36 posts tagged with power and Technology.
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Galaxy Gals
The queen of suspense: how Ann Radcliffe inspired Dickens and Austen – then got written out of the canon - "She was all but forgotten. Now the 18th-century author's republished novels reveal why she made such an extraordinary contribution to literature." [more inside]
Power (Plough, Sword & Book) and Progress (Exit, Voice & Loyalty)
Justice by Means of Democracy [archive|transcript] - "[T]he work of democracy is to continuously resist capture. There is no end of history. There is no state of rest for democracy. Democracy is the work of resisting capture by powerful interests and restoring power-sharing just over and over and over again. So we have to do work to introduce new governance mechanisms in the place of those that are not working."[1,2; link-heavy post!] [more inside]
A Land of Contrasts ^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H Sinicisation
How China is tearing down Islam [ungated; viz. cf.] - "Thousands of mosques have been altered or destroyed as Beijing's suppression of Islamic culture spreads."[1,2] [more inside]
Constructed Worlds, Group Beliefs and Narrative Consciousness
Three Simple Policy Heuristics - "The most important thing to understand is this: Harm ripples, kindness ripples. People you hurt go on to hurt other people. People who are treated with kindness become better people, or more prosperous people, and go on to help others. Yes, there are exceptions (we'll deal with those people), but they are exceptions." (via) [more inside]
Why and how we are going to be flying electric
Cheddar explains why he believes Electric Planes are Inevitably Coming - with particular reference to the economics of short distance, commercial flights. Electric Future announces"Electric Planes have arrived" - a review of current and models and those in the immediate pipeline. Real Engineering summarises the the technical challenges and limits. [more inside]
Energy Transition
Where Wind and Solar Power Need to Grow for America to Meet Its Goals [ungated link] - "A broad shift toward renewable energy could transform landscapes and coastlines all over the United States." (Net Zero America Project) [more inside]
The Hidden Science Making Batteries Better, Cheaper and Everywhere
How Batteries Work: Inside The Batteries Powering Your Car, Phone and More - "From electric vehicles to your cell phone, lithium ion batteries have evolved quickly over the past few years. Bloomberg Green charted the evolution of their makeup and how they work." (Bloomberg: The Next Generation of Batteries | How a New Generation of Batteries Will Change the World) [more inside]
Carbon‐Neutral Pathways
New study: A zero-emissions US is now pretty cheap (pdf) - "In 2050, benefits to the US offset costs, but there are some unexpected outcomes." [more inside]
The magic of cheap energy
Why I'm so excited about solar and batteries - "Instead of the Jetsons future, we got the cyberpunk future. Why did that happen? ... I blame the slowdown in energy technology... we didn't get anything better than oil during this time. Nuclear fission provided a bit of a boost to electricity generation (and a big boost in France), but nobody ended up driving fission cars around or flying fission planes through the sky."[1] [more inside]
The Trick of Orthodoxy
Economics truly is a disgrace - "This is very personal post. It is my story of the retaliation I suffered immediately after my 'economics is a disgrace' blog post went viral. The retaliation came from Heather Boushey–a recent Biden appointee to the Council of Economic Adviser and the President and CEO of Equitable Growth where I then worked. This is not the story I wanted to be telling (or living). Writing this post is painful. I am sorry." (via; previously) [more inside]
Age of Discord II
Welcome To The 'Turbulent Twenties' - "We predicted political upheaval in America in the 2020s. This is why it's here and what we can do to temper it."[1,2] (via) [more inside]
Angry, educated and rich
Intra-Elite Competition: A Key Concept for Understanding the Dynamics of Complex Societies - "Elites are a small proportion of the population (on the order of 1 percent) who concentrate social power in their hands."[1] (via; previously) [more inside]
Innovation in 'atoms': build more solar, get cheaper energy
Solar's Future is Insanely Cheap (2020) [thread] - "This incredible pace of solar cost decline, with average prices in sunny parts of the world down to a penny or two by 2030 or 2035, is just remarkable. Building new solar would routinely be cheaper than operating already built fossil fuel plants, even in the world of ultra-cheap natural gas we live in now. This is what I've called the third phase of clean energy, where building new clean energy is cheaper than keeping fossil fuel plants running." [more inside]
Lock in: no exit, voice nor loyalty
Facebook and Speech: It's All About Power - "As long as there is one Facebook algorithm, one Twitter algorithm, one Instagram algorithm, etc. that will always be way too much power in one place. We all need to be able to programmatically interact with these services." [more inside]
Narrative, Fiction and World-Building Reality
Ursula K. Le Guin's Revolutions - "Le Guin's work is distinctive not only because it is imaginative, or because it is political, but because she thought so deeply about the work of building a future worth living." [more inside]
Your Data, Your Money, Your Laws
Your data could be at the centre of the fight against big tech (NYT) - "Furman, a Harvard professor advising the British government on tech regulation, said that rather than relying on antitrust law alone, countries should create a dedicated regulator for the tech industry, to match those covering the banking, health and transportation sectors of the economy. He said a watchdog with expertise in the field could better review a company's behavior and use of data on a case-by-case basis." [more inside]
Technology, Law and Political Economy for Humans
How China Is Planning to Rank 1.3 Billion People - "Yet educated, urban Chinese take a positive view, seeing social credit systems as a means to promote honesty in society and the economy rather than a privacy violation, according to a poll by Mercator Institute for China Studies."[1] [more inside]
Common Wealth and Collective Power
Bernie Sanders' plan to empower workers could revolutionise Britain's economy (among others') - "Giving employees a stake in firms would reshape power: this could be the start of a transatlantic challenge to neoliberalism." [more inside]
Peripheral Belters or Retooling Finance and Tech for Everyone's Benefit
Going to Space to Benefit Earth - "Bezos then went on to discuss his plan to ship humans off of the best planet in the solar system and send them to live in floating cylinders in space." [more inside]
Public Squares or Private Premises
Alex Jones, the First Amendment, and the Digital Public Square - "How should we challenge hate-mongering in the age of social media?" [more inside]
“...a moral pretext for what is really just imaginative pleasure.”
Empathy Machines: Fellow feeling as a technologically mediated experience by Olivia Rosane “The narrative about the power of literature, like the current approach to VR, makes historical change not a matter of the resistance efforts of the oppressed and their allies but of relatively privileged people speaking to other relatively privileged people to spark a paternalistic response. [...] By focusing on bringing the experiences of the marginalized to elites, VR developers implicitly endorse a system in which a small number of people retain outsize power.”
Greatest Story Ever Told, Greatest Trick Ever Pulled
Authority - "We construct authority. How we construct it is among the most important social, ethical, and technological problems we face." [more inside]
Towards an Empathic Civilization
The Third Industrial Revolution: A Radical New Sharing Economy - "Where do we go from here? In this feature-length documentary, social and economic theorist Jeremy Rifkin lays out a road map to usher in a new economic system." (previously) [more inside]
City state island nation
Reports of its death were greatly exaggerated, and the end-of-the-nation-state theory itself died at the turn of the millennium. But now it’s back, and this time it might be right.
Classifying Voice
Freedom of speech in the digital age - "Speech that disseminates ideas is more valuable than speech whose purpose is to intimidate others." [more inside]
New energy transitions: Tipping point for self-organized criticality?
Electric vehicles – It's not just about the car - "One of the key characteristics of complex systems, such as the world's energy and transport sectors, is that when they change it tends not to be a linear process. They flip from one state to another in a way strongly analogous to a phase change in material science... A second important characteristic of this type of economic phase change is that when one major sector flips, the results rip through the whole economy and can have impacts on the societal scale." (via) [more inside]
Al Gore and Bill Gates on Investing in Clean-Energy 'Moon Shots'
The case for optimism on climate change - "I'll finish with this story. When I was 13 years old, I heard that proposal by President Kennedy to land a person on the Moon and bring him back safely in 10 years. And I heard adults of that day and time say, 'That's reckless, expensive, may well fail.' But eight years and two months later, in the moment that Neil Armstrong set foot on the Moon, there was great cheer that went up in NASA's mission control in Houston. Here's a little-known fact about that: the average age of the systems engineers, the controllers in the room that day, was 26, which means, among other things, their age, when they heard that challenge, was 18." (via; previously) [more inside]
"It's something we must do, and we can do, and we will do."
Tesla Powerwall Battery Economics: Almost There - "Elon Musk announced Tesla's home / business battery today. [video] tl;dr: It'll get enthusiastic early adopters to buy. The economics are almost there to make it cost effective for a wide market... That said, for large scale grid deployment (outside of the home), it still looks like flow batteries[1] and advanced compressed air[2] are likely to be far cheaper in the long run." [more inside]
Indirect fusion's nothing less than HiiiPoWeR
Installed solar capacity is growing by leaps and bounds, led by Walmart and Apple, and helped by bonds backed by solar power payments,[*] which have sent industry stocks soaring, even as molten salt and new battery technologies come on line to generate storage for use when the sun doesn't shine. Of course we could always go to geostationary orbit -- or the moon -- as well we may (if politics allow it) as thirst from the developing world grows beyond the earth's carrying capacity. [more inside]
The Feudal Internet
The bright future of solar powered factories
Most of the talk about renewable energy is aimed at electricity production. However, most of the energy we need is heat, which solar panels and wind turbines cannot produce efficiently. To power industrial processes like the making of chemicals, the smelting of metals or the production of microchips, we need a renewable source of thermal energy. Direct use of solar energy can be the solution, and it creates the possibility to produce renewable energy plants using only renewable energy plants, paving the way for a truly sustainable industrial civilization. [more inside]
you may say I'm a dreamer
-Only an 'energy internet' can ward off disaster
-We must electrify the transport sector [more inside]
-We must electrify the transport sector [more inside]
ending corporate welfare
Get the Energy Sector off the Dole - Why ending all government subsidies for fuel production will lead to a cleaner energy future—and why Obama has a rare chance to make it happen.
Hot Rocks
Stanford Ovshinsky
The Edison of our age? Stanford Ovshinsky may not be a household name, but his inventions have the power to change the world.
Wave Power Generation
Ocean Power Technologies is one of the leading Ocean Wave Power alternative energy companies. The technology is simple to understand, easy to deploy and costs about the same as fossil fuel power 3 to 4 cents. OPT just signed a deal for a 1M farm off the coast of Spain with a 100M farm by 2006, a major step forward for wave power generation.
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