So you no doubt saw that Trump’s big reveal was yet another grift—this time in the form of NFTs (nonfungible tokens) that are worth … hmm, I guess whatever Trump says they’re worth. But in reality ... hahahaha! ... nothing. And not only are they worth nothing, apparently any slackjawed yob with Photoshop and an Amazon account could have made their own versions.

PC Magazine:

[J]ournalists noticed(Opens in a new window) that at least some of the images for the NFTs relied on photos of clothing you can buy online. For example, an NFT showing Trump wearing a cowboy outfit seems to be based on a duster jacket from Scully Leather, which is sold on Amazon and Walmart.

Another NFT of Trump wearing a tuxedo borrows imagery of a suit sold on Men’s Wearhouse. Meanwhile, a separate NFT incorporated a photo of a $49 Western Sports coat. 

PC Magazine also noted that Matthew Sheffield of The Young Turks had located some of the source images for Trump’s NFTs—and they weren’t from Trump’s personal Leonardo da Vinci-style sketchbook.

The Trump fighter jet pilot NFT seems to be a Shutterstock image. Did they license it?

https://t.co/uMtVqpnS8d

pic.twitter.com/i6x7nn5nec

— Matthew Sheffield (@mattsheffield)

December 16, 2022

It appears that Donald Trump's NFT image of himself as a cowboy comes from an Amazon image that was slightly altered.

https://t.co/B0b2SUSbX9

pic.twitter.com/OA8L2rHw4J

 — Matthew Sheffield (@mattsheffield)

December 16, 2022

And Sheffield had his own writeup about Trump’s latest grift, which is about as tacky a post-presidential pursuit as one could possibly conjure. Imagine if Jimmy Carter stopped building homes for unhoused people and started selling fake Rolexes out of the back of his van. We’d be horrified. Well, this shit is arguably worse.

The Young Turks:

In a recorded video message to supporters, Trump hailed the artistic quality of the images, which appear to be assembled randomly and automatically by a computer program from a pre-defined collection of backgrounds, costumes, and heads, according to listings on the OpenSea NFT marketplace. According to the Collect Trump Cards website, the NFT graphics were designed by an illustrator named Clark Mitchell.

“These cards feature some of the really incredible artwork pertaining to my life and career, it’s been very exciting,” Trump said in the video, also noting that only a limited number of the virtual cards would be released. He also offered several sweepstakes incentives to people who purchased, including a dinner and a chance to speak to him on the Zoom video conference service.

Several of the paper doll-style images used in the cards appear to be barely modified copies of widely available photos seen on clothing retailer and stock photo websites.

Hmm, maybe the creators of these things learned Photoshop at Trump University. Then again, Trump’s supporters are unlikely to notice the piss-poor quality of this “art.” But they might notice not being able to access it:

LMAOOO they bought 'em, but now they can't find

their stupid trump cards! 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣

pic.twitter.com/QZRWcPl58f

— BrooklynDad_Defiant!☮️ (@mmpadellan)

December 16, 2022

We deserve these laughs after all the tears this guy has brought us over the past seven years. It’s been a long slog, but I think we might finally be rid of him soon. Though his defenestration could have been a bit more cinematic, perhaps. This is like if Darth Vader had died in a freak scrapbooking accident in the first act of Return of the Jedi.

On the other hand, this is just perfect. Because it’s quintessential Trump—lazy, gauche, overhyped, and utterly absurd all at once. At least one of these fuck-yous to his fans needs to be on his tombstone.

I pick this one. I mean, what could possibly sum up his life better?

Fuck me, is this really one of the NFTs Donald

Trump is offering? #NASCAR

pic.twitter.com/lCfyGuFbLY

— Matthew Burroughs (@MJBurroughs)

December 15, 2022

Though his estate might need permission to reprint it, because this one was probably stolen, too:

We did some research and I can say with some degree of confidence that this is Donald Trump’s head on Charles LeClerc’s body.

The blue Richard Mille watch and uniquely long thumb led me to that conclusion. (Not the same pics here, just for reference) #NASCAR #F1 https://t.co/jeXMEXZpoh

pic.twitter.com/gECXDvH2hU

— Matthew Burroughs (@MJBurroughs)

December 15, 2022

Oh, Donny. Never change.

Not like you could, even if you tried.

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As winter storms continue to pummel much of the United States, is climate change partially — or majorly — to blame?

As with any natural disaster that relates to the weather, it is natural to wonder whether climate change plays a role. Certainly the weather this winter has been extreme, with Texans and Oklahomans being warned of potential tornadoes and Americans everywhere bracing for possible power outages (which on their own can be devastating). Winter storms mean blocked roads, damaged property, crumbling infrastructure and possibly even injuries and deaths.

The big question for both policymakers and the public, therefore, is how much of the horrid weather can be definitively attributed to global warming.

Climate change experts say that it's not merely a coincidence — climate change really is worsening our winter storms this year, as multiples experts told Salon.

Winter storms develop in a climate change environment: it is warmer and moister," Kevin Trenberth of the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) told Salon by email. "But it is plenty cold in winter over the continent. It means snow amounts can be much greater: e.g. see Buffalo recently. They may be more intense: not guaranteed, but more developments ensue. Watch for a bad nor-easter."

While it may seem counterintuitive to attribute more snow to the planet warming, Trenberth observed that this only seems to be the case because the general public is insufficiently informed about how climate change works.

"[People need] education that winter warming may mean more snow, not less," Trenberth added.

This does not mean that scientists can precisely quantify the extent to which climate change has played a role. According to Dr. Michael E. Mann — a climate scientist and director of the Center for Science, Sustainability and the Media at the University of Pennsylvania — it is "tricky" to figure these things out with precision.

"There's still quite a bit of debate about whether we can expect more events like the Texas cold spell last year due to climate change," Mann wrote to Salon. "On the other hand, there is evidence that warming leads to more powerful, snowier nor'easters—something we've seen quite a bit of in the northeast in recent years."

"There is evidence that warming leads to more powerful, snowier nor'easters—something we've seen quite a bit of in the northeast in recent years."

The good news is that, while there are many unanswered questions, scientists do know the means of accomplishing this. As Mann put it, they will use "high-resolution climate model simulations that better resolve the dynamics of powerful winter storms like nor'easters."

Mann added, "It's something I hope to look into in my own research over the next few years."

While the exact role of climate change in causing winter storms is murky, there is little question that the storms have been getting worse — and, in the process, have wreaked havoc on an American infrastructure that is simply not equipped to handle them. This was dramatically demonstrated last year when millions of Texans were left without electricity during an unprecedented winter storm because their power grid had not been designed for resiliency during adverse winter conditions.

"I would say that extreme weather in general—whether summer season extremes like droughts, heat waves, and floods, or winter storms like nor'easters—are disruptive to transportation, and labor, and all of the elements that comprise a supply chain," Mann told Salon. "So more extreme weather means more disruption of supply chains."

Trenberth added that the weather problems do not stop simply because there is an end to the "snow and ice and cold."

"In spring, the snow and ice melt can lead to flooding, as has happened in recent years over the upper Midwest," Trenberth wrote to Salon. This year, a La Nina year, [there was] more [precipitation[ in northern states." He added there could also be "possible continued drought in southern states" as well as "fire risk, especially as people get careless with heating."

Ironically, although Texas Gov. Greg Abbott tried to argue last year that the blackouts somehow discredited the need for a Green New Deal, one expert told Salon at the time that as climate change worsens, extreme weather events will further test America's infrastructure. Eventually there may be no choice but to rebuild it.

"From a Green New Deal perspective, we would want to have public utilities that prioritize public safety and resiliency and disaster readiness over the optimal price in a perfect market equilibrium situation and really nice weather — so I think that's an important distinction," Daniel Aldana Cohen, associate professor of sociology at the University of Pennsylvania and co-author of "A Planet to Win: Why We Need a Green Deal," told Salon at the time.

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Perhaps the most useful and honest image from the new website advertising Donald Trump’s digital trading cards is at the bottom of the page, where Trump gives two thumbs up while winking at the viewer. The twofold message seems simple: Everything is A-OK, and this is all a bit of a joke.

People certainly laughed heartily on Thursday when Trump made what he had billed as a “Major Announcement.” He was now offering for sale “limited edition” digital trading cards, featuring what appeared to be risibly amateurish images of the former president playing golf, posing as an astronaut, surrounded by bars of gold and shooting lasers from his eyes.

This latest entrepreneurial endeavor from a businessman with myriad failures and bankruptcies seems to be a belated effort to cash in on the market for “non-fungible tokens.” NFTS include the sale of images given a unique digital stamp and thus, theoretically, an artificial scarcity. NFTS use bitcoin technology and can be bought and sold like any other commodity. The market for them may have peaked in 2021 with the $69 million sale of a digital collage by an artist called Beeple. Since then, the market has crashed.

Critics derided the crude iconography of the images and their clumsy construction. The “Collect Trump Cards” website attributes the designs to Clark Mitchell, an artist who specializes in popular imagery, saying, “He has prominent working relationships with brands such as Star Wars, Hasbro, Mattel, Marvel.” Mitchell has a basic mastery of the hypermasculine tropes of comic book culture and professional sports.

If the images seen on the website are similar to the digital images that will be transferred to anyone who pays the $99 fee, then the Trump cards will feature clumsy Photoshop pictures of the former president’s face grafted onto reasonably fit male bodies, clad in various costumes of masculine bravado, including sporting garb, a sheriff’s duster and lots of blue suits.

The Lincoln Project, a political action committee that specializes in slickly produced social media mockery of Trump, posted a clip of the online video announcement overlaid with canned laughter. “Stop. We can only laugh so much,” said the tweet, which had racked up more than 19,000 likes a day after the Major Announcement.

    Stop. We can only laugh so much.

    Trump's #MajorAnnouncement is a major flop. pic.twitter.com/aFitG9A2qf

    — The Lincoln Project (@ProjectLincoln) December 15, 2022

Along with laughter, however, was the pervasive sense that this newest scheme has distilled the essence of Trump to its purest form. It was “on brand” in a way more telling and disturbing than previous efforts to cash in on a name once associated with the Oval Office.

We can look to some of the darker trends in the contemporary art market to sharpen that intuition. In his announcement, Trump wrote, “These limited edition cards feature amazing ART of my Life & Career!”

Art was prominently capitalized, sharpening the dissonance between a word that summons thoughts of Leonardo, Rembrandt and Picasso and the image that followed — Trump as superhero in tights and a cape. A similar dissonance is often felt in contemporary art museums and markets when seemingly trivial or worthless objects — garbage or things found on the street, random mementos plucked from the cupboard of memory — are repurposed as art and treated as both intellectually substantial and commercially valuable.

The shorthand critique of this phenomenon is: “My kid could do that.” And, indeed, your kid could probably make images of Trump as laughably awful as the ones that Trump is now attempting to sell, if your kid has even a passing familiarity with the tropes of pop culture and basic competence with photo-editing software.

In the art world, the conceptual move that rebrands supposed trash as art isn’t quite so simple. It has a long pedigree, dating back to the work of Marcel Duchamp, whose infamous “readymade” sculpture included a 1917 work known as “Fountain,” a urinal turned 90 degrees on its axis and signed with a cipher for the artist’s name. And, yes, your kid could probably reposition a urinal and sign his or her name to it, but they probably couldn’t do it at just the right historical moment to inaugurate a century of discussion about what constitutes art. Is it the material object or the idea? An original form or its iteration?

People laughed at Duchamp’s urinal, and they are laughing still at its descendants, which can be found in galleries and art markets around the world. This isn’t to argue that Trump’s ART is art. It isn’t. What matters here is how laughter defines community and how closely Trump’s attempt to market amateurish iconography parallels the way artists, critics and collectors have used laughter to establish the boundaries of the art world.

Simply put, if you can’t take Duchamp or conceptual art seriously, you are a philistine, by the definition of the art world. It proves that you are unwilling or incapable of a basic set of thought exercises and mental calisthenics that are essential to the appreciation of contemporary art. One of the hallmarks of Trump’s art, and the work of other artists who have attempted to market Trump imagery as art, is the expectation that elites will laugh at it. Those who laugh are immediately outsiders to Trump world, where a taste for the tawdry is established as a fundamental shibboleth of loyalty and belonging.

Call it inverse philistinism: the use of intentionally bad imagery, perhaps with a wink, to create an “us-them” dynamic. Other artists who align themselves with Trump have done this, as well. Jon McNaughton, who calls himself “America’s foremost conservative artist,” has created treacly depictions of Trump as a saintly figure nurturing a suffering America to rekindle its idealism and find its true soul. But he has also created a cartoonish image of Trump and his wife, Melania, riding in a giant, flag-emblazoned pickup truck, titled “Keep on Trumpin’,” a reference to a 1968 countercultural cartoon, “Keep on truckin’,” by artist Robert Crumb.

The text below the image (available as a signed canvas print for $399) makes the economy of inverse philistinism explicit: “YOU might be a TRUMP SUPPORTER if you think attaching US flags to a jacked up 4-wheeler is patriotic! … YOU might be a TRUMP SUPPORTER if you hang McNaughton Paintings in your house!” McNaughton also sells Trump NFTs, and Trump’s recent foray into that market is likely an attempt to muscle out competitors.

Another artist, Julian Raven, began an ultimately fruitless battle with the Smithsonian in 2017 after the National Portrait Gallery refused to hang his 16-foot-long painting of Trump’s head next to a soaring eagle and American flag, a portrait only marginally better than Trump’s trading cards. Raven’s challenge to an established museum was a public performance, designed in part to suggest that the Portrait Gallery’s standards of quality and inclusion were simply irrational, and if you believe in inverse philistinism, they are. Once “high art” expanded its boundaries to include “bad art” or things that were never intended to be art, the makers of bad art were empowered to challenge the institutional authority of the art world.

Strategically, of course, the best thing for the Trump brand, the best hope of sustaining his popularity, is to get people who are inclined to laugh at Trump to keep laughing at Trump. This fires the fury of his followers, who feel it is they who are being laughed at, and that in turn inspires the purely tribal sense of identification with the former president.

The joke, in the end, will unfortunately be at the expense of people who pay $99 for his NFTs, which, despite what appears to be an initial surge of interest, are likely to be extremely risky as a long-term investment. But that, too, is very on brand for Trump, a perfect distillation of his unique take on marketing. NFTS are a reductio ad absurdum of art: You aren’t paying for an object or a thing, just an idea or a feeling. Trump does the same for politics: When you invest in him (with your votes, your financial support or simply your affection), you get next to nothing tangible in terms of policy or accomplishments. But you do get to belong to his community, with all its intangible but non-fungible benefits.

Source

Elon Musk’s decisions, particularly regarding Twitter, are drawing international attention and, sometimes, outrage. At a much more granular level, however, it’s Musk’s neighbors being driven nuts.

Residents of Bastrop County in central Texas expressed displeasure about the commercial activities surrounding once-idyllic farmland, the Austin Business Journal reported. Musk has centered much of his business empire in the area around Austin and Bastrop, including the social media company, Tesla, SpaceX, the Boring Co. and Neuralink.

Musk’s moves have some residents, disheartened by ecological disruption and a lack of transparency from Musk’s companies, contemplating moving. Ecological concerns in the area stem from recent wildfires and floods. Residents fear damage could worsen as the Boring Co. digs underground tunnels and aims to dump treated wastewater into the Colorado River.

One particular issue involved the erection of a chain-link fence, which residents said Musk’s companies promised they would not do. Long-time resident Chap Ambrose is leading the charge to shed more light on Musk’s activities in the region, even if there’s little that can be done to change them.

Much of Musk’s activity is obscured, but there are some things that can’t be hidden. Tesla has an electric vehicle factory and headquarters just west of the Travis/Bastrop county line. Last month, SpaceX started construction on a 521,000-square-foot building across from a property owned by the Boring Co.; the plans for the SpaceX property are not clear.

The Boring Co. has been trying to get city approval to build a massive underground highway that would connect Austin and San Antonio.

The county doesn’t have much sway in slowing Musk down. It may not want to, either, as the same businesses generating controversy are also generating jobs and economic incentives for the area.

“As long as they are communicating with us and as long as they are going in there and filing their permits on time, there’s not a lot whole else we can do,” Bastrop County Commissioner Mel Hamner told the Journal.

Source

•     Elon Musk lifted a suspension on Twitter accounts after a poll answered by 3.1 million people.

•     Musk had banned journalists after he accused them of "doxxing" him.

•     He agreed with a user who said journalists wanted to cause him and his family harm or harassment.

Elon Musk suggested the was "no other reason" journalists had for allegedly "doxxing" him than as an attempt to cause harm to him and his family, moments after restoring some blocked Twitter accounts.

The billionaire returned access to the accounts of several journalists Friday night after accusing them of "doxxing" him — the act of publicly providing identifiable information about someone — by sharing his live location by posting about the ElonJet website, which tracks his private jet's movements.

But shortly after lifting the suspension, Musk replied to a tweet from a user who wrote: "The only reason these so-called journalists would want to dox @elonmusk real time location - is because they want him and his family harassed or harmed," adding a political message that the left use violence when they "don't get their way."

Musk replied: "Indeed, there is no other reason."

The u-turn followed a Twitter poll where Musk asked when he should reinstate "accounts that doxxed my location in real-time," giving users a choice between "Now" and "In 7 days."

After 3.1 million votes, 58.7% of users voted in favor of lifting the suspension, compared with 41.3% who voted for it being lifted in seven days' time.

Musk banned the accounts of journalists including CNN's Donie O'Sullivan, the Washington Post's Drew Harwell, and Ryan Mac from the New York Times.

The reporters were suspended on Thursday for reporting on the Wednesday suspension of Jack Sweeney's account, the student who gained notoriety for posting the real-time location of Elon Musk's private jet.

The journalists made reference to Sweeney's @ElonJet account, but didn't make reference to Musk's location in their reporting. Post reporter Harwell had criticized Elon Musk's highly publicized commitment to free speech in his final tweet before being suspended.

Musk has been engaged in a tug-of-war with mainstream news outlets since his $44 billion acquisition of Twitter. Prior to the lifting of suspensions, Musk tweeted: "So inspiring to see the newfound love of freedom of speech by the press."

Source

A single act of kindness can have a ripple effect. This holiday season, Steve Hartman, the correspondent for CBS News' iconic "On The Road" franchise and CBS Mornings' "Kindness 101," is calling on you to do something kind — big or small — for someone else this month.

"Under the right conditions and with a little luck, a simple act of kindness can change the world," said Hartman. "We have seen the proof and we've done the math. Now we just need America to take up the challenge."

Hartman explained that he "hatched a plan" to spread kindness across the globe after witnessing countless stories of compassion and character.

"We certainly have more than enough receptive hosts. I mean, who isn't open to more kindness in their life?!" Hartman said.

A few ideas: Buy a coffee for the person in line behind you. Launch a donation drive at work. Volunteer for a worthy cause. Get creative! The sky's the limit when it comes to being kind — and the potential impact of your kindness is limitless.

Share a photo or video of your act of kindness on Twitter or Instagram using the hashtag #KindnessGoesViral for a chance to be featured on CBS News platforms. Please be sure to get the permission of anyone included in that photo or video before sharing it with us.

Watch "The Gift: Kindness Goes Viral with Steve Hartman," a one-hour special airing Wednesday, Dec. 28 at 10 p.m. ET on CBS to see just how far one act of kindness can go. You can also stream it on-demand on Paramount+ starting Thursday, Dec. 29.

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The Secretary of Energy on Friday nullified a 1954 decision to revoke the security clearance of J. Robert Oppenheimer, a top government scientist who led the making of the atomic bomb in World War II but fell under suspicion of being a Soviet spy at the height of the McCarthy era.

In a statement, the Energy Secretary, Jennifer M. Granholm, said the decision of her predecessor agency, the Atomic Energy Commission, to bar Oppenheimer’s clearance was the result of a “flawed process” that violated its own regulations.

As time has passed, she added, “more evidence has come to light of the bias and unfairness of the process that Dr. Oppenheimer was subjected to while the evidence of his loyalty and love of country have only been further affirmed.”

Historians, who have long lobbied for the reversal of the clearance revocation, praised the vacating order as a milestone.

“I’m overwhelmed with emotion,” said Kai Bird, co-author with Martin J. Sherwin of “American Prometheus,” a 2005 biography of Oppenheimer that won the Pulitzer Prize.

“History matters and what was done to Oppenheimer in 1954 was a travesty, a black mark on the honor of the nation,” Mr. Bird said. “Students of American history will now be able to read the last chapter and see that what was done to Oppenheimer in that kangaroo court proceeding was not the last word.”

Christopher Nolan has a movie coming out on Oppenheimer that’s based on Mr. Bird and Mr. Sherwin’s book. A trailer for the film, named “Oppenheimer,” began playing Thursday at movie theaters.

Alex Wellerstein, a historian of science at Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, N.J., called the reversal long overdue.

“I’m sure it doesn’t go as far as Oppenheimer and his family would have wanted,” he said. “But it goes pretty far. The injustice done to Oppenheimer doesn’t get undone by this. But it’s nice to see some response and reconciliation even if it’s decades too late.”

In April and May of 1954, after 19 days of secret hearings, the Atomic Energy Commission revoked Oppenheimer’s security clearance. The action blocked Oppenheimer’s access to the government’s atomic secrets and brought his career to a humiliating end. Until then a hero of American science, he lived out his life a broken man and died in 1967 at the age of 62.

In 2014, the Obama administration made public hundreds of newly declassified pages from the commission’s secret hearings. The testimony suggested that Oppenheimer had been anything but disloyal.

Historians and nuclear experts who studied the declassified material — roughly a tenth of the hearing transcripts — said it offered no damning evidence against him, and that the testimony, on balance, tended to exonerate him.

“It’s hard to see why it was classified,” Richard Polenberg, a historian at Cornell University who edited a much earlier, sanitized version of the commission’s hearings, said in 2014 “It’s hard to see a principle here — except that some of the testimony was sympathetic to Oppenheimer, some of it very sympathetic.”

An eccentric genius fond of pipes and porkpie hats, Oppenheimer grew up in an elegant building on Riverside Drive in Manhattan, attended the Ethical Culture School and graduated from Harvard in three years. After studies in Europe, he taught physics at the University of California, Berkeley.

As a young professor, he crashed his car while racing a train, leaving his girlfriend unconscious. His father gave the young woman a Cézanne drawing.

In the 1930s, like many political liberals, Oppenheimer belonged to groups led or infiltrated by Communists; his brother, his wife and his former fiancée were party members.

In the 1940s at Los Alamos in New Mexico, in great secrecy, he led the scientific effort that devised the atomic bomb. Afterward, as chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission’s main advisory body, he helped direct the nation’s postwar nuclear developments.

Oppenheimer’s downfall came amid Cold War fears over Soviet strides in atomic weaponry and Communist subversion at home. In 1953, a former congressional aide charged in a letter to the F. B.I. that the celebrated physicist was a Soviet spy.

Troubled by the allegation, President Dwight D. Eisenhower ordered “a blank wall” erected between Oppenheimer and any nuclear secrets.

A key element in the case against Oppenheimer was derived from his resistance to early work on the hydrogen bomb, which could explode with 1,000 times the force of an atomic bomb. The physicist Edward Teller had long advocated a crash program to devise such a weapon, and told the 1954 hearing that he mistrusted Oppenheimer’s judgment. “I would feel personally more secure,” he testified, “if public matters would rest in other hands.”

No evidence came to light that supported the spy charge. But the security board found that Oppenheimer’s early views on the hydrogen bomb “had an adverse effect on recruitment of scientists and the progress of the scientific effort.”

The material declassified in 2014, which was released by the Energy Department, suggested that Oppenheimer’s opposition to the hydrogen bomb project rested on technical and military grounds, not Soviet sympathies.

Richard Rhodes, author of the 1995 book “Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb,” said the records showed that making fuel to test one of Teller’s early H-bomb ideas would have forced the nation to forgo up to 80 atomic bombs.

“Oppenheimer was worried about war on the ground in Europe,” Mr. Rhodes said in an interview at the time. He saw the need for “a large stockpile of fission weapons that could be used to turn back a Soviet ground assault.”

Experts who examined the declassified transcripts said they shed much light on the famous case. Dr. Polenberg of Cornell, for example, expressed bewilderment that 12 pages of testimony from Lee A. DuBridge, a friend and colleague of Oppenheimer’s who discussed the atomic trade-offs and the European standoff with the Soviet Union, had remained secret for 60 years.

“A difference of opinion doesn’t mean disloyalty,” Dr. Polenberg said in 2014. “It’s hard to see why it was redacted.”

Dr. Polenberg also pointed to 45 pages of declassified testimony from Walter G. Whitman, an M.I.T. engineer and member of the Atomic Energy Commission’s advisory body.

“In my judgment,” Mr. Whitman said of Oppenheimer, “his advice and his arguments for a gamut of atomic weapons, extending even over to the use of the atomic weapon in air defense of the United States, has been more productive than any other one individual.”

Asked his opinion of Oppenheimer as a security risk, he called him “completely loyal.”

In her Friday statement, Ms. Granholm said her department, as a successor agency to the Atomic Energy Commission, had been entrusted with the responsibility to correct the historical record and honor Dr. Oppenheimer’s “profound contributions to our national defense and the scientific enterprise at large.”

“I am pleased,” she added, “to announce the Department of Energy has vacated the Atomic Energy Commission’s 1954 decision In the Matter of J. Robert Oppenheimer.”

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Some parts of the Arctic don't look very polar anymore.

Many regions are likely transforming from snowfall- to rainfall-dominant climates, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

"At the fringes, the transition is essentially occurring already," John Walsh, chief scientist at the International Arctic Research Center at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, said in a briefing at the fall meeting of the American Geophysical Union on Tuesday.

In the next few decades, he said, rain will become the main form of precipitation over most of the Arctic fringes.

A 2021 study in the journal Nature Communications found that rainfall could take over in parts of the Arctic as early as the 2060s.

That's because temperatures are rising and precipitation is increasing across the Arctic due to the greenhouse gases emitted by humans' use of fossil fuels.

NOAA released its annual Arctic report card on Tuesday, reporting that the polar region continues to warm twice as fast as the rest of the planet.

That's causing Arctic sea ice to diminish, the tundra to turn green with vegetation, and sea birds to starve to death in droves.

It's not just that the Arctic is changing. In some places, we're losing it. That's a problem for the whole planet.

A rainy Arctic loses its snow cover more quickly, speeding up climate change there and exposing more permafrost – vast areas of frozen ground that are slowly thawing and releasing large amounts of the dangerous greenhouse gas methane.

Some tundra doesn't look so Arctic anymore

For the first time this year, NOAA has determined that Arctic precipitation – either rain or snow – is increasing across all seasons.

"The precipitation story, I feel like it's finally emerging," Uma Bhatt, who leads atmospheric sciences at the University of Alaska Fairbanks Geophysical Institute, told Insider.

What's causing more rain

There are a few possible explanations, Walsh said:

•     More moisture is available as sea ice melts away, leaving more open ocean to evaporate into the atmosphere.

•     A warmer atmosphere holds more moisture, allowing it to drop more rain or snow.

•     More storms are passing over more open water, and warmer water. That can fuel more intense storms with heavier precipitation.

Whatever the case, in the coldest regions like eastern Siberia or northern Canada, that means more snowfall.

But in places like southwest Alaska, that means rain falling on top of snow, then freezing. That's what happened in Fairbanks in December 2021, when nearly an inch and a half of rain fell and then froze.

Roads became dangerous. Schools closed. Caribou and other grazing animals couldn't eat grass because it was covered with ice.

"These freezing rain events can be devastating, because the ice layer can persist for months until the spring thaw," Walsh said.

Rain is blending seasons together

As rain blends seasons together, snow melts away earlier, more shrubs grow in its place, and places like southwest Alaska are primed for big wildfires, Bhatt said.

The 2022 Alaskan wildfire season reached 1 million acres burned more quickly than any prior season on record and ended with 3 million acres burned statewide.

Bhatt is part of a group of researchers assessing whether the Arctic tundra in southwest Alaska should be reclassified as sub-Arctic tundra.

"Lately a lot of us have been reflecting on how much things have changed in the last 20 years. It's changed a lot," she said. "And I don't know what they'll look like in 10 years."

This article was originally published by Business Insider.

Source

They marched up a hill toward their usual spot, a dirt mound located far from the park’s crowds. Among them was Odille Zexter-Kaiser, a senior at Edward R. Murrow High School in Midwood, who trudged through leaves in Doc Martens and mismatched wool socks.

“It’s a little frowned on if someone doesn’t show up,” Odille said. “We’re here every Sunday, rain or shine, even snow. We don’t keep in touch with each other, so you have to show up.”

After the club members gathered logs to form a circle, they sat and withdrew into a bubble of serenity.

Some drew in sketchbooks. Others painted with a watercolor kit. One of them closed their eyes to listen to the wind. Many read intently — the books in their satchels included Dostoevsky’s “Crime and Punishment,” Art Spiegelman’s “Maus II” and “The Consolation of Philosophy” by Boethius. The club members cite libertine writers like Hunter S. Thompson and Jack Kerouac as heroes, and they have a fondness for works condemning technology, like “Player Piano” by Kurt Vonnegut. Arthur, the bespectacled PBS aardvark, is their mascot.

“Lots of us have read this book called ‘Into the Wild,’” said Lola Shub, a senior at Essex Street Academy, referring to Jon Krakauer’s 1996 nonfiction book about the nomad Chris McCandless, who died while trying to live off the land in the Alaskan wilderness. “We’ve all got this theory that we’re not just meant to be confined to buildings and work. And that guy was experiencing life. Real life. Social media and phones are not real life.”

“When I got my flip phone, things instantly changed,” Lola continued. “I started using my brain. It made me observe myself as a person. I’ve been trying to write a book, too. It’s like 12 pages now.”

Briefly, the club members discussed how the spreading of their Luddite gospel was going. Founded last year by another Murrow High School student, Logan Lane, the club is named after Ned Ludd, the folkloric 18th-century English textile worker who supposedly smashed up a mechanized loom, inspiring others to take up his name and riot against industrialization.

“I just held the first successful Luddite meeting at Beacon,” said Biruk Watling, a senior at Beacon High School in Manhattan, who uses a green-painted flip phone with a picture of a Fugees-era Lauryn Hill pasted to it.

“I hear there’s talk of it spreading at Brooklyn Tech,” someone else said.

A few members took a moment to extol the benefits of going Luddite.

Jameson Butler, a student in a Black Flag T-shirt who was carving a piece of wood with a pocketknife, explained: “I’ve weeded out who I want to be friends with. Now it takes work for me to maintain friendships. Some reached out when I got off the iPhone and said, ‘I don’t like texting with you anymore because your texts are green.’ That told me a lot.”

Vee De La Cruz, who had a copy of “The Souls of Black Folk” by W.E.B. Du Bois, said: “You post something on social media, you don’t get enough likes, then you don’t feel good about yourself. That shouldn’t have to happen to anyone. Being in this club reminds me we’re all living on a floating rock and that it’s all going to be OK.”

A few days before the gathering, after the 3 p.m. dismissal at Murrow High School, a flood of students emerged from the building onto the street. Many of them were staring at their smartphones, but not Logan, the 17-year-old founder of the Luddite Club.

Down the block from the school, she sat for an interview at a Chock full o’Nuts coffee shop. She wore a baggy corduroy jacket and quilted jeans that she had stitched herself using a Singer sewing machine.

“We have trouble recruiting members,” she said, “but we don’t really mind it. All of us have bonded over this unique cause. To be in the Luddite Club, there’s a level of being a misfit to it.” She added: “But I wasn’t always a Luddite, of course.”

It all began during lockdown, she said, when her social media use took a troubling turn.

“I became completely consumed,” she said. “I couldn’t not post a good picture if I had one. And I had this online personality of, ‘I don’t care,’ but I actually did. I was definitely still watching everything.”

Eventually, too burned out to scroll past yet one more picture-perfect Instagram selfie, she deleted the app.

“But that wasn’t enough,” she said. “So I put my phone in a box.”

For the first time, she experienced life in the city as a teenager without an iPhone. She borrowed novels from the library and read them alone in the park. She started admiring graffiti when she rode the subway, then fell in with some teens who taught her how to spray-paint in a freight train yard in Queens. And she began waking up without an alarm clock at 7 a.m., no longer falling asleep to the glow of her phone at midnight. Once, as she later wrote in a text titled the “Luddite Manifesto,” she fantasized about tossing her iPhone into the Gowanus Canal.

While Logan’s parents appreciated her metamorphosis, particularly that she was regularly coming home for dinner to recount her wanderings, they grew distressed that they couldn’t check in on their daughter on a Friday night. And after she conveniently lost the smartphone they had asked her to take to Paris for a summer abroad program, they were distraught. Eventually, they insisted that she at least start carrying a flip phone.

“I still long to have no phone at all,” she said. “My parents are so addicted. My mom got on Twitter, and I’ve seen it tear her apart. But I guess I also like it, because I get to feel a little superior to them.”

At an all-ages punk show, she met a teen with a flip phone, and they bonded over their worldview. “She was just a freshman, and I couldn’t believe how well read she was,” Logan said. “We walked in the park with apple cider and doughnuts and shared our Luddite experiences. That was the first meeting of the Luddite Club.” This early compatriot, Jameson Butler, remains a member.

When school was back in session, Logan began preaching her evangel in the fluorescent-lit halls of Murrow. First she convinced Odille to go Luddite. Then Max. Then Clem. She hung homemade posters recounting the tale of Ned Ludd onto corridors and classroom walls.

At a club fair, her enlistment table remained quiet all day, but little by little the group began to grow. Today, the club has about 25 members, and the Murrow branch convenes at the school each Tuesday. It welcomes students who have yet to give up their iPhones, offering them the challenge of ignoring their devices for the hourlong meeting (lest they draw scowls from the die-hards). At the Sunday park gatherings, Luddites often set up hammocks to read in when the weather is nice.

As Logan recounted the club’s origin story over an almond croissant at the coffee shop, a new member, Julian, stopped in. Although he hadn’t yet made the switch to a flip phone, he said he was already benefiting from the group’s message. Then he ribbed Logan regarding a criticism one student had made about the club.

“One kid said it’s classist,” he said. “I think the club’s nice, because I get a break from my phone, but I get their point. Some of us need technology to be included in society. Some of us need a phone.”

“We get backlash,” Logan replied. “The argument I’ve heard is we’re a bunch of rich kids and expecting everyone to drop their phones is privileged.”

After Julian left, Logan admitted that she had wrestled with the matter and that the topic had spurred some heated debate among club members.

“I was really discouraged when I heard the classist thing and almost ready to say goodbye to the club,” she said. “I talked to my adviser, though, and he told me most revolutions actually start with people from industrious backgrounds, like Che Guevara. We’re not expecting everyone to have a flip phone. We just see a problem with mental health and screen use.”

Logan needed to get home to meet with a tutor, so she headed to the subway. With the end of her senior year in sight, and the pressures of adulthood looming, she has also pondered what leaving high school might mean for her Luddite ways.

“If now is the only time I get do this in my life, then I’m going to make it count,” she said. “But I really hope it won’t end.”

On a leafy street in Cobble Hill, she stepped into her family’s townhouse, where she was greeted by a goldendoodle named Phoebe, and she rushed upstairs to her room. The décor reflected her interests: There were stacks of books, graffitied walls and, in addition to the sewing machine, a manual Royal typewriter and a Sony cassette player.

In the living room downstairs, her father, Seth Lane, an executive who works in I.T., sat beside a fireplace and offered thoughts on his daughter’s journey.

“I’m proud of her and what the club represents,” he said. “But there’s also the parent part of it, and we don’t know where our kid is. You follow your kids now. You track them. It’s a little Orwellian, I guess, but we’re the helicopter parent generation. So when she got rid of the iPhone, that presented a problem for us, initially.”

He’d heard about the Luddite Club’s hand-wringing over questions of privilege.

“Well, it’s classist to make people need to have smartphones, too, right?” Mr. Lane said. “I think it’s a great conversation they’re having. There’s no right answer.”

A couple days later, as the Sunday meeting of the Luddite Club was coming to an end in Prospect Park, a few of the teens put away their sketchbooks and dog-eared paperbacks while others stomped out a tiny fire they had lit. It was the 17th birthday of Clementine Karlin-Pustilnik and, to celebrate, the club wanted to take her for dinner at a Thai restaurant on Fort Hamilton Parkway.

Night was falling on the park as the teens walked in the cold and traded high school gossip. But a note of tension seemed to form in the air when the topic of college admissions came up. The club members exchanged updates about the schools they had applied to across the country. Odille reported getting into the State University of New York at Purchase.

“You could totally start a Luddite Club there, I bet,” said Elena Scherer, a Murrow senior.

Taking a shortcut, they headed down a lonely path that had no park lamps. Their talk livened when they discussed the poetry of Lewis Carroll, the piano compositions of Ravel and the evils of TikTok. Elena pointed at the night sky.

“Look,” she said. “That’s a waxing gibbous. That means it’s going to get bigger.”

As they marched through the dark, the only light glowing on their faces was that of the moon.

The post ‘Luddite’ Teens Don’t Want Your Likes appeared first on New York Times.

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Meditation, breathwork, breathing exercises — whatever you want to call it — mindfulness continues to soar in popularity as we all look for more ways to boost mood, improve energy levels and reduce stress during the holidays.  

And what better way to do your daily breathing exercise than by listening to the dulcet tones of Thor himself? Over the past few years, Chris Hemsworth has released a soothing series of stress-release meditations via his fitness and wellbeing app, Centr(opens in new tab). Alongside the aptly named and brilliantly funny ‘Affirmations That Positively, Absolutely, Probably (Most Likely) Won’t Make Your 2020 Worse,’ by Chris Hemsworth. 

We’ve reviewed plenty of Hemsworth’s workouts, including this feisty 200-rep bodyweight workout and his 250-rep dumbbell workout, but it’s great to see him exercising his (and our) mental health as well. This guided breathing exercise only takes five minutes and is positively (absolutely, probably, most likely) going to make you feel calmer and energized afterward. 

New to meditation? Give this Navy SEAL sleep technique a go, or access the full ‘Learn to Meditate’ series via Centr. So, why not sweep the distractions to one side for a moment, find a comfortable space to sit or lay, and in the words of Hemsworth’s team, “take the time today to tune in, breathe, and still your mind with Chris’s calming voice leading the way.” Yes, please.  

Watch Chris Hemsworth’s stress-release breathing exercise 

You can access this five-minute breathing exercise from anywhere in the world. If you’re surrounded by distractions, grab some of the best headphones for sleep that could help you focus and relax. Looking to get comfy while you breathe? These are the best yoga mats on the market. 

A quick breathing exercise or meditation is a simple way to trigger relaxation and improve your physical and mental wellbeing. We traditionally associate it with sitting with legs crossed in a dark room battling busy minds and trying to ignore rumbling stomachs or the sound of chatter next door. But breathing exercises can be done in as little as one minute and have a positive physiological impact on stress levels, anxiety, and mental clarity. 

When stressed, your body can’t determine between perceived and actual threat. In short, it will physically react the same way to a car horn as a tiger chasing you — think fast pulse, ragged breathing, and jitters. We spend a lot of time in this ‘fight-or-flight’ mode, activated by the sympathetic nervous system in response to stress, and it can take around 30-60 minutes to come back down after.

Research(opens in new tab) has shown that a deep rhythmic breathing exercise or “diaphragmatic breathing” is a type of mind-body training that forms a core component of yoga. The practice slows down and controls your breath rate, which physiologically takes the body from your sympathetic to the parasympathetic nervous system — a state of calm. Breathing exercises help improve emotional balance and mood, reduce feelings of anxiety and stress, and even boost energy and cognitive performance. 

According to YouGov(opens in new tab), 51% of women and 35% of men find the holidays stressful. But if Hemsworth has taught us anything with this breathing exercise, it’s that you only need five minutes to feel noticeably more calm. 

I just tried this 5-minute Chris Hemsworth breathing exercise to reduce stress — and wow

I gave this five-minute breathing exercise a go and found it really helpful for managing stress levels and finding clarity throughout the day. Hemsworth guides you the entire way, asking you to deepen your breathing and notice any areas where you hold stress, like your jaw or shoulders. As you breathe, tension begins to melt away as the body relaxes and your mind focuses. Just as gently as you melt into your mat, Hemsworth guides you back to the room with a clearer, more alert mind. 

That cozy warm feeling you have just after waking from a nap? Five minutes of one quick breathing exercise got me there. If this doesn’t sound like your thing, no worries, because TikTok trend brown noise could boost your focus, sleep, and workouts, wind down with this bedtime yoga routine or use this 15-minute walking workout to boost mood and calorie burn.  

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Former President Donald Trump’s digital superhero trading cards have sold out in less than a day, reportedly raising $4.45 million.

All of the 45,000 nonfungible tokens (NFTs) were purchased only half a day after their release, according to OpenSea, which bills itself as the "the largest NFT marketplace.”

The the official “Donald Trump Digital Trading Card" sets were for sale for $99 each and were described at their launch as “very much like a baseball card, but hopefully much more exciting.” The cards featured Trump as a superhero in a red costume with a cape, “Trump champion” belt, and a capital T on his chest.

The sale of the digital cards was estimated to have raised around $4.45 million, according to the Washington Examiner.

"Hello, everyone. This is Donald Trump, hopefully your favorite president of all time, better than Lincoln, better than Washington, with an important announcement to make. I'm doing my first official Donald Trump NFT collection," Trump said in a clip announcing the NFTs.

NFT INT, the producer of the card set, stressed that the money made will not be used to fund Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign.

"These Digital Trading Cards are not political and have nothing to do with any political campaign. NFT INT LLC is not owned, managed or controlled by Donald J. Trump, The Trump Organization, CIC Digital LLC or any of their respective principals or affiliates. NFT INT LLC uses Donald J. Trump's name, likeness and image under paid license from CIC Digital LLC, which license may be terminated," the company said in a statement on a website selling the cards.

The release of the cards on Thursday was met with derision from several former Trump advisors, including Steve Bannon, who took aim at Trump’s latest stunt on his “The War Room Show” while speaking about the card collection. “I can’t do this anymore,” he said.

He added that Trump, who he advised on his pathway to the presidency in 2016, was “one of the greatest presidents in history” and that he “love the folks” working with him but said: “They oughta be fired today.”

Trump described the card set as "incredible artwork pertaining to my life and my career." Some of the cards depicted Trump as a superhero featuring lasers shooting out of his eyes. Others showed Trump in an astronaut suit.

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Defense Expo Korea, an exhibition showcasing the latest South Korean military equipment, took place on September 21-25, 2022. The 2022 exhibition was the largest since it first opened in 2014 and welcomed senior military officers, including defense ministers, from 43 countries. This record attendance may have been a result of South Korea’s arms deal with Poland.

The South Korea-Poland arms deal, signed in July 2022 and worth an estimated US$15 billion, is by far the largest military export deal in South Korea’s history. It marks a huge milestone for the South Korean defense industry and could help gather momentum for South Korea’s arms sales. Deals with Australia, Malaysia, Norway and Saudi Arabia are already in the works.

This stunning achievement was not built in a day. Over the last 15 years, Seoul has implemented wide-ranging reforms to strengthen its local defense industry’s global competitiveness, investing more resources into defense-related research and development. At the same time, South Korean defense firms have made persistent efforts to carve out new markets overseas.

South Korea’s arms sales have grown not only in volume, but also in range. The country has sold warships, submarines, air defense systems and an array of electronic warfare and communication systems. KF-21 — South Korea’s first homegrown fighter jet — flew for the first time in July 2022, making the country one of the few nations to have developed and flown an advanced supersonic fighter.

The KF-21 has substantial export potential as it is expected to have better capabilities for its price than comparable fighter jets.

There are various factors, including steady investment in research and development, push marketing and reforms in defense acquisition, behind South Korea’s success. But above all, the success stems from “tailored sales” directed at buyers’ security challenges, as evidenced by the arms deal with Poland.

The KF-21 Boramae at its roll-out ceremony. Photo: KAI

Seoul’s long-standing ambition to develop its defense industry is aimed at expanding the country’s economic strength and countering persistent military threats from Pyongyang. Self-reliance in defense for the sake of expanding the country’s autonomy in foreign affairs and regional politics has ultimately been the main rationale for South Korea’s strong defense industry.

There is no doubt that South Korea has achieved a high level of success in indigenizing its arms procurement and securing arms exports. According to data from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, South Korea’s arms exports shot up by 177% over the last five years, raising the country from the world’s 14th to 8th largest arms exporter. South Korea has been the world’s fastest-growing arms exporter over the last five years.

Despite this success, big challenges lie ahead. Even after many years of private and public investment, much of South Korea’s defense technology base is not strong enough to secure its own market. The sector relies heavily on foreign technologies and many key sub-systems are still imported from abroad.

Engines for the new KF-21 fighter jet are imported from the United States and other key high-tech defense assets, such as missile systems and precision-guided munitions, also rely heavily upon foreign technologies.

Another challenge for South Korea in sustaining its defense export growth is the country’s short line-up of marketable products relative to those of larger exporters. Mounting insecurity in Europe and Asia means that the high-end arms market will continue to grow and many “traditional” arms producers will be edged out of the industry.

In this context, South Korea’s defense industry is likely to lose its competitive edge in the global market unless it further diversifies its products.

In the long run, the sustained growth of South Korea’s arms exports may affect its foreign relations. In 1997, Turkey became the first recipient of South Korea’s K9 howitzers because Germany, which had originally planned to export its self-propelled artillery to Turkey, refused to export arms to the country due to concerns around worsening conflict and human rights oppression.

South Korea’s 155mm K9 self-propelled howitzer. Photo: Hanwha Defense

At the time, many European countries, including Germany, the Netherlands and Norway, put an embargo on arms exports to Turkey.

South Korea’s defense companies have signed arms export deals with the United Arab Emirates and Egypt. But the deals could face scrutiny because some European countries have already suspended arms exports to Middle Eastern countries over human rights concerns. Arms exports should not just be regarded as a “big hit” from an economic perspective, but should be cautiously treated as a complicated issue involving foreign affairs and geopolitics.

South Korea’s recent success does not guarantee another boom in arms sales. Russia’s war in Ukraine was an opportunity for Seoul to sign a deal with Poland.

For European countries that have hiked defense spending to counter the Russian threat and are hastening to backfill their own military supplies, South Korean defense products may be a realistic alternative as US arms manufacturers struggle to meet demand due to supply chain disruptions and labor shortages.

But it remains to be seen whether South Korea’s defense industry will continue its rapid growth in the coming years.

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WASHINGTON — Euphoria over a “cooldown” in US inflation ignores a vital variable: how China’s reopening process is about to propel commodities prices even higher.

This cooldown argument is fast gaining currency following reports that showed prices rose just 7.1% in November year-on-year. US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen has hit the news circuit to make the cooldown case.

With the most aggressive Federal Reserve tightening cycle since the 1990s and the inflation-reduction scheme enacted by US President Joe Biden’s Democratic Party, Yellen says prices are going to continue surprising to the downside.

But not if China’s Covid reopening trade has anything to say about it. The sheer speed of President Xi Jinping’s pivot away from “zero-Covid” lockdowns is about to reintroduce the power of Chinese demand into global goods markets.

As 1.4 billion Chinese move around more and spend more freely, the cost of everything from oil to food to airfares to lodging to consumer goods everywhere will soon experience one of history’s greatest demand-pull inflation surges.

“Surely it will push up global inflation if China reopens fully,” says economist Iris Pang at ING Bank. “There will be more international travel, more sales, more production.”

In a recent report, economists at the New York Federal Reserve argued that “what happens in China does not stay in China.” They conclude that “specifically, we find that expansionary credit policies in China lead to notable increases in commodity prices, global production, and GDP outside of China driven by higher Chinese demand.”

New York Fed economist William Barcelona says that “because of China’s importance for global consumption, stronger Chinese growth raises global growth prospects, inducing an increase in global risk sentiment and an expansion in global asset prices and global credit.”

Sung Won Sohn, an economics professor at Loyola Marymount University, thinks China’s rebound along with an intensifying conflict between Russia and Ukraine will put upward pressure on costs everywhere. He adds that there’s another “800-pound gorilla” in the mix: the cost of labor.

“The job market is hot, especially in services including health care as well as leisure and hospitality,” Sohn says. “There are a lot more job openings than the available labor supply, leading to a low jobless rate and rapid wage growth. To be sure, the Federal Reserve’s campaign to slow economic growth eventually will have a dampening effect on the job market, but it will take time.”

Jerome Powell faces an inflation-recession dilemma. Photo: AFP / Graeme Jennings

Analyst Edward Moya at OANDA notes that the China effect may explain why the Fed is not letting down its guard on runaway inflation. In the statement surrounding the Fed’s 0.5% tightening move on Wednesday, policymakers signaled more rate hikes to come.

“The Fed did not welcome the disinflation trends that have just started to emerge and focused on robust job gains and elevated inflation,” says analyst Edward Moya at OANDA. “Any hopes of a soft landing disappeared as the Fed seems like they are committed to taking rates much higher.”

A key problem is the US has been trying to curb supply-side-driven inflation with monetary tools better suited to addressing demand-side pressures.

Biden did indeed enact legislation to curb consumer prices. Moody’s Investors Service and Fitch Ratings think a US$430 billion bill he signed in September to lower the cost of healthcare, prescription drugs and energy will cap inflation over time.

But the real heavy lifting needs to be rekindling US innovation and raising productivity. Biden’s earlier $300 billion investment in research and development plan to raise America’s economic game came along with moves to improve physical infrastructure and add momentum to clean energy innovation.

Some economists think it might already be bearing fruit. “Another downside inflation surprise not only validates a Fed decision to slow the pace of rate hikes, it also raises hopes that the inflation surge may actually be tamed within the next 12 months,” says economist Seema Shah at Principal Asset Management.

Economist Bill Adams at Comerica Bank adds that “inflation was terrible in 2022, but the outlook for 2023 is much better. Supply chains are working better, business inventories are higher, ending most of the shortages that fueled inflation in 2020.”

Unlike his predecessor Donald Trump, Biden wants to rebuild economic muscle at home, not just tweet at China and spin Washington’s wheels for show. Still, Biden’s efforts to resurrect America’s animal spirits have only just begun.

So far, Biden’s administration has had only modest success in raising America’s competitiveness. Meantime, the Fed’s rate hikes are working at cross purposes and discouraging investment in R&D.

Biden needs to make up for lost time during Trump’s 2017-2021 presidency. Trump’s massive $1.8 trillion stimulus package did zero to incentivize investments in semiconductors, innovation and productivity-enhancing technologies that might be curbing inflation pressures today.

Now that Trump’s acolytes in the Republican Party are about to control the House of Representatives, Biden can expect to pass little in the way of new legislation. That, as China spends trillions to be the dominant power in 5G, semiconductors, biotechnology, electric vehicles, artificial intelligence, consumer electronics and renewable energy.

A Beijing shop for Chinese telecom giant Huawei features a red sticker reading ‘5G.’ The company has been targeted by US bans. Photo: AFP / Nicolas Asfouri

As Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz at Columbia University observes: “The US might know how to make the world’s best bombers and missile systems, but they will not help us here.”

The West, Stiglitz notes, “must once again make our economic, social, and political systems the envy of the world. In the US, that starts with reducing gun violence, improving environmental regulations, combating inequality and racism, and protecting women’s reproductive rights. Until we have proven ourselves worthy to lead, we cannot expect others to march to our drum.”

The answer, he argues, is “we must offer concrete help to developing and emerging-market countries, starting with a waiver on all Covid-related intellectual property so that they can produce vaccines and treatments for themselves.”

Another inflation wildcard: whether Biden and Xi can put US-China trade relations on a more constructive footing.

Washington’s row with Beijing over technology intensified this week with Biden’s White House confirming talks with Japan and the Netherlands about shutting off the flow of semiconductor manufacturing equipment exports to China. Team Biden, meantime, is seeking to add another three dozen Chinese companies to its trade blacklist.

A bill in the US Senate bill has bipartisan support to constrain China’s tech ambitions. It aims to cut the access of Huawei Technologies Co and other foreign firms from the globe’s biggest economy. It comes amid broad support among US lawmakers to reduce Beijing’s influence, particularly where Huawei is concerned.

In November, the US Federal Communications Commission banned Huawei, ZTE Corp and certain telecom companies from selling to US consumers or working with American banks.

As US Senator Tom Cotton, an Arkansas Republican, puts it: “We cannot allow Huawei and the Chinese Communist Party to have access to Americans’ personal data and our country’s most sensitive defense systems. We must address the dire threat these Chinese companies pose to our national security.” 

Yet such moves might backfire as global tech prices increase in response. These odds increase as Xi’s government hits back. Earlier this week, Beijing challenged Biden’s move to end sales of advanced computer chips and chip-making equipment at the World Trade Organization, labeling the gambit “trade protectionism.”

For now, economists including Zhang Zhiwei at Pinpoint Asset Management think China’s muted domestic inflation rates leave room for the People’s Bank of China to ease policy.

Chinese consumer inflation was just 1.6% in November year-on-year from 2.1% in October. Core inflation, excluding erratic food and energy prices, was unchanged at 0.6%. Producer prices fell 1.3% in November.

As Zhang notes, odds are “the government will do more to boost market and household confidence.”

Demonstrators protesting against strict Covid measures gathered in the capital Beijing for a second night. The measures have since been rolled back. Image: Screengrab / RNZ

Asked on Wednesday, US Fed head Jerome Powell said it remains unclear how China’s lifting of Covid-19 curbs will influence inflation around the globe. Surely, Powell argues, China’s return to unfettered global trade will affect supply chains, but also increase demand for commodities that could prove inflationary.

On Thursday, China’s Central Economic Work Conference mulled economic goals for 2023, including setting a GDP target. Xi’s team has its work cut out for it.

“The November data were way below consensus, pointing to a worsening slowdown” sure to continue into year end, says economist Lu Ting at Nomura Holdings. “Surging Covid infections will offset some of the positive impact of the easing in the near term,” meaning that the “road to a full reopening may still be painful and bumpy.”

Nowhere more than investors buying into a US peak inflation narrative that China is almost certain to blow up in the months ahead.

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REMOTE WORK. COMPETITIVE salaries. A streamlined hiring process. They’re all perks being offered to prospective tech workers from an unlikely employer: the US government. 

Soaring Silicon Valley salaries, perks, and stocks have allowed Big Tech companies to lure the industry’s top employees for years while government jobs sat open. But as companies like Meta, Amazon, and Google have cut jobs or slowed hiring, government, nonprofit, and smaller companies are now seizing the moment and looking to catch the attention of out-of-work technologists. The US Department of Veterans Affairs is seeking tech workers to fill 1,000 roles. They’ll work on solving problems like modernizing benefits software and revamping medical appointments scheduling. (“Silicon Valley isn’t the only place for tech innovation,” the department’s information technology office tweeted last month.) Big Tech’s losses could be a boon to these employers.

“It’s a very interesting confluence of events,” says Charles Worthington, the VA’s chief technology officer. “There’s this increased interest in public service. There’s obviously new headwinds in the tech industry that are leaving more people needing a job. And then there’s these great opportunities at the VA.” 

Nearly 1,000 tech companies around the world have laid off more than 150,000 tech workers this year, according to Layoffs.fyi, a site that tracks publicly reported job cuts in the industry. Meta cut 11,000 jobs and Amazon 10,000 in November. Smaller cuts at companies like Lyft, Snap, and Stripe have shown that uncertainty is widespread in the tech world.

But tech jobs make up just a small slice of the US economy, and experts say recent layoffs are a high-profile outlier occluding a strong job market still hungry for workers. So, tech workers are turning elsewhere for opportunities, and they’re increasingly looking for jobs in nonprofits, smaller startups, and government. The jobs don’t all come with access to swimming pools or flush stock options, but these employers hope they can woo the influx of talent, now that there’s less competition in the private sector. And their stability could become a big selling point.

“People are taking this moment of uncertainty as a way to pause and reflect on what they’ve been doing and see if there’s an opportunity for them to work on something different,” says Jessica Watson, the chief experience officer at US Digital Response, a nonprofit that helps governments with digital expertise. It has seen more applications for in-house roles and more interest in government tech roles. 

Some governments have long struggled to secure top tech talent and younger workers. The divides in the private and public sector extend beyond the US. In the UK, public sector pay has fallen to a 19-year low, making competition with private industries harder. But in China, some young workers are ready to leave behind a volatile tech industry for greater security. Finland’s government was so eager for tech workers to join the country’s industry that, in 2021, it gave foreigners 90-day visas to try out life in Helsinki.

As uncertainty grows amid declining tech stock values, more young people may consider the shift, too. US Digital Response cohosted a job fair in December planned in response to the recent layoffs. Ten state and city governments from around the US came to make their case to the prospective workers. The state of California is looking to hire nearly 2,500 tech workers, according to Matthias Jaime, deputy secretary of technology and innovation for the state. San Francisco is advertising government roles that require only one day in the office per week. But in addition to convenience, regular hours, and pensions, those recruiting for more government and nonprofit workers are advertising a fuzzy, warm feeling that comes from making a positive impact. “I think it is a super compelling mission,” Kurt DelBene, chief information officer with the VA, says of working in the department. “You’re basically delivering to people who have made their commitment to all of us, the biggest commitment they can make, by being in the armed forces. And they deserve our support.” 

Tech Jobs for Good, a job board that focuses on mission-driven employers, saw a 40 percent increase in job-seeker profiles in May, says its founder, Noah Hart. That’s around the time tech layoffs began at Carvana, Klarna, and Robinhood. In October, as other tech companies began cutting employees, profile sign-ups jumped another 30 percent, Hart says. “There’s been a longer trend of more and more job seekers looking for impactful roles,” Hart says. “A lot of organizations are still hiring and are getting a lot more applications.” 

Nonprofits and governments are trying to become more competitive. The average job posted on Tech Jobs for Good pays $118,000 to $134,000 Hart says. By comparison, software engineers at Google make between $98,000 and $330,000, and data scientists earn $113,000 to $200,000. The VA is working to close the existing pay gap between its roles and the private sector by 60 percent. And for some employees, making an impact and having a remote job might mean more than Silicon Valley perks and plummeting company stock prices.

Smaller startups or industries like retail and health care are also benefitting from the group of technologists let loose. “It does create an amazing opportunity for companies in pretty much every industry to work with this amazing talent,” Leonardo Lawson, founder and CEO of Bond Creative MGMT, a management consulting firm, says of the layoffs. “The companies that are sleeping on [hiring laid off tech workers], they’re going to really regret it.” 

The most proactive employers could walk away winners. Joshua Browder, CEO of AI robot lawyer company DoNotPay, tweeted in November that he wanted to hire people affected by layoffs and would offer jobs to immigrants and sponsor their visas to help people who lost their jobs stay in the US. He says DoNotPay had four open jobs, but that tweet sent hundreds of applicants its way. By mid-December, DoNotPay had already made offers to candidates, Browder says. 

“I was actually quite surprised that the companies were laying them off, because they are incredibly talented people,” Browder says. “I think these companies are making a mistake by being too aggressive with their layoffs.” Six months ago, Browder says, he likely would have had to pay tens of thousands of dollars to a recruiter to get such talent. Now, they’re landing in his inbox for free.

Source

SEEN FROM AFAR, the parish of Ponta do Sol looks as compact and picturesque as a postcard. There’s a small roundabout at the center, a gas station, a tiny shopping complex, and a cluster of modest buildings topped by terra-cotta roof tiles. Rippling green slopes of banana, palm, and pine fan out behind, houses dotted among the hills. All of this is surrounded by dramatic escarpment and made subtropically lush by the many small waterfalls that gurgle from the rock face, filling centuries-old irrigation canals. When Gonçalo Hall first drove through the area in September 2020, the words that came into his mind were: “What the fuck is this.”

Ponta do Sol is on the southern coast of Madeira, the main island of the Portuguese archipelago of the same name. Hall had visited Madeira once as a kid, but he didn’t remember it being so beautiful, so wild. Now, as he put it in an interview, he was seeing the place “with the eyes of a digital nomad.” He had returned to help run a conference about remote work in Madeira’s regional capital, Funchal. The day after his long drive through the countryside, he approached the regional secretary of economy and asked point-blank: Why are you sleeping on digital nomads?

Hall, 35, is tall and husky, with blond hair, blue eyes, a jovial demeanor, and a proclivity for speaking in hashtag mantras like “life is good” or “be happy, make millions.” He grew up in Lapa, the poshest area of Lisbon, but now keeps an apartment in Ponta do Sol with his wife, Catarina: Lisbon, he complained when we first met, had become too much of a melting pot. Hall had long dreamed of finding a lifestyle where he could show up to work in flip-flops and shorts rather than the suits and ties of the bankers in his family. In early 2019, the couple moved to Bali for two months, where Hall picked up his first remote contracts, including a marketing gig for a firm called Remote-how, and amassed a hefty contact list in the process. Then they went to Thailand, Malaysia, Vietnam, and Bali again, spending a month or two in each before returning to Europe.

Back in Lisbon, after less than a year of the digital nomad lifestyle, Hall was organizing conferences about remote work and digital nomadism, self-identifying as an expert on both. When he landed in Madeira, he took in its low cost of living, fast internet speeds, surfable beaches, and Instagrammable beauty—the pillars of digital nomad marketing. He recognized something else as well in the pastoral pace. A small nomad project that he had visited in rural Spain, just before his arrival in the archipelago, had impressed him; it was charming, more intimate than the bustling urban hubs he had experienced so far.

Established digital nomad hot spots, like Chiang Mai, Thailand, or Canggu, Bali, tend to be bubbles where wealthy and overwhelmingly white foreigners cluster at coffee shops, coworking spaces, and other businesses that cater to their wants and comforts in English. If he built a destination for digital nomads in small-town Madeira, Hall thought, things would be different. Itinerant remote workers could live just like locals, alongside locals: They could reside in the same neighborhoods, eat at the same restaurants, and mingle at gatherings coordinated by a “community manager.” Hall decided to pitch his idea to the Madeiran government.

It was an easy sell. Tourism in the archipelago had plummeted due to the Covid-19 travel bans that had barred travelers from outside of Europe’s Schengen Area, and so Hall framed digital nomads as the cure. Portugal’s urban centers were already saturated with remote workers, but Madeira, less than a two-hour flight from Lisbon, was still under the radar. High-earning professionals could pour money into local businesses, Hall told regional officials. All they needed to welcome them was an inviting infrastructure and a ready-made network to land in. If he built it, Hall promised, they would come. 

A meeting was arranged with Madeira’s regional president, Miguel Albuquerque, and “after two or three beers,” Albuquerque recalled later, “the deal was sealed.” StartUp Madeira, a regional business incubator, was enrolled to manage the project, Hall was hired to lead, and the coastal parish of Ponta do Sol, population 4,300, was selected as the location for an experiment that looked a little bit like tourism, a little bit like a future-of-work demo, a little bit like selective immigration—and a lot like a test for a strained local housing market. The project was perhaps an inevitable extension of mainland Portugal’s eager embrace of foreign remote workers, itself part of a global expansion of digital-nomad-friendly legislation and of the private industries attending to their needs. It was ironic, in a way: While the pandemic had closed borders for so many, it had created financial incentives to open them to others. 

WHEN THE DIGITAL Nomad Village officially launched in February 2021, there were a small handful of inaugural residents. They included Kamil Kokot, a Polish software developer; his sister; two German men they’d arranged to rent a house with via Slack; and Hall himself. There was a local 7 pm curfew then, but after months of being grounded by Covid, the newcomers were thrilled to be in a new place among new people. By spring, the Village had swelled to 50, and Kokot felt he had begun to make a tight-knit group of friends. They threw him a surprise birthday party in May, then celebrated a makeshift Christmas, Halloween, and New Year’s Eve together in the weeks that followed. They set off fireworks on the beach just before curfew one warm spring night, giddily sipping on champagne while bewildered residents of Ponta do Sol watched from their homes. At the end of June, a group of these newfound friends traveled to the Azores for a happy holiday together, then scattered. Some, like Kokot, returned the following winter. Madeira, he told me, was the first place outside Poland where he could imagine making a home.

By the time I visited in February 2022, the pilot project was a year old. An estimated 200 international remote workers were staying in rentals in the Ponta do Sol parish and larger municipality. At least 1,000 more had snapped up rooms, apartments, and villas elsewhere on the island—in some cases because the stock had been exhausted or priced too high in Ponta do Sol. Many came through town to cowork or attend the yoga classes, workshops, and other events that pack the Digital Nomad Village’s calendar.

One of those events, a weekly “community lunch,” is held every Wednesday at a restaurant near the coworking space. The day I joined, some 30-odd remote workers gathered at Steak & Sun, where the kitchen staff have learned to make vegetarian and vegan dishes for their new clientele. Submitting a 🐠 on a Slack post claimed an order of bacalhau a bras, a non-alcoholic beverage, and an espresso for €9. At my table were Hall and his wife, an arts administrator from Lithuania, a startup cofounder from the UK, several software developers from Germany, and one from Scotland.

Melissa and João Cabral, siblings from Calheta, the next town over, approached the group and introduced themselves in English. “We’re locals,” Melissa said, “would it be OK if we joined?” The people seated around me let out an enthusiastic yes, motioning for them to sit, sit, please sit. As the siblings settled into their seats, Hall announced that they were the very first locals to join community lunch. The Cabrals couldn’t hide their surprise.

Both Cabrals were in marketing and worked remotely. They had visited the coworking space that morning, when Hall told them about the lunch. Melissa was initially hesitant. “You see the word ‘digital nomads’ so you think, ‘it’s not for us,’” she said, a sentiment later echoed by several other locals I spoke with. But she was a remote worker in Madeira too, and networking with entrepreneurs and people with international connections could be useful, so she decided to come. Melissa posed a question to the table: “Do you think it’s important to connect with locals?” Hall responded with a quick and firm yes, absolutely. That would be the next phase of the project, he said. Covid, he offered, had so far made it impossible.

The siblings later told me that they were floored by the warm reception. A cluster of curious travelers surrounded them after lunch, asking questions, extending dinner invitations, encouraging them to use the coworking space, and insisting that they return. They said they would. Still, Melissa said, if she and her brother were the first locals to join, then clearly “something is not working that well.”

THE DIGITAL NOMAD Village is not a physical village, of course. It is a marketing pitch and a virtual infrastructure that facilitates the mutual interaction of international remote workers, superimposed and dependent on the actual, centuries-old village of Ponta do Sol. The closest the Digital Nomad Village has to a physical structure is the free coworking space, an area on loan at the John Dos Passos Cultural Center, one of the few modern buildings in town. Downstairs, locals meet up for film screenings, dance rehearsals, and photo exhibitions. Upstairs, foreign remote workers gather to gaze at their laptops and take Zoom meetings in the courtyard. On my visits, I noticed that the desks inside were always claimed first: The ocean views from the outdoor workspace are stunning, but even in the shade, it’s often too bright to see your screen.

Very few people I met in the Village embraced the term “digital nomad.” The label is taken up most enthusiastically by those who make their money off it. In this definition, digital nomads are freelancers and entrepreneurs who explore the world, untethered to corporate offices, long apartment leases, and car payments, and who stay for weeks or months or longer—just not long enough to be liable to pay taxes. In Portugal, the lines that divide digital nomads from foreign remote workers from expats from immigrants from working holidayers are often fuzzed: Portuguese officials don’t hide their desire to transform this particular class of wanderers into settlers.

The national government has so far had very little basis for guessing how many itinerant remote workers pass through the country each year, where they come from, what they do, how long they stay, how they live, or even what measurable impact or contributions they make to the broader economy or social life of the country. StartUp Madeira started compiling its own statistics after the launch of the Digital Nomad Village experiment, counting the arrival of more than 8,000 remote workers to the archipelago so far—but that’s still little more than an estimate, and likely a low one. The numbers are based solely on the number of people who register through StartUp Madeira's website.

Here’s what we know, and what we don’t, about the damaged Soyuz spacecraft

The greatest thing about electric cars is that they don't burn fossil fuels, adding carbon dioxide to the atmosphere and contributing to climate change. We can't keep burning that stuff forever.

But while electric cars are increasingly common, electric aircraft are just getting off the ground. Sure, there are drones with electric motors, quadcopter-style vehicles big enough to carry a person, and even a few electric commercial aircraft. (Air Canada recently ordered 30 of these planes from Heart Aerospace.)

Still, there are some significant challenges to using batteries for flight, which is why you probably haven’t taken a trip in an electric plane. Here are some of the physics problems that aviation engineers will have to grapple with first.

Physics of Flying

Objects on Earth stay on the ground due to their gravitational interaction with the planet, which creates a downward-pulling force. In order to get off the ground and then remain airborne, a plane needs an upward-pushing force that is equal in magnitude to the gravitational force. For aircraft, this force is called the lift, and it's due to the interaction between the plane’s wings and the air.

How exactly does a wing provide lift? A wing is an angled surface moving through air, which is made up of tiny molecules that are essentially stationary. Imagine these molecules as being like snow, and the wing as a plow that pushes through them, deflecting them downward, but also slightly forward. If the wing pushes on the air, then the air must push back on the wing in the opposite direction—which in this case mostly means upward. This is the lift force.

Illustration: Rhett Allain

Actually, since the force from the air pushes mostly up, but also pushes slightly backwards, in the direction opposite to the motion of the wing, we often break this interaction into two forces. The upward-pushing force is called the lift, and the backwards force is the drag. Notice that these two forces are connected together. You can't have lift without drag because they are from the same interaction.

You can change the magnitude of the lift force on a wing. If the plane is traveling faster, it will collide with more air and produce a greater lift—but also a greater drag. If you want the aircraft to fly in a level path, its lift must be equal to its weight. When a plane decreases its speed below a certain value (which depends on the characteristics of that particular plane), then it will begin to fall.

The lift force also depends on the area of the wings. Bigger wings collide with more air to produce greater lift. Finally, the lift also depends on the angle that the wing moves through the air, which is called “the angle of attack.”

With all these parameters, it's sometimes easier to characterize a particular aircraft with a value called the “glide ratio.” Imagine a plane with no forward thrust, which is what would happen if the engines were turned off. Now the backwards-pushing drag force will make the plane decrease in speed. However, if the aircraft moves downward (to a lower altitude) as it continues to fly forward, then it can use the gravitational force to keep moving at a constant speed, but it will not maintain a level flight. This ratio of how far it moves horizontally compared to how far it drops vertically is the glide ratio. (Since this ratio really depends on the connection between lift and drag, it’s equal to the value of the lift force divided by the drag force, often called the L/D ratio.)

A typical airliner will have a glide ratio of around 15 to 1 (or just 15), meaning it will move forward 15 meters and drop 1 meter during unpowered flight. A non-powered glider can have a ratio of over 40 to 1.

Power to Fly

If you want an aircraft to travel at a constant speed in level flight, you are going to need some type of thrust. There has to be some force pushing the plane forward to balance the backwards-pushing drag force. Both jets and propeller-based vehicles essentially do this by taking air and throwing it backwards through an engine or past a propeller to provide a forward-pushing force.

Increasing the speed of air requires energy. Conventional aircraft get this energy through the combustion of jet fuel—but it could just as easily be from an electrical battery, or any number of other energy sources. The important thing is that it can’t do this just once; it has to continually push air to provide thrust. If it stops, the aircraft will convert from powered flight to gliding and probably end up back on the ground too soon.

Let’s think about the power required to fly at a constant speed. We define power as the rate of change of energy. Let's say you fly this plane for 100 seconds (that's our Δt) and use a total energy of 200 joules (ΔE). Then the power would be ΔE/Δt = 2 joules per second. That is the same as 2 watts.

How do we estimate the power required to fly a plane? One method would be to just fly it, then look at how much fuel was consumed. But I want a way to approximate this value without actually getting into an aircraft, so here is a way to do it using the glide ratio. Imagine I have a plane without power gliding down at some angle. After it drops by 1 meter, I lift it back up to its original height. Lifting a plane by a height h requires an energy of m × g × h, where m is the mass of the plane and g is the gravitational field. (On Earth, this has a value of 9.8 newtons per kilogram.) Here’s a diagram of how that looks:

Illustration: Rhett Allain

I have the energy required to lift the plane, but to calculate the power, I also need the time it takes for this motion to happen. If the aircraft is traveling with a speed v, it will travel some distance s, and it will require a time interval between lifts of Δt = s/v. Putting this all together, I get the following expression for the power:

Illustration: Rhett Allain

This expression has the ratio of h/s, which is just the inverse of the glide ratio. Let's call the glide ratio G. That means the power to fly the aircraft will be:

Illustration: Rhett Allain

If the mass is in units of kilograms, and the speed is in meters per second, the power will be in units of watts.

Just for fun, let's try this out for a Boeing 747. There are a bunch of variants of the 747, so I'm just going to pick some values. Let's go with a weight of 800,000 pounds and a cruising speed of 800 kilometers per hour. (I will need to do some unit conversions for these values.) Finally, I will go with a glide ratio of 15, which seems reasonable. With that, I get a cruising power requirement of 7.26 x 107 watts or about 70,000 horsepower. That's a lot, but remember this is a giant jet.

What about a smaller aircraft like a Cessna 172? It has a mass of 1,111 kilograms with a cruising speed of 226 km/hr. This put its power at 45,600 watts, or just 61 horsepower. Obviously, a small plane shouldn't require as much power as a large airliner, so that makes sense.

Stored Energy and Mass

Why do planes use fossil fuels instead of battery power to fly? The reason is that you can get a whole lot of energy by burning aviation gasoline (for propeller aircraft) or jet fuel (for jets—obviously).

The key idea here is what's called “energy density.” There are actually two versions of energy density. There is the stored energy per unit volume (in joules per liter) or the stored energy per unit mass (in joules per kilogram), which is usually called the specific energy.

Let's go back to the example of the 747. Most variants of this plane have a fuel capacity somewhere around 200,000 liters, which is really a lot of fuel. With a density of about 0.8 kilogram per liter, this gives it a fuel mass of 160,000 kilograms. The specific energy of jet fuel is around 12,600 watt-hours per kilogram. This means that with 1 kilogram of fuel, you could get a power of 1 watt for 1 hour—assuming you can use all of the energy, which you can't.

Let's say that the overall efficiency of the plane is 35 percent (which is the same as saying each jet engine is 35 percent efficient). That means that 1 kilogram of fuel will actually only give you 0.35 watts for one hour. But you see where this is going, right? I know the amount of fuel in the 747 and the required power. With that, I can calculate the flight time (and also the flight distance). Cranking the numbers gives me a flight time of 13.5 hours and a distance of around 10,000 kilometers, or 6,200 miles. That's just a rough calculation, but it seems legit.

Now suppose I take all that jet fuel and replace it with batteries. Assume that I can replace the jet engines with equivalent electric-powered turbofan engines or something. So, that's a 160,000-kilogram battery. Electric cars use a lithium-ion battery, and the best specific energy you can get is about 250 watt-hours per kilogram. Now you can already see the problem. If I assume an electric motor is 50 percent efficient, our electric-powered 747 could fly for 22.7 minutes with a range of 304 kilometers. Forget about that trip to Hawaii.

Actually, it's even worse than that. I ignored the extra energy you need to get the aircraft up to cruising altitude at its cruising speed. It wouldn't even make it that far.

Would it help to have a smaller aircraft like the Cessna 172? Of course, it uses less power, but it also carries less fuel—just about 170 kilograms. If we replace that fuel with a lithium-ion battery, it could fly for about 30 minutes. That's still not great. If you reduce the speed from 220 km/hr to 150 km/hr, you can get a flight time of about 42 minutes, but you won't really be able to get a better distance, since you are flying slower.

So, maybe lithium-ion batteries aren't the best option. What about some other energy sources? Let's just try some stuff for fun.

How about a nuclear-powered airplane? If you take uranium-235 and break it into parts (like in a reactor), you can get 79 million megajoules per kilogram. That’s 7.9 x 1013 joules for one kilogram of fuel. Still, you can't just drop some uranium in a plane and expect to get power. A nuclear reactor doesn’t just contain fuel, it’s got all sorts of other stuff to turn that nuclear reaction into energy. The most important thing you would need is some heavy shielding to protect the humans on board from radiation. That adds a lot more mass. But still, it's possible. Just 1 kilogram of fuel would be enough for a 747 to fly for over 200 hours.

If nuclear planes seem too much like an idea from the Cold War (because they were), what about something more reasonable, like a rubber-band-powered aircraft? They would be like those toy planes you used to build with the wind-up propeller, but just bigger and with more rubber bands. It just so happens that I have previously measured the specific energy for a twisted rubber band. I found that with just one kilogram of rubber bands, you could store 6,605 joules, for a specific energy of 6,605 joules/kg. If you take the fuel out of a 747 and replace it with 160,000 kg of rubber bands, you would get a flight time of 10 seconds. That would be fun—but you wouldn't have time to watch a movie or even for your free drink. At least you could say you flew on a rubber-band plane.

What if the plane was powered by having the passengers ride a bunch of exercise bikes? A 747 can easily carry 500 passengers, and a human can produce a power output of 75 watts for a period of eight hours (or one work day). But that just gives a total power of 37,500 watts. That's only 0.07 percent of the power needed to fly at cruising speed. So that won’t work either.

Still, it’s sort of a relief. The only thing worse than powering planes with fossil fuels might be powering them with people.

How Far Can You Fly a Battery-Powered Jumbo Jet?

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Rocket Report: Meet the Blue Origin Space Rangers; methane rocket fails in debut

Several motorists caught speeding through an elementary school zone on the Florida Keys Overseas Highway received an onion as a reminder to slow down – from a sheriff’s deputy dressed as the Grinch.

Col Lou Caputo, a 37-year veteran of the Monroe county sheriff’s office, came up with the concept more than 20 years ago. He was back on the streets this Tuesday.

If caught by Caputo, drivers who travel about 5mph or less above the school zone speed limit can choose between traffic citations and an onion presented by the Grinch. Those speeding beyond that likely receive a costly ticket.

“It’s about education, awareness that our school zones are still operating even though it’s the holiday season,” Caputo said. “We want people to slow down.”

Caputo said he portrays the character created by children’s author Dr Seuss to give motorists a “gift” but also to call attention in a nice way to the need to obey speed limits in school zones.

“It catches them off guard,” Caputo said. “But when I give them a clear choice of a citation or the onion, they will take the onion. And I’ve had them eat the onion right in front of me.”

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What do physicists from around the country – currently gathered at the Australian Institute of Physics (AIP) annual Congress held in Adelaide – think about the news that US researchers have generated energy from a fusion reactor?

Cosmos spoke, between AIP Congress sessions, with two nuclear physicists from the Australian National University (ANU).

So, how did these experienced nuclear physicists react when scientists at the US Department of Energy’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California achieved a net energy gain from a controlled fusion reaction?

ANU’s Professor Andrew Stuchbery said that the announcement filled him with “excitement, but realistic excitement.”

Stuchbery says as significant as the result is, it will not mean all our homes are going to be powered by nuclear fusion any time soon.

“It’s an essential step on the way to eventually realising fusion power, which should be a much cleaner sources of energy than fission power.

People have been striving towards achieving this outcome for decades. It is a fantastic achievement. There’s elation, but we have to be realistic.

It’s not going to produce commercial fusion power next week. In fact, it’s going to take some decades. There’s still the huge problem of scaling up.”

Professor Kenneth Baldwin, also from ANU, agrees.

Professor Kenneth Baldwin. Credit: ANU.

“I can remember back to when I was a student back in the late 70s, early 80s. There was a bit of a running joke back then that fusion is always 30 years away. Now, it’s really with us. This is a truly amazing achievement. And it’s created a great buzz around the Australian Institute of Physics Congress here in Adelaide. Everyone’s talking about it. It’s gone around the world and the entire physics community is very excited about this.

“But I think this old adage of being 30 years away is going to come back again, and probably that’s the timescale that will be needed to turn this into a commercial fusion electricity generating system,” Baldwin told Cosmos.

“Which means, of course, that this won’t happen till the second part of the century, and it’ll be too late to help us with the fight against climate change. That means that all the heavy lifting is going to be done by renewables, solar and wind, and by nuclear fission in countries that have that.”

The facility at Los Alamos, California which achieved net energy output from fusion, used lasers to force deuterium and tritium isotopes of hydrogen (hydrogen atoms with two and three neutrons respectively) together. The laser interacts with the isotope-filled capsule, causing it to implode and squeeze the plasma inside, causing the deuterium-tritium (D+T) reaction. A tiny amount of material was used in their test.

Professor Andrew Stuchbery. Credit: ANU.

Stuchbery wonders how can be practically scaled up.

“It has to be scaled up in both size and in the frequency of these pulses. You do one shot with this little device, and then you need another one.

There’s a lot of technical developments that need to happen before this can become commercialised, but the very fact that for the first time ever on Earth, we have induced a D+T reaction in this way is a step forward.”

Both Stuchbery and Baldwin note that this laser-induced fusion method is not the only approach being studied internationally.

No matter the method, Baldwin explains, the goal is to replicate what is happening inside our sun and other stars. The cores of these giant balls of gas see trillions of fusion reactions take place each second – spreading their energy in the form of light and heat across the universe.

The nuclear physicists discussed an alternative method of fusion being investigated which uses magnetically-confined plasma instead of laser pulses. “The idea is that you contain the plasma with a magnetic field and you pump in energy, and seek to achieve enough energy density in the plasma to induce fusion reactions,” Stuchbery explains.

“The energy output is significant for what went in, but it was a flash instantaneous, so scaling up means that one has to produce a lot more of these flashes per second,” explains Stuchbery. “And one has to scale up the size of the reaction chamber. And that’s not trivial.”

Tests of magnetically confined plasma fusion are taking place at the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) based in Europe. But Australian nuclear physicists are involved in the investigations.

“ITER is a big international effort,” says Stuchbery.

“Magnetic confinement experiments are really aimed at providing a continuous generation of excess power from the fusion reaction, whereas the Livermore experiments, or pulsed experiments, are basically miniature hydrogen bombs that are set off by these massive laser pulses,” says Baldwin.

“However, the magnetic confinement system would operate continuously. Existing experiments which have been done have got very close to break even. At the Joint European Torus, for example, in the UK,  have run for many seconds, but this needs to be extended to hours and days, if not continuously.”

“It’s always good to have multiple approaches to things. It’s very interesting to see the diversity and diversity is a good thing,” Baldwin adds.

In fusion reactions, most of the energy produced is in neutrons. These chargeless particles are difficult to trap, making it hard to extract that energy.

“The idea of the ITER-type experiment is that you have a blanket around the reactor that will catch that energy, but it will also make tritium which is providing fuel. But the fact that the neutron has all the energy and doesn’t have a charge and is hard to stop and transfer its energy to something else, is a is a difficulty.”

The scientists note Australia’s relatively small, but significant role in nuclear fusion research.

“I think Australia’s part would be in terms of theoretical modeling for the devices and materials development and characterisation,” Stuchbery says. Baldwin adds: “Australia, being a small country, obviously has a relatively small role to play this, but nonetheless, we’ve contributed to this magnetic confinement activity over many decades.”

Baldwin stresses fusion is a clean future energy source. He also dispels myths that, like fission, nuclear fusion can be used to create weaponry.

“Fusion is a clean form of energy source. The byproduct of the fusion reaction between isotopes of the hydrogen atom – deuterium and tritium – is helium atoms, an inert gas. From the reaction itself, there are no radioactive products. There are certainly no greenhouse gases produced. This has great environmental benefits. There might be some very slight neutron activation of the materials surrounding the fusion reactor, but this will be very low grade, and will be very short-lived depending on the materials that are used. We won’t have anywhere near the issues that nuclear fission has in terms of radioactive waste disposal. That’s a huge advantage.

“Maybe in the very long term, it will come to replace these other forms of energy, given that it offers limitless supplies of fuel with almost zero environmental consequences, and potentially the ability to generate unlimited energy in the centuries to come.”

Stuchbery shares in Baldwin’s optimism for the future, and stresses that there is much work that still needs to be done before nuclear fusion reaches its potential.

“It is exciting. But let’s not step into science fiction. But let’s not be pessimistic, either. It’s a fantastic international endeavor to pursue this goal and it’s a great success for science.”

Originally published by Cosmos as After fusion breakthrough, Australian nuclear physicists look to their role in the future of the ultimate green energy

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TAMPA, Fla. – WFLA News Channel 8 will host its 14th Annual KINDNESS DAY on Friday, Dec. 16 at News Channel 8’s visitor’s parking lot located at 200 S. Parker St. in Tampa. Kindness Day supports five Tampa Bay keystone charities – Feeding Tampa Bay, OneBlood, Toys for Tots, Hillsborough Education Foundation and the Tampa Rough Riders. Donations will be received via a fast and easy, drive-through drop-off system.

Viewers can donate:

•     New toy (TOYS FOR TOTS)
•     New teddy bear (TAMPA ROUGH RIDERS)
•     Non-perishable food (FEEDING TAMPA BAY)
•     School supplies (HILLSBOROUGH EDUCATION FOUNDATION)
•     Or give blood (ONEBLOOD)

… All to help families in need during the holiday season. Volunteers from each charity will be on-hand to accept donations Friday starting at 6 a.m. and continue until 5 p.m. OneBlood will have two Big Red Buses on site to accept blood donations for those who have time to stop, park and donate.

“This year marks our 14th year for Kindness Day! I truly believe this year will be the best year ever, for our community’s “spirit of giving” is strong! Kindness Day represents the station’s 8 On Your Side brand and serves our Tampa Bay surrounding community,” said Mark Higgins, Vice-President and General Manager of WFLA/News Channel 8 and WTTA/Great 38.

Each passing car that donates will be handed ONE Goody Bag* containing gifts and offers from our kind and generous community partners: Circle K, Grow Financial Federal Credit Union, Rumfish Beach Resort, Monster Energy Supercross Championship, Enchant, Florida Strawberry Festival, Famous Tate, Rays, Cool Today, Tampa Bay Times, Henry B. Plant Museum, Bucs, Achieva, Chick-fil-A, McDonalds, OneBlood and Joffrey’s Coffee & Tea Company.

News Channel 8’s KINDNESS DAY is sponsored: by Circle K, Achieva, Volkswagen Brandon, Famous Tate, Tampa Bay Times, Grow Financial Federal Credit Union, New South Window Solutions, Enchant, Cool Today and Central Florida Behavioral Health Network, Inc.

Join us Friday, December 16 from 6 a.m. until 5 p.m. and GIVE the gift that doesn’t come in a box – KINDNESS.

DROP-OFF ITEMS NEEDED are new teddy bears, canned and non-perishable foods, new unwrapped toys, school supplies and willing blood donors.

*Goody Bags to be distributed while supplies last*

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But if it happens to you in the city of Chesapeake on December 16, you may be in luck.

This is the fifth year Chesapeake Police have partnered with Kroger, the Chesapeake Crime Line and the Chesapeake Jubilee for "Turkey instead of a Ticket."

According to the department, a local man who is not a police officer named Rodney Foster started this act of kindness after raising money from several sponsors.

If the circumstances of your traffic stop allow, you'll get the perfect centerpiece for your holiday dinner -- a frozen turkey -- instead of that dreaded piece of paper.

So, make sure you're extra nice!

As always, please drive safely and obey traffic signals.

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Scientists may have found the first water worlds

Covid-related deaths could reach one million in the current epidemic wave as the hospital system struggles to keep pace with and treat runaway infections since the country eased its “zero-Covid” rules a week ago.

An estimated 684 people per million would die from Covid-19 as the Chinese government relaxes its epidemic rules without an accompanying mass vaccination booster campaign, according to a research report co-authored by Gabriel Leung, the former dean of medicine at the University of Hong Kong.

The report was not released publicly but was obtained and reviewed by Bloomberg, which estimated about 964,400 people could die from the coronavirus in China.

“Our results suggest that local health systems across all provinces would be unable to cope with the surge of Covid-19 cases posed by reopening in December 2022–January 2023,” the researchers wrote, according to the report.

Meanwhile, the official number of reported Covid infections keeps declining as PCR tests are no longer compulsory. The Chinese government also stopped announcing the daily number of identified asymptomatic cases from Tuesday.

Chinese netizens are now using other measures, such as the number of keyword searches for “fever” on the internet and the number of people who seek help from clinics, to monitor the epidemic’s trajectory. Figures showed that Beijing and nearby cities including Baoding and Shijiazhuang now face large-scale virus outbreaks.

Since the Chinese government announced on December 7 a 10-point notice that Covid patients could choose to quarantine at home while cities should avoid lockdowns and reduce PCR tests, the number of people with fever in key cities has surged.

On Monday, Li Ang, a spokesperson of the Beijing Municipal Health Commission, said the number of people who sought medical treatment at fever clinics in the capital city was 22,000 on December 11, about 16 times higher than the level a week earlier.

Li said about 19,000 people were found to have seasonal flu symptoms in the week ended December 11, about six times higher than the level recorded the previous week.

He said more than 30,000 people now called the emergency hotline “120” each day, which is also about six times higher than the normal level. He said these figures showed that the quick and wide spread of the coronavirus would likely continue in Beijing.

The National Health Commission announced that a total of 6,197 new Covid cases were recorded on Monday, down from 8,838 on Sunday. On Tuesday, the number dropped to 2,291 as all asymptomatic cases were excluded.

Covid patients try to get admitted to a hospital in Beijing. Photo: Screenshot, Weibo

The Commission said it could not get the accurate number of all asymptomatic cases as PCR tests were no longer compulsory.

Hu Xijin, former editor in chief of the Communist Party mouthpiece the Global Times, said last week that the declining number of officially announced positive cases did not reflect the true epidemic situation in China.

Jiang Debin, a Guangdong-based columnist, said the government’s decision to exclude asymptomatic cases was reasonable as it could help ease public panic about the disease’s fast spread. He said many people had been hoarding medicine and queuing up at hospitals and clinics over the past week but actually most of them could just stay home.

During the pandemic, many countries launched mobile apps for those who tested positive at home to voluntarily report their cases, helping infectious disease experts monitor the Rt value, an effective reproduction number of the virus. An Rt of less than 1.0 means the infection is not spreading.

A new study by researchers at the University of Hong Kong, who traveled to Beijing in November, estimated that 684 people per million would die in China’s reopening as many people have not received a booster shot. The researchers said if China had delayed the reopening to January 2023 and boosted its vaccination rates, the number of deaths could fall by 26%.

The team also suggested that the fast growth of infections in China could lead to mutations of the virus.

In Beijing, funeral and cremation service providers said they were now serving a lot more customers this week. Video footage showed cars queuing up in front of the Babao Mountain Funeral House. But the National Health Commission did not report any Covid death cases.

A nurse in China prepares to administer the Sinovac vaccine. Photo: AFP / George Calvelo / NurPhoto

A writer called City Data Group wrote in an article that Beijing, Baoding and Shijiazhuang were now facing serious virus outbreaks as the online search for the keyword “fever” had increased to a high level. The writer said a “fever index” could be used to monitor the virus transmission.
 
He said the index rose to 1.57 in Shanghai in April and 2.6 in Urumqi in October due to virus outbreaks, up from the normal level of 1. He said the index had now reached 3.98 in Beijing, 4.98 in Baoding and 4 in Shijiazhuang. He also estimated that at least 1.7 million people would die in the current epidemic wave. 

On Wednesday, the China National Pharmaceutical Group Corp said it had signed an agreement with Pfizer to import the American firm’s oral Covid treatment pill Paxlovid. The medicine is now priced at 2,980 yuan (US$426.80) per box on the Internet. 

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