One of life's paradoxes is that supposedly very smart people often do the dumbest things. The leadership of the Big Tech & AI companies are a case in point. They've sold themselves as human job shredders to investors, yet seem surprised at the backlash. Having the gall to refuse to pay taxes, and also expecting their profits to be further subsidized by consumers' jacked up electricity bills only adds to the public's resentment.

But their short-sightedness is even worse. They expect to be the biggest stock market companies in human history, while simultaneously creating unemployment levels somewhere north of 25% and climbing.

Now for the US firms the tide has turned, and whatever happens, their old 2026 agenda is dead for good. They can either embrace the change they are creating with honesty, or the people will do it for them. The days of selling investors a future where they profit from automating employment, and then play a game with everyone else where they deny saying as much are over.

What is true for AI in 2026, will soon be true for physical work and robotics. The clock is ticking for human employment when it comes to driving jobs and unskilled work, too.

Will this all end in Universal Basic Income? Who knows, but if not, it will either be something like it, or societal collapse. Unsurprisingly it seems people don't like the latter option, and are willing to vote for representatives who are against it, too.

Time for the Big Tech and the AI companies to read the room.

By early November, the European Commission will roll out an expanded version of its Open Research Europe (ORE) platform, which uses a ‘publish, review, curate’ model. In this approach, preprints are posted, reviewed openly — with the identity of the reviewers and their reports made public — then flagged as ‘peer reviewed’ on the same platform.

The idea here is to separate the publication, peer-review and evaluation of scientific research from the traditional academic journals that have historically controlled all three.

At the moment, much of the scientific publishing industry is built on a rather strange arrangement: research is largely paid for with public money, academics often carry out peer reviews for free, and universities then pay huge subscription fees to commercial publishers like Elsevier and Springer Nature to access the results.

If this new model catches on it could seriously disrupt that arrangement, make scientific research much more accessible and change the way academic work is evaluated and recognized.

Preprint-centric publishing model gets major boost: European funders put weight behind emerging ‘publish, review, curate’ approach for preprints.

The problem here is that although the chemistry is sound, the economics are more questionable. Even with this breakthrough, the end methane looks orders of magnitude more expensive than the wholesale price of existing methane. Still, economies of scale are a real thing, and there are lots of use cases for this where it doesn't have to compete with the wholesale price of methane, for example in very remote locations far away from gas pipes or as grid storage options for solar power. How Terraform built the cheapest solar in North America

Nobody has ever used this kind of ‘assembly democracy’ to win a national election, though. It took them more than a year to build their candidate list, with over 80 student assemblies in six university cities proposing names, interviewing candidates and vetoing anyone they didn’t trust. The students disqualified themselves, and nobody from the ruling coalition or the top ranks of the old opposition was allowed to stand either.

What emerged was a list of 250 doctors, academics, lawyers, artists and athletes, 134 of them with PhDs. Because the students refused to stand themselves, their promises to clean up politics were believable to the electorate. Turnout jumped ten points to almost 70%, with roughly 600,000 more people voting than in the last election.

The result? 141 seats in the Serbian parliament, an outright majority.

As the famous quote, often erroneously attributed to Lenin, goes, "There are decades where nothing happens, and there are weeks where decades happen".

If ever there was a time of revolutionary change, it seems we are living through it now. Now the Serbian students have demonstrated a template for peaceful 21st-century revolution. By excluding themselves, and everyone from the old order, they've succeeded in wiping the slate clean. At least within their own party, the old right-wing strongman's party still has seats in parliament too.

How many people in other countries might try this approach? Abandon ALL the old parties, and sweep to electoral victory, with something only a year or two old?

ARTICLE source for quotes

Apparently it is also discussing converting Norway's Andøya Spaceport into a military launch facility. Isar Aerospace, a German company, launched their first Spectrum rocket from there in September. Germany has plans for its own satellite constellation SATCOMBw Stage 4, with initial operational capability targeted for 2029. Though oddly Germany is also contributing to IRIS², a separate EU satellite constellation.

Germany’s Air Force Says It Is Building Offensive Space Capabilities Out to Geostationary Orbit, and Will Not Rule Out Kinetic Effects

"the researchers identified 500 watt-hours per kilogram as an important threshold for the energy density of a solar stratospheric aircraft’s battery. At that level, they argue, persistent flight becomes viable across many parts of the world where atmospheric conditions allow…..By comparison, today’s commercial electric-vehicle batteries sit in the roughly 250 watt-hour per kilogram range, while experimental or specialty cells in the 400 watt-hour per kilogram range are already available. “We’re almost there,” Mascarenhas said. “Those cells are very expensive right now, but they’re getting cheaper very quickly.”"

​ It's a truism that war accelerates technology development, and we are certainly seeing it with the current Ukraine & Middle East wars. Now it seems another fundamental breakthrough is around the corner. The power of satellites has previously been restricted to a small club of those with the money and technology for space launch; soon it looks like that won't be true.

​ Outside of warfare, could this tech be a telecommunications alternative for satellite constellations? They would be orders of magnitude cheaper and allow for huge amounts of redundancy. Also, they won't leave you beholden to a Bond movie baddie on his private island HQ threatening to switch off your access.

Powering Solar-Powered Flight: Study reveals battery performance targets for solar stratospheric aircraft

People often talk of the 21st century being China’s century, but perhaps when the history books are written it will turn out to be Africa’s century.

Will China shape 2050 Africa more than any other region or country? I’d guess so. It will help provide the renewable energy, AI, and robotics that will equip that population.

The projected average ages in Africa, China, Europe and the US in 2050 are interesting. 25 for Africa, 42 for America, 45 for Europe, and 50 for China. China’s population will be on course to halve by centuries’ end too.

1.4 billion people with an average of 25? It won’t surprise me if Africa’s the center of world culture in 2050.

Africa’s unprecedented urbanization - against historic normalization

The former MTU student frequently films interviews and videos that he calls "pranks" across Cork and elsewhere in Ireland, with many of those featured in his content unaware that they are being filmed. The Irish Data Protection Commission has previously expressed concern about the misuse of smart glasses. A spokesperson for Meta said: “We don't tolerate harassing content, however it was captured, and have removed the account @rendy_vlad for repeatedly violating our bullying and harassment policies.

Filming people without their consent and publishing it is illegal in many parts of the world. It's why you sometimes see people blurred out on TV. It means the production people didn't get them to sign a model consent form.

But doesn't all Smart Glasses use fall into that category? You could say the same about phone cameras, but at least then, people recording can make the excuse that everyone could clearly see what they are doing.

The other murky area here is monetization. In most parts of the world people automatically own the copyright to their own image. If Big Tech wants to argue they can ignore copyright law, why do they get to be the ones who can ignore the law when they choose?

Instagram removes account of Cork-based influencer 'Rendy Vlad'