarters and hire more than 30 engineers. McQuary said it expects to begin another round of fundraising soon.

"Johnson, meanwhile, hasn't stopped working on new inventions," the article points out. "He continues to refine the design for his solid-state battery..."

They are trying to pay Warner Bros. Discovery in an $82.7 billion merger. Here’s why it’s a terrible idea.

https://archive.is/4Pd2y

How do an artist, a videographer, a musician and a copywriter feel about generative AI?

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.zip/post/54551509

Our Antisemitism Envoy may have slight shades of Nazi

Antisemitism Envoy Jillian Segal — whose family bankrolls far-right political lobby group “Advance” — has misled the Senate over her failure to denounce last month’s NSW Parliament House neo-Nazi rally.

Segal said, she had conveyed her “condemnation” to those media outlets “who approached me”.This is false. The Klaxon approached Segal and her office on November 9, in writing, expressly asking: “As Australia’s Antisemitism Envoy, do you denounce the neo-Nazi rally at the weekend?” We received no response.

As previously reported, Segal’s family trust was the tied-second biggest funder of [far-right group] Advance in 2023-24 — the latest data — giving it $50,000 in the year.

A former Labour Prime Minister says Parliament is passing too many laws without proper scrutiny.

Sir Geoffrey Palmer told Nine to Noon the government was increasingly pushing through legislation under urgency, which allowed it to skip stages such as public consultation and select committees.

But Leader of the House Chris Bishop said just nine Bills have been passed in that way, and there were good reasons for all of them.

Palmer said the normal checks and balances were stripped out when laws were made at pace.

"Urgency has become the default mechanism for dealing with Parliamentary legislation and the standing orders are not followed and you also have extended sittings - and both of those mean the Government's agenda is completely at the will of the Government," he said.

Palmer said the Fast-Track Approvals Act 2024 - and its amendment - was a classic example of a trend that "ministers know best" and was "ministerial dictatorship".

"It was criticised by the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment then, Simon Upton, the amendment bill puts the process that was enacted in 2024 on steroids.

"It gets faster and faster. It will be a fast-track to environmental degradation, [more] than it already is."

Bishop was approached for further comment.

The legislation, which passed under urgency at the end of last year, is back before Parliament with an amendment that the government intended to push through by the end of 2025.

It said the amendment to the Act would increase competition in the supermarket sector.

Despite being open for just over 10 days, it received 2158 submissions, with about 95 percent opposed.

Palmer said legislative checks and balances - which he already considered lacking - were further reduced when legislation was made at pace.

"What is the hurry? Legislation is law-making. You want to get it right. You have to analyse it, you have to do proper research, you don't bang it through because a minister has an idea.

"It needs to be properly drafted by Parliamentary council. We have had a degradation of our legislative system in New Zealand in recent years."

Bishop said the government had a big legislative agenda and limited hours in ordinary house time to get it done.

Regarding the use of urgency, he said: "I am reluctant to use urgency to avoid select committees outside of the standard Budget urgency process, and it is only done so when there are good reasons."

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ca/post/56438780

How UK of you...

French President Emmanuel Macron has threatened tariffs on Chinese goods, just days after a state visit to China, in an interview published Sunday by Les Echos. He also stated that he still believes a negotiated solution is possible to address the trade deficit between the world’s second-largest economy and the European Union (EU).