Just a short article by Australian scholars (March 2024):

Could spending a billion dollars actually bring solar manufacturing back to Australia? It’s worth a shot

The government will spruik jobs in the regions, especially where retiring coal plants such as Liddell in New South Wales will take jobs with them.

But there are other benefits. We could take better advantage of the talent and research knowhow in Australia to begin building next-generation cells.

If we can kickstart a viable solar industry, it would help us unlock other parts of the green economy. Cheap and plentiful solar power could make it viable to crack water to make green hydrogen or make green steel and aluminium.

Many of these initiatives have to be set in train now to gain the benefits in five or ten years’ time. Today’s announcement is just the start. But in a sun-drenched country, it makes sense to aim for the skies.

This is a typical Axel Springer article, nothing but hot air.

They are citing a “diplomat”, a “second diplomat”, a “UK government official”, and “EU officials”, all anonymously, but heavily critical supporting a narrative suggested by the headline.

Then, at the end, there comes the first name, citing Anand Menon, director of the UK in a Changing Europe think tank, who says that “Brussels should wait […] before passing judgement …”

Yeah, and journalists should research information before publishing articles.

Addition: A friendly reminder that Axel Springer signed a deal last year with OpenAI on licensing news for model training for its ChatGPT. Whenever one uses OpenAI/ Microsoft’s ChatGPT, they yield something that is powered by a large amount of such Axel Springer ‘news’.

I don’t know exactly how Estonia handles this in detail, but it means that each buyer only gets a fraction of what they want to buy. Usually large funds get a bit more than retail customers as it is the case also here according to the numbers.

It means that Estonia is considered a trustworthy creditor.

Ah, never mind, you’ll bear with it (/satire, just to be safe).

A few numbers more:

Annual inflation in August 2024 was 9.05%, around the same level as in July 2024 when it was 9.13%.

Annual inflation rates in Russia this year (2024):

• January: 7.44%
• February: 7.69%
• March: 7.72%
• April: 7.84%
• May: 8.3%
• June: 8.59%
• July: 9.13%
• August: 9.05%

The slowdown in inflation in August was expected and is explained by the seasonal decline in the price of fruit and vegetables, according to Russia’s Federal State Statistics Service (Rosstat) which these statistics all come from.

In January-August 2024, prices increased by 5.25%. In January-August 2023, prices increased by 3.70% (again, the data comes from Rosstat).

(It is noteworthy that the Jan-Aug 2023 rise of 3.70% is already high.)

As the article also states:

“The shortage of (labour) resources may lead to a situation where economic growth slows down, despite all the efforts to stimulate demand, with all that stimulus accelerating inflation,” Central Bank Governor Elvira Nabiullina said over the summer.

[Edit typo.]

I’m wondering whether Mr. Sanchez has also discussed Taiwan, Tibet, Xinjiang, and other human rights issues when he was in China to negotiate China’s Envision investment of $1 bn in Spain a few days ago?

Because we don’t want a war. Neither a trade war nor a war in Taiwan, Ukraine, nor anywhere else.

I would expect the head of a government agency for psychological defence to be citing own sources and investigations, or, at least, from respected research organizations, rather than from an “influencer,” not matter who this is. The fact that Lauren Southern is far-right figure makes the thing even worse. (And, not to forget, a government official should not use Twitter at all.)

One reason may be that in Romania there is a law that prohibits shooting down drones in peacetime, but they’re gonna change that it seems:

Romanian lawmakers plan to consider legislation at their current session on enabling Romania to shoot down drones invading the country’s airspace in peacetime.

Does China have a tech company which does NOT develop spyware?

I am not an expert for this, but it seems so:

Closer defence cooperation between New Zealand and Japan (2023)

Shared regional threats.

@NaibofTabr@infosec.pub

Whataboutism? Apart from the fact that it has nothing to do with the linked article, there has been a lot of, say, ‘not too positive’ reports about Trump’s social network.

@Riven@lemmy.dbzer0.com

How are the so-called ‘laws’ written in China?

@0x0@programming.dev

As @Deceptichum@quokk.au already said, this is about safety, and it’s not a geopolitical thing.

Space debris expert: Orbits will be lost—and people will die—later this decade – (2022)

Some of them are children

Thanks for this comment. I really didn’t think of this.

I guess if you are surrounded only by yes-sayers for too long, something like that may happen.

@YeetPics@mander.xyz

Zhang Zhan is a role model for a person who is standing up. As some others have already written in their comments, it’s a similar situation in China as it is in Russia, Iran, North Korea (or Nazi-Germany 90 years ago, if you seek an example in history).

Those Chinese who threaten their peers should be legally prosecuted and then sent back to China. If they don’t value freedom of expression and human rights, they have nothing to do here in Europe. This is unacceptable.

Seems to be aligned with the EU’s new policy to abandon Open Source Software.

Other news comes from a user on Wikimedia:

Couldn’t Wikimedia take the lead when it comes to social media decentralization

I just noticed that the Wikimedia Foundation profile on Mastodon is very inactive compared to X profile. Taking into account a recent example, where more than 20 million users had to flee from X due to its criminal practices, wouldn’t it make sense and be used as an opportunity to reach the audience that is migrating to the Fediverse?

The Wikimedia Foundation seems to be aligned with some core ideas related to decentralization (e.g. chapters and user groups), not to mention its long-standing voice in the open source world and against disinformation, which seems to be an important goal o X and its owner?

Here we go: Empowering farmers in Central Europe: the case for agri-PV – (archived link)

I added the link also in the body.

That’s what I thought, too. Just shutting down won’t be enough, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do it. They should be regulated, and there must be a human being who can held accountable for what they do (very much as it is the case with ‘conventional’ media, and forcing them to make their code Open Source could be some measures).

We should definitely fight the root cause, but we should take away the gun of the shooter and rethink the gun policy, too.