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Category: Technology

  • EV sales hit record. So why do some experts predict a slowdown?

    Electric vehicle sales in the United States set a record this past quarter and are on track to break the 1 million mark in 2023, which would be an unprecedented figure and a milestone for the industry. This surge comes even as many vehicle models have lost their eligibility for federal, and some state, incentives. 

    Analysts at both Wards Intelligence and Cox Automotive reported that consumers bought nearly 300,000 EVs between the beginning of April and the end of June. That represents a year-over-year jump of roughly 50 percent, and included growth in May and June, the first two months after federal tax credit rules became more stringent. Plug-in hybrid sales climbed as well. 

    “​​There are some vehicles that are intriguing enough to buyers that you don’t need a rebate,” Christie Schweinsberg, a sustainability analyst at Wards, said, noting the ever-increasing range of EVs and options for consumers to choose from. “People will still want to buy.”

    But there are signs that the torrential pace of sales growth may not be sustainable. According to Cox, at the end of June dealers had, on average, about a 53 day supply of internal combustion vehicles in stock. The inventory runway for EVs, on the other hand, was more than double that. Overall, there were more than 92,000 electric vehicles available in the second quarter, compared to about 20,000 a year prior.

    “The demand is not keeping up with production, which is the opposite story of a year ago,” Michelle Krebs, executive analyst at Cox Automotive, said about electric vehicles. “We call it the ‘Field of Dreams’ moment. Automakers are building more but not enough consumers have come to the field.”

    Krebs attributes the glut to both a post-pandemic boost in production and traditional consumer hesitations about buying electric vehicles. Price, she said, is the primary barrier among buyers that Cox surveys, because EVs remain generally more expensive than a similar gas-powered model. Concerns about charging infrastructure is another reason that would-be-owners stay on the sidelines. 

    The landscape for incentives on electric vehicles has become more confusing as well, said Krebs. At this time last year, dozens of models qualified for a federal tax credit of up to $7,500, with many cities and states offering additional incentives. Since then, some places, such as Oregon and New Jersey, have run out of money for their rebate programs. The Inflation Reduction Act that Congress passed last year established manufacturing standards aimed at encouraging automakers to invest in U.S. production facilities and battery supply chains. That legislation has, at least in the short-term, significantly trimmed the list of models eligible for a tax credit.  

    “We certainly see an impact because of it,” said Michael Stewart, a spokesperson for Hyundai, which saw its vehicles, which don’t currently meet the new requirements, drop off the federal list. While sales of all of Hyundai’s EV models grew despite losing the credit, he believes that progress toward the company’s, and country’s, ambitious EV sales targets could have been even greater with them. 

    Still, the Hyundai Kona and BMW i4, which also does not qualify for federal tax credits, saw sales nearly triple. Market leader Tesla benefited from having recently regained access to tax credits and saw a 76 percent jump in sales of its popular Model Y.

    Companies have combated the gaining EV headwinds in part by lowering prices – the average cost of an electric vehicle has dropped almost 20 percent, to $53,438, in the last year alone. Manufacturers have also utilized a loophole in the Inflation Reduction Act that allows them to claim a credit on vehicles they lease rather than sell. Hyundai has been particularly aggressive about promoting leases, which Stewart says have gone from accounting for around 5 percent of the cars the company moves off the lot to about 30 percent. 

    In the wake of the Inflation Reduction Act, Hyundai and other companies have announced plans to produce more electric vehicles in the United States and source more battery components domestically. This would make more models eligible for federal tax credits in the future. But, for now, both Schweinsberg and Krebs say the growing inventory indicates that the growth of electric vehicle sales could start to drop. 

    One factor, said Schweinsberg, is that cars often see a decline in sales within a year or two of a new model being introduced – a threshold that some EVs are reaching. “Typically it does well when the new generation comes out,” she said, adding that it’s probably too early to tell exactly what the trajectory for electric vehicles might look like.

    Krebs predicts that EV sales will continue to grow, though “maybe not at the pace that a lot of people had hoped for.” To her, that’s not necessarily surprising given the dramatic shift the industry is attempting to make. 

    “It’s the biggest change in the industry since Henry Ford’s moving assembly line,” she said. “There are going to be bumps in the road.”

    This story was originally published by Grist with the headline EV sales hit record. So why do some experts predict a slowdown? on Jul 14, 2023.

    This post was originally published on Grist.

  • The French Revolution executed royals and nobles, yes – but most people killed were commoners

    ANALYSIS: By Claire Rioult, Monash University and Romain Fathi, Flinders University

    For a lot of people, mention of the French Revolution conjures up images of wealthy nobles being led to the guillotine.

    Thanks to countless movies, books and half-remembered history lessons, many have been left with the impression the revolution was chiefly about chopping off the heads of kings, queens, dukes and other cashed-up aristocrats.

    But today what’s known in English as Bastille Day and in French as Quatorze Juillet — a date commemorating events of July 14 in 1789 that came to symbolise the French Revolution — it is worth correcting this common misconception.

    In fact, most people executed during the French Revolution — and particularly in its perceived bloodiest era, the nine-month “Reign of Terror” between autumn 1793 and summer 1794 — were commoners.

    As historian Donald Greer wrote:

    […] more carters than princes were executed, more day labourers than dukes and marquises, three or four times as many servants than parliamentarians. The Terror swept French society from base to comb; its victims form a complete cross section of the social order of the Ancien régime.

    The ‘national razor’
    The guillotine was first put to use on April 15 1792 when a common thief called Pelletier was executed. Initially seen as an instrument of equality, however, the guillotine soon acquired a grim reputation for its list of famous victims.

    Miniature guillotine, French revolution era,
    Miniature guillotine, French revolution era, Musée Carnavalet. Image: Les musées de la ville de Paris/The Conversation

    Among those who died under the “national razor” (the guillotine’s nickname) were King Louis XVI and Queen Marie Antoinette, many revolutionary leaders such as Georges Danton, Louis de Saint-Just and Maximilien Robespierre. Scientist Antoine Lavoisier, pre-romantic poet André Chénier, feminist Olympe de Gouges and legendary lovers Camille and Lucie Desmoulins were among its victims.

    But it wasn’t just “celebrities” executed at the guillotine.

    While reliable figures on the definitive number of people guillotined during the Revolution are hard to find, historians commonly project between 15,000 and 17,000 people were guillotined across France.

    The bulk of it occurred during the the Reign of Terror.

    When the decision was made to centralise all (legal) executions in Paris, 1376 people were guillotined over just 47 days, between June 10 and July 27, 1794. That is about 30 a day.

    The bulk of the executions occurred during the the Reign of Terror.
    The bulk of the executions occurred during the the Reign of Terror. Image: Bibliothèque nationale de France/The Conversation

    The guillotine wasn’t the only method
    However, the guillotine represents just one way people were executed.

    Historians estimate around 20,000 men and women were summarily killed — either shot, stabbed or drowned — during the Terror across France.

    They also estimate that in just under five days, 1500 people died at the hands of Parisian mobs during the 1792 September massacres.

    More broadly, around 170,000 civilians died in the civil Wars of the Vendée, while more than 700,000 French soldiers lost their lives across the 1792-1815 period.

    The vast majority of these people killed were ordinary French men and women, not members of the elite.

    Overall, Greer estimates 8.5 percent of the Terror’s victims belonged to the nobility, 6.5 percent to the clergy, and 85 percent to the Third Estate (meaning non-clerics and non-nobles). Women represented 9 percent of the total (but 20 percent and 14 pecent of the noble and clerical categories, respectively).

    Priests who had refused to take the oath of loyalty to the Revolution, émigrés who had fled the country, hoarders and profiteers who made the price of bread much dearer, or political opponents of the moment, all were deemed “enemies of the Revolution”.

    Why was so much blood shed during the Reign of Terror?
    The paranoia of the regime in 1793–94 was the result of various factors.

    France fought at its borders against a coalition led by Europe’s monarchs to nip the revolution in the bud before it could threaten their thrones.

    Meanwhile, civil war ravaged the west and south of France, conspiracy rumours circulated across the country, and political infighting intensified in Paris between opposing factions.

    All these factors led to a series of laws voted up in late 1793 that enabled the expedited judgment of thousands of people suspected of counterrevolutionary beliefs.

    The measures contained in the infamous “Law of Suspects” were, however, relaxed in the summer of 1794 and completely abolished in October 1795.

    Queen Marie Antoinette led to her execution on a horse-cart on the 16th of October 1793.
    The fate of Queen Marie-Antoinette and its many depictions in pop culture has influenced how many people think of the Revolution. Image: Aquatint with engraving by C. Silanio after Aloisin, 1793/Wellcome Collection/The Conversation

    How the focus came to be on beheaded nobility
    For many people, however, mention of this period of French history leads to the vision of a bloodthirsty Revolution indiscriminately sending to their death thousands of nobles.

    This is largely influenced by the fate of Queen Marie-Antoinette and its many depictions in pop culture.

    British counter-revolutionary propaganda in the 1790s and 1800s also helped popularise the idea that aristocrats were martyrs and the main victims of revolution executioners.

    This representation was mostly forged via the abundant publication in the 19th century of memoirs and diaries of survivors and relatives of victims, usually from the social and economic elite fiercely opposed to the Revolution and its legacy.

    A broader legacy
    Beyond the guillotine and the Reign of Terror, the legacies of the revolution run far deeper.

    The revolution abolished entrenched privileges based on birth, imposed equality before the law and opened the door to emerging forms of democratic involvement for everyday citizens.

    The Revolution ushered in a time of reforms in France, across Europe and indeed across the world.The Conversation

    Claire Rioult, is PhD candidate in early modern history, Monash University, and Dr Romain Fathi, senior lecturer, History, Flinders University.  This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons licence. Read the original article.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • What Is Cultivated Meat? Could It Change the Future of Food?

    In 2013, Hanni Rützler, a nutritional scientist from Austria, secured her place in the history books when she became the first person in the world to bite into a cultivated meat burger. Her verdict? “Perfect consistency, but I miss salt and pepper,” she said after trying the piece of lab-grown beef, reported to be worth around $250,000. 

    But while Rützler may have been the first person to sink her teeth into meat grown in a lab, she’s far from the last. Since then, cultivated meat (also referred to as cultured, cell-based, or lab-grown meat) has actually been served to paying customers in restaurants. (Luckily they didn’t have to take out a loan to try it, as the price has come down considerably in the last decade.) And by 2035, a new report from Research and Markets predicts the whole industry could reach almost $2 billion.

    VegNews.whatisculturedmeat.SupermeatSuperMeat

    But what actually is cultivated meat? Where can it be sold right now? Does it count as vegan food? And when it comes to feeding the world ethically and sustainably, does this industry actually have potential? Here, we explore the answers to your burning questions.

    What is cultivated meat?

    Cultivated meat is just like traditional meat, only unlike the latter, which is taken from farmed animals, the former is grown from real animal cells inside a lab. 

    The idea behind the industry is to remove the need for animal farming altogether, and take billions of cows, chickens, fish, turkeys, pigs, and more, out of the food system. 

    VegNews.SuperMeatChicken.DrorVarshavskiSuperMeat

    The industry is still relatively new⁠—the first cultivated meat companies were founded around seven years ago. But now, there are roughly 99 companies worldwide working on creating cultured animal protein in a lab.

    How is cultivated meat made?

    The process of making cultivated meat takes a few weeks and starts when cells are taken from a farm animal. (To grow a beef burger, for example, real cow cells are needed. For a nugget, real chicken cells are obtained.) 

    After that, the cells are put into bioreactors (essentially big vats) and fed “an oxygen-rich cell culture medium,” according to the Good Food Institute, a nonprofit dedicated to the growth of the alternative protein market. 

    VegNews.PilotPlant.GoodMeatEat Just

    “Changes in the medium composition, often in tandem with cues from a scaffolding structure, trigger immature cells to differentiate into the skeletal muscle, fat, and connective tissues that make up meat,” it continues. After that, the resulting protein is harvested and prepared, ready for consumption.

    Is cultivated meat vegan?

    Because cultivated meat is taken from real animal cells, it is not technically vegan. But that said, because it’s slaughter-free, some vegans have said they’d be open to consuming it. 

    One poll by the dating app Veggly, conducted last year, found that 24 percent of vegans would be open to eating cultivated meat. And while nearly half said they wouldn’t eat it, they did also state that they still want the industry to succeed.

    VegNews.GOODMeatEat Just

    “The more momentum cultured meat gains, the less demand there will be for animal meat,” said Veggly’s founder Alex Felipelli. “Ultimately, we as vegans just want to save as many animals’ lives as possible and protect the planet. Cultured meat is one of the new innovations that will help us achieve this, so it’s worth supporting or encouraging it, even if we don’t want to eat it.”

    Is cultivated meat sustainable?

    Right now, the food system relies heavily on animal agriculture. But this way of producing protein is detrimental to the planet. Livestock emits 14.5 percent of global greenhouse gasses, and it’s also a driver of deforestation and habitat destruction, as well as water pollution, and ocean dead zones.

    Ultimately, changing the way we make meat, and shifting production to the lab, would help to mitigate some of these environmental challenges. According to one 2011 Oxford University study, for example, cultivated meat could reduce emissions by 96 percent. And a more recent analysis, conducted in 2021, suggested that if a cultivated meat production facility was run on renewable energy, the carbon footprint of producing beef could be up to 92 percent lower.

    VegNews.CultivatedChickenFilet.UPSIDEFoodsUpside Foods

    It would also cut down on resources, as well as waste. “When we’re raising animals, a very large amount is being discarded: the bones, fur, eyeballs, organs. What we’re doing is wasting resources to produce stuff that we don’t get back,” Shir Friedman—who co-founded the Modern Agriculture Foundation and currently serves as cultivated meat company SuperMeat’s head of communications—told Gizmodo back in 2016. “With cultured meat, you grow exactly what you want, and you barely throw anything away.”

    Where can cultivated meat be sold?

    Back in 2020, Singapore became the first country in the world to give cultivated meat its regulatory approval. Now, cultivated chicken by Good Meat (a subsidiary of California vegan egg brand Eat Just) is sold in one of the country’s popular restaurants, Huber’s Butchery. 

    But the brand’s market just opened up significantly, as the US has also now approved cultivated meat for sale in the country. In June 2023, both Good Meat and Upside Foods, another California-based cultivated meat company, were granted final approval by the US Department of Agriculture, following an inspection of their facilities. This doesn’t mean that cultivated meat will instantly be for sale across the US, but it does mean that both companies can start preparing to roll out their products. 

    VegNews.GOODCultivatedMeat-2Eat Just

    “This approval will fundamentally change how meat makes it to our table,” said Uma Valeti, the founder and CEO of Upside Foods. “It’s a giant step forward towards a more sustainable future—one that preserves choice and life.”

    What other foods can be cultivated in a lab?

    The world of cultivated meat is exciting, innovative, and intriguing. But it’s not the only food that can be produced inside a lab. In fact, one day, we could all be drinking coffee, enjoying chocolate, and chewing on collagen gummies, all of which started their journeys inside a lab.

    CULT Food Science, a new product division of Canadian brand Cult Foods, for example, has created Zero Coffee, a sparkling coffee beverage made with cultured coffee. It also developed Free Candy, a gummy made with cultured collagen. The latter is a popular supplement, associated with improved skin elasticity, but because it comes from animal bones, it’s not sustainable. Cultured collagen, however, offers a potentially more environmentally-friendly, more ethical alternative.

    VegNews.cellbasedcoffe.CultFoodsCult Foods

    And in Switzerland, some researchers have even worked out how to create lab-grown chocolate, which would reduce the demand for cocoa, which is also an industry associated with deforestation.

    “It is not only staple products such as meat that will be reinvented through cellular agriculture,” said Cult’s CEO Lejjy Gafour. “But the over $50 billion auxiliary market, such as coffee beans and collagen.” 

    In fact, he added that most of the “key ingredients you see on grocery shelves” can be replaced with cultivated alternatives. “The products that bring us so much enjoyment–an afternoon coffee or sweet snack–so often rely on environmentally harmful ingredients,” added Joshua Errett, Cult’s vice president of product development. “[We’re] providing a sustainable alternative.”

    This post was originally published on VegNews.com.

  • Right-Wing Websites Connected to Former Trump Lawyer Are Scamming Loyal Followers With Phony Celebrity Pitches

    by Craig Silverman

    ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.

    Oprah Winfrey looked upset.

    The photo caught her midsentence, her left hand jabbing at the camera.

    “They are twisting everything,” the TV icon was quoted as saying, under a red “BREAKING NEWS” banner.

    The ad featuring the Winfrey image and quote ran on the conservative website DC Swamp Tales. It directed readers to a webpage that resembled a news article. The text spun a narrative about a television interviewer who unfairly berated Winfrey for promoting a revolutionary product that could “reverse Dementia instantly & for good.”

    But there was no such dispute. Winfrey’s quote was fake, and her name and likeness were used without permission. The product, a low-dose, cannabis-derived gummy supplement, does not treat dementia, let alone reverse it.

    “These ads are false. Oprah Winfrey does not have anything to do with these products,” Nicole Nichols, a spokesperson for Winfrey’s company Harpo Inc., told ProPublica.

    Oprah Winfrey had nothing to do with this ad or the anti-dementia product it was touting, her spokesperson said. (Screenshot by ProPublica)

    Such scam ads have proliferated on right-wing websites worldwide in the past eight months. They use fake endorsements from celebrities including Winfrey, country music singers Dolly Parton and Reba McEntire, Twitter and Tesla owner Elon Musk, actor Ryan Reynolds, Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau and former German chancellor Gerhard Schröder to promote dubious medicines and cryptocurrency frauds. Conservative publishers make money from each click on a deceptive ad, exploiting their like-minded readers.

    The ads were placed by AdStyle, an ad network whose corporate website lists it as being registered in Delaware with an office in Boca Raton, Florida. Its website said it is “trusted by” major brands including Toyota, Ikea, EA Games and L’Oréal. But Florida and Delaware corporate registries have no record of AdStyle, which appears to be operated by a Latvian couple living in Italy. Spokespeople for Toyota and Ikea said they could not find any records of those companies working with AdStyle. EA Games and L’Oréal did not respond to queries.

    “These ads are certainly terrible,” said Kirsten Grenier Burnett, a spokesperson for McEntire. Spokespeople for Trudeau, Musk, Reynolds, Shröder and Parton either did not respond or declined to comment.

    This month, after reporters contacted AdStyle, the “trusted by” assertion and the brand logos were removed from the company’s website.

    Since November, reporters for ProPublica, Sweden’s Expressen newspaper, the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, and Paper Trail Media in Germany have viewed hundreds of AdStyle ads across scores of right-wing websites. The vast majority of the ads were outright scams or made seemingly exaggerated claims. “This 197-Year-Old Man’s Longevity Secret Makes Your Cells 4 TIMES Younger,” one pitch proclaimed.

    AdStyle ads are often displayed on a network of more than a dozen U.S. conservative outlets connected to a lawyer whose clients have included former President Donald Trump. Advertisers pay AdStyle to show their ads to web users, and the company splits the revenue with its publisher partners. Its ads are easy to spot because they carry the AdStyle logo.

    The prevalence of scam ads on AdStyle and its many partnerships with right-wing sites around the world exemplify how conservative publishers, politicians and operatives profit from fleecing their fellow right-wingers — and how some players take the strategy global. Even the editorially conservative National Review has acknowledged “the right’s grifter problem.”

    Deceptive ads abound on Trump’s Truth Social network, while his former campaign chair Steve Bannon and other supporters face federal charges for running an alleged fraudulent donation scheme to build a privately funded border wall. (Bannon has pleaded not guilty to money laundering, fraud and conspiracy charges. Two other people have pleaded guilty.)

    A recent New York Times investigation revealed how a group of conservative operatives had raised close to $100 million using robocalls that asked for money to help veterans and first responders. Only 1% of the money went to those causes. And this month ProPublica reported on an IRS whistleblower complaint alleging that leaders of 2020 election denialist nonprofit True the Vote had used donations for personal gain. True the Vote said the complaint was without merit.

    Digital advertising has made it easy and lucrative to target people on the internet with scam ads and donation pitches. Besides AdStyle, other networks and social media platforms have carried scam ads. Earlier this month, Harpo filed two federal lawsuits against people and companies it said used Winfrey’s name and trademarks without permission to market weight loss and CBD gummies. Both cases are pending. Harpo did not sue AdStyle. Asked why, Winfrey’s company declined to comment.

    It’s unclear who ultimately owns AdStyle and how much money it and its publisher partners earn from the scam ads. Ad networks like AdStyle act as a middleman by connecting advertisers with publishers. An advertiser signs up with a network, uploads the ads it wants to run, identifies the kind of people it wants to reach, and sets the price range it’s willing to pay each time someone views or clicks on an ad.

    Meanwhile, the network signs deals with publishers to place ads on their websites in exchange for a share of the revenue. It’s unclear how AdStyle splits revenue with publishers, but ad networks typically take between 20% and 50% of the revenue generated.

    Scam ads on DC Swamp Tales featured Elon Musk and Reba McEntire. (Screenshot by ProPublica)

    In the U.S., AdStyle primarily works with right-wing sites operated by two companies, Saber Communications and Digital Communications LLC, located a few doors down from each other in Fredericksburg, Virginia.

    The companies are owned by Andrew Coelho and Michael Rothfeld, political marketers with ties to former U.S. representative and presidential candidate Ron Paul and his son, Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul. Federal Election Commission records show Saber provided digital marketing services to Rand Paul and PACs that support him. Ron Paul’s 2012 presidential campaign paid Saber close to $8 million.

    With names like Liberal Hack Watch, DC Dirt Sheet and DC Swamp Tales, most sites in the Saber/Digital Media Communications network publish content with a pro-Trump bent. Four other sites produce Christian content or travel and lifestyle advice for conservatives.

    Through their websites, Rothfeld and Coelho collect the email addresses of American conservatives and target them with paid political and marketing messages.

    “I am a professional junk mailer,” Rothfeld said in a 2012 talk to the Young Americans for Liberty National Convention, according to BuzzFeed News. “I am a professional telemarketer. I’m a professional spammer — like, a hundred million pieces of, emails a month. And I’m a professional negative campaigner. And I’m damn proud of all four.”

    Until 2020, Digital Communications listed David Warrington as its registered agent. The Virginia-based Warrington was also the agent for at least seven now-defunct LLCs connected to websites in the Rothberg/Coelho network.

    Warrington represented Trump in his dealings with the Jan. 6 congressional committee. His clients have also included Jessie Benton, a Texas political consultant convicted of illegally funneling money to Trump’s campaign on behalf of Roman Vasilenko, who has been described as a “Russian naval officer turned multilevel marketer.” Vasilenko, who was not charged, did not respond to requests for comment through his social media accounts.

    Warrington said he represents Rothfeld, Coelho and their companies. He provided a statement from Saber about the AdStyle ads on its sites.

    AdStyle is “by far our least active ad service, delivering less than 3% of total banner impressions on the sites we manage,” the statement said. “For the sites that still host their ads in low-priority positions, their ads currently generate an average of $11 per month per site.” He declined to comment further.

    Rand Paul and the Trump campaign did not respond to requests for comment, nor did Ron Paul when he was contacted through his institute and social media accounts.

    In Sweden, AdStyle works with Samnytt, one of the country’s leading far-right sites. In 2021, its publisher and political editor, Mats Dagerlind, was convicted in a Stockholm court of gross defamation against a Syrian-Swedish journalist for calling him a “jihadist undercover.” Dagerlind was fined about $2,800 plus court costs and given a suspended sentence. The site’s CEO is Kent Ekeroth, a politician affiliated with the Sweden Democrats, a nationalist party that pursues anti-immigration policies.

    In a statement to the Expressen newspaper, Dagerlind said the site does not control the content of ads placed by AdStyle. “Due to political persecution from the establishment in Sweden, Samnytt has been blocked from using the more established ad exchanges,” he said. (Google Ads, for example, do not appear on Samnytt.)

    In Germany, AdStyle places ads on far-right sites such as Journalistenwatch, which a previous ProPublica investigation identified as a source of false information.

    “We don’t care because we think our readership is smart enough to not be scammed,” said Conny Axel Meier, a member of Journalistenwatch’s board and editorial team. “I don’t really care what advertising is going on. After all, we work with a lot of advertising partners. We don’t control the advertising, we don’t care, we can’t check them all.” He plans to continue working with AdStyle “as long as I don’t get a letter from a public prosecutor’s office,” he added.

    The celebrities featured in the scam ads on these and other sites change depending on the location of the person viewing the ad. In Germany, scam ads featured Shröder and former tennis star Boris Becker. In Sweden, they used Stefan Persson, the majority owner of fast fashion retailer H&M and the country’s richest person. In each case, the ads placed by AdStyle sent readers to websites promoting fraudulent cryptocurrency investment schemes that can cause people to lose their life savings.

    “These are 100% incorrect and false claims,” said Kristina Stenvinkel, a spokesperson for Persson’s family company. “It is very regrettable that there are people who fabricate and mislead by exploiting and using public figures for their own gain.”

    On its LinkedIn page, AdStyle says it was founded in 2015 by “a small group of great minds in Boca Raton.” Its website gives an address there. But building management and a lessor of office space there said AdStyle isn’t a tenant.

    AdStyle’s website said the company was “trusted by” major brands like Ikea and Toyota, both of which said they had no record of working with AdStyle. The logos were removed after journalists contacted AdStyle for comment. (Screenshot by ProPublica)

    At least five profiles for current AdStyle employees on LinkedIn use headshots that exhibit characteristics of AI-generated images, such as mismatched earrings and unrealistic backgrounds. ProPublica could not find the employees in public records. One actual employee is Anna Bella Burjak, whose LinkedIn profile says she is the company’s director of business development.

    Burjak is married to a web developer named Leonid Volinski, whose name appears in a domain registration linked to AdStyle. Originally from Latvia, the couple used to live in Israel but recently moved to a town roughly 60 miles from Venice, Italy.

    When reporters visited the couple’s residence, Burjak and Volinski declined to comment. Within a day, AdStyle had removed the investment and dementia scam ads from the network, including the Winfrey ad.

    “We have taken immediate action to reinforce our systems and processes, working diligently to enhance our ad approval mechanisms to better prevent the appearance of misleading or low-quality advertisements,” the company said in an unsigned email. “We are actively reviewing and refining our content moderation policies.”

    This post was originally published on Articles and Investigations – ProPublica.

  • Police using live facial recognition at British Grand Prix

    Northamptonshire force says technology adds ‘extra layer of security’ at Silverstone for F1 race

    Police are using live facial recognition (LFR) to scan the faces of people attending the British Grand Prix at Silverstone this weekend.

    Northamptonshire police is deploying the technology on Saturday and Sunday to provide “an extra layer of security” at the Formula One race, which 450,000 people are expected to attend, the force said.

    Continue reading…

    This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.

  • Robots alone might not save us, but they can help

    By Jason Leman

    See original post here.

    A sci-fi film response:

    Our hero wakes. Using her 3D food printer she prints out a full English breakfast, eating it in the front room of her flat – part of the great house-building of the 2020s. Pouring recycled water into the solar-power kettle our hero relaxes back and muses while her cuppa boils. A basic income and housing revolution, combined with technological innovation has enabled any individual to live outside of the capitalist system. Yet, many people were still trapped in a cycle of working to maintain their consumer status. It was time for a revolution. In space. With lasers.

    [I have pretensions to being a sci-fi fan, so apologies for any slightly less than academic references that slip in…]

    Simon Duffy argues in this blog post that the automation of jobs is not a compelling reason for a basic income. Capitalists will always find a way to make a profit. However, I argue below that technology makes the transition to a basic income more likely. It does this through providing greater choice over how we spend our time and providing us with a greater ability to meet our own needs.

    Technology has been largely responsible for a halving of the average working week since the inception of the industrial revolution. Greater productivity and an abundance of resources has led to people having more time outside paid work than any time since the 1520s. Leisure time is important because it gives us time to seek roles and meaning outside of paid labour. There has been a paradigmatic shift from work being the central pillar of individual, family and community life, to work being almost peripheral to the lives of many. This is not to ignore people who either have to, or want to, do more paid work to get by, or those who devote their lives to a profession or career. Averages never tell the whole tale. However, technology has removed for many the demands of work that dominates every waking hour. This change has made the step to living an independent life on a basic income more accessible for the average person.

    So technology has given us more choice over what we do with our time.

    Technology has also devolved power. What previously would have taken teams of people to accomplish can now be done by just a few. Monopolies on information have been thoroughly disrupted, those on energy generation and manufacturing teetering, with others in the sights of innovators. People are producing and distributing their own media, producing their own energy, and manufacturing in their backyards. This is not to say that technology could replace a basic income, but it could significantly reduce the amount of income needed to become self-sufficient. Currently, the shortage of housing is a critical cause of poverty and inequality. Technology could not solve the problem, but should the right policies be implemented, technology could magnify and democratise the impact.

    So technology offers the chance for individuals, households and communities to become producers as well as consumers.

    If technology could help pave the transition to a basic income, what of the argument that it would make a basic income a necessity? As Elon Musk has recently found to his cost, automation is great for repetitive jobs but is less great for jobs that need flexibility. Human beings are marvellously adaptable and remarkably low maintenance compared to machines. For any employer, such a resource is great to have around. Human labour hasn’t been made obsolete yet, and employers will still have to pay up or create work that people want to do regardless of pay. Yet, the endpoint of this process is arguably far more interesting than simply being “robots will take our jobs”.

    Self-replicating autonomous robots that could construct themselves out of waste might be thought of as a slave army for the new industrialists. Labour costs would be near zero. Simon suggests this might lead to a dystopia, perhaps where most humans are scraping a living as the new industrialists move to an orbiting space station (as in the plot in the 2013 film Elysium).

    However, technology does not just give us time but also power. The cost of a self-replicating autonomous robot would be near zero, and so something available for every household. Every household becomes a factory that can produce white goods from blueprints and waste, reuse and recycle and create what is needed. Before the industrial revolution, many households were largely self-sufficient. If we approach this situation again, capitalism itself may teeter on obsolescence as we enter a post-scarcity world (like a story from author Iain M. Banks’ ‘The Culture’ series). A basic income in such a world would simply be a way of ensuring exchange with others could continue when there was no need to be in paid work.

    Prior to this utopia, we are witnessing the downsides to technological revolutions, largely driven by the wish to gain status through consumption, wealth or power. In our current revolution, humans have to fit in with technology-driven systems. Workers are monitored and evaluated by automated overseers. People are required to do emotion work to emulate unflappable automata. The globe has shrunk such that local power and relationships have been disrupted, whilst globalised capital has promoted its own interests.

    Technology does not mean emancipation. The 50s housewife, freed from one set of chores by labour-saving devices, was engaged in other chores in an arms race of what it meant to be a good housewife. A person working 80 hours a week, freed from the basic need to do paid work, may still work long-hours to fund extravagant consumption. The challenges of consumerism, climate change, pollution, inequality, and conflict are political ones, not technological ones. They are a long series of choices that we must make as individuals, households, and societies. However, technology is giving many people choices where they did not previously exist.

    The last time the average working week was 32 hours was in the 1520s, when many households could be self-reliant, at least when the crops didn’t fail. The freedoms we have now are extraordinary compared to then. The power to make choices is itself revolutionary. We can look towards the 2020s with an optimistic eye on what technology has enabled. Robots and technology won’t save us, but they are making the step to a basic income more feasible.

    The post Robots alone might not save us, but they can help appeared first on Basic Income Today.

    This post was originally published on Basic Income Today.

  • FBI Hired Social Media Surveillance Firm That Labeled Black Lives Matter Organizers “Threat Actors”

    The FBI’s primary tool for monitoring social media threats is the same contractor that labeled peaceful Black Lives Matter protest leaders DeRay McKesson and Johnetta Elzie as “threat actors” requiring “continuous monitoring” in 2015.

    The contractor, ZeroFox, identified McKesson and Elzie as posing a “high severity” physical threat, despite including no evidence that McKesson or Elzie were suspected of criminal activity. “It’s been almost a decade since the referenced 2015 incident and in that time we have invested heavily in fine-tuning our collections, analysis and labeling of alerts,” Lexie Gunther, a spokesperson for ZeroFox, told The Intercept, “including the addition of a fully managed service that ensures human analysis of every alert that comes through the ZeroFox Platform to ensure we are only alerting customers to legitimate threats and are labeling those threats appropriately.”

    The FBI, which declined to comment, hired ZeroFox in 2021, a fact referenced in the new 106-page Senate report about the intelligence community’s failure to anticipate the January 6, 2021, uprising at the U.S. Capitol. The June 27 report, produced by Democrats on the Senate Homeland Security Committee, shows the bureau’s broad authorities to surveil social media content — authorities the FBI previously denied it had, including before Congress. It also reveals the FBI’s reliance on outside companies to do much of the filtering for them.

    The FBI’s $14 million contract to ZeroFox for “FBI social media alerting” replaced a similar contract with Dataminr, another firm with a history of scrutinizing racial justice movements. Dataminr, like ZeroFox, subjected the Black Lives Matter movement to web surveillance on behalf of the Minneapolis Police Department, previous reporting by The Intercept has shown. 

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    In testimony before the Senate in 2021, the FBI’s then-Assistant Director for Counterterrorism Jill Sanborn flatly denied that the FBI had the power to monitor social media discourse.

    “So, the FBI does not monitor publicly available social media conversations?” asked Arizona Sen. Kyrsten Sinema. 

    “Correct, ma’am. It’s not within our authorities,” Sanborn replied, citing First Amendment protections barring such activities. 

    Sanborn’s statement was widely publicized at the time and cited as evidence that concerns about federal government involvement in social media were unfounded. But, as the Senate report stresses, Sanborn’s answer was false. 

    “FBI leadership mischaracterized the Bureau’s authorities to monitor social media,” the report concludes, calling it an “exaggeration of the limits on FBI’s authorities,” which in fact are quite broad.

    It is under these authorities that the FBI sifts through vast amounts of social media content searching for threats, the report reveals.

    “Prior to 2021, FBI contracted with the company Dataminr that used pre-defined search terms to identify potential threats from voluminous open-source posts online, which FBI could then investigate further as appropriate,” the report states, citing internal FBI communications obtained as part of the committee’s investigation. “Effective Jan. 1, 2021, FBI’s contract for these services switched to a new company called ZeroFox that would perform similar functions under a new system.”

    The FBI has maintained that its “intent is not to ‘scrape’ or otherwise monitor individual social media activity,” instead insisting that it “seeks to identify an immediate alerting capability to better enable the FBI to quickly respond to ongoing national security and public safety-related incidents.” Dataminr has also previously told The Intercept that its software “does not provide any government customers with the ability to target, monitor or profile social media users, perform geospatial, link or network analysis, or conduct any form of surveillance.” 

    While it may be technically true that flagging social media posts based on keywords isn’t the same as continuously flagging posts from a specific account, the notion that this doesn’t amount to monitoring specific users is misleading. If an account is routinely using certain keywords (e.g. #BlackLivesMatter), flagging those keywords would surface the same accounts repeatedly.

    The 2015 threat report for which ZeroFox was criticized specifically called for “continuous monitoring” of McKesson and Elzie. In an interview with The Intercept, Elzie stressed how incompetent the FBI’s analysis of social media was in her situation. She described a visit the FBI paid her parents in 2016, telling them that it was imperative she not attend the Republican National Convention in Cleveland — an event she says she had no intention of attending and which troll accounts on Twitter bearing her name claimed she would be at to foment violence. (The FBI confirmed that it was “reaching out to people to request their assistance in helping our community host a safe and secure convention,” but did not respond to allegations that they were trying to discourage activists from attending the convention.)

    “My parents were like why would she be going to the RNC? And that’s where the conversation ended because they couldn’t answer that.”

    “I don’t think [ZeroFox] should be getting $14 million dollars [from] the same FBI that knocked on my family’s door [in Missouri] and looked for me when it was world news that I was in Baton Rouge at the time,” Elzie told The Intercept. “They’re just very unserious, both organizations.”

    The FBI was so dependent on automated social media monitoring for ascertaining threats that the temporary loss of access to such software led to panic by bureau officials.

    “This investigation found that FBI’s efforts to effectively detect threats on social media in the lead-up to January 6th were hampered by the Bureau’s change in contracts mere days before the attack,” the report says. “Internal FBI communications obtained by the Committee show how that transition caused confusion and concern as the Bureau’s open-source monitoring capabilities were degraded less than a week before January 6th.” 

    One of the FBI communications obtained by the committee was an email from an FBI official at the Washington Field Office, lamenting the loss of Dataminr, which the official deemed “crucial.”

    “Their key term search allows Intel to enter terms we are interested in without having to constantly monitor social media as we’ll receive notification alerts when a social media posts [sic] hits on one of our key terms,” the FBI official said.

    “The amount of time saved combing through endless streams of social media is spent liaising with partners and collaborating and supporting operations,” the email continued. “We will lose this time if we do not have a social media tool and will revert to scrolling through social media looking for concerning posts.”

    But civil libertarians have routinely cautioned against the use of automated social media surveillance tools not just because they place nonviolent, constitutionally protected speech under suspicion, but also for their potential to draw undue scrutiny to posts that represent no threat whatsoever. 

    While tools like ZeroFox and Dataminr may indeed spare FBI analysts from poring over timelines, the company’s in-house definition of what posts are relevant or constitute a “threat” can be immensely broad. Dataminr has monitored the social media usage of people and communities of color based on law enforcement biases and stereotypes. 

    A May report by The Intercept also revealed that the U.S. Marshals Service’s contract with Dataminr had the company relaying not only information about peaceful abortion rights protests, but also web content that had no apparent law enforcement relevance whatsoever, including criticism of the Met Gala and jokes about Donald Trump’s weight.

    The FBI email closes noting that “Dataminr is user friendly and does not require an expertise in social media exploitation.” But that same user-friendliness can lead government agencies to rely heavily on the company’s designations of what is important or what constitutes a threat. 

    The dependence is mutual. In its Securities and Exchange Commission filing, ZeroFox says that “one U.S. government customer accounts for a substantial portion” of its revenue.

    Additional reporting by Sam Biddle.

    The post FBI Hired Social Media Surveillance Firm That Labeled Black Lives Matter Organizers “Threat Actors” appeared first on The Intercept.

    This post was originally published on The Intercept.

  • The overlooked climate consequences of AI

    This story was published in partnership with The Markup, a nonprofit, investigative newsroom that challenges technology to serve the public good. Sign up for its newsletters here.

    “Something’s fishy,” declared a March newsletter from the right-wing, fossil fuel-funded think tank Texas Public Policy Foundation. The caption looms under an imposing image of a stranded whale on a beach, with three huge offshore wind turbines in the background. 

    Something truly was fishy about that image. It’s not because offshore wind causes whale deaths, a groundless conspiracy pushed by fossil fuel interests that the image attempts to bolster. It’s because, as Gizmodo writer Molly Taft reported, the photo was fabricated using artificial intelligence. Along with eerily pixelated sand, oddly curved beach debris, and mistakenly fused together wind turbine blades, the picture also retains a tell-tale rainbow watermark from the artificially intelligent image generator DALL-E. 

    DALL-E is one of countless AI models that have risen to otherworldly levels of popularity, particularly in the last year. But as hundreds of millions of users marvel at AI’s ability to produce novel images and believable text, the current wave of hype has concealed how AI could be hindering our ability to make progress on climate change.  

    Advocates argue that these impacts — which include vast carbon emissions associated with the electricity needed to run the models, a pervasive use of AI in the oil and gas industry to boost fossil fuel extraction, and a worrying uptick in the output of misinformation — are flying under the radar. While many prominent researchers and investors have stoked fears around AI’s “godlike” technological force or potential to end civilization, a slew of real-world consequences aren’t getting the attention they deserve. 

    Many of these harms extend far beyond climate issues, including algorithmic racism, copyright infringement, and exploitative working conditions for data workers who help develop AI models. “We see technology as an inevitability and don’t think about shaping it with societal impacts in mind,” David Rolnick, a computer science professor at McGill University and a co-founder of the nonprofit Climate Change AI, told Grist.

    But the effects of AI, including its impact on our climate and efforts to curtail climate change, are anything but inevitable. Experts say we can and should confront these harms — but first, we need to understand them.

    Large AI models produce an unknown amount of emissions

    At its core, AI is essentially “a marketing term,” the Federal Trade Commission stated back in February. There is no absolute definition for what an AI technology is. But usually, as Amba Kak, the executive director of the AI Now Institute, describes, AI refers to algorithms that process large amounts of data to perform tasks like generating text or images, making predictions, or calculating scores and rankings. 

    That higher computational capacity means large AI models gobble up large quantities of computing power in its development and use. Take ChatGPT, for instance, the OpenAI chatbot that has gone viral for producing convincing, human-like text. Researchers estimated that the training of ChatGPT-3, the predecessor to this year’s GPT-4, emitted 552 tons of carbon dioxide equivalent — equal to more than three round-trip flights between San Francisco and New York. Total emissions are likely much higher, since that number only accounts for training ChatGPT-3 one time through. In practice, models can be retrained thousands of times while they are being built. 

    OpenAI CEO Sam Altman speaks at Keio University in Tokyo, Japan, on June 12. Tomohiro Ohsumi / Getty Images

    The estimate also does not include energy consumed when ChatGPT is used by approximately 13 million people each day. Researchers highlight that actually using a trained model can make up 90 percent of energy use associated with an AI machine learning model. And the newest version of ChatGPT, GPT-4, likely requires far more computing power because it is a much larger model.

    No clear data exists on exactly how many emissions result from the use of large AI models by billions of users. But researchers at Google found that total energy use from machine learning AI models accounts for about 15 percent of the company’s total energy use. Bloomberg reports that amount would equal 2.3 terawatt-hours annually — roughly as much electricity used by homes in a city the size of Atlanta in a year.

    The lack of transparency from companies behind AI products like Microsoft, Google, and OpenAI means that the total amount of power and emissions involved in AI technology is unknown. For instance, OpenAI has not disclosed what data was fed into this year’s ChatGPT-4 model, how much computing power was used, or how the chatbot was changed. 

    “We’re talking about ChatGPT and we know nothing about it,” Sasha Luccioni, a researcher who has studied AI models’ carbon footprints, told Bloomberg. “It could be three raccoons in a trench coat.”

    AI fuels climate misinformation online

    AI could also fundamentally shift the way we consume — and trust — information online. The UK nonprofit Center for Countering Digital Hate tested Google’s Bard chatbot and found it capable of producing harmful and false narratives around topics like COVID-19, racism, and climate change. For instance, Bard told one user, “There is nothing we can do to stop climate change, so there is no point in worrying about it.”

    The ability of chatbots to spout misinformation is baked into their design, according to Rolnick. “Large language models are designed to create text that looks good rather than being actually true,” he said. “The goal is to match the style of human language rather than being grounded in facts” — a tendency that “lends itself perfectly to the creation of misinformation.” 

    Google, OpenAI, and other large tech companies usually try to address content issues as these models are deployed live. But these efforts often amount to “papered over” solutions, Rolnick says. “Testing their content more deeply, one finds these biases deeply encoded in much more insidious and subtle ways that haven’t been patched by the companies deploying the algorithms,” he said.

    Giulio Corsi, a researcher at the U.K.-based Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence who studies climate misinformation, says an even bigger concern is AI-generated images. Unlike text produced on an individual scale through a chatbot, images can “spread very quickly and break the sense of trust in what we see,” he said. “If people start doubting what they see in a consistent way, I think that’s pretty concerning behavior.”

    Climate misinformation existed long before AI tools. But now, groups like the Texas Public Policy Foundation have a new weapon in their arsenal to launch attacks against renewable energy and climate policies — and the fishy whale image indicates that they’re already using it.

    A view of the Google office in London, U.K., in May. Steve Taylor / SOPA Images / LightRocket via Getty Images

    AI’s climate impacts depend on who’s using it, and how

    Researchers emphasize that AI’s real-world effects aren’t predetermined — they depend on the intentions, and actions, of the people developing and using it. As Corsi puts it, AI can be used “as both a positive and negative force” when it comes to climate change.

    For example, AI is already used by climate scientists to further their research. By combing through huge amounts of data, AI can help create climate models, analyze satellite imagery to target deforestation, and forecast weather more accurately. AI systems can also help improve the performance of solar panels, monitor emissions from energy production, and optimize cooling and heating systems, among other applications. 

    At the same time, AI is also used extensively by the oil and gas sector to boost the production of fossil fuels. Despite touting net-zero climate targets, Microsoft, Google, and Amazon have all come under fire for their lucrative cloud computing and AI software contracts with oil and gas companies including ExxonMobil, Schlumberger, Shell, and Chevron. 

    A 2020 report by Greenpeace found that these contracts exist at every phase of oil and gas operations. Fossil fuel companies use AI technologies to ingest massive amounts of data to locate oil and gas deposits and create efficiencies across the entire supply chain, from drilling to shipping to storing to refining. AI analytics and modeling could generate up to $425 billion in added revenue for the oil and gas sector between 2016 and 2025, according to the consulting firm Accenture.

    AI’s application in the oil and gas sector is “quite unambiguously serving to increase global greenhouse gas emissions by outcompeting low-carbon energy sources,” said Rolnick. 

    Google spokesperson Ted Ladd told Grist that while the company still holds active cloud computing contracts with oil and gas companies, Google does not currently build custom AI algorithms to facilitate oil and gas extraction. Amazon spokesperson Scott LaBelle emphasized that Amazon’s AI software contracts with oil and gas companies focus on making “their legacy businesses less carbon intensive,” while Microsoft representative Emma Detwiler told Grist that Microsoft provides advanced software technologies to oil and gas companies that have committed to net-zero emissions targets.  

    EU commissioners Margrethe Vestager and Thierry Breton at a press conference on AI and digital technologies in 2020 in Brussels, Belgium. Thierry Monasse / Getty Images

    There are currently no major policies to regulate AI

    When it comes to how AI can be used, it’s “the Wild West,” as Corsi puts it. The lack of regulation is particularly alarming when you consider the scale at which AI is deployed, he added. Facebook, which uses AI to recommend posts and products, boasts nearly 3 billion users. “There’s nothing that you could do at that scale without any oversight,” Corsi said — except AI. 

    In response, advocacy groups such as Public Citizen and the AI Now Institute have called for the tech companies responsible for these AI products to be held accountable for AI’s harms. Rather than relying on the public and policymakers to investigate and find solutions for AI’s harms after the fact, AI Now’s 2023 Landscape report calls for governments to “place the burden on companies to affirmatively demonstrate that they are not doing harm.” Advocates and AI researchers also call for greater transparency and reporting requirements on the design, data use, energy usage, and emissions footprint of AI models.

    Meanwhile, policymakers are gradually coming up to speed on AI governance. In mid-June, the European Parliament approved draft rules for the world’s first law to regulate the technology. The upcoming AI Act, which likely won’t be implemented for another two years, will regulate AI technologies according to their level of perceived risk to society. The draft text bans facial recognition technology in public spaces, prohibits generative language models like ChatGPT from using any copyrighted material, and requires AI models to label their content as AI-generated. 

    Advocates hope that the upcoming law is only the first step to holding companies accountable for AI’s harms. “These things are causing problems now,” said Rick Claypool, research director for Public Citizen. “And why they’re causing problems now is because of the way they are being used by humans to further human agendas.”

    This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The overlooked climate consequences of AI on Jul 6, 2023.

    This post was originally published on Grist.

  • Hackers already infiltrate EV chargers. It could only get worse

    This story was co-published with WIRED.

    With his electric Kia EV6 running low on power, Sky Malcolm pulled into a bank of fast-chargers near Terre Haute, Indiana, to plug in. As his car powered up, he peeked at nearby chargers. One in particular stood out.

    Instead of the businesslike welcome screen displayed on the other Electrify America units, this one featured a picture of President Biden pointing his finger, with an “I did that!” caption. It was the same meme the president’s critics started slapping on gas pumps as prices soared last year, cloned 20 times across the screen. 

    “It was, unfortunately, not terribly surprising,” Malcolm said of the hack, which he stumbled upon last fall. Such shenanigans are increasingly common. At the beginning of the war in Ukraine, hackers tweaked charging stations along the Moscow–Saint Petersburg motorway in Russia to greet users with anti-Putin messages. Around the same time, cyber-vandals in England programmed public chargers to broadcast pornography. Just this year, the hosts of YouTube channel The Kilowatts tweeted a video showing it was possible to take control of an Electrify America station’s operating system. 

    While such breaches have so far remained relatively innocuous, cybersecurity experts say the consequences would be far more severe at the hands of truly nefarious miscreants. As companies, governments and consumers sprint to install more chargers, the risks could only grow.

    In recent years, security researchers and white-hat hackers have identified sprawling vulnerabilities in internet-connected home and public charging hardware that could expose customer data, compromise wi-fi networks, and, in a worst-case scenario, bring down power grids. Given the dangers, everyone from device manufacturers to the Biden administration is rushing to fortify these increasingly common machines and establish security standards.

    “This is a major problem,” said Jay Johnson, a cybersecurity researcher at Sandia National Laboratories. “It is potentially a very catastrophic situation for this country if we don’t get this right.”

    Chinks in EV charger security aren’t hard to find. Johnson and his colleagues summarized known shortcomings in a paper published last fall in the journal Energies. They found everything from the possibility of hackers being able to track users to vulnerabilities that “may expose home and corporate [Wi-Fi] networks to a breach.” Another study, led by Concordia University and published last year in the journal Computers & Security, highlighted more than a dozen classes of “severe vulnerabilities,” including the ability to turn chargers on and off remotely, as well as deploy malware.


    When British security research firm Pen Test Partners spent 18 months analyzing seven popular EV charger models, it found five had critical flaws. For instance, it identified a software bug in the popular Chargepoint network that hackers could likely exploit to obtain sensitive user information (the team stopped digging before acquiring such data). A charger sold in the UK by Project EV allowed researchers to overwrite its firmware. 

    Such cracks could conceivably permit hackers to access vehicle data or consumers’ credit card information, said Ken Munro, a co-founder of Pen Test Partners. But perhaps the most worrying weakness to him was that, as with the Concordia testing, his team discovered that many of the devices allowed hackers to stop or start charging at will. That could leave frustrated drivers without a full battery when they need one, but it’s the cumulative impacts that could be truly devastating.

    A woman in a tan coat plugs a charger into her electric vehicle, which is parked on the street outside her home in Berkeley, California
    Cybersecurity experts say one of the best ways to ensure the security of your home EV charger is to skip connecting it to the internet. Paul Chinn/The San Francisco Chronicle via Getty Images

    “It’s not about your charger, it’s about everyone’s charger at the same time,” he said. Many home users leave their cars connected to chargers even if they aren’t drawing power. They might, for example, plug in after work and schedule the vehicle to charge overnight when prices are lower. If a hacker were to switch thousands, or millions, of chargers on or off simultaneously, it could destabilize and even bring down entire electricity networks.

    “We’ve inadvertently created a weapon that nation states can use against our power grid,” said Munro. The United States glimpsed what such an attack might look like in 2021 when hackers hijacked Colonial Pipeline and disrupted gasoline supplies nationwide. The attack ended once the company paid millions of dollars in ransom. 

    Munro’s top recommendation for consumers is to not connect their home chargers to the internet, which should prevent the exploitation of most vulnerabilities. The bulk of safeguards, however, must come from manufacturers.

    “It’s the responsibility of the companies offering these services to make sure they are secure,” said Jacob Hoffman-Andrews, senior staff technologist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital rights nonprofit. “To some degree you have to trust the device you’re plugging into.”

    Electrify America declined an interview request. With regard to the issues Malcolm and the Kilowatts documented, spokesperson Octavio Navarro wrote in an email that the incidents were isolated and the fixes were quickly deployed.” In a statement, the company said, “Electrify America is constantly monitoring and reinforcing measures to protect ourselves and our customers and focusing on risk-mitigating station and network design.”

    Pen Test Partners wrote in its findings that companies were by and large responsive to fixing the vulnerabilities it identified, with ChargePoint and others plugging gaps in less than 24 hours (though one company created a new hole while trying to patch the old one). Project EV did not respond to Pen Test Partners but did eventually implement “strong authentication and authorisation.” Experts, however, argue that it’s far past time for the industry to move beyond this whack-a-mole approach to cybersecurity. 

    “Everybody knows this is an issue and lots of people are trying to figure out how to best solve it,” said Johnson, adding that he has seen progress. For example, many public EV charging stations have upgraded to more secure methods of transmitting data. But as for a coordinated set of standards, he said, “there’s not much regulation out there.”

    There has been some movement toward changing that. The 2021 Bipartisan Infrastructure Law included some $7.5 billion to expand the electric vehicle charging network across the U.S., and the Biden administration has made cybersecurity part of that initiative. Last fall, the White House convened manufacturers and policymakers to discuss a path toward ensuring that increasingly vital electric vehicle charging hardware is properly protected.

    Earlier this year the Federal Highway Administration finalized a rule that will require all states to implement cybersecurity standards for any charger installed under the 2021 Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. Santiago Mejia/The San Francisco Chronicle via Getty Images

    “Our critical infrastructure needs to meet a baseline level of security and resilience,” said Harry Krejsa, chief strategist at the White House Office of the National Cyber Director. He also argued that bolstering EV cybersecurity is as much about building trust as it is mitigating risk. Secure systems, he said, “give us the confidence in our next-generation digital foundations to aim higher than we possibly could have otherwise.”

    Earlier this year the Federal Highway Administration finalized a rule requiring states to implement “appropriate” cybersecurity strategies for chargers funded under the infrastructure law. But Johnson says the regulation omits devices installed outside that expansion, not to mention the more than 100,000 units already in place nationwide. Plus, he said, states haven’t offered much detail about what they’ll do. “If you drill down into the state plans, you’ll find that they are actually extremely light on cyber requirements,” he said. “The vast majority that I saw just say they will follow best practices.”

    Just what constitutes best practice remains ill-defined. Johnson and his colleagues at Sandia published recommendations for charger manufacturers, and he noted that the National Institute of Standards and Technology is developing a framework for fast-charging that could help shape future regulation. But, ultimately, he would like to see something akin to the 2022 Protecting and Transforming Cyber Health Care Act that’s geared toward electric vehicles.

    “Regulation is a way to drive the entire industry to improve their baseline security standards,” he said, pointing to recent laws in other countries as models or starting points for policymakers in the United States. Last year, for instance, the United Kingdom rolled out a host of requirements for EV chargers, such as enhanced encryption and authentication standards, tamper detection alerts and randomized delay functionality. 

    The latter means that a charger must be able to turn on and off with a random time delay of up to 10 minutes. That would mitigate the impact of all the chargers in an area coming online simultaneously after a power outage or hack. “You don’t get that spike, which is great,” said Munro. “It removes the threat from the power grid.”

    Johnson is optimistic that the industry is moving in the right direction, albeit more slowly than is ideal. “I can’t imagine [stricter standards] won’t happen. It’s just taking a long time,” he said. And he certainly doesn’t want to spark undue alarm, but rather apply steady pressure for improvement. 

    “It’s scary stuff,” he said, “but it shouldn’t be fear mongering.”

    This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Hackers already infiltrate EV chargers. It could only get worse on Jul 5, 2023.

    This post was originally published on Grist.

  • Armageddon and the Limits of Evolution

    On March 28, 2022, the Biden administration sent to Congress a revised version of its classified National Defense Strategy. The new version removed the longstanding doctrine of “no first use” of nuclear weapons, and opened the door to a nuclear response to a non-nuclear threat. Within months of the new U.S. policy, but without referring to it, the Putin administration responded that it might consider first use in case of an existential threat to Russia, including a non-nuclear one.  More recently, Sergei Karaganov, head of the Council on Foreign and Defense Policy, a non-governmental Russian think tank, argued that perhaps Russia should use a low yield tactical nuclear weapon in order to convince NATO to back off and stop threatening Russia’s security.

    What drives human society to engage in such reckless behavior? The answer to this question is at once familiar to any student of human nature, human society and human history, and yet equally perplexing given the prospect of potential obliteration. This article is an exploration of such causes and their consequences, with possible implications that go far beyond human behavior alone, and may be grounded in universal principles.

    We live in extraordinary times – possibly more extraordinary than we realize. How many of those living even fifty years ago imagined that today we might be able to carry in the palm of our hand a device that can access most of human knowledge. Or quantum computers with almost infinite and instantaneous computing capacity, which are now being designed. We can now even peer at the birth of the universe.

    We owe this to human intelligence, which is sometimes ridiculed, but is an extraordinary evolutionary development nonetheless. More specifically, we owe our superpowers to human technology, which is a product of human intelligence, and which further expands the production of human intelligence with new tools, even including the ability to augment human intelligence with artificial intelligence.

    How did this come about? The answer is quite simple and well known, although only the most imaginative science fiction writers have even scratched the surface of its potential consequences. Intelligence is born of evolution.

    Evolution, in turn, is born of competition, and more specifically the competition between life forms. In fact, if there is another form of competition, such as between astronomical or chemical or physical units, they might have to be defined as life forms by virtue of that competition. Even the most ancient and primitive life forms, such as viruses, compete against other life forms and against each other. This is the fundamental fact of evolution.

    We know that evolution has produced a fantastic array of life forms on earth, and we can imagine that the array is infinitely greater when life forms in the rest of the universe are eventually included. We also know that life forms have lived and died and gone extinct and passed on their genes according to their ability to compete and survive in different environments and in response to other life forms, and to great catastrophes, as well, such as the Chicxulub asteroid that wiped out all non-avian dinosaurs and ushered in the age of mammals 65 million years ago.

    What are the strategies that organisms have employed in the competition for survival? There are many that we all can name: size, speed, venom, diet, teeth, claws, regeneration of tissue, immunity to disease, etc. These can also be called tools or weapons, though not in the technological sense. The term weapon is nonetheless appropriate because it confers advantages in the competition against other organisms, eventually resulting in the survival or extinction of some over others, depending on the success or failure of the weapon.

    But there is a special weapon that is implied by the term strategy itself, namely intelligence. Intelligence is present in all living things. Even a virus has a form of intelligence and responds to its environment. Plants and fungi have also shown this ability, including a means of communication. Intelligence therefore qualifies as a tool or weapon in the tool chest or arsenal of every organism.

    It is not surprising, therefore, that evolution should experiment with intelligence in much the same way as with teeth, claws, horns, plumage and other traits. The antlers of the Irish elk, the diving adaptations of the sperm whale, the size of the Beast of Baluchistan, the plumage of birds of paradise, the predations of the strangler fig and carnivorous plants are all examples of evolutionary experiments that have gone to extremes. Some organisms, like the nautilus, have survived relatively unchanged for vast eons, while others have painted themselves into evolutionary corners that have resulted in extinction. The development of humans, therefore, demonstrates that evolution is also capable of taking intelligence to extremes.

    It has often been noted that humans are relatively helpless creatures, except for their brains. Furthermore, those brains place a great demand upon the body’s metabolism, the female birth canal, the rearing requirements of the young, the number of offspring, etc. Nevertheless, our brain confers enough of an advantage to overcome these disadvantages, at least thus far in our evolution.

    This has been true in the last few million years of our existence, and especially in the last ten thousand. Today, human technology has carried us off the charts as a species. It began in the paleolithic period, so called because stone tools are the only ones that survive in the archaeological record from this earliest and most basic stage of technological development. From then on, the human species has continued to evolve physically, eventually resulting in the homo sapiens species. But our technological evolution proceeded and accelerated even faster. In fact, our species essentially invented technological evolution, at least within our corner of the universe, and it is now proceeding at breakneck speed.

    The reasons for the acceleration of technological advancement have been widely discussed elsewhere, and may be summarized as 1) population growth (the increase in the number of minds that can be applied to technological advancement), 2) the increase in available time at the disposal of those minds, and 3) the multiplying effect of technological advances, i.e. the use of existing technology to create new technology, at an ever increasing and perhaps geometric pace.

    Why is technology so attractive to us? Most of the reasons are self-evident. It has the potential (though not always the effect) to make our lives easier, more comfortable and more secure. These are motives that drive all life forms, not just humans. It also gives us competitive advantages, both against other species (now a lesser issue), and within our own.

    In fact, the competition within our own species has become the primary evolutionary drive for humans. This sometimes takes relatively benign forms, such as social achievement and recognition, but the most intense competition is what we call warfare. Not surprisingly, it is also the time of greatest and fastest technological advancement, due to the much greater investment in the development of new weaponry during times of conflict. As noted earlier, we are now proceeding into unknown territory, powered by our ancient competitive drive, our relatively recent brain capacity, and our seemingly self-propelled technology.

    Are we the only life forms in the universe to experience these developments? Many well-known thinkers agree that this is extremely unlikely. Although the proportion of planets capable of developing and sustaining life is undoubtedly a small fraction of the total, and although the number that have developed intelligent life and technological societies is smaller still, the total number of planets is so enormous that intelligent life cannot be unique on a cosmic scale. Furthermore, some or many such planets will have reached an evolutionary stage comparable to our present millions or billions of years before us.

    Why, then, is there no incontrovertible evidence of alien societies having come to our planet? Why is there no synthetic substance of clearly alien origin that we can point to? We have sent synthetic terrestrial substances to the moon, Mars and other planets despite our short history of space travel, so why would alien civilizations not do the same?

    This is sometimes called the Fermi paradox, after a famous question posed by Enrico Fermi in a conversation with other physicists in 1950. Many thinkers have proposed explanations, but I would like to approach it from first principles rather than responses to the question, per se.

    I propose that just as physical laws govern the entire universe, there are evolutionary and biological laws that also apply universally, not merely on earth. A good candidate for one such law is clearly evolution, and the competitive forces that drive it. It is, in fact, hard to imagine that competition between species and among the same species is not one of these universal laws. A species without such a drive would simply not bother to attempt to survive, and therefore disappear in short order (or, more likely, never come into being).

    It is also reasonable to assume that, sooner or later, intelligence inevitably becomes one of the experimental paths of evolution. As on earth, it becomes the impetus for technological development, and also more rapid in times of warfare than at other times, in pursuit of an advantage against competitors.

    This is a clue that we can use to help answer the question of why alien civilizations would not have visited earth, and why we are unlikely to visit theirs. It is also the reason for the title of this article. In order to explore this line of inquiry, it is instructive to look at the history of weapons development, already mentioned in passing.

    Weapons are often cited as a metric for technological advancement. They may have other uses, but it is their use in warfare that often stands out in the creation of empire and domination of competing societies. Such may have been the case with fire and stone implements, although we often have only inferential evidence for prehistorical periods. Clearer evidence comes for the taming of the horse and other domesticated creatures, and from metallurgy and then gunpowder. Shipbuilding, external and internal combustion engines, chemistry, electricity and the other developments of the industrial revolution eventually also contributed to advances in weaponry and warfare.

    Since 1900, we have experienced poison gas, aircraft, hypersonic missiles, electronic weapons, artificial intelligence, and of course, nuclear weapons. We know that poison gas (“chemical weapons”) has been banned by international treaty, and that no one has used nuclear weapons in warfare since 1945. But poison gas has been used despite the ban, and nuclear weapons still exist in great quantities, with delivery systems capable of destroying most or all of humanity. It is a Sword of Damocles over the human race, with other swords under development. Some suspect that biological weapons have also been tried.

    Will we succeed in avoiding our own destruction? For how long? Will no one in the next 10 years trigger a nuclear war? The next 100? 1000? 10,000? No one at all? Has there ever been a weapon that has not been used? In the case of nuclear weapons, a single war between nuclear powers might be enough to finish us off. Will the US/NATO use a nuclear weapon when it runs out of conventional weapons, to prevent a defeat in Ukraine? In eastern Asia? Will Russia be driven to use if nuclear weapons in order to avoid disappearance as a nation?

    Most of us know the story of the scorpion and the frog. The scorpion asks the frog to carry him across the river. “No way!” says the frog. “You’ll kill me with your stinger!”

    “Why would I do that?” asks the scorpion. “I can’t swim.”

    So the frog takes him halfway across, when the scorpion mortally stings him.

    “Why did you do that?” asks the dying frog,

    “I’m a scorpion,” says the scorpion. “It’s in my nature.”

    And what is the nature of humans? Has there ever been a time without war? Many of us will acknowledge that we came close to nuclear Armageddon during the Cuban missile crisis of 1962. Reportedly, there were scorpions in both Washington and Moscow. Washington’s chief scorpion was Gen. Curtis Lemay, the Air Force Chief of Staff. He is reported to have considered a nuclear war “winnable” and worth the risk, and he even permitted some of his bombers to stray beyond the callback point despite lacking the authority. Khrushchev made reference to similar pressures on his side (a negotiating bluff, perhaps, but certainly plausible).

    Are there scorpions in Washington today? Some policy makers are certainly tempting fate, principally the neoconservative warmongers. They bear major responsibility for pulling the U.S. out of nuclear arms reduction and limitation treaties, including the manufacture and testing of low-yield “battlefield” nuclear weapons that both sides previously refrained from developing, for fear that the temptation to use them would be too great if they found themselves losing a conventional war, as in Ukraine. This sort of nuclear brinkmanship is exactly the sort of folly that can lead to masses of dead scorpions and frogs.

    The question therefore arises: is nuclear holocaust even avoidable (permanently, that is)? Or a holocaust by biological or other means, such as a takeover by artificial intelligence? Or other technology that we haven’t even thought of yet? If not, does it explain why we have no evidence of visitation by alien civilizations? Are we hitting a barrier to further evolution that is universal in scope, and which sooner or later results in a lifeless burnt-out planet, or one with only primitive life forms, or perhaps a small number of intelligent survivors, doomed to rise again, bump against the ceiling of evolutionary development and get thrown back in an endless cycle?

    I am not the first to make this case, but I believe that it is unfortunately very timely, and I hope it stimulates new thoughts for consideration.  I also hope that I am wrong, that there is something that I am overlooking, and that we can find a way to overcome this aspect of our nature and build a more peaceful – or at least less warlike – society that has eluded us for as long as we have existed.  But the evidence is not encouraging, and I would feel a lot better if an alien civilization came calling soon, proving that self-destruction is not the inevitable end of evolution and technology.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Village Basketball and Football Championships

    This week’s News on China.

    • Alibaba Cloud will broadcast 2024 Olympics
    • Taiwanese leader’s popularity slumps
    • World’s largest hydro-solar power plant
    • Village basketball and football championships

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • REPORT: Safeguarding AI: Addressing the Risks of Generative Artificial Intelligence

    Permalink

    This post was originally published on Press and Publicity – NYU Stern Center for Business and Human Rights.

  • As charging headaches persist, automakers turn to Tesla’s Supercharger network

    Ford CEO Jim Farley was driving his family back from vacation in Lake Tahoe last summer when he recognized something most EV owners know well: Public charging can be a headache. 

    On the 300-mile trip to Monterey, California, it wasn’t easy to find places to plug in his Ford Mustang Mach-E. His children had no problem, however, spotting the numerous Tesla Supercharger stations along the way. 

    “My kids kept looking at me, ‘Hey Dad, there’s another Supercharger, can we stop there? How about there?’” Farley recounted in a conversation on Twitter Spaces in May. “I’d say ‘No, we have to go over here, behind this other building.’”

    Farley said that was when he realized Tesla had done far better than any other charging network in creating an easy, dependable, and accessible customer experience. So easy in fact, that he wanted Ford customers to be able to access it, too. 

    Farley was on Twitter to make an unprecedented announcement with Tesla CEO Elon Musk: Ford will join Tesla’s vast network of 12,000 Supercharger fast-charging stations. Early next year, it will offer an adapter that will allow Ford drivers to connect Tesla’s charging cables to their cars. Beginning in 2025, the company’s EVs will come with Tesla’s charging port.

    “It was shocking,” said Loren McDonald, CEO of analytics firm EVAdoption, adding that Farley was sending a clear message. “He had absolutely no confidence that the charging networks could get their act together. Or why would you join with your competitor?” 

    Ford Mustang Mach-E at Tesla Supercharger station
    Beginning next year, Ford EVs like this Mustang Mach-E will be able to connect to Tesla Superchargers using an adapter. Courtesy of Ford Motor Company

    The once unimaginable decision set off a cascade of echoing announcements. Two weeks later, General Motors CEO Mary Barra held her own Twitter Space with Musk to reveal that GM would join the network by offering adapters, to be followed by adopting its ports. Rivian and Volvo recently said the same. 

    The growing embrace of Tesla’s network could transform the public charging experience for EV drivers, who will gain access to Supercharger stations throughout North America. It is meant to catalyze EV adoption by providing a simpler, more expansive, and more reliable experience than those offered by notoriously unreliable third-party networks. And it suddenly increased the likelihood that the U.S. could one day see a single charging standard rather than the patchwork of systems that frustrate current EV drivers and could scare off potential ones. 

    While the announcements surprised many, in some ways they were inevitable. Tesla began building its proprietary global charging network over a decade ago, just as the company introduced its first sedan, the Model S.

    “Tesla understood that in order for them to sell a lot of EVs, they had to take it upon themselves to build out the infrastructure,” said McDonald. 

    Perhaps presumptuously, Tesla named its system the North American Charging Standard, or NACS. In actuality, it is far from the standard. There are three EV fast charging cable configurations in the U.S. CHAdeMO connectors are used almost exclusively by the Nissan Leaf, while most other EVs use the Combined Charging System, or CCS. Each has a different shape, and they are not interchangeable.

    No other automaker built a network like Tesla’s, leaving most EV drivers dependent upon third-party networks like EVgo, Chargepoint and Electrify America for their public charging needs. Drivers often encounter broken chargers and long wait times, if they can find a fast charger at all.  

    In a 2022 survey by the consumer advocacy group Plug In America, one quarter of non-Tesla EV drivers said broken chargers or sparse locations were a “major difficulty” or “deal breaker” to using some of the biggest fast charging networks. Only two to three percent of Tesla drivers said that of their network. 

    Customer frustration is catching up with legacy automakers and third-party charging networks, said Matt Teske, CEO of Chargeway, a mobile app designed to help users find and utilize charging stations. 

    “Everyone else was saying, ‘We build cars in a silo, you build chargers in a silo, but hopefully we make those things connect somehow,’” said Teske. That is, until the automakers saw that the two weren’t connecting. “They finally realized that the business model used by many third-party networks doesn’t truly serve the driver, and that impacted the ownership experience.”

    The decision by two of the Big Three automakers to adopt Tesla’s standard will essentially double the number of places where customers can fill up and simplify the experience. Whereas a typical Electrify America or Chargepoint station may have four to six chargers, Supercharger stations can have as many as 50 to 100, reducing or eliminating wait times. Tesla’s charging cable and connector are smaller and lighter than CCS and CHAdeMO, making them easier to handle, and its chargers don’t have screens, which can break or be difficult to read. Payments are made exclusively through a mobile app. 

    Teske said this kind of efficiency is key to getting drivers to abandon internal combustion. “What truly will accelerate electric vehicle adoption is, how do we get average consumers to look at using electricity as their fuel of choice when buying a car and say, ‘That’s easy,’” he said. 

    Of course, the Tesla charging network can’t bear the burden of charging all 1.8 million electric vehicles on U.S. roads today, much less the 28.3 million expected by 2030. By one estimate, the country will need 172,000 public fast-chargers by then. It currently has about 9,000. As third-party networks scale up, the moves by Ford, GM and Rivian put pressure on them to do better. 

    “It’s forcing everybody else to get their act together,” said McDonald, “because if they don’t, they’re out of business at some point.”

    EVgo Station
    An EVgo charging stall in Vienna, Virginia, includes both CCS and CHAdeMO connectors. EVgo has announced it will add NACS connectors to its chargers. Saul Loeb / AFP via Getty Images

    EVgo and Chargepoint, among others, have announced they will add NACS connectors to their stations. That of course does not address issues with spotty reliability or cumbersome user experiences.  

    Nor does it solve the problem of customer confusion over which connector is compatible with their car and which charging stalls offer that connection — an impediment to adoption that the adoption of a single universal charging standard could solve. 

    Some in the industry publicly support this idea, including General Motors. “We have a real opportunity to drive this to be the unified standard for North America, which will enable even more mass adoption,” Barra said during her conversation with Musk. 

    Adopting a single standard would not happen overnight — there are hundreds of thousands of electric vehicles already on the road that don’t use Tesla’s plug, and big players like Volkswagen and Toyota, the world’s two largest automakers, have not indicated that they will embrace NACS. 

    The Biden administration, which has invested billions in accelerating EV adoption, has not yet publicly supported a single standard. On Tuesday, the Joint Office of Energy and Transportation announced that it will collaborate with the Society for Automotive Engineers to conduct an expedited review of NACS as a potential “public standard.” Such a designation would make it available to any manufacturer, much like a USB-C cord, which could further NACS adoption by more automakers. 

    That said, a $5 billion grant program run by the Joint Office to build 500,000 charging stations by 2030 requires eligible projects to include at least four CCS connectors. While Texas and Washington recently added requirements that such projects also include NACS connectors, the Joint Office has not followed suit. 

    “I think we’re headed down a two standard-connector path for much of the rest of this decade,” said McDonald, who likened the landscape to other widespread technologies with dueling interfaces, like Apple versus Android and Windows versus Mac.

    In the short term, it’s possible that charging could become even more confusing, as networks try to accommodate all three standards in their stations. Drivers may need to rely on adapters that they attach to connector cables to make them compatible with their car, adding a layer of hardware that can break or get lost. 

    “This is what happens when you have a Wild West approach to technology and everybody’s trying to prove they have the best mousetrap,” Teske said. “Unless there’s a really strong push for regulation to step in and change the conversation, we’re going to have a very messy landscape for drivers to contend with for years to come.”

    It is already possible to catch a glimpse of what automaker-agnostic Supercharger stations will look like by visiting one of Tesla’s 11 Magic Dock Supercharger locations, which include CCS adapters so other cars can plug in. 

    At the Magic Dock in Placerville, California, last week, Dawn Sorrell pulled up to charge a Tesla Model Y that she’d rented for a trip from Virginia to visit her mother in Northern California. It was her first time driving a fully electric car. “It’s a completely different mindset, I’m just figuring it out as I go,” she said.

    Sorrell supported the idea of outside automakers accessing the Tesla network. “Anything where you’re opening it up more is going to be better,” she said, “because it’s stressful, making sure you have a charge.”

    This story was originally published by Grist with the headline As charging headaches persist, automakers turn to Tesla’s Supercharger network on Jun 28, 2023.

    This post was originally published on Grist.

  • Teal Process & Company on the future of work, learning, time, and space

    Tell me about your phrase, “work is a feeling.”

    Yatú: We believe that work is a feeling that emerges from an activity. For example, sometimes people like to listen to certain types of music that gets them in the mood to work.

    Norm: Work isn’t just one feeling. There are different types of work feelings. We recommending first figuring out how you want to feel when you work, or when you’re being “productive.” Then, you create an infrastructure or environment that supports that work feeling.

    How does Teal like to feel when it works?

    Norm: I like to feel “open and a little lost.” We believe you have to not know where you’re going in order to find somewhere new. A lot of the things we work on take a while to find themselves. So, it’s normal that we’re lost for a while.

    Yatú: Personally, I like to feel “cozy.” Traditional time systems do a good job of making sure you don’t feel cozy. That’s why we had to invent our own time and space.

    That reminds me of your clocks. Why do you cover all the clocks in your house?

    Norm: We believe you shouldn’t have to watch the time. When we allow ourselves to be sensitive, we believe every human can innately feel time and space.

    I equate covering the clocks up to a social media detox. In the same way you detox yourself from the habit of checking your phone, you can detox yourself from the habit of checking the time. After I covered the clocks up, I would catch myself looking for the time and realizing, “I don’t actually need to know the time after all.”

    How did you begin questioning time?

    Norm: We moved into the apartment we share in 2020, at the beginning of the pandemic. We put a lot of time, energy, and thought into our physical space, which was new to us then. Eventually, we realized time was just as important as space — the two are completely intertwined to create an environment.

    Yatú: When the days of the pandemic felt blurred together, we would say, “This all feels like one day.” We began by defining our own “paragonday” — our ideal sense of time. “Paragon” means ideal, so “paragonday” is an ideal day.

    So your time system, “Paragonday Systems,” is about feeling time?

    Yatú: Yes. It’s important each person defines paragonday for themselves.

    For me personally, paragonday feels like there’s a sense of abundance. People sometimes call this vacation, but I believe most people plan their vacations too much. Paragonday is whatever you want it to be. It can be a massage. It could be you going to visit a waterfall. It could simply be you closing your eyes and thinking peacefully. Whatever it is, it’s important to intentionally decide an ideal environment for you to enjoy time.

    Paragonday sounds dreamy. What are the other ways to pass time?

    Yatú: In Paragonday Systems, NP1 stands for “Non-Paragonday 1” which is a period of time that’s often filled with obligations. For a lot of people NP1 maps onto the work week, or Monday through Friday. Then there is NP2 or “Non-Paragonday 2” which is a period of time that isn’t tied to the obligations of “work.” The unplanned space of NP2 typically maps onto the weekend.

    You can “parachute into Paragonday” from NP1 or NP2. Parachuting is the transitional period. It’s a mental parachute; you do it in your head. You land whenever you’re ready. You grab both handles of the parachute and you go, “pshhhhhhuuu”! The parachute is our way of making an intentional choice to enter your ideal sense of time.

    Norm: Our date format goes like this: “Season Day, Year”. For example, the theoretical artifact we made for Paragonday Systems, accessible at http://www.paragonday.systems, was created on Spring Paragonday 3, 2020. Each time you enter a new Paragonday, you increment the count.

    How did you two meet?

    Yatú: We went to the same school. Our relationship became strong when we worked together on a hackathon for our college.

    Yatú & Norm: We bonded over a shared mission to inspire other students to organize their own hackathons to create a broader educational network.

    For the record, what’s a hackathon?

    Yatú: Hackathons are those events where people quickly and collaboratively create something, usually technological, over a short period of time like a weekend. Eventually, our goal became broadening the idea of what hacking is.

    We wanted to give people the opportunity to explore things. Eventually, we organized hackathons that allowed people to come together to create anything they wanted — with less tech focus. At our university, we didn’t have design classes. And there weren’t many designers who showed up to the hackathons at first.

    Norm: Eventually, more designers popped up. We also brought in local professional designers to give workshops.

    Yatú: It was a funny moment — people were writing articles about diversity — using a photo of our hackathon as an illustration. But we didn’t even try to be that.

    We simply tried to create an environment that welcomes anyone to explore anything — focusing bringing in all the disciplines. We did this by attracting a wider audience and fostering an encouraging environment towards building. The rest followed naturally.

    Norm: Yatú and I had tons of conversations about why we were doing the things we were doing, and that’s how we were able to mind meld and grow.

    Shortcomings in your educations have been extremely motivating to both of you.

    Norm: Yeah, we learned a lot. One week, we both almost dropped out. I basically failed out of my major. It’s funny because we were working with administrators at the school to organize hackathons. We talked often with heads of departments but were simultaneously failing out of their classes.

    Yatú: We ran multiple organizations on campus. We truly believed in the motto, “learn by doing.” Our groups bonded through friendships, travel, and the desire to learn. We created an environment where anyone could appoint themselves to lead any exploration.

    Norm: We did a lot of work for anyone to have supportive educational infrastructure because we knew what it’s like not to have that.

    How do each of you define Teal?

    Yatú: We have a shared understanding that Teal is always an open question.

    Norm: Yeah. In trying to describe it to people, it can also be called an “art group” or … But once you start trying to define it in any kind of way, it loses the vastness. The vastness is hard to communicate.

    Yatú: At first, I didn’t want to define Teal. But Norm said it was important to define it.

    The vastness is Teal’s character. Teal is sometimes considered “the gray of color.”

    Norm: We added “Process & Company” to the name because we wanted to communicate how things came to be through documentation (“Process”), and we also wanted it to be real and legitimate (“Company”).

    Yatú: The other meaning of “& Company” is the “company you keep” — being intentional about the people you share time with.

    It gets easier to describe the things inside of Teal.

    One of Teal’s concepts I’m especially curious about is “careering.”

    Norm: Yeah! We like to talk about how the word “career” is both a noun and a verb. Most people know about “career” the noun, which means “an occupation undertaken for a significant period with opportunities for progress.” But “career” is also a verb.

    Yatú: As a verb, “career” means “to move swiftly and in an uncontrolled manner in a specified direction.”

    Norm: Thinking about career as a verb helps introduce a more fluid way of exploring throughout one’s working life.

    A career doesn’t have to be a finite ladder, with roles predetermined that you fit into. Instead, a career can be more like a map you draw that ties together your interests, what roles you play, and what environments you want to inhabit, so that you can move around it fluidly over time, maybe even continuing to draw the map as you go.

    Careering sounds fun and natural, but also scary due to the uncertainty …

    Norm: There is a lot of privilege in the ability to have time to think freely about the roles you’d like to create and play. We often wonder how to give more folks this opportunity.

    We believe organizations need to empower individuals to explore roles. If people have the ability to switch roles, play more roles, and discover completely new roles, we ultimately believe it will benefit both organizations and individuals. If an organization doesn’t allow for inward mobility, they can both lose talent and lose money. Recruiting and onboarding new individuals is expensive.

    Careering goes hand-in-hand with lifelong learning. We believe more educational moments should happen in our lives, especially in the workplace. Currently education in the US is bucketed from kindergarten through 12th grade and sometimes university, which can make it feel like learning ends then.

    If someone says, “I want to change industries. But it’s actually a difficult thing to do!” — what actionable advice can you give them?

    Yatú: Relationships allow for mobility. If more people are thinking that things are possible with you, and you surround yourself with people who believe in the possibilities of things, that’s a different potential future. The advice I’d give someone is to find and surround yourself with people who believe in you, who are honest, who are optimists — people who are willing to try things that haven’t been done before. If we look to architecture, every good architect has good relationships.

    Norm: With design, it feels like if you can learn how to design one thing, then you can learn how to design anything. So start somewhere. We like to think about every work experience as a “careering waypoint” — it gives you a direction but doesn’t imply a final destination.

    Which reminds me that back in our hackathon days, we would encourage people to “learn whatever language your best friend knows.” In order to pick up technical skills like computer programming, we believe it’s about finding folks, building those relationships, and learning whatever tools are available and shared to get started.

    I noticed in 2022 you published this “Careering Theory” as a website: https://www.careering.life. It’s exciting to see everything together here.

    Norm: Yeah, one other thing about Teal is that we have a lot of concepts. But whatever theories we have, it’s important we work through them by creating, such as publishing Careering as a theoretical artifact.

    How has Teal explored careering?

    Norm: As we were graduating, we started thinking about life after university and asked, “What are ways of living?” We were coming out of the tunnel that was the hackathon scene. We started finding other ways people were operating, such as having residencies. We also liked the idea of apprenticeships, or finding someone to work and learn with.

    This is actually how one of our projects called “Leave Room for Thoughts” started in 2018. I found out about the concept of an artist residency, told Yatú, and our minds were completely blown —

    Yatú: Yeah. We found out about residencies and said to ourselves, “Let’s do it.” I took a loan out to finance the project. We said, “We’ve got to find a space.” We only had one month before starting our full-time jobs, so we met up with our friend Benji in NYC and found a space within a week.

    Norm: We had no plan other than spending a month together in a space.

    Yatú: We didn’t know what we were doing. We were careering before we even defined it. The only thing we knew was that we wanted to do a residency.

    For the residency, we hit up friends saying, “We have a space. You can come by and create whatever you want and we’ll help you make it happen.”

    We had five people come in during that month. We documented it.

    Like we did in our hackathon days, we did a lot of work simply for someone to have the supportive infrastructure because we know what it’s like to not have the infrastructure. When you’re no longer a student at a university, it’s easy to appreciate access to space and certain facilities, now that they are no longer available.

    One other interesting thing to note is that every artist who came to the space was experimenting with something for the first time. They all ended up continuing whatever creative pursuits they began at the residency into their ongoing practice.

    Norm: It was the last couple of days we were in New York and were reflecting, finishing things up and working with the artists. We were like, “What just happened?” And then we asked outselves, “Is this an institution??”

    Yatú: Afterwards, we packaged the narrative of what happened as an online artifact: https://lrft.institute. Something happened in real life. It’s not just a website.

    Norm: Four years later, we created a new program under the “Leave Room for Thoughts” umbrella called “Campus Complex,” a month-long educational experiment that unfolded across New York City.

    Originally, we wanted to design a new physical campus for ideal learning, with beautiful rolling hills and all. But we soon realized the potential by utilizing existing infrastructure within NYC, so we brought together local organizations to create our own “Schoolscape.”

    Yatú: We encouraged learners to freely explore the Schoolscape and document their journey along the way. In creating the theoretical artifact for this program, https://cc.place, our “Leave Room for Thoughts” institution was intentionally put to rest, or as we like to say “composted,” because we don’t believe that institutions should exist forever.

    Can you tell me more about how Teal approaches publishing on the web?

    Norm: We’ve always believed that websites can be more. Or that websites can just “be.” Generally, anything that people try to put in a box … it can be something else.

    Back in our hackathon scene days, everyone was generally into startups and building digital products. In that sphere, websites were very functional. We realized we could play with the web in a way where we could still use what we learned from digital products. That’s why most of our online artifacts have special attention put into the navigation, for example.

    All in all, we believe the purpose of websites can be just to exist. I would love to see more people creating and publishing things for the simple purpose of them existing. Websites can also be works of art.

    On a more holistic level, we’ve been applying this lens of viewing websites to make beautiful tools more broadly. We call this “Couture Software” — or, bespoke tools for us and friends. An example we use internally we call “Concept Trust,” a tool that helps our process of creation.

    Speaking of websites, the first project Teal did, “Gassed Up,” resulted in an online artifact you can explore: https://tealprocess.net/gassed-up.

    How did this website begin?

    Yatú: Gassed Up started with a space. Everything always comes back to space. We used to work out of this co-working startup incubator. They had a room that could be used for events. We asked if we could use that space for one day to do a photoshoot. I had a vision.

    Norm: The day before the shoot we were looking through a book of Norman Rockwell paintings I had. There’s one with this guy looking at the balloons and mess he has to clean up, feeling defeated. There was something nice about the exciting party and the sadness simultaneously. I’m imagining early us, getting into art and design for the first time, thinking to ourselves, “Yeah, the contrast! The dichotomy!” So, we decided there had been this birthday party.

    Yatú: We did the photoshoot, then did video. That’s when I first did web design.

    Norm: As we were putting together the site, we wondered, “How do we weave this together?“ We realized we needed a story. What if we introduce the characters first? We had a nice photo of a ladder. We realized the ladder had to be the star!

    Yatú: This ladder was called Giraffe. It was yellow.

    Norm: We named the ladder first. Then we needed to identify the other characters — a couple humans and the balloons. We wondered, “Are we creating a universe here? Do these characters exist in a broader world?” So we chose names for ourselves. I chose “Norman” from the book that inspired some of the vibe.

    Yatú: My character’s name was Xavier. I thought it was a cool name at the time. My mom actually wanted to call me this before I was born. For some reason “Xavier” never stuck for me. After a while, my friends started calling me “Yatú Sabe.” It had a nice ring. In Spanish, “ya tú sabe” means “you already know.” It’s a way of acknowledging someone’s inherent knowledge.

    So, we started exploring names in our first project. And that’s how our names came to be. We sometimes call them our Teal names, but they’re the names everyone calls us now.

    How do you work so well together?

    Yatú: Trust is the most important thing. As long as we trust each other and we’re honest with each other, then problems are just opportunities for us to think things through.

    We also have a lot of complementary traits. Norm is a pretty encouraging as a person. His encouragement enables me a lot. And I have the audacity to try things. We build on each other. We ladder each other’s thoughts.

    Norm: It all comes back to the ladder.

    One reason we’re able to ladder each other’s thoughts so well is that we take each other’s very ridiculous ideas very seriously. We’re like, “Okay, if that was a thing, then…” We build on each other’s ideas by validating and extending them further.

    Somehow, Yatú and I are able to align on something that feels grand and wonderful to go explore. And then we go explore it together.

    What’s Teal’s operational model?

    Norm: Ideas start as concepts, get nourished into experiments, and then are published as artifacts. Yatú came up with this funnel. There are way more concepts than there are artifacts. And it takes a long time to even go from experiment to artifact.

    Yatú: This operational model isn’t perfect, but it’s been working for us.

    Norm: It helps us align on strategy. Questions like, “How much time are we trying to spend on this?” or “What level are we trying to take this to?”

    We also landed on three formats: digital, physical, and theoretical. We work at the intersection of those, which is everything.

    Note: This conversation was originally conducted in 2021, edited in 2022, and published in 2023. As Teal Process & Company says, “sometimes time finds us rather than us finding the time.”

    Currently, Norm & Yatú are careering as Artist-Founders by playing with USBs and the world of hardware connectivity.

    This post was originally published on The Creative Independent.

  • Victoria eyes Israeli health innovation hub

    The Victorian government is among a consortium of partners collaborating with Israel’s leading medical research center on establishing a new digital health innovation centre in the state. Sheba Medical Center has partnered with the state government, Monash University, Monash Health, and the Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre to consider launching an Accelerate, Redesign, Collaborate (ARC) Innovation…

    The post Victoria eyes Israeli health innovation hub appeared first on InnovationAus.com.

    This post was originally published on InnovationAus.com.

  • “The Palestine Laboratory”: Antony Loewenstein on How Israel Exports the Technology of Occupation

    This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

  • “The Palestine Laboratory”: Antony Loewenstein on How Israel Exports the Technology of Occupation

    Palestinelaboratory

    We speak with journalist and author Antony Loewenstein about his new book, The Palestine Laboratory: How Israel Exports the Technology of Occupation Around the World. Loewenstein explains that Israel’s military-industrial complex has used the Occupied Palestinian Territories for decades as a testing ground for weaponry and surveillance technology that it then exports around the world for profit. “You find in over 130 countries across the globe in the last decades, Israel has sold … a range of tools of occupation and repression that have initially been tested in Palestine on Palestinians,” Loewenstein says.

    This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

  • China’s facial recognition technology hinders North Korean escapees

    Facial recognition technology in China is increasing the risk that North Korean escapees in China will be caught, and raising the prices charged by smugglers who assist them, sources who work closely with escapees told Radio Free Asia. 

    Most North Koreans who escape do so by crossing the northern border into China. But facial recognition systems there are spreading – with cameras installed on street corners and train stations – and used by Chinese police to keep track of the population on the streets.

    While face of nearly every Chinese resident is registered in a government database, North Koreans escapees are not, and turn up nothing when scanned, Seo Jae-pyoung, head of the Association of the North Korean Defectors, a support group based in South Korea, told RFA’s Korean Service.

    When the face does not match a profile, the police are quick to check on the person to determine why, he said.

    While it’s difficult to know for sure if the software has led to North Korean refugees getting captured in China, it has clearly raised the risks and costs for those trying to escape, those familiar with the situation say.

    In March, the surveillance software appeared to be a key factor in the capture of five or six North Korean refugees and a local broker helping them move within China, Seo said. They were caught by Chinese police near the northeastern city of Dalian.

    “It seems that those North Korean escapees were already tracked down,” he said. “It is highly likely that they were caught because they were unaware of the dangers of facial recognition technology and tracking.”

    Seo said that artificial intelligence-based facial recognition technology has increased the risks facing North Koreans who want to escape. Typically, they travel discreetly through China all the way to Southeast Asia, where they take a flight to Seoul.

    Sharp decrease

    This may be one reason that the number of North Koreans who successfully reach the South are down, experts say. 

    Between 2001 and 2019 more than 1,000 North Koreans arrived in the South each year, reaching a peak of 2,914 in 2009. But this dropped to 229 in 2020 and then to the double digits in 2021 and 2022, data from the South Korean Ministry of Unification showed.

    Much of the rapid decline is due to the COVID-19 pandemic, during which North Korea and China closed the entirety of the 1,350-kilometer (840-mile) Sino-Korean border, but experts say that facial recognition tech is also responsible.

    The issue was raised before a U.S. Congressional hearing this month.

    “The AI-based facial recognition program has made the North Korean refugees’ internal movement by public transportation within China almost impossible while the authorities have been using surveillance technology to monitor and intercept the escapees attempting to flee China,” Ethan Hee-Seok Shin, a legal analyst at the South Korea-based Transitional Justice Working Group, told the Congressional-Executive Commission on China on June 13.

    ENG_KOR_FaceRecognition_06162023_02.jpg
    A man walks past surveillance cameras in Beijing, Nov. 23 2021. Credit: Carlos Garcia Rawlins/Reuters

    The technology is spreading fear among escapees in China, Hanna Song, director of international cooperation at the South Korea-based Database Center for North Korean Human Rights, told the same hearing.

    “China’s increasing use of emerging technology is being used as a tool of repression that affects the most vulnerable groups including North Korean refugees,” she said. “Many North Koreans spoke about how the advanced surveillance capabilities, such as facial recognition and biometric systems, are used to monitor and track the movements of those in China.”

    There are no statistics on North Korean refugees caught or arrested as a result of facial recognition technology in China. Experts have explained that it is not easy to identify North Koreans because there are many foreigners who are not registered in China’s surveillance system.

    But sources told RFA that facial recognition likely has a role in the arrests of such refugees in China.

    “Most of the North Korean escapees being arrested now [in China] can be attributed to facial recognition cameras,” Chun Ki-won, a reverend with the Durihana Mission, an organization that carries out rescue operations for escapees, told RFA.

    Kim Sung-eun of the Caleb Mission, another group that assists escapees in China, said personnel from his organization were arrested with a group of escapees because of facial recognition technology.

    “Some of our people got caught too, before COVID-19,” said Kim. “There is a facial recognition machine in front of the train station. They passed it and sat on the train and they were caught right away.”

    All the escapees were forcibly repatriated to North Korea, he said.

    ENG_KOR_FaceRecognition_06162023_03.JPG
    A demonstration of face-recognize technology is displayed on Chinese State-owned surveillance equipment manufacturer Hikvision’s screen at Security China 2018 in Beijing, China, Oct. 23, 2018. Credit: Ng Han Guan/AP

    Several officials of South Korea-based organizations told RFA that they believe facial recognition technology is having a great impact on escaped North Koreans. 

    “Cameras installed throughout China and artificial intelligence facial recognition technology have made it difficult for North Korean refugees to move, and awareness of fleeing North Koreans [in China] is growing,” said Ko Yonghwan, a former North Korean diplomat who is currently a non-resident senior researcher at Korean Institute for Military Affairs.

    Because the technology is so advanced, China would even be able to surveil escapees at North Korea’s request, said Choo Jaewoo, a professor at the department of Chinese language and literature at Seoul’s Kyung Hee University.

    “If North Korea requests tracking of a specific person and China accepts it, the risk of being caught by facial recognition technology could be much greater,” said Choo.

    Higher costs

    The surveillance software has increased the risk facing brokers, prompting them to raise their prices.

    Before facial recognition technology was so prevalent, it cost about US$2,000 per refugee to get through China with the help of a broker, but now it costs $10,000 to $15,000, said Kim from the Caleb Mission.

    “It wasn’t easy before, but the reality is that using the train station or bus stop has become more difficult,” said Ji Chul-ho, head of the Emergency Rescue team at Now Action & Unity for Human rights, a South Korean organization that helps North Korean escapees.

    “It is a reality that it is difficult to use most [public transportation] these days,” he said. “As a result, the cost of rescue is higher than in the past, as it is necessary to move using the broker’s vehicle and to more carefully arrange [escape] plans.”

    Prior to the advent of facial recognition technology, escapees could at least see police coming and try to avoid them, or hide when they hear sirens, Ji said.

    “Now we are exposed to more invisible and unaware fears,” he said. “It is a serious problem.”

    Translated by Leejin J. Chung. Edited by Eugene Whong and Malcolm Foster.


    This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Cheon Soram for RFA Korean.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • To reach net-zero emissions, American homes need an electric makeover

    Households in the U.S. use 1 billion fossil-fuel powered machines to heat our homes, cook food, and drive to work. Those residential appliances and vehicles produce 42 percent of the nation’s energy-related emissions. But electric alternatives, like heat pumps and electric vehicles, already exist — and adopting them will help curb emissions, fast. A report released on Tuesday by the nonprofit Rewiring America found that to reach President Joe Biden’s goal of a net-zero emissions economy by 2050, Americans will need to buy 14 million more electric household machines than usual over the next three years.

    Cora Wyent, director of research at Rewiring America, said that target is “ambitious, but it’s achievable,” mainly due to clean tech incentives created by the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act and some state policies. The report finds that if there are enough early adopters, market trends will soon take over — eventually resulting in widespread adoption with little to no additional effort. 

    “The good news about this transition is that we have time. We have decades to do it,” Wyent said. “But what happens in the next few years really dictates when that adoption curve starts to take off.” 

    The report details growth trajectories for five clean technologies: heat pumps, heat pump water heaters, induction stoves, electric vehicles, and rooftop solar. All are eligible for tax rebates or other incentives under the Inflation Reduction Act.

    The report quantifies exactly how many electrical machines Americans will need to purchase above business-as-usual scenarios in order to reach net-zero by 2050. It focuses on the amount of sales needed to achieve “market acceleration” — a critical tipping point where sales will begin to increase sustainably on their own. 

    Heat pumps, which use electricity for space heating and cooling, are currently used in 16 percent of homes in the U.S.. To get on track for net-zero by 2050, sales will need to outpace business-as-usual projections by a factor of three by 2032. To meet that pace, households will need to purchase 2.38 million more heat pumps than usual over the next three years. 

    Sales of heat pump water heaters, which are used in only 1 percent of households in the U.S., will need to speed up 10 times over the business-as-usual scenario by 2032. That means 200,000 extra units over the next three years.

    Induction stoves run on electricity and use magnetic properties to cook food, resulting in none of the toxic pollution generated by gas and propane stoves. To align with its 2050 climate goal, U.S. households will need to adopt induction stoves five times faster than usual, purchasing an additional 1.76 million induction stoves over the next three years. 

    Meanwhile, electric vehicles, which today make up only 2 percent of U.S. passenger cars on the road, need to accelerate sales seven times over current projections by 2032. The report sets a national goal of selling 6.7 million extra electric vehicles in the next three years. Rooftop solar sales would also need to speed up by a factor of seven, requiring 2.78 million additional installations in three years. 

    The report aims to inspire policymakers to start identifying gaps in uptake of these technologies and get working on policies to incentivize adoption. 

    “This transition is already starting to happen,” Wyent said. One encouraging example is heat pumps, which outpaced gas furnaces in sales in 2022 for the first time. But for that transition to happen equitably, policymakers will need to design laws that ensure lower-income communities and communities of color can access these technologies early — and start reaping the climate and energy efficiency benefits sooner.

    “We hope that breaking this down into smaller targets will help cities, states, manufacturers, and everyone else who’s invested in this transition to set near-term goals that will get us on the right trajectory,” Wyent told Grist.

    This story was originally published by Grist with the headline To reach net-zero emissions, American homes need an electric makeover on Jun 22, 2023.

    This post was originally published on Grist.

  • PNG academic says Port Moresby politicians naïve over US defence deals

    By Don Wiseman, RNZ Pacific senior journalist

    A Papua New Guinean academic says the new security deals with the United States will militarise his country and anyone who thinks otherwise is naïve.

    In May, PNG’s Defence Minister Win Barki Daki and US Secretary of State Antony Blinken signed the Defence Cooperation Agreement and the Shiprider Agreement.

    Last week they were presented to PNG MPs for ratification and made public.

    The defence cooperation agreement talks of reaffirming a strong defence relationship based on a shared commitment to peace and stability and common approaches to addressing regional defence and security issues.

    Money that Marape ‘wouldn’t turn down’
    University of PNG political scientist Michael Kabuni said there was certainly a need for PNG to improve security at the border to stop, for instance, the country being used as a transit point for drugs such as methamphetamine and cocaine.

    “Papua New Guinea hasn’t had an ability or capacity to manage its borders. So we really don’t know what goes on on the fringes of PNG’s marine borders.”

    But Kabuni, who is completing his doctorate at the Australian National University, said whenever the US signs these sorts of deals with developing countries, the result is inevitably a heavy militarisation.

    “I think the politicians, especially PNG politicians, are either too naïve, or the benefits are too much for them to ignore. So the deal between Papua New Guinea and the United States comes with more than US$400 million support. This is money that [Prime Minister] James Marape wouldn’t turn down,” he said.

    The remote northern island of Manus, most recently the site of Australia’s controversial refugee detention camp, is set to assume far greater prominence in the region with the US eyeing both the naval base and the airport.


    Kabuni said Manus was an important base during World War II and remains key strategic real estate for both China and the United States.

    “So there is talk that, apart from the US and Australia building a naval base on Manus, China is building a commercial one. But when China gets involved in building wharves, though it appears to be a wharf for commercial ships to park, it’s built with the equipment to hold military naval ships,” he said.

    Six military locations
    Papua New Guineans now know the US is set to have military facilities at six locations around the country.

    These are Nadzab Airport in Lae, the seaport in Lae, the Lombrum Naval Base and Momote Airport on Manus Island, as well as Port Moresby’s seaport and Jackson’s International Airport.

    According to the text of the treaty the American military forces and their contractors will have the ability to largely operate in a cocoon, with little interaction with the rest of PNG, not paying taxes on anything they bring in, including personal items.

    Prime Minister James Marape has said the Americans will not be setting up military bases, but this document gives them the option to do this.

    Marape said more specific information on the arrangements would come later.

    Antony Blinken said the defence pact was drafted by both nations as ‘equal and sovereign partners’ and stressed that the US will be transparent.

    Critics of the deal have accused the government of undermining PNG’s sovereignty but Marape told Parliament that “we have allowed our military to be eroded in the last 48 years, [but] sovereignty is defined by the robustness and strength of your military”.

    The Shiprider Agreement has been touted as a solution to PNG’s problems of patrolling its huge exclusive economic zone of nearly 3 million sq km.

    Another feature of the agreements is that US resources could be directed toward overcoming the violence that has plagued PNG elections for many years, with possibly the worst occurrence in last year’s national poll.

    But Michael Kabuni said the solution to these issues will not be through strengthening police or the military but by such things as improving funding and support for organisations like the Electoral Commission to allow for accurate rolls to be completed well ahead of voting.

    This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

    This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

  • LexisNexis Is Selling Your Personal Data to ICE So It Can Try to Predict Crimes

    The legal research and public records data broker LexisNexis is providing U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement with tools to target people who may potentially commit a crime — before any actual crime takes place, according to a contract document obtained by The Intercept. LexisNexis then allows ICE to track the purported pre-criminals’ movements.

    The unredacted contract overview provides a rare look at the controversial $16.8 million agreement between LexisNexis and ICE, a federal law enforcement agency whose surveillance of and raids against migrant communities are widely criticized as brutal, unconstitutional, and inhumane.

    “The purpose of this program is mass surveillance at its core.”

    “The purpose of this program is mass surveillance at its core,” said Julie Mao, an attorney and co-founder of Just Futures Law, which is suing LexisNexis over allegations it illegally buys and sells personal data. Mao told The Intercept the ICE contract document, which she reviewed for The Intercept, is “an admission and indication that ICE aims to surveil individuals where no crime has been committed and no criminal warrant or evidence of probable cause.”

    While the company has previously refused to answer any questions about precisely what data it’s selling to ICE or to what end, the contract overview describes LexisNexis software as not simply a giant bucket of personal data, but also a sophisticated analytical machine that purports to detect suspicious activity and scrutinize migrants — including their locations.

    “This is really concerning,” Emily Tucker, the executive director of Georgetown Law School’s Center on Privacy and Technology, told The Intercept. Tucker compared the LexisNexis contract to controversial and frequently biased predictive policing software, causing heightened alarm thanks to ICE’s use of license plate databases. “Imagine if whenever a cop used PredPol to generate a ‘hot list’ the software also generated a map of the most recent movements of any vehicle associated with each person on the hot list.”

    The document, a “performance of work statement” made by LexisNexis as part of its contract with ICE, was obtained by journalist Asher Stockler through a public records request and shared with The Intercept. LexisNexis Risk Solutions, a subsidiary of LexisNexis’s parent company, inked the contract with ICE, a part of the Department of Homeland Security, in 2021.

    “LexisNexis Risk Solutions prides itself on the responsible use of data, and the contract with the Department of Homeland Security encompasses only data allowed for such uses,” said LexisNexis spokesperson Jennifer Richman. She told The Intercept the company’s work with ICE doesn’t violate the law or federal policy, but did not respond to specific questions.

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    The document reveals that over 11,000 ICE officials, including within the explicitly deportation-oriented Enforcement and Removal Operations branch, were using LexisNexis as of 2021. “This includes supporting all aspects of ICE screening and vetting, lead development, and criminal analysis activities,” the document says.

    In practice, this means ICE is using software to “automate” the hunt for suspicious-looking blips in the data, or links between people, places, and property. It is unclear how such blips in the data can be linked to immigration infractions or criminal activity, but the contract’s use of the term “automate” indicates that ICE is to some extent letting computers make consequential conclusions about human activity. The contract further notes that the LexisNexis analysis includes “identifying potentially criminal and fraudulent behavior before crime and fraud can materialize.” (ICE did not respond to a request for comment.)

    LexisNexis supports ICE’s activities through a widely used data system named the Law Enforcement Investigative Database Subscription. The contract document provides the most comprehensive window yet for what data tools might be offered to a LEIDS clients. Other federal, state, and local authorities who pay a hefty subscription fee for the LexisNexis program could have access to the same powerful surveillance tools used by ICE.

    The LEIDS program is used by ICE for “the full spectrum of its immigration enforcement,” according to the contract document. LexisNexis’s tools allow ICE to monitor the personal lives and mundane movements of migrants in the U.S., in search of incriminating “patterns” and for help to “strategize arrests.”

    The ICE contract makes clear the extent to which LexisNexis isn’t simply a resource to be queried but a major power source for the American deportation machine.

    LexisNexis is known for its vast trove of public records and commercial data, a constantly updating archive that includes information ranging from boating licenses and DMV filings to voter registrations and cellphone subscriber rolls. In the aggregate, these data points create a vivid mosaic of a person’s entire life, interests, professional activities, criminal run-ins no matter how minor, and far more.

    While some of the data is valuable for the likes of researchers, journalists, and law students, LexisNexis has turned the mammoth pool of personal data into a lucrative revenue stream by selling it to law enforcement clients like ICE, who use the company’s many data points on over 280 million different people to not only determine whether someone constitutes a “risk,” but also to locate and apprehend them.

    LexisNexis has long since deflected questions about its relationship by citing ICE’s “national security” and “public safety” mission; the agency is responsible for both criminal and civil immigration violations, including smuggling, other trafficking, and customs violations. The contract’s language, however, indicates LexisNexis is empowering ICE to sift through an large sea of personal data to do exactly what advocates have warned against: busting migrants for civil immigration violations, a far cry from thwarting terrorists and transnational drug cartels.

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    ICE has a documented history of rounding up and deporting nonviolent immigrants without any criminal history, whose only offense may be something on the magnitude of a traffic violation or civil immigration violation. The contract document further suggests LexisNexis is facilitating ICE’s workplace raids, one of the agency’s most frequently criticized practices, by helping immigration officials detect fraud through bulk searches of Social Security and phone numbers.

    ICE investigators can use LexisNexis tools, the document says, to pull a large quantity of records about a specified individual’s life and visually map their relationships to other people and property. The practice stands as an exemplar of the digital surveillance sprawl that immigrant advocates have warned unduly broadens the gaze of federal suspicion onto masses of people.

    Citing language from the contract, Mao, the lawyer on the lawsuit, said, “‘Patterns of relationships between entities’ likely means family members, one of the fears for immigrants and mixed status families is that LexisNexis and other data broker platforms can map out family relationships to identify, locate, and arrest undocumented individuals.”

    The contract shows ICE can combine LexisNexis data with databases from other outside firms, namely PenLink, a controversial company that helps police nationwide request private user data from social media companies.

    In this Wednesday, April 29, 2020 photo, a surveillance camera, top right, and license plate scanners, center, are seen at an intersection in West Baltimore. On Friday, May 1, planes equipped with cameras will begin creating a continuous visual record of the city of Baltimore so that police can see how potential suspects and witnesses moved to and from crime scenes. Police alerted to violent crimes by street-level cameras and gunfire sound detectors will work with analysts to see just where people came and went.

    A license plate reader, center, and surveillance camera, top right, are seen at an intersection in West Baltimore, Md., on April 29, 2020.

    Photo: Julio Cortez/AP

    The contract’s “performance of work statement” mostly avoids delving into the numerous categories of data LexisNexis makes available to ICE, but it does make clear the importance of one: license plates.

    The automatic scanning of license plates has created a feast for data-hungry government agencies, providing an effective means of tracking people. Many people are unaware that their license plates are continuously scanned as they drive throughout their communities and beyond — thanks to automated systems affixed to traffic lights, cop cars, and anywhere else a small camera might fit. These automated license plate reader systems, or ALPRs, are employed by an increasingly diverse range of surveillance-seekers, from toll booths to homeowners associations.

    Police are a major consumer of the ALPR spigot. For them, tracking the humble license plate is a relatively cheap means of covertly tracking a person’s movements while — as with all the data offered by LexisNexis — potentially bypassing Fourth Amendment considerations. The trade in bulk license plate data is generally unregulated, and information about scanned plates is indiscriminately aggregated, stored, shared, and eventually sold through companies like LexisNexis.

    A major portion of the LexisNexis overview document details ICE’s access to and myriad use of license plate reader data to geolocate its targets, providing the agency with 30 million new plate records monthly. The document says ICE can access data on any license plate query going back years; while the time frame for different kinds of investigations aren’t specified, the contract document says immigration investigations can query location and other data on a license plate going back five years.

    “This begins to look a lot like indiscriminate, warrantless real-time surveillance capabilities for ICE with respect to any vehicle.”

    The LexisNexis license plate bounty provides ICE investigators with a variety of location-tracking surveillance techniques, including the ability to learn which license plates — presumably including people under no suspicion of any wrongdoing — have appeared in a location of interest. Users subscribing to LexisNexis’s LEIDS program can also plug a plate into the system, and LexisNexis will automatically share updates on the car as they come in, including maps and vehicle images. ICE investigators are allowed to place up to 2,500 different license plates onto their own watchlist simultaneously, the contract notes.

    ICE agents can also bring the LexisNexis car-tracking tech on the road through a dedicated smartphone app that allows them to, with only a few taps, snap a picture of someone’s plate to automatically place them on the watchlist. Once a plate of interest is snapped and uploaded, ICE agents then need only to wait for a convenient push notification informing them that there’s been activity detected about the car.

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    Combining the staggering number of plates with the ability to search them from anywhere provides a potent tool with little oversight, according to Tucker, of Georgetown Law.

    Tucker told The Intercept, “This begins to look a lot like indiscriminate, warrantless real-time surveillance capabilities for ICE with respect to any vehicle encountered by any agent in any context.”

    LexisNexis’s LEIDS program is, crucially, not an outlier in the United States. For-profit data brokers are increasingly tapped by law enforcement and intelligence agencies for both the vastness of the personal information they collect and the fact that this data can be simply purchased rather than legally obtained with a judge’s approval.

    “Today, in a way that far fewer Americans seem to understand, and even fewer of them can avoid, CAI includes information on nearly everyone,” warned a recently declassified report from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence on so-called commercially available information. Specifically citing LexisNexis, the report said the breadth of the information “could be used to cause harm to an individual’s reputation, emotional well-being, or physical safety.”

    While the ICE contract document is replete with mentions of how these tools will be used to thwart criminality — obscuring the extent to which this the ends up deporting noncriminal migrants guilty of breaking only civil immigration rules — Tucker said the public should take seriously the inflated ambitions of ICE’s parent agency, the Department of Homeland Security.

    “What has happened in the last several years is that DHS’s ‘immigration enforcement’ activities have been subordinated to its mass surveillance activities,” Tucker said, “which produce opportunities for immigration enforcement but no longer have the primary purpose of immigration enforcement.”

    “What has happened in the last several years is that DHS’s ‘immigration enforcement’ activities have been subordinated to its mass surveillance activities.”

    The federal government allows the general Homeland Security apparatus so much legal latitude, Tucker explained, that an agency like ICE is the perfect vehicle for indiscriminate surveillance of the general public, regardless of immigration status.

    “That’s not to say that DHS isn’t still detaining and deporting hundreds of thousands of people every year. Of course they are, and it’s horrific,” Tucker said. “But the main goal of DHS’s surveillance infrastructure is not immigration enforcement, it’s … surveillance.

    “Use the agency that operates with the fewest legal and political restraints to put everyone inside a digital panopticon, and then figure out who to target for what kind of enforcement later, depending on the needs of the moment.”

    The post LexisNexis Is Selling Your Personal Data to ICE So It Can Try to Predict Crimes appeared first on The Intercept.

    This post was originally published on The Intercept.

  • What Is 3D-Printed Food Exactly? And How Is It Made?

    Recently, several food experts gathered in the quiet Israelian city of Rehovot to sample a new type of seafood. During the tasting event, they were presented with a handful of grouper dishes prepared in traditional Singaporean and Israeli recipes. The twist? The fish on the plate didn’t spend its pre-dinner life swimming in the ocean. In fact, it was never alive at all. The seafood was prepared using a 3D printer and grouper fish cells. It’s not a scene from a sci-fi movie, it’s real life. And many experts are hoping it’s the future of food.

    The grouper referred to above was created by an Israeli deep-tech company called Steakholder Foods in collaboration with Umami Meats, a Singaporean cultured seafood brand. Together, the two companies successfully printed the first-ever, ready-to-cook cultivated grouper fish product. And the food-tasting event was in celebration of that achievement.

    But why and how, exactly, did they make a 3D-printed, edible, and cruelty-free version of a Mediterranean fish? Here’s more about 3D-printed food, how it works, and why it might be the key to building a more sustainable food industry.

    VegNews.3dprintedfood.SteakholderFoodsSteakholder Foods/Instagram

    How is 3D-printed food made?

    To create its history-making product, Steakholder Foods used “cutting-edge 3D bioprinting technology.” This technology has been in development for decades, and started back in the 1980s, when an academic researcher called Robert J. Klebe used a standard inkjet printer to print cells.

    Since then, the field of research has rapidly evolved. And now, 3D bioprinting is an established manufacturing process. “[It] uses bio-inks to print living cells developing structures layer-by-layer which imitate the behavior and structures of natural tissues,” explains biomedical firm UPM Biomedicals.

    This method is being utilized in the medical field, used for 3D printed skin, for example, but it’s also being used in the food industry, as Steakholder Foods has demonstrated. As well as breaking new ground with grouper, the company has also printed the biggest-ever steak made from animal cells.

    “We formulate bio-ink from our carefully selected cell lines and unique scaffolding materials,” the brand explains. “The bio-ink is loaded into our 3D printer which then, in just a matter of minutes, prints a whole cut of meat with pinpoint precision based on a digital design.”

    After that, the meat is incubated for a few weeks to “allow the stem cells to differentiate into muscle and fat cells and for muscle fibers to form with the right density, thickness, and length to become a cut of meat.”

    It’s worth noting that 3D printing also works to produce other foods, including plant-based meats. And this, too, is a rapidly advancing market. Just last year, Michelin-starred British chef Marco Pierre White announced he was collaborating with another Israeli food-tech brand, called Redefine Meat, to launch 3D-printed plant-based meat dishes across his restaurants.

    Right now, you can walk into Mr. White’s in Leicester Square and order 3D-printed Redefine Steak with piccolo tomatoes and Koffmann chips. And, again, no—this is not off the pages of a sci-fi novel. It’s just a standard evening out in London.

    VegNews.3dprintedfoods.redefinemeatRedefine Meat/Instagram

    What are the benefits of 3D-printed food?

    It is becoming more mainstream, but it’s also important to point out that 3D-printed food is still in its infancy. Food-tech brands are working towards a future where this technology is the norm, but we’re not quite there yet. That said, it’s looking hopeful. Last year, Redfine Meat raised more than $380 million to expand its operations.

    But why, exactly, is this technology starting to take off, particularly in the alternative meat market? There are a few reasons. First, 3D printing allows cultured and plant-based brands to produce a result that is superior in taste and texture to other products on the market, which means it will appeal not just to vegans, but to omnivores, too. That’s a vital demographic for these companies—but not just for profit-driven reasons.

    Making meat the traditional way, by farming billions of animals in cramped, intensive, and industrialized factory farms, is hurting the planet in many ways. The entire animal agriculture industry, for example, is responsible for 14.5 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions. It uses huge amounts of resources like land and water, and farming cows for beef is also a leading driver of deforestation.

    3D-printing food can help transform the way we produce meat, but it can also help companies to cut down on food waste, which, again is a major environmental problem. This is because when food ends up in the landfill, it emits methane, a potent greenhouse gas. “3D-food printers make use of precisely controlled stepper motors to dispense ingredients,” explains Xometry, an industrial parts marketplace company, which regularly uses 3D printing. “This means that consistent ingredient accuracy is maintained while also reducing overall waste.”

    And finally, several reports indicate that 3D-printing food is not just more sustainable, but it could also result in a healthier product, too. This is because it can be molded and adapted by food scientists in order to maximize nutritional value. “From personalized dietary requirements to elderly nutrition, one can control how much protein, sugar, vitamins, minerals, and fats go into 3D-printed food,” explains alternative meat company Savor Eats. “One can also make softer food products for older adults that fulfill their nutritional requirements.”

    There’s no doubt, 3D-printed plant-based and cultured food has some major potential. It might be a little way off from dominating the grocery shelves anytime soon but watch this space. In just a few year’s time, you, too, could be tucking into a grouper dinner that’s 3D-printed, sustainable, nutritious, and, of course, delicious, too.

    This post was originally published on VegNews.com.

  • The Frankenstein Chatbots are Erupting

    Rick Claypool is a level-headed policy analyst and number-cruncher for Public Citizen, who is known for reporting the decline in corporate crime enforcement with each succeeding Presidency. (Biden less than Trump). His latest report (with Cheyenne Hunt) clearly shows him in an unusually agitated state. Its title is “‘Sorry in Advance!’ Rapid Rush to Deploy Generative A.I. Risks a Wide Array of Automated Harms.”

    Claypool is not engaging in hyperbole or horrible hypotheticals concerning Chatbots controlling humanity. He is extrapolating from what is already starting to happen in almost every sector of our society.

    I challenge you to read his report without experiencing cognitive dissonance and throwing up your hands thinking the genie is already out of a million bottles. Claypool takes you through “… real-world harms [that] the rush to release and monetize these tools can cause – and, in many cases, is already causing.”

    Claypool’s analysis takes you through five broad areas of concern, excluding the horrific autonomous weapons the Department of Defense (aka the Department of Offense) is deeply involved in developing. The various section titles of his report foreshadow the coming abuses: “Damaging Democracy,” “Consumer Concerns” (rip-offs and vast privacy surveillances), “Worsening Inequality,” “Undermining Worker Rights” (and jobs), and “Environmental Concerns” (damaging the environment via their carbon footprints).

    Before he gets specific, Claypool previews his conclusion: “Until meaningful government safeguards are in place to protect the public from the harms of generative A.I., we need a pause.” Just how, he doesn’t say. Because with so many increasing generators of these Chatbots around the world, this flood of Frankenstein Chatbots may present a problem the Dean of the Harvard Law School, Roscoe Pound, described regarding the prohibition of alcoholic beverages in the 1920s as being beyond “the limits of effective legal action.”

    Claypool quotes Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, who released last November the shocking ChatGPT A.I. product, saying afterward: “I think we are potentially not that far away from potentially scary ones.” Altman has been busy up on Capitol Hill mesmerizing legislators by saying “regulation is needed” by which he means the industry itself writing the rules and standards for Congress.

    Using its existing authority, the Federal Trade Commission, in the author’s words “… has already warned that generative A.I. tools are powerful enough to create synthetic content – plausible sounding news stories, authoritative-looking academic studies, hoax images, and deepfake videos – and that this synthetic content is becoming difficult to distinguish from authentic content.” He adds that “…these tools are easy for just about anyone to use.” BIG TECH is rushing way ahead of any legal framework for AI in the quest for big profits, while pushing for self-regulation instead of the constraints imposed by the rule of law.

    There is no end to the predicted disasters, both from people inside the industry and its outside critics. Destruction of livelihoods, harmful health impacts from promotion of quack remedies, financial fraud, political and electoral fakeries, stripping of the information commons, subversion of the open internet, faking your facial image, voice, words, and behavior, tricking you and others with lies every day. AI’s potential for deception will make Fox News’ deceptions look comparatively restrained.

    With Congress and the White House issuing unenforceable exhortations to the industry to be nice, safe and responsible, critics are looking to the European Union’s first stage passage of an A.I. Act to protect its people from the more overt damages to their common and individual rights and interests. The Act’s focus is on which uses of A.I. need to be curbed, including the adverse impact on elections. It mandates the labeling of A.I.-generated content. On May 16, 2023, Public Citizen petitioned the Federal Election Commission to issue a rule preventing the use of AI to deceive voters.

    All legislative bodies will have to confront the barriers of secrecy – claims by governments on weapons and surveillance development and the already asserted “trade secrets” by corporations. In the U.S., there will also be First Amendment defenses for free speech by these artificial entities called corporations. Their corporate lawyers will have a lucrative field day concocting delays and obstructions.

    Our nation and the world are barely organized enough to control through treaties the use of nuclear weapons – through treaties, poorly prepared for devastating pandemics, and virtually nowhere in foreseeing and forestalling the mega-threats of generative A.I. “to society and humanity.” Those were the words of an open warning letter calling for a six-month pause, signed by top CEOs (such as Elon Musk), technologists and academics.

    With few exceptions, a lazy Congress, readying for a long July 4 holiday break followed by taking off all of August for a congressional recess, is oblivious to its special powers and duties to the American people. Let’s see some congressional urgency to put some specificity and enforcement teeth behind and beyond Biden’s nonbinding “Blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights” published by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy in October 2022.

    Rep. Ted Lieu (D-CA), who sits on the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology, is pushing for the creation of a new federal agency to regulate A.I. Technologies.

    For now, I have two recommendations. Demand your Senators and Representatives join you for local town meetings during Congress’s August recess where you and your lawmakers can listen to each other and address the pressing issues. Tell them that this run-away robotic juggernaut is stripping humans of their own mental identities, autonomy and self-reliant judgments.

    Everyone is at risk. Even Microsoft and Google have little idea of the whirlwind they are unleashing, driven by shortsighted profits, not wisdom, civic principles and accountabilities to public institutions and the people themselves. Have your local experts formulate the focus of the town meeting agendas, backed by your sense of urgency.

    Then demand that your members of Congress end their three-day a week work routine and conduct rigorous hearings in D.C. and around the country with a deadline for passing legislation. Tell them they, too, are at risk for the fakery, slander, and imitations of the Chatbots.

    Lastly, upgrade and make more precise your skepticism toward the Chatbots already entering and affecting your lives and localities. Be on guard and develop an ever-larger circle of trusting relatives, friends, neighbors and coworkers.

    The corporate Chatbots are coming on fast without any legal or ethical frameworks to restrain and discipline them from subverting your freedoms and true sense of realities.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • A once-shuttered California mine is trying to transform the rare earth industry

    In arid southeastern California, just across the border from Nevada, sits the only large-scale rare earth element mine in the Western Hemisphere. Here at Mountain Pass, rocks are dug out of a 400-foot pit in the ground, crushed, and liquified into a concentrated soup of metals that are essential for the magnets inside consumer electronics, wind turbines, and electric vehicles, or EVs. Today, that metallic soup is shipped to China, where individual rare earths are separated before being refined into metals and forged into magnets. But MP Materials, the company that took ownership of the 70 year-old Mountain Pass mine in 2017, hopes to change that. This quarter, MP Materials plans to begin separating rare earths at Mountain Pass — the first time this key processing step will have occurred in the United States since 2015. 

    MP Materials says that the new U.S.-based rare earth supply chain it is building will be greener than its counterparts in Asia, where the mining and processing of rare earths have created nightmarish pollution problems. Some of its domestically processed rare earths will be used to make alloys and magnets for EVs, and others could help renewables developers build the wind turbines the U.S. desperately needs to decarbonize its power sector. MP Materials’ rare earths could also get used in everything from smartphones to military weapons like drones and missiles. 

    Julie Klinger, a geographer at the University of Delaware who studies the global rare earth industry, said MP Materials’ new processing capabilities have the potential to be a “best-case scenario in terms of diversifying the global supply chain and also doing so in a comparably robust regulatory environment.” However, Klinger cautioned that from a sustainability perspective, it’s important to minimize new mining overall. That could mean prioritizing the use of rare earths in clean energy versus military applications, or dramatically ramping up rare earth recycling, an industry still in its infancy.

    Owing to their unique atomic structure, rare earth elements are able to generate stronger magnetic fields than other elements susceptible to magnetization, like iron. As a result, rare earths can be used to create the most powerful commercial magnets on the market today. Within the clean energy sector, they’re used in the types of generators popular for offshore wind turbines, as well as inside the motors of EVs and hybrid vehicles. These magnets get their strength from the “light,” or lower atomic weight, rare earth elements neodymium and praseodymium, which are often refined together as a compound called NdPr oxide. A pinch of dysprosium or terbium, two of the scarcer and more valuable “heavy” rare earth elements, is added to the mix to boost the magnet’s heat resistance.

    Rare earths magnets are used in the types of generators popular for offshore wind turbines. ANDY BUCHANAN / AFP via Getty Images

    Demand for rare earth magnets is growing quickly. By 2030, under an aggressive decarbonization scenario, the U.S. EV sector’s rare earth magnet demand could rise nearly sixfold compared with 2020 levels, according to a recent report by the U.S. Department of Energy, or DOE. Over the same time frame, rare earth magnet demand for the nascent offshore wind industry could rise from zero to 10,000 tons. These trends mirror what’s expected worldwide: In a report published in April, critical minerals research firm Adamas Intelligence forecasted that the value of the market for rare earths used in magnets will increase fivefold by 2040, driven by rapid growth of the EV and wind energy sectors. By that same year, the world could face a 90,000-ton-per-year shortfall of NdPr oxide, roughly equivalent to total global production in 2022. 

    As the U.S. competes with other nations for these critical resources, one country dominates their production. In 2020, China was responsible for 58 percent of rare earth mining, 89 percent of rare earth separations (including nearly 100 percent of heavy rare earth separations), 90 percent of rare earth refining, and 92 percent of magnet-making. While the Chinese government has attempted to reduce the rare earth industry’s environmental impact in recent years, decades of poorly regulated production, along with illegal mining, have caused significant air and water pollution, leaving behind nightmarish waste ponds filled with heavy metals and radioactive elements. (Rare earths tend to occur alongside the radioactive elements thorium and uranium, resulting in the production of low-level radioactive waste during mining and processing.) In neighboring Myanmar, where illegal rare earth mining is taking off today, the situation is equally bleak.

    MP Materials is positioning itself as an alternative to Asian dominance of the rare earth supply chain and its questionable environmental legacy. The company assumed ownership of the Mountain Pass mine in 2017 after its previous owner, Molycorps, struggled to become profitable and ultimately filed for bankruptcy. Since then, MP Materials has been steadily ramping up rare earth production at Mountain Pass, generating 14,000 tons of rare earth oxides in 2018, and 28,000 tons the following year. Last year, Mountain Pass produced 42,499 metric tons of rare earths — the highest output in the mine’s history, and 14 percent of the global total.

    The revival of Mountain Pass has already reconfigured the global rare earth mining landscape. Now, MP Materials seeks to redraw the rest of the supply chain. After rare earths are mined and concentrated in liquid form, companies use additional steps like roasting and leaching to separate out impurities and unwanted elements, such as cerium, a low-value light rare earth. From there, a series of chemical extraction processes separate elements of interest. Separated rare earth oxides are then converted into metals through processes like electrowinning, in which metals are extracted from a solution by running an electric current through it. Rare earth metals are then pressed, or sintered, into a magnetic block which can be cut into a desired shape.

    The view inside the mill where minerals are extracted from rock at Mountain Pass Mine in 2019. Ricky Carioti / The Washington Post via Getty Images

    MP Materials is in the process of investing $700 million to develop all of these capabilities in the U.S. In 2021, the company began upgrading the refinery at Mountain Pass to restore its processing capabilities, including rare earth separations. According to the company’s earnings call for the first quarter of 2023, the facility will begin separating NdPr oxide this quarter. With the help of a $35 million contract from the US Department of Defense, or DOD, the company is planning additional upgrades to separate the 11 elements classified as medium and heavy rare earths, focusing on the magnet elements dysprosium and terbium. Once these capabilities exist, MP Materials will ship processed rare earths from California to a new facility under construction in Fort Worth, Texas, where they will be used to make alloys and magnets for General Motors EVs. 

    While the concentrations of dysprosium and terbium in Mountain Pass ore is low, Matt Sloustcher, senior vice president of communications and policy at MP Materials, says MP Materials expects to produce enough of them to “cover the needs of its Texas magnetics factory.” MP Materials’ facilities will also be capable of refining material mined elsewhere, including material with a higher relative abundance of heavy rare earths.

    According to Sloustcher, the company’s goal is to begin supplying General Motors with rare earth alloy later this year, and to produce finished magnets by 2025. At full capacity, MP Materials expects the magnetics factory to produce 1,000 tons of rare earth magnets a year, supporting the production of roughly half a million EV motors.

    Under Molycorp’s ownership in the 1990s and early 2000s, the Mountain Pass mine was beset with environmental scandals related to the handling of radioactive wastewater, which Molycorp pumped into open-air evaporation ponds in the desert. To avoid repeating that history, MP Materials is operating Mountain Pass as a “zero discharge” facility, meaning all of the water it uses is recycled on site, with dry waste buried in lined landfills. It claims to be the only rare earth mine in the world to use this process.

    From an environmental perspective, MP Materials’ water recycling process process is “a really big deal,” said Klinger. “It significantly reduces their waste footprint.”

    The refining processes MP Materials is adding will inevitably increase its environmental footprint. Owing to their chemical similarity, separating rare earths from one another is extraordinarily complicated. Separation processes, which can include hundreds of different steps, consume large volumes of water, chemicals, and energy. The company says it is intent on minimizing resource use, and to that end is recycling chemicals throughout its process. In addition, it has introduced a roasting step to remove cerium before attempting to separate other elements, which MP Materials believes will improve the efficiency of the entire process. Cerium comprises nearly half of the rare earth mixture present in Mountain Pass ore.

    Eric Schelter, a professor of chemistry at the University of Pennsylvania who studies rare earth separations, agrees that this roasting step will make it “relatively simpler” to separate the rare earths of value. But he says that if there is no market for the cerium, it must be disposed of as waste, driving up costs. In general, Schelter cautions that the economics of rare earth production are challenging and have worked against U.S. industry in the past. 

    “Personally, I think it would be great” if MP Materials were successful, Schelter said. “This is a really significant need. But ultimately, the marketplace is going to decide that it is, or is not, worthwhile to buy these magnets or buy these materials from them.”

    Sloustcher, from MP Materials, agrees that profitably producing rare earths is challenging considering the large quantities of low-value materials that need to be sifted out first, including both cerium and the light rare earth lanthanum. However, he says the company has identified customers that are “eager for U.S.-produced cerium and lanthanum products,” which are used in water treatment and fuel manufacturing processes, among others. NdPr oxide, Sloustcher says, is the “key commodity that drives economic value” in the rare earth industry, and MP Materials believes it is “a low-cost NdPr producer globally.” Sloustcher added that the company has already proven it can produce rare earths at a profit for several years.

    To ensure no valuable rare earth material is wasted, MP Materials is also planning to recycle the scrap produced during magnet fabrication, as well as end-of-life magnets. The goal, Sloustcher says, is re-introduce recyclable material at whatever point in the process flow it is most efficient, whether that means using scrap to produce new magnets directly or separating it back to individual elements. Schelter believes that the latter approach will make it easier to scale up recycling, because different types of magnets contain different amounts of rare earths. 

    hands hold a pile of rocky soil
    A worker at the Mountain Pass Mine holds Bastnasite on May 30, 2019. Ricky Carioti / The Washington Post via Getty Images

    An unknown but likely very small fraction of rare earths are recycled at end-of-life today.

    “Recycling magnets from phones, hard drives, and wind turbines can provide magnets of different grades,” Schelter said. “Collecting them from different sources would be enabled by a chemistry that purified the individual rare earths back out again.” 

    Klinger, the University of Delaware researcher, is excited about MP Materials’ interest in rare earths recycling, and its pitch for a greener supply chain more broadly. However, any new rare earth production will have an environmental cost, and Klinger says that the extent of the impacts ultimately comes down to our consumption of rare earths — not just for clean energy and personal electronics, but also weapons of war. Rare earths are essential for a variety of defense applications, including drones, missile guidance, tank and aircraft motors, and advanced laser systems. In addition to investing tens of millions in both light and heavy rare earth processing at Mountain Pass, the DOD recently awarded Australian company Lynas a $120 million contract to build a rare earth separations facility in Texas, expected online in 2025. 

    The DOD declined to comment on the fraction of rare earths from these new U.S. processing facilities that could ultimately make their way into defense applications. However, a DOD official told Grist in an emailed statement that generally speaking, rare earth demand for civilian applications like clean energy “vastly exceeds projected defense demand.”

    Nevertheless, Klinger worries that military industrial demand for rare earths will rise as conflicts intensify across the world and the global arms trade grows. She suspects that reining in this demand will lead to the “greatest gains” in terms of reducing the need for new mining overall, and she’s in the process of gathering data to explore the idea further.

    “I am a little concerned,” Klinger said, “by what the overemphasis on the energy transition might be covering up.”

    This story was originally published by Grist with the headline A once-shuttered California mine is trying to transform the rare earth industry on Jun 15, 2023.


    This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Maddie Stone.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Algorithm Used in Jordanian World Bank Aid Program Stiffs the Poorest

    A program spearheaded by the World Bank that uses algorithmic decision-making to means-test poverty relief money is failing the very people it’s intended to protect, according to a new report by Human Rights Watch. The anti-poverty program in question, known as the Unified Cash Transfer Program, was put in place by the Jordanian government.

    Having software systems make important choices is often billed as a means of making those choices more rational, fair, and effective. In the case of the poverty relief program, however, the Human Rights Watch investigation found the algorithm relies on stereotypes and faulty assumptions about poverty.

    “Its formula also flattens the economic complexity of people’s lives into a crude ranking.”

    “The problem is not merely that the algorithm relies on inaccurate and unreliable data about people’s finances,” the report found. “Its formula also flattens the economic complexity of people’s lives into a crude ranking that pits one household against another, fueling social tension and perceptions of unfairness.”

    The program, known in Jordan as Takaful, is meant to solve a real problem: The World Bank provided the Jordanian state with a multibillion-dollar poverty relief loan, but it’s impossible for the loan to cover all of Jordan’s needs.  

    Without enough cash to cut every needy Jordanian a check, Takaful works by analyzing the household income and expenses of every applicant, along with nearly 60 socioeconomic factors like electricity use, car ownership, business licenses, employment history, illness, and gender. These responses are then ranked — using a secret algorithm — to automatically determine who are the poorest and most deserving of relief. The idea is that such a sorting algorithm would direct cash to the most vulnerable Jordanians who are in most dire need of it. According to Human Rights Watch, the algorithm is broken.

    The rights group’s investigation found that car ownership seems to be a disqualifying factor for many Takaful applicants, even if they are too poor to buy gas to drive the car.

    Similarly, applicants are penalized for using electricity and water based on the presumption that their ability to afford utility payments is evidence that they are not as destitute as those who can’t. The Human Rights Watch report, however, explains that sometimes electricity usage is high precisely for poverty-related reasons. “For example, a 2020 study of housing sustainability in Amman found that almost 75 percent of low-to-middle income households surveyed lived in apartments with poor thermal insulation, making them more expensive to heat.”

    In other cases, one Jordanian household may be using more electricity than their neighbors because they are stuck with old, energy-inefficient home appliances.

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    Beyond the technical problems with Takaful itself are the knock-on effects of digital means-testing. The report notes that many people in dire need of relief money lack the internet access to even apply for it, requiring them to find, or pay for, a ride to an internet café, where they are subject to further fees and charges to get online.

    “Who needs money?” asked one 29-year-old Jordanian Takaful recipient who spoke to Human Rights Watch. “The people who really don’t know how [to apply] or don’t have internet or computer access.”

    Human Rights Watch also faulted Takaful’s insistence that applicants’ self-reported income match up exactly with their self-reported household expenses, which “fails to recognize how people struggle to make ends meet, or their reliance on credit, support from family, and other ad hoc measures to bridge the gap.”

    The report found that the rigidity of this step forced people to simply fudge the numbers so that their applications would even be processed, undermining the algorithm’s illusion of objectivity. “Forcing people to mold their hardships to fit the algorithm’s calculus of need,” the report said, “undermines Takaful’s targeting accuracy, and claims by the government and the World Bank that this is the most effective way to maximize limited resources.”

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    The report, based on 70 interviews with Takaful applicants, Jordanian government workers, and World Bank personnel, emphasizes that the system is part of a broader trend by the World Bank to popularize algorithmically means-tested social benefits over universal programs throughout the developing economies in the so-called Global South.

    Confounding the dysfunction of an algorithmic program like Takaful is the increasingly held naïve assumption that automated decision-making software is so sophisticated that its results are less likely to be faulty. Just as dazzled ChatGPT users often accept nonsense outputs from the chatbot because the concept of a convincing chatbot is so inherently impressive, artificial intelligence ethicists warn the veneer of automated intelligence surrounding automated welfare distribution leads to a similar myopia.

    The Jordanian government’s official statement to Human Rights Watch defending Takaful’s underlying technology provides a perfect example: “The methodology categorizes poor households to 10 layers, starting from the poorest to the least poor, then each layer includes 100 sub-layers, using statistical analysis. Thus, resulting in 1,000 readings that differentiate amongst households’ unique welfare status and needs.”

    “These are technical words that don’t make any sense together.”

    When Human Rights Watch asked the Distributed AI Research Institute to review these remarks, Alex Hanna, the group’s director of research, concluded, “These are technical words that don’t make any sense together.” DAIR senior researcher Nyalleng Moorosi added, “I think they are using this language as technical obfuscation.”

    As is the case with virtually all automated decision-making systems, while the people who designed Takaful insist on its fairness and functionality, they refuse to let anyone look under the hood. Though it’s known Takaful uses 57 different criteria to rank poorness, the report notes that the Jordanian National Aid Fund, which administers the system, “declined to disclose the full list of indicators and the specific weights assigned, saying that these were for internal purposes only and ‘constantly changing.’”

    While fantastical visions of “Terminator”-like artificial intelligences have come to dominate public fears around automated decision-making, other technologists argue civil society ought to focus on real, current harms caused by systems like Takaful, not nightmare scenarios drawn from science fiction.

    So long as the functionality of Takaful and its ilk remain government and corporate secrets, the extent of those risks will remain unknown.

    The post Algorithm Used in Jordanian World Bank Aid Program Stiffs the Poorest appeared first on The Intercept.

    This post was originally published on The Intercept.

  • Technology Needs Assessments by Congress Municipalities and Local Civic Groups

    Photograph Source: Kai Kowalewski – CC BY-SA 4.0

    The pace of for-profit technological innovations is accelerating, but to what end beyond corporate sales? The gap between marketing new high-tech products and assessing their intended and unintended consequences has never been greater.

    Let’s start with the ballooning of augmented reality inside virtual reality. Facebook’s Oculus Rift escapism has flopped. Trying to improve on this bizarre quest to envelop its customers, Apple plans to release the “Vision Pro”, a “mixed-reality” headset so large that Washington Post columnist Molly Roberts described it as “clunky and creepy” and predicted failure for this $3,499 rip-off.

    Do mega-corporation CEOs – who spend company profits on massive stock buybacks for no productive use (Apple plans to spend $90 billion on buybacks this year) – spend any money on the lost practice of technology assessment? Do Facebook and Apple have studies on what fantasy goggles are doing to youngsters’ minds? Are these devices producing anxieties, fears or addictions? Do these corporations have more victims than customers? Do the high-tech CEOs care? If they do, they’re not saying.

    Let’s move on to the big stuff! Congress has been spending trillions of your taxpayer dollars on technologies of modern weaponry, chemicals, drugs, medical devices, transportation, the Internet, biotechnology, nanotechnology and fusion energy. Yet the general public remains clueless about the adverse impact of these expenditures. Congress doesn’t even know if many technologies or products work as advertised.

    You can thank the bombastic, ignorant Newt Gingrich for hurling our 535 members of Congress into this black void. In 1994 Gingrich orchestrated the Republican takeover of the House of Representatives. And, in 1995, after becoming Speaker of the House, Gingrich and the Republican-controlled Congress eliminated the funding of the Congressional Office of Technology Assessment (OTA). With a small $20 million annual budget, OTA produced scores of assessment reports needed by Congress. (See: https://ota.fas.org/otareports/). Senator Edward Kennedy (D-MA) was one of OTA’s strongest supporters, who with other members of Congress served on its bipartisan board. When Congress was debating the creation of OTA, Kennedy said “without an OTA the role of Congress in national science policy would become more and more perfunctory and more and more dependent on administration facts and figures, with little opportunity for independent Congressional evaluation.” Kennedy was furious about the Republican defunding of OTA, but could not marshal enough of his dejected fellow Democrats to fight to restore funding even after Gingrich resigned in disgrace five years later.

    The failure of Democrats to fund OTA when they controlled Congress allowed Gingrich’s demolition to continue the wreckage he launched. Technically unadvised members looked foolish for years in their questioning of Silicon Valley executives at public hearings.

    Right after Obama’s victory in 2008, carrying large Democratic majorities in the House and Senate, I organized an effort to refund OTA with Nobel laureates and other scientists on board. For many years, Cong. Rush Holt Jr. (D-NJ) led the effort in the House, only to be undermined by Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who said she didn’t want to give the Republicans an opportunity to accuse her of starting another bureaucracy on Capitol Hill. Truly shocking!

    Now it is 2023 and the studied ignorance of Congress fuels the strategically useless F-35 Fighter planes at a $1.5 trillion projected cost. Well over a trillion dollars will be spent upgrading the nuclear bomb arsenal – currently able to blow up the world many times over. The unavoidable ballistic missile so-called defense program soaks up billions of dollars yearly (See: “Why Missile Defense Won’t Work” by MIT Professor Ted Postol. The rave for electric vehicles badly needs a thorough technology assessment for its lifecycle costs and benefits.

    An adequately funded OTA would have alerted Congress early about the looming opioid crisis and crimes that have taken a million or more American lives. A similar alert from an OTA report, before Covid-19 struck, could have alerted Congress on the lack of preparedness for coming pandemics. Being part of Congress, OTA can command the attention and credibility from members far more easily than any studies or alarms from citizen groups or civically-minded Think Tanks.

    Pressing the issue of funding OTA in the 21st century’s second decade brought the Democratic Party’s excuse that either one chamber of Congress or the other half was Republican-controlled. I, with Bruce Fein, Joan Claybrook and Claire Nader, explained to Speaker Pelosi in 2020 that the House or Senate can fund OTA without the concurrence of the other simply on the grounds of its prerogative to more fully fund its own institution. No reply.

    It took 86-year-old Congressman Bill Pascrell, Jr. (D-NJ) to publicly chastise his colleagues with articles titled: Why is Congress so dumb? (January 11, 2019, Washington Post) and Congress Is Sabotaging Your Post Office (April 7, 2019, Washington Monthly). Still no visible reaction from the tone-deaf congressional solons busily reducing their own significance under the Constitution and spending money unwisely.

    The ongoing lack of local technology assessment capabilities leaves Congress without a grassroots infrastructure of fact-based, nonpartisan analysis.

    Municipalities do not have formal little OTAs for their infrastructure projects, so the grasping, politically connected vendors take advantage of such ignorance to increase prices and delay projects and continue shoddiness. Think bridges, highways, schools and public buildings projects.

    The science and engineering departments of universities are rarely interested in supplying such knowledge or even teaching the ethics of engineering to their students. In 2018 we sponsored a book titled Ethics, Politics, and Whistleblowing in Engineering by Rania Milleron and Nicholas Sakellariou (CRC Press) that delved into how disasters can occur when engineering professionals don’t take their consciences that reflect their expected responsibilities to work. Three times we sent letters to about two dozen Deans and professors of Engineering around the country encouraging them to develop classes on ethics for their students. Not a single reply. (See, January 2, 2019, Letter to Engineering Professors or Department Heads).

    In 1998, our community project in Winsted, Connecticut retained an engineer, Susan M. McGoey, as a “community technologist.” She proved her worth manyfold, catching over-reaches by the engineering firm hired to upgrade the town’s drinking water purification plant. She also advised the town on its municipal watershed stewardship, began a natural resources inventory and organized a successful river clean-up along with many other money-saving projects from redesigning traffic lights to improving downtown renovations.

    Readers interested in collaborating with the renewed effort to fund the Office of Technology Assessment (OTA) in Congress can contact their members of Congress, and also connect with us at info@nader.org. It is high time to aggregate dedicated public opinion and advocacy on this inexpensive but very important restoration.


    This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Ralph Nader.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • How Does Technology Factor in for US Militarism toward China?


    The United States is about militarism. Its economy is largely based on the military-industrial complex. It has hundreds upon hundreds of military bases in lands around the planet. Yet, despite a bloated military budget, the US fails to care for all its citizens, certainly not the millions of homeless, poor, and those unable to afford medical procedures because they are without medical insurance; however, the US does house and feed its soldiers, marines, and air-force personnel abroad. Yet, when it comes to its veterans there is often a price they must pay. Nonetheless, what must not be forgotten is the far greater price paid by the victims of US aggression.

    The US claims full-spectrum dominance. US politicians make bellicose statements about which country the US will attack next. And when a pretext is required the US will fabricate one. (See AB Abrams’s excellent book Atrocity Fabrications and Its Consequences, 2023. Review)

    I asked Wei Ling Chua, the author of 3 books including Democracy: What the west can learn from China and Tiananmen Square’s “Massacre”? The Power of Words vs Silent Evidence, how aggressive US posturing impacts China.

    Kim Petersen: It is clear that the US is waging an economic war against China. However, based on the bombast of several American military and political figures, the US is also pining for a military confrontation. US Air Force four-star general Mike Minihan said his gut warns of a war with China in 2025.  The Chinese claim to most of the South China Sea has caused the US to assert the right to freedom of navigation by sailing its warships off the Chinese coast. But when has China ever denied any ships the right to freely traverse the South China Sea? And as for the disputed territoriality in the South China Sea, why does the US arrogate to itself a supposed right to meddle in the affairs of other countries even those thousands of kilometers from the US shoreline? The Brookings Institute informs that of potential threats worldwide, “China gets pride of place as security challenge number one — even though China has not employed large-scale military force against an adversary since its 1979 war [what even Wikipedia calls a “brief conflict”] with Vietnam.” Consider that the media organ of British capitalism, The Economist, complains that “People’s Liberation Army (PLA) fighter jets keep staging recklessly close, high-speed passes to intimidate Western military aircraft in international airspace near China.” The magazine doesn’t blink at the risible scenario it has described: foreign fighter planes near China. Isn’t there sufficient airspace for American military jets in the US? Or sufficient coastline to practice freedom of navigation with its warships in US waters?

    The US is so fixated on the economic rise of China that it even scuppered a multibillion-dollar deal its ally France had to sell submarines to Australia and replace it with nuclear submarines to be supplied by itself and the United Kingdom — AUKUS. The obvious target of the nuclear subs: China. China’s foreign minister Qin Gang has called on the US to put the brakes on to avoid confrontation and conflict. What does all the militaristic hoopla directed at China portend?

    Nonetheless, SCMP.com reported on 24 March 2023 that China has developed a coating for its submarines — an “active” tile based on giant magnetostrictive material (GMM) technology — that “could turn the US active sonar technology against itself.”

    Also, the Chinese navy has many more ships than the US (around 340 Chinese navy ships to the 300 US navy ships) and that gap is widening.

    Given that the rise of China is not just economic, but that China has also developed a staunch defensive capability, what do the military experts say about China’s capability of defending itself against an American attack? Such an attack would also be insane because war between two nuclear-armed foes is a scenario in which there are no winners.

    Wei Ling Chua: The US is the most warmongering country on the planet with every inch of its territory looted from others. Like former US President Jimmy Carter told Trump in a (2019) phone conversation: “US has only enjoyed 16 years of peace in its 242-year history.”  The US is also the only nuclear power ever to use such a weapon of mass destruction, which it did on 2 populated civilian cities (Hiroshima and Nagasaki). So, any military threat from the US cannot be taken lightly.

    In addition, one should also note that the Chinese military grouped itself into 5 defense regions (Western defense region, Northern defense region, Central defense region, Southern defense region, and Eastern defense region), they are all within China and defensive in nature; whereas, the US military grouped itself into 6 command centers covering the entire world [Africa Command (AFRICOM), Southern Command (covering Latin America), European Command (covering Europe, part of the Middle East and Eurasia), Central Command (covering the Middle East), Indo-Pacific Command (covering the entire Asia Pacific Region, and half the Indian Ocean), and Northern Command (covering the US, Alaska, Canada, Mexico, and Bahamas)]. The US military is obviously imperialistic in nature.

    However, the good news is that after WW2, the US-led military coalition never won any war in Asia. Their military coalition was badly beaten in the Korean War and Vietnam War (both of which involved China). The latest sudden and messy US withdrawal from Afghanistan after 20 years of brutal occupation demonstrates that the US military is not as powerful as perceived. It appears to be as Mao famously described: “A Paper Tiger.”

    I believe that if the US regime is informed and rational, it will not dare to start a war with China on the Chinese doorstep. The reasons are quite obvious:

    1) After the Korean and Vietnam wars, the US never dared to directly attack any well-armed country such as North Korea, Iran, USSR/Russia, etc. For example, in 2020, Iran fired 22 missiles at 2 US airbases in revenge for the cowardly US assassination of their minister (Qasem Soleimani) while he was on an official diplomatic visit inside Iraq. Despite the Pentagon’s initial playing down of the severity of the Iranian attacks, it was later admitted that 109 US troops had suffered brain injuries. The US did not dare take further military action against Iran.

    My perception from this incident is that the US is too confident — that no one dares to take military action against their military bases across the world.So, they are complacent and failed to invest in underground shelters in those 2 airbases. So, it is reasonable to assume that such weaknesses are likely to be widespread across all the other US military bases across the world.

    2) All the countries the US and NATO attacked after the Korean War and Vietnam War were developing countries. It was only after these countries had been weakened by years of economic sanctions and were without a decent air and sea defense system (e.g., Libya, Syria, Iraq, etc). One should note that the US invasion of Iraq was carried out only after over a decade of UN weapons inspection, disarmament, and economic sanctions. That is after the Iraqi economy and its advanced weaponry were destroyed. As a result, US fighter jets were able to take their own sweet time, flying low, flying slowly to identify targets and bombs. So, the US military weapons have yet to be tested in confrontation with a militarily powerful country, one armed with air and sea defense systems.

    As for the perceived US military might and superior high-tech weaponry, I believe that the following examples will shed some light on whether the US is more militarily powerful or China:

    Firstly, we should thank the United States for its ongoing military actions across the world, and its marketing tactics to promote its image as a superpower, with the intention to sell weapons and to scare the world into submission from its position of strength. Below is a series of US announcements of new weaponry that had frightened the Chinese; as a result, China commissioned her scientists to invent powerful weapons with ideas initiated by the Americans. E.g.,

    Hypersonic Missiles

    • The US is the first country that commissioned a hypersonic bomber program capable of nuking any country worldwide within an hour in the early 2000s. Such an announcement scared the Chinese and Russians. Yet, whereas the US failed miserably and decided to shut down the program in early 2023, we have witnessed that Russia and China successfully developed hypersonic missile technology.  Ironically, given the US failure and China’s success in the technology, the Washington Post published a report titled “American technology boosts China’s hypersonic missile program” to attribute China’s hypersonic missile success to US technology. (When one comes by this type of baseless claim of US technological superiority over China, besides having a good laugh, I am really speechless at the unbelievably shameless nature of the American propaganda machine)

    Laser Guns

    • The US is also the first country which commissioned a laser gun program. In 2014, the US announced that the weapon was installed on USS Ponce for field testing with success. However, in 2023, CBS News reported that the Pentagon spent $1b a year to develop these weapons and stated that  “Whether such weapons are worth the money is an open question, and the answer likely depends on whom you ask. For defense contractors, of course, a new generation of powerful military hardware could provide vast new revenue streams.” The irony is that in 2022, China had already exported its laser guns to Saudi Arabia and that country was reported to have successfully gunned down 13 incoming attack drones.

    One ought to recall what happened to Saudi oil facilities in 2019 when drones attacked. The report at that time was: “US-made Patriot anti-aircraft missiles, the main air defense of Saudi Arabia that was so useless last Saturday, cost $3m apiece.” In addition, there is the recent bad news that the vaunted US Patriot missile system was put out of action by a Russian hypersonic missile in Kiev on the 16th of May 2023. The report’s title was “A Patriot Radar Station and five missile batteries destroyed in Russian hypersonic strikes”. Obviously, the mendacious US military-industrial complex was successfully ripping off a lot of its allies which paid super high prices for their inferior products.

    F-35 “World Most Advanced” stealth fighter

    • The US is a country that loves to boast about its military capability even when the concept is still in an imaginary stage. E.g., introduced in 2006 as the world’s most advanced stealth fighter, the F-35 is also regarded as the US’s most expensive 5th-generation warplane. However, in the past 5 years alone, more than a dozen F-35s crashed across the world despite not operating in a war zone. In 2019, Japan confirmed that an F-35A jet had crashed, causing the remaining F-35s in Japan to be grounded. In 2021, two F-35s were damaged and grounded by a lightning strike in the sky over western Japan. Forbes magazine ran a report titled “Japan is about to waste its F35s shadowing Chinese plane” with this statement: “The stealth fighter is too expensive, too unreliable, and too valuable for other missions to waste it on boring up-and-down flights.” In 2020, The National Interest reported that “The F-35 Stealth Fighter still has hundreds of flaws.” And in 2021, Forbes magazine reported, “The US Air Force just admitted the F35 stealth fighter has failed.” In 2022, the Chinese [People’s Liberation Army] PLA detected an F-35 over the East China Sea and confronted it with their J20 fighter jet, and according to US Airforce General Kenneth Wilbach: “American Lockheed Martin F-35s had had at least one encounter with China’s J-20 stealth fighters recently in the East China Sea and that the US side was ‘impressed’.” These cases demonstrated that the US’s supposedly most advanced “stealth fighter” is visible to Chinese radar technology.

    Space Technology/Rocket Engines

    • Despite the US’s stringent technology bans against China, including even attending international space conferences in the US, China is now the only country to have independently and successfully built its own space station. The International space station (ISS) was created by a number of countries with the Russian contribution being the most crucial part of putting the station and astronauts (with Russian rockets) in space. However, as usual, the American media likes to bullshit to save face. So, in 2020, when the American media reported the news that NASA paid the Russians $90m to send an astronaut to the ISS, the title was: “Despite SpaceX success, NASA will pay Russia $90m to take US astronaut to ISS”. The irony is that in 2022, the US imposed the strictest economic sanctions against Russia including confiscating Russian public and private assets in the West and banning Russia from the SWIFT payment system due to Russia’s military action in Ukraine to prevent NATO expansion. As a counter-US sanction measure, NASA was forced to pay Russia in rubles (2 billion) to take the American astronaut back to Earth. These two incidents should be enough evidence that SpaceX’s space technology is not as advanced as its public relations. The Russians and the Chinese appear more advanced than NASA/Elon Musk’s SpaceX in transporting astronauts to and from a space station.

    Many people may not have noticed that, in 2015, the US ordered 20 rocket engines from Russia. So, in 2022, when Russia counters US-Ukraine war sanctions with a ban on selling their rocket engines to the US, TechCrunch+ reported the situation with an honest title in recognition of the reality: “Russia halts rocket engine sales to US, suggests flying to space on their ‘broomsticks’.”

    GPS Vs Beidou Global Navigation/positioning systems

    • Global positioning technology is a vital part of many advanced weapon systems including land, sea, and air travel: In 1993, the US government falsely accused a Chinese commercial cargo ship with the registered name ‘Yinhe’ of transporting chemical weapon materials to Iran. The US government then cut off Yinhe’s GPS for 24 days to strand them in the Indian Ocean and forced them to allow US officials to board the cargo ship for inspection and nothing was found. Again, in 1996, the PLA conducted a series of missile tests in the Taiwan Strait, and the US again suddenly shut down the GPS used by the PLA. Both incidents led to the Chinese government’s investment in its own Global positioning technology.

    In 2003, the cash-strapped EU invited China to participate in their Galileo navigation satellite project. However, after China transferred €200 million (US$270 million) to the project, in the name of security concerns, China was forced out of major decision-making by the EU in 2007. The irony is that China managed to develop its own Global positioning system (Beidou) faster than the EU’s Galileo project. As a “revenge” perhaps, on a “first-launched, first-served” international wavelength application rule, China successfully registered the use of transmit signals on the wavelength that the EU wanted to use for Galileo’s public regulated service. The New York Times reported the story with a title: ‘Chinese Square off with Europe in Space’.

    One may notice that the US’s aging GPS satellite system has been having a lot of problems in the past years. Just do a web search under GPS breakdown, GPS jamming, GPS outages, GPS error, GPS problems, GPS malfunction, etc., to find out about the reliability of the GPS system.

    Contrariwise, the Chinese Beidou navigation system is a Chinese owned technology with new functions and apparently more precision than the GPS. For example:

    • The Chinese Beidou can be used for text communication between users, while the GPS cannot. So, Huawei became the first company to add satellite texting to their phone device (Mate 50). The significance of such a new communication feature is that, during wartime, the PLA command center or between individual PLA soldiers will be able to communicate with each other with no blind spot. That will enable rapid battlefield intelligence gathering and transmission.
    • In addition, if one ever uses a Beidou navigation device while driving, one should notice that the device’s screen displays the position of the specific car on a specific lane. Should the driver change lanes, the screen will display the changes instantly. That is an indication that Beidou’s navigation system is far more accurate and advanced than the GPS in terms of positioning precision and processing speed. This may imply that the Chinese satellite-guided missiles will be more accurate than the US GPS-guided missiles.
    • A report by Japan Nikkei in 2020 headlined, “Chinese Beidou navigation system has surpassed American GPS in over 165 countries.” That indicates that the Beidou system is a tested, mature navigation technology.
    • A recently published report of a series of computer simulations run by a research team in China revealed that China needs only 24 hypersonic anti-ship missiles to destroy the newest US aircraft carrier and its accompanying warships.

    I consider that China is superior in technology to the US. For example, a recent Australian Strategy Policy Institute report acknowledged, “China leads the world in 37 out of 44 critical technologies.”

    Of course, unless the US regime is crazy enough to start a mutually destructive nuclear war, there is little reason to believe that the US would be able to win a war with non-nuclear weapons on China’s doorstep.

    Winning a war is not just about weaponry: the Korean War, Vietnam War, and Afghanistan War have already demonstrated that a coalition of the most militarily powerful imperialistic nations can be defeated by the people of a lesser-armed nation fighting for their freedom. So, beyond the use of advanced weaponry, the factors that determine who will win a war include:

        • the unity of the citizens,
        • the fighting morale of the soldiers,
        • the logistical support,
        • the military strategies,
        • the ability to manufacture more weapons with speed to sustain a long war;
        • the manufacturing supply chains
        • the energy supply and reserve,
        • the food supply and reserve,
        • the money to sustain a war, and
        • the neighboring countries’ attitude toward the warring parties.

    So, when one goes through the above list, one should easily come to the conclusion that the US is in a  disadvantageous position to travel across the Pacific Ocean to attack China on its doorstep.

    *****
    Upcoming: What does US militarism augur in the context of Taiwan?


    This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Kim Petersen.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • John Mitchell: Planet Ocean – tides are changing, but halt plastic horror

    By John Mitchell in Suva

    Fiji got to celebrate World Oceans Day this week — a day when our conscience gets the occasional prick on matters related to the value of the ocean in sustaining life.

    I like to brag about growing up surrounded by the sea and those unique moments during childhood I spent rowing across Qamea’s picturesque and mangrove-fringed Naiviivi Bay, plucking seashells from shallow tide pools and digging up vetuna (sandworm) from the sand.

    Yes, the sea is a way of life for all of us.

    Think of this.

    The ocean covers more than 70 percent of the planet.

    It is our life source, supporting humanity’s sustenance and existence, and that of every other organism on earth.

    The ocean produces much of the oxygen we breath and need to survive, it is the habitat of most of earth’s biodiversity and is the main source of meat protein for more than a billion people around the world.

    40 million ’employees’
    The ocean is key to our economy with an estimated 40 million people to be employed by ocean-based industries by 2030.

    In Fiji, an estimated 60 percent of the 900,000 population are thought to live in coastal communities, surviving on activities linked to the ocean, and our fisheries and tourism sectors are so intrinsically connected to the health of the ocean.

    But the ocean we call our home is facing a variety of threats that challenges its existence and endangers humanity.

    United Nations statistics say that we have depleted 90 percent of big fish populations and destroyed 50 percent of coral reefs.

    “We are taking more from the ocean than can be replenished. We need to work together to create a new balance with the ocean that no longer depletes its bounty but instead restores its vibrancy and brings it new life,” the UN says.

    With such dreadful reality in the backdrop, the 2023 WOD theme seemed timely and relevant — “Planet Ocean: tides are changing”.

    It provides us with an opportunity to rethink what we’ve done, what we need to do and how to work together with world leaders, decision-makers, indigenous leaders, scientists, private sector executives, civil society, celebrities, and youth activist to make the health of the ocean a public agenda.

    Veiuto Primary School Year 2 student Josaia Waqaivolavola takes part in the beach clean up at the My Suva Picnic Park along the Nasese foreshore in Suva
    Veiuto Primary School Year 2 student Josaia Waqaivolavola takes part in the beach clean up at the My Suva Picnic Park along the Nasese foreshore in Suva on Tuesday. Image: Jonacani Lalakobau/Fiji Times

    Clean up day
    On Wednesday this week, The Fiji Times’ front page photo was of Josaia Waqaivolavola, a Year 2 student from Veiuto Primary School who was captured on camera participating in a beach clean up at My Suva Picnic Park along the Nasese foreshore.

    His group collected 10 trash bags filled with plastics, among others.

    It’s when we see the amount of rubbish along our coastlines and in the sea around us that we begin to realise that all the talk about “putting rubbish in the bin” is not working.

    We talk about responsible citizenship but plastics continue to pollute our communities, roads, streets and parks, and our oceans.

    Plastics have become so cheap to produce that we are producing things we don’t intend to keep for long.

    In other words, we are producing plastics only to throw them away.

    We are now mass producing disposable plastics at a phenomenal rate that the world’s waste management systems are finding hard to keep up.

    40% of plastics disposable
    It is estimated that about 40 percent of the now more than 448 million tonnes of plastics produced every year is disposable and used in products intended to be discarded virtually soon after purchase.

    Just go to the beach and you’ll find them on the sand.

    World statistics estimate that each day billions upon billions of plastic material find their way into our rivers, streams and eventually into our oceans.

    During my childhood years on Qamea, my family’s livelihood depended on the sea.

    At a time, when village canteens had no refrigerators to store meat, the sea was our main source of daily meat protein.

    Many years ago, scientists and environment experts were warning us that the amount of plastics in the world’s ocean would increase 10 times by 2020.

    That was three years ago.

    Too polluted for fish
    They further advised that by 2050, if statistical predictions remain true, we’d have so much plastics in the sea and our oceans would too polluted that fish and other delicacies would be unsafe to eat or we’d not be able to even swim anymore.

    Cleaning the ocean is good but may not be good enough.

    We need to nip this spiralling issue in the bud.

    We need to work before the plastic reaches the ocean.

    We need to work on land where they are produced before we go to the ocean.

    In Fiji, the concern over disposable plastic waste is the same as the threat in other countries of the world — we are using more disposable plastics at a rate faster than we are able to effectively dispose them that our waste managing systems are struggling to contain the problem.

    Recycling not effective
    Our recycling initiatives are not effectively solving our disposable plastic dilemma.

    During this year’s WOD celebrations, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres described the ocean as “the foundation of life”.

    That pretty much sums everything up.

    If the ocean is life, then why can’t we get out act together.

    The ball is in everyone’s court and the time to act is now.

    Until we meet again, stay blessed, stay healthy and stay safe!

    John Mitchell is a Fiji Times journalist and writes the weekly “Behind The News” column. Republished with permission.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • Papuan students accused of ‘treason’ over raising Morning Star flags

    Jubi News

    The trial of three Papuan “free speech” students accused of treason has resumed at the Jayapura District Court this week.

    The defendants — Yoseph Ernesto Matuan, Devio Tekege, and Ambrosius Fransiskus Elopere — have been charged with treason for organising a free speech rally where they were accused of raising the banned Morning Star flags of West Papuan independence at the Jayapura University of Science and Technology (USTJ) on November 10, 2022.

    During the hearing on Thursday, linguist Dr Robert Masreng testified as an expert witness presented by the public prosecutor.

    He said the Morning Star flags displayed in the event were “merely an expression”.

    The students organised a protest to voice opposition against the Papua dialogue plan initiated by the National Commission on Human Rights (Komnas HAM).

    However, the event was broken up by police and several participants were arrested.

    Dr Masreng, a faculty member at Cenderawasih University’s Faculty of Teacher Training and Education, clarified the definitions of treason, independence, Morning Star, conspiracy, and the meanings of writings displayed during the free speech rally.

    Treason ‘definitions’
    He said that according to the Indonesian Thesaurus dictionary, “treason” referred to engaging in deceitful actions or manipulating others to achieve personal objectives.

    It could also denote rebellion, expressing a desire to prevent something from happening.

    Additionally, Dr Masreng noted that treason could signify an intention to commit murder.

    In court, Dr Masreng explained that treason involved deceptive actions, rebellion, and an intention to commit murder.

    He emphasised that the Morning Star flag was a symbol that gained meaning when it was used for a specific purpose. Without a clear intention behind its use, the flag lost its importance.

    Dr Masreng said that the Morning Star flag was often used as a symbol to express ideas.

    He said that the meaning of the flag could be understood based on how it was used in different situations, and different people might interpret it in their own unique ways.

    ‘Independence’ clarified
    Dr Masreng clarified the term “independence” by explaining that it represented a perspective of freedom that had a wide-ranging and abstract significance when it was used.

    The understanding of the word relied on the specific situation and how different people perceived it, especially in relation to the core concept of freedom.

    Dr Masreng said this meant that when someone expressed themself, it implied being free from criticism and oppression.

    He also provided an interpretation of the chant “referendum yes, dialogue no.”

    He said the chant conveyed a decision to the general public without involving Parliament.

    Rejecting dialogue was an expression of the speaker’s unwillingness to engage in a dialogue.

    Regarding the statement requesting intervention of the United Nations Human Rights Council in Papua, Dr Masreng said this signified that the problems in Papua were not limited to domestic concerns, but were matters that should be acknowledged by the international community.

    “It means an expression of asking the government to be open to the international community, allowing them to enter Papua and observe the dire human rights situations in the region,” he said.

    Republished from Jubi with permission.


    This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Technology Needs Assessments by Congress, Municipalities, and Local Civic Groups

    The pace of for-profit technological innovations is accelerating, but to what end beyond corporate sales? The gap between marketing new high-tech products and assessing their intended and unintended consequences has never been greater.

    Let’s start with the ballooning of augmented reality inside virtual reality. Facebook’s Oculus Rift escapism has flopped. Trying to improve on this bizarre quest to envelop its customers, Apple plans to release the “Vision Pro”, a “mixed-reality” headset so large that Washington Post columnist Molly Roberts described it as “clunky and creepy” and predicted failure for this $3,499 rip-off.

    Do mega-corporation CEOs – who spend company profits on massive stock buybacks for no productive use (Apple plans to spend $90 billion on buybacks this year) – spend any money on the lost practice of technology assessment? Do Facebook and Apple have studies on what fantasy goggles are doing to youngsters’ minds? Are these devices producing anxieties, fears or addictions? Do these corporations have more victims than customers? Do the high-tech CEOs care? If they do, they’re not saying.

    Let’s move on to the big stuff! Congress has been spending trillions of your taxpayer dollars on technologies of modern weaponry, chemicals, drugs, medical devices, transportation, the Internet, biotechnology, nanotechnology and fusion energy. Yet the general public remains clueless about the adverse impact of these expenditures. Congress doesn’t even know if many technologies or products work as advertised.

    You can thank the bombastic, ignorant Newt Gingrich for hurling our 535 members of Congress into this black void. In 1994 Gingrich orchestrated the Republican takeover of the House of Representatives. And, in 1995, after becoming Speaker of the House, Gingrich and the Republican-controlled Congress eliminated the funding of the Congressional Office of Technology Assessment (OTA). With a small $20 million annual budget, OTA produced scores of assessment reports needed by Congress. Senator Edward Kennedy (D-MA) was one of OTA’s strongest supporters, who with other members of Congress served on its bipartisan board. When Congress was debating the creation of OTA, Kennedy said “without an OTA the role of Congress in national science policy would become more and more perfunctory and more and more dependent on administration facts and figures, with little opportunity for independent Congressional evaluation.” Kennedy was furious about the Republican defunding of OTA, but could not marshal enough of his dejected fellow Democrats to fight to restore funding even after Gingrich resigned in disgrace five years later.

    The failure of Democrats to fund OTA when they controlled Congress allowed Gingrich’s demolition to continue the wreckage he launched. Technically unadvised members looked foolish for years in their questioning of Silicon Valley executives at public hearings.

    Right after Obama’s victory in 2008, carrying large Democratic majorities in the House and Senate, I organized an effort to refund OTA with Nobel laureates and other scientists on board. For many years, Cong. Rush Holt Jr. (D-NJ) led the effort in the House, only to be undermined by Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who said she didn’t want to give the Republicans an opportunity to accuse her of starting another bureaucracy on Capitol Hill. Truly shocking!

    Now it is 2023 and the studied ignorance of Congress fuels the strategically useless F-35 Fighter planes at a $1.5 trillion projected cost. Well over a trillion dollars will be spent upgrading the nuclear bomb arsenal – currently able to blow up the world many times over. The unavoidable ballistic missile so-called defense program soaks up billions of dollars yearly (See: “Why Missile Defense Won’t Work” by MIT Professor Ted Postol). The rave for electric vehicles badly needs a thorough technology assessment for its lifecycle costs and benefits.

    An adequately funded OTA would have alerted Congress early about the looming opioid crisis and crimes that have taken a million or more American lives. A similar alert from an OTA report, before Covid-19 struck, could have alerted Congress on the lack of preparedness for coming pandemics. Being part of Congress, OTA can command the attention and credibility from members far more easily than any studies or alarms from citizen groups or civically-minded Think Tanks.

    Pressing the issue of funding OTA in the 21st century’s second decade brought the Democratic Party’s excuse that either one chamber of Congress or the other half was Republican-controlled. I, with Bruce Fein, Joan Claybrook and Claire Nader, explained to Speaker Pelosi in 2020 that the House or Senate can fund OTA without the concurrence of the other simply on the grounds of its prerogative to more fully fund its own institution. No reply. (See letter).

    It took 86-year-old Congressman Bill Pascrell, Jr. (D-NJ) to publicly chastise his colleagues with articles titled: “Why is Congress so dumb?” (January 11, 2019, Washington Post) and “Congress Is Sabotaging Your Post Office” (April 7, 2019, Washington Monthly). Still no visible reaction from the tone-deaf congressional solons busily reducing their own significance under the Constitution and spending money unwisely.

    The ongoing lack of local technology assessment capabilities leaves Congress without a grassroots infrastructure of fact-based, nonpartisan analysis.

    Municipalities do not have formal little OTAs for their infrastructure projects, so the grasping, politically connected vendors take advantage of such ignorance to increase prices and delay projects and continue shoddiness. Think bridges, highways, schools and public buildings projects.

    The science and engineering departments of universities are rarely interested in supplying such knowledge or even teaching the ethics of engineering to their students. In 2018 we sponsored a book titled Ethics, Politics, and Whistleblowing in Engineering by Rania Milleron and Nicholas Sakellariou (CRC Press) that delved into how disasters can occur when engineering professionals don’t take their consciences that reflect their expected responsibilities to work. (See Nicholas Ashford’s review). Three times we sent letters to about two dozen Deans and professors of Engineering around the country encouraging them to develop classes on ethics for their students. Not a single reply. (See, January 2, 2019, Letter to Engineering Professors or Department Heads).

    In 1998, our community project in Winsted, Connecticut retained an engineer, Susan M. McGoey, as a “community technologist.” She proved her worth manyfold, catching over-reaches by the engineering firm hired to upgrade the town’s drinking water purification plant. She also advised the town on its municipal watershed stewardship, began a natural resources inventory and organized a successful river clean-up along with many other money-saving projects from redesigning traffic lights to improving downtown renovations. (See: Courant.).

    Readers interested in collaborating with the renewed effort to fund the Office of Technology Assessment (OTA) in Congress can contact their members of Congress, and also connect with us at gro.redannull@ofni. It is high time to aggregate dedicated public opinion and advocacy on this inexpensive but very important restoration.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.