#carbon fundamentalism

[national-hockey-gay]

being trans and also an identical twin is so weird because what do you mean if i want to present in a way that doesn’t give me dysphoria i have to accept that people will no longer look at me and my sister and know right away that we’re soulmates. the universe is cruel

[jcmarchi]

Mars’ missing atmosphere could be hiding in plain sight

New Post has been published on https://thedigitalinsider.com/mars-missing-atmosphere-could-be-hiding-in-plain-sight/

Mars’ missing atmosphere could be hiding in plain sight

Mars wasn’t always the cold desert we see today. There’s increasing evidence that water once flowed on the Red Planet’s surface, billions of years ago. And if there was water, there must also have been a thick atmosphere to keep that water from freezing. But sometime around 3.5 billion years ago, the water dried up, and the air, once heavy with carbon dioxide, dramatically thinned, leaving only the wisp of an atmosphere that clings to the planet today.

Where exactly did Mars’ atmosphere go? This question has been a central mystery of Mars’ 4.6-billion-year history.

For two MIT geologists, the answer may lie in the planet’s clay. In a paper appearing today in Science Advances, they propose that much of Mars’ missing atmosphere could be locked up in the planet’s clay-covered crust.

The team makes the case that, while water was present on Mars, the liquid could have trickled through certain rock types and set off a slow chain of reactions that progressively drew carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and converted it into methane — a form of carbon that could be stored for eons in the planet’s clay surface.

Similar processes occur in some regions on Earth. The researchers used their knowledge of interactions between rocks and gases on Earth and applied that to how similar processes could play out on Mars. They found that, given how much clay is estimated to cover Mars’ surface, the planet’s clay could hold up to 1.7 bar of carbon dioxide, which would be equivalent to around 80 percent of the planet’s initial, early atmosphere.

It’s possible that this sequestered Martian carbon could one day be recovered and converted into propellant to fuel future missions between Mars and Earth, the researchers propose.

“Based on our findings on Earth, we show that similar processes likely operated on Mars, and that copious amounts of atmospheric CO2 could have transformed to methane and been sequestered in clays,” says study author Oliver Jagoutz, professor of geology in MIT’s Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences (EAPS). “This methane could still be present and maybe even used as an energy source on Mars in the future.”

The study’s lead author is recent EAPS graduate Joshua Murray PhD ’24.

In the folds

Jagoutz’ group at MIT seeks to identify the geologic processes and interactions that drive the evolution of Earth’s lithosphere — the hard and brittle outer layer that includes the crust and upper mantle, where tectonic plates lie.

In 2023, he and Murray focused on a type of surface clay mineral called smectite, which is known to be a highly effective trap for carbon. Within a single grain of smectite are a multitude of folds, within which carbon can sit undisturbed for billions of years. They showed that smectite on Earth was likely a product of tectonic activity, and that, once exposed at the surface, the clay minerals acted to draw down and store enough carbon dioxide from the atmosphere to cool the planet over millions of years.

Soon after the team reported their results, Jagoutz happened to look at a map of the surface of Mars and realized that much of that planet’s surface was covered in the same smectite clays. Could the clays have had a similar carbon-trapping effect on Mars, and if so, how much carbon could the clays hold?

“We know this process happens, and it is well-documented on Earth. And these rocks and clays exist on Mars,” Jagoutz says. “So, we wanted to try and connect the dots.”

“Every nook and cranny”

Unlike on Earth, where smectite is a consequence of continental plates shifting and uplifting to bring rocks from the mantle to the surface, there is no such tectonic activity on Mars. The team looked for ways in which the clays could have formed on Mars, based on what scientists know of the planet’s history and composition.

For instance, some remote measurements of Mars’ surface suggest that at least part of the planet’s crust contains ultramafic igneous rocks, similar to those that produce smectites through weathering on Earth. Other observations reveal geologic patterns similar to terrestrial rivers and tributaries, where water could have flowed and reacted with the underlying rock.

Jagoutz and Murray wondered whether water could have reacted with Mars’ deep ultramafic rocks in a way that would produce the clays that cover the surface today. They developed a simple model of rock chemistry, based on what is known of how igneous rocks interact with their environment on Earth.

They applied this model to Mars, where scientists believe the crust is mostly made up of igneous rock that is rich in the mineral olivine. The team used the model to estimate the changes that olivine-rich rock might undergo, assuming that water existed on the surface for at least a billion years, and the atmosphere was thick with carbon dioxide.

“At this time in Mars’ history, we think CO2 is everywhere, in every nook and cranny, and water percolating through the rocks is full of CO2 too,” Murray says.

Over about a billion years, water trickling through the crust would have slowly reacted with olivine — a mineral that is rich in a reduced form of iron. Oxygen molecules in water would have bound to the iron, releasing hydrogen as a result and forming the red oxidized iron which gives the planet its iconic color. This free hydrogen would then have combined with carbon dioxide in the water, to form methane. As this reaction progressed over time, olivine would have slowly transformed into another type of iron-rich rock known as serpentine, which then continued to react with water to form smectite.

“These smectite clays have so much capacity to store carbon,” Murray says. “So then we used existing knowledge of how these minerals are stored in clays on Earth, and extrapolate to say, if the Martian surface has this much clay in it, how much methane can you store in those clays?”

He and Jagoutz found that if Mars is covered in a layer of smectite that is 1,100 meters deep, this amount of clay could store a huge amount of methane, equivalent to most of the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere that is thought to have disappeared since the planet dried up.

“We find that estimates of global clay volumes on Mars are consistent with a significant fraction of Mars’ initial CO2 being sequestered as organic compounds within the clay-rich crust,” Murray says. “In some ways, Mars’ missing atmosphere could be hiding in plain sight.”

“Where the CO2 went from an early, thicker atmosphere is a fundamental question in the history of the Mars atmosphere, its climate, and the habitability by microbes,” says Bruce Jakosky, professor emeritus of geology at the University of Colorado and principal investigator on the Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution (MAVEN) mission, which has been orbiting and studying Mars’ upper atmosphere since 2014. Jakosky was not involved with the current study. “Murray and Jagoutz examine the chemical interaction of rocks with the atmosphere as a means of removing CO2. At the high end of our estimates of how much weathering has occurred, this could be a major process in removing CO2 from Mars’ early atmosphere.”

This work was supported, in part, by the National Science Foundation.

[essektheylyss]

Would I be a calmer person if I was willing to dnf a book? Undoubtedly. But then I wouldn't get to deconstruct exactly what I don't like about the book for my own learning process, and I would lose out on some prime kvetching, so I think it levels out.

[justgayskissinggays]

I'm obsessed with Somnum. I'm sooooo normal about him. I am so normal about this man who was literally just a test subject. Another mindless cog in this wheel. You are just a kid. But it doesnt matter. They poke and prod you with things you don't understand. You know you're in pain, you know something is wrong but there is nothing you can do.

You are cursed. Cursed to be consumed by things you don't understand. Everyday it's harder to stay awake. Dreams whisper in your ears lies and promises and truths and lick you with their fickle tongues. A meal. They are starving. You almost feel bad, if you weren't there food. You are in so much pain. You can't stay awake. You are fighting for it, fighting to be alive.

Then theres a light; you're being given away. Labelled a failure and a useless project and yet you are wanted by something. You learn what family is and its not really the best family but its something you can be loyal to. But you are the runt of the litter; skilled but unable to use it. Everyday sleep comes easier and waking is harder. Everyday something new is ripping you apart. The dreams have eaten your lungs. They have started on your muscles; your stomach. They creep under your skin to consume every waking inch of you.

You get the news, you will die in two years. They will eat you body heart and soul and you will be nothing. Your parents tell you that they can only keep you comfortable. They look at you with pity, you are no longer what they believed. Your parents who adopted to avoid having a child like you. But you were always destined to this, from the moment you were born. Destined to be eaten by dreams. Destined to die. Destined to lose yourself to the surreal. Your family adopted kids to avoid watching one die. You are a disappointment and pitiful.

You are the runt of the litter. Always the weak one, everyday you try to stay awake just a little longer and you fail. You desperately try to keep your grip on reality, to not become distorted by the dreams consuming you. But its only getting later, and one day it'll be to late. They will eat you, they will devour you. They are starving. They will never find a meal as delectable as you for another century. Your eyes are going. Your fingers are going. Your feet are going. Devoured by things that aren't real, and soon you won't be too.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Tesla's Dieselgate

Elon Musk lies a lot. He lies about being a “utopian socialist.” He lies about being a “free speech absolutist.” He lies about which companies he founded:

https://www.businessinsider.com/tesla-cofounder-martin-eberhard-interview-history-elon-musk-ev-market-2023-2 He lies about being the “chief engineer” of those companies:

https://www.quora.com/Was-Elon-Musk-the-actual-engineer-behind-SpaceX-and-Tesla

He lies about really stupid stuff, like claiming that comsats that share the same spectrum will deliver steady broadband speeds as they add more users who each get a narrower slice of that spectrum:

https://www.eff.org/wp/case-fiber-home-today-why-fiber-superior-medium-21st-century-broadband

The fundamental laws of physics don’t care about this bullshit, but people do. The comsat lie convinced a bunch of people that pulling fiber to all our homes is literally impossible — as though the electrical and phone lines that come to our homes now were installed by an ancient, lost civilization. Pulling new cabling isn’t a mysterious art, like embalming pharaohs. We do it all the time. One of the poorest places in America installed universal fiber with a mule named “Ole Bub”:

https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/the-one-traffic-light-town-with-some-of-the-fastest-internet-in-the-us

Previous tech barons had “reality distortion fields,” but Musk just blithely contradicts himself and pretends he isn’t doing so, like a budget Steve Jobs. There’s an entire site devoted to cataloging Musk’s public lies:

https://elonmusk.today/

But while Musk lacks the charm of earlier Silicon Valley grifters, he’s much better than they ever were at running a long con. For years, he’s been promising “full self driving…next year.”

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/09/herbies-revenge/#100-billion-here-100-billion-there-pretty-soon-youre-talking-real-money

He’s hasn’t delivered, but he keeps claiming he has, making Teslas some of the deadliest cars on the road:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/06/10/tesla-autopilot-crashes-elon-musk/

Tesla is a giant shell-game masquerading as a car company. The important thing about Tesla isn’t its cars, it’s Tesla’s business arrangement, the Tesla-Financial Complex:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/11/24/no-puedo-pagar-no-pagara/#Rat

Once you start unpacking Tesla’s balance sheets, you start to realize how much the company depends on government subsidies and tax-breaks, combined with selling carbon credits that make huge, planet-destroying SUVs possible, under the pretense that this is somehow good for the environment:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/14/for-sale-green-indulgences/#killer-analogy

But even with all those financial shenanigans, Tesla’s got an absurdly high valuation, soaring at times to 1600x its profitability:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/15/hoover-calling/#intangibles

That valuation represents a bet on Tesla’s ability to extract ever-higher rents from its customers. Take Tesla’s batteries: you pay for the battery when you buy your car, but you don’t own that battery. You have to rent the right to use its full capacity, with Tesla reserving the right to reduce how far you go on a charge based on your willingness to pay:

https://memex.craphound.com/2017/09/10/teslas-demon-haunted-cars-in-irmas-path-get-a-temporary-battery-life-boost/

That’s just one of the many rent-a-features that Tesla drivers have to shell out for. You don’t own your car at all: when you sell it as a used vehicle, Tesla strips out these features you paid for and makes the next driver pay again, reducing the value of your used car and transfering it to Tesla’s shareholders:

https://www.theverge.com/2020/2/6/21127243/tesla-model-s-autopilot-disabled-remotely-used-car-update

To maintain this rent-extraction racket, Tesla uses DRM that makes it a felony to alter your own car’s software without Tesla’s permission. This is the root of all autoenshittification:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/24/rent-to-pwn/#kitt-is-a-demon

This is technofeudalism. Whereas capitalists seek profits (income from selling things), feudalists seek rents (income from owning the things other people use). If Telsa were a capitalist enterprise, then entrepreneurs could enter the market and sell mods that let you unlock the functionality in your own car:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/06/11/1-in-3/#boost-50

But because Tesla is a feudal enterprise, capitalists must first secure permission from the fief, Elon Musk, who decides which companies are allowed to compete with him, and how.

Once a company owns the right to decide which software you can run, there’s no limit to the ways it can extract rent from you. Blocking you from changing your device’s software lets a company run overt scams on you. For example, they can block you from getting your car independently repaired with third-party parts.

But they can also screw you in sneaky ways. Once a device has DRM on it, Section 1201 of the DMCA makes it a felony to bypass that DRM, even for legitimate purposes. That means that your DRM-locked device can spy on you, and because no one is allowed to explore how that surveillance works, the manufacturer can be incredibly sloppy with all the personal info they gather:

https://www.cnbc.com/2019/03/29/tesla-model-3-keeps-data-like-crash-videos-location-phone-contacts.html

All kinds of hidden anti-features can lurk in your DRM-locked car, protected from discovery, analysis and criticism by the illegality of bypassing the DRM. For example, Teslas have a hidden feature that lets them lock out their owners and summon a repo man to drive them away if you have a dispute about a late payment:

https://tiremeetsroad.com/2021/03/18/tesla-allegedly-remotely-unlocks-model-3-owners-car-uses-smart-summon-to-help-repo-agent/

DRM is a gun on the mantlepiece in Act I, and by Act III, it goes off, revealing some kind of ugly and often dangerous scam. Remember Dieselgate? Volkswagen created a line of demon-haunted cars: if they thought they were being scrutinized (by regulators measuring their emissions), they switched into a mode that traded performance for low emissions. But when they believed themselves to be unobserved, they reversed this, emitting deadly levels of NOX but delivering superior mileage.

The conversion of the VW diesel fleet into mobile gas-chambers wouldn’t have been possible without DRM. DRM adds a layer of serious criminal jeopardy to anyone attempting to reverse-engineer and study any device, from a phone to a car. DRM let Apple claim to be a champion of its users’ privacy even as it spied on them from asshole to appetite:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/14/luxury-surveillance/#liar-liar

Now, Tesla is having its own Dieselgate scandal. A stunning investigation by Steve Stecklow and Norihiko Shirouzu for Reuters reveals how Tesla was able to create its own demon-haunted car, which systematically deceived drivers about its driving range, and the increasingly desperate measures the company turned to as customers discovered the ruse:

https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/tesla-batteries-range/

The root of the deception is very simple: Tesla mis-sells its cars by falsely claiming ranges that those cars can’t attain. Every person who ever bought a Tesla was defrauded.

But this fraud would be easy to detect. If you bought a Tesla rated for 353 miles on a charge, but the dashboard range predictor told you that your fully charged car could only go 150 miles, you’d immediately figure something was up. So your Telsa tells another lie: the range predictor tells you that you can go 353 miles.

But again, if the car continued to tell you it has 203 miles of range when it was about to run out of charge, you’d figure something was up pretty quick — like, the first time your car ran out of battery while the dashboard cheerily informed you that you had 203 miles of range left.

So Teslas tell a third lie: when the battery charge reached about 50%, the fake range is replaced with the real one. That way, drivers aren’t getting mass-stranded by the roadside, and the scam can continue.

But there’s a new problem: drivers whose cars are rated for 353 miles but can’t go anything like that far on a full charge naturally assume that something is wrong with their cars, so they start calling Tesla service and asking to have the car checked over.

This creates a problem for Tesla: those service calls can cost the company $1,000, and of course, there’s nothing wrong with the car. It’s performing exactly as designed. So Tesla created its boldest fraud yet: a boiler-room full of anti-salespeople charged with convincing people that their cars weren’t broken.

This new unit — the “diversion team” — was headquartered in a Nevada satellite office, which was equipped with a metal xylophone that would be rung in triumph every time a Tesla owner was successfully conned into thinking that their car wasn’t defrauding them.

When a Tesla owner called this boiler room, the diverter would run remote diagnostics on their car, then pronounce it fine, and chide the driver for having energy-hungry driving habits (shades of Steve Jobs’s “You’re holding it wrong”):

https://www.wired.com/2010/06/iphone-4-holding-it-wrong/

The drivers who called the Diversion Team weren’t just lied to, they were also punished. The Tesla app was silently altered so that anyone who filed a complaint about their car’s range was no longer able to book a service appointment for any reason. If their car malfunctioned, they’d have to request a callback, which could take several days.

Meanwhile, the diverters on the diversion team were instructed not to inform drivers if the remote diagnostics they performed detected any other defects in the cars.

The diversion team had a 750 complaint/week quota: to juke this stat, diverters would close the case for any driver who failed to answer the phone when they were eventually called back. The center received 2,000+ calls every week. Diverters were ordered to keep calls to five minutes or less.

Eventually, diverters were ordered to cease performing any remote diagnostics on drivers’ cars: a source told Reuters that “Thousands of customers were told there is nothing wrong with their car” without any diagnostics being performed.

Predicting EV range is an inexact science as many factors can affect battery life, notably whether a journey is uphill or downhill. Every EV automaker has to come up with a figure that represents some kind of best guess under a mix of conditions. But while other manufacturers err on the side of caution, Tesla has the most inaccurate mileage estimates in the industry, double the industry average.

Other countries’ regulators have taken note. In Korea, Tesla was fined millions and Elon Musk was personally required to state that he had deceived Tesla buyers. The Korean regulator found that the true range of Teslas under normal winter conditions was less than half of the claimed range.

Now, many companies have been run by malignant narcissists who lied compulsively — think of Thomas Edison, archnemesis of Nikola Tesla himself. The difference here isn’t merely that Musk is a deeply unfit monster of a human being — but rather, that DRM allows him to defraud his customers behind a state-enforced opaque veil. The digital computers at the heart of a Tesla aren’t just demons haunting the car, changing its performance based on whether it believes it is being observed — they also allow Musk to invoke the power of the US government to felonize anyone who tries to peer into the black box where he commits his frauds.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/28/edison-not-tesla/#demon-haunted-world

This Sunday (July 30) at 1530h, I’m appearing on a panel at Midsummer Scream in Long Beach, CA, to discuss the wonderful, award-winning “Ghost Post” Haunted Mansion project I worked on for Disney Imagineering.

Image ID [A scene out of an 11th century tome on demon-summoning called 'Compendium rarissimum totius Artis Magicae sistematisatae per celeberrimos Artis hujus Magistros. Anno 1057. Noli me tangere.' It depicts a demon tormenting two unlucky would-be demon-summoners who have dug up a grave in a graveyard. One summoner is held aloft by his hair, screaming; the other screams from inside the grave he is digging up. The scene has been altered to remove the demon's prominent, urinating penis, to add in a Tesla supercharger, and a red Tesla Model S nosing into the scene.]

Image: Steve Jurvetson (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Tesla_Model_S_Indoors.jpg

CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/deed.en

[transgenderer]

The thing about killing an oil executive to lower carbon emissions, or similar ideas, feels fundamentally like dream logic. It's bizarre to me how common this kind of thinking is. Like the thing about how the planet isn't dying, it's being killed by people with names and addresses. It's like...sympathetic magic. That if you kill someone associated with a bad thing, it will stop the bad thing. Like climate change is the boss in a video game and you have to hit its weak points

[probablyasocialecologist]

As environmental, social and humanitarian crises escalate, the world can no longer afford two things: first, the costs of economic inequality; and second, the rich. Between 2020 and 2022, the world’s most affluent 1% of people captured nearly twice as much of the new global wealth created as did the other 99% of individuals put together, and in 2019 they emitted as much carbon dioxide as the poorest two-thirds of humanity. In the decade to 2022, the world’s billionaires more than doubled their wealth, to almost US$12 trillion. The evidence gathered by social epidemiologists, including us, shows that large differences in income are a powerful social stressor that is increasingly rendering societies dysfunctional. For example, bigger gaps between rich and poor are accompanied by higher rates of homicide and imprisonment. They also correspond to more infant mortality, obesity, drug abuse and COVID-19 deaths, as well as higher rates of teenage pregnancy and lower levels of child well-being, social mobility and public trust. The homicide rate in the United States — the most unequal Western democracy — is more than 11 times that in Norway. Imprisonment rates are ten times as high, and infant mortality and obesity rates twice as high.

[...]

Our work has shown that the amount spent on advertising as a proportion of gross domestic product is higher in countries with greater inequality. The well-publicized lifestyles of the rich promote standards and ways of living that others seek to emulate, triggering cascades of expenditure for holiday homes, swimming pools, travel, clothes and expensive cars. Oxfam reports that, on average, each of the richest 1% of people in the world produces 100 times the emissions of the average person in the poorest half of the world’s population. That is the scale of the injustice. As poorer countries raise their material standards, the rich will have to lower theirs.

[...]

The scientific evidence is stark that reducing inequality is a fundamental precondition for addressing the environmental, health and social crises the world is facing. It’s essential that policymakers act quickly to reverse decades of rising inequality and curb the highest incomes.

[molsno]

I fundamentally do not understand the purpose of sodastream. why does this exist? to add carbonation to water? you can go to the store and buy a bottle of club soda. to make your own soda using their proprietary bottles? you can just buy them already made in bottles or cans. it's an overengineered device that doesn't solve a problem it didn't also create. it feels like its only purpose is to funnel money into israel

[iamthepulta]

@joemomrgneissguy SPACE MINING. HO BOY.

So when mining comes into a conversation, there are several 'laws' of mining and processing that I like to consider that people tend to forget:

Location and rarity of commodity

Location and rarity of extraction techniques/reagents

What is necessary for this operation to work?

Where does the finished product go?

Some of these are extraneous. Theoretically, we don't have to care that iron is common on earth and might be present on the moon, so it changes the conversation from "why?" to "how would we?". Same with extraction and reagents. If you don't care how expensive it is to ship- for example: water and carbon dioxide to the moon because you want to process He-3, nothing can stop you.

However, what will stop planning, is processing. Blowing up a rock is easy. Collecting the rock and breaking it into a usable form is not. If there isn't a plan for exactly what commodity is being mined and how to separate it and all the equipment that needs to be made to get it into a usable form, and a plan to get that equipment into space. God help the poor bastard.

And fundamentally, no matter HOW you turn it, people use the finished product. If there are no people where you are mining the Thing, you need to have a way for the Thing to get back to the people who need it. WHY are you mining the Thing? What is economic about the Thing being made? and Is it worth the money?

[angry geologist rant under the cut]

So the thing about space and asteroids is metals come in native form a lot of the time because there's nothing to oxidize them; it makes processing simpler and the density increases profit. This is usually what people talk about when they go off about space mining: Ohh, if we just reach this asteroid 400 years away there's so much Gold and Platinum! Ohh, if we just crashed a FUCKING ASTEROID INTO EARTH OR MARS we could be so rich!

However this is a LIE for two reasons: It's actually harder to process straight sulfides or straight metal because they aren't brittle. Instead of breaking into smaller pieces you can separate and process, they jam the crusher. Universities with mining departments often have huge chunks of impressive high-grade sitting around that were donated by companies when they jammed their fucking system. If you can't break it down, it's a useless fucking clump of rock.

Secondly, even if you have native metals clumped together like an iron-nickel asteroid, unless you want an iron-nickel product, you have to separate them. Since it's not brittle, you would have to pour a bunch of hydrochloric on it and wait for the reaction to dissolve the outer surface.

And all this is assuming the metals are on Earth. If not, you have to figure out how to do this in space. How much HCl will you need? How are you going to fly it up there? How are you going to break it down? How are you going to replace parts when they inevitably break?

The big "commodity" on the moon is Helium-3, which is extremely rare on Earth. (So yes, we have a need, and yes, there's substantial reason to mine it in a place where it's more accessible.) The logic starts breaking down around "getting it back" and "how does the operation work": In moon quantities (up to 15 parts per billion (ppb)), you have to mine about 150 tons to extract 1g of He-3. That's not unreasonable, to be honest, since economic gold hovers around 7-12 ppb. And technically you'd only have to heat the rock to 600-700 C. However, things do melt at those temperatures. Then you have to get it back to earth. Either a SpaceX-style return and come back, or a drop shipments- It's just insane to me though that we would use SO MANY RESOURCES to rip up the fucking moon, even with an automated system, when if you look at He-3 we already produce what equals 11 pounds of He-3 yearly from Oil and Gas deposits, it's just not collected.

I have more beef with planets that are theoretically resource-rich, but people just- don't care about getting them back to Earth? Venus has significant metal-Sulfides and Tellurides in its atmosphere, which is why people joke about the "floating oxygen colonies" on Venus. But congratulations! You've colonized a planet that is inaccessible to human technology because anything we've ever designed will dissolve. Same with Europa. To design something that works on Venus - not to mention extracts things in the proper form to be used in human conditions - and/or get them back to Earth means redesigning how we think of the properties of the periodic table.

With extraction, we play a lot with oxidation states, and one of the rules is to stay within Earth's aqueous conditions. If you oxidize anything too much, your solution will want to vaporize to oxygen. Reduce anything too much, and your solution will want to vaporize to hydrogen gas.

So, if you design anything on Earth designed for conditions on Venus, it will be unstable. If you design anything on Venus meant for Earth, it will be unstable.

Which is kind of the end of my rant, I guess. Don't crash something into Earth unless you can process it. If you can process it in space, can you get it back? Who's responsible when the thing breaks? Why the fuck is money being spent when 9 times out of 10 we have it here on earth with the conditions we're familiar with?

If we've somehow depleted Earth enough that we need resources from other planets, which would insinuate we have not figured out how to recycle our own metals, which is untrue, and likewise we have no business in space anyway- Where did all our resources go? Are we leaving for those other planets? Do we have faster-than-light travel to collect the new resources in a timely manner?

There isn't even water in space half the time and if you do have a colony on Mars and tech bros are going to process all the hematite to build their shitty underground Martian city, are they shipping water from the north and south poles to do this? Have they figured out how to renew the carbon filters that are going to be needed to get all the waste and organics out of it once it's used?

In my opinion, it's all just fucking stupid. Space mining tries to answer a question that doesn't need to be asked with people who don't know how mineral processing works who haven't thought what the logistics require and don't care that entropy demands even minerals in stasis don't last forever. But it's ~new~ and the dollar signs on metallic asteroids gleam in their eyes and I want to take out Elon Musk's kneecaps.

[mbari-blog]

With eight arms instead of 10, this squid breaks the rules.

The octopus squid (Octopoteuthis deletron) is unusual among squids. Typically, squids have eight arms and two long tentacles, making a total of 10 appendages. But as young Octopoteuthis mature into adults, their two feeding tentacles are reabsorbed into their bodies.

Eight arms are not the only thing that stands out about this species. While exploring the midwater, we often encounter octopus squid in a distinctive posture: large fins spread wide, and arms with twinkling tips curled above the head. Light-producing organs called photophores flash with bioluminescence at the end of each arm.

MBARI has spent several decades studying Octopoteuthis. Cameras on our advanced underwater robots have revealed insights into the mysterious lives of octopus squid, from their unique behaviors to their defensive strategies.

Octopus squid and their deep-dwelling kin play a vital role in ocean food webs. Despite their ecological importance, we still know very little about the lives of deep-sea squids. MBARI’s work is answering fundamental questions about deep-sea cephalopods and providing vital information that resource managers can use to inform their decision-making about the ocean.

The deep sea is closer than you think. What we do on land affects the ocean, even the animals and environments deep below the surface. By choosing sustainable seafood, refusing single-use plastic, and reducing our carbon footprint, we can help protect the amazing animals of the deep.

Learn more about this captivating cephalopod in our Animals of the Deep gallery.

[neonspectrumdreams]

Don't Forget to Breathe - Breathwork Techniques

Breathing is a fundamental process that all humans engage in. Air is life giving and life saving. Naturally, the quality of our breathing can have a significant impact on our mental state. 

Breathwork can be considered a form of meditation; when we meditate, we focus on something else in order to avoid becoming enmeshed in the constant barrage of thoughts that we generate throughout the day. So breathwork positively affects our mental state in this same way that meditation does, as well.

Breathwork can be used as a grounding technique after different types of psychological distress. It can help relax the fight or flight response which turns on during PTSD and anxiety symptoms. It can help distract and detach from distressing thoughts and emotions. It can help change state in general from a negative state to a neutral and calm state.

It is recommended to do these exercises for 10-30 minutes a day if possible, although a shorter time period a few times a month is acceptable. It can also be practiced in a shortened version multiple times throughout the day anytime unacceptable anxiety or emotions become overwhelming. So, for instance, if you have an anxiety attack because you just found out about a deadline, you can focus on your breathing for a couple minutes, then go back to your day. 

Okay, onto the types of breathwork I will be teaching today.

The simplest version of breathwork is a simple breathing meditation. In breathing meditation, we sit or stand somewhere with as few stimuli (distractions) as possible, and we focus on our breathing. Any time our thoughts begin to drift to something that is not the process of breathing, we re-direct them back to focusing on breathing. Instead of engaging with our daily anxieties, we simply focus on the act of breathing rather than thinking. 

You may notice that breathing is not just one action. It can roughly be divided into four parts: inhaling, holding (which is when gas exchange occurs in the lungs and the oxygen is traded for carbon dioxide,) exhaling, and a pause before beginning it all over again. Some people find that timing these four stages can occupy the mind more easily and allow them to get into the mindset of meditating more effectively. Many people do a breathwork technique that is called “the cube” - staying in each of these four stages for four seconds. Others vary the timing of each stage by one or two seconds, sometimes giving certain states a longer duration than the others. You can experiment with the timing to find your ideal time. Not everyone times their breaths when they engage in breathing meditation, but it is an option many find helpful.

Some people find it helpful to engage in certain breathing techniques, although this is optional. Breathing through the diaphragm, a popular breathing adjustment, allows someone to breathe more deeply. Breathing through the nose and exhaling through the mouth also yields a deeper breath. Another technique is to breathe in and out through pursed lips. The way breathing changes during yoga can be used as well - simply going through the process of yoga and focusing on your breathing as you move through any regimen of poses is a common form of meditation many do, sometimes unknowingly. These techniques are often recommended to people with asthma to help them breathe more clearly (but of course should not be used in place of medical care.) 

Another form of breathwork is to visualize your breath. You can imagine energy of some color, say blue, entering through your mouth and going to your lungs. You can feel the energy fill you up. Many people like to imagine the energy heals them, or try to feel the subtle physical feelings of the oxygen exchange taking place in the lungs. Then the energy turns red as you exhale it from your lungs back out around you. You can experiment with the specific visualization to find something personal to you that works for you.

[jcmarchi]

Researchers use earth’s magnetic field to verify Old Testament event - Technology Org

New Post has been published on https://thedigitalinsider.com/researchers-use-earths-magnetic-field-to-verify-old-testament-event-technology-org/

Researchers use earth’s magnetic field to verify Old Testament event - Technology Org

Research from Tel Aviv University (TAU) and three other Israeli universities will enable archaeologists to identify burnt materials discovered in excavations and estimate their firing temperatures. The new technique can determine whether a certain item, such as a mud brick, underwent a firing event even at relatively low temperatures, from 200°C (about 400°F) and higher. This information can be crucial for correctly interpreting the findings.

Applying their method to findings from ancient Gath (Tell es-Safi in central Israel), the researchers validated the Biblical account from 2 Kings 12,18: “About this time Hazael King of Aram went up and attacked Gath and captured it. Then he turned to attack Jerusalem.” (2 Kings 12, 18).

Dr. Yoav Vaknin led the multidisciplinary study from the Sonia and Marco Nadler Institute of Archaeology, Entin Faculty of Humanities, at TAU and the Palaeomagnetic Laboratory at The Hebrew University. Other contributors included Professor Ron Shaar from the Institute of Earth Sciences at The Hebrew University, Professors Erez Ben-Yosef and Oded Lipschits from the Nadler Institute at TAU, Professor Aren Maeir from the Martin (Szusz) Department of Land of Israel Studies and Archaeology at Bar-Ilan University, and Dr. Adi Eliyahu Behar from the Department of Land of Israel Studies and Archaeology and the Department of Chemical Sciences at Ariel University. The paper has been published in the scientific journal PLOS ONE.

“Throughout the Bronze and Iron Ages, the main building material in most parts of the Land of Israel was mud bricks,” Professor Lipschits explains. “This cheap and readily available material was used to build walls in most buildings, sometimes on top of stone foundations. That’s why it’s so important to understand the technology used in making these bricks.”

The new method measures the magnetic field recorded and “locked” in the brick as it burned and cooled down. In the second stage of the procedure, the researchers gradually “erase” the brick’s magnetic field using a process called thermal demagnetization. This involves heating the brick in a special oven that neutralizes the earth’s magnetic field. The heat releases the magnetic signals, which once again arrange themselves randomly, canceling each other out, and the total magnetic signal becomes weak and loses its orientation.

The researchers fired mud bricks under controlled temperature and magnetic field conditions, measured each brick’s acquired magnetic field, then gradually erased it. They found that the bricks were completely demagnetized at the temperature at which they had been burned, proving that the method works.

“Our approach enables identifying burning which occurred at much lower temperatures than any other method,” Dr. Vaknin says. “Most techniques used for identifying burnt bricks are based on actual changes in the minerals, which usually occur at temperatures higher than 500°C [932°F], when some minerals are converted into others.”

After proving the method’s validity, the researchers applied it to a specific archaeological dispute: Whether a specific brick structure discovered at Tell es-Safi — identified as the Philistine city of Gath, home of Goliath — was built of pre-fired bricks or burned on location. The prevalent hypothesis, based on the Old Testament, historical sources, and carbon-14 dating attributes the destruction of the structure to the devastation of Gath by Hazael, King of Aram Damascus, around 830 BCE. But a previous paper by researchers including Professor Maeir, head of the Tell es-Safi excavations, proposed that the building had not burned down, but rather collapsed over decades, and that the fired bricks found in the structure had been fired in a kiln prior to construction. If this hypothesis were correct, this would be the earliest instance of brick-firing technology discovered in the Land of Israel.

To settle the dispute, the current research team applied the new method to samples from the wall at Tell es-Safi and the collapsed debris found beside it. The findings were conclusive: The magnetic fields of all bricks and collapsed debris displayed the same orientation, north and downwards. “Our findings signify that the bricks burned and cooled down in-situ, right where they were found, namely in a conflagration in the structure itself, which collapsed within a few hours,” Dr. Vaknin says. “Had the bricks been fired in a kiln and then laid in the wall, their magnetic orientations would have been random. Moreover, had the structure collapsed over time, not in a single fire event, the collapsed debris would have displayed random magnetic orientations.

“We believe that the main reason for our colleagues’ mistaken interpretation was their inability to identify burning at temperatures below 500°C. Since heat rises, materials at the bottom of the building burned at relatively low temperatures, below 400°C, and consequently the former study did not identify them as burnt. At the same time, bricks in upper parts of the wall, where temperatures were much higher, underwent mineralogical changes and were therefore identified as burnt, leading the researchers to conclude that they had been fired in a kiln prior to construction. Our method allowed us to determine that all bricks in both the wall and debris had burned during the conflagration: those at the bottom burned at relatively low temperatures, and those that were found in higher layers or had fallen from the top – at temperatures higher than 600°C.”

“Our findings are very important for deciphering the intensity of the fire and scope of destruction at Gath, the largest and most powerful city in the Land of Israel at the time, as well as understanding the building methods prevailing in that era,” Professor Maeir concludes. “It’s important to review conclusions from previous studies, and sometimes even refute former interpretations, even if they came from your own school.”

Source: AFTAU

You can offer your link to a page which is relevant to the topic of this post.

[biracy]

Once u learn to be critical of rhetoric that relies on associating [supposed bad thing] with some form of psychological and/or neurological "damage", u really notice just how prevalent it is on here. Everyone you don't like is delusional, they're insane, they have brain damage, they need to Check The Carbon Monoxide Detectors, they need to Get Help and Go To Therapy, [form of media and/or communication] is literally brain poison, they've had their attention spans destroyed, they're "small brain" or "smooth brain" or "brain dead" or whatever. So many people on here remain seemingly incapable of criticizing someone's actions or views without needing to insinuate that the "problem" is neurological, "in the brain", unchangeable, fundamental. I should not have to explain why it is insensitive, nonconstructive, and oftentimes straight-up ableist to tell someone that they must have "brain damage" because you got into an argument with them online.

[mindblowingscience]

Scientists are calling for changes to chemistry textbooks after discovering a fundamental aspect of structural organic chemistry has been incorrectly described for almost 100 years. The team from Cardiff University's School of Chemistry, dispute the long-held belief that alkyl groups—a chemical group consisting of carbon and hydrogen atoms arranged in a chain—donate electrons to other parts of a molecule. Instead, their research shows alkyl groups actually pull electrons away from the rest of the molecule, making them electron-withdrawing when compared to hydrogen.

Continue Reading.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

FTC vs surveillance pricing

Support me this summer on the Clarion Write-A-Thon and help raise money for the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers' Workshop!

In the mystical cosmology of economics, "prices" are of transcendental significance, the means by which the living market knows and adapts itself, giving rise to "efficient" production and consumption.

At its most basic level, the metaphysics of pricing goes like this: if there is less of something for sale than people want to buy, the seller will raise the price until enough buyers drop out and demand equals supply. If the disappointed would-be buyers are sufficiently vocal about their plight, other sellers will enter the market (bankrolled by investors who sense an opportunity), causing supplies to increase and prices to fall until the system is in "equilibrium" – producing things as cheaply as possible in precisely the right quantities to meet demand. In the parlance of neoclassical economists, prices aren't "set": they are discovered.

In antitrust law, there are many sins, but they often boil down to "price setting." That is, if a company has enough "market power" that they can dictate prices to their customers, they are committing a crime and should be punished. This is such a bedrock of neoclassical economics that it's a tautology "market power" exists where companies can "set prices"; and to "set prices," you need "market power."

Prices are the blood cells of the market, shuttling nutrients (in the form of "information") around the sprawling colony organism composed of all the buyers, sellers, producers, consumers, intermediaries and other actors. Together, the components of this colony organism all act on the information contained in the "price signals" to pursue their own self-interest. Each self-interested action puts more information into the system, triggering more action. Together, price signals and the actions they evince eventually "discover" the price, an abstraction that is yanked out of the immaterial plane of pure ideas and into our grubby, physical world, causing mines to re-open, shipping containers and pipelines to spark to life, factories to retool, trucks to fan out across the nation, retailers to place ads and hoist SALE banners over their premises, and consumers to race to those displays and open their wallets.

When prices are "distorted," all of this comes to naught. During the notorious "socialist calculation debate" of 1920s Austria, right-wing archdukes of religious market fundamentalism, like Von Hayek and Von Mises, trounced their leftist opponents, arguing that the market was the only computational system capable of calculating how much of each thing should be made, where it should be sent, and how much it should be sold for.

Attempts to "plan" the economy – say, by subsidizing industries or limiting prices – may be well-intentioned, but they broke the market's computations and produced haywire swings of both over- and underproduction. Later, the USSR's planned economy did encounter these swings. These were sometimes very grave (famines that killed millions) and sometimes silly (periods when the only goods available in regional shops were forks, say, creating local bubbles in folk art made from forks).

Unplanned markets do this too. Most notoriously, capitalism has produced a vast oversupply of carbon-intensive goods and processes, and a huge undersupply of low-carbon alternatives, bringing the human civilization to the brink of collapse. Not only have capitalism's price signals failed to address this existential crisis to humans, it has also sown the seeds of its own ruin – the market computer's not going to be getting any "price signals" from people as they drown in floods or roast to death on sidewalks that deliver second-degree burns to anyone who touches them:

https://www.fastcompany.com/91151209/extreme-heat-southwest-phoenix-surface-burns-scorching-pavement-sidewalks-pets

For market true believers, these failures are just evidence that regulation is distorting markets, and that the answer is more unregulated markets to infuse the computer with more price signals. When it comes to carbon, the problem is that producers are "producing negative externalities" (that is, polluting and sticking us with the bill). If we can just get them to "internalize" those costs, they will become "economically rational" and switch to low-carbon alternatives.

That's the theory behind the creation and sale of carbon credits. Rather than ordering companies to stop risking civilizational collapse and mass extinction, we can incentivize them to do so by creating markets that reward clean tech and punish dirty practices. The buying and selling of carbon credits is supposed to create price signals reflecting the existential risk to the human race and the only habitable planet known to our species, which the market will then "bring into equilibrium."

Unfortunately, reality has a distinct and unfair leftist bias. Carbon credits are a market for lemons. The carbon credits you buy to "offset" your car or flight are apt to come from a forest that has already burned down, or that had already been put in a perpetual trust as a wildlife preserve and could never be logged:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/03/18/greshams-carbon-law/#papal-indulgences

Carbon credits produce the most perverse outcomes imaginable. For example, much of Tesla's profitability has been derived from the sale of carbon credits to the manufacturers of the dirtiest, most polluting SUVs on Earth; without those Tesla credits, those SUVs would have been too expensive to sell, and would not have existed:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/11/24/no-puedo-pagar-no-pagara/#Rat

What's more, carbon credits aren't part of an "all of the above" strategy that incorporates direct action to prevent our species downfall. These market solutions are incompatible with muscular direct action, and if we do credits, we can't do other stuff that would actually work:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/31/carbon-upsets/#big-tradeoff

Even though price signals have repeatedly proven themselves to be an insufficient mechanism for producing "efficient" or even "survivable," they remain the uppermost spiritual value in the capitalist pantheon. Even through the last 40 years of unrelenting assaults on antitrust and competition law, the one form of corporate power that has remained both formally and practically prohibited is "pricing power."

That's why the DoJ was able to block tech companies and major movie studios from secretly colluding to suppress their employees' wages, and why those employees were able to get huge sums out of their employers:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_Litigation

It's also why the Big Six (now Big Five) publishers and Apple got into so much trouble for colluding to set a floor on the price of ebooks:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Apple_(2012)

When it comes to monopoly, even the most Bork-pilled, Manne-poisoned federal judges and agencies have taken a hard line on price-fixing, because "distortions" of prices make the market computer crash.

But despite this horror of price distortions, America's monopolists have found so many ways to manipulate prices. Last month, The American Prospect devoted an entire issue to the many ways that monopolies and cartels have rigged the prices we pay, pushing them higher and higher, even as our wages stagnated and credit became more expensive:

https://prospect.org/pricing

For example, there's the plague of junk fees (AKA "drip pricing," or, if you're competing to be first up against the wall come the revolution, "ancillary revenue"), everything from baggage fees from airlines to resort fees at hotels to the fee your landlord charges if you pay your rent by check, or by card, or in cash:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/07/drip-drip-drip/#drip-off

There's the fake transparency gambit, so beloved of America's hospitals:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/13/a-punch-in-the-guts/#hayek-pilled

The "greedflation" that saw grocery prices skyrocketing, which billionaire grocery plutes blamed on covid stimulus checks, even as they boasted to their shareholders about their pricing power:

https://prospect.org/economy/2024-06-12-war-in-the-aisles/

There's the the tens of billions the banks rake in with usurious interest rates, far in excess of the hikes to the central banks' prime rates (which are, in turn, justified in light of the supposed excesses of covid relief checks):

https://prospect.org/economy/2024-06-11-what-we-owe/

There are the scams that companies like Amazon pull with their user interfaces, tricking you into signing up for subscriptions or upsells, which they grandiosely term "dark patterns," but which are really just open fraud:

https://prospect.org/economy/2024-06-10-one-click-economy/

There are "surge fees," which are supposed to tempt more producers (e.g. Uber drivers) into the market when demand is high, but which are really just an excuse to gouge you – like when Wendy's threatens to surge-price its hamburgers:

https://prospect.org/economy/2024-06-07-urge-to-surge/

And then there's surveillance pricing, the most insidious and profitable way to jack up prices. At its core, surveillance pricing uses nonconsensually harvested private information to inform an algorithm that reprices the things you buy – from lattes to rent – in real-time:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/05/your-price-named/#privacy-first-again

Companies like Plexure – partially owned by McDonald's – boasts that it can use surveillance data to figure out what your payday is and then hike the price of the breakfast sandwich or after-work soda you buy every day.

Like every bad pricing practice, surveillance pricing has its origins in the aviation industry, which invested early on and heavily in spying on fliers to figure out how much they could each afford for their plane tickets and jacking up prices accordingly. Architects of these systems then went on to found companies like Realpage, a data-brokerage that helps landlords illegally collude to rig rent prices.

Algorithmic middlemen like Realpage and ATPCO – which coordinates price-fixing among the airlines – are what Dan Davies calls "accountability sinks." A cartel sends all its data to a separate third party, which then compares those prices and tells everyone how much to jack them up in order to screw us all:

https://profilebooks.com/work/the-unaccountability-machine/

These price-fixing middlemen are everywhere, and they predate the boom in commercial surveillance. For example, Agri-Stats has been helping meatpackers rig the price of meat for 40 years:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/04/dont-let-your-meat-loaf/#meaty-beaty-big-and-bouncy

But when you add commercial surveillance to algorithmic pricing, you get a hybrid more terrifying than any cocaine-sharks (or, indeed, meth-gators):

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/tennessee-police-warn-locals-not-flush-drugs-fear-meth-gators-n1030291

Apologists for these meth-gators insist that surveillance pricing's true purpose is to let companies offer discounts. A streaming service can't afford to offer $0.99 subscriptions to the poor because then all the rich people would stop paying $19.99. But with surveillance pricing, every customer gets a different price, titrated to their capacity to pay, and everyone wins.

But that's not how it cashes out in the real world. In the real world, rich people who get ripped off have the wherewithal to shop around, complain effectively to a state AG, or punish companies by taking their business elsewhere. Meanwhile, poor people aren't just cash-poor, they're also time-poor and political influence-poor.

When the dollar store duopoly forces all the mom-and-pop grocers in your town out of business with predatory pricing, and creating food deserts that only they serve, no one cares, because state AGs and politicians don't care about people who shop at dollar stores. Then, the dollar stores can collude with manufacturers to get shrunken "cheater sized" products that sell for a dollar, but cost double or triple the grocery store price by weight or quantity:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/27/walmarts-jackals/#cheater-sizes

Yes, fliers who seem to be flying on business (last-minute purchasers who don't have a Saturday stay) get charged more than people whose purchase makes them seem to be someone flying away for a vacation. But that's only because aviation prices haven't yet fully transitioned to surveillance pricing. If an airline can correctly calculate that you are taking a trip because you're a grad student who must attend a conference in order to secure a job, and if they know precisely how much room you have left on your credit card, they can charge you everything you can afford, to the cent.

Your ability to resist pricing power isn't merely a function of a company's market power – it's also a function of your political power. Poor people may have less to steal, but no one cares when they get robbed:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/07/19/martha-wright-reed/#capitalists-hate-capitalism

So surveillance pricing, supercharged by algorithms, represent a serious threat to "prices," which is the one thing that the econo-religious fundamentalists of the capitalist class value above all else. That makes surveillance pricing low-hanging fruit for regulatory enforcement: a bipartisan crime that has few champions on either side of the aisle.

Cannily, the FTC has just declared war on surveillance pricing, ordering eight key players in the industry (including capitalism's arch-villains, McKinsey and Jpmorgan Chase) to turn over data that can be used to prosecute them for price-fixing within 45 days:

https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2024/07/ftc-issues-orders-eight-companies-seeking-information-surveillance-pricing

As American Prospect editor-in-chief David Dayen notes in his article on the order, the FTC is doing what he and his journalistic partners couldn't: forcing these companies to cough up internal data:

https://prospect.org/economy/2024-07-24-ftc-opens-surveillance-pricing-inquiry/

This is important, and not just because of the wriggly critters the FTC will reveal as they use their powers to turn over this rock. Administrative agencies can't just do whatever they want. Long before the agencies were neutered by the Supreme Court, they had strict rules requiring them to gather evidence, solicit comment and counter-comment, and so on, before enacting any rules:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/18/administrative-competence/#i-know-stuff

Doubtless, the Supreme Court's Loper decision (which overturned "Chevron deference" and cut off the agencies' power to take actions that they don't have detailed, specific authorization to take) will embolden the surveillance pricing industry to take the FTC to court on this. It's hard to say whether the courts will find in the FTC's favor. Section 6(b) of the FTC Act clearly lets the FTC compel these disclosures as part of an enforcement action, but they can't start an enforcement action until they have evidence, and through the whole history of the FTC, these kinds of orders have been a common prelude to enforcement.

One thing this has going for it is that it is bipartisan: all five FTC commissioners, including both Republicans (including the Republican who votes against everything) voted in favor of it. Price gouging is the kind of easy-to-grasp corporate crime that everyone hates, irrespective of political tendency.

In the Prospect piece on Ticketmaster's pricing scam, Dayen and Groundwork's Lindsay Owens called this the "Age of Recoupment":

https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/03/aoi-aoi-oh/#concentrated-gains-vast-diffused-losses

For 40 years, neoclassical economics' focus on "consumer welfare" meant that companies could cheat and squeeze their workers and suppliers as hard as they wanted, so long as prices didn't go up. But after 40 years, there's nothing more to squeeze out of workers or suppliers, so it's time for the cartels to recoup by turning on us, their customers.

They believe – perhaps correctly – that they have amassed so much market power through mergers and lobbying that they can cross the single bright line in neoliberal economics' theory of antitrust: price-gouging. No matter how sincere the economics profession's worship of prices might be, it still might not trump companies that are too big to fail and thus too big to jail.

The FTC just took an important step in defense of all of our economic wellbeing, and it's a step that even the most right-wing economist should applaud. They're calling the question: "Do you really think that price-distortion is a cardinal sin? If so, you must back our play." Support me this summer on the Clarion Write-A-Thon and help raise money for the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers' Workshop!

https://clarionwriteathon.com/members/profile.php?writerid=293388

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/07/24/gouging-the-all-seeing-eye/#i-spy

[mariacallous]

In 2025, we will see a fundamental transformation in the language of climate politics. We’re going to hear a lot less about “reducing emissions” from scientists and policymakers and a lot more about “phasing out fossil fuels” or “ending coal, oil, and methane gas.” This is a good thing. Although it is scientifically accurate, the phrase “reducing emissions” is too easily used for greenwashing by the fossil-energy industry and its advocates. The expression “ending coal, oil, and methane gas,” on the other hand, keeps the focus on the action that will do most to resolve the climate crisis.

This discourse shift has been initiated by the latest report of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The world’s climate scientists say that already existing fossil-energy infrastructure is projected to emit the total carbon budget for halting global heating at 2 degrees Celsius over preindustrial temperatures. This statement means two things. It means that the world cannot develop any more coal, oil, or gas, if we want our planet to remain relatively livable. And it means that even some already developed fossil-fuel deposits will need to be retired before the end of their lifetime, since we need to leave space in the carbon budget for essential activities like agriculture.

The international community has already integrated this new science into its global climate governance. The 28th Conference of the Parties—the annual conference of the world’s nations party to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change—called for every country to contribute to “transitioning away from fossil fuels.” Never before in the history of international climate negotiations had the main cause of global heating been clearly named and specifically targeted. The United Nations itself now calls for the phaseout of coal, oil, and methane gas.

This new climate language will become mainstream in 2025. In her policy plans for her second term aspPresident of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen pledged not to work to lower EU emissions, but to “continue to bring down energy prices by moving further away from fossil fuels.” The new UK government promised in its manifesto that it will withhold licenses for new coal and for oil exploration—and states outright that it will “ban fracking for good.” And in France, Macron has explicitly vowed to end fossil-fuel use entirely.

Climate politics in the US will also evolve in the wake of Donald Trump’s reelection for president. Republicans will continue to embrace a “drill, baby, drill” climate agenda, denying the danger or sometimes even the reality of climate change while advocating for expanding domestic crude and methane-gas production. They may try to greenwash their policies by claiming they embrace an “all of the above” energy strategy, but this messaging will have limited effects. Due to political polarization the association of Trump with coal, oil, and gas will raise Democratic support for phasing out fossil fuels. Before the 2024 election, 59 percent of Democrats said climate change should be the Federal government’s top priority, but only 48 percent said they supported a phaseout. In 2025 majorities of Democrats will begin to support fossil-fuel phaseout, especially if climate advocates revive science-based climate messaging, continue to emphasize that clean-energy deployment is job creation, and frame choosing to phase out fossil fuels as a form of freedom that upholds our right to a livable future.

Given that Democrats won many down-ballot races, and cities and states are still pledging to pass climate policies, this shift in the Democratic majority will keep the US on the map in international climate negotiations, whether or not Trump withdraws the US from the Paris Agreement, creating new local alliances with the UK, the EU, and global south nations calling for international fossil-fuel phaseout targets. This bloc can counter the power of petrostates in international climate negotiations. At the very least, the mainstreaming of the language of fossil-fuel phaseout will help undermine the greenwashing strategy of current oil and gas company PR, which falsely advertises industry as pursuing technologies at scale to help “reduce emissions” even as they continue their upstream investments.

Of course the petrostates, along with India and China, will push back against the rhetoric of fossil fuel phaseout. But India can be helped to turn away from its domestic coal stores by clean-energy financing at close to cost along with the international aid and technology transfers already pledged at previous climate conferences. And although its rhetoric may not align with that of the West, China should not be imagined as opposed to climate action. China has enacted the most comprehensive climate policy on the planet, in service of its goal to peak emissions by 2030 and achieve net zero emissions by 2060. If their climate messaging remains focused on “emissions,” in light of their plan to keep using fossil fuels past 2030, they are preparing for next decade’s pivot away from fossil fuels by building out clean energy at a truly extraordinary rate.

In 2025 climate discourse will recenter on the message that halting global heating requires the phaseout of coal, oil, and gas. This new consensus will shift the politics of climate change and help motivate an urgent sprint to a clean-energy, ecologically integrated economy—the only economy that ensures a livable future.