December 7th, 2023 • 3h 2m
Shownotes
Every new episode of No Agenda is accompanied by a comprehensive list of shownotes curated by Adam while preparing for the show. Clips played by the hosts during the show can also be found here.
Section 702 Renewal and Red Lights Blinking!!!
Israel Hamas
Zero reporting of Hamas Rocket strikes this week
Israel said to set up pumps in Gaza for flooding Hamas tunnels with seawater | The Times of Israel
Judges 9:45 NIV
All that day Abimelek pressed his attack against the city until he had captured it and killed its people. Then he destroyed the city and scattered salt over it.
Climate Change
First loss insurance BOT
Phileosepher
First-loss insurance is basically where you take a partial loss, and you won't have to pay more after an event (e.g., your car is worth $10K, and you take 6K so the accident doesn't register for the renewal period's calculation).
In WWI and before, life insurance policies on soldiers was a profitable racket. Likely, COP28's dialogue was about their *existing* policies on our legal fictions, and their tipped hand that they're going to try again.
Source: I'm an Underling Insurance Agent.
Air Traffic Control Union BOTG
Adam,
The National Air Traffic Control Association (NATCA) want to keep the pool of ATC candidates LOW.
FWIW, I am a FAA Contract Tower employee and have been a controller for over 30 years.
A few weeks ago, two guys who were running for NATCA presidency visited my tower. I am NOT a represented employee. I brought up the air traffic control shortage and asked what they are doing to address the shortage - they said they are NOT INTERESTED in increasing the workforce (or in this case, meeting staffing levels). Their argument was having more ATC's would result in "Lower Wages". This is total BULLSHIT. The FAA has a MONOPOLY on ATC wages. Having more controllers does not reduce wages (when was the last time a Federal Employee got a pay cut?). What it would do is remove Overtime. A lot of ATC's got used to working six days on, one day off and getting paid for it. I've heard facilities not certifying controllers for fear of losing that Overtime, and NATCA is listening.
I've heard some interesting stories about controllers showing up to work wearing bunny suits, cleaning their glock in the control tower, and the showing up to work drunk stories in our district. I've heard about racism (towards black women). Me and another contract tower manager joke to see if one of the managers is drunk while on a Zoom call.
Jews vs Muslims
Ministry of Truthiness
VAERS
Big Tech / AI
Gmail’s AI-powered spam detection is its biggest security upgrade in years | Ars Technica
Emails like this have been so difficult to classify because, while any spam filter could probably swat down an email that says, "Congratulations! A balance of $1,000 is available for your jackpot account," that's not what this email actually says. A big portion of the letters here are "homoglyphs"—by diving into the endless depths of the Unicode standard, you can find obscure characters that look like they're part of the normal Latin alphabet but actually aren't.
Meta AI chief Yann LeCun skeptical about AGI, quantum computing
Big Pharma
FYI - Criminal complaint addressed to ICC & Queen Ursula's army & Pfizer pre-purchase agreement available through Italian RAI website
Hi Adam,
A German foundation office filed a Criminal complaint addressed to ICC against:
• Generaldirektor der Weltgesundheitsorganisation TEDROS ADHANOM GHEBREYESUS, • Vorsitzender und CEO der Pfizer Biopharmaceuticals Group, ALBERT BOURLA,
• Präsident des Paul-Ehrlich-Instituts KLAUS CICHUTEK,
• Direktorin der Europäischen Arzneimittel-Agentur (EMA) EMER COOKE,
• ehemalige Präsidentin Impfstoffe, Pfizer Biopharmaceuticals Group, NANETTE COCERO • Co-Vorsitzender der Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation WLLIAM „BILL“ GATES III,
• EU-Kommissarin für Gesundheit STELLA KYRIAKIDES,
• Präsidentin der Europäischen Kommission URSULA VON DER LEYEN und andere
Here’s the document that I know of (not sure if any possible attachments are excluded or not publicly made available)
The pre-purchase EU-Pfizer agreement:
I have some remarks on this in relation to risk management handling and an rfi I filed at the EMA. I’m tight on time but perhaps I’ll come to you on this back to this later on.
In the meanwhile I guess you have already enough insights into the whole legislative-administrative-law side handling to already from many angles establish the extent of what the acknowledgements by the EMA can be possibly damaging to the EMA, EU council & MEP’s, national gov’s and national health authorities.
In the meanwhile I’m curious about what doc’s may surface next confirming that inside the bubbles they were addressed internally/vis-a-vis in written shedding light on the covid-handling.
Transmaoism
Trump
South Dakota on Kristi Noem BOTG
Hey Adam,
I am from South Dakota and I have lived here all my life, but Kristi Noem was loved for her COVID policy for not shutting down the state but she fell out of favor because she turned on farmers over the carbon pipelines.
Farmers lobbied the Public Utilities Commission and was successful on killing the permits. South Dakota also has a law that allows surveyors to go on to private property without permission which Kristi failed to call a special session in order to recall the law.
Here is a little insight into South Dakota politics.
Thank you,
Toby
Kristi Noem BOTG from Craig Weinberg
One of the main issues with Kristi is that she’s a liar. She seemed to have more of interest in national politics than South Dakota. During the early days of Covid she claims to never have shut anything down and let the people make their own decisions… Except the speaker of the house at the time has a different story. He had receipts to show that she actually wanted to give her health secretary full control to shut down whatever they wanted but the legislator in the middle of the night put a stop to that. She also says things like “My budget” and “My plan” when she’s not writing anything. There’s also the alleged affair with Cory Lewendowski that broke pretty big over the summer that she has avoided talking about… For years there was speculation that it was happening but the proof seems a lot more real now. She’ll say whatever she needs to to align with trump… all the thinking is she wants his VP spot. She will get killed in a general election.
STORIES
Meta AI chief Yann LeCun skeptical about AGI, quantum computing
Thu, 07 Dec 2023 15:41
Yann LeCun, chief AI scientist at Meta, speaks at the Viva Tech conference in Paris, June 13, 2023.
Chesnot | Getty Images News | Getty Images
Meta's chief scientist and deep learning pioneer Yann LeCun said he believes that current AI systems are decades away from reaching some semblance of sentience, equipped with common sense that can push their abilities beyond merely summarizing mountains of text in creative ways.
His point of view stands in contrast to that of Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, who recently said AI will be "fairly competitive" with humans in less than five years, besting people at a multitude of mentally intensive tasks.
"I know Jensen," LeCun said at a recent event highlighting the Facebook parent company's 10-year anniversary of its Fundamental AI Research team. LeCun said the Nvidia CEO has much to gain from the AI craze. "There is an AI war, and he's supplying the weapons."
"[If] you think AGI is in, the more GPUs you have to buy," LeCun said, about technologists attempting to develop artificial general intelligence, the kind of AI on par with human-level intelligence. As long as researchers at firms such as OpenAI continue their pursuit of AGI, they will need more of Nvidia's computer chips.
Society is more likely to get "cat-level" or "dog-level" AI years before human-level AI, LeCun said. And the technology industry's current focus on language models and text data will not be enough to create the kinds of advanced human-like AI systems that researchers have been dreaming about for decades.
"Text is a very poor source of information," LeCun said, explaining that it would likely take 20,000 years for a human to read the amount of text that has been used to train modern language models. "Train a system on the equivalent of 20,000 years of reading material, and they still don't understand that if A is the same as B, then B is the same as A."
"There's a lot of really basic things about the world that they just don't get through this kind of training," LeCun said.
Hence, LeCun and other Meta AI executives have been heavily researching how the so-called transformer models used to create apps such as ChatGPT could be tailored to work with a variety of data, including audio, image and video information. The more these AI systems can discover the likely billions of hidden correlations between these various kinds of data, the more they could potentially perform more fantastical feats, the thinking goes.
Some of Meta's research includes software that can help teach people how to play tennis better while wearing the company's Project Aria augmented reality glasses, which blend digital graphics into the real world. Executives showed a demo in which a person wearing the AR glasses while playing tennis was able to see visual cues teaching them how to properly hold their tennis rackets and swing their arms in perfect form. The kinds of AI models needed to power this type of digital tennis assistant require a blend of three-dimensional visual data in addition to text and audio, in case the digital assistant needs to speak.
These so-called multimodal AI systems represent the next frontier, but their development won't come cheap. And as more companies such as Meta and Google parent Alphabet research more advanced AI models, Nvidia could stand to gain even more of an edge, particularly if no other competition emerges.
The AI hardware of the futureNvidia has been the biggest benefactor of generative AI, with its pricey graphics processing units becoming the standard tool used to train massive language models. Meta relied on 16,000 Nvidia A100 GPUs to train its Llama AI software.
CNBC asked if the tech industry will need more hardware providers as Meta and other researchers continue their work developing these kinds of sophisticated AI models.
"It doesn't require it, but it would be nice," LeCun said, adding that the GPU technology is still the gold standard when it comes to AI.
Still, the computer chips of the future may not be called GPUs, he said.
"What you're going to see hopefully emerging are new chips that are not graphical processing units, they are just neural, deep learning accelerators," LeCun said.
LeCun is also somewhat skeptical about quantum computing, which tech giants such as Microsoft , IBM , and Google have all poured resources into. Many researchers outside Meta believe quantum computing machines could supercharge advancements in data-intensive fields such as drug discovery, as they're able to perform multiple calculations with so-called quantum bits as opposed to conventional binary bits used in modern computing.
But LeCun has his doubts.
"The number of problems you can solve with quantum computing, you can solve way more efficiently with classical computers," LeCun said.
"Quantum computing is a fascinating scientific topic," LeCun said. It's less clear about the "practical relevance and the possibility of actually fabricating quantum computers that are actually useful."
Meta senior fellow and former tech chief Mike Schroepfer concurred, saying that he evaluates quantum technology every few years and believes that useful quantum machines "may come at some point, but it's got such a long time horizon that it's irrelevant to what we're doing."
"The reason we started an AI lab a decade ago was that it was very obvious that this technology is going to be commercializable within the next years' time frame," Schroepfer said.
WATCH: Meta on the defensive amid reports of Instagram's harm
Diamond prices plummet as higher interest rates and lab grown alternatives take the shine off the precious gems - ABC News
Thu, 07 Dec 2023 15:25
From Greek mythology, to Marilyn Monroe's Hollywood and clever marketing by De Beers, diamonds have long been lusted over.
But the shiny stones have recently been losing their shimmer as prices have been in a tailspin.
"The current softness in natural diamond prices is primarily a correction, following what I would say is a record run up in prices that we saw in 2021 and 2022," said New York City-based independent diamond analyst, Paul Zimnisky.
When COVID shut the world down from enjoying experiences, those who could afford it, went shopping.
That demand pushed diamond prices higher.
"All of the moons pretty much aligned for diamonds, and it was a really strong period," Mr Zimnisky said.
"Almost every category of natural diamonds went parabolic to the upside, due to supply shortages, following the stimulus, primarily in the US, during the pandemic."
Prices for a cut, one carat, natural white diamond, rose 5.8 per cent in the 2020 calendar year then soared 17.4 per cent in 2021, according to the global RapNet Diamond Index (RAPI).
"Now we're on the other side of that '... we're experiencing a demand shock in the other direction," Mr Zimnisky told The Business.
The slogan "diamonds are forever" was coined by De Beers in the post-war jewellery industry.( Supplied )
Prices started to plunge in 2022, with the RAPI wiping off 10.7 per cent for a one carat stone that year.
This year has been much worse.
From January 1 to November 1, the price of a one carat diamond has fallen twice last year's figure, wiping off 21.3 per cent.
In total, the price of a one carat diamond has seen a 32 per cent decline in less than two years.
For a half carat stone, prices have fallen almost 40 per cent.
Diamond price falls as interest rates riseCentral bank interest rate hikes to cool rising inflation has been a big driver of the price plunge.
"Diamond prices have reacted according to the changing fundamental picture," Mr Zimnisky said.
The correction started just as central banks began hiking rates.
"Diamond prices certainly are highly correlated with GDP growth," Mr Zimnisky, a former Wall Street analyst, added.
One carat white diamond prices have fallen 30 per cent in the last two years.( Supplied: Rohan Jewellers )
Perth-based jeweller Rohan Milne has experienced the diamond downswing, and while he said there have been "significant drops here", the price plunge hasn't been as bad as in the US.
"They've seen upwards of 20 per cent or more drop, potentially, but I think here, we're probably not seeing such big fluctuations in the price, just because the Aussie dollar has sort of cushioned some of that," Mr Milne told The Business.
"When the Aussie dollar drops, at the same rate as say, the price of white diamonds in US dollars, we don't see that big fluctuation because we're still buying it in US dollars '-- so that sometimes keeps pace.
"That's always been the case with gold as well."
Perth jeweller Rohan Milne has seen the effect of the diamond downswing firsthand.( Supplied: Rohan Jewellers )
The lab effectA flight to affordability has been a feature of the diamond market for years, and that's seen the rise of lab grown, also known as, synthetic diamonds.
In 2018, the biggest diamond trader in the world, De Beers, announced it would start selling the manufactured stones.
"The market was quite astonished that here was the company that spearheaded, maintained and promoted natural diamonds, and yet they had a spin-off of the synthetics," diamond consultant, John Chapman said.
Diamond expert, John Chapman has been working with the precious gems since the 1980's.( ABC News: Rachel Pupazzoni )
Mr Chapman is a physicist and diamond analyst, who used to work for the Australian diamond company Argyle and is now regarded worldwide for his expertise in the precious stones.
Mined, or natural, diamonds were made under extreme pressure at the earth's core, sent to the surface by a volcano hundreds of millions of years ago (or in the case of the Argyle diamond mine in northern Western Australia, 1.3 billion years ago), buried under the earth's surface and then dug out of the ground by miners.
Synthetic diamonds can be made in a matter of days '' and to the untrained eye, it's near impossible to tell the difference.
Mr Chapman said the rise in popularity for synthetic stones, bought at a much more competitive price, has also impacted the price of natural stones.
"It's compelling for a consumer to be able to have something on their finger or in their ears, which to the unaided eye, or even with an aided eye, you can't tell the difference. So that's what the industry is up against"
Lab grown diamonds are produced from a seed and are near-impossible to differentiate by an untrained eye.( Supplied: De Beers )
Mr Chapman said the marketing juggernaut that is the entry of De Beers '-- the company that devised the concept of spending two months' salary on a diamond ring '-- into manufactured diamonds may have been another marketing ploy.
"There are a few thoughts about what their strategy was there, because they were quite cheap, even for synthetics, they were at the lower end," he explained.
"There was some speculation that it was a strategy to undermine all the other producers who would have to match their prices, and as a result, probably go broke '-- and therefore, it might have been a way to destroy the synthetic market."
Whether there's any truth to the speculation or not, lab grown diamond prices have indeed, crashed.
Mr Zimnisky's data shows that in 2016 a one carat lab grown white diamond cost $US5,450 compared to a naturally occurring one carat diamond that sold for an average $US6,538.
That price difference has now grown much wider.
In 2023 a one carat lab grown white diamond cost $US1,355 while a natural diamond sells for an average $US4,726.
"The price differential between natural and man-made diamonds is so wide that the products are beginning to attract different customer bases," he said.
De Beers has now exited the synthetic diamond engagement ring market.
Both diamonds and gold are traded in US dollars.( Supplied: Rohan Jewellers )
A league of their ownAmid the downturn, there's one corner of the market that defies the trend, because it's a league few can afford to be in.
Pink diamonds from Rio Tinto's now closed Argyle diamond mine in the Kimberley continue to fetch higher prices.
"Back in the day, when they were actually producing, they would say that they would produce a handful of pinks, cut, each year," Mr Milne said.
"That's rarity within rarity, no matter what, so you can start to see why they cost so much."
The Argyle diamond mine accounted for more than 90 per cent of the world's supply of pink diamonds during its nearly 40-year life.
But less than one per cent of the diamonds mined at Argyle, were pink.
Two years ago, Rio Tinto announced the final tender of the most prized pink diamonds, a year after the mine's closure.
But last month they surprised the market, announcing a new tender, with 87 Argyle pink diamonds, weighing 29.96 carats, as well as two yellow diamonds from its Diavik mine in Canada.
Mr Milne was one of about 80 jewellers and ateliers worldwide, invited to bid in this year's tender.
It's in effect a silent auction, where those who are invited to take part, get an hour or so to view the diamonds at only four locations around the world, then make their offer, without knowing any of the other bids.
That tender process closed this week, but the secrecy around the process remains, as the winning bids are never publicly revealed.
Rio Tinto's exclusive diamond tender includes collections like these five brilliant cut stones, retrieved from the now closed Argyle mine.( Supplied: Rio Tinto )
Rio Tinto Diamond's manager of sales and business development, Heidi Creech, said the stones on offer are "in a league of their own".
"In the past we have seen Argyle pink diamonds in particular, really defy the ebb and flow of economic cycles," Ms Creech told The Business
"They have outperformed the equity market year on year for many years and certainly, while of course the economic situation is difficult at the moment, we still expect strong bidding for this event," she added.
"For Argyle pink diamonds for example, we have seen these sell for millions of dollars per carat."
These teardrop pink Argyle diamonds are part of Rio Tinto's final tender.( Supplied: Rio Tinto )
Will rarity reign supreme?Advocates of the diamond market say it's that element of rarity, that will see natural white diamond prices pick back up again compared to their synthetic counterparts.
Last year 120 million carats of rough diamonds were mined globally, but that number is expected to shrink over time, as mines close.
"There are quite a few mines like the Rio Tinto ones in Canada, I think they've got three or five years left, there are lots of other mines, which must be nearing their end too," Mr Chapman said.
"There are no new mines on the horizon, and even if there were, that would take a good 10 years before it was in production," he added.
Rio Tinto's Diavik diamond mine in Canada is expected to produce diamonds until early 2026.( Supplied: Rio Tinto )
Mr Milne noted supply is starting to be held back, which will add to the fear of missing out psychology among consumers.
"I have spoken to people in the rough [diamond] end of the market, and the changes that they're making to ensure that the white diamond market is going to be consistent in its pricing," he said.
"They'll probably hold off on some of the rough that's coming to the cutters, which will mean there'll be less goods coming back onto the market.
"So kind of similar to OPEC trimming back on maybe some of their production of oil, I would expect that there'll be stabilisation within the natural diamond market."
Only time will tell whether the famous De Beers "a diamond is forever" branding will ring true again.
Posted 21 Nov 202321 Nov 2023Tue 21 Nov 2023 at 9:02pm, updated 22 Nov 202322 Nov 2023Wed 22 Nov 2023 at 12:25am
Big meat companies and lobby groups are planning a large presence at the Cop28 climate conference
Thu, 07 Dec 2023 15:22
Big meat companies and lobby groups are planning a large presence at the Cop28 climate conference, equipped with a communications plan to get a pro-meat message heard by policymakers throughout the summit.
Documents seen by the Guardian and DeSmog show that the meat industry is poised to ''tell its story and tell it well'' at the Dubai conference.
The files show how the world's largest meat company, JBS, is planning to come out in ''full force'' at the summit, along with other big industry hitters such as the Global Dairy Platform and the North American Meat Institute.
The documents, which were produced by the industry-funded Global Meat Alliance (GMA), emphasise the industry's desire to promote ''our scientific evidence'' at the summit.
Members of the alliance have been asked to stick to key comms messages, which include the idea that meat is beneficial to the environment.Meat and dairy companies are under increasing pressure over their large greenhouse gas footprints. The dairy industry is responsible for 3.4% of global human-induced emissions, a higher share than aviation.
Trade groups also give some indication in the documents of how they hope to shape conversations in Dubai. One said it will ''push'' the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization to host ''positive livestock content'' at Cop28. The Guardian recently revealed that pressure from the industry led to censorship of FAO reports on the role of cattle in increasing greenhouse gas emissions.
Animal agriculture is the largest emitter of methane, a greenhouse gas 80 times more potent than carbon dioxide when measured over a 20-year period. Scientists said that unless swift action is taken, methane from agriculture alone will push the world beyond a 1.5C (2.7F) rise in temperature above preindustrial levels that risks tipping the world into irreversible climate breakdown.
''These companies are stepping up their game because the exposure they are facing is stepping up,'' says Jennifer Jacquet, professor of environmental science and policy at the University of Miami. ''It used to be that they were caught on the back foot, but now they're completely prepared.''
''Any credible action to reduce emissions in the food sector will inevitably lead to a reduction in the total volume of meat and dairy products produced,'' says Nusa Urbancic, CEO of campaign group the Changing Markets Foundation. ''The industry is terrified of that and has been deploying multiple tactics to delay the inevitable.''
Ranchers load feed pens for cattle on a farm in Maraba, Brazil. Photograph: Bloomberg/Getty ImagesThe meat sector's largest emitters plan to be on the ground at Cop28 in large numbers, the documents show. At Cop27, JBS, the world's most polluting meat company, gained access to talks because it came as part of Brazil's national delegation.
Companies at the summit will be accompanied by lobby groups that represent them, some of which have a history of obstructive action. They include the North American Meat Institute (Nami), which represents large meat producers in the US and which in 2022 was still questioning on its website whether climate change was caused by humans.
While the leaked documents are aimed at the meat sector, they also show that dairy companies are planning on sending a ''large delegation'' to Cop28.
Earlier this year, backlash from several countries with interests in meat led to the watering down of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's recommendations on diets.
Companies and trade groups are told in the documents that one of the ways to ''have the most influence'' is to ''equip delegates with your key messages and solutions'', a list of which are provided in the pack.
The files also detail collaborations planned for the event itself, with meat lobbying groups hosting events at country pavilions, including those of the US and Australia.
Australia and the US are the second and third largest beef exporters globally after Brazil, and their governments have a strong economic interest in supporting the growth of these industries, as well as close political ties with them.
Researchers said government support is a significant factor in determining the continued power of the animal agriculture industry over alternatives. A study this year found that in the EU, meat and dairy farmers received 1,200 times more public funding than new alternative protein sources, while in the US, they received 800 times more support.
Jacquet said addressing the cosy relationship between governments and industry was crucial to changing diets to align with climate goals.
''Typically, the talk is about demand-side interventions, like you can get schools or individuals to give up meat,'' she said. ''But I'm a little worried that some of this [meat] production is so baked into subsidies and policy, that even with decreased demand, this apparatus will just keep flowing.''
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In the documents, trade groups also reveal their plans to influence non-country pavilions via sponsorship, which can cost between $10,000 and $200,000. This is championed as a way to host sessions and bring guests along to receptions.The documents also include a messaging summary with key talking points that present meat as ''sustainable nutrition'' and suggest that meat production can be beneficial to the environment.
In a four-page set of arguments, the Global Meat Alliance claims that producers can ''play a key role in environmentally sustainable food systems'' and that the sector is ''continuously driving towards carbon-friendly farming''.Several of these arguments reference the idea that grazing livestock can help maintain healthy soils, which can store carbon. This is often described as ''regenerative agriculture''. It is a favoured line with many food companies, despite the fact that scientists have said that soils are not a reliable way to store carbon in the long term, and that removals can be easily undone.
In its messaging, the industry also heavily references the role of meat in relieving hunger in the global south, claiming that it ''plays a key role in reducing food insecurity and malnutrition''. However, the UN-linked Committee on World Food Security has repeatedly pointed out that hunger and malnutrition are not caused by a lack of food, pointing instead to problems with access, distribution and power.
Meat eating worldwide is very unequal. Europeans eat more than twice the global average, and consumption levels in north America and Australia are even higher. One 2018 study found western countries would have to reduce their meat intake by 90% to limit global heating to acceptable levels.
Traditional bagels with hot salt beef prepared in a bakery in Bethnal Green, London. Photograph: Paolo Paradiso/AlamyThe documents make passing reference to cutting methane, and encourage participation in events where this is discussed. This is despite the fact that emissions from beef production globally are roughly equal to the emissions of the entire nation of India, with science pointing to a shift in diets as the one surefire way to cut emissions.The Food4Climate pavilion, which aims to promote plant-based food, is labelled in the documents as ''extreme'', which also show displeasure at the Cop28 presidency's choice of a mostly vegan menu.
While the Global Meat Alliance presents itself as supporting an ''aligned global meat sector'' the group's membership is skewed heavily toward producers in the global north.
Fourteen of the group's 16 partners come from the UK, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand or North America. The remaining two partners are global lobby groups representing large companies and multiple countries.
This follows a wider trend in multi-stakeholder climate initiatives, where smallholder groups are sidelined. A recent report found that small-scale farmers, who produce a third of the world's food, receive just 1% of climate finance.
A GMA spokesperson said: ''The GMA is an international networking group with an aim to support a better connected, aligned global meat sector by providing industry with accumulated insights, best practice, and collaboration opportunities to address shared challenges such as sustainability in the pre-competitive space. This includes visibility on intergovernmental events which are often dominated by an anti-meat narrative. GMA works to simplify and distil public information around these events, which is largely complex, to ensure industry understand how and where to engage, having equal opportunity to be heard.''
Livestock experts with a focus on the global south have repeatedly stressed the importance of including a range of perspectives in discussions of livestock pollution. Ian Scoones, a researcher at the Institute of Development Studies, said: ''My big fear in all of this debate is that the likes of pastoralists who we work with around the world will get stuffed because they don't have a voice.''
Kevin McKernan loses entire database of research after NZ health service obtains an injunction to prevent sharing of leaked Covid vax health data
Thu, 07 Dec 2023 15:20
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US-based genomics scientist Kevin McKernan says he has lost an estimated US$200, 000 worth of research data after his account on file hosting service MEGA was deleted overnight.
It appears that McKernan's account was deleted by MEGA in response to an urgent injunction granted to New Zealand's (NZ) Ministry of Health (MOH) to prevent the sharing of anonymised data leaked by whistleblower Barry Young.
Young, a 56 year old database administrator and former employee of the MOH, leaked data from a 'pay per dose' Covid vaccine database to NZ journalist Liz Gunn and US tech millionaire and Substacker Steve Kirsch.
Both Gunn and Kirsch claimed that the data showed conclusive proof that the Covid vaccines are killing people at high rates. Kirsch publicly uploaded the data on Friday 1 December, the same day the injunction was granted to the MOH.
McKernan had 'mirrored' Kirsch's data upload on his MEGA account to make it easier for people to download and analyse after international confusion broke out following the sensationalised release , which brought the integrity of whistleblower's data into question.
Having heard that an injunction had been granted to the MOH to prevent further distribution of the NZ data, McKernan says that he texted Kirsch to get clarity on Sunday 3 December, but did not hear back.
In a thread posted to X on Monday 4 December Boston time* (where McKernan is based), McKernan says he woke up to find that his entire MEGA account, including medical genome sequencing and vaccine sequencing data, with an estimated value of US$200,000, had been suddenly deleted. McKernan is one of the leading scientists involved in researching DNA contamination in the mRNA Covid vaccines .
Image courtesy of Kevin McKernan ''There is pure irony in this. Private company who puts sequence data public of medicinal plants and fungi to help the world, gets attacked by a public health agency that won't share the tax payers data'...Wrong side of history,'' wrote McKernan, who heads up medical cannabis company Medicinal Genomics .
Image courtesy of Kevin McKernanMcKernan also warned that some of the deleted files were related to criminal court proceedings. ''We are assessing the damages '... this should get very interesting,'' he wrote.
On 2 December, Kirsch reported that the site where he was hosting the NZ whisteblower data, Wasabi, had turned off his account without notice, speculating that ''maybe it was because the New Zealand Ministry told them to take down my site as noted in this article .''
Image courtesy of Steve Kirsch Concerned parties report that despite requesting to see the wording of the injunction since it was granted late last week, their requests were refused. The injunction was only made publicly available at 6pm on Tuesday 5 December, NZ time.
Injunction granted to New Zealand Ministry of Health 1 December 2023 The injunction was awarded by the Employment Relations Authority, which Voices For Freedom NZ Head of Legal, Katie Ashby-Koppens, suggests has ''acted outside its remit'' and therefore does not have the power to make such orders against third parties or in other jurisdictions.
''There are grounds for challenging this injunction,'' says Ashby-Koppens, noting Kirsch's public assurances that the released data has been anonymised, and so poses no threat of breach of privacy.
Conspicuously, in the flurry of New Zealand media articles reporting on the data leak and the injunction, no Ministry of Health representative has suggested that the data leaked by Young is fabricated or in any way false.
Young has reportedly been charged with ''accessing a computer system for dishonest purposes'' and was scheduled to be released on bail at 1pm today.
MEGA has been contacted for comment.
Barry Young stands in the Wellington District Court, image courtesy of 1 News*McKernan's post was created on Monday 4 December Boston time, but at Tues 5 December Perth time, where the screenshots were taken. Hence the apparent discrepancy in dates. The date of McKernan's communication with Steve Kirsch has been updated to reflect Boston time.
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'Huge risk' of Christmas attacks, warns EU
Thu, 07 Dec 2023 15:19
The aftermath of an attack in Paris which left a German tourist deadThere is a "huge risk of terrorist attacks in the European Union" over the coming holiday season, a senior EU official has said.
European Home Affairs Commission Ylva Johansson said the polarisation in society caused by the Israel-Hamas war was increasing the risk of violence.
Her remarks came days after a tourist was fatally stabbed in Paris.
The EU was making an additional '¬30m (£26m) available for additional security, Ms Johansson said.
She did not specify whether there was any specific information which had led to the warning.
"We saw it recently in Paris, unfortunately we have seen it earlier as well," she added ahead of a meeting of EU interior ministers.
A similar warning came from German Interior Minister Nancy Faeser who told reporters the EU had to keep a close eye on threats and propaganda, as there was a high "risk of further emotionalisation and radicalisation of violent Islamist perpetrators".
Many European countries have seen a surge in hate crimes since Hamas gunmen attacked Israeli communities, leaving about 1,200 people dead and many others held hostage in Gaza. Israel's invasion of Gaza has since left more than 15,000 people dead, according to the Hamas-run health ministry.
EU ministers were meeting after a deadly attack close to the Eiffel Tower on Saturday in which a 23-year-old German tourist called Collin B was stabbed to death, and his girlfriend and a British tourist were wounded.
The young German couple had visited Disneyland Paris, the Louvre and taken selfies in front of the Eiffel Tower before the attack.
Police said the 26-year-old French suspect, identified as Armand R, who comes from a non-religious Iranian family had pledged allegiance to the Islamic State group.
The man, who was arrested at the scene, had previously been imprisoned for planning a terror plot in the La D(C)fense business district outside Paris.
In 2020, he was interviewed by French police for having communicated with Abdoullakh Anzorov, who murdered teacher Samuel Paty.
Anti-terror prosecutor Jean-Fran§ois Ricard said that Armand R's mother had raised concerns about his behaviour although there was no evidence at the time to take further measures against him.
Germany has also been on high alert for possible attack.
Last week two boys were detained in different parts of the country on suspicion of planning a militant Islamist attack on a Christmas market in the city of Leverkusen.
And a 20-year-old Iraqi who arrived in Germany last year is in custody on suspicion of planning a knife attack on a Christmas market in Hannover.
The head of German domestic intelligence in the eastern state of Thuringia, Stephan Kramer, has warned of the "considerable potential for danger" posed by Hamas-sympathisers, not just to Christmas markets but to major sporting events such as the Paris Olympics and the Euro 2024 football championships next year.
Israel Weighs Plan to Flood Gaza Tunnels With Seawater - WSJ
Thu, 07 Dec 2023 15:08
Move could drive out Hamas fighters but threatens to foul Gaza's freshwater supply and damage infrastructureWASHINGTON'--Israel has assembled a system of large pumps it could use to flood Hamas's vast network of tunnels under the Gaza Strip with seawater, a tactic that could destroy the tunnels and drive the fighters from their underground refuge but also threaten Gaza's water supply, U.S. officials said.
The Israel Defense Forces finished assembling large seawater pumps roughly one mile north of the Al-Shati refugee camp around the middle of last month. Each of at least five pumps can draw water from the Mediterranean Sea and move thousands of cubic meters of water per hour into the tunnels, flooding them within weeks.
Copyright (C)2023 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 87990cbe856818d5eddac44c7b1cdeb8
UNLV mass shooter was career college professor, source says, but unknown whether he had a connection with school | News | albanyherald.com
Thu, 07 Dec 2023 14:37
(CNN) '-- The gunman in a Wednesday mass shooting on the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, campus that left three dead and a fourth wounded is a 67-year-old career college professor with connections to colleges in Georgia and North Carolina, a law enforcement source told CNN, but it's unknown what connection he had with the school where the shooting took place.
At a Wednesday evening news conference, Las Vegas Metro Sheriff Kevin McMahill said the identity of the shooter, who is dead, will not be released until his family has been notified.
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White House interns demand Middle East cease-fire in letter to Biden
Thu, 07 Dec 2023 14:31
WASHINGTON '-- A group of White House interns joined the growing list of administration officials applying internal pressure to President Joe Biden to call for a permanent cease-fire between Israel and Hamas, sending him a letter late Tuesday that accuses him of having "ignored" the "pleas of the American people."
The letter, first shared with NBC News and addressed to Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, is supported by more than 40 interns who work in the White House and other executive branch offices, according to the text.
"We, the undersigned Fall 2023 White House and Executive Office of the President interns, will no longer remain silent on the ongoing genocide of the Palestinian people," the interns wrote.
In the aftermath of Hamas' brutal Oct. 7 terrorist assault, and with the group still holding hostages, Israel has mounted a ferocious counterattack that has killed thousands of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip and driven many more from their homes. National Security Council spokesman John Kirby recently said that the word "genocide" is being "thrown around in a pretty inappropriate way" and that it is Hamas, not Israel, that is pursuing the eradication of an entire people.
Biden's support for Israel's military campaign has brought sharp criticism from some in the progressive wing of his party, including threats to abandon him in the 2024 election, and calls from inside his administration to lean more heavily on Israel to halt its offensive. The interns' letter amplifies those concerns.
''We heed the voices of the American people and call on the Administration to demand a permanent ceasefire,'' the interns wrote. ''We are not the decision makers of today, but we aspire to be the leaders of tomorrow, and we will never forget how the pleas of the American people have been heard and thus far, ignored.''
The writers, like those at other agencies who have sent similar missives in recent weeks, declined to sign their names to the letter. Instead, they identified themselves by offices '-- including the Executive Office of the President, the Office of the Vice President and the Domestic Policy Council '-- and as "Palestinian, Jewish, Arab, Muslim, Christian, Black, Asian, Latine, White, and Queer."
Last month, more than 500 political appointees sent Biden a similar letter. They also declined to make their names public. In the three weeks since then, Israel paused its offensive to allow for exchanges of prisoners and some of the hostages taken by Hamas and then relaunched its assaults when talks over further releases broke down.
Biden on Tuesday blamed Hamas for the end of the temporary cease-fire, pointing to the group's refusal to release young women it is holding. He accused Hamas, which the U.S. has designated as a foreign terrorist organization, of using "rape to terrorize women and girls."
The set of White House interns who wrote to Biden on Tuesday said they went to work for his administration because of "our shared values and the profound belief that, under your leadership, America has the potential to be a nation that stands for justice and peace."
Yet the clear implication of their words is that they don't see him holding the country to that standard right now.
"While the Administration expressed support for the humanitarian pause, we maintain that anything other than a complete halt of Israel's mass slaughter of innocent civilians in the Gaza Strip will simply not suffice," they wrote.
"We urge the Biden-Harris Administration to call for a permanent ceasefire now, a release of all hostages including Palestinian political prisoners, and to support a diplomatic solution that will put an end to the illegal occupation and the Israeli apartheid, in accordance with international law and for a free Palestine."
Jonathan Allen Jonathan Allen is a senior national politics reporter for NBC News, based in Washington.
Giant Sun 'Hole' Bigger Than 60 'Earths' Spewing Solar Wind Towards Our Planet
Thu, 07 Dec 2023 14:24
Beyond Politics
Check out all the latest trending news and stories from across the globe and the Internet! Lifestyle, cultural stories, social media hits, latest science and technology news, photos, videos, and much more!
https://sputnikglobe.com/20231206/giant-sun-hole-bigger-than-60-earths-spewing-solar-wind-towards-our-planet--1115430208.html
Giant Sun 'Hole' Bigger Than 60 'Earths' Spewing Solar Wind Towards Our Planet
Giant Sun 'Hole' Bigger Than 60 'Earths' Spewing Solar Wind Towards Our Planet
Spaceweather.com has unveiled information about a visible coronal hole, which is a massive dark spot on the Sun's surface. The fissure is now emitting intense streams of cosmic wind, a type of radiation that is remarkable due to its unusually high speed.
2023-12-06T15:21+0000
2023-12-06T15:21+0000
2023-12-06T15:21+0000
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The coronal hole formed on December 2, and reached a maximum width of 800,000 km. To put it in perspective, this vast expanse is five times the size of Jupiter and a staggering 60 times larger than Earth. Scientists believe that the fissure's size is unprecedented at the current stage of the solar cycle.Initially, researchers predicted that a dark spot like this would lead to a moderate geomagnetic storm on Earth, which could potentially disrupt radio communications. However, the cosmic wind turned out to be less intense than anticipated. Despite this, its passage did trigger polar aurorae in high-latitude regions.Coronal holes form when magnetic fields of the Sun open up, causing material from the star (also known as stellar matter) to be sent out into space. Consequently, these areas appear as dark spots since they are colder and have lower density than the surrounding space plasma.Solar activity has been steadily increasing throughout the year as the Sun is slowly approaching the explosive peak of its 11-year cycle. However, coronal holes can occur at any time throughout the cycle. The other thing that left the scientist puzzled is the fact that the new hole is close to the equator. Even though they normally appear further towards the poles of the Sun.Astronomers have previously estimated that solar activity will peak in early 2024.
https://sputnikglobe.com/20231205/scientists-detect-likely-culprit-of-strange-radiation-bursts-from-heart-of-our-galaxy-1115413007.html
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sun, hole on sun, space, space exploration
sun, hole on sun, space, space exploration
Spaceweather.com has unveiled information about a visible coronal hole, which is a massive dark spot on the Sun's surface. The fissure is now emitting intense streams of cosmic wind, a type of radiation that is remarkable due to its unusually high speed.
The coronal hole formed on December 2, and reached a maximum width of 800,000 km. To put it in perspective, this vast expanse is five times the size of Jupiter and a staggering 60 times
larger than Earth. Scientists believe that the fissure's size is unprecedented at the current stage of the solar cycle.
Initially, researchers predicted that a dark spot like this would lead to a moderate geomagnetic storm on Earth, which could potentially disrupt radio communications. However, the cosmic wind turned out to be less intense than anticipated. Despite this, its passage did trigger polar aurorae in high-latitude regions.
Coronal holes form when magnetic fields of the
Sun open up, causing material from the star (also known as stellar matter) to be sent out into space. Consequently, these areas appear as dark spots since they are colder and have lower density than the surrounding
space plasma.
Solar activity has been steadily increasing throughout the year as the Sun is slowly approaching the explosive peak of its 11-year cycle. However, coronal holes can occur at any time throughout the cycle. The other thing that left the scientist puzzled is the fact that the new hole is close to the equator. Even though they normally appear further towards the poles of the Sun.
Astronomers have previously estimated that solar activity will peak in early 2024.
What the perfect male and female buttocks look like, according to science - and it's all about the waist-to-hip ratio | Daily Mail Online
Thu, 07 Dec 2023 14:00
Plastic surgeons have revealed the type of rear-end Americans find most attractive.
The findings, from two studies published in an academic journal, show that, size is not the most important factor when it comes to an aesthetically pleasing derriere on women, despite the 'Kardashian effect' on beauty standards.
In one study, by surgeons at Loma Linda University in California, experts recruited 1,100 men and women and asked them to look at pictures of eight different sets of female buttocks, which the doctors had digitally generated.
They were then asked to indicate to researchers which one they found the most attractive. Results showed that people found 'waist to hip' ratio of 0.65 most attractive. This number resulted in a more narrow waist that flared slightly into the hips.
WOMEN: The rear-ends were ranked from first place to last place based on how many votes they received, with 1 being the most desirable and 8 being the least. The smaller numbers in the bottom left indicate the waist to hip ratio, which is the waist measurement to your hip measurement
WOMEN: Experts recruited 1,100 men and women and asked them to look at pictures of eight different sets of female buttocks, which the doctors digitally generated
WOMEN: The two least desirable buttocks were those with the largest (right) and smallest (left) differences in hip/waist ratios. The extreme hourglass figure seen on my A-list celebrities ranked last place
But the ideal buttocks is far from the extreme proportions seen on many A-list celebrity women famous for their hourglass figures.
In a separate study involving 2,000 men and women, participants were shown five images of male buttocks and asked to rate each from one to five '-- with those rated five being the most attractive.
The male buttocks ranked number one was also moderately sized, but the outlines of the muscle more defined.
Commenting on the female results, Dr Marc Everett, a plastic surgeon in New York City, told DailyMail.com: 'The mid-2010s brought an explosion in popularity of "Brazilian Butt Lift" or BBL [a procedure in which a doctor transfers fat from the belly, hips or thighs to the buttocks].
'But these days we are seeing fewer patients requesting extreme results.
'Instead, they're going for more modest size fat transfers, which put them into the "unsuspecting" or "it could still be natural" category.'
Kim Kardashian, pictured in 2017 and 2022, is arguably best known for her perfect hourglass curves. But the beauty has had a transformation over the years and recently started displaying a more svelte figure
Dr Everett adds he's seen a recent increase in patients who want to reverse their rear-enhancing procedure.
'I am seeing patients with some remorse about their exaggerated results,' he says.
'They are seeking remedies for oversized buttocks that are less fashionable this decade, or for buttocks starting to sag due to aging.'
The interest in BBLs was driven by large-reared celebrities including Khloe Kardashian, Cardi B and K.Michelle.
But with a shift in fashion many seem to have had the surgery reversed, with Khloe Kardashian appearing in 2022 with a slimmed-down figure.
The procedures have surged in popularity, with the number of BBLs rising from nearly 4,000 in 2011 to 61,000 in 2021.
In the first study, scientists began digitally altering a stock image of a pair of female buttocks to create eight images with varying waist-to-hip ratios.
This is the main determinant of butt size '-- along with the amount of body fat inside the buttocks '-- and made the computer-generated images appear to have varying volume in buttock tissue.
The larger a person's waist-to-hip ratio, the more fat they had around their waist, making their behind appear less curvy, scientists said.
And the smaller the waist-to-hip ratio the less fat they had around their waist, making their buttocks appear curvier.
The images were then shown to 1,000 study participants recruited via social media.
Almost all participants were from the US '-- half male, half female, and the majority were aged 25 to 34 years old.
Researchers found the buttocks with a waist-to-hip ratio of 0.65 was most popular. Forty-four percent of respondents said this was their preferred option.
A ratio of 0.65 means that the buttocks is about 35 percent larger than the waist. It was measured by wrapping a tape measure around the waist at its smallest point and the hips at their largest point.
In second place was the slightly smaller ratio of 0.60: a quarter of the sample favored this size.
One in 10 participants liked the second largest butt the best '-- 0.675. And the butt considered least attractive had the lowest waist-to-hip ratio of 0.55.
There is variation in waist-to-hip ratios across the population, doctors said, but anything at 0.6 or below would be 'hard to play off' as natural.
Every image shown got a vote from at least one of the 1,000 participants who said that was their preferred waist-to-hip ratio. Preferences in other regions of the world may differ.
Researchers found there were no significant differences between age groups, genders and ethnic groups in terms of which buttocks they preferred.
Writing in the study published in the peer-reviewed journal of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery, they said: 'Our study found that a lower waist-to-hip ratio was preferred in comparison to the often-cited 0.7.
'Only 5.7 percent of respondents thought 0.7 was the most attractive waist-to-hip ratio.
'This may be a consequence of prominent exposure and desensitization of the general population to reality stars and celebrities with curvier figures.'
Dr Everett said a waist-to-hip ratio from 0.6 and below was 'pretty exaggerated' and 'hard to play off as natural'.
MEN: The rear-ends of men were ranked from first place to last place based on how many votes they received, with 1 being the most desirable and 5 being the least. Study participants appeared to prefer muscular buttocks that had definition
MEN: Those which were more padded and curvy scored the worst - possibly because they appear more feminine
In the study on male butts, researchers asked 2,000 people to rate five digital images of a male buttocks from three angles: Behind, at a curve and side on.
The participants ranked the images from 1 to 5 with 5 being the most attractive and their scores were then combined to get an overall figure.
Participants were recruited online and 61 percent were male aged between 25 and 34 years old.
They were all in the United States and half of the participants were from a white background while 75 percent were heterosexual.
Cardi B revealed in 2022 that she had had butt fillers taken out of her behind. She is shown, left, in July, and, right, later in the year after telling fans she had had them removed
Results showed that, overall, participants preferred a buttocks that was 'moderately enhanced' and 'well-proportioned' in appearance.
Dr Ashit Patel, a plastic surgeon in North Carolina who led the study, said: 'In our survey, raters thought the ideal male buttocks shouldn't be too wide and should retain the characteristic dimple on the sides.'
Results showed that from behind, a gluteal trochanteric index (GTI) of 0.66 was most popular '-- with an average score of 3.1.
The GTI was measured by dividing the distance from the thinnest point of the waist to the bottom of the buttocks by the widest point of the buttocks.
Researchers said they used this on men instead of the waist-to-hip ratio because of differences in fat distribution between the two genders.
A ratio of 0.66 means the buttocks is about 34 percent larger than the distance from the waist to the bottom of the behind.
Khloe Kardashian, pictured in 2014 and again in 2022, is believed to have had surgery to augment the size of her butt. She is shown with a much larger one initially before showing off her more slimmed down appearance
It was followed by a ratio of 0.64 with an average score of three and 0.68 with an average score of 2.9. At the other end of the scale, participants were least likely to rate 0.58 as their favorite.
For the other views, however, participants ranked the buttocks with a GTI of 0.64 as the most appealing.
Among gay participants, results showed participants were most likely to rank the ratio of 0.62 as the most appealing.
Researchers said there was a significant difference in responses by region, with those who lived in southern areas of the US most likely to say they preferred a more voluptuous buttocks on men.
Dr Patel said: 'Our study is one of the first to really focus on what makes the male buttocks most attractive.
'We believe the findings will be helpful in discussions with patients considering gluteal enhancement and provide guidance in achieving optimal results and patient satisfaction.'
Interest in male buttocks enhancements has been rising in recent years '-- with the numbers coming forward rising with the proportion of all butt alteration surgeries done on men rising from 2.2 percent in 1997 compared to 6.2 percent in 2012.
This study, also published in the journal of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery this year, aims to give people a baseline on which butts are most appealing.
The Rise and Fall of Podcasting '' Adam Davidson
Thu, 07 Dec 2023 13:19
The Daily Beast has an interesting article about personal and political dynamics within one podcasting company, Pushkin Industries.
But I don't think Pushkin's struggles or those of any other company are primarily about individuals making bad decisions. Pushkin launched right around the same time I launched my podcast company, Three Uncanny Four. I think they made a lot of better decisions than I did. This quote, from Malcolm Gladwell cut a little close to home. I could have said the exact same words:
''We made mistakes. I think we grew too fast. I think we lost sight of who we are and what we stand for,'' he admitted. ''I think we got a little blinded by some of the hype and craziness in our industry over the last couple of years.''
Podcasting has offered a fascinating case study of the sudden emergence, rapid growth, and then maturing of a medium.
Alex Blumberg and I launched Planet Money in 2008. From that year through 2018, podcasting's audience growth was incredible. In 2008, almost nobody had even heard of podcasts, let alone listened to one. This chart suggests around 20% had ever heard one but fewer than half of them regularly listened.
Apple wouldn't launch its podcast app for another four years. It required some technical skill and a fair bit of time to even download a podcast and you had to do it from your computer, so you needed to know what you'd want to listen to before you left the house.
But that growth kept on growing.
Supply of great shows and the talent to make great shows was lagging behind that audience growth. For years, this was the main complaint of podcast executives: we can't find enough people who know how to edit tape, how to record, how to shape a show.
As a result, there were only so many compelling shows launched each year.A fast-growing audience, hungry for content, meant that pretty much every decent show found listeners organically.
The economics were wonderful for thoughtful, carefully produced shows. Those were the shows that stood out, that friends told their friends about. I would guess that in 2008, there were well below 100 people in the U.S. who had any experience creating highly produced long-form audio shows. (NPR and most other public radio shows are focused on 3 to 5 minute radio stories or live radio. These require some of the same skills as podcasting, but are, fundamentally, a different beast than produced long-form audio.)
Through to 2018, you could launch an amazing show with 2 or 3 employees who made an average of $60K a year or so. Or, more likely, freelancers at a comparable rate. You could spend next to nothing on marketing and still build a sizable audience. You could sell ads yourself or partner with one of a lot of agencies. If your show was pretty darn good, it would be like a big Hollywood launch. The world of podcast listeners would know about it, listen to it, tell their friends.
But in 2019 there was a complete transformation. On one day, Spotify poured $400M+ into an industry that had been around $400M for the entire year of 2018. That same year Sony Music put a lot of money in, so did Amazon and SiriusXM, and countless others. The industry more than doubled in a few months. There was more money than ever. And that drew a lot of skilled people from other media or from non-media jobs into the industry.
It also bid up the price of marketing channels. They stopped being organic and became quite costly and crowded. In a world of 4 or 5 new great shows a year, you can rely on organic growth. Suddenly, there were like 4 to 5 great new shows every day.
As a result, thoughtfully produced (i.e.: expensive!) shows became uneconomical.
Staffers and freelancers made more money (good!). Marketing costs skyrocketed. One ad on the Daily or whatever hit show could be $40,000. And there were so many new shows, many of them quite good, that whatever date you chose to launch would be crowded with a ton of other shows. I remember launching ''The Passion Economy'' podcast and finding out that another show, called ''Passion Economics'' happened to launch on the very same day. When I ran Three Uncanny Four, we had a new show by a host who was Instagram famous. We spent months planning the launch, spending tens of thousands on it. The host forgot to mention that he had an entirely different show, with an entirely different marketing campaign, launching the same week.
At the same time, a bunch of big celebrities realized that podcasting was no longer a low-status, low-revenue gig for struggling standups. It was the single-easiest way for top tier talent to make a fortune. Those celebrities brought their own audiences.
For podcast company execs, the economics of these celebrity shows are far more appealing. With a highly produced show, a company needs to lay out a lot of money to pay for highly-skilled people to build a highly produced show. For Planet Money or other produced shows, it can easily take several person-months to make one hour of a show. And there are not all that many people who know how to do this work well, so the good ones get paid a lot (as they should!).
A company might pay several hundred thousand dollars before a show launches. It might take a full year to produce eight episodes. That math works out fine if you are all-but-guaranteed a successful launch. But after 2019, virtually no new highly produced shows had successful launches. So, you spend all this money, launch the show, and'... nobody listens. You can spend a lot on marketing. But, still, nobody listens.
By contrast, if you do a deal with a celebrity, you might pay a bit upfront, but most of the money is tied to the success of the show. If it works and finds an audience, the celebrity gets a percentage. If it doesn't work and doesn't find an audience, the company isn't out much money.
Even better, for the company, the celebrity brings their own audience, so marketing costs are low.
Most celebrity shows fail. There was a long run of shows hosted by very famous people who clearly didn't want to do a show at all but were talked in to it by managers and agents looking for a payday. The shows that succeeded were the ones hosted by famous people who love doing it. It is very hard''even for talented actors''to fake authenticity in audio for an hour a week. There are minimal upfront costs. The celebrities need to make time available, so you do have to guarantee them something. And you have to buy them a mic, maybe, and some decent headphones. But that is nothing compared to the costs of a highly produced show.
At the same time, the podcast advertising market became highly concentrated. It's a bit nuts that as late as 2018, individual shows had their own ad salespeople directly talking to all these big companies. There were probably thousands of ad sales people. By 2020, there was near-total concentration, with five or so ad operations responsibility for a majority of ads sold.
This created a new dynamic. When an ad salesperson only makes money if they get ads on your show, they are going to work very hard to get ads on your show. But if that same salesperson has a large library of shows to sell, they will focus on the already successful shows with large audiences. It takes less time, less effort to sell a show that has 1 million listeners than to sell a show with 20,000 or 100,000 listeners. And it's all but impossible to sell a brand new show with no listeners.
Things got even worse for the highly-produced shows. They typically had limited runs. Seasons of 6- or 8- or, maybe, 12 episodes. Compare that to weekly shows, that
Here's some math:
In 2018, you could:
Create a new show for around $20,000 per episode (~200 hours of work at ~$100/hour). Get an audience of 300,000 or more for, essentially, no marketing spend. Sell ads for around $100 CPM (cost per thousand impressions). Which brings in $30,000 per episode. You make $10,000 per episode profit. That can be a business. Launch ten of those a year, with an average of 10 episodes a year, and you've got $1 million profit on a $2 million investment. Pretty darn good. Nothing comes even close.
That's the math behind my launch of Three Uncanny Four and behind Alex Blumberg launching Gimlet and 1,000 other people launching 1,000 other shows.
By 2020, that all changed:
That same show costs more, because the skilled talent could demand more money. Let's call it $150/hour. Marketing costs skyrocketed. Each company calculates it differently and estimates range from $2 to $50 in marketing costs to bring in a single listener. Audience size seems to cap out at around 100,000, even with that spend. CPMs for 100,000-listener shows has fallen dramatically. let's call it $50 CPM (which is probably generous. A 10-episode show economics became:
Production costs: $30,000/episode. (~200 hours times ~$150/hour). Marketing costs: $300,000 to get 100,000 listeners. Or $30,000 per episode for a 10-episode run. Sell ads for $50 per 1,000 and get $5,000/episode. Lose $55,000 per episode. These numbers are rough estimates and any individual company's real costs and revenue will be quite different. But the rough order of magnitude is right.
From 2018 to 2020, highly-produced podcasting went from a fairly easy way to make a decent profit to a near-guaranteed way to lose a fortune.
Compare the highly-produced cost structure to a celebrity show:
Production costs: $150,000 per year (an engineer and a producer). With 50 episodes a year, that's $3,000/episode. But one engineer can probably handle 10 shows. And a producer can do 2 or 3. So, as you grow, this cost becomes even more negligible. Marketing costs: $50K or so on PR push to get press. So, $1K/episode. Guarantee to celebrity: $250K, recoupable (meaning you lose that if the show fails but you are repaid if the show succeeds). Sell ads for $100/1,000 listeners, because brands want to be associated with celebrities. Audience: 500,000 to 1 million if you have the right celebrity. Let's say you do 10 of these in a year. You are out $3M in guarantees and marketing. ($50K marketing+$250K advanceX10).
If one of these shows hits big, you get: $100,000 PER EPISODE ($100/thousand listenersX1M listeners). And you get to do 50 episodes in a year. So, you get $5M in revenue. Off of ONE show. The other nine shows you do could be total failures. But let's say 2 of them become 500,000 listener shows. Then you're making another $100K/week, or $5M/year. And most of that is pure profit, because you've covered all your costs with your one hit. The other shows can all be failures and you're still profitable. But if those shows can break even at around 60,000 listeners per episode, which is pretty low for a celebrity-driven show. And every listener above that is profit.
For the people laying out the dough''the investors and the executives who control the spend''these are low risk engagements. You do have to promise $250K up front. But most of the profit for the talent is only realized if the show is successful. So, yes, you do have to give something like 25% to 35% to talent and their team. But you are still keeping a ton of dough. And if the show is created and owned by the talent, they get all the upside.
Again, these numbers are quite rough and each company's picture is different. But you start to see why Conan O'Brien sold his company for $150M and the Smartless folks are getting as much as $80M from Amazon.
And this shows why the companies that focused on highly-produced, non-celebrity shows have gone defunct or are heading there. Gimlet, Three Uncanny Four, Pushkin, and on and on.
I know many (most?) of the people involved in most of these companies. And, yes, we have all made a lot of dumb choices and bad decisions. But that was true during the fast-growth stage of podcasting, too.
I'm not sure there was any set of choices in which these companies would have succeeded.
What changed is that podcasting became mature and the economics fundamentally shifted.
With hindsight, the only way any of these companies could have triumphed would have been to shift to a cheap-to-produce celebrity-centric talk format. Though, even then, I'm not sure the market wanted so many companies doing that. And I don't think we would be the people best positioned to succeed at that game.
I made some very bad decisions myself. I ran Three Uncanny Four poorly. I was so eager to please. I so wanted to create a great culture and to support the staff and to get along with Sony Music execs and to make everyone happy that I abandoned my vision before even really trying to implement it. I failed. And I continue to learn a lot from that failure.
I do think there is a good path for individual creators: Patreon and other subscription models. This has been wonderful for at least some. But, as far as I know, few larger companies have succeeded with subscription models.
Perhaps, with precisely the right set of choices, Three Uncanny Four and Gimlet and Pushkin and 1,000 other companies would be alive and thriving today. But I doubt it.
Forbes names 'most powerful woman' award winner '-- RT World News
Thu, 07 Dec 2023 13:07
Ursula von der Leyen's backing of Ukraine saw her take the spot for a second year running
European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen has been named 'The World's Most Powerful Woman' by Forbes magazine for the second year in a row. She beat off competition from European Central Bank chief Christine Lagarde and US Vice President Kamala Harris to clinch the top spot.
Von der Leyen rose from eighth on the annual list in 2021 to first in 2022, with Forbes citing her ''strong and decisive support of Ukraine, as well as her continued leadership in bringing Europe through the coronavirus pandemic.''
Her support for Ukraine was cited again this year, with the magazine describing her as ''one of the West's staunchest supporters of Ukraine amid Russia's unprovoked invasion.''
Unlike in 2022, von der Leyen did not get a feature article this year, with Forbes simply naming her atop its list on Wednesday and updating its biography of her.
Von der Leyen served as Germany's defense minister under Chancellor Angela Merkel from 2013 to 2019. During this time, she oversaw an underfunded and declining military, with yearly reports pointing out that German troops lacked functioning weapons, working vehicles, and even adequate boots.
In December 2019, she became the first woman to lead the European Commission, the EU's executive branch. While she won praise from Forbes for spearheading a '¬750 billion coronavirus relief bill in 2020, she was criticized by European conservatives for openly withholding some of this money from Hungary and Poland over their refusal to accept migrants or implement liberal reforms demanded by Brussels.
When Russian troops entered Ukraine in February 2022, von der Leyen quickly emerged as one of Kiev's loudest advocates on the global stage. Under her leadership, the European Commission imposed nearly a dozen packages of sanctions on Moscow and embargoed Russian energy imports, to the detriment of many EU economies.
Von der Leyen has promised EU membership to Ukraine, despite multiple member states raising concerns with Kiev's dire public finances, ongoing armed conflict with Russia, and rampant corruption. She has also overseen the dramatic expansion of the European Peace Facility, an euphemistically-named fund used by the commission to finance foreign conflicts, namely the one in Ukraine.
European Central Bank chief Christine Lagarde came second on Forbes' list, while US Vice President Kamala Harris took third place. Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni '' another staunch backer of Kiev '' and pop star Taylor Swift came in fourth and fifth, respectively.
Television Legend Norman Lear Dies at 101
Wed, 06 Dec 2023 23:04
Norman Lear, the legendary creator of All in the Family, The Jeffersons, Maude, and many more while shaping television sitcoms for decades, has died. He was 101.
Vanity Fair reports the acclaimed TV writer/producer died Tuesday at his home in Los Angeles.
More to come'...
Follow Simon Kent on Twitter: Follow @SunSimonKent or e-mail to: skent@breitbart.com
Illinois Bill Would Require Blood Donors to Disclose COVID Vaccination Status | The Epoch Times
Wed, 06 Dec 2023 22:59
HB4243 would require donors to disclose whether they received an mRNA vaccine and imposes labeling requirements for donated blood and blood products.
New legislation in Illinois would allow individuals receiving blood donations to know whether they're receiving blood from an individual vaccinated with a COVID-19 vaccine or another messenger RNA (mRNA) vaccine.
Bill HB4243, introduced on Nov. 29 by Illinois state Rep. Jed Davis, amends the Illinois Clinical Laboratory and Blood Bank Act and would require blood banks to test donated blood for evidence of COVID-19 vaccines and
other mRNA components, including lipid nanoparticles and spike protein'--and requires a blood donor to disclose during each donor screening process whether they have received a COVID-19 vaccine or any other mRNA vaccine during their lifetime.
Additionally, the bill imposes labeling requirements for blood or blood components that test positive for evidence of a COVID-19 vaccine or other mRNA vaccine component or were obtained from a donor who received a COVID-19 vaccine or other mRNA vaccine.
''A constituent approached me concerned about her son's upcoming surgery. What if he needed a blood transfusion with the long-term impacts concerning mRNA vaccines unknown? As a parent myself, her concern and corresponding question feel warranted,'' Mr. Davis told The Epoch Times in an email.
''This conversation was the catalyst for my bill delineating blood donations and mRNA vaccines. We disclose medical information all the time with providers, so why not our vaccine history? It's an easy ask, and I'm proud to sponsor this bill.''
Once a bill is
introduced in Illinois, it is read and referred to the Rules Committee and will then be assigned to a substantive committee. For elected officials like Mr. Davis, he believes that part of his job is to translate the concerns or ideas of constituents into legislation when applicable'--and that every bill, including HB4243, originated from someone walking through his office door. ''Without hesitation, helping people is such a blessing and honor,'' he said.
Concerned about blood transfusions from people vaccinated against COVID-19, a Republican lawmaker in Montana
introduced a bill earlier this year that would have made it a misdemeanor offense for anyone who received a COVID-19 vaccine to donate tissue or blood. However, the bill was tabled quickly in a 19 to 1 vote.
Unlike the bill introduced in Montana, HB4243 does not criminalize individuals who donate blood if they've received a COVID-19 vaccine. It merely allows people receiving blood products to know whether the blood they're receiving came from a vaccinated individual and requires blood blanks to add this information to product labels so that patients can make informed decisions.
According to the
Red Cross, there is no waiting period for those who received a COVID-19 vaccine'--as long as they are symptom-free and feel well at the time of donation. If an individual doesn't know which vaccine they received, they must wait two weeks to donate blood.
The Association for the Advancement of Blood & Biotherapies, America's Blood Centers, and the American Red Cross do not believe COVID-19 vaccines pose a risk to patients receiving blood transfusions.
In a joint statement issued on Jan. 26, the three organizations said there is no ''scientific evidence that demonstrates adverse outcomes from the transfusions of blood products collected from vaccinated donors and, therefore, no medical reason to distinguish or separate blood donations from individuals who have received a COVID-19 vaccination.''
The statement further reads that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), on multiple occasions, has confirmed that there is no evidence to support concerns about the safety of blood donated by vaccinated individuals. However, the FDA has not provided data showing it is safe to receive blood donated from vaccinated individuals, and many studies have found mRNA from COVID-19 vaccines circulating in the blood or plasma of recently vaccinated individuals.
A 2022 study
published in Biomedicines found synthetic mRNA in Pfizer's COVID-19 vaccine persists in the blood of vaccinated individuals for at least two weeks post-vaccination.
A January study published in the
Journal of Pathology, Microbiology, and Immunology found full-length or traces of SARS-CoV-2 spike mRNA vaccine sequences from both Pfizer and Moderna in the blood of some vaccinated individuals up to 28'days after COVID-19 vaccination.
''We expect that vaccine mRNA detected in plasma is contained within LNPs [lipid nanoparticles] and that the LNPs in plasma have been slowly released from the injection site either directly to the blood or through the lymph system,'' the authors wrote.
In a January
study in Circulation, researchers found persistently elevated circulating levels of full-length spike protein in the blood of adolescents and young adults who developed myocarditis following COVID-19 vaccination.
A 2022 study in
Clinical Infectious Diseases found circulating S1 antigens
from the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein in the plasma of participants vaccinated with Moderna's COVID-19 vaccine. Antigens are the weakened or inactive parts of a particular organism'--in this case, the spike protein'--that triggers an immune response within the body. Researchers also confirmed that the detected S1 antigens resulted from vaccination and not natural infection.
EV Owners Waking Up to the Nightmare of Massive Repair Bills '' PJ Media
Wed, 06 Dec 2023 22:48
"Sticker shock" has taken on a whole new meaning when new electric vehicle owners get their first repair bill following a simple fender bender. The Wall Street Journal reports that a San Francisco resident got in a minor accident with his electric truck. He thought that repairs would be "a couple-thousand-dollar bill from the repair shop and to be without his truck for a couple of weeks."
Instead, the first-time EV owner was shocked to get a $22,000 bill for repairs that took 2 1/2 months.
The Biden administration has a goal to have 50% of all new cars on the road in 2030 be electric vehicles. That's about 48 million cars and trucks. Owners are going to need chargers on the road, mechanics to service them, and parts to repair their vehicles.
None of those things exist in the numbers necessary for a smooth transition to EVs.
As far as repairs go, they may be more expensive than gas-powered cars, but the upkeep of EVs is only a fraction of what a driver pays for maintaining a conventional vehicle. But insurance is much higher and parts are twice as expensive as gasoline cars.
Altogether, you probably come out a little ahead with an EV as far as operating costs. But is the rest of it worth it?
When these vehicles do get into a crash, repairs can be more complex for many reasons. The bodies can be more complicated to disassemble, and the repairs tend to require more steps and precautions, Fredman said.
Vehicles containing lithium-ion batteries also require special storage consideration because of the risk of fire when they are damaged, said Scott Benavidez, chairman of the trade group Automotive Service Association and owner of a collision repair business in New Mexico. Those precautions add both time and cost to the repair process, he added.
The fire hazard is especially acute because most rural and small-town volunteer fire departments don't know how to put out a fire from a vehicle containing lithium-ion batteries. It will take a few years before the fire departments catch up with their urban counterparts.
And it's probably only a matter of time before manufacturers catch up with consumer demand and can iron out at least some of the difficulties.
There are signs that costs could come down as automakers build up a supply of spare parts and more independent repair shops become trained.
EV market leader Tesla has company-owned collision repair centers, as well as a network of privately owned body shops. Those additions helped half the cost of repairs on Teslas over the past decade as more shops became equipped to work on the vehicles, said Xander Walker, a former Tesla employee who worked on refurbishing leased vehicles and trade-ins.
There's some hope that most of these problems can be fixed in the next decade. But it's still a mystery to me why Biden and his administration started a war against gasoline-powered cars while they were still a viable mode of transportation.
'$1 Burrito event' for Northwestern University students linked to highly contagious norovirus outbreak
Wed, 06 Dec 2023 21:40
The Evanston Health and Human Services Department is investigating a norovirus outbreak linked to a $1-burrito event for Northwestern University students.
The ''$1 Burrito event'' for Northwestern University students took place last Saturday between 1 and 8 p.m. with Big Wig Tacos.
The city's health department began receiving complaints on Monday from students who reported experiencing stomach cramps, vomiting, and diarrhea after consuming food from the event.
The department said in a news release that it began ''an immediate and thorough inspection of the food establishment.''
Big Wig Tacos said it has cooperated with the Evanston Health Department in its investigation.
''While there have been reported cases, we are not certain the outbreak originated at our restaurant. Prior to the event, the Evanston Health Department completed a routine health inspection and found no issues with our establishment,'' the restaurant said in a news release, noting that norovirus outbreaks ''are more common in settings like colleges and universities.''
''Nevertheless, we are taking immediate and comprehensive measures to address the situation. We are taking extra steps to thoroughly clean and sanitize, with a particular focus on areas that may be susceptible for the transmission of the virus.''
A norovirus outbreak at Northwestern University was linked to a $1 dollar burrito event at Big Wig Tacos in Evanston, Illinois. Google MapsFox News Digital has reached out to the city's health department and Big Wig Tacos for additional comments.
Per the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the norovirus is a highly contagious virus that can cause vomiting, diarrhea, nausea, and stomach pain.
The CDC recommends washing your hands and rinsing fruits and vegetables as preventative measures.
Brazillian city enacts an ordinance that was written by ChatGPT | AP News
Wed, 06 Dec 2023 20:32
RIO DE JANEIRO (AP) '-- City lawmakers in Brazil have enacted what appears to be the nation's first legislation written entirely by artificial intelligence '-- even if they didn't know it at the time.
The experimental ordinance was passed in October in the southern city of Porto Alegre and city councilman Ramiro Rosrio revealed this week that it was written by a chatbot, sparking objections and raising questions about the role of artificial intelligence in public policy.
Rosrio told The Associated Press that he asked OpenAI's chatbot ChatGPT to craft a proposal to prevent the city from charging taxpayers to replace water consumption meters if they are stolen. He then presented it to his 35 peers on the council without making a single change or even letting them know about its unprecedented origin.
''If I had revealed it before, the proposal certainly wouldn't even have been taken to a vote,'' Rosrio told the AP by phone on Thursday. The 36-member council approved it unanimously and the ordinance went into effect on Nov. 23.
''It would be unfair to the population to run the risk of the project not being approved simply because it was written by artificial intelligence,'' he added.
The arrival of ChatGPT on the marketplace just a year ago has sparked a global debate on the impacts of potentially revolutionary AI-powered chatbots. While some see it as a promising tool, it has also caused concerns and anxiety about the unintended or undesired impacts of a machine handling tasks currently performed by humans.
Porto Alegre, with a population of 1.3 million, is the second-largest city in Brazil's south. The city's council president, Hamilton Sossmeier, found out that Rosrio had enlisted ChatGPT to write the proposal when the councilman bragged about the achievement on social media on Wednesday. Sossmeier initially told local media he thought it was a ''dangerous precedent.''
The AI large language models that power chatbots like ChatGPT work by repeatedly trying to guess the next word in a sentence and are prone to making up false information, a phenomenon sometimes called hallucination.
All chatbots sometimes introduce false information when summarizing a document, ranging from about 3% of the time for the most advanced GPT model to a rate of about 27% for one of Google's models, according to recently published research by the tech company Vectara.
In an article published on the website of Harvard Law School's Center of Legal Profession earlier this year, Andrew Perlman, dean at Suffolk University Law School, wrote that ChatGPT ''may portend an even more momentous shift than the advent of the internet,'' but also warned of its potential shortcomings.
''It may not always be able to account for the nuances and complexities of the law. Because ChatGPT is a machine learning system, it may not have the same level of understanding and judgment as a human lawyer when it comes to interpreting legal principles and precedent. This could lead to problems in situations where a more in-depth legal analysis is required,'' Perlman wrote.
Porto Alegre's Rosrio wasn't the first lawmaker in the world to test ChatGPT's abilities. Others have done so in a more limited capacity or with less successful outcomes.
In Massachusetts, Democratic state Sen. Barry Finegold turned to ChatGPT to help write a bill aimed at regulating artificial intelligence models, including ChatGPT. Filed earlier this year, it has yet to be voted on.
Finegold said by phone on Wednesday that ChatGPT can help with some of the more tedious elements of the lawmaking process, including correctly and quickly searching and citing laws already on the books. However, it is critical that everyone knows ChatGPT or a similar tool was used in the process, he added.
''We want work that is ChatGPT generated to be watermarked,'' he said, adding that the use of artificial intelligence to help draft new laws is inevitable. ''I'm in favor of people using ChatGPT to write bills as long as it's clear.''
There was no such transparency for Rosrio's proposal in Porto Alegre. Sossmeier said Rosrio did not inform fellow council members that ChatGPT had written the proposal.
Keeping the proposal's origin secret was intentional. Rosrio told the AP his objective was not just to resolve a local issue, but also to spark a debate. He said he entered a 49-word prompt into ChatGPT and it returned the full draft proposal within seconds, including justifications.
''I am convinced that ... humanity will experience a new technological revolution,'' he said. ''All the tools we have developed as a civilization can be used for evil and good. That's why we have to show how it can be used for good.''
And the council president, who initially decried the method, already appears to have been swayed.
''I changed my mind,'' Sossmeier said. ''I started to read more in depth and saw that, unfortunately or fortunately, this is going to be a trend.''
_____Savarese reported from Sao Paulo. AP journalists Steve LeBlanc in Boston and Matt O'Brien in Providence, Rhode Island, contributed to this report.
Earth on verge of five catastrophic climate tipping points, scientists warn | Environment | The Guardian
Wed, 06 Dec 2023 18:19
Many of the gravest threats to humanity are drawing closer, as carbon pollution heats the planet to ever more dangerous levels, scientists have warned.
Five important natural thresholds already risk being crossed, according to the Global Tipping Points report, and three more may be reached in the 2030s if the world heats 1.5C (2.7F) above pre-industrial temperatures.
Triggering these planetary shifts will not cause temperatures to spiral out of control in the coming centuries but will unleash dangerous and sweeping damage to people and nature that cannot be undone.
''Tipping points in the Earth system pose threats of a magnitude never faced by humanity,'' said Tim Lenton, from the University of Exeter's Global Systems Institute. ''They can trigger devastating domino effects, including the loss of whole ecosystems and capacity to grow staple crops, with societal impacts including mass displacement, political instability and financial collapse.''
The tipping points at risk include the collapse of big ice sheets in Greenland and the West Antarctic, the widespread thawing of permafrost, the death of coral reefs in warm waters, and the collapse of one oceanic current in the North Atlantic.
Unlike other changes to the climate such as hotter heatwaves and heavier rainfall, these systems do not slowly shift in line with greenhouse gas emissions but can instead flip from one state to an entirely different one. When a climatic system tips '' sometimes with a sudden shock '' it may permanently alter the way the planet works.
Scientists warn that there are large uncertainties around when such systems will shift but the report found that three more may soon join the list. These include mangroves and seagrass meadows, which are expected to die off in some regions if the temperatures rise between 1.5C and 2C, and boreal forests, which may tip as early as 1.4C of heating or as late as 5C.
Mangrove forests can protect land areas from rising sea levels and coastal abrasion, but they are at risk. Photograph: Hotli Simanjuntak/EPAThe warning comes as world leaders meet for the Cop28 climate summit in Dubai. On Tuesday, Climate Action Tracker estimated that their emissions targets for 2030 put the planet on track to heat 2.5C by the end of the century, despite promises from countries at a previous summit to try to limit it to 1.5C.
The tipping point report, produced by an international team of 200 researchers and funded by Bezos Earth Fund, is the latest in a series of warnings about the most extreme effects of climate change.
Scientists have warned that some of the shifts can create feedback loops that heat the planet further or alter weather patterns in a way that triggers other tipping points.
The researchers said the systems were so tightly linked they could not rule out ''tipping cascades''. If the Greenland ice sheet disintegrates, for instance, it could lead to an abrupt shift in the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, an important current that delivers most of the heat to the gulf stream. That, in turn, can intensify the El Ni±o southern oscillation, one of the most powerful weather patterns on the planet.
The co-author Sina Loriani, from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, said tipping-point risks could be disastrous and should be taken very seriously, despite the remaining uncertainties.
''Crossing these thresholds may trigger fundamental and sometimes abrupt changes that could irreversibly determine the fate of essential parts of our Earth system for the coming hundreds or thousands of years,'' he said.
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In its latest review of climate change science, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change found that tipping thresholds were unclear but the dangers would grow more likely as the planet heats up.
It said: ''Risks associated with large-scale singular events or tipping points, such as ice-sheet instability or ecosystem loss from tropical forests, transition to high risk between 1.5C to 2.5C and to very high risk between 2.5C to 4C.''
The tipping point report also looked at what it called ''positive tipping points'', such as the plummeting price of renewable energy and the growth in sales of electric vehicles. It found that such shifts do not happen by themselves but need to be enabled by stimulating innovation, shaping markets, regulating business, and educating and mobilising the public.
A study from the report's co-author Manjana Milkoreit last year warned against overusing the label of social tipping points by promising solutions that did not exist at scale or could not be controlled.
''While scholarship benefits from hope, we need to exercise caution when offering social tipping points as potential solutions to the temporal squeeze of climate change,'' she wrote.
Global Tipping Points | Home
Wed, 06 Dec 2023 18:19
WelcomeGlobal Tipping Points is led by Professor Tim Lenton from the University of Exeter's Global Systems Institute with the support of more than 200 researchers from over 90 organisations in 26 countries.
The Global Tipping Points Report was launched at COP28 on 6 December 2023. The report is an authoritative assessment of the risks and opportunities of both negative and positive tipping points in the Earth system and society.
Foreword by Dr. Andrew Steer, President & CEO at Bezos Earth Fund.
Summary Report Harmful tipping points in the natural world pose some of the gravest threats faced by humanity. Their triggering will severely damage our planet's life-support systems and threaten the stability of our societies.
Introduction This report is for all those concerned with tackling escalating Earth system change and mobilising transformative social change to alter that trajectory, achieve sustainability and promote social justice.
Section 1 Earth system tipping pointsConsiders Earth system tipping points. These are reviewed and assessed across the three major domains of the cryosphere, biosphere and circulation of the oceans and atmosphere.
Section 2 Tipping point impactsConsiders tipping point impacts. First we look at the human impacts of Earth system tipping points, then the potential couplings to negative tipping points in human systems.
Section 3 Governance of Earth system tipping pointsConsiders how to govern Earth system tipping points and their associated risks. We look at governance of mitigation, prevention and stabilisation then we focus on governance of impacts, including adaptation, vulnerability and loss and damage.
Section 4 Positive tipping points in technology, economy & societyFocuses on positive tipping points in technology, the economy and society. It provides a framework for understanding and acting on positive tipping points. We highlight illustrative case studies across energy, food and transport and mobility systems, with a focus on demand-side solutions.
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You've heard of long COVID, but what about 'long vax'?
Wed, 06 Dec 2023 17:29
What is 'long vax'?According to reports to the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System, some patients have experienced a variety of neurologic and systemic symptoms after receiving a COVID-19 vaccination. Some reported symptoms include post-vaccine neuropathy and tinnitus. Some vaccine recipients have also been diagnosed with postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome (POTS), a condition that has also been diagnosed in long COVID patients.
However, Harlan Krumholz from the Yale School of Medicine and other researchers noted that "[i]mportantly, immune-mediated neurological adverse events post-vaccination are rare and often less severe than those that follow actual infection."
To better understand long-term symptoms that may occur after COVID-19 vaccination, Krumholz and his colleagues surveyed 241 adults who were part of the online LISTEN study from May 2022 to July 2023 and self-reported post-vaccination syndrome (PVS). Patients with long COVID were excluded from the study. So far, the study has only been posted on medRxiv and has not yet been peer reviewed.
Most of the participants were white women from the United States, and the median age was 46. Among the participants, 55% said they received the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, and 37% said they received the Moderna vaccine. A third (34%) also said that they had COVID-19 at least once.
Participants completed surveys between November 2022 and July 2023, a median of 595 days after being vaccinated. In the survey, participants used a list of 96 symptoms to identify any health conditions that had occurred due to a vaccine injury and reported their self-perceived health status on a five-point scale.
Participants also rated their quality of life on the Euro-QoL visual analogue scale (EQ-VAS) and reported symptom severity on their worst days. The symptom severity scale ranged from zero (trivial illness) to 100 (unbearable).
Overall, participants attributed a median of 22 symptoms to PVS, and 44% said their current health was fair or poor. The five most common reported symptoms were exercise intolerance (71%), excessive fatigue (69%), numbness (63%), brain fog (63%), and neuropathy (63%).
The median EQ-VAS score was 50. It was 52 among those without any previous comorbidities. Participants also reported a median symptom severity of 80.
The symptoms also negatively impacted the participants' mental health. In the week before taking the survey, many participants said they felt unease (93%), fearfulness (82%), and overwhelmed by worries (81%). They also reported feelings of helplessness (80%), anxiety (76%), depression (76%), or hopelessness (72%) at least once.
Participants tried a median of 20 treatments for their symptoms. The most common prescription therapies were oral steroids (48%), gabapentin (25%), low-dose naltrexone (20%), ivermectin (18%), propranolol (11%), and bronchodilators (11%).
Some of the non-drug treatments included limiting exercise or exertion (51% of participants), quitting alcohol or caffeine (44%), hydration and increasing salt intake (44%), and intermittent fasting (39%).
According to the researchers, some limitations of the study include the fact that patients were self-referred and self-reported their symptoms. "The participants are not representative, so it is not possible to estimate the incidence or who might be most susceptible to this condition," the researchers wrote.
CommentaryAccording to Krumholz, ongoing symptoms after COVID-19 vaccination are not often studied. "Even the definition of post-vaccination syndrome is in flux, but a working definition could be symptoms that begin with a week of a vaccination and persist for at least 2 months," he said.
The current study "raises awareness about what these individuals are experiencing and points attention to the need for more studies to understand what is underlying this condition and how to relieve suffering," Krumholz said.
Notably, "[t]hese people are not anti-vaxxers '-- they were all vaccinated '-- but because of politics, many have had the experience of being dismissed and ignored," Krumholz added.
Going forward, more research will be needed to better understand the effects of PVS. "The next step is to correlate what these people are experiencing with deep investigations of immune function," Krumholz said, adding that the LISTEN study is still recruiting participants. (George, MedPage Today, 12/1)
Develop a strong COVID-19 vaccine communication strategy that shares information, addresses patient concerns, and encourages uptake.
Climate Trace
Wed, 06 Dec 2023 17:17
Climate comms, research and commentary
1d I have to say, I'm pretty blown away by the amazing new Climate TRACE tool, launched over the weekend at #COP28 with Al Gore's team. Pretty sure I could spend a week or two straight diving into these datasets - it is truly incredible work and I have never seen anything like it. https://climatetrace.org/We now have a top-down, independent and multi-source synthesised dataset of the major carbon bombs that exist across the world - my own interest is in the many coal, oil and gas projects along with the massive coal and gas-fired power stations. But this is significant for anyone who's been hunting for a different approach to the patchy voluntary data from companies.Some highlights from their findings: "Since 2015 the largest increases in global emissions have come from electricity production and other energy use in China, electricity production in India, and oil and gas production in the US""In 2022, the continued post-COVID travel rebound caused aviation emissions to surge, with the total from international flights rising 74% between 2021 and 2022""Road transportation emissions increased 3.5% in 2022. Despite the increasing availability of electric vehicles, high- and upper-middle income countries were responsible for 68% of that total increase in emissions"My screenshots below: - The fossil fuel extraction sites in Norway, along with our other emissions- Fossil fuel projects in Australia, plus power stations- The UAE's sources, and the 32 MTCO2-e field that dominates the list- Equinor's per-asset emissions! I suggest you go find your own country, filter for your 'favourite' sources of climate damage, and then click 'more details' on the bottom right to get a ranking from worst to less bad. Gavin McCormick WattTime.org
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Parents' Personality Disorders Driving Surge in Trans Kids: Psychiatrists | The Epoch Times
Tue, 05 Dec 2023 21:00
"Transhausen by proxy," a term coined for narcissistic parents who push so-called "gender transitioning" on their children, may be playing a role in the sudden rise of transgender children, some experts say.
Celebrities are increasingly in the limelight with announcements about their children who come out as transgender or nonbinary. Nonbinary individuals identify as neither male nor female.
"Transhausen by proxy" isn't an officially recognized psychological condition; it's a play on an official condition known as Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy (MSBP). MSBP is a mental illness that's also sometimes called medical child abuse or factitious disorder imposed on others. It's exhibited mostly by women seeking attention by exaggerating or making up an illness of children or others in their care.
Transhausen by proxy has very real effects on society, experts told The Epoch Times.
They point to headlines such as the one on Pride.com in May, which gushes: "15 Celebs Who Are Out & Proud of Their Trans & Nonbinary Kids." The article praises stars such as Cher, Sade, Jennifer Lopez, and Charlize Theron for supporting their children who reject their biological sex.
A girl at the annual New York City Pride March in New York on June 25, 2023. Some psychiatrists say parents are to blame in some cases of gender dysphoria. (Samira Bouaou/The Epoch Times)Another article by Pink News details how UK television stars Carrie and David Grant claim that three of their four children are transgender or nonbinary.
Ms. Grant is a singer and voice coach. Her husband was part of the '80s band Linx and worked with groups such as the Spice Girls. The couple told the publication that they had discussed alternate gender identities before their children "came out."
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They're currently pitching their book, "A Very Modern Family," on the topic of "understanding queer and neurodivergent children."
But celebrities aren't the only ones heralding transgender and nonbinary children.
Parents routinely post on social media cheering their children's transition or advocating for "transgender rights." Some parents have been featured in news articles for fleeing red states that block transgender procedures for children and moving to blue states where "gender-affirming care" is allowed.
The increase in cases of gender dysphoria and families with multiple transgender children have led some medical and mental health professionals to suspect psychological illness, such as narcissistic personality disorder, is involved.A Parent-Fueled Condition?Dr. Erica Li is a pediatrician in Spokane, Washington, who considers herself an old-school liberal. She's not necessarily against gender transitioning. Early in her career, she considered becoming a pediatrician specializing in gender dysphoria.
However, she began to question why doctors were advocating for medical procedures to transition children without solid scientific evidence that the procedures came with an overwhelming benefit for their young patients, she told The Epoch Times.
Dr. Erica Li, a pediatrician in Washington state, says a reliable prognosis is needed before doctors subject children to radical gender procedures. (Courtesy of Dr. Erica Li)
If the cause of gender dysphoria is unknown in a patient and the prognosis of treatment is uncertain, then radical treatment with morbid side effects isn't justified, she said.
Dr. Li believes that contemporary gender medicine is no longer based on reality. Now, she said, it's more about ideology. And the outcomes and long-term side effects of treating gender dysphoria are "murky."
Until recently, gender dysphoria was rare and occurred mainly in young males. Left untreated, the condition often resolves naturally after puberty. In some cases, children struggling with gender dysphoria turned out to be gay, according to studies.
But in recent years, many in favor of "gender-affirming care" argue that medical interventions save lives by reducing suicidal tendencies in youth. They assert that it's a human right for people to be able to identify as the opposite sex and that society must be accepting.
Dr. Li now, in some cases, sees another force at work'--parents with personality disorders.
Narcissism, which has similarities to MSBP, may contribute to the proliferation of gender dysphoria claims and shouldn't be ignored, she said.
Some experts believe that narcissistic parents are playing a part in the upward trend of gender dysphoria among children. Children attend a New York City Pride March in New York on June 25, 2023. (Samira Bouaou/The Epoch Times)"The narcissism of some of these mothers has to be exposed," Dr. Li said.
Machiavellianism is one of the traits in the dark triad model, along with psychopathy and narcissism. (wikipedia.org)Mothers, in particular, may use the attention from having a transgender child to climb the social hierarchy, she said. She's not the only medical professional to feel this way.
MSBP in parents has been described by insiders working in gender clinics in the United States and abroad, Dr. Li said. The condition is associated with what's known in personality research as the "Dark Triad," she said.
Those exhibiting the Dark Triad express Machiavellianism, which uses deception to win power. They also express underlying psychopathy, such as amoral behavior. And they express narcissism, which is the need for admiration coupled with an absence of empathy for others.'Transhausen by Proxy'In February, Jamie Reed, a former case manager at the Washington University Transgender Center at St. Louis Children's Hospital, exposed practices at the clinic and described parents who were adamant about transitioning their children.
Her revelations became the catalyst for Missouri lawmakers to draft a law barring hormone therapy for minors.
In a July article appearing in
LGBT Courage Coalition, Ms. Reed wrote about how children at the clinic were the victims of "one parent's own psychological needs."
"As horrible as this is to say, I did see parents (primarily moms) who showed signs of Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy," she wrote.
Ms. Reed, a lesbian and mother of five, described how the clinic tore families apart when both parents didn't agree to putting their children on hormones.
Fathers often attempted to stop the medical transitioning of their children, she wrote, and staff often referred to those fathers as "idiots" or said they had "patriarchal issues."
Activist Chris Elston, known as Billboard Chris (2nd L), embraces a supporter as he demonstrates against ''gender-affirming'' treatments and surgeries on minors, outside of Boston Children's Hospital in Boston on Sept. 18, 2022. (Joseph Prezioso/AFP via Getty Images)"Often the dads were fighting for the most reasonable things'--more time in therapy, therapy with a provider who would actually explore where his child's desire to escape his or her own body was coming from, time to allow mental health professionals to do proper psychotherapy," Ms. Reed wrote, adding that she no longer trusts "affirming" doctors because they are "blinded by ideology."
Likewise, in the UK, the Tavistock and Portman gender clinics accepted about 30 children under the age of 5 in the two-year period ending in 2022, according to National Health Service data. About half were younger than 4.
Dr. Az Hakeem , a psychiatrist who worked at the Portman Clinic until 2012, was quoted by The Telegraph and the Daily Mail as saying he was concerned with cases that smacked of "transhausen by proxy."
Dr. Hakeem told the news outlets that he had seen a significant number of grieving parents who had lost a child and eventually had another baby. Some parents wanted to transition the later-born child to the sex of the child who had died.
A general view of The Tavistock Centre in London on June 23, 2023. The Tavistock and Portman gender clinic was ordered by the UK government to close after a review condemned the use of cross-sex hormones and puberty blockers for patients who transitioned. (Dan Kitwood/Getty Images)He described instances in which parents of toddlers came to the clinic wanting a son instead of a daughter, or vice versa. In one example, he said the parents changed the name of their male child and put a wig on his head to shore up their belief that he really was a girl.
The UK gender clinics eventually merged into one. Eventually, the combined clinic was ordered by the UK government to close after a review condemned the use of cross-sex hormones and puberty blockers for patients who transitioned. The review found no solid evidence that the treatments benefited patients.Malignant NarcissismSam Vaknin, who lives in Europe, wrote about narcissistic abuse in his book, "Malignant Self-love: Narcissism Revisited."
Mr. Vaknin, who has a Ph.D. in physics and certification in psychological counseling, has studied pathological, malignant narcissism since the mid-1990s.
Many parents resist the idea that their child could be transgender. However, some parents enjoy the attention that they receive when their child comes out as transgender, he said.
"A trans child renders them special, renders them unique," Mr. Vaknin said. "It is a badge of distinction."
That kind of narcissism isn't the same as MSBP, he said. Parents affected by MSBP seek the attention of medical professionals under the guise of diagnosing puzzling medical conditions.
Parents with overt narcissism may see their children as objects to be used to gain attention, he said, or may even see their children as extensions of themselves.
Children of narcissists, he said, learn to modify their behavior to receive approval from their parents.
In severe cases, parents may have narcissistic personality disorder, he said.
These individuals exhibit grandiosity, a need for admiration, and a lack of empathy, according to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.
Experts say children may feel trapped into transitioning once they're accepted as a different gender. A child holds a flag at the annual New York City Pride March in New York on June 25, 2023. (Samira Bouaou/The Epoch Times)All the World's a StageIn June, some pop-culture magazines highlighted a public spat between actress Megan Fox and producer and director Robby Starbuck over a social media
comment he made about her three boys dressing like girls.
Mr. Starbuck, once a Republican write-in candidate for the U.S. House from Tennessee's 5th Congressional District, posted a photo of Ms. Fox with her three long-haired boys on X, formerly Twitter. In the photo, her oldest wore a pink "girls" T-shirt.
"We used to live in the same gated community, and our kids played at the park," Mr. Starbuck wrote. "I saw 2 of them have a full-on breakdown, saying they were forced by their mom to wear girls' clothing as their nanny tried to console them.
"It's pure child abuse. Pray for them."
Ms. Fox shot back in a profanity-laced response, calling Mr. Starbuck a "narcissist" and "clout chaser."
"Irregardless [sic] of how desperate you may become at any given time to acquire wealth, power, success, or fame'--never use children as leverage or social currency," she posted on X.
Megan Fox (R) sits with Machine Gun Kelly in Las Vegas on Feb. 5, 2022. A photo of Ms. Fox's three sons with long hair was posted on social media. (David Becker/Getty Images)"Exploiting my child's gender identity to gain attention in your political campaign has put you on the wrong side of the universe."
Despite what parents may say about their children's gender identities, a person can't switch sexes, Dr. Li and Mr. Vaknin said.
Sex is defined by reproductive cells known as gametes, Dr. Li said.
The brain doesn't define sex, as some believe, she said. Scientists haven't found significant differences between the male and female brains, and they haven't linked gender identity to a specific location in the brain.
The unclear terminology surrounding transgenderism makes it all the more difficult to discuss and understand, Mr. Vaknin said.
Gender dysphoria should be called "sex dysphoria," because it refers to someone confused about his or her sex, he said.
Gender can be seen as a societal role of a man or woman, but sex is biologically determined, Mr. Vaknin said. Sexual appearance and genitalia can be changed, he said, but sex can't.
"Sex cannot be assigned," Mr. Vaknin said. "You're born with it."
The annual New York City Pride March in New York on June 25, 2023. (Samira Bouaou/The Epoch Times)Exploitation by Medical ProfessionalsWhat may look like parental advocacy from afar may be the work of medical and mental health practitioners who have exploited parents, Oklahoma psychiatrist Lauren Schwartz told The Epoch Times.
She lays the blame squarely on professionals who have manipulated parents by telling them, "It's better to have a trans child than a dead child."
That has brought out "behaviors that otherwise you wouldn't expect from parents," Dr. Schwartz said.
She began speaking out about transitioning children when she saw poor outcomes, producing little benefit for patients.
The core claim of those promoting the idea of gender dysphoria is that someone can be born into the wrong body, Dr. Schwartz said.
"There's never been anything in medicine, especially not in mental health, where we would start with that," she said.
Affirming the identity of children as something other than their biological sex could be detrimental to them, Dr. Schwartz said. It signals to children that they are somehow wrong about who they are, and it tells them that their confusion or uncertainty isn't normal.
Allowing children to change pronouns can make it difficult for them to reverse course and go back to identifying with their biological sex later when they're no longer confused, she said.
The general population may wonder why doctors are going along with gender ideology that flies in the face of science, Dr. Li said.
In her view, gender ideology dominates thinking in medical schools, leaving little room for dissent.
Doctors who promote so-called "gender-affirming care" often are praised by their peers as "life-saving heroes," Dr. Li said. Appearing "empathetic and progressive" in this way helps some doctors to climb the social hierarchy in some circles, she said.
But it's a "travesty" when parents or doctors allow children younger than 18 to make life-altering decisions based on sparse research, Mr. Vaknin said. He argues that a more cautious approach would limit the procedures available to patients until at least age 25, when the brain is fully mature.
Transgender-affirming children's books in Irvine, Calif., on Aug. 30, 2022. (John Fredricks/The Epoch Times)Adolescents don't have what's known as an "ide ntity core," he said. That means they don't know who they are yet, and they're still changing in response to peers, family, and education.
The part of the brain responsible for executive function is incomplete befo re age 21, he said. Executive function refers to the higher-level cognitive skills used to control and coordinate other cognitive abilities and behaviors.
"When you're an adolescent, you try everything," Mr. Vaknin said. "And to render one of these experiments permanent is a crime. Anyone collaborating with this is a criminal."
What is striking, Mr. Vaknin said, is the lack of unbiased, high-quality research on transgender procedures and outcomes.
"There isn't a single study that has followed kids exposed to puberty blockers and then have transitioned," he said. "Not one."
Gmail's AI-powered spam detection is its biggest security upgrade in years | Ars Technica
Tue, 05 Dec 2023 12:46
1337 SP34K D3F3473D '-- Gmail's spam filters can now understand "adversarial text manipulations." Ron Amadeo - Dec 4, 2023 7:04 pm UTC
Getty Images | pagadesign
The latest post on the Google Security blog details a new upgrade to Gmail's spam filters that Google is calling "one of the largest defense upgrades in recent years." The upgrade comes in the form of a new text classification system called RETVec (Resilient & Efficient Text Vectorizer). Google says this can help understand "adversarial text manipulations"'--these are emails full of special characters, emojis, typos, and other junk characters that previously were legible by humans but not easily understandable by machines. Previously, spam emails full of special characters made it through Gmail's defenses easily.
If you want an example of what "adversarial text manipulation" looks like, the below message is something from my spam folder. My personal Gmail experience with these emails is that they used to be a major problem during the first half of the year, with emails like this regularly landing in my inbox. It does seem like this RETVec tech upgrade works, though, because emails like this haven't been a problem at all for me in the last few months.
Enlarge / An example of "adversarial text manipulation" from my spam folder.
Ron Amadeo
Emails like this have been so difficult to classify because, while any spam filter could probably swat down an email that says, "Congratulations! A balance of $1,000 is available for your jackpot account," that's not what this email actually says. A big portion of the letters here are "homoglyphs"'--by diving into the endless depths of the Unicode standard, you can find obscure characters that look like they're part of the normal Latin alphabet but actually aren't.
For instance, the subject "ð'ð'ð'ð''ð'¤_ð'ð'¨ð'®ð'_ð'ð''ð''ð'¨ð'®ð'§ð'" is weirdly bolded not because it has bolded styling but because it uses Unicode glyphs like the "Mathematical Bold Capital C." It's a math symbol that happens to look like the letter "C" to people, but the robot doing spam filtering accurately views it as a math symbol and doesn't understand the intended English meaning. The closer you look at an email like this, the worse it gets: "C0NGRATULATIONS" has a zero replacing one of the "O" characters, the underlined letters in "Já´Ì²á´Ì²á´Ì²pot" are so strange they don't even come up in Unicode searches, and a lot of spaces are swapped out for periods or underscores. The result is that a spam filter looks at this hot mess of an email and basically gives up. (I don't understand why illegible emails default to "inbox" instead of "spam," but I'm not in charge.)
Advertisement Google says RETVec is here to save the day: "RETVec is trained to be resilient against character-level manipulations including insertion, deletion, typos, homoglyphs, LEET substitution, and more. The RETVec model is trained on top of a novel character encoder which can encode all UTF-8 characters and words efficiently. Thus, RETVec works out-of-the-box on over 100 languages without the need for a lookup table or fixed vocabulary size."
Google says the efficiency here is a big deal. Alternative approaches that used a "fixed vocabulary size" or "lookup table" for homoglyphs made them resource-intensive to run. Imagine a list of every possible spelling and misspelling of "congratulations" that swaps out one or more characters for numbers, math symbols, Cyrillic, Hebrew, or emojis, and you have a nearly endless list. Google says RETVec is only 200,000 "instead of millions of parameters," so while Google's spam-filtering cloud is probably big enough to run anything, this is small enough that it could even run on a local device. RETVec is open source, and Google hopes it will rid the world of homoglyph attacks, so even your local comment section could be running it someday.
RETVec appears to work a lot like how humans read: It's a machine-learning TensorFlow model that uses visual "similarity" to identify what words mean instead of their actual character content. Google's similarity demo uses the same technology to identify pictures of cats, so turning that into the world's fanciest optical character recognition system sounds pretty doable. Apparently, this approach has led to big improvements, with Google saying: "Replacing the Gmail spam classifier's previous text vectorizer with RETVec allowed us to improve the spam detection rate over the baseline by 38% and reduce the false positive rate by 19.4%. Additionally, using RETVec reduced the TPU usage of the model by 83%, making the RETVec deployment one of the largest defense upgrades in recent years."
Google says it has been testing RETVec internally "for the past year," and it has already rolled out to your Gmail account.
Hamas' spoils of war? Terror group's associates are accused of making more than $900 MILLION by shorting shares in Israel's biggest bank weeks before October 7 massacre | Daily Mail Online
Tue, 05 Dec 2023 05:03
Two New York-based professors on Monday published a report into financial transactions in the weeks leading up to October 7They cited several instances of 'unusual' trades, with traders making significant bets on Israel's financial institutions dropping in valueThey said the deals likely were made by Hamas insiders - 'traders informed about the coming attacks', who 'profited from these tragic events'By Harriet Alexander For Dailymail.com
Published: 22:09 EST, 4 December 2023 | Updated: 22:30 EST, 4 December 2023
Hamas-linked financiers made hundreds of millions of dollars of profits by shorting Israeli stocks before the October 7 massacre, two analysts say.
One unidentified trader 'shorted' 4.43 million shares in Israel's largest bank, Leumi, between September 15 and October 5 - meaning they gambled that the price of Leumi's shares would fall.
After the October 7 attack, Leumi's share price did indeed plummet as its operations were paralyzed, earning a $900 million profit for the trader, who is believed to have links to Hamas.
The trade and others were unearthed by Robert J. Jackson, Jr, from New York University School of Law, and Joshua Mitts of Columbia Law School.
On Monday they published a report into their findings titled: 'Trading on Terror?'
They've speculated that the cash may have been funneled back into Hamas' operations. Jackson and Mitts did not identify who was behind the trades, but noted they were highly unusual.
'Our findings suggest that traders informed about the coming attacks profited from these tragic events, and consistent with prior literature we show that trading of this kind occurs in gaps in U.S. and international enforcement of legal prohibitions on informed trading,' they write.
Leumi bank, the largest in Israel, was shorted by a trader from September 15-October 5, earning the trader $900 million
Joshua Mitts (left), from Columbia Law School, and Robert J. Jackson, Jr, from New York University School of Law (right), on Monday published their analysis of the trades
'We contribute to the growing literature on trading related to geopolitical events and offer suggestions for policymakers concerned about profitable trading on the basis of information about coming military conflict.'
And another trader made a remarkable 227,000 short transactions on October 2 against the EIS - the Enterprise Investment Scheme (EIS), a security traded on the New York Stock Exchange.
The EIS gives investors exposure to Israeli exchange-traded funds.
The value of EIS fell by 7.1 percent on October 11 - the first day the U.S. market was open after the terror attack - and within the first month lost 17.5 percent of its value, meaning that that one trader profited handsomely from the October 2 trades.
Revelers flee from the Supernova peace festival during the October 7 attacks, which left more than 1,200 Israelis dead
Hamas terrorists are seen on October 7 taking hostages from communities near Gaza
The terrorists are seen having burst through the Gaza border fence on October 7
Abandoned and torched vehicles at the site of the October 7 attack on the Supernova desert music festival in southern Israel
Jackson and Mitts concluded: 'It is extremely unlikely that the volume of short selling on October 2 occurred by random chance.'
The pair said the trades raised suspicion that they could have been carried out by someone with insider knowledge of the Hamas attack.
'Although we see no aggregate increase in shorting of Israeli companies on US exchanges, we do identify a sharp and unusual increase, just before the attacks, in trading in risky short-dated options on these companies expiring just after the attacks,' they wrote.
Hamas, which since 1997 has been proscribed as a terrorist organization by the United States, cannot carry out transactions on the open market.
Any Hamas figures who tried to do so risk having their assets frozen by the U.S. Treasury.
But the group has taken advantage of innovative financing systems, such as cryptocurrency.
A Wall Street Journal report found that, between August 2021 and June 2023, three terror groups - Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad and its Lebanese ally, Hezbollah - collectively received over $134 million in crypto.
Hamas received some $41 million in digital currency over the nearly two-year period, the Journal reported.
Islamic Jihad received $93 million.
'Pfizergate' affair lead EU lawmaker Mich¨le Rivasi dies aged 70 '' EURACTIV.com
Mon, 04 Dec 2023 13:42
Mich¨le Rivasi, the Green MEP who pushed for the SMS exchanges between the European Commission President and Pfizer CEO to be made public, died on Wednesday (29 November) at the age of 70 of a heart attack while on her way to the European Parliament in Brussels.
Rivasi had been a Member of the European Parliament for the Greens since 2009, notably getting involved in a battle against the EU-Mercosur free trade agreement and standing against the use of pesticides, including glyphosate.
In the name of transparency, she devoted part of her last mandate to investigating the so-called ''SMS affair'', which concerns suspicions about text messages exchanged between European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla about the negotiation of a contract for 1.8 billion doses of COVID-19 vaccines.
''Always ready to defend the principles she held dear, Mich¨le Rivasi devoted her life to protecting biodiversity and our health, and to fighting for the transparency of our institutions in the interests of European citizens,'' a press release reads.
She was also known for her controversial stance on vaccines. Throughout the Covid-19 pandemic, the MEP had criticised the implementation of a 'COVID certificate' and compulsory vaccination of healthcare workers in France.
On X (formerly Twitter), President of the European Parliament Roberta Metsola said she was ''saddened'' by the ''sudden death'' of Rivasi, ''an experienced MEP of deep convictions, committed and hard-working''.
''We are deeply saddened by the death of our colleague Mich¨le Rivasi. ['...] Her remarkable career, her passionate political battles and her empathy have left their mark on all those who had the chance to meet her,'' said Terry Reintke and Philippe Lamberts, on behalf of the Greens/EFA Group.
''Our Group and the European Parliament are today losing a political figure who, throughout her career, sought above all to defend the public interest,'' the statement said.
Before being elected as an MEP, Rivasi was a Socialist MP for the southeastern French region of Dr´me from 1997 to 2002. She also founded the Commission for Independent Research and Information on Radioactivity (CRIIRAD) in the wake of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster in April 1986.
Edited by Theo Bourgery-Gonse
Read more with EURACTIV
Spotify to Cut 1,500 Jobs in Third Round of Layoffs this Year - The New York Times
Mon, 04 Dec 2023 12:53
Business | Spotify to Cut 1,500 Jobs After Spending Spree https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/04/business/spotify-layoffs.htmlThe music streaming service has expanded into podcasting and audiobooks but found it difficult to turn a consistent profit.
Daniel Ek, Spotify's chief executive, said job cuts were needed because ''our cost structure for where we need to be is still too big.'' Credit... Shannon Stapleton/Reuters Dec. 4, 2023 Updated 7:44 a.m. ET
Spotify said on Monday that it would cut nearly a fifth of its work force, at least the third round of layoffs this year, as it has struggled to become consistently profitable after spending aggressively to expand beyond music streaming into areas such as podcasting.
Spotify's chief executive officer, Daniel Ek, wrote in a note to employees posted on the company's website that the platform now needed to ''rightsize'' to account for a ''very different environment.'' Spotify will let go of about 1,500 people, or 17 percent of its staff.
''Economic growth has slowed dramatically and capital has become more expensive,'' Mr. Ek said. ''Despite our efforts to reduce costs this past year, our cost structure for where we need to be is still too big,'' Mr. Ek added.
Despite being the largest music streaming platform, Spotify has long struggled to be profitable because of the terms of licensing deals it has with record labels and music publishers. The company has pushed into new areas like podcasting, including buying the podcast studios Gimlet for $230 million in 2019 and The Ringer for about $200 million in 2020. It struck expensive deals with well-known figures such as former President Barack Obama and first lady Michelle Obama, as well as Prince Harry and wife, Meghan. More recently, the company has expanded into audiobooks.
The shifts have helped Spotify attract listeners and subscribers, but have not been a financial breakthrough. In the first nine months of 2023, Spotify lost $462 million, more than double the loss in the same period in 2022.
But the company turned a small profit last quarter, its first in more than a year, in what Paul Vogel, its chief financial officer, at the time called ''an important inflection point for the business.''
Spotify had 226 million paying subscribers at the end of September and is on track to add 30 million for the full year, 50 percent more than it expected at the outset of 2023. The company recently raised prices for its subscriptions in more than 50 countries.
Spotify also has over 360 million monthly active users whose accounts are supported by advertising. This segment has been growing faster than paid subscriptions, but it generates less revenue at a lower profit margin for the company.
The jobs cuts are the largest Spotify has announced this year. In June, Spotify cut about 200 jobs, including many involved in podcasting. Another 600 employees had been let go in January.
As part of its leaving package for the job cuts announced on Monday, Spotify said an average employee would receive about five months of severance pay.
Spotify's New York-listed stock rose in premarket trading, extending gains the company has made this year, partly reversing a long slide from a peak in early 2021. The company's share price has more than doubled this year.
NZ Whistleblower Arrested for Exposing the Truth: Here's What They Didn't Want You to See
Mon, 04 Dec 2023 12:31
'
Statistician and whistleblower, Barry Young, also known as ''Winston Smith,'' 56, has been arrested by New Zealand authorities for exposing a damning database on COVID-19 vaccine deaths. However, the official charge was ''dishonestly accessing vaccination data.''
In a long-format interview with Liz Gunn, founder of the New Zealand Loyal Party, on November 30th, Mr. Young presented connections between specific COVID-19 vaccine batches and mortality rates. The data he shared was alarming:
Batch ID 1: Total Vaccinated 711, Death Count 152, 21.38% Dead
Batch ID 8: Total Vaccinated 221, Death Count 38, 17.19% Dead
Batch ID 3: Total Vaccinated 310, Death Count 48, 15.48% Dead
Batch ID 4: Total Vaccinated 364, Death Count 37, 10.16% Dead
Batch ID 6: Total Vaccinated 1006, Death Count 101, 10.04% Dead
Batch ID 2: Total Vaccinated 1018, Death Count 98, 9.63% Dead
Batch ID 7: Total Vaccinated 38, Death Count 3, 7.89% Dead
Batch ID 72: Total Vaccinated 5882, Death Count 278, 4.73% Dead
Batch ID 62: Total Vaccinated 18173, Death Count 831, 4.57% Dead
Batch ID 71: Total Vaccinated 11019, Death Count 498, 4.52% Dead
The underlying mortality rate in New Zealand should be only 0.75%, said Young. So, the odds of death rates this high happening by chance are approximately 100 billion to 1.
''So statistically, what we're saying is that there is no chance that this vaccine is not a killer,'' Young declared.
Entrepreneur and COVID-19 vaccine skeptic, Steve Kirsch, made a bold comment when Mr. Young was surrounded by the police. He said, ''The data is legit; that's why they are arresting Barry. He's a hero for exposing the truth.''
Kirsch added, ''This data destroys the 'safe and effective' narrative. That's why they are trying to distract people from analyzing it.''
Kirsch later revealed, ''Over the last month, I've had many talks with Barry. The charges are without merit. It was crystal clear that his intent in leaking the documents was to expose a crime (negligent manslaughter) being perpetrated by the NZ Ministry of Health and save lives. I guess in NZ, they don't want you to do that.''
''Barry single-handedly has saved millions of lives because he proved you can leak data without affecting privacy, but that the data can show that a vaccine killed 10 million worldwide. This was thought to be impossible before Barry showed it was possible. He should be recognized internationally as a hero. What NZ is doing to him is misguided.''
The full interview with Barry Young is still available on Rumble. You can watch it via the video below:
For more stories written and curated by The Vigilant Fox, be sure to subscribe to Vigilant News.
COP28 president sparks outcry after controversial fossil fuel comments
Mon, 04 Dec 2023 11:58
Sultan Al-Jaber, chief executive officer of Abu Dhabi National Oil Co. and president of COP28, speaks in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, on Saturday, Dec. 2, 2023.
Bloomberg | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Dubai, UNITED ARAB EMIRATES '-- COP28 President Sultan Al-Jaber is facing a backlash over his claim that there is "no science" behind calls for a phase out of fossil fuels '-- a demand that many believe will ultimately determine the success of the U.N. climate conference.
In comments first reported on Sunday by The Guardian and investigative journalism organization the Centre for Climate Reporting, COP28 president and United Arab Emirates climate chief Al-Jaber suggested a fossil fuel phase out would not allow sustainable development "unless you want to take the world back into caves."
The remarks, which were made by Al-Jaber during a live online event on Nov. 21, have been described by scientists and advocates as "farcical," "beyond astonishing" and verging on climate denial.
In a social media post, University of Pennsylvania climate scientist Michael Mann accused Al-Jaber of "making a complete mockery" of the COP28 talks and urged U.N. chief Antonio Guterres to speak out on the issue.
Al-Jaber was seen as a controversial choice to lead COP28 discussions in Dubai given that he also works as the head of the state-run Abu Dhabi National Oil Company.
Speaking at a news conference on Monday, Al-Jaber said his team "very much believe and respect the science." He added that he'd been surprised by the "constant and repeated attempts to undermine the work of the COP28 presidency."
Separately, a spokesperson for COP28 told CNBC that Al-Jaber has been "unwavering" in saying that keeping global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius involves action across a number of areas and sectors.
"The COP President is clear that phasing down and out of fossil fuels is inevitable and that we must keep 1.5°C within reach. We are not sure what this story was supposedly revealing. Nothing in it is new or breaking news."
If we fail with the phase out on fossil fuels then we are not going to be successful on climate mitigation.
Petteri Taalas
WMO Secretary General
The 1.5 degrees Celsius temperature threshold is widely recognized as crucial because so-called tipping points become more likely beyond this level. Tipping points are thresholds at which small changes can lead to dramatic shifts in Earth's entire life support system.
Looking ahead, "the COP President is focused on working with parties to deliver a plan that will deliver maximum transition and minimal disruption for everyone in the world," the spokesperson said. "He has repeatedly communicated our position on fossil fuels and invited all parties to work together and come up with solutions that can achieve alignment, common ground and consensus."
The spokesperson added that the COP28 host has been "excited with the progress" made so far and for the delivery of a decision on the global stock take. "Attempts to undermine this will not soften our resolve," they said.
'Very basic physics'The outcry over Al-Jaber's comments comes as COP28 gears up for a fight over the future of fossil rules.
For nearly three decades, policymakers representing nearly 200 countries at the U.N.'s annual climate conference have tried to address the chief driver of the climate crisis: the burning of coal, oil and gas.
The language of the final agreement, expected by or around the Dec. 12 end of the conference, will be closely monitored. A "phase out" commitment would likely require a shift away from fossil fuels until their use is eliminated, while a "phase down" could indicate a reduction in their use '-- but not an absolute end.
There's also an ongoing debate about whether an agreement should center on "abated" fossil fuels, which are trapped and stocked with carbon capture and storage technologies, or "unabated" fossil fuels, which are largely understood to be produced and used without substantial reductions in the amount of emitted greenhouse gases.
DUBAI, UNITED ARAB EMIRATES - DECEMBER 3: In this handout image suppled by COP28, Petteri Taalas, Secretary-general of the World Meteorological Organization, attends the event 'Delivering Early Warnings For All', during day four of the UNFCCC COP28 Climate Conference at Expo City Dubai on December 3, 2023 in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. The COP28, which is running from November 30 through December 12, is bringing together stakeholders, including international heads of state and other leaders, scientists, environmentalists, indigenous peoples representatives, activists and others to discuss and agree on the implementation of global measures towards mitigating the effects of climate change. (Photo by Kiara Worth /COP28 via Getty Images)
Handout | Getty Images News | Getty Images
"If we fail with the phase out on fossil fuels then we are not going to be successful on climate mitigation," Petteri Taalas, secretary general of the U.N.'s World Meteorological Organization, told CNBC in Dubai.
Asked for a response to Al-Jaber's comments, Taalas said there is "very clear science" behind calls for a fossil fuel phase out.
"This impact of carbon dioxide on atmospheric warming, that's very basic physics '... There's no question about that."
U.S. climate envoy John Kerry was also asked to reflect on Al-Jaber's comments. In an interview with CNBC's Tania Bryer on Sunday, Kerry replied, "That's not the argument."
"The G7 countries voted that there should be a phasing out of unmitigated fossil fuel emissions and what there is science for is keeping 1.5 degrees as your North Star," Kerry said.
"Every decision we make should be geared to say, 'does this advance the 1.5 degrees or is it going to be more destructive and take us in the wrong direction?'"
Separately, former U.S. vice president Al Gore reportedly said Sunday that the UAE's position as COP28 host was an abuse of public trust.
"They are abusing the public's trust by naming the CEO of one of the largest and least responsible oil companies in the world as head of the COP," Gore said, according to Reuters.
At the time of Al-Jaber's appointment as COP28 president earlier this year, his office said he would play a "crucial role" in building consensus "and driving ambitious climate outcomes."
A spokesperson for ADNOC, which recently became the first among its peers to bring forward its net-zero ambition to 2045, has previously said: "All of the current energy transition scenarios, including by the IEA, show that some level of oil and gas will be needed into the future."
One Supreme Court Case Could Mess Up Chunks of the Tax Code - WSJ
Mon, 04 Dec 2023 04:13
Justices will debate the meaning of 'income' under the 16th AmendmentWASHINGTON'--A case that could punch holes in the federal tax code heads to the Supreme Court on Tuesday.
The court will hear arguments in Moore v. U.S., which challenges a piece of the 2017 tax law that imposed a one-time levy on profits that companies had accumulated outside the U.S. But its implications could reach much further, providing the justices an opportunity to define what Congress can tax under the Constitution'--and what it can't.
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VIDEO - Cop28 president hits back after outcry over remarks on fossil fuels '' video report | Environment | The Guardian
Wed, 06 Dec 2023 21:14
The Cop28 president, Sultan Al Jaber, held a surprise press conference at which he said comments he made about the phasing out of fossil fuels were 'misrepresented'. The Guardian reported how Jaber had remarked that there was 'no scientific evidence' indicating a phase-out of fossil fuels was needed to restrict global heating to 1.5C. Jaber, who is CEO of the UAE's state oil company Adnoc, defended the comments he made during a virtual meeting on 21 November with the former Irish president and UN climate envoy Mary Robinson. Jaber said: 'Let's just clarify where I stand on the science '... I honestly think there is some confusion out there and misrepresentation'
Cop28 live '' latest updates
Cop28 president forced into defence of fossil fuel phaseout claims
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VIDEO - Montreal Mayor Valerie Plante collapses during press conference | CTV News
Wed, 06 Dec 2023 20:29
Montreal Mayor Val(C)rie Plante is "doing well" but will reduce the pace of her activities over the next few days after collapsing during a press conference at City Hall on Tuesday morning.
Plante was answering a question about homelessness in the city when she suddenly stopped talking for several seconds before sinking to the floor.
She was conscious when she dropped down.
Plante was quickly surrounded by her staff, who asked reporters to stop filming.
An ambulance was called to City Hall, but Plante was not transported to hospital.
The mayor's press attach(C)e Catherine Cadotte confirmed she was examined by paramedics and was starting to feel better.
Later in the day, Cadotte said as a precautionary measure, the mayor will absent herself from the Ville-Marie borough council meeting on Tuesday and will reduce her activities in the coming days.
"She will gradually resume her activities and thanks everyone for their understanding and support," she said.
A post was made to Plante's X account confirming her state of health.
"The mayor of Montreal suffered a dizzy spell during a press conference and, fortunately, is out of danger. She will receive all the medical attention she requires and thanks you for your support," it reads.
La mairesse de Montr(C)al a subi un malaise en conf(C)rence de presse et, heureusement, elle est hors de danger. Elle recevra tout l'accompagnement m(C)dical requis et vous remercie pour votre soutien. #polmtl
'-- Val(C)rie Plante (@Val_Plante) December 5, 2023Plante received multiple well-wishes on social media following the incident, including some from Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Quebec Premier Fran§ois Legault.
"I'm thinking of you, Val(C)rie. Speedy recovery," Trudeau replied to her post on X.
"Glad you're doing well. Speedy recovery!" added Legault.
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VIDEO - Biden 'not sure' he'd be running if Trump was not in 2024 race | Reuters
Wed, 06 Dec 2023 17:44
WESTON, Massachusetts/WASHINGTON, Dec 5 (Reuters) - President Joe Biden said on Tuesday he may have skipped mounting a 2024 re-election bid if he were not facing Donald Trump because the Republican poses a unique threat to the United States.
"If Trump wasn't running, I'm not sure I'd be running," Biden said at a fundraising event for his 2024 campaign outside of Boston. "We cannot let him win."
Biden's striking self-assessment comes as even staunch Democratic voters express concerns about the president's age. The Democrat turned 81 years old last month and is already the eldest Oval Office occupant in history.
"Somebody gave him a talking point they thought would sound good," Trump, who was president from 2017 to 2021, said at a Fox News town hall on Tuesday.
Biden, seeking a second four-year term in next year's election, later told reporters at the White House that he would not drop out of the race.
"No, not now," Biden said when asked if he would consider stepping aside if Trump, 77, stopped seeking his own second term. "Look, he is running, and I have to run."
Asked if he would have run were Trump not in the race, Biden said, "I expect so."
U.S. President Joe Biden speaks at a dinner hosted by the Human Rights Campaign at the Washington Convention Center in Washington, U.S., October 14, 2023. REUTERS/Ken Cedeno/File Photo Acquire Licensing Rights
During his 2020 presidential campaign, Biden often mentioned that his decision to run was due in part to then-President Trump's handling of issues, including a 2017 white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia.
Now, Biden faces limited competition for his party's nomination and is again positioning Trump as a danger to democracy itself.
Trump, who faces criminal charges over his efforts to reverse his 2020 election loss, has painted Biden as a dangerous autocrat.
After considering the decision for weeks with family and close confidants, Biden announced his re-election bid in April, coming to the private belief that neither Vice President Kamala Harris nor any other Democratic hopeful could beat Trump in next year's general election, according to a former White House official who requested anonymity to discuss the president's thinking.
The president's aides increasingly regard Trump's frontrunner status for the Republican presidential nomination as insurmountable, according to two of those Democrats who also declined to be named.
Biden has repeatedly made comments about Trump during a fundraising blitz that started on Tuesday in Boston and is set to include at least nine events before the end of the month.
"I don't think anyone doubts our democracy is at risk again," Biden said earlier on Tuesday.
Recent polling has shown the Republican frontrunner leading Biden in hypothetical matchups in key swing states and on the national level.
Reporting by Nandita Bose in Weston, Massachusetts, and Trevor Hunnicutt in Washington; Additional reporting by Eric Beech; Editing by Chris Reese, Matthew Lewis and Kim Coghill
Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.
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Video: John Kerry is accused of farting during climate speech where he asked for coal power plants to be eliminated
During John Kerry's speech at COP28 panel, Biden Climate Envoy was just calling for the elimination of every single coal plant on earth when he was accused of having wind.
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