skybrian's recent activity
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Comment on YouTube capitulates to US President Donald Trump in ~society
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Comment on Weekly US politics news and updates thread - week of October 6 in ~society
skybrian LinkMarc Benioff Says Trump Should Send Guard Troops to San Francisco - NY Times https://archive.is/wk2RT …Marc Benioff Says Trump Should Send Guard Troops to San Francisco - NY Times
While other tech titans built private rocket ships and scooped up super yachts, the Salesforce founder and chief executive Marc Benioff was known for spreading large sums of money around San Francisco, his hometown. He tended toward the liberal side of Silicon Valley politics. He lectured other business leaders about the importance of helping homeless people instead of complaining about them.
But 2025 seems to have ushered in Benioff 2.0.
The benevolence remains, but the liberal leanings do not. In a wide-ranging interview, Mr. Benioff said this week that he avidly supported President Trump and thought National Guard troops should be deployed to San Francisco — an action that city leaders would consider beyond the pale.
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Speaking by telephone from his private plane en route to San Francisco, he lamented that he has to pay for hundreds of off-duty law enforcement officers to help patrol the convention area and said that San Francisco needed to “re-fund” the police.
The city never actually “defunded” its police force, and San Francisco’s violent crime rates are below those in many other U.S. cities.
But San Francisco has struggled to recruit and keep officers, and it still has problems with lower-level crimes and open-air drug use, especially in neighborhoods like the Tenderloin near City Hall. It has about 1,500 police officers, and Mr. Benioff says it needs another thousand.
“You’ll see. When you walk through San Francisco next week, there will be cops on every corner,” he continued. “That’s how it used to be.”
Mr. Benioff’s team wanted him to highlight his latest round of philanthropy, which includes another personal donation of $100 million to the University of California, San Francisco children’s hospitals named after him, as well as a $39 million company gift to schools and children’s causes. His family and company have given more than $1 billion to Bay Area causes over the past 26 years.
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Comment on Can cash accelerate the end of extreme poverty? Taking the next big step in Malawi. in ~society
skybrian LinkFrom the article: … …From the article:
So far, GiveDirectly and Canva have delivered cash equivalent to $550 to every adult in the Khongoni subdistrict of Malawi, reaching over 85k people.
Our last phase tested what happens when large cash transfers are delivered widely, quickly, and without conditions.
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Our large scale cash injection was equivalent to doubling the economy in Khongoni. Compared to surrounding areas, inflation in Khongoni rose by about 1% – a statistically detectable but economically negligible effect. After five months, this had fallen to zero.
Markets were able to absorb large-scale transfers without driving significant price inflation. That gives us strong evidence that this model can be scaled responsibly and rapidly without triggering harmful inflation.
This stability was a product of how recipients and markets responded:
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Recipients didn’t spend all at once: Findings showed households did not spend all of the transfer immediately and gradually increased their spending over months.
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They also shopped around: Recipients had access to multiple markets, locally and in nearby Lilongwe city, allowing them to choose between sellers if someone didn’t have what they needed or tried to raise prices.
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Vendors chose not to raise prices: Traders reported keeping prices steady to maintain trust, saying opportunistic hikes would damage their reputation once the cash was gone.
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Markets adapted to demand: Many vendors simply ordered more stock and new traders entered markets, both without significantly driving up prices.
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This year, GiveDirectly and Canva launched the next phase of our work in Malawi: delivering $550 at districtwide scale, starting in Chiradzulu and aiming to reach ~185k people by early 2027.
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Can cash accelerate the end of extreme poverty? Taking the next big step in Malawi.
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Comment on US President Donald Trump’s 100% China tariff triggers $20b wipeout, 1.6m crypto traders liquidated in ~finance
skybrian Link ParentIt's all based on fame and vibes. Once upon a time, people believed that cryptocurrency should be independent of the financial markets and now they believe otherwise. That's a self-fulfilling...It's all based on fame and vibes. Once upon a time, people believed that cryptocurrency should be independent of the financial markets and now they believe otherwise. That's a self-fulfilling prophesy.
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Comment on US President Donald Trump’s 100% China tariff triggers $20b wipeout, 1.6m crypto traders liquidated in ~finance
skybrian Link ParentTariffs are bad for business, so it makes the stock market go down (or will on Monday) and cryptocurrency is no longer independent of the stock market. Bitcoin goes down when there is bad news for...Tariffs are bad for business, so it makes the stock market go down (or will on Monday) and cryptocurrency is no longer independent of the stock market. Bitcoin goes down when there is bad news for investors in general.
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Comment on US President Donald Trump’s 100% China tariff triggers $20b wipeout, 1.6m crypto traders liquidated in ~finance
skybrian LinkFrom the article: ...From the article:
Bitcoin dropped from above $122,000 on Friday morning to around $113,600, wiping out all gains since August, and briefly dipped below $102,000 later that evening.
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Still, one major Hyperliquid whale reportedly shorted nine figures worth of BTC and ETH, earning an estimated $190 million profit, according to on-chain analyst @mlmabc, who suggested the trader may have influenced Friday’s crash.
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US President Donald Trump’s 100% China tariff triggers $20b wipeout, 1.6m crypto traders liquidated
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Comment on Early Bitcoin whale shorted $1.1b right before tariffs, now up $27m in ~finance
skybrian LinkMeanwhile: Trump’s 100% China Tariff Triggers $20B Wipeout, 1.6M Crypto Traders Liquidated -
Comment on Real talk with Skyline High School’s violence interrupter in ~society
skybrian LinkFrom the article:From the article:
A novel partnership between the Oakland Unified School District and Oakland’s Department of Violence Prevention three years ago introduced teams at seven city high schools dedicated to interrupting and preventing violence. After the first year, OUSD saw a reduction in students being suspended for violence, and the district expanded the program, adding two additional teams at Oakland Tech and Skyline high schools. But city funding runs out at the end of this school year, putting pressure on district leaders to identify a new funding source.
Carla Ashford is a violence interrupter with the Oakland nonprofit Youth Alive, which is one of the organizations the Department of Violence Prevention contracts to implement the program. She now spends her days helping mediate conflicts between students at Skyline High, in the Oakland Hills.
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Real talk with Skyline High School’s violence interrupter
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Updated 2025 fall vaccine guide
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Comment on Illiteracy is a policy choice: why aren’t we gathering behind Mississippi’s banner? in ~society
skybrian LinkFor California, some good news at the state level: New law changes how California kids learn to read … … The Washington Post editorial board declared that The reading wars are ending. Phonics won.For California, some good news at the state level:
New law changes how California kids learn to read
The new legislation provides elementary school teachers with training in evidence-based reading instruction, also known as the science of reading. It also requires the California State Board of Education to adopt compatible instructional materials for first through eighth grade classrooms.
Newsom signed the legislation Thursday at Alexander Science Center School in Los Angeles during a press conference to announce improved state test scores.
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The governor included $480 million in the 2025-26 budget to support literacy instruction, including $200 million in one-time funding to pay for evidence-based literacy training for elementary school teachers.
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With the literacy plan in place, soon learning to read should start to look different, especially in the younger grades. Instead of teaching students to recognize whole words, teachers are likely to encourage students to sound them out aloud.
Because of increased state funding for the literacy plan, schools are also more likely to have additional reading coaches to support students and teachers. And beginning as early as this school year, students in kindergarten through second grade will be screened for possible reading difficulties, including dyslexia.
The Washington Post editorial board declared that The reading wars are ending. Phonics won.
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Comment on YouTube capitulates to US President Donald Trump in ~society
skybrian Link ParentIn Google’s case, paying $24 million for the White House ballroom probably seems cheap versus €2.95 billion in fines.In Google’s case, paying $24 million for the White House ballroom probably seems cheap versus €2.95 billion in fines.
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Comment on What to know about France’s political mess in ~society
skybrian LinkIn shock move, French president reappoints prime minister who quit Monday …In shock move, French president reappoints prime minister who quit Monday
French President Emmanuel Macron has reappointed Prime Minister Sebastien Lecornu to his post, despite accepting his resignation Monday following the collapse of his overnight government.
“The president of the republic has named Mr Sébastien Lecornu prime minister and has charged him with forming a government,” the Élysée Palace said in a statement Friday.
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Lecornu faced broad criticism for his choice of ministers in Sunday night’s cabinet. After promising a break with the past two prime ministers, amid a divided political landscape in France, he announced a ministerial selection that featured more Macron allies than in the president’s very first cabinet in 2017.
Lecornu took nearly a month to name his first short-lived cabinet. Many in France will be closely following his choice of colleagues second-time round.
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Comment on Shipping emissions mandate led to spike in global temperatures in ~enviro
skybrian LinkFrom the article: …From the article:
The summer of 2023 saw a surprising increase in global temperatures, even within the context of the ongoing greenhouse gas-driven warming trend. Many scientists were flummoxed. Their simulations didn’t show this kind of spike.
“Climate scientists were saying this is essentially impossible, that it is bonkers to see such a jump all at once,” said Daniele Visioni, assistant professor in the Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences. “People were saying, ‘Climate change is suddenly accelerating.’ We’d never seen something like this.”
Visioni’s paper, “Modeling 2020 Regulatory Changes in International Shipping Emissions Helps Explain Anomalous 2023 Warming,” published Nov. 28 in Earth System Dynamics, gets to the bottom of it.
Mandated reductions in sulfate emissions from international shipping routes in 2020 are partly responsible for the record high temperatures, the researchers found. Reducing the amount of aerosol particles in the atmosphere reduces cloud coverage; thus, clouds’ ability to reflect solar radiation back to space is diminished. The paper’s findings suggest future policy decisions around abrupt reductions in tropospheric aerosols should take into account their surface temperature impact.
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The regulation required ships to use fuel with a sulfur content of no more than 0.5%, down from the previous limit of 3.5%. This reduction led to a more than 80% decrease in total sulfur oxide emissions from shipping.
And while there was some talk of this tradeoff within the shipping industry, he said, there was little attempt to call widespread attention to the potential effect.
“There was no attempt to say we should have all eyes on the shipping corridor,” Visioni said. “In hindsight, it would have been great to study that four years ago before the problem manifested itself.”
The Cornell researchers looked at monthly global temperature anomalies over the period 2020-23, removing the assumed linear contribution from greenhouse gases and seasonality, in order to determine the shipping industry’s impact on temperature anomalies. They found that removing sulfur dioxide from shipping fuel likely increased the planet’s temperature by 0.08 degrees Celsius.
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Shipping emissions mandate led to spike in global temperatures
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Comment on The manmade clouds that could help save the Great Barrier Reef in ~enviro
skybrian Linkhttps://archive.is/nHdFn … … … … …Since 2016, Harrison and his colleagues have been investigating whether it is possible to reduce coral bleaching in the Great Barrier Reef by altering the weather above it. As the planet heats up, unusually high ocean temperatures are stressing corals around the world, forcing them to eject their symbiotic partners: the photosynthetic single-celled algae that live in their tissues and provide them with much of their sustenance. Theoretically, machine-generated fog and artificially brightened clouds can shade and cool the water in which corals live, sparing them much of that stress.
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Harrison’s project is essentially a highly localized version of geoengineering: the deliberate modification of the planet to counteract climate change. When Harrison began his undergraduate studies in the late 1990s, geoengineering was still largely taboo in the scientific community. In a paper that considered the history of such research, the climate scientist Stephen Schneider recalled that even the idea of including a single chapter on geoengineering in a 1992 National Research Council report resulted in “serious internal and external debates.” The physicist David Keith, now a prominent figure in the field, remembers colleagues in the ’90s telling him that pursuing geoengineering might tarnish his reputation and derail his career. Not much changed in the subsequent two decades, though there were some high-profile geoengineering blunders.
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Since then, and especially in the past five years, the situation has evolved considerably. The failure to prevent the planet’s average temperature from reaching 1.5 degrees Celsius above the preindustrial base line, and the progressively obvious and lethal consequences of climate change, are rapidly shifting attitudes toward geoengineering. Interventions once deemed too risky to study are now viewed as potentially necessary. Geoengineering still faces substantial opposition: More than 550 scholars have signed a petition calling for an international non-use agreement that would severely restrict development and deployment of solar geoengineering, for example, a category that includes cloud brightening and other sunlight-reflecting techniques. Yet that appeal is countered by numerous endorsements for rigorous research on solar geoengineering and other climate interventions from prominent scientific organizations, including the United Nations Environment Program; the Royal Society, in Britain; the U.S. National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine; the American Geophysical Union; and the editorial board of the journal Nature. Just last year, the British government committed $75 million to such research, including outdoor experiments.
“Things have changed very quickly even in the last six months,” says Keith, who headed solar-geoengineering research at Harvard before moving to the University of Chicago in 2023 to establish a new climate-engineering initiative. “There’s a much higher level of interest. More senior political and environmental figures are willing to engage in a serious way. More people in the scientific core are talking about it. There’s new money. It feels different.”
Support for local and regional applications of geoengineering is growing in particular. Scientists who study Antarctica, for instance, are increasingly calling for physical interventions to stabilize the glaciers that are most likely to collapse. In addition to its limited scale, perhaps the compelling point in favor of Harrison’s project is its explicit goal to help save one of the world’s most celebrated ecosystems. If current trends continue, the compounding effects of global warming, ocean acidification and severe storms will devastate most of the planet’s tropical reefs by mid-to-late century, ultimately reducing them to fragmented havens tucked among swaths of slime-coated rubble. If we do not develop the means to protect them now, there won’t be much of anything left to protect.
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Proponents of Harrison’s work counter that the limited scale and duration of localized geoengineering significantly reduce the inherent risks. The ship-based technology they are developing could be applied to just a few of the more culturally and ecologically important reefs among the nearly 3,000 that make up the Great Barrier Reef system. Even if cloud brightening were eventually deployed to protect the reef system as a whole — approximately the size of Italy — experts regard such an intervention less as a form of planetary engineering than a kind of regional weather modification, akin to cloud-seeding, which is already practiced in Australia, China, the United States and elsewhere to stimulate rain and reduce hail, primarily for the benefit of agriculture.
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The idea of artificially brightening marine clouds began with puzzling satellite images of wispy white lines lacing the ocean. In 1966, the meteorologist John H. Conover proposed that such “anomalous cloud lines” were a product of oceangoing vessels. Subsequent research proved him right. A cloud typically forms when water vapor in the air condenses onto tiny airborne particles, which can be dust, salt, soot, pollen grains or microbes. As the particles accumulate water, they form increasingly large droplets, which collide and combine, eventually becoming a visible white cloud. Ship tracks, as they are now known, form around the copious airborne particles generated by ship exhaust.
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Following a period of lab-based technological refinement, the next logical step is a substantially larger outdoor experiment. With three big ships working in tandem, Harrison thinks they could modify cloud cover across roughly 460 square miles of the Great Barrier Reef. He estimates that modifying weather over the entire reef system would likely require up to 800 cloud-brightening stations, which could be a mix of dedicated vessels, volunteer ships and anchored barges. Deployment at that scale is where some of the major obstacles to this endeavor come into focus. First, where is all that infrastructure going to come from? The single research vessel the scientists currently rely on is expensive and in demand among researchers. Acquiring an entire fleet of cloud-seeding ships, supplementing them with anchored stations and operating all that equipment continuously through the worst summer heat waves is a vastly more ambitious and costly proposition. Australia has committed an average of $200 million each year from 2014 to 2030 to fund all its reef restoration, adaptation and management efforts combined. This one intervention would probably exceed that entire budget. Even so, that’s a fraction of the roughly $4 billion that the reef contributes annually to the Australian economy, mostly through tourism.
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The manmade clouds that could help save the Great Barrier Reef
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Comment on Base Power raises $1B to deploy home batteries everywhere in ~enviro
skybrian LinkFrom the article: ...From the article:
Base Power has sold more than 100 megawatt-hours’ worth of its home storage batteries in Texas — a notable figure considering the company was founded in 2023.
Base Power leases the batteries to homeowners, who pay between $695 and $995 upfront to install 25 kilowatt-hour or 50 kilowatt-hour batteries, both of which dwarf the competition. (For instance, the 25-kilowatt battery doubles a single Tesla Powerwall.) The batteries can keep a household powered for as long as 48 hours, according to the company.
Customers also pay a monthly fee ($19 or $29) and commit to buying electricity from Base Power for three years at 8.5 cents per kilowatt-hour plus delivery fees.
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[Texas]'s utility regulator handsomely rewards power providers that can respond quickly with large amounts of electricity when the grid needs it most, something grid-scale batteries excel at. In exchange for the low upfront cost, Base Power customers agree to allow the company to use the batteries to sell electricity back to the grid when they don’t need them for backup power.
In addition to expansion beyond Texas, the company is also planning to build a second battery factory in the United States. It is currently constructing its first factory near Austin, Texas.
However odious it is, settling a lawsuit is legal.
It seems like a bad loophole, though.