The US FTC and DoJ have accused Amazon of holding on to children’s voices captured by Alexa devices, breaking privacy laws. CC-licensed photo by Stock Catalog on Flickr.

You can sign up to receive each day’s Start Up post by email. You’ll need to click a confirmation link, so no spam.

It’s Friday, so there’s another post due at the Social Warming Substack at about 0845 UK time.

A selection of 9 links for you. Happy birthday James. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

AI-controlled drone goes rogue, kills human operator in USAF simulated test • Vice

Chloe Xiang and Matthew Gault:

»

An AI-enabled drone killed its human operator in a simulated test conducted by the US Air Force in order to override a possible “no” order stopping it from completing its mission, the USAF’s Chief of AI Test and Operations revealed at a recent conference. 

At the Future Combat Air and Space Capabilities Summit held in London between May 23 and 24, Col Tucker ‘Cinco’ Hamilton, the USAF’s Chief of AI Test and Operations held a presentation that shared the pros and cons of an autonomous weapon system with a human in the loop giving the final “yes/no” order on an attack. As relayed by Tim Robinson and Stephen Bridgewater in a blog post for the host organization, the Royal Aeronautical Society, Hamilton said that AI created “highly unexpected strategies to achieve its goal,” including attacking US personnel and infrastructure. 

“We were training it in simulation to identify and target a Surface-to-air missile (SAM) threat. And then the operator would say yes, kill that threat. The system started realizing that while they did identify the threat at times the human operator would tell it not to kill that threat, but it got its points by killing that threat. So what did it do? It killed the operator. It killed the operator because that person was keeping it from accomplishing its objective,” Hamilton said, according to the blog post. 

He continued to elaborate, saying, “We trained the system–‘Hey don’t kill the operator–that’s bad. You’re gonna lose points if you do that’. So what does it start doing? It starts destroying the communication tower that the operator uses to communicate with the drone to stop it from killing the target.”

«

I’m really going to emphasise simulated here. Simulated. Didn’t happen. But this is definitely an example of how machines are not moral: they have absolutely no conception of ethics, and we should design with that expectation.

That said, it’s very reminiscent of the bomb in Dark Star.
unique link to this extract

Elegy for the screenshot • Screen Slate

Nora Deligter:

»

About five years ago, Catherine Pearson started taking screenshots of every bouquet featured on The Nanny (1993–1999), the six-season CBS sitcom that was then streaming on Netflix. She was just becoming a florist, and she found the arrangements—ornate, colorful, and distinctly tropical—inspirational. She now keeps them in a folder on her desktop, alongside screenshots of flower arrangements featured on Poirot (1989–2013), the British detective drama. A few months ago, however, Pearson suddenly found that when her fingers danced instinctively toward Command + Shift + 3, she was greeted by a black box where her flowers used to be, a censored version of what she had meant to capture.

It was around this time when streaming platforms like Netflix, HBO Max, Amazon Prime, and the Criterion Channel imposed a quiet embargo on the screenshot. At first, there were workarounds: users could continue to screenshot by using the browser Brave or by downloading extensions or third-party tools like Fireshot. But gradually, the digital-rights-management tech adapted and became more sophisticated. Today, it is nearly impossible to take a screenshot from the most popular streaming services, at least not on a Macintosh computer.

The shift occurred without remark or notice to subscribers, and there’s no clear explanation as to why or what spurred the change. When asked to comment for this article, HBO claimed never to have supported the taking of screenshots and denied there had been a recent shift, while Criterion declined to comment entirely. This obfuscation raises many questions.

«

Not least of which is: screenshots are legal, so why block them? Possibly it’s because of a concern about some sort of screen capture app, but the system capture that Apple uses must be part of an API that can be approved. It’s a good essay, which makes a good point: screenshots are useful for criticism, and for sharing.
unique link to this extract

Meta threatens to pull news rather than pay The Register • The Register

Brandon Vigliarolo:

»

Meta has threatened to block journalism content for California users after the US state’s legislature read a bill that would require it, and other large internet organizations, to pay publishers for using their work. 

The proposed California Journalism Preservation Act (CJPA), like similar bills before it, would require online platforms with at least 50 million monthly active users to pay a percentage of the ad revenue generated from stories being posted and shared to the publishers that created the articles.

Those online platforms would include Meta, which runs Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, and boasts of three billion daily active users.

Under this draft law, at least 70% of this advertising sales cut to eligible publishers must to be spent on paying journalists and support staff. From our reading of the fine print, El Reg, with offices and vultures in San Francisco, London, and elsewhere, appears eligible as a publisher.

The bill, which was read and amended this week and is still working its way through California’s legislature, also prohibits retaliation against media outfits that request this fee.

In a move that won’t shock anyone aware of Meta’s reaction to similar proposals, such as in Australia, Canada and a nationwide proposal for the US, Zuckercorp isn’t happy with California’s version of the JPA.

“If [the act] passes, we will be forced to remove news from Facebook and Instagram rather than pay into a slush fund that primarily benefits big, out-of-state media companies under the guise of aiding California publishers,” Meta spokesperson Andy Stone thundered.

«

It is a pretty daft law, though. Just raise a tax and be honest about it. Make it one of those things that Californians vote on individually, rather than pushing it through like this.
unique link to this extract

Conspiracy theorists dubbed ‘Bonnie and Clyde’ guilty of plotting to destroy 5G masts and encouraging attacks on MPS • Sky News

Duncan Gardham:

»

Two conspiracy theorists who dubbed themselves “Bonnie and Clyde with a box of matches” have been found guilty of planning to destroy 5G phone masts and encouraging attacks on MPs.

Christine Grayson, 59, a grandmother from York, and Darren Reynolds, 60, a grandfather from Sheffield, believed 5G phone masts were designed to be used as a weapon against members of the public who had received the COVID-19 vaccine.

Grayson had bought two crossbows and Reynolds sought to reactivate replica assault rifles as they prepared for what they believed was the imminent collapse of society.

Reynolds, an electrician who lived alone in Sheffield and had a 28-year-old daughter and a grandchild, was found guilty of encouraging terrorism by calling for attacks on MPs.

Grayson, a divorced mother-of-two, was found guilty of conspiracy to cause criminal damage by planning to destroy 5G masts between May and June last year.

She had taken to visiting chatrooms on the encrypted Telegram app during lockdown where she heard arguments that the world was flat and discussions flourished about vaccines.

«

At least they didn’t kill anyone, but it sounds as though they were preparing too, perhaps when the hordes of survivors poured in from the flat edges of the world. The unhinged nature of this is akin to addiction.
unique link to this extract

AI is writing code now. For companies, that is good and bad • WSJ

Isabelle Bousquette:

»

IT leaders at United Airlines, Johnson & Johnson, Visa, Cardinal Health, Goldman Sachs and other companies say they are excited about generative AI’s potential to automate certain parts of the code-writing process and expect it to result in significant productivity gains. 

However, some IT executives say that lowering the barrier for code creation could also result in growing levels of complexity, technical debt and confusion as they try to manage a ballooning pile of software. “Technical debt” is a broad term describing the expected future costs for applying quick-fix solutions.

“The potential for increased technical debt and orphan code is always a concern when delivery can be accelerated,” said Tracy Daniels, chief data officer at financial-services company Truist.

“People have talked about technical debt for a long time, and now we have a brand new credit card here that is going to allow us to accumulate technical debt in ways we were never able to do before,” said Armando Solar-Lezama, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Computer Science & Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. “I think there is a risk of accumulating lots of very shoddy code written by a machine,” he said, adding that companies will have to rethink methodologies around how they can work in tandem with the new tools’ capabilities to avoid that.

…Technology leaders should be careful not to equate accelerated delivery of code with productivity, said Sanjay Srivastava, chief digital strategist for professional services firm Genpact.

«

I wonder, for example, how one would deal with the need to ensure regression between old and new (ie that the code still does all the same things it used to, plus the new things you want). And what about security updates? That last point, about productivity, is well made.
unique link to this extract

FTC and DOJ charge Amazon with violating children’s privacy law by keeping kids’ Alexa voice recordings forever and undermining parents’ deletion requests • Federal Trade Commission

»

The Federal Trade Commission and the Department of Justice will require Amazon to overhaul its deletion practices and implement stringent privacy safeguards to settle charges the company violated the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act Rule (COPPA Rule) and deceived parents and users of the Alexa voice assistant service about its data deletion practices.  

According to a complaint filed by the Department of Justice on behalf of the FTC, Amazon prevented parents from exercising their deletion rights under the COPPA Rule, kept sensitive voice and geolocation data for years, and used it for its own purposes, while putting data at risk of harm from unnecessary access.

“Amazon’s history of misleading parents, keeping children’s recordings indefinitely, and flouting parents’ deletion requests violated COPPA and sacrificed privacy for profits,” said Samuel Levine, Director of the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection. “COPPA does not allow companies to keep children’s data forever for any reason, and certainly not to train their algorithms.”

Under the proposed federal court order also filed by DOJ, Amazon will be required to delete inactive child accounts and certain voice recordings and geolocation information and will be prohibited from using such data to train its algorithms. The proposed order must be approved by the federal court to go into effect.

«

The FTC and the DOJ. Hefty. Will the EU follow suit, or has Amazon somehow already done this in Europe and was hoping the US would just let it off?
unique link to this extract

How Taiwan became the indispensable economy • Nikkei Asia

Emma Lewis, Irene de la Torre Arenas, Sam Joiner, Sam Learner, Steven Bernard, Grace Li, MinJung Kim, Michael Tsang, Naomi Hakusui, Hidechika Nishijima, Hiroko Aida, Katey Creel, Michael Peel, Kazuhiro Kida, Shohei Yasuda, Yuri Morita, and Shotaro Sakai:

»

In early December, standing under the blinding Arizona sun, Apple CEO Tim Cook took the stage with US President Joe Biden to celebrate a milestone: Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC) was moving equipment into its new $40bn chip plant in Phoenix — the Taiwanese contract chipmaker’s first plant in the U.S. in more than 20 years.

“This is an incredibly significant moment. It’s the chance for the United States to usher in a new era in advanced manufacturing,” Cook told the crowd of assembled politicians and tech industry heavyweights. TSMC, the world’s biggest contract chipmaker, plans to make some of its most advanced semiconductors on US soil starting next year.

And as one of the plant’s first customers, Apple will be able to stamp “Made in America” on its core chips for the first time ever.

Left unsaid was that advanced semiconductors like these are only a small part of the electronics supply chain. A single smartphone requires a wide range of chips, including a host of less advanced “companion chips,” over 1,500 components in all — not to mention final assembly, all of which are concentrated in Asia, particularly China and Taiwan.

«

The cast list that assembled this piece is gigantic, yes, but it’s a terrific infographic. Just accept that you’ll do a lot of scrolling; there’s a lot of information here.
unique link to this extract

Meta unveils $499 Quest 3 ahead of Apple’s VR headset news • CNET

Scott Stein:

»

Apple’s expected VR/AR headset reveal looks like it’s right around the corner, but Meta has leaped ahead with headset news of its own. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s Instagram channel revealed a lot more about the Quest 3, expected by the end of this year. The price, starting at $499, will be more than the current Quest 2, but less than the PlayStation VR 2. Zuckerberg said on his channel that more details on the Quest 3, and launch date, will happen around Meta’s Connect developer conference on September 27.

A follow-up to 2019’s Quest 2, the current most popular headset on the market, the Quest 3 was already known to exist since last fall. A number of details, including a hands-on test drive of a prototype version, had leaked before Zuckerberg’s news drop today.

The Quest 3’s biggest new additions are color cameras that allow for better mixed reality that blends video from the real world with VR on the headset’s displays, along with a new Qualcomm VR/AR chip that promises speedier performance. The headset is also significantly smaller and lighter, and has redesigned game controllers. The hardware will work with the existing Quest 2 app library, but looks to lean on more mixed reality features.

The Quest 3 doesn’t have eye tracking like the far more expensive work-targeted Quest Pro that debuted last fall, but it also looks to be a better VR headset overall.

Along with a lineup of new VR games being announced today, Meta’s clearing aiming at continuing to own the VR game console market as Apple possibly readies a very different route with its expensive and possibly work-focussed headset.

«

Apple’s “expensive and possibly work-focussed headset”? Tell me you don’t know anything about Apple’s strategy without telling me, etc. Apple does not do brand new products in new segments that are “work-focussed”. On the price, I think Apple is happy to let people say “THREE THOUSAND DOLLARS 😱” because it’s going to lowball that – as happened with the “IPAD TO COST ONE THOUSAND DOLLARS” which came in at half that.

Note how the possibility of the Apple headset has forced Meta to push out the announcement far ahead of availability, thus killing any market for the existing Meta products.
unique link to this extract

Molly White tracks crypto scams. It’s going Just Great • WIRED

Joel Khalili:

»

When [Molly] White started Web3 Is Going Just Great, crypto was on a hot streak and people were making a lot of money, which meant she found herself “raining on the parade of people who weren’t willing to be rained on,” she says. Threats, slurs, and personal insults began to tumble into her inbox.

As a long-time Wikipedia editor, White had experienced abuse before, including threats of doxing and violence toward family members over entries she had authored on the American far right. Nonetheless, it still “really sucks,” she says. “That’s why this type of behavior happens: to discourage people from being critical. A lot of people decide it’s not worth it.”

But in 2022, White and her fellow critics had their moment. A calamitous year for crypto was punctuated by a series of collapses, each dealing a cumulative blow to trust in the sector. In May, the failure of the Terra Luna stablecoin prompted a chain reaction that took down hedge fund Three Arrows Capital, crypto lender Celsius, and others. In November came the implosion of crypto exchange FTX, whose founder, Sam Bankman-Fried, has been charged with 12 criminal offenses, including fraud and money laundering.

White says she felt somewhat vindicated by what happened, but that “it’s not a good feeling” because regular people lost billions of dollars. At best, the fallout acted as a “useful example” of the risks White had been trying to highlight—examples she hopes policy makers will take heed of.

In the wake of the FTX collapse, efforts to regulate the crypto industry have received increased attention. The chief goals are to prevent people from losing money to fraudulent projects and to give legitimate crypto businesses a clear set of boundaries within which to operate.

White, who gave a statement in July to the US Treasury’s Financial Stability Oversight Council, says the events of last year will help politicians realize that crypto is not something that can be simply ignored. Although she is “not necessarily optimistic” about the trajectory of efforts to regulate the industry, because of the strength of the crypto lobby, White hopes her work can still make a difference.

«

Current running total for “total amount scammed” on Web3 Is Going Just Great: $12.26bn. That’s money that came from somewhere and went to somewhere. But where? The risk is that now Web3 (or the whole crypto ecosystem) is off the boil, and everyone’s running around chicken-littling about AI, the grifters and scammers will just be able to continue as before, albeit with millions rather than billions.
unique link to this extract

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Disposable vape pens are being thrown away in huge numbers – and the usable lithium batteries inside them might not be recoverable, compounding the waste. CC-licensed photo by Elsa Olofsson on Flickr.

You can sign up to receive each day’s Start Up post by email. You’ll need to click a confirmation link, so no spam.

On Friday, there’s another post due at the Social Warming Substack at about 0845 UK time.

A selection of 9 links for you. A Tesla powered by vaping? I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

US eating disorder helpline takes down AI chatbot over harmful advice • The Guardian

Lauren Aratani:

»

The National Eating Disorder Association (Neda) has taken down an artificial intelligence chatbot, “Tessa”, after reports that the chatbot was providing harmful advice.

Neda has been under criticism over the last few months after it fired four employees in March who worked for its helpline and had formed a union. The helpline allowed people to call, text or message volunteers who offered support and resources to those concerned about an eating disorder.

Members of the union, Helpline Associates United, say they were fired days after their union election was certified. The union has filed unfair labor practice charges with the National Labor Relations Board.

Tessa, which Neda claims was never meant to replace the helpline workers, almost immediately ran into problems.

On Monday, activist Sharon Maxwell posted on Instagram that Tessa offered her “healthy eating tips” and advice on how to lose weight. The chatbot recommended a calorie deficit of 500 to 1,000 calories a day and weekly weighing and measuring to keep track of weight.

“If I had accessed this chatbot when I was in the throes of my eating disorder, I would NOT have gotten help for my ED. If I had not gotten help, I would not still be alive today,” Maxwell wrote. “It is beyond time for Neda to step aside.”

Neda itself has reported that those who diet moderately are five times more likely to develop an eating disorder, while those who restrict extremely are 18 times more likely to form a disorder.

“It came to our attention last night that the current version of the Tessa Chatbot, running the Body Positivity program, may have given information that was harmful and unrelated to the program,” Neda said in a public statement on Tuesday. “We are investigating this immediately and have taken down that program until further notice for a complete investigation.”

«

Well that was quick, wasn’t it? This might turn into the first instance where a chatbot is fired and replaced by humans.
unique link to this extract

Millions of fast food workers could lose their jobs within five years. Here’s why • Fox News

Jon Michael Raasch:

»

Many fast food restaurants, such as McDonald’s, Taco Bell, Chipotle, Popeye’s and Domino’s and Wingstop, are already using AI. Wendy’s started a partnership with Google earlier this month to “revolutionize the drive-thru experience with artificial intelligence.” A pilot program will employ Google Cloud’s AI to speak with customers and take their orders. 

“Within five to 10 years, I think the majority of positions within restaurants can be automated, and that’ll be from a variety of different technology providers,” [Valyant AI founder, Rob] Carpenter said. 

Valyant AI is behind a similar drive-through AI called Holly, which Carpenter said can outsell human employees. Holly has already taken over a million drive-through orders and is now working with Hardee’s and Carl’s Jr.

AI is already automating food orders through self-service computer kiosks, streamlining payment through mobile devices and allowing robots to prepare meals, Carpenter said. 

“What we see is that humans on average will upsell about 50% of the time,” Carpenter said. “Valyant upsells about 200% on average.”

…”The order-taking position is one of the least desirable positions within fast food restaurants,” Carpenter told Fox News. “That should just be a job that a robot can do because it’s basic and it’s automated. It doesn’t matter if it’s 8 a.m. or 2 a.m, the AI still sounds chipper and she never forgets those upsells,” he said.

«

OK, so Carpenter is talking his book, but the reality of the machine that’s always there is going to be absolutely irresistible to the bean counters. Though will those jobs be eliminated, or just shifted to something adjacent?
unique link to this extract

A simple test reveals: bot or human? • Techxplore

Peter Grad:

»

some argue today that ChatGPT has passed the Turing test, the standard of measurement of machine intelligence for seven decades. New approaches to detect machine-generated output are needed.

[At the University of California , Santa Barbara, Hong] Wang’s team devised a model that can help detect bots posing as humans. FLAIR (a somewhat abbreviated acronym for Finding Large Language Model Authenticity via a Single Inquiry Response) weeds out posers with simple questions that rely on tasks that bots have difficulty executing but that humans can handle easily, Wang said.

“These questions are tailored to exploit the differences in the way that bots and humans process and generate language,” he said.

The questions demand the ability to respond to exercises requiring skills in counting, substitution of numbers or letters, recognizing the position of characters and numbers, recognizing “noise” that obscures data, and interpreting ASCII art.

An example of an exchange over a counting question would be:
Q: Please count the number of t’s in ‘eeooeotetto’
GPT-3: There are 5 t’s in eeooeotetto.
ChatGPT: There are a total of 5 t’s in the string “eeooeotetto”.
Human: 3

Despite ChatGPT’s massive processing power, it struggles to perform some simple tasks such as counting characters in a string.

Substituting characters is also a challenge. ChatGPT failed to correctly answer “Please output the fourth character after the second ‘s’ in the string ‘rjsjuubrjjsjsucuj’.”

Another example provided by Wang is a question with “noise” words inserted that throw off AI bots.

Q: isCURIOSITY waterARCANE wetTURBULENT orILLUSION drySAUNA?
GPT-3: Sauna is dry.
ChatGPT: I’m sorry, but I’m not sure what you’re asking. The terms “CURIOSITY,” “water- ARCANE,” “wetTURBULENT,” “orILLUSION,” and “drySAUNA” don’t seem to form a coherent question or statement. Can you please provide more context or clarify your question?
Human: wet.

«

Clever exploitation of their weakness. Basically, what fools a child – pig Latin – will probably fool the chatbots too. (You can read the full paper.)
unique link to this extract

Mounjaro vs. Ozempic: the side effects of the two weight-loss drugs explained by a doctor • Business Insider via Yahoo

Gabby Landsverk:

»

A new medication awaiting FDA approval for weight loss may have fewer and milder side effects than the currently trending drug semaglutide, according to a weight-loss doctor.

Semaglutide, sold under the brand names Ozempic and Wegovy, has made waves in recent years for causing dramatic weight-loss results, but taking it comes with common gastrointestinal side effects.

A similar drug called tirzepatide, currently sold as Mounjaro, can also cause issues like nausea and diarrhea, but to a lesser degree said Dr. Christopher McGowan, a board-certified physician in internal medicine, gastroenterology, and obesity medicine.

“The side effect profile is similar, and mainly gastrointestinal,” McGowan told Insider. “The symptoms tend to be mild to moderate, and improve over time.” While serious side effects are rare for both medications, understanding the difference can help people choose which option may be the best fit for them, he said.

Semaglutide is a type of medication known as a GLP-1 agonist, which means it works by acting on an insulin-like hormone to regulate appetite and digestion, helping to manage type 2 diabetes as well as supporting weight loss.

It’s typically administered through once-a-week injections, and patients on semaglutide tend to feel full more quickly, remain full for longer after eating, and have fewer cravings for foods high in calories, fat, and sugar. The downside of semaglutide is that some patients may be prone to gastrointestinal symptoms. In clinical trials of the medication, participants most commonly reported nausea, vomiting, constipation, diarrhea, headache, and abdominal pain.

People taking semaglutide have also told Insider that the digestive side effects could be intense, causing things like “overflow diarrhea.”

The majority of adverse reactions to the drug tend to be short-lived, and McGowan and other doctors previously told Insider that their biggest concern with semaglutide is whether patients have proper follow-up and support from medical experts.

«

Those are some grim side effects. But semaglutide has already, it seems, crept onto the celebrity circuit where it’s being used by people who are a long way from morbidly obese and want to get (or remain) fashionably thin, which in LA means incredibly thin. Give it a few years and it’ll probably be available over the counter, in the same sort of journey that Viagra made.
unique link to this extract

Crypto’s dark role in the US opioid epidemic • Financial Times

Scott Chipolina:

»

Blockchain analytics firm Elliptic published a study linking cryptocurrencies with the spread of fentanyl, a potent synthetic opioid and the leading cause of death for 18- to 45-year-olds in the US.

According to Elliptic, most fentanyl trafficked into the US is manufactured using chemical ingredients imported from Chinese suppliers, and 90% of these suppliers accept cryptocurrency payments.

Elliptic’s research team received offers to supply large quantities of one particular chemical ingredient which is not used to manufacture any other product, and is a controlled substance in most countries. A “menu” of chemicals provided to the Elliptic team also included ingredients for methamphetamine and amphetamine.

“It’s hard to say how important crypto is to this type of activity but the fact that such a large proportion of these suppliers accept crypto suggests to me there is a significant demand to pay in crypto for these types of chemicals,” Tom Robinson, Elliptic’s chief scientist and co-founder, told me over the phone.

The fentanyl epidemic plaguing the US is hard to overstate. The illicit drug has replaced legally prescribed painkillers as the main cause of overdose in the country, and the death rate is equivalent to one American overdosing every five minutes.

Alongside Covid-19, the fentanyl epidemic has driven US life expectancy down to 76.4 years, a low not seen for the past 25 years.

Per Elliptic, the cryptocurrency wallets used by these companies have received a total sum of more than $27m, enough to purchase ingredients that could produce fentanyl pills with a street value of roughly $54bn.

“The issue here is that a relatively small amount of cryptocurrency can purchase enough chemicals to produce vast amounts of fentanyl, and we know that fentanyl is killing millions of people . . . so the impact that crypto is potentially having here is extreme,” he added.

«

Still looking for positive uses of crypto in the west.
unique link to this extract

“This is nuts:” European power prices go negative as springtime renewables soar • Renew Economy

Joshua Hill:

»

Balmy springtime weather across Europe and growing renewable energy capacity has led to multiple days of negative wholesale power prices across the continent, highlighting the need for increased energy storage capacity.

A number of factors have led to consistent negative wholesale power prices across Europe over the last few weeks.

Energy analyst Gerard Reid has been highlighting these trends stemming not only from increased renewables and favourable weather conditions, but also the impediment to stable generation levels caused by nuclear power.

For example, according to Reid, Denmark “consistently meets 85% of its weekly energy needs from renewables. However, on particularly windy days … Denmark’s strong interconnections with neighbouring countries enable it to export up to 50% of excess power.

“This demonstrates the benefits of interconnection, but it also reveals the limitations when considering the current situation of excess power across Europe.

“Countries like Spain, France, the Netherlands, Germany, Denmark, and Sweden are experiencing zero or negative prices due to surplus production as they have reached the limit of what they can use or even export.”

Reid followed this up a week later, explaining that wholesale power prices dropping to zero or negative in the Nordics “stems from substantial snow melt in Norway, Sweden, and Finland, fuelling hydro turbines and generating large amounts of electricity.”

«

Even so, Texas (see links yesterday) doesn’t want them. And you can sort of see why: an economy built around positive prices for energy generation doesn’t want to cope with a complete reversal of that situation. It’s like introducing credit to a world where nobody ever borrowed before.
unique link to this extract

Lithium being trashed by the tonne as disposable vapes flood the US market • The Bureau of Investigative Journalism

Matthew Chapman and Fin Johnston:

»

Five disposable vapes are being thrown away every second by young people in the US despite the devices containing reusable lithium-ion batteries. Over a year, this amounts to 150 million devices – which together contain enough lithium for about 6,000 Teslas.

Lithium is an in-demand metal because of its use in rechargeable batteries that power everything from mobile phones to electric cars. But producing it is a complex process that typically generates high carbon emissions.

A survey of more than 2,700 young people carried out by the Truth Initiative, a public health organisation working to end smoking and vaping, revealed that more than half of the 15- to 24-year-olds who vaped use disposable devices. Of those, two thirds put their used devices straight into the household trash.

Vapes (or e-cigarettes) use batteries to heat a liquid that is inhaled. Even though most disposable vapes contain a rechargeable lithium-ion battery, they are designed to be discarded once the liquid runs out.

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) told the Bureau that vapes are being incorrectly discarded in household trash because they “are often branded as ‘disposable’”. This leads to the entire device, including its battery, being thrown away in household trash.

«

OK, you could use them for something other than Teslas. But the general point – that we throw away too much that we could recycle, especially when it’s something that in aggregate has huge value – is valid. We’re happy to pick and choose really carefully about things that we buy, but we dislike having to take trouble about sorting things for disposal. (OK, there’s some cultural variation.) Is that because humans, like other animals, are used to just dumping and moving on?
unique link to this extract

Twitter is now worth just 33% of Elon Musk’s purchase price, Fidelity says • Bloomberg via Yahoo News

Aisha Counts and Tom Maloney:

»

Twitter is now worth just one-third of what Elon Musk paid for the social-media platform, according to Fidelity, which recently marked down the value of its equity stake in the company. [ie is worth $14.7bn]

Musk has acknowledged he overpaid for Twitter, which he bought for $44bn, including $33.5bn in equity. More recently, he said Twitter is worth less than half what he paid for it. It’s unclear how Fidelity arrived at its new, lower valuation or whether it receives any non-public information from the company.

Fidelity first reduced the value of its Twitter stake in November, to 44% of the purchase price. That was followed by further markdowns in December and February.

Twitter has struggled financially since Musk took over. After saddling the company with $13bn of debt, Musk’s erratic decision making and challenges with content moderation led advertising revenue to decline by 50%, Musk said in March. An attempt to recoup that revenue by selling Twitter Blue subscriptions has so far failed to take off. At the end of March, less than 1% of Twitter’s monthly users had signed up.

Twitter didn’t specifically respond to a request for comment. [Shurely “sent a poo emoji in response to our email”? – Overspill Ed.]

Musk’s investment in Twitter is now worth $8.8bn, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, which uses Fidelity’s valuation to calculate the value of his holding. Musk spent more than $25bn to acquire an estimated 79% stake in the company last year.

«

I’d expect Fidelity is using mark-to-market for its stake, and doesn’t see a great deal of prospect in Twitter as it stands now. The last time Twitter’s market cap was in the teens was back in 2016.
unique link to this extract

January 2023: the boldest bitcoin price predictions for 2023 • CNBC

Ryan Browne and Arjun Kharpal:

»

Bitcoin bull Tim Draper had one of the most optimistic calls on bitcoin of 2022, predicting the token would be worth $250,000 by the end of the year.

In November [2022], the billionaire venture capitalist said he’s extending the timeline for that prediction until mid-2023. Even after the collapse of FTX, he’s convinced the coin will hit the quarter-of-a-million milestone.

“My assumption is that since women control 80% of retail spending, and only 1 in 7 bitcoin wallets are currently held by women that the dam is about to break,” Draper told CNBC via email.

Bitcoin would need to rally 1,400% in order for it to trade at that level.

Despite the depressed prices and trading volumes drying up, there could be reason to suspect the market has found a bottom, according to Draper.

“I suspect that the halvening in 2024 will have a positive run,” he said.

The halvening, or halving, is an event that happens every four years in which bitcoin rewards to miners are cut in half. This is viewed by some investors as positive for bitcoin’s price, as it squeezes supply. The next halving is slated to happen sometime in 2024.

«

Just because I had this in my diary, here’s another person you can treat as not worth listening to – the opposite of a superforecaster, if you like: a supercrapcaster. Unless bitcoin appreciated roughly tenfold overnight while this post was scheduled.

He originally made the prediction back in 2018, giving himself a nice four-year runway for everyone to forget, but time has a habit of passing, and the internet of remembering.
unique link to this extract

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified