These two things (fascism and socialism) are not related.

Actually, they are: Like Communism, Fascism is a particular subset of socialism. But it's gotten such a bad reputation that the rest of the socialists want to avoid the fallout and go so far as to claim it's their opposite.

The fascist approach is to pick a limited number of winners - sector labor unions or corporations - and heavily regulate them.

National drug store chains turning over patent records to the cops etc. without a warrant also lets them track their movements arounjd the country.

Not as find-grained, but much quicker than trying to mine license plate reader and surveilance camera imagery from around the continent. "Where's Wally Suspect?" "He was at this Walgreens in Tacoma on June 7 but that Kroger in Phoenix yesterday."

If you're against the surveillance state over cameras, library checkouts, browser histories, or TV show selection, you certainly should be against this data leak.

"But I don't have anything to hide so I don't care." doesn't cut it when, say, some piece of a cancel culture gets control of the machinery of government (or just some piece of law enforcement) and uses it against anyone not perfectly aligned with their particular ideology.

Trump wants to be a king,

Dictator, not king. But only for a day.
Oh wait that wasn't comedy that as Trump's actual words.

They were his actual words AND comedy. He was cracking a joke.

If you had actually watched the Hannity giest-appearance / interview where he cracked it (and aren't too closed-minded to get it), you'd see he was promising voters he'd spend his first day writing executive orders undoing Biden's "first 24 hours" spree of orders shutting down all Trump's first-term policies, along with Biden's later policy changes implemted by Biden, establishing or reestablishing his own policies.

Trump knows the media outlets opposed to him will take his comments out of context - and try to censor his own actual statements and their context. So he uses it. One way is to crack jokes they'll distort into ludicrous flames. Later, when people hear what he actually said and understand how they've been gaslight, the media that distorted him are discredted and some of those people switch to supporting him.

... Google will automagically disable the site's advertising (demonitizing the entire site)

Oops. "Demonitize" is the wrong word for that, as it's denying them traffic and exposure, not money for displaying their content (which is a different branch of Google.)

Google ... says it will deindex offending platforms from search and also remove their ability to advertise. "Since this is a dynamic blocking, the search engine therefore undertakes to perform de-indexing of all websites/telematic addresses that are the subject of subsequent reports that can also be communicated by rights holders accredited to the platform," AGCOM writes. "Google has shared a procedural mode for the communication of the blocking list, and the Company has also committed to the timely removal of all advertisements that do not comply with the company's policies, having particular regard to those that invest the promotion of pirate sites referring to protected sporting events."

Did I read that right? Anyone can repost a link to a pirate feed to any free-speech discussion site and (once a purported rights owner - for instance: the operation that also posted the link) complains Google will automagically disable the site's advertising (demonitizing the entire site) and stop displaying anything from the site in response to searches (effectively hiding the entire site from Google Search users).

What an opportunity for censors worldwide! Corporate, State Actor, Political Party, Terrorist, Political Pressure Group, Vandal, Extortion, etc.

It's hard to evaluate the 500k statistic without knowing the total number of deaths in that period. Does that represent most of the deaths, or a small amount? A quick web search brought me to this page, which claims "Europe" had 9.6 million deaths in 2021. I put Europe in quotes because that is what the page says and the EU is not necessarily the same as Europe, especially as that graph goes back further than the EU. But it's probably a good rough estimate.

Interestingly, it's clear from that graph that about 1.5 million in 2021 are excess deaths likely from COVID-19, but that's not relevant here.

Anyway, given that number, that makes the 500k about 5% of total deaths. To me, that seems a reasonable possibility.

Other comments pointed out that the headline here is bogus, and that the 500k isn't direct deaths, but contributory, where the poor air may have made people weaker and thus less likely to survive whatever really ultimately killed them. And even the article only claims that half of that number would have survived with lower pollution levels.

That does decrease the usefulness of the statistic, because it becomes clear that the authors are just trying to make a big number to make their work (and thus themselves) look more important. Not that air pollution isn't important, but this appears to be another example of over-hyping a problem, which does tend to turn people off a lot and maybe that is why you consider this article "nonsense".

So, while the article has the standard hyperbolic attitude, the underlying information is likely correct, when taking into account its own caveats.

It does mean that it's actually not as big a deal as the article would like, though. Useful for someone deciding what level of enforcement to put on polluters (vs. economic interests), but not really something for general people to get upset over.

I note that the study was of the correlation of population death rates with pollution from coal plants. Attributing the entire improvement to the coal pollution reduction misses things like coal-polluted areas tending to have lower average income than cleaner ones, with all the other health hazards and service shortages that brings. It's across time, and as the areas clean up they also tend to gentrify, changing that factor. (Though some of the resulting mortality improvement might fairly be credited to the pollution reduction - even though not due to direct chemical / micromechanical effects on bodies.)

Since it's across time, EVERYTHING ELSE changed as well, and some of that (such as improved medical treatment) might also have caused much of the improvement. To sort that out you need to do a multivariable analysis against pretty much everything (and then you STILL have a correlation-as-causation issue.)

(I'd also like to see how much percentage-wise the coal pollution dropped across the study groups, which would also be indicative.)

Nevertheless, though the number might not be right, pollution from coal combustion IS some very nasty stuff, and a lot of it has been eliminated. So perhaps most of this stat IS from that cleanup. (Or even "more than all of it", if the total of conflating effects was net negative.)

If I'm following the description correctly, it causes heat to move across the special substance, which can make it cold on one side and hot on the other.

Nepe. It's a chunk of dielectric in a capacitor that gets hotter as the capacitor is charged and colder as it's discharged. You have to bathe it in a fluid and pump the fluid past it and to the cold or hot ends of the system at the appropriate times in the charge-discharge cycle (or do some other auxiliary heat-moving thing).

Peltier systems work similarly,

Nope. Different system entirely. Moving charge carriers carring differenct amounts of heat between hot and cold ends, vs. locked-in-place atoms becoming more or less spin-aligned, and hotter or cooler, as a field is applied and revoved, with the heat moved to the hot end or from the cold end by a pumped fluid.

You can add a little heat, or pull out a little heat, but it's not gonna make ice in the desert.

Or you can stack them in series in a shrinking pyramid and reach cryogenic temepratures. (Such coolers are used for some infrared cameras to cool the sensor so it can detect cooler things.)

But Peltier systems are mostly not used when there's room for other solutions because they're terribly inefficient,

Did your bank client move to a different provider after this incident? If not (and there could be plenty of good reasons not to move), you know why FiServ doesn't need to spend any money on customer service.

That's nothing! Some of us have gained 100% of our volume in the last 50 years!

Why weren't they already doing that? Is it simply cost?

Almost certainly. (Could be the current output of their one mine is already committed elsewhere, so it had to wait for other mines to be opened or that one to be buy another truck or the like.)

If worst came to worst we could just MAKE it from any convenient carbon source. But that would cost about twice as much - give or take a tad depending mostly on what form you needed for your process' feedstock.

But why pay $2 for what you could buy from China for $1, or from any of several other sources for maybe $1.15? Until China decides to keep itheir production for themselves. Then there's a flurry of price fluctuations as the other suppliers ramp up or start up and the customers get other suppliers under contract.

So get it from Canida:

Mine production: 15,000 MT

Canada's graphite production rose by 3,000 MT in 2022 over the previous year. Interest in Canada as a source of graphite has been rising for the past few years, particularly since Tesla (NASDAQ:TSLA) said it plans to source the lithium, graphite and cobalt it needs for its Nevada-based lithium-ion battery gigafactory from North America. The Lac des Iles mine is the only mine in Canada that is producing graphite, but there are a number of graphite projects under development.

(I've posted this in more detail before.)

Essentially all the real problems the Network Neutrality proposals try to address are misuses of technical capabilities (which were designed to enable improved network performance) to implement anticompetitive or consumer fraud schemes.

The FCC is good on technical issues, but is generally rotten on consumer protection. This is not a technical issue, and technical tweaks to address it also tend to re-break the network issues it was built to fix. Expect trouble if you try to fix this stuff via FCC regulation.

The FTC is a consumer protection agency with a track record of taking on large companies (including technical ones - AT&T, IBM, Microsoft, ...) often imposing serious beatings that mitigate or solve the problems or at least mitigate them for years or decades. IMHO they are the agency that could handle the job.

They'd also like to handle it. But right now there are two issues: They read the law as blocking them from ruling on the Internet, and they are currently underfunded and understaffed for the task.

IMHO the FTC seems the right agency to handle the job, while the FCC seems like to break it worse rather than fix it once they're turned loose on it. It would just require a legislative tweak to make it clear they have a go-ahead, and perhaps a bit of appropriation to staff them up.

Much as I hate to encourage government interference of any sort, if you intend to pass and enforce laws to turn the dogs of law enforcement loose on miscreants, you should turn loose the breed of dog that has a track record doing the right thing.

I think that's only true of automatic transmissions. (Manuals have the gears and shafts immersed in oil.

The problem is when a manual is in neutral, the lower gear shaft does not spin and bring oil up but the top gear shaft thatâ(TM)s not engaging is still attached to the spinning drivetrain so it results in a lack of lubrication issue.

OK, I see how that would be a problem. (I thought they had both (sets of) shafts immersed and/or had a "gear" that was always turning and at least partially immersed, even when in neutral, so they wouldn't fry when a user tried to save gas by putting them in neutral and stopping the engine on a long mountain downgrade.)