Hu Yamin’s new book on Chinese Marxist literary criticism
Hu Yamin’s new book on Chinese Marxist literary criticism
Hu Yamin is a prominent Chinese scholar specializing in comparative Marxist literary criticism. Her recent work, The Contemporary Construction of the Chinese Form of Marxist Literary Criticism, offers a historical-geographic comparative analysis of W…People's World
For the first time EVs & batteries are more efficient, better, and cheaper than their fossil fuel competitors. China has scaled up their manufacturing and is exporting to the Global S. at a fast speed
- YouTube
Profitez des vidéos et de la musique que vous aimez, mettez en ligne des contenus originaux, et partagez-les avec vos amis, vos proches et le monde entier.www.youtube.com
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Poor Communities Are Paying the Price for “Free” AI Tools
Poor Communities Are Paying the Price for "Free" AI Tools
AI data centers produce massive noise pollution, use huge amounts of water and keep us hooked on fossil fuels.Gridwork
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[Article] Scientists make embryos from human skin DNA for first time
US scientists testing the technique say it could help people overcome infertility and potentially allow same-sex couples to have a genetically related child.
A Bullet Crashed the Internet in Texas
A ‘stray bullet’ 25,000 people offline near Dallas.
Archived version: archive.is/20251001151950/404m…
A Bullet Crashed the Internet in Texas
The internet can be more physically vulnerable than you think. Last week, thousands of people in North and Central Texas were suddenly knocked offline. The cause? A bullet. The outage hit cities all across the state, including Dallas, Irving, Plano, Arlington, Austin, and San Antonio. The outage affected Spectrum customers and took down their phone lines and TV services as well as the internet.“Right in the middle of my meetings 😒,” one users said on the r/Spectrum subreddit. Around 25,000 customers were without services for several hours as the company rushed to repair the lines. As the service came back,, WFAA reported that the cause of the outage came from the barrel of a gun. A stray bullet had hit a line of fiber optic cable and knocked tens of thousands of people offline.
playlist.megaphone.fm?p=TBIEA2…
“The outage stemmed from a fiber optic cable that was damaged by a stray bullet,” Spectrum told 404 Media. “Our teams worked quickly to make the necessary repairs and get customers back online. We apologize for the inconvenience.”Spectrum told 404 Media that it didn’t have any further details to share about the incident so we have no idea how the company learned a bullet hit its equipment, where the bullet was found, and if the police are involved. Texas is a massive state with overlapping police jurisdictions and a lot of guns. Finding a specific shooting incident related to telecom equipment in the vast suburban sprawl around Dallas is probably impossible.
Fiber optic cable lines are often buried underground, protected from the vagaries of southern gunfire. But that’s not always the case, fiber can be strung along telephone poles in the sky and sent to a vast and complicated network junction boxes and service stations that overlap different municipalities and cities, each with their own laws about how the cable can be installed. That can leave pieces of the physical infrastructure of the internet exposed to gunfire and other mischief.
This is not the first time gunfire has taken down the internet. In 2022, Xfinity fiber cable in Oakland, California went offline after people allegedly fired 17 rounds into the air near one of the company’s fiber lines. Around 30,000 people were offline during that outage and it happened moments before the start of an NFL game that saw the Los Angeles Rams square off against the San Francisco 49ers.
“We could not be more apologetic and sincerely upset that this is happening on a day like today,” Comcast spokesperson Joan Hammel told Dater Center Dynamics at the time. Hammel added that the company has seen gunshot wounds on its equipment before. “While this isn’t completely uncommon, it is pretty rare, but we know it when we see it.”
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"I’m Canceling My Subscription": Xbox Players Call to "Boycott" Game Pass "Hard" Over 50% Price Increase As Microsoft’s Website Crashes from Mass Cancellations
Microsoft just raised the price of Xbox Game Pass Ultimate to $29.99/month, and fans aren’t happy. Many are canceling, some are calling for a boycott, and even Microsoft’s website is struggling to keep up.
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US | FCC chairman leads “cruel” vote to take Wi-Fi access away from school kids
FCC Republicans kill funding for Wi-Fi hotspot lending and Wi-Fi on school buses.
So your argument is a “he said she said” <...>
and then quoted the applicable (Universal Service) law that directly contradics Carr's bullshit.
UK | Covid cases rising with new variants 'Nimbus' and 'Stratus'
Unwell with a bad throat and temperature? You may have one of the new Covid strains circulating this autumn.
Archived version: archive.is/20250930133514/bbc.…
Disclaimer: The article linked is from a single source with a single perspective. Make sure to cross-check information against multiple sources to get a comprehensive view on the situation.
Tim Berners-Lee Invented the World Wide Web. Now He Wants to Save It
Tim Berners-Lee may have the smallest fame-to-impact ratio of anyone living. Strangers hardly ever recognize his face; on “Jeopardy!,” his name usually goes for at least sixteen hundred dollars. Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web, in 1989, but people informed of this often respond with a joke: Wasn’t that Al Gore? Still, his creation keeps growing, absorbing our reality in the process. If you’re reading this online, Berners-Lee wrote the hypertext markup language (HTML) that your browser is interpreting. He’s the necessary condition behind everything from Amazon to Wikipedia, and if A.I. brings about what Sam Altman recently called “the gentle singularity”—or else buries us in slop—that, too, will be an outgrowth of his global collective consciousness.Somehow, the man responsible for all of this is a mild-mannered British Unitarian who loves model trains and folk music, and recently celebrated his seventieth birthday with a picnic on a Welsh mountain. An emeritus professor at Oxford and M.I.T., he divides his time between the U.K., Canada, and Concord, Massachusetts, where he and his wife, Rosemary Leith, live in a stout greige house older than the Republic. On the summer morning when I visited, geese honked and cicadas whined. Leith, an investor and a nonprofit director who co-founded a dot-com-era women’s portal called Flametree, greeted me at the door. “We’re basically guardians of the house,” she said, showing me its antique features. I almost missed Berners-Lee in the converted-barn kitchen, standing, expectantly, in a blue plaid shirt. He shook my hand, then glanced at Leith. “Are you a canoer?” she asked. Minutes later, he and I were gliding across a pond behind the house.
Berners-Lee is bronzed and wiry, with sharp cheekbones and faraway blue eyes, the right one underscored by an X-shaped wrinkle. There’s a recalcitrant blond tuft at the back of his balding head; in quiet moments, I could picture Ralph Fiennes playing him in a movie—the internet’s careworn steward, ruminating on some techno-political conundrum. A twitchier figure emerged when he spoke. He muttered and trailed off, eyes darting, or froze midsentence, as though to buffer, before delivering a verbal torrent. It was the arrhythmia of a disciplined demeanor struggling with a restless mind. “Tim has always been difficult to understand,” a former colleague of his told me. “He speaks in hypertext.”
He visibly relaxed as we paddled onto the water. Berners-Lee swims daily when it’s warm, and sometimes invites members of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) to “pondithons,” or pond-based hackathons. “We have a joke that if you get any number of them on the island, then they form a quorum, and can make decisions,” he said, indicating a gazebo-size clump of foliage. He spoke of the web as though it were a small New England town and he one of the selectmen. Berners-Lee raised his two children in nearby Lexington, the cradle of the American Revolution, and rose early for the annual Patriots’ Day festivities. “We took them to the reënactment on the Battle Green,” he recalled, “and the midnight ride of Paul Revere.”
The Founding Fathers idolized Cincinnatus, who was appointed dictator to save the Roman Republic, then peacefully returned to his fields. Berners-Lee is admired in a similar spirit—not only for inventing the web but for refusing to patent it. Others wrung riches from the network; Berners-Lee assumed the mantle of moral authority, fighting to safeguard the web’s openness and promote equitable access. He’s been honored accordingly: a knighthood, in 2004; the million-dollar Turing Award, in 2016.
Now Sir Tim has written a memoir, “This Is for Everyone,” with the journalist Stephen Witt. It might have been a victory lap, but for the web’s dire situation—viral misinformation, addictive algorithms, the escalating disruptions of A.I. In such times, Berners-Lee can no longer be Cincinnatus. He has taken up the role of Paul Revere.
“They thought they were safe,” he said, as the boat startled a flock of geese. Platforms had lulled users into complacent dependency, then sealed off the exits, revealing themselves as extractive monopolies. Berners-Lee’s escape hatch is a project called the Solid Protocol, whose mission is to revolutionize the web by giving users control over their data. To accelerate its adoption, he launched a company, Inrupt, in 2017. “We can build a new world in which we get the functionality of things like Facebook and Instagram,” he told me. “And we don’t need to ask for permission.”
Berners-Lee knows that the obstacles are formidable. But he’s pulled off a miracle before. “Young people don’t understand what it took to make the web,” he said. “It took companies giving up their patent rights, it took individuals giving up their time and energy, it took bright people giving up their ideas for the sake of a common idea.” The dock slid into view just as he reached a crescendo. Smiling, he set down his paddle. “Shall I drop you here?”
Italy poll finds 15% see attacks on Jewish people as 'justifiable'
Around 15% of Italians consider physical attacks on Jewish people "entirely or fairly justifiable", according to a survey published on Tuesday, as protests against Israel's offensive in Gaza continue across the country.
Archived version: archive.is/20251001151317/reut…
Disclaimer: The article linked is from a single source with a single perspective. Make sure to cross-check information against multiple sources to get a comprehensive view on the situation.
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Drone Strikes Shut 38% of Russia’s Oil Refineries, Gasoline Output Falls 1 Million Tons
As of September 28, 38% of primary refining capacity – equal to 338,000 tons per day – was offline, with gasoline output falling by 1 million tons.
Archived version: archive.is/newest/kyivpost.com…
Disclaimer: The article linked is from a single source with a single perspective. Make sure to cross-check information against multiple sources to get a comprehensive view on the situation.
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Nepal chooses a 2-year-old girl as new living goddess worshipped by both Hindus and Buddhists
A 2-year-old girl has been chosen as Nepal’s new living goddess, known as the Kumari. Aryatara Shakya replaces the previous Kumari, who has followed the tradition of stepping down upon reaching puberty.
Archived version: archive.is/20251001214125/apne…
Disclaimer: The article linked is from a single source with a single perspective. Make sure to cross-check information against multiple sources to get a comprehensive view on the situation.
Ukraine Officially Reveals Long-Range Neptune-D Missile With 1,000 km Reach
The RK-360L missile, a land-attack variant of the Neptune system, boasts a range of 1,000 km and increased warhead capacity for versatile targeting.
Archived version: archive.is/newest/united24medi…
Disclaimer: The article linked is from a single source with a single perspective. Make sure to cross-check information against multiple sources to get a comprehensive view on the situation.
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Chornobyl Nuclear Plant loses power after Russian attack on nearby town, Energy Ministry says
"Due to power surges, the New Safe Confinement — the key structure that isolates the destroyed 4th reactor of the Chornobyl Nuclear Power Plant and prevents the release of radioactive materials into the environment — was left without electricity," the Energy Ministry said.
Archived version: archive.is/20251001202906/kyiv…
Disclaimer: The article linked is from a single source with a single perspective. Make sure to cross-check information against multiple sources to get a comprehensive view on the situation.
Chornobyl Nuclear Plant loses power after Russian attack on nearby town, Energy Ministry says
"Due to power surges, the New Safe Confinement — the key structure that isolates the destroyed 4th reactor of the Chornobyl Nuclear Power Plant and prevents the release of radioactive materials into the environment — was left without electricity," th…Kateryna Denisova (The Kyiv Independent)
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Germany arrests three alleged Hamas members on suspicion of plotting attacks
Germany’s federal prosecutor on Wednesday said three alleged members of Palestinian group Hamas were arrested on suspicion of plotting attacks on Israeli or Jewish institutions.
Archived version: archive.is/newest/france24.com…
Disclaimer: The article linked is from a single source with a single perspective. Make sure to cross-check information against multiple sources to get a comprehensive view on the situation.
Germany arrests three alleged Hamas members on suspicion of plotting attacks
Germany’s federal prosecutor on Wednesday said three alleged members of Palestinian group Hamas were arrested on suspicion of plotting attacks on Israeli or Jewish institutions.FRANCE 24
v2.0.0: Stable Release of Immich (complete with Merch and DVD)
v2.0.0 - Stable Release of Immich · immich-app immich · Discussion #22546
v2.0.0 - Stable Release of Immich Watch the video Welcome Hello everyone, After: ~1,337 days, 271 releases, 78,000 stars on GitHub, 1,558 contributors, 31,500 members on Discord, 36,000 members on ...GitHub
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French military boards Russia-linked oil tanker suspected of launching drones
Tanker, named on list of ‘shadow fleet’ vessels, may have been launchpad for drones that closed Denmark airports
Archived version: archive.is/20251001173009/theg…
Disclaimer: The article linked is from a single source with a single perspective. Make sure to cross-check information against multiple sources to get a comprehensive view on the situation.
v2.0.0: Stable Release of Immich (complete with Merch and DVD)
v2.0.0 - Stable Release of Immich · immich-app immich · Discussion #22546
v2.0.0 - Stable Release of Immich Watch the video Welcome Hello everyone, After: ~1,337 days, 271 releases, 78,000 stars on GitHub, 1,558 contributors, 31,500 members on Discord, 36,000 members on ...GitHub
Russia-appointed ‘stooge’ mayor killed in apparent drone strike by Ukraine
Vladimir Leontyev had been convicted in absentia of collaboration with the enemy.
Archived version: archive.is/newest/tvpworld.com…
Disclaimer: The article linked is from a single source with a single perspective. Make sure to cross-check information against multiple sources to get a comprehensive view on the situation.
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Jane Goodall, dogged advocate for the natural world, has died aged 91
Acclaimed conservationist and chimpanzee expert Jane Goodall has died, leaving behind a legacy of empathy for primates and the natural world
Archived version: archive.is/newest/newscientist…
Disclaimer: The article linked is from a single source with a single perspective. Make sure to cross-check information against multiple sources to get a comprehensive view on the situation.
Data breach at dealership software provider impacts 766k clients
A ransomware attack at Motility Software Solutions, a provider of dealer management software (DMS), has exposed the sensitive data of 766,000 customers.
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Live: Samud Flotilla being intercepted by the IDF
Livestreams - Global Movement to Gaza
Watch live streams and video updates from the Global Sumud Flotilla sailing to Gaza.globalsumudflotilla.org
Colombia to cancel free trade deal with Israel, "reform" treaty with US
Colombia’s President Gustavo Petro said Monday that his government will end its free trade agreement with Israel and seeks to revise the one with the United States.
Petro made the announcement during a cabinet meeting amid rapidly deteriorating tensions with its former partners over Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza, which is largely sponsored by the US.
The announcement came shortly after an open letter by the Colombo-American Chamber of Commerce, which said that 500 businessmen distanced themselves from the president’s opposition to the genocide.
According to Petro, the “pro-gringo” businessmen failed to understand that life comes before trade.
Colombia to cancel free trade deal with Israel, "reform" treaty with US
Colombia’s President Gustavo Petro said Monday that his government will end its free trade agreement with Israel and seeks to revise the one with the United States.
Petro made the announcement during a cabinet meeting amid rapidly deteriorating tensions with its former partners over Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza, which is largely sponsored by the US.
The announcement came shortly after an open letter by the Colombo-American Chamber of Commerce, which said that 500 businessmen distanced themselves from the president’s opposition to the genocide.
According to Petro, the “pro-gringo” businessmen failed to understand that life comes before trade.
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Colombia to cancel free trade deal with Israel, “reform” treaty with US [Adriaan Alsema | SEP 30 2025 | colombiareports.com]
(Image: President's Office)
Colombia’s President Gustavo Petro said Monday that his government will end its free trade agreement with Israel and seeks to revise the one with the United States.
Petro made the announcement during a cabinet meeting amid rapidly deteriorating tensions with its former partners over Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza, which is largely sponsored by the US.
The announcement came shortly after an open letter by the Colombo-American Chamber of Commerce, which said that 500 businessmen distanced themselves from the president’s opposition to the genocide.
According to Petro, the “pro-gringo” businessmen failed to understand that life comes before trade.
"Trade is not more important than life, as the 500 pro-gringo businessmen, who are not Colombian or do not appear to be, would have us believe. They are more interested in exporting trinkets to the United States than in preserving life on the planet." -- President Gustavo Petro
“We are not the kind of business that bows down to greed and that means we will also reform the FTA and that means we will no longer have an FTA,” said the president.
Consequently, “the coal companies that export [to Israel] must fold or sell their concessions,” said Petro.
US says they’ll revoke visa of Colombia’s president for call on US soldiers to disobey Trump
Apart from ending the free trade deal with Israel and seeking changes in the treaty with the US, Petro ordered the ministers of trade and transport, to prioritize road infrastructure projects that would allow increased trade with the rest of South America.
"We had the most powerful international trade agreement with the Andean Pact. And now the political satraps come out and say that it is with the United States. When was that the case? Our industrial goods were sold to Venezuela and Ecuador. There was always food trade in the Andean Pact. Why did we abandon the Andean Pact? To prioritize a free trade agreement with the United States that hurts us." -- President Gustavo Petro
The president additionally ordered his foreign minister, Rosa Villavicencio, to replace the personnel at the Colombian embassy to Beijing, claiming that his attempts to strengthen ties with China were being sabotaged.
The government began improving trade relations with China earlier this year in response to an apparent trade war on the rest of the world declared by Trump after taking office.^[[1] https://archive.ph/q1UQ2]
How to get subtitles in jellyfin
I was a regular Plex user, until they had their mental breakdown recently. So I switched to jellyfin. I have only two problems with jellyfin so far. One of them is subtitles (the other is the "remote controller" doesn't always sync properly).
Plex had an integrated subtitle downloader. You could just start a show, see that it was lacking subtitles and Plex could isntantly download subtitles for you. That doesn't seem to work in Jellyfin.
Is there an option or a plugin somewhere that can do/fix this for jellyfin?
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Ollama on Fedora Silverblue
Ollama on Fedora Silverblue
I found myself dealing with various rough edges and questions around running Ollama on Fedora Silverblue for the past few months. These arise from the fact that there are a few different ways of in…Debarshi's den
The BlueSky Patent Non-Aggression Pledge is Good for The Social Web
We are happy to see the patent non-aggression pledge published by BlueSky today.
Software patents and related intellectual property can have a dampening effect on innovation in an entire application domain, such as distributed social networks. They make developers use complex, roundabout methods to do simple tasks, just to avoid the appearance of using a technique that may or may not be patented by another company now or in the future.
By offering this pledge, BlueSky makes it that much easier for everyone in this entire area — not just those working on ATProto or closely linked technologies — to more safely explore techniques without worrying about patent trolls pouncing on them or their users sometime in the future. It was a brave and generous step on their part.
The ActivityPub specifications, including Activity Streams, are covered by the W3C Patent Policy which gives good protection from patents by the specification creators and the W3C member organizations. Patent licensing is an important advantage of working in an open standards organization.
With the BlueSky patent pledge, another distributed social networking protocol and its related technologies are free to explore and re-use with less worry about paying royalties to a patent holder. It’s a good step forward in the ecosystem.
We hope companies and projects in other distributed social network ecosystems follow up on this step by releasing their own patent pledges, or developing their standards in an open standards organization like the W3C.
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Hey Google, meet Gemini: the new voice of your smart home
Hey Google, meet Gemini: the new voice of your smart home
Google is replacing Google Assistant with Gemini on every Google Home and Nest speaker or display, bringing natural language, context, and new smart home features.Jennifer Pattison Tuohy (The Verge)
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Launching October 1st, Gemini For Home is a suite of new AI-powered features for Google’s smart home hardware and software.The biggest change: Gemini is replacing Google Assistant on all of Google’s smart speakers, all the way back to the original Google Home speaker. This LLM-powered upgrade, announced at Google I/O, will be available through an Early Access program at first, with a wider rollout planned for next year.
On smart speakers, Gemini brings an entirely new voice assistant that uses and understands natural language, can interpret context, and can pull in more real-time information. You still activate it with the wake words “hey Google,” but Google Assistant has been evicted.
“Gemini for Home is the intelligence for your entire home,” Anish Kattukaran, head of product at Google Home and Nest, tells The Verge. “It’s not going to just replace Assistant on speakers and displays, but it’s going to upgrade your other devices as well, your cameras and doorbells, where you interact with those devices, and bring those smarts collectively to your entire home.”
I'm not excited for Apple to invent smart homes after this, completing the duopoly of LLMs being in everyone's homes even harder than before.
Long live Home Assistant
Home Assistant
Open source home automation that puts local control and privacy first. Powered by a worldwide community of tinkerers and DIY enthusiasts. Perfect to run on a Raspberry Pi or a local server.Home Assistant
Strike called in Italy, protests flare over interception of Gaza aid ships
ROME, Oct 1 (Reuters) - Italian unions called a general strike for Friday in solidarity with the international aid flotilla for Gaza, while protests sprang up in a number of cities late on Wednesday after reports that the ships had been intercepted by military personnel.
In the southern city of Naples, demonstrators got into the main railway station and halted train traffic, while police surrounded the Termini railway station in Rome after protesters gathered close to entrances.
"The aggression against civilian ships that were carrying Italian citizens is an extremely serious matter," the CGIL union said, calling the strike which other smaller unions said they would join.
In the northwestern city of Genoa, the USB announced that it intended to block the port and called on all protesters to gather at 10 p.m. (2000 GMT) at one of the main entrances.
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Strike called in Italy, protests flare over interception of Gaza aid ships
ROME, Oct 1 (Reuters) - Italian unions called a general strike for Friday in solidarity with the international aid flotilla for Gaza, while protests sprang up in a number of cities late on Wednesday after reports that the ships had been intercepted by military personnel.
In the southern city of Naples, demonstrators got into the main railway station and halted train traffic, while police surrounded the Termini railway station in Rome after protesters gathered close to entrances.
"The aggression against civilian ships that were carrying Italian citizens is an extremely serious matter," the CGIL union said, calling the strike which other smaller unions said they would join.
In the northwestern city of Genoa, the USB announced that it intended to block the port and called on all protesters to gather at 10 p.m. (2000 GMT) at one of the main entrances.
Strike called in Italy, protests flare over interception of Gaza aid ships
ROME, Oct 1 (Reuters) - Italian unions called a general strike for Friday in solidarity with the international aid flotilla for Gaza, while protests sprang up in a number of cities late on Wednesday after reports that the ships had been intercepted by military personnel.
In the southern city of Naples, demonstrators got into the main railway station and halted train traffic, while police surrounded the Termini railway station in Rome after protesters gathered close to entrances.
"The aggression against civilian ships that were carrying Italian citizens is an extremely serious matter," the CGIL union said, calling the strike which other smaller unions said they would join.
In the northwestern city of Genoa, the USB announced that it intended to block the port and called on all protesters to gather at 10 p.m. (2000 GMT) at one of the main entrances.
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Pope Leo hits out at critics of global warming
Pope Leo hits out at critics of global warming
In his first major statement on climate change, the pontiff criticises those who minimise climate change.Matt McGrath (BBC News)
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It's ultimately good news, but the framing is bizarre.
Who criticises global warming? Well, people like us, and pope Leo. As opposed to people who'd rather criticise us and claim that global warming is no biggie (or even not happening).
Similarly, who minimises climate change? Well, people who are actually doing something about it. People who are switching away from burning fossil fuels and taking other steps to minimise the impact of not only themselves, but others, by working in fields like renewable energy, transit, heat pumps, etc.
Even the other framing of "minimising the impact of climate change" means working with adaptation strategies.
I can only assume the framing is so weird because of choices the BBC made.
My dad, very strong "Catholic". Pope says something, my dad, "ahh don't listen to him, he's an idiot"
My interpretation is he's not actually catholic just likes the church because sometime he can use it to justify his bigotry, when it's convenient for him and nobody has the energy to challenge the hypocrisy
Probably very few people will change their mind. It might sway a few Catholics who are on the fence about global climate change (somehow).
But what the Pope says will have an impact on young people from Catholic families who haven't learned much about climate change. Especially in places like the Philippines where climate change is quite literally lapping at their shores.
The idea that all Catholics have to do what the Pope says, or even agree with the Pope, is, frankly, anti-Catholic bullcrap - back when I was a very very small child, John Birch Society bigots were passing out pamphlets claiming JFK would be taking his orders from the Vatican.
But what the Pope does have is moral and persuasive authority. And when teenagers are growing up and learning about the world, and TikTok and right wing news are spewing all sorts of climate denial garbage at them, and they're being bombarded from all sides by the message that all politicians are liars and everybody's out to take your money and trying to change anything is hopeless - don't underestimate the influence of someone who's respected as not just a world leader but a good man.
Hades 2's latest hotfix rectifies narrative hiccups and stops Olympus runs ending in the most frustrating way I can imagine
Hades 2 devs Supergiant have released the roguelike's first 1.0 hotfix, rectifying a list of issues that includes some narrative scipting.
grue
in reply to silence7 • • •Honestly, could be worse. Hydrogen is a greenwashing scam anyway.
The bad part is that funding for wind and solar projects is apparently being cancelled, too.
On an unrelated note, I had to read that article with some bullshit popup about ToS demanding binding arbitration and a class action waiver superimposed on it because I refused to tap "accept." Binding arbitration and a class-action waiver, just to read a damn web page! Fucking delusional.
Bloomberg is shit; please find a better source.
Hypx
in reply to grue • • •grue
in reply to Hypx • • •On the contrary, hydrogen itself is fossil fuel propaganda. They sell it on its "potential" for being generated via electrolysis using renewable electricity ("green hydrogen"), but in practice the vast majority of it comes from cracking natural gas ("gray hydrogen"). And that "potential" will never come to fruition, because by the time it would battery electric vehicle ("BEV") tech and infrastructure will be so far ahead there won't be a point anymore.
We should just face facts: a hydrogen car is, in practice, a CNG car, except that you've converted the fuel into a form that makes it (even more of) a pain in the ass to handle for no good reason.
If anything, if we're really Hell-bent on non-BEV solutions then we should go the opposite way and work on synthesizing "green hydrogen" into hydrocarbon liquid fuel so that we can use it with the fueling infrastructure and internal-combustion vehicles we already have, making that stuff carbon-neutral.
Hypx
in reply to grue • • •Except that's total bullshit. In fact, it's literally same argument used against BEVs in the past. There was a time when any talk of BEVs were shouted down by people who kept insisting that the grid is being powered by coal or natural gas, and that BEVs were nothing more than "coal-powered cars" and the like. But now we know that's nonsense. Electricity can be made green, whereas fossil fuels cannot. Same is true of hydrogen.
The other point is that we are push hard towards the limits of BEVs can really achieve. We'll never see long-ranged airplanes powered by batteries, and same can be said of ocean-going ships. Many industries stand no chance of switching to batteries either. They either require a fire source, or need the chemistry provided by hydrogen. Nor will the grid reach zero emissions without long-duration energy storage, which will require hydrogen in most cases. So if you actually think this problem through, you'll realize that batteries alone are only going to solve a small part of the problem. Everything else will require hydrogen in some way.
E-fuels will require prodigious amounts of green hydrogen to exist at scale. They are produced by combining H2 with CO2. While I don't rule them out as a solution, it will require massive investments in hydrogen first. It is not an excuse to dismiss hydrogen.
grue
in reply to Hypx • • •It doesn't require "massive investments in hydrogen," though! It just requires electrolyzing the hydrogen, and that's the easy part. It can be done right there in the same facility as the Fischer-Tropsch reactions, so the end product you're distributing everywhere is a convenient liquid and all you need to handle the hydrogen gas itself is a short chunk of pipe going between reaction vessels.
The "massive investments in hydrogen" for the "hydrogen economy" are all the absurd cryogenic or ludicrously high-pressure storage tanks to build out the entire distribution and fuel station network that we'd need to use actual H~2~ as an energy storage medium instead of just an intermediate step in an industrial process. None of it is necessary for synthetic liquid fuels.
Hypx
in reply to grue • • •Having enough electrolyzers for that is still a huge investment. Plenty of naysayers have said, and still are saying, that this alone is impossible. Also, if we can make the Fischer-Tropsch process cost-effective for making synthetic fuels, then green hydrogen would have already become really cheap by then.
No one is wedded to the idea of always using pure H2 for everything. The pro-H2 position is simply pointing out that green hydrogen is necessary for solving climate change, even if that means making synthetic fuels in the end. But it is worth saying that using pure H2 is not some huge challenge. Having to use cryogenic fuels or high pressure tanks are already possible in cars today.
grue
in reply to Hypx • • •Wat?
An electrolytic cell is just a couple of chunks of metal stuck in some water and hooked up to a voltage source, plus some tubes to collect the gases. It's so simple elementary school kids could build one in science class, and (unlike the proton exchange membrane in a fuel cell) requires no exotic materials or complicated-to-manufacture components.
If that's true, we've been talking past each other and don't disagree as much as it seemed. But I'm not convinced it is. Every time I've seen folks talking about the "hydrogen economy," it's in the context of building out a shitload of infrastructure for carting gaseous H~2~ around, with zero mention of making synthetic liquid fuels.
And that latter part is the point I care about: it's true that batteries are never gonna be viable for stuff like aviation, but gaseous H~2~ fuel cells won't be either. The real future for that stuff looks a lot like the present, except using non-fossil feedstocks to make the same sorts of fuels we're already using. That could mean fuel synthesized from hydrogen, or biofuel, or some mix of both -- it doesn't even matter as long as it performs the same as the Jet A or whatever you're trying to replace -- but it's definitely gonna be a liquid that's easy to handle with the infrastructure we already have and it's probably gonna be burned in the same sorts of combustion engines we're already using, not reacted in a fuel cell.
The goal is carbon-neutral fuel made from non-fossil sources, for those use-cases batteries aren't good for. Hydrogen is only part of one possible solution, and a pretty incidental part at that. Talking about the "hydrogen economy" is missing the point.
It's "possible," sure, but at huge cost and complexity that means it's flat out dumb compared to using a liquid fuel. And that's never gonna change.
By the way, I'd like to get back to my original "greenwashing scam" point for a minute. Consider that there are two orthogonal issues here:
With "the hydrogen economy," a huge emphasis is placed on the latter of those two issues, while the former is just sort of hand-waved as a trivial detail we'll get to later, even though transitioning from "gray" to "green" hydrogen is also a huge unsolved problem that isn't trivial at all.
Meanwhile, with liquid fuels and combustion engines, the latter is a solved problem, so there's no excuse to direct less than full attention to the former.
So if you're an entity with a vested interest in fossil fuel extraction, what're you gonna do? You're gonna push for hydrogen, of course, because it provides a whole extra set of distracting issues for engjneers and tree-huggers to occupy themselves with that aren't getting down to the brass tacks of actually replacing the fossil feedstock with a sustainable one.
Hypx
in reply to grue • • •You and I might know that, but the loudest critics of hydrogen do not. They really think that this step is impossible.
Just to be clear, green synthetic fuels are a huge ask. We will need direct air capture of CO2 before it is feasible at scale. It is a technology only now coming into view, and is still effectively impossible at this very moment.
For aviation, the conversation was always centered around either SAF (either biofuels or synthetic fuels) or LH2.
FYI, batteries are themselves never going to be truly green. You will always have a dirty supply chain for their production and mining. Today, that requires vast amounts of fossil fuels to be used. Even if you really believe batteries can solve most of transportation, there will still be a major reason to abandon BEVs in transportation at some point in the future.
Then you are making a similar mistake that the critics of electrolyzers are making: Forgetting that this is just a series of pipes and tanks, and those are dirt cheap to scale up. Cheaper than expanding the grid BTW. If we have to use gaseous or liquid hydrogen, we could easily do it.
Transitioning from gray to green hydrogen is trivial. It's literally the same process that the grid is going through now. Nothing changes for the end-user, since it is the same thing to them, just like green electricity. In fact, the reason why this conversation is happening at all is because pro-hydrogen people are certain this step is easily solved.
Actually making green hydrocarbon fuels in the quantities needed is not a trivial problem. It is likely just as difficult, if not more so, than figuring out how to distribute pure hydrogen. It needs to be mentioned that we can pipe hydrogen just like natural gas. The infrastructure for that is already largely built.
Fossil fuel companies would strongly oppose any kind of green energy. It's a conspiracy theory to think that would support the lesser of two apocalyptic outcomes. At best, only the pipeline companies would accept a transition to green hydrogen. But that is the same situation as the utility companies, and we don't spread conspiracy theories about the BEVs being a trick by the utility companies.
grue
in reply to Hypx • • •Okay, good point. I was thinking about how we have all that point-source CO~2~ coming from our legacy fossil fuel power plants, but we'd still also need a separate source of clean electricity. If we built that, it would make more sense to replace the fossil fuel plant with it than to augment it. You'd have to refine the transportation fuel from petroleum the normal way, but that's more efficient than doing the hydrogen synthesis thing using dirty electricity.
Hey now, I didn't say that! I was just talking about the relative merits of batteries vs. fuel cells vs. normal combustion engines running on synthetic or bio fuels.
The real way to "solve most of transportation" is zoning reform that results in cities with walkable density. Bicycles come in second, and rail transit a distant third. Cars of any type are really only suitable for the 20% of the population that's rural, service vehicles, contractors and delivery people that need to haul bigger loads than fit on a cargo bike, etc.
(Speaking of which, once you reduce the demand for vehicle fuel that much, stuff like biodiesel made from waste veggie oil starts to look plentiful enough to make a decent dent in the market. That, at least, has been a solved problem for decades, and I've got the '90s VW and B100 fuel receipts to prove it.)
Anyway, I'm still pretty skeptical about building out an entire "economy" around storage and distribution of a gas that's so famously difficult to store that it can leak straight through metal, and more bullish than you are on synthetic fuel processes that we've known how to do for a century but just haven't bothered commercializing/scaling up because fossil fuels have been too cheap, but I'm kinda running out of motivation to continue defending my position on it. Thanks for the interesting discussion!
Hypx
in reply to grue • • •Not even close. Even if all cars were eliminated, there will still be enormous commercial need for fuels, such as commercial trucking, shipping, aviation, mining, construction, etc. Not to mention that growing crops for biodiesel require massive energy inputs in the form of fertilizers, pesticides, farm equipment, etc. And of course, the farmland needed will displace food production, which is its own major problem.
Which is why biofuels can never really be taken seriously as part of a green economy.
Sure, same here.
grue
in reply to Hypx • • •Mostly unnecessary; that's what freight trains are for. (Short-haul from freight depot to loading dock can be handled by battery electric trucks.)
Believe it or not, sails! Obviously you're not going to get a 100% reduction because modern shipping companies wouldn't tolerate being becalmed (and I'm not falling for that article's "up to 90%" claim either, BTW -- I only picked that one to link because it has a decent overview of multiple different technologies), but it can still make a big dent in the fuel requirements.
Not much you can do about how much fuel a given flight uses... but you can reduce the number of flights by shifting travelers to high-speed passenger rail instead.
In other words, stuff that doesn't actually go anywhere (instead just driving back and forth on a site that probably has good access to the grid or a generator), which means it's (comparatively) real easy to electrify.
Who said anything about that? I was talking about waste veggie oil.
I'm not sure you fully appreciate how large a reduction in automobile/trucking/shipping/construction equipment fuel use I'm proposing. I'm saying we should electrify or modal-shift so much of the demand that biodiesel made from just the stuff thrown out by restaurants and meat-packing plants and whatnot -- without even growing bespoke crops for it -- could satisfy most of what remains.
Sails and kites support cargo ships: cargo-partner
www.cargo-partner.comHypx
in reply to grue • • •No. Absolutely not. Sorry, but I cannot this claim seriously at all. We are not going to switch to sail ships again. I don't think you grasp just how big modern shipping actually is, and how impossible such an idea really is.
I doubt you have any grasp of how massive the problem really is, and how tiny your proposed solutions are in comparison. For instance, you keep citing the possibility of using waste cooking oil for biofuels. Well, the world only makes 3.7 billion gallons of that per year: oilandenergyonline.com/article…
Converted to barrels of oil equivalence, that's around 100 million barrels. The problem? That's literally one day's worth of petroleum consumption: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_…
So you are about 0.3% of the way of solving the problem with that idea. Even if we could radically reduce petroleum use in the way you are imagining, that's still going to be a negligible impact. And the world's GDP is still growing. There's still multiple billions of people that will want to live like the first world. So demand for energy will skyrocket in the coming decades, not decrease. The problem will only get exponentially larger and harder to solve.
Ultimately, this is eco-Ludditism, and is more about wishing away the problem than actually solving it. Worse, you enabling the worse stereotypes about environmentalists. Namely that they are crazy wackos who aren't willing to engage with reality. Any solution must take seriously the idea that there >8 billion people on Earth now, and they all want to live in convenience.
Wikimedia list article
Contributors to Wikimedia projects (Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.)humanspiral
in reply to Hypx • • •I'm hopeful for wind powered shipping. An abundant H2 supply would accelerate this youtu.be/HFIzcPBGGEQ (1.2mw high altitude turbine thethered to large ship) that can scale even higher.
- YouTube
youtu.behumanspiral
in reply to grue • • •e-fuels or bio fuels are only short term solutions that are greenwashing because in the short term there is insufficient green H2 abundance. Their only value is to keep using your existing machinery.
For new machinery/transportation, a fuel cell is 2x the efficiency of a combustion engine. It is a range extender for any battery electric machine/home, with usable waste heat. A green economy involves people eventually going back to buy fossil fuels from drug stores, because there eventually are so few machines that use them. It is greenwashing to say "we want to keep everything the same except just have very expensive gasoline".
It's simply ok to make new H2/Ammonia consuming machines that displace older machines even as people are not forced to upgrade until they are ready. In long term, H2 will always be cheaper than e-fuels in addition to being 2x the energy value with far more flexible use.
humanspiral
in reply to grue • • •That happens to be fossil fuel propaganda for e-fuels. The process is a heat based industrial scale, where fossil fuel supply chains are already developed, and H2 "extraction" is part of a continuous heat process, and ample CO (often co2 processed into CO) generation is part of the process. Furthermore these are net 0 fuels which are not good enough, or as good as green fuels. A reasonable carbon tax is $300/ton. Direct air capture can reach costs below this amount, and compete with green transition, but only if the CO2 is permanently sequestered or solidified. 0 credit would be given if e-fuels CO2/CO content comes from fossil fuels or air capture.
Again, H2 or Ammonia, are the right long term fuels. They can be synthesized without the heat-based industrial processes, or at least use H2 for the heat. H2 economy means smaller scale production distributed closer to customers.
grue
in reply to humanspiral • • •No, it doesn't, because it's my own original thought and I'm not a fossil fuel propaganist.
I'm not talking about fucking cracking natural gas; I'm talking about building an electrolysis plant running on renewable electricity next to a former refinery doing all the hydrocarbon chemistry that has been adaptively reused to make synthetic fuel. The hydrogen is not supposed to be coming from petroleum!
On the contrary, carbon neutral is absolutely good enough. Why the hell wouldn't it be?!
Again, you're wrong about H~2~ because throwing out all the liquid fuel infrastructure we already have to switch to the most difficult-to-handle choice short of something hypergolic is just fundamentally stupid.
I don't know anything about ammonia; maybe it really is the right solution. It's kind of a different topic, though. Do you want to start talking about that instead?
humanspiral
in reply to grue • • •H2 (or green electricity) is carbon negative when it displaces FF use. unnecessary and expensive efuels are not. DAC is/can be carbon negative. But sequestering the CO2 is less expense than combining it with H2 into an efuel that negates the capture value of DAC. A carbon tax and dividend is a better social mechanism for cost (including climate cost) reductions even when investing in DAC reduces the tax collections and dividends.
A misunderstanding, that stems from extreme volume of disinformation, is that energy transition means "first we have to nuke all infrastructure from orbit" strawman, that is used to protect the status quo. Instead, less then no new dead ender energy infrastructure investments should be made during transition, and then one day, fairly far away, old inefficient machinery will not be worth repairing, even though access to fuel will continue existing for a very long time, and no matter how inneficient it is, a machine will be sold for something greater than 0 to someone who needs it for backup, or because it is cheap.
Just because you can't hold H2 in your existing beer mug container doesn't mean H2 handling is not a largely solved problem. Ammonia is higher energy density than liquid H2 with propane container handling solutions.
humanspiral
in reply to grue • • •Obviously, an H2 economy has to be green H2 based. Pure H2 will always be cheaper than e-fuels, because the latter is more steps. An airplane costs 100x in lifetime fuel as its purchase price, and H2 will always be cheaper in addition to more range due to it being the highest energy density fuel.
Much anti-H2 propaganda has come from BEV stockholder base. H2 is not a threat to BEVs, and can help refuel them quicker/cheaper in public chargers, but in no way does it stop the people who understand batteries to make better batteries.
grue
in reply to humanspiral • • •It has to be that to be a good thing, but it doesn't have to be that to exist. There are plenty of people pushing for spending $$$$$$$$$ on fuel cell cars and hydrogen fuel stations even when they're just being used with cracked natural gas for no actual environmental benefit.
It's like pretending your diesel car is green even though you've never put a drop of B100 in it.
At the point of production, sure. At the point of use, not so much, since hydrogen is so much more difficult/expensive to store and transport.
Energy density by weight, not by volume. It doesn't do much good to have longer range if you can't carry enough cargo because too much of the plane is taken up by fuel tanks.
humanspiral
in reply to grue • • •It actually does. Making H2 from NG, for heat/transportation, is using NG with extra expensive steps. H2 already exists as a fundamental chemical (including Ammonia) for agriculture and rocket fuel. An H2 economy is for expanded use, and green H2 is only economic possible case.
fatter planes with fatter delta wings.
silence7
in reply to grue • • •There are both processes which need it to decarbonize like nitrate fertilizer manufacturing, and things like cars where you can get the same outcome more cheaply via other methods, leaving hydrogen based systems as greenwashing.
On the whole, this is not great.
And I'm unwilling to ditch Bloomberg; they're doing a meaningful chunk of the environmental tech reporting right now, and gift links like this one enable almost everyone to access it.
Hypx
in reply to silence7 • • •silence7
in reply to Hypx • • •Hypx
in reply to silence7 • • •We've already waited decades for BEVs to be ready. It's hypocritical to say we cannot wait for anything else. And besides, hydrogen cars are in production right now, so we don't have to wait much longer for it be mainstream.
And given that the BEV is simply not going to the universal solution, there will be many people that will have to wait anyways. So we should be open to other options regardless.
silence7
in reply to Hypx • • •Hypx
in reply to silence7 • • •silence7
in reply to Hypx • • •Its literally driven by economics and practicality. People dont buy them because its cheaper and more convenient to use battery-electric.
If there had been a huge green hydrogen build out earlier, it might have been different, but it isn't
Hypx
in reply to silence7 • • •humanspiral
in reply to silence7 • • •spidermanchild
in reply to humanspiral • • •spidermanchild
in reply to Hypx • • •Hypx
in reply to spidermanchild • • •The first point to make is that hydrogen is not decades off. Green hydrogen is happening now, and its production is rapidly expanding alongside the expansion of renewable energy production. Many sectors can rapidly adopt green hydrogen right away. This is similar to the conversation we we had about solar power about a decade ago. Critics of solar power back then were being Luddites (and sometimes secret fossil fuel industry stooges). They were convinced that solar could not be cost-effective or scale, based off of very outdated understandings of the issue, but they were wrong. This conversation is repeating with green hydrogen.
On a related note, pro-electrification crusaders are being hypocrites on this subject. They themselves are demanding that we wait decades for miracle batteries or multi-decadal long electrification programs. Because they want "perfect" solutions rather than "good" solutions. A good example is how they demand we fully electrify all rail, a process that will take decades, rather than doing something faster like switching diesel trains to hydrogen trains. In reality, adopting hydrogen now, alongside more reasonable forms of electrification, will be a faster path for reducing CO2 emissions.
Also note that most "fearmongering" types of argument against hydrogen originated from the fossil fuel industry. They are always spreading propaganda intended to undermine green energy projects, and make similar claims about all green technologies. Claims that hydrogen is dangerous, or a GHG, or will leak, etc., are all fear tactics created with minimal amounts of evidence. In reality, hydrogen has very few problems, and adopting it will drastically make transportation and industry safer and more green. It is unfortunate that many environmentalists have fallen for this tactic, but I suppose every green idea had to overcome it.
Finally, you can buy hydrogen and hydrogen-related products. Sure, we are still a bit early on the adoption curve, but that is true of every new idea. Someone can buy a hydrogen car, or a furnace, or whatever right now. Many more are also capable, but don't know it yet. So rather than demonizing something for not being able to basically time travel, environmentalists should promote green ideas in order to accelerate their adoption.
humanspiral
in reply to silence7 • • •H2 is complimentary to batteries. You can discharge battery capacity that will recharge to full the next day. It's affordable enough to make already, and as a fuel, is tradeable/exportable power. Making H2 is needed to support more renewables so that surpluses aren't wasted.
Making H2 just doesn't stop you from using BEVs today or tomorrow. Faster charging for more range using a fuel that was made when, and priced because, it was conveniently sunny.
The world can get there without the US, and energy sabotage was always a GOP magnet. But anti-H2 sentiment, based on genuine disinformation, but ok perhaps overhyped Toyota prototypes prior to infrastructure maturity, has made adoption/progress slower, if only because renewables adoption has been slower than what was possible.