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5·2 days agoEven better, you can literally slap a bunch of them in the desert and improve the soil quality and plant diversity. It’s a great way to fight desertification for no additional effort.
Solar is really the star of the show. It is getting incredibly cheap, increasingly automated, and are expected to last 30-40 years while retaining >80% generation capacity. Funnily enough, the US is losing in this area to India. They aren’t even trying to compete with China at this point.
18·4 days agoChina lost 36% of its billionaires to years of economic troubles and crackdowns
The hilarious thing is that the number of billionaires in China is actually dropping quite rapidly despite sustained growth. That’s the complete opposite of what you would get in a neoliberal economy.
https://www.scmp.com/article/3326468/chinas-15th-5-year-plan
SCMP has written a series of articles on what they believe would likely be addressed in this plan. I’m not really in a position to comment on how accurate their predictions are.
It’s so unfortunate that so much of the software we rely on is unmodifiable, inscrutable code running on some company’s servers. It really does not inspire confidence in their reliability and long term dependability, especially how they can just axe the project if they don’t feel it’s profitable enough. Open source should be the way to go. Ideally, it should be the bare minimum.
What I really appreciate with China’s AI approach is their focus on open source models and frameworks, and their emphasis on practical AI applications. That’s why almost all of the top open source models (Deepseek, Qwen, GLM, Kimi), are all from China, which means anyone with enough hardware can run it on their own devices.
How liberal electoral systems convinced everyone that they are democratic, despite consistently failing to achieve majority approval or support, is probably one of the greatest propaganda success stories in modern history.
I’m really excited for sodium-ion batteries to mature. Sodium is much more plentiful and less harmful to acquire than lithium, with near limitless amounts of it in the crust and the oceans. They also operate in a broader temperature range and can theoretically last for even more cycles. The only real downside is its lower energy density, which is improving and isn’t too important for grid-scale storage. Scale is really the biggest issue right now, and fortunately scaling up is something China is quite good at doing.
From what I recall, as long as he doesn’t interfere with the investigation and doesn’t commit additional crimes, the sentence is automatically reduced to life imprisonment, the ideas is that it gives the convicted person incentive to cooperate.
Figures like GDP per capita don’t really reflect the material conditions of the actual people living in the country once past a certain point. Focusing on other indicators like life expectancy shows how behind countries like the US are, despite their vast wealth.