Israel's extreme far-right national security minister pledged today to "crush [Palestinians] one by one," Haaretz has reported. Itamar Ben-Gvir made his comment while speaking to illegal settlers at the equally illegal settlement "outpost" of Evyatar as they were being evicted by the occupation authorities.
Race kooks both black and white have long dreamed of separate Americas, and what was the Civil War but that dream manifested in its bloody, brutal reality? It is an old idea that never loses its appeal to those with too much hate in their hearts and too few powers of observation."Of course interstate trade, travel, and state relations would continue," she wrote. (Gee, thanks.) "However in red states, they could have different rules about store product placement on national store's shelves. In red states, I highly doubt Walmart could place sex toys next to children's toothbrushes."Again, I hate to bring attention to a political figure so desperate for it, but imagine with a person who is concerned about a plague of marital aids next to the kids' dental care section. Tickle me Elmo, indeed. Does she imagine that Walmart organizes its stores based on state laws? Worse, imagine a person who wants to regulate store layouts at the state level.Or try this one from the same thread: "Red states would likely ban all gender lies and confusing theories, Drag Queen story times, and LGBTQ indoctrinating teachers, and China's money and influence in our education. While blue states could have government-controlled gender transition schools."Is there a lot of drag storytelling in her northwest Georgia district? Are the libraries in Cave Spring and Mount Berry now indistinguishable from La Cage aux Folles? Has Chickamauga Elementary School replaced Old Glory with a picture of Chairman Xi and the gym coach with Eddie Izzard?Assuming rural Georgia has not become a hotbed of sexual experimentation and Chinese communism since my most recent visit, Greene is not angry about what is happening where she grew up, but what other people in other places are doing, or, more accurately, what she imagines other people are doing based on a steady diet of Facebook posts and Newsmax segments.Greene says we "need to separate by red states and blue states." What in the heck does she think we have already done? There's certainly plenty of people who agree with her call to shrink the federal government, but in terms of most of what she's talking about, Americans already live the way they want to live, where they want to live. The proximity of sex toys to bubble gum-flavored toothpaste or how sex ed is taught is already different depending on where you are in America, because Americans already have the power to shape markets and local governments.Greene and the rest of the American divorce crowd aren't really talking about how they want to live. They're talking about how they want other Americans to live.
Twenty years after the emergence of major green energy technologies - wind, solar, electric vehicles, batteries and ancillary technologies -- they have become the new energy system. Green has far less to do with it - they are just better.Each of these technologies have grown well over a 10 times since 2000, and continue to grow at rates of 15-20% per year - meaning they could be up to three to four times bigger again by 2030: wind and solar already are 12% of the global power industry, EVs are already at 15% of global new car sales.Play with energy scenarios galore - but the maths takes you to some unambiguous conclusions.Green energy technology is the new energy system. Perhaps time to retire the colourful adjectives: green energy is energy.
In December, Reason's Nick Gillespie sat down with [the authors of Superabundance: The Story of Population Growth, Innovation, and Human Flourishing on an Infinitely Bountiful Planet, Marian L. Tupy of the Cato Institute and Gale L. Pooley of Brigham Young University-Hawaii]. They discussed how the real prices of our most basic necessities--and most of our luxury goods--have declined over time and how free markets and human innovation make our planet infinitely bountiful. [...]Tupy: [L]ooking at hundreds of different commodities, fuels, minerals, metals, even finished goods and some services, everything has become cheaper in terms of "time price." People simply have to work less in order to buy things which are essential goods and commodities in order to survive.What is the concept of "time price"?Pooley: We buy things with money, but we really pay for them with time. How much time does it take you to earn the money to buy that thing? So there's a money price that you can express in dollars and cents, but there's a time price that you can express in hours and minutes. The time price equation is real simple. It's just how much it cost you divided by your hourly income.Time is this universal constant. You can't inflate it; you can't counterfeit it. Of the seven fundamental majors in science, six of them go back to time. It's this fundamental feature. So if you can move economics from thinking of money to thinking in time, I think we then allow that discipline to become more scientific.We all get 24 hours a day. So if instead of income inequality you can think about time inequality, I think it's much more informative and revealing in terms of what kind of life we have.
Perovskites, a family of materials with unique electric properties, show promise for use in a variety fields, including next-generation solar cells. A Penn State-led team of scientists created a new process to fabricate large perovskite devices that is more cost- and time-effective than previously possible and that they said may accelerate future materials discovery."This method we developed allows us to easily create very large bulk samples within several minutes, rather than days or weeks using traditional methods," said Luyao Zheng, a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Materials Science at Penn State and lead author on the study. "And our materials are high quality - their properties can compete with single-crystal perovskites."
Over its lifetime, 14D has explored a few options for its technology, including long duration energy storage - electricity to electricity - and a South Australia government-sponsored attempt at storing biogas as thermal energy, that was not a success.In 2023, the company has retrained its focus on using the "unique thermophysical properties" of its technology to supply industrial heat of the sort that is currently supplied using carbon-intensive processes fuelled by gas and coal.Having now successfully demonstrated in its lab-based furnaces that it can reach the sort of temperature levels, between 800°C - 1200°C, required for heavy industrial processes, the next step is to generate that sort of heat continuously over extended periods of time.