The Record: FTC: Social media and video streaming companies violate user privacy on ‘vast’ scale
A Federal Trade Commission (FTC) report released Thursday asserts that large social media and video streaming companies are essentially maintaining an all-seeing surveillance apparatus that spies on consumers with few internal controls to regulate how users and non-users' data is collected, stored and sold.
The report is based on FTC orders for information sent to nine platforms including Meta, Amazon, X, Snap, YouTube and ByteDance, the parent company of TikTok.
TechCrunch: Karman Industries hopes its SpaceX-inspired heat pumps will replace industrial boilers
Industrial heat, which is used by companies as diverse as breweries and food processors to chemical manufacturers and paper mills, is one of the last bastions of fossil fuels. After all, it’s pretty hard to beat a flame when you need to heat something up.
But recently, a slew of startups have started exploring ways to make heat using electricity. Some, like Rondo, Antora, and Fourth Power, rely on cheap wind and solar to heat specialized bricks to thousands of degrees, storing the thermal energy for later use. Others, like Skyven Technologies, have developed industrial-scale heat pumps that use a series of compressors to achieve the desired temperature.
Pluralistic (Cory Doctorow): There’s no such thing as “shareholder supremacy” (18 Sep 2024)
The problem is that power is hard to represent faithfully in quantitative models. This may seem like a good reason to you to be skeptical of modeling, but for economism, it’s a reason to pretend that the qualitative doesn’t exist. The method is to incinerate those qualitative factors to produce a dubious quantitative residue and do math on that:
https://locusmag.com/2021/05/cory-doctorow-qualia/](https://locusmag.com/2021/05/cory-doctorow-qualia/)
Hence the famous Ely Devons quote: “If economists wished to study the horse, they wouldn’t go and look at horses. They’d sit in their studies and say to themselves, ‘What would I do if I were a horse?'”
Brighter Side: Common diabetes drug found to significantly slow down aging
A groundbreaking study from CAS suggests metformin can reduce cellular aging, potentially extending the healthy years of human life by up to 18 years.
Global: Donald Trump claims B.C.’s ‘very large faucet’ could help California’s water woes
Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump announced an idea late last week to help alleviate California water shortages — and it involves British Columbia.
“So you have millions of gallons of water pouring down from the north with the snow caps in Canada and all pouring down,” Trump said at a press conference at his Los Angeles golf course.
“And they have essentially a very large faucet. And you turn the faucet and it takes one day to turn it. It’s massive.”
Last Updated: 19.Sep.2024 23:25 EDT
