Pasta News Network - New Zealand

A New Zealand company that makes fence posts out of soft plastic will soon be manufacturing its products in the South Island.

That means collection points for the Soft Plastics Recycling Scheme are expected to be re-established across Nelson and Marlborough.

Future Post managing director Jerome Wenzlick said the company started making fence posts nearly five years ago in Auckland, using soft plastic waste.

I like the concept and the engineering, my only concern is with the longevity of plastic. Will it leach into the soil and will particulate shaven off by the wind / debris / etc. cause more micro plastics to be airborne.

The northern part of New Zealand has been shaken by a strong earthquake this morning.

The 5.1 magnitude quake hit at a depth of 7km about 5km south of Te Aroha in the Waikato region at 5.39am.

More than 20,000 people reported feeling a shake in the areas nearby, including Hamilton, Tauranga, Auckland, and Rotorua.

It was followed by two 2.7 magnitude earthquakes in the same spot at 5.47am and 5.51am.

The current price inflation engulfing the US and other western nations results more from fiscal stimulus in 2020 and 2021 than monetary policy. In America alone, national politicians pumped more than $6 trillion into the domestic economy in the form of direct payments—subsidies—to state and local governments, preferred industries (insurance, airlines), businesses (payroll “loans”), and individuals in the form of stimulus checks.

All this new money was created even as Covid lockdowns dramatically reduced the production of goods and services and disrupted global supply chains. So unlike monetary stimulus, where central banks push interest rates down and buy government bonds from commercial banks, the price inflation we are suffering today is directly tied to fiscal stimulus. It’s a simple matter of more money chasing fewer goods and services. Paying people to stay home and not work was a recipe for disaster.

While US focused, it is much the same in any other western nation.

Describing all the ways experts got it wrong is a thriving cottage industry. Expertise is itself contentious, as conventional expertise legitimized by credentials, prestigious institutional positions, scholarship, prizes, etc. can be wielded to promote the interests of the expert or whomever is funding the expert.

Another segment of experts are self-proclaimed, essentially substituting an air of confidence in their own projections for actual expertise.

Yet another segment of experts are lightweights with a misleading veneer of legitimacy to cloak their real identity as paid shills for corporations or other self-interested parties. PhD, anyone? Just put that PhD after your name and then pontificate about subjects completely outside your field.

Accurate.

At the beginning of October, Elon Musk put forward a peace plan for Ukraine. The plan came, like so many of Musk’s ideas, in the form of a Twitter poll

It was not warmly received. In a particularly memorable tweet, Ukraine’s then-ambassador to Germany said, “Fuck off is my very diplomatic reply to you.”

Criticism focused on the first two points: that Russia’s sham referendums be redone under UN supervision, and that Crimea be formally recognised as part of Russia. Perhaps understandably, many Ukrainians and their Western supporters were indignant at the prospect of giving up any territory in exchange for peace.

Friendly reminder, this war started on the 24th of February 2022, the first peace talks happened on the 28th of February 2022. (((They))) do not want peace.

The three major controversies over pandemic management for the past three years have been lockdown measures, universal masking recommendations and mandates, and Covid vaccines.

The last was a pharmaceutical intervention using revolutionary new technology. The first two were radical departures from the existing scientific and policy consensus as encapsulated in official documents from the World Health Organisation (WHO) and in several national pandemic preparedness plans. They established the willingness of the state to dictate every aspect of people’s lives, down to the most ridiculous and absurd details.

A sobering essay by the inimitable Ramesh Thakur.

Worth reading in full.

"The primary cause identified was a problem with the power supply and the degraded uninterrupted power supply, which had no link to the commercial power, and had to be connected to the other manually. The secondary problem was the power surge due to the power outage, which affected the equipment," said Bautista.

That power surge occurred when technicians tried to bypass the damaged UPS and sent 380 volts into the system, instead of the intended 220 volts, thus frying the terminals that receive satellite data from airplanes and air traffic management systems.

I am scared to think what the switch board looked like.

We've been trying to nail down how the Android team feels about RISC-V (reduced instruction set computer) for a while. We last heard a comment from the team six months ago, where our Google I/O question about RISC-V was answered only with "we're watching, but it would be a big change for us." Some external RISC-V porting projects exist, and various RISC-V commits have been landing in the Android Open Source Project (AOSP), but since anyone can submit code to AOSP, it has been hard to make any bold proclamations about RISC-V's Android status.

Google's keynote at the RISC-V Summit was all about bold proclamations, though. Lars Bergstrom, Android's director of engineering, wants RISC-V to be seen as a "tier-1 platform" in Android, which would put it on par with Arm. That's a big change from just six months ago. Bergstrom says getting optimized Android builds on RISC-V will take "a lot of work" and outlined a roadmap that will take "a few years" to come to fruition, but AOSP started to land official RISC-V patches back in September.

A good compiler and toolchain do not happen overnight, and then you have to optimise your software to take advantage or work around certain silicon behaviours. Sometimes Google does nice things.

Platform transitions aren't easy either, Apple is the only company that I have seen and experienced doing it well.

MegaFace is a large-scale public face recognition training dataset that serves as one of the most important benchmarks for commercial face recognition vendors. It includes 4,753,320 faces of 672,057 identities from 3,311,471 photos downloaded from 48,383 Flickr users' photo albums. All photos included a Creative Commons licenses, but most were not licensed for commercial use.

This analysis explores how the MegaFace face recognition dataset exploited the good intentions of Flickr users and the Creative Commons license system to advance facial recognition technologies around the world by companies including Alibaba, Amazon, Google, CyberLink, IntelliVision, N-TechLab (FindFace.pro), Mitsubishi, Orion Star Technology, Philips, Samsung1, SenseTime, Sogou, Tencent, and Vision Semantics to name only a few. According to the press release from the University of Washington, "more than 300 research groups [were] working with MegaFace" as of 2016, including multiple law enforcement agencies.

Remember, it is fine if (((they))) do it.