Solar panels, mostly on home rooftops, is now the second largest electric generation industry in Australia.
The Australian Energy Council says continuously growing small-scale solar power is now getting closer to coal fired capacity.
The Council is an industry body which represents the top 20 electricity generators and grid operators in Australia.
Mighty China, the $14+ Trillion-a-year global power, last year confronted tiny $1.3 Trillion Australia.
Slapped on trade restrictions, issued a laundry list of 14 mistakes the Aussies had to ‘correct’.
It should have been a totally unequal fight. Beijing, the manufacturing and trading power could reasonably expect to force scrappy, commodity dependent Canberra into submission.
China is a global superpower, Australia just a just an iron ore producer, an exporter of farm goods, coal and wine.
But it hasn’t worked out that way.
Despite a ferocious and abusive campaign, led by the Chinese Communist Party’s English-language propaganda sheet, the Global Times, Beijing is now more dependent on key Australian exports than it was a year ago.
Led by editor Hu Dijin, the Global Times has attacked Australia as nothing more than chewing gum on the sole of China’s shoe. A type of annoyance that sometimes needed to be cleaned off with a rock.
“(Australia is) Chewing gum stuck on the sole of China’s shoes.”
Hu Dijin, Global Times editor
Author Michael Schuman, writing in The Atlantic, argues that the result is an uneasy standoff.
Beijing, while blocking a range of non-essential Australian products, has found that it’s voracious economy requires key Australian inputs. Australian iron ore is the lifeblood of China’s construction industry, and Australian lithium underpins the fast grow Chinese electric vehicle industry.
Australian iron ore is the lifeblood of China’s construction industry, and Australian lithium underpins the fast grow Chinese electric vehicle industry.
Beijing hasn’t managed to force Canberra into submission, but Australia hasn’t made any headway in getting China to back down.
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Podcast star Alex Cooper has landed a $60 million (USD) contract to stream exclusively on Spotify.
The 26-year-old started her wildly popular podcast, Call Her Daddy, talking about sex from a keenly enthusiastic, and youthful, female angle.
She focused on titillating angles including an oral sex technique, the ‘Gluck Gluck 9000’.
Now more mature, Cooper is, perhaps inevitably, moving on to relationship discussions, considerations of deeper emotions.
This is leading her to discussions of early life experiences, what motivates sexual behaviour and even consideration of ‘the unconscious mind’.
As Spotify emerges as the global leader in podcasting it is buying up the biggest names, ensuring they stream exclusively on Spotify (to drive subscription sales), and promoting them heavily.
Big money is involved with Spotify laying out $100 million for a multi-year contract with Joe Rogan.
As in the early Hollywood star system, artists are tied to one distribution channel and artistic control disputes are virtually guaranteed further down the road.
But, for now, the artists can’t believe their luck. The financial rewards are huge.
Spotify is applying corporate management techniques, ensuring artists produce regularly and in large quantities.
Cooper will be producing 48 weekly episodes a year (4 weeks vacation) with 26 mini-promotion podcasts.
As with the early Hollywood stars, she will also be required to attend a variety of live promotional events.
Cooper is keen, says she wants to expand into crime – the fastest growing podcast subject.
What’s a girl star to do? Can’t be a sex siren for ever. She’s growing up.
Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, says Bitcoin is “hugely important to Twitter and Twitter shareholders.”
Dorsey says he is “focusing on the use case of the internet having a native currency, and bitcoin is the best candidate for that role.
“If the Internet has a native currency, a global currency, we are able to move so much faster.”
Jack Dorsey
Last week Twitter reported revenue of $US 1.19 billion in the quarter – a 74% increase year over year.
Twitter’s advertising business is booming but it isn’t maintaining it’s home market share, losing 1% of users.
Keep in touch!
Beijing is engaged in a sweeping crackdown in some of its most successful technology and Fintech companies, destroying hundreds of billions in the process.
Why?
Noah Smith argues on Substack that it isn’t just a matter of suppressing too powerful business leaders.
Smith argues that Beijing is much more likely ensuring a focus on ‘hard’ tech advances – chips, AI, Software. Hard tech that could be needed if it ever came to a ‘hot’ war with Japan, the US, or Australia.
Quoting the insights of Dan Wang, Smith portrays US ‘tech’ giants as little more than high margin, data enabled, consumer companies.
“It’s become apparent in the last few months that the Chinese leadership has moved towards the view that hard tech is more valuable than products that take us more deeply into the digital world. Xi declared this year that while digitization is important, “we must recognize the fundamental importance of the real economy… and never deindustrialize.”
Dan Wang
Whiling aways millions of hours on social platforms like Facebook, or on gaming platforms, is amusing, but it doesn’t build national power – or the ‘hard’ economy.
The online consumer companies, which we label as ‘tech’ are simply data enabled retailers. Not hard core tech. They undertake very little research and most of their innovation is focused on increasing margins, not developing new technologies.
For 15 years China has been the largest creator of man made emissions.
Beijing talks Green but doesn’t walk the talk.
The current five year plan calls for a rapid expansion of the world’s largest concentration of coal fired power generating plants.
If that is achieved – and China has a track record of meeting its targets – it will be a catastrophe. Not just for China’s heavily polluted air, but for the global climate.
It’s time Beijing was confronted. The lunacy of it’s growth obsessions need to be highlighted. It cannot continue on this self destructive path.
Along with soaring emissions from coal fired electricity generation, coal fire steel production is increasing every year.
Last year President Xi Jinping said China would be ‘carbon neutral’ by 2060.
Can that be done? Forty years is a long time and the climate is already changing, much faster than most expected.
For China to become carbon neutral some existing industries, like coal, would have to be closed down – almost entirely. Other industries, such as renewables and the trend toward greater electrification would have to be expanded dramtically.
China is the world’s largest producer and consumer of electricity, outpacing the United States.
Four fifths – 80%! – of China’s energy currently comes from fossil fuels. Moreover demand is climbing fast.
For China to become carbon neutral, 86% will have to come from renewables and other low or non carbon technologies. And the market is going to be more than double the current size!
On May 26, 2021, there were three events that surprised the oil and gas industry:
A Dutch court ordered Royal Dutch Shell to cut its own CO2 emissions and those of its suppliers and customers by 45% by the end of 2030 from 2019 levels.
Shareholders in Chevron surprised its board by voting for a resolution that the company should cut its emissions.
And, at Exxon-Mobil, a small shareholder group convinced a majority of investors to put at least two of its nominees onto the board – with a view to being more pro-active on climate change strategy, something Forbes likened to a “new David” taking on “one of the biggest Goliaths ever”
Korean scientists have developed a new mesh to remove salt from sea water.
The big problem with ‘sieving’ salt out of seawater is that the mesh becomes clogged and/or water logged.
Has to be replaced, so both impractical and slow. Korean scientists have designed a new nanotech material which they can make into a mesh. Removes more than 99% of the salt and, after 30 days wasn’t water logged and hadn’t dropped significantly in efficiency.
Study didn’t indicate what happened to the removed salts – but a huge potential step forward in reducing potable water costs. Large scale desalination costs could be reduced dramatically – a huge boon in arid and semi arid zones like Australia, the Arabian Peninsula, the US South West, North Africa.
Lots of suburban developments are headed this way, the integrated dwelling, power plant, transportation charging solution.
Writing an Email, texting, making a call, buying medicine, ordering an Uber (Or an Hola), posting on any of the major social media platforms, shopping, running our power grid: artificial intelligence is already a key part of each and everyone of these daily activities.
Which is a bit worrying – because it is isn’t very good as yet.
But, it is getting better every day – learning from being used.
An IBM explanation of the state of play in practical artificial intelligence:
“at its simplest form, artificial intelligence is a field, which combines computer science and robust datasets to enable problem-solving.
“It includes the sub-fields of machine learning and deep learning. These two fields use algorithms that are designed to make predictions or classifications based on input data.”
So, where to from here?
If the World Economic Forum is to be believed, AI development – and penetration – is going to accelerate dramatically in the next few years.
The biggest driver: automated vehicles. Whether cars, trains, planes or ships, automated vehicles are going to require ever more sophisticated and real time updated AI in order to move safely.
To handle the massive amounts of data that will be required tech companies are increasing data flow speeds – from the current state of the art – 10 Gig for server connections and 100 Gig for uplinks to 400 and 800 Gig!
“Ultimately, miners have to make a profit. And getting cheap renewable energy maximizes their potential for profit. It’s really that simple, and I thought I had some agreement with some notable figures out there. Then that seemed to change over a matter of few weeks, and now it’s in a weird kind of place. But I believe fully that bitcoin over time and today does incentivize more renewable energy.” – on how bitcoin mining incentivizes use of renewable energy.
Twitter founder, Jack Dorsey.
It seems a macho jock culture dominated at Sony Australia for decades.
The female singers paid the price, the backroom boys munched on the rewards.
Deer can regrow their antlers, and humans can replace their livers. What else might be possible?
Manipulating the genome to regrow body parts? It may be much simpler than that. One scientist has regrown worm body parts by altering electric flows – reprogramming the bodily software.
Writing in the New Yorker, Mathew Justin explores the possibilities.
Aussie Arts & Letters 
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