The market for learning the Lithuanian language is quite small.
While the market for "learn Spanish as a second language" is bigger, the much more valuable tool is one that teaches English as a first language.
What does it need?
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🔥 I only assume these people are being indirectly paid by the fossil-fuel industry. In general, for these bad-faith, low-quality arguments against any form of renewable energy, it is a safe bet. Regardless of whether they are paid, directly or indirectly, it is very blatantly propaganda.
⚙️ "Center of the American Experiment’s mission is to build a culture of prosperity for Minnesota and the nation. Our daily pursuit is a free and thriving Minnesota whose cultural and intellectual center of gravity is grounded in free enterprise, limited government, individual freedom, and other time-tested American virtues."
https://jasonhayes.substack.com/p/net-zero-just-isnt-happening
LINKS TO
https://files.americanexperiment.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/Shattered-Green-Dreams.pdf
There are so many flaws in this report, it is enough that one should throw the report (and its advocates) out entirely. ✨ If a person gives you 10 arguments, and 8 of them are objectively wrong, and you aren't sure about two, you must not give that person the benefit of the doubt.
ONE. Bad Math.
There are a remarkable number of situations where they give highlight, where they highlight figures such as: "This resource will consume 10x production" or "2000%". They never emphasize the baseline. For example, when they talk about nickel production, they say it is "1600%" of American production but "11%" of global production. Similarly, for aluminum, they say "45 times the U.S.’ 670,000 metric tons of primary aluminum production in 2024 and 42 percent of the world’s 72 million metric tons".
Yes, if America doesn't produce much nickel or aluminum you will get a very large multiple of that. The solution is either recognizing that it's a global economy and that an America-first-at-all-costs approach is simply a smoke screen to shut down something you don't like, or building more nickel mines in the US; a large percentage increase that might not be a large absolute increase.
TWO. Environmentalists whenever it helps their cause.
The piece is very aggressive on highlighting any actual or perceived environmental ills that can be traced to solar or wind energy. 200 turtles don't have an habitat? Crime. Use a dirty mine in Indonesia? Crime. However, for systems they support, these types of environmental ills are simply ignored or dismissed.
Furthermore, many of the scenes they highlight are purely speculative or are described as topics that may need additional research. "Do wind turbine noise cause whale problems? There is no evidence of it, but they aren't sure. We can't take the risk." This once again is caution at all costs because they have an underlying motivation to kill the project.
And when there is some merit to their claims, they are still exaggerated, hyper-aggressive and concerned with relative impact only when it benefits them. They claim a study says 350,000 birds died in wind turbines in one year. They then say this is definitely an underestimate. With no argument other than that it helps their cause. Meanwhile, with a U.S. population of 15 billion birds, most of which have a lifespan of 5 to 10 years, this seems like a relatively low number. They note in passing that "building collisions" caused 600 million deaths, but shrug it off, saying that this high number means "any cause of mortality needs to be tackled".
🔥 If your philosophy is that one dead bird is too many, nothing will satisfy you. I really don't care to rebut those arguments further.
THREE. Focusing on the failures.
The report talks at length about the Ivanpah Solar Power Facility in California. This is not a traditional solar panel plant, but a plant that uses large arrays of mirrors to superheat a reservoir to over 1000 degrees Fahrenheit. This design has several flaws and does cause more serious safety issues. The plant is also being decommissioned early because it is ineffective. However the authors extrapolate from this to say that all solar plants have these same problems. This is a sleight of hand deception.
FOUR. Focusing on meaningless metrics.
Like several other influencers in this space, they focus heavily on one metric that suits their goals, the energy generated per land area used. A solar plant that uses 70 square miles and a nuclear plant that uses one square mile may generate the same amount of energy.
This is problematic for several reasons. First, the land used is not equivalent. 70 square miles of the Nevada desert may not be used for anything else. Thus, the cost is low. Second, if a solar plant replaces a field growing ethanol corn in Iowa, it is done because the economic and the energy returns are far greater. Simply claiming that some other technology đź’ˇ which has its own drawbacks might be even better doesn't mean you can't do the first improvement.
A very different meaningless metric comes from long-time anti-solar shill Robert Bryce, who is quoted as saying that in Minnesota, “nearly all of the wind projects” are “located in counties that are poorer than the statewide average”. Except of course they are. Once the 9 counties of the Minneapolis-St. Paul metro area (the 9 richest counties in the state) are excluded, only 3 of the remaining 78 counties are not "poorer than the statewide average". This is not a legitimate socio-economic argument, it is deception.
And a third one comes from another piece linked in the blog post ⚙️ https://lifepowered.org/data-banning-fossil-fuels-wouldnt-stop-climate-change/ where they claim that "if the United States banned fossil fuels by 2050", it would only cause "a tenth of a degree" of change by 2100. The (hidden) assumption is that no other countries make any changes. The argument is effectively saying "if we divide the world into 20 parts, none of them can make a big enough change on their own, so we should do nothing". 🔥 Which is a frightfully stupid reason to do nothing.
FIVE. Misunderstanding system lifecycle.
They have one quote which massively misrepresents the lifecycle of these products. They say that most solar panels only have warranties of 25 years, whereas a coal plant can be in operation for 60 years. đź’ˇ The concerns about the lifespan of wind turbines seem to be at least somewhat based in fact rather than misrepresentation. The difference is that the word warranty is used.
Nobody can offer a 60-year warranty on solar. I looked into it. It simply doesn't make sense. The problems related to the fact that neither the purchaser, the manufacturer, nor the insurer are likely to be around in 60 years, either as corporate entities or natural persons, make such a long warranty become meaningless.
This doesn't mean that technology can't last that long. It simply means that the financial product of a warranty becomes meaningless. For the coal plant, there is no warranty. The owner of the plant is incentivized to keep it running as long as it is economical.
SIX. Obstacles of our own design.
The authors consistently point to tax credits and other government incentives that encourage fast depreciation and replacement of solar or wind, claiming that this proves they are not sustainable in the long run. Similarly, they point to the permitting process, at one point making the ludicrous claim that it would take 1,400 years to prove all the permits necessary for a net-zero energy transition.
The flaw here is obvious: These are stupid rules the government made up. They can just get rid of the rules. You don't want them to get rid of the rules because you don't want the solar plants. This isn't a real obstacle; it's a fake one.
SEVEN. Failure to consider alternate technology.
They routinely math based on an assumption that batteries need to support 100% of energy storage needs. This is a fallacious assumption. In particular, for cold weather climates, a battery-based system will never be feasible. The only possible option is a solar and/or wind-powered system that generates some amount of (presumably) methane that can be stored and then burned during the winter season. This would have a substantially lower metal, et cetera cost. However, it doesn't fit their conclusion. So they need not consider it.
https://alluvial.substack.com/p/finding-value-in-faraway-places
I have a few thoughts on this piece, none of which lead towards anyone in the U.S. should be getting involved in this.
https://x.com/patio11/status/1930340924212539902 (n.b. This is extremely well-known among companies which have a business process where you sign things. Most of them use a signature to demonstrate solemnization rather than authorization or authentication.)
I'm not familiar with the word solemnization here. But the concept makes sense. The purpose of the signature isn't to demonstrate consent, or identity. It is to create a ritual.
An early version is available at https://earlyversion.com/trakaido .
Still to be done:
The list of things that were done, beyond the fold:
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seen on Reddit: Leblouh - the practice of force-feeding girls from as young as five to nineteen, in (Arab) countries where obesity was traditionally regarded as desirable
I am intensely skeptical about the accuracy of this article. It seems like it is taking an obscure phenomenon and inflating it out of proportion. And, relying on an absence of evidence against this phenomenon outside the Veil of History as the primary source of evidence.
Most of the sources in the past 10 years are clearly "activists who have no experience with the phenomenon other than reading the Wikipedia article".
Širvintos is a small town in eastern Lithuania, serving as the administrative center of the Širvintos District Municipality within Vilnius County. It lies approximately 50 km northwest of Vilnius, the capital, and is part of the ethnographic region of Aukštaitija.
The town has a population of around 6,000–7,000 people and is situated along the Širvinta River, from which it takes its name. Širvintos is known for its quiet atmosphere, a modest but tidy town center, and its recent urban revitalization efforts. In the past decade, significant EU-funded improvements have transformed parts of the town—new public spaces, walking paths, renovated streets, and cultural sites have been developed to make it more livable and attractive.
The focus today is "Trakaido". Here is a list of 21 things to do, and 3 things that got finished before I wrote this post.
DONE:
Perhaps the correct question is not why does the machine need to be polite. Perhaps the correct question is regardless of the motivation, make it be polite. đź’ˇ there is a certain evolutionary need; people tend to like things that are polite more.
🔥 as a coder, one must start with the only programming language with polity requirements: INTERCAL. The full name of the compiler is "Compiler Language With No Pronounceable Acronym", which is, for obvious reasons, abbreviated "INTERCAL".
INTERCAL has many other features designed to make it even more aesthetically unpleasing to the programmer: it uses statements such as "READ OUT", "IGNORE", "FORGET", and modifiers such as "PLEASE". This last keyword provides two reasons for the program's rejection by the compiler: if "PLEASE" does not appear often enough, the program is considered insufficiently polite, and the error message says this; if it appears too often, the program could be rejected as excessively polite. Although this feature existed in the original INTERCAL compiler, it was undocumented.
🔥 this seems to support a theory where humans are the computational substrate for the language called "English".
of course, there is "tone" and there is "content".
humans struggle with it ⚙️ and I have not yet tried to get the machine to pull it off. but one can splice them fairly easy. have an excited tone while talking about something bad. an interesting tone when talking about something boring. etc etc.
at a certain level of comprehension+maturity, the question becomes a tradeoff between "what you want to hear" and "what you need to hear".
however, I don't think the machine is at that point, yet.
ONE. https://computer.rip/2025-06-08-Omnimax.html - the history of Omnimax (one form of IMAX).
The TLDR - never profitable; it's amazing a project kept afloat by "science museums" for decades did as well as it did.
TWO. - LLMs are Cheap ⚙️ https://www.snellman.net/blog/archive/2025-06-02-llms-are-cheap/
It may be time to start a "LLM-powered widgets" business.
The word widgets is a bit of legerdemain; it distracts from the details. the process would be:
* choose a vertical (education, "personal productivity", law, medicine, etc.)
* get a team of about five (one designer, two developers, one quality-assurance, and me)
* build a suite of tools (for "education", not just "a reading game to learn -op", but "reading games for everything in the 1st grade curriculum) ⚔️ for "law", my cheapest estimate includes $500k to train models on specific corpuses of government legal codes and court decisions. for education and "personal productivity", the regular APIs are enough.
* get to an MVP within 3 months
* sell sell sell
There's a new soccer tournament ⚙️ the Club World Cup, and it probably will suck.
but: it is a dry-run for the World Cup next year. and, for "does Trump blow up border-control to the point this doesn't work". ⚙️ we invoke Guild Law: no discussion of politics or religion
Somewhere in the past six years, Curtis Yarvin has made a heel turn. He wasn't viewed as much of a hero before, but he definitely isn't now. The obvious point of examination is that of his wife's death. We have three theories regarding that.
But, regardless of the reason, Curtis Yarvin of today is not a serious thinker in the way that he was five or six years ago.
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