ZeroGravitas

1978 film (based on a 1971 musical) set in 1958 with the high school kids repairing a beaten up 1948 model year car.

Billionaires don't like paying taxes says billionaire owned newspaper.

There's nothing you can do, the billionaire mouthpiece continued. If you try to tax them the billionaires will punish you.

Fear the billionaires. Know your place.

This cause a real flutter of activity in Washington as multiple top aides rushed to game out different scenarios and decide how to use their limited influence over Trump to maximize their polymarket winnings betting on the exact date that NATO collapses.

They mention large hot water stores which are cheaper and simpler than batteries for storing heat, at least for now.

Perfect is the enemy of the good.

What kind of car you buy is a simple but very impactful choice. One that many people are not making due to misinformation.

And Scott Adams is on the record that these people and Al Gore and Romney and the Clintons all meet his criteria for master persuader?

Because he clearly seemed to be building Trump up as something unique.

The show is based on the podcast Boomtown which covers these kind of gritty realities.

The cringe propaganda bits are added by Sheridan.

The big event just before he announced he was now voting Republican in May 2022 was newspapers reporting on him sexually harassing an employee 6 years earlier.

My similar take is that the edgy 4 Chan users were just kids who grew up in Fox viewing households.

They willed into existence the propaganda that had been bathing them since birth.

So Joe Biden and George W Bush are also master persuaders?

I feel we've cheapened the title "master persuader" if every elected politician in semi-democratic nations, even the nepo babies, gets that accolade.

I'm really looking for masterful persuasion, preferably of people who haven't already poisoned themselves with a diet of misinformation.

The USA had a pull forward effect in 2024 because some tariffs applied to anything completed after the end of that year.

This pumps the numbers for 2024 and depresses them for 2025.

Since 2005 France has deployed as much solar and wind generation as they've removed nuclear, about 10-15%.

You probably meant late 20th Century France, when better renewable alternatives didn't exist, not current 21st century France.

Have we given up on him being a master persuader already?

He was literally born into wealth before he could even stumble.

> Because so many of its leaders lean conservative, UATX has been portrayed in some quarters as having been a right-wing project from the start. However, the truth is vastly more complex.

Interviewing the rubes who got suckered about their hopes and dreams doesn't make a scam less of a scam. It just makes them suckers.

It makes more sense if you assume Trump is being paid off by China.

I'm not saying that's happening, just that it makes more sense than this chaotic self-destruction of the American empire.

Not only do the existing wind farms reduce the price of electricity by saving gas, they have had much larger effect on reducing the price households pay for gas itself, by reducing demand for that commodity.

Over the period 2010 to 2023 they reduced electric bills in the UK by about 14 billion, but reduced gas bills by about 140 billion!

It's not really a good ad for their software as they appear to be grabbing brown skinned people at random.

The adjusted graph is a better reflection of "meeting their needs" than raw primary energy, since more than half of fossil primary energy is lost as waste heat.

Even the refurbs of existing nuclear have high price tags.

France keeps upping estimates for their refurbs and Ontario just announced price hikes to refurb theirs and mess around with SMRs.

China has has Megawatt-scale floating PV at sea too.

The US has done well historically, roughly on par with China on per capita renewable rollout, slightly ahead of China between 2019-2023 but probably falling behind now.

China being so big and populous makes it hard to make simple comparisons.

edit: looked it up, US is still ahead of China as of 2024:

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/renewable-electricity-per...

Bear in mind that pre 2000 is likely hydro, in the early years of solar and wind that confused matters if lumped in together but I think it's now obvious when the new tech kicks in.

He says his purpose with the flashy but vague reveal was to get attention by big OEMs. That's a path to money and therefore a reason to lie.

He made his original money selling his no code app to SAP.

So if you want to be skeptical I'd say there's plenty of reason to be skeptical. I don't see why any legit battery corp would need flashy demos and a motorcycle to give you money for serious battery tech. But you can probably get lots of money from someone desperate to get into batteries.

He also revolutionised AI with some really dodgy sounding claims last year:

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/youngkasi_today-is-a-big-day-...

They'll just blame those delays and cost overruns on greens or liberals.

Better to point out that in China the nuclear targets are many years behind and continually lowered while the renewable targets are met years early and raised.

These stories never make clear if the change is bounded by the location of the users.

Would someone in Japan be able to ask Grok to alter an image published by someone in the UK and then display it to other users except those in the UK?

Interesting story but the actual person credited with starting this potentially catastrophic diplomatic embarrassment is billionaire nepo baby Ronald Lauder:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ronald_Lauder

Apparently the original discussion included trying to trade Puerto Rico for Greenland.

> Nearly all the most impressive people I know are accidental moderates. ... But someone who works with ideas has to be independent-minded to do it well.

A shame he doesn't name names so we can check how many are openly fascist now that it is in vogue.

Paul more recently, on twitter:

https://x.com/paulg/status/2007079764964892917

> The rational fear of those who dislike economic inequality is that the rich will convert their economic power into political power: that they'll tilt elections, or pay bribes for pardons, or buy up the news media to promote their views.

> I used to be able to claim that tech billionaires didn’t actually do this—that they just wanted to refine their gadgets. But unfortunately in the current administration we’ve seen all three

So possibly the third kind of moderate is someone who thinks they are moderate but are really just oblivious about plainly obvious consequences.

wenn das der Führer wüsste!

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/wenn_das_der_F%C3%BChrer_w%C3...

UK government subsidy support for air-to-air was announced a couple of months ago:

https://www.gov.uk/government/news/discounts-for-families-to...

The last two Republican state educational "miracles" turned out to be fraud. It'll be a "miracle" if this one isn't too.

Took ten years to go from glowing puff pieces to pleading guilty to fraud charges in Texas.

https://www.elpasotimes.com/story/news/local/el-paso/2016/04...

Some of the individual measures sound positive but since they don't see sustained gains I'd guess that they are mostly juking the stats.

And then using that to push all sorts of absurd stuff like Murdoch owned education tablets:

https://thebaffler.com/salvos/jebfest-the-education-miracle

The guy went to a conference for Republican Women and drugged and raped the conference organiser who stepped in to stop him sexually harassing two other women attendees.

And this was probably considered a plus when hiring him into the current government.