This Frontline Interview with David Marcus on YouTube is 23.5 minutes. He explains how Trump’s lawyer, Roy Cohn taught Trump to play dirty with everyone in business. Trump was sued by the govt for not renting to blacks and Hispanics. Cohn told him to countersue. They ended up settling out of court but Trump declared he was the winner. Bad results end up as good publicity. SMH…
2020-09-28 1st Hydrogen Fueled Single Engine Comm’l Airplane Flight
First single ‘engine’ commercial airplane flight fueled by hydrogen.
2020-09-28 FB Algorithm Recruits Qanon Followers?
This story involves two New Jersey state senators competing for the seat. Tom Malinowski, a Democrat, was targeted by attack advertising from the Republicans saying he is soft on pedophiles.
What I see is the negative political advertising is being used as a weapon by both sides. The politicians have become afraid that if they say anything controversial, it may be used against them in the future. A defense against this is to “hunt in a pack”. The politicians, to prevent attacks on individuals, refrain from deviating from the party line, thus the politicians become totally entrenched in the party’s ideology. This entrenchment stifles any original thinking, there are no debates about solutions to problems. Instead of opponents running positive campaigns about how they’re better than their opponent, they have to defend their position from attacks by their opponent.
I think we should learn from what the British have done with political advertising. They have a ban on ads on television for a week or two before an election. This counteracts the “money equals free speech” decision by the Supreme Court.
Quote from Wikipedia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Campaign_advertising
>> In the European Union, many countries do not permit paid-for TV or radio advertising for fear that wealthy groups will gain control of airtime, making fair play impossible and distorting the political debate in the process. <<
2020-09-27 Geothermal Energy
Geothermal energy JHAT comment
The Yale article(?) said something about an earthquake in S. Korea. Nothing has been said about the sizeable earthquakes that fracking has caused in Oklahoma.
*WARNING!!*
I’m not against geothermal, but I read a comment that said “the wells have scaling and fouling” caused by the minerals in the water. That means there is high maintenance, the wells have to be redrilled to keep the flow from stopping due to clogged wells. So the well field has to be thoroughly explored to make sure the maintenance doesn’t cause the geothermal system to become unprofitable.
With the costs of renewables continuing to fall, there is a diminishing chance that geothermal energy will grow, because the choicest locations have already been developed.
BTW the geothermal plants at The Geysers in California are owned by more than one company. The total geothermal energy in California is a constant 880 MW, and you can check at caiso.com and click on the green.
2020-09-26 Hydrogen Burning And Explosion
The mine safety electrical equipment are designed so that the electrical area where there may be sparks is isolated from the ambient atmosphere by a fine mesh metal screen. The idea is that the metal screen will cool a burning gas off so the flame can’t pass through the mesh. The non-flammable air can pass through the mesh to cool the electrical equipment.
If water is electrolysed into oxygen and hydrogen gases, mixed together, the mixture becomes explosive because the mixture will burn very rapidly. If the mixture is on both sides of a strong, fine metal mesh, will the burning mixture be cooled off by the mesh and stop burning, but the pressure wave will still pass through the mesh? Or will the mesh allow the flame front to pass through? Is whether or not the flame passes through the mesh dependent on the depth of the holes in the mesh (i.e the thickness of the mesh material)? There may be other physical parameters that affect the blocking of the flame front. Size of holes? Spacing of holes? Shape of holes? Pressure? Temperature? Etc.
2020-09-26 Power-to-X Technology
Power-to-X technology explained. Electricity storage concepts. Power-to-hydrogen is one example. Grid-dedicated battery storage is not normally considered a power-to-X concept.
2020-09-25 S&P 500 SPY ETF
The S&P 500 SPDR SPY Exchange Traded Fund “World’s top index” explained. Also the special funds for sectors such as high tech, etc.
https://www.investors.com/news/spy-stock-buy-now/?src=A00220&yptr=yahoo
2020-09-25 Anaheim Will Get Electric Buses
The electric vehicle revolution is already happening. Hopefully it will occur much quicker that 2035, which is when Gov. Newsom has signed a law mandating all new vehicles sold must be zero polluting.
The only problem is people are avoiding mass transit systems because of CoVID19. I’ve read that ridership is down. That should change once most people receive vaccinations.
2020-09-25 Flywheel Energy Storage Systems Articles
In this article there is a link to the .PDF paper with the research and technical details. The sad story of Beacon which went bankrupt a year after completing the Stephentown flywheel storage farm, still operating. Now, Amber Kinetics is making small systems.
I read about flywheel energy storage systems decades ago, the design concepts and plans have been around for a very long time.
https://h2-observer.com/2020/09/06/flywheel-energy-storage-back-to-the-future/
2020-09-24 Facebook User Supervising Game “Democratos”
I’m optimistic that humans are basically good, and given the opportunity, can make rational decisions. Humans also want to have fun and be entertained. So a game with some forms of rewards is a good choice. I found the article about Facebook and it gave me an idea that I think is a solution to the problem of where to draw the line when it comes to content moderation and censorship of controversy.
Two quotes from this TheVerge article
https://www.theverge.com/21444203/facebook-leaked-audio-zuckerberg-trump-pandemic-blm
>>
“What we do is really try to not take a point of view,” the company’s chief operating officer, Sheryl Sandberg, told interns during a Q&A on July 7th. “I have a very strong point of view on this president. It’s a personal point of view. It’s one I hold deeply. It’s not one that should enter into my judgments when I’m doing policy changes. … We have to be a neutral platform, and make those decisions coming from a place of rules and principles.”
<<
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>> During his July 16th Q&A, Zuckerberg sought to quell that criticism during his opening remarks.
“I think I’ve probably been the most outspoken CEO in the country against — on the many things that I disagree with this president on,” he said. “Whether it’s the immigration policies, which I think have not only been unfair but I think put the country at a huge disadvantage going forward compared to the opportunities that we should be going after. On climate change, where I think moves like pulling out of the Paris Agreement were a huge setback for the world. On things like his divisive and inflammatory rhetoric, that I’ve called disgusting — which I think was farther than pretty much any other corporate CEO who I’ve seen out there.”
<<
I’m watching the PBS Frontline “The Facebook Dilemma (Part 2)”. About the abuse of Facebook by hate groups and fake news, etc. I think it was Tessa ?? said, “This is not a problem you solve; this is a problem you contain.”
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Coming from a place of Rules & Principles
Sandberg’s last sentence about “rules and principles” shows that the Facebook boss is very controlling, afraid to let the users make any decisions about policy. They don’t want to democratize the Facebook platform.
The bosses don’t have to give up control of the platform. The bosses can establish ‘house rules’ for this Facebook user opinion censorship game that I call “Democratos”.
The user will be given a certain number of ammunition at the beginning of each day. The user can shoot them at any target; use none or all.
The target could be a controversial, polarizing statement. One example I recently saw was “Men are no good.”
The shooter might choose to change a pixel to the background color. The wise shooter would change a pixel in men so it becomes less and less visible. The males would eventually make men invisible. But the women would change the pixels back to their original color, keeping the Men. The wiser shooters would add two letters, ‘Wo’ in front of men to change it to women.😆
The house rules might be algorithms that determine how many bullets it takes to erase a letter or word. The algorithm could be logarithmic so that it takes many more bullets as the letter gets dimmer. The bullets might hit targets that change the background color or saturation. The house controls the accuracy and power of the weapons. Could be a BB gun or a mortar depending on the user’s traits. There are “big shots” in every organization. 👍
The statements would be censored if most of the bullets erased the important words. If most of the bullets restored the original words then the democratic will of the users would be upheld.
Scores would be kept so that the user could see what was happening with his ammo, how much other users were firing, the percent of users who viewed but did not shoot, etc. This would indicate relative importance to the users. There could be many levels depending on the user’s participation, score relative to the optimum, the maturity factor of the user, etc.
There have to be safeguards and protection against fraud and corruption. This might be accomplished by distributing control over a larger number of users, preventing accumulation of too much power. Privacy must be maintained. There are many other aspects that I don’t know about that need to be implemented. Democratos decision making game should be the will of the people, within the rules of a civil society.
Another Application
This same type of democratic decision making could be applied to the content moderators that do the censorship of reported items. The Democratos beta versions could be tested by these moderators before they go public. How many content moderators are there? Thousands? How about letting the users do some of the content moderation! Then eventually the users could train AI (artificial intelligence) to do most of the work of the humans.
The possibilities are many. The rationale is to provide the tools to the users and give the users the power to build a system that is doing most of the housekeeping work, and saving the most difficult decisions for the humans. The virtual system can do much of what the real world does.
