Batteries are the missing element that makes microgeneration a feasible replacement for power stations. CC-licensed photo by Ben Paulos on Flickr.
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It’s Friday, and (surprise!) there’s another post due at the Social Warming Substack at about 0845 UK time.
A selection of 9 links for you. Charged up. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.
Meta investors, Zuckerberg reach settlement to end $8bn trial over Facebook privacy violations • Reuters
Tom Hals:
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Mark Zuckerberg and current and former directors and officers of Meta Platforms agreed on Thursday to settle claims seeking $8bn for the damage they allegedly caused the company by allowing repeated violations of Facebook users’ privacy, a lawyer for the shareholders told a Delaware judge on Thursday.
The parties did not disclose details of the settlement and defence lawyers did not address the judge, Kathaleen McCormick of the Delaware Court of Chancery. McCormick adjourned the trial just as it was to enter its second day and she congratulated the parties.
The plaintiffs’ lawyer, Sam Closic, said the agreement just came together quickly.
Billionaire venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, a defendant in the trial and a Meta director, was scheduled to testify on Thursday.
Shareholders of Meta sued Zuckerberg, Andreessen and other former company officials including former Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg in hopes of holding them liable for billions of dollars in fines and legal costs the company paid in recent years.
The Federal Trade Commission fined Facebook $5bn in 2019 after finding that it failed to comply with a 2012 agreement with the regulator to protect users’ data.
The shareholders wanted the 11 defendants to use their personal wealth to reimburse the company. The defendants denied the allegations, which they called “extreme claims.”
Facebook changed its name to Meta in 2021. The company was not a defendant and declined to comment. On its website, the company has said it has invested billions of dollars into protecting user privacy since 2019.
A lawyer for the defendants declined to comment.
“This settlement may bring relief to the parties involved, but it’s a missed opportunity for public accountability,” said Jason Kint, the head of Digital Content Next, a trade group for content providers.
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So the settlement all came together just as the board members were about to testify in a hugely embarrassing (for Facebook) trial. We don’t know what payment was made, or by whom, but Meta surely cannot be involved in paying anything. So it must have been personally expensive for these people.
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How solar panels and batteries can now run ‘close to 24/365’ in some cities • Carbon Brief
Kostansa Rangelova and Dave Jones (both from Ember):
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A few years ago, solar power became the “cheapest electricity in history”, but it still lacked the ability to meet demand 24 hours a day and 365 days a year.
Since then, there have been significant improvements in the cost and performance of batteries, making it cheaper than ever to pair solar with energy storage using batteries.
In our new Ember white paper, we present modelling showing that solar with batteries in major sunny cities, such as Las Vegas or Mexico City, can now get more than 90% of the way to continuous generation, at costs below those of coal or nuclear power.
Even in cloudier cities away from the equator, such as Birmingham in the UK, it is possible to run on solar plus storage across the majority of hours in the year.
The white paper sets out how near-continuous “24/365” solar power has become an economic and technological reality in sunny regions. A solar panel generates most electricity when the sun is shining, meaning it cannot provide constant power throughout the year. Put another way, 100 watts
of solar capacity only generates around 20W on average – and that output will be concentrated in daylight hours.
Our report shows that battery energy storage can unlock solar’s full potential, by turning daytime generation into around-the-clock electricity. Indeed, when paired with sufficient battery storage, that same 100W of solar capacity can provide electricity around the clock – up to 100% of the time.
This also means up to five times as much solar generation can be delivered using the same connection to the electricity network, reducing the need for costly grid upgrades.
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Batteries are the next part of the microgeneration revolution. It’s interesting how the word “negawatts” – energy that the power station doesn’t have to supply because demand is satisfied – isn’t getting any airtime these days, yet is a central part of what’s happening.
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Seismic Report 2025 • Seismic Foundation
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We polled 10,000 people across the U.S., U.K., France, Germany, and Poland to understand how AI fits into their broader hopes and fears for the future.
…Overwhelmingly, over the near term, people think AI will worsen almost everything they care about. We asked people whether they thought AI would improve or worsen a range of salient issues, ranging from the economy to politics, health and society. The pattern is clear. The trend is negative for every issue except health care and pandemic prevention. Unemployment, Misinformation, and War and Terrorism are the areas where people think AI will do the most damage.
The balance of opinion – all respondents who said this would improve with AI, minus all those who said it would get worse:
↓20% Unemployment, ↓19% Disinformation or misinformation, ↓15% War and terrorismAI offers enormous promise to enhance human potential and productivity. To truly deliver on that promise, this technology needs to have the broadest possible reach across the workforce. But, as with every technological leap, some of us will find adopting and adapting to the new technology easier than others. The best outcomes depend on overcoming these challenges.
Our research shows that people have an innate understanding of this fact.
Women are twice as likely as men to worry about AI. And with cause; see for example this UN report that found that women are three times more likely to have their jobs disrupted by AI than men.
The same divide shows up across income levels. The higher your income, the more optimistic you are about AI.
This is an economic issue. And our findings show an emerging understanding that well-regulated AI can lead to better broad outcomes. Only 15% of people think there is enough regulation around AI, while 45% of us think there should be more.
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You can read the full report.
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Why “John” became a popular name • History News Network
“Cliopatria”:
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The supremacy of John persisted for centuries. He was knocked from the top spot by William only in the 19th century. The pattern emerged when George Redmonds, a historian from Huddersfield , combed through lists of men, women and children registered to pay the poll tax, the national tax that was so rigorously enforced that it caused the Peasants’ Revolt in 1381.
The name first became popular among the upper classes after a religious revival in the early 13th century when John the Baptist became a favourite saint. As crusaders returned from the Holy Land, churches bearing the names of St John the Baptist and St John the Evangelist sprang up. Today they account for around 700 churches.
The name spread to the lower classes because children tended to be named not by their parents but by their godfathers, usually the local landowner. Once the name became established it proliferated and remained in families as traditions changed and boys were named after their fathers.
Leslie Dunkling, a name expert who compiled the Guinness Book of Names series, said that the philosophy of naming a boy after his father guaranteed John’s supremacy.
“Unlike the naming of girls, the naming of boys was considered a very serious business,” he said. “It remained popular right up until the 1950s, when suddenly people decided that their children should not inherit their parents’ names.” John, which had only ever been second to William and David until 1950, fell out of fashion and was ranked twelfth among boys named in 1965. In 1975 it was at number 25 and ten years later number 30. By 1995 it was no longer in the top 50.
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Why the federal government is making climate data disappear • Grist
Kate Yoder:
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A lot of information about the changing climate has disappeared under President Donald Trump’s second term, but the erasure of the National Climate Assessments is “by far the biggest loss we’ve seen,” said Gretchen Gehrke, who monitors federal websites with the Environmental Data and Governance Initiative. The National Climate Assessments were one of the most approachable resources that broke down how climate change will affect the places people care about, she said. The reports were also used by a wide swath of stakeholders — policymakers, farmers, businesses — to guide their decisions about the future. While the reports have been archived elsewhere, they’re no longer as easy to access. And it’s unclear what, if anything, will happen to the report that was planned for 2027 or 2028, which already existed in draft form.
So why did the reports survive Trump’s first term, but not his second? You could view their disappearance in a few different ways, experts said — as a flex of executive power, an escalation in the culture war over climate change, or a strategic attempt to erase the scientific foundation for climate policy. “If you suppress information and data, then you don’t have the evidence you need to be able to create regulations, strengthen regulations, and even to combat the repeal of regulations,” Gehrke said.
This isn’t climate denial in the traditional sense. The days of loudly debating the science have mostly given way to something quieter and more insidious: a campaign to withhold the raw information itself. “I don’t know if we’re living in climate denial anymore,” said Leah Aronowsky, a science historian at Columbia Climate School. “We have this new front of denial by erasure.”
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UK NCA officer jailed for stealing bitcoin from darknet criminal he previously helped investigate • The Record
Alexander Martin:
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A former officer with Britain’s National Crime Agency (NCA) has been jailed after stealing bitcoin from a darknet drugs trafficker whom he helped investigate.
Paul Chowles, 42, was on Wednesday sentenced to five and a half years in prison by Liverpool Crown Court after previously pleading guilty to theft, transferring criminal property and concealing criminal property.
Chowles had contributed to a joint investigation by the NCA and the FBI into the Silk Road marketplace which led to the arrest of Thomas White, a man from Liverpool, who launched Silk Road 2.0 shortly after the FBI shut down the original in 2013.
White was among several individuals in Britain who were convicted as part of the operation against Silk Road. He was arrested in November 2014, when Chowles led the NCA’s work analyzing devices seized from White and extracting both data and cryptocurrency from those devices.
This work led to police seizing 97 bitcoin from White, but in 2017 while White was in custody 50 of those bitcoin — worth at that time nearly £60,000 ($80,000) and around £4.4m ($5.9m) today — mysteriously disappeared from White’s “retirement wallet.”
White denied he had accessed the wallet himself and told investigators he suspected someone inside the NCA had withdrawn the funds, noting the agency was holding the private keys for his wallet. By late 2021, investigators believed the lost bitcoin was untraceable and wrote off the loss.
However, following an investigation by Merseyside Police, Chowles was discovered to have secretly accessed White’s wallet and attempted to launder the pilfered bitcoin through darkweb exchanges into other public addresses he controlled. The police found Chowles had also converted the bitcoin into cash using Cryptopay debit cards and said he had benefited in excess of £613,000 ($820,000) from the theft.
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And he would have got away with it if White, released in early 2022, hadn’t raised the matter with Merseyside Police, who then became suspicious of their counterparts in the NCA.
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Oxfordshire on-street electric vehicle charging scheme launched • BBC News
Ethan Gudge:
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A scheme that will allow residents without off-street parking to charge their electric vehicles outside their own home has been unveiled.
The Oxfordshire County Council project will see charging cable channels installed outside the homes of 500 people who do not have their own driveway.
It is believed to be the largest scheme of its kind in the UK, and is being partially funded by a £700,000 grant from central government. Guy Hargreaves, who took part in a similar but smaller trial in 2022, said his charging channel “works so brilliantly” that he “can’t find a single fault”.
“The charging channel allows us to minimise the use of commercial chargers, whose rates are still a little too high at present,” Mr Hargreaves, from Summertown, said. He added that being able to charge at home was “safe and convenient”.
The council said the charging channels were an “affordable and practical solution” for people without off street parking who wanted to switch their petrol or diesel car to an electric one. Councillor Judy Roberts, the authority’s environment chief, said: “A third of Oxfordshire householders don’t have off street parking, so we believe this could be a real game-changer and give residents the confidence to switch to an electric vehicle (EV).”
“Being able to access home electricity rates and park in your usual spot are the sorts of things that are likely to make EV ownership a reality for many local people,” she added. As part of the scheme, residents would pay the council £300 to cover the cost of a site survey, the installation of a channel and a two-year licence to use it.
Following the second year, those taking part would have to pay about £100 each year, which the council said would cover operating costs.
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I’m sorry – a hundred pounds to look annually at a channel that the council has dug in the pavement? That’s disgraceful. It could easily wipe out the benefits of using an EV.
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Western Digital • New Cartographies
Nicholas Carr:
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The most celebrated of the Professions canvasses was one of the last [Jed Martin] painted. Titled Bill Gates and Steve Jobs Discussing the Future of Information Technology and subtitled The Conversation at Palo Alto, it portrayed the two aging entrepreneurs sitting in the living room of Jobs’s house in Silicon Valley. Gates, casually dressed and wearing flip-flops, looks relaxed and happy, a man enjoying his retirement and his money. Jobs, in the early stages of the disease that would kill him, appears pinched and withdrawn, an “embodiment of austerity.” The two men are playing a game of chess, which Gates appears to be winning.
Comments [author Michel] Houellebecq [who chronicled Martin’s work]:
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In certain pages of his autobiography, The Road Ahead, Bill Gates occasionally lets slip what could be considered total cynicism — particularly in the passage where he confesses quite plainly that it is not necessarily advantageous for a business to offer the most innovative products. More often it is preferable to observe what the competitors are doing (and there he clearly refers, without using the name, to Apple), to let them bring out their products, confront the difficulties inherent in any innovation, and, in a way, surmount the initial problems; then, in a second phase, to flood the market by offering low-cost copies of the competing products.
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AI, it strikes me, applies the Gates model to the entirety of culture. Let writers and musicians and artists do the hard work of actually creating the original artifacts of culture. Then have the machine flood the market with low-cost copies, with cheap derivatives.
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But don’t stop there. You need to read all that Carr writes.
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Women’s marathon record holder Ruth Chepngetich suspended for doping • Runner’s World
Theo Kahler:
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The Athletics Integrity Unit (AIU), the organization that enforces anti-doping for World Athletics, announced on Thursday that Ruth Chepngetich, the current women’s world record in the marathon (2:09:56), has been provisionally suspended for the presence of Hydrochlorothiazide, a diuretic that is banned by the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA).
A sample taken on March 14, 2025 triggered the positive test. The head of the AIU, Brett Clothier, said in a press release that Chepngetich, 30, was notified of the result on April 16 and cooperated with the investigation.
He explained further:
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“When there is a positive test for diuretics and masking agents, a provisional suspension is not mandatory under the World Anti-Doping Code. Chepngetich was not provisionally suspended by the AIU at the time of notification, however, on 19 April, she opted for a voluntary provisional suspension while the AIU’s investigation was ongoing.”
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“In the intervening months, the AIU continued its investigation and today issued a Notice of Charge and imposed its own provisional suspension,” Clothier continued.
…Hydrochlorothiazide (HCTZ) is classified under “diuretics and masking agents” by WADA and is prohibited “at all times.” The minimum reporting concentration is 20 ng/ml. Chepngetich’s urine test reported an estimated level of 3800 ng/ml—190 times the allowed limit. The standard sanction for a “specified substance” violation is two years.
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The next question is how soon her world record – which was authenticated – will be wiped. Questions (doping questions) were raised over her run, which broke all sorts of personal bests, and both the 2’11 and 2’10 marathon records.
But also: the actual doping substance wasn’t detected – only the masking agent. So what was used?
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| • Why do social networks drive us a little mad? • Why does angry content seem to dominate what we see? • How much of a role do algorithms play in affecting what we see and do online? • What can we do about it? • Did Facebook have any inkling of what was coming in Myanmar in 2016? Read Social Warming, my latest book, and find answers – and more. |
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The Overspill: when there's more that I want to say 