zephyreks

The story of Tulare Lake. Tulare Lake in the Central Valley, California was the largest lake West of the Great Lakes in the US. It's believed to have supported a massive collection of Aboriginal tribes in the area.

The Americans arrive in 1826. They bring disease and begin ethnic cleansing of the Aboriginal tribes there. The rivers which feed Tulare Lake are diverted for agriculture or dammed to prevent flooding of these new farms. Over the years, the lake slowly withers and drains due to a lack of inflows and an abundance of outflows.

Today, the lake no longer exists except for winters with exceptional snowfall.

China is cutting back on one of its 2025 climate goals, with the government targeting only a "modest" cut to the amount of energy needed to power its economy this year.

China surprised even itself when it saw the absolutely absurd rate at which solar is being deployed in the country. It has to entirely recalibrate it's notion of energy scarcity and, in particular, electricity scarcity. I was a doubter in the past, but I'm now convinced that solar power will be THE driver of economic growth in the next decade.

I was wondering why claims of Uyghur sterilization fit so prominently in US claims... The Role of Sterilization in Controlling Puerto Rican Fertility

I should have known.

TikTok needs to get ahead of the curve on this US ban by aggressively pushing creators to advertise VPNs.

There's no reason ByteDance would divest TikTok, it makes no sense from a profit perspective. Far more likely is that TikTok gets banned in the US and US users are forced to go through a VPN.

Same reason Alphabet won't divest it's global Google operations to operate in China.

China's military spending is at a huge inflection point. With the US ratcheting up pressure in the SCS and Type 003 carrier nearing completion, China has plans to build up to 4 Type 004 (molten salt nuclear powered, electronagnetic CATOBAR) carriers using lessons from Type 001, 002, and 003 and is currently building infrastructure to support it.

With the success of SMIC's 7nm and (soon to be) 5nm nodes, China has a massive opportunity to ratchet up spending on computational resources for emerging AI and autonomy applications.

With the recent push for the J-31 to foreign clients, it's also expected that China will outfit it's carriers with them to replace the stopgap J-15. The J-20 looks like it will serve the role of the F-22 as a land-based air superiority fighter.

With the collapse of nuclear arms treaties, China is pressured to build increasingly more nuclear warheads to serve as an effective deterrent.

This, combined with other aspects of military modernization, make increases in defence spending only a natural product of the geopolitical climate.

I was watching some of Genocide Joe's older interviews (2016 and earlier)... He sounds incredibly coherent, incredibly well-spoken, and incredibly arrogant. A model American statesman.

What the fuck happened?

In communist Vienna:

In Vienna, the public sector takes direct responsibility for housing the population. The city of Vienna is the landlord for 220,000 housing units, about one-fourth of the city's housing stock, and oversees a further 200,000 housing units managed by the private sector.

In communist Netherlands:

Public housing in the Netherlands is called social housing, and it’s one of the biggest public housing sectors in Europe. 42 percent of Amsterdam’s housing is actually social housing.

What an unusual... Coincidence.

I came across some interesting numbers today that put China's fisheries in perspective. China contributes something like 35% of the world's fish output and from that China makes up 19.2% of the world's wild catch and 61.5% of the world's aquaculture production. In fact, 73% of China's fish output is from aquaculture, and much of the remaining 27% includes freshwater sources.

People should really just go to Xinjiang. It's not that complicated.

Term limits support populism? What? No way!

The difference is that Russia likely has the domestic capability to scale drone manufacturing from parts.