ChatGPT and it's future variants completely automates propaganda production. And by enabling the creation of an unlimited on demand stream of fact free opinions targeted to the individual reader, it also undermines the economic basis for independent journalism and the fourth estate.
No one is going to use UDP to bug a room. They're going to encode the audio over prerecorded noise and broadcast on 500/600mhz, i.e pretend it's a stage microphone that a musician left on in their bag.
JB Straubel's (Tesla cofounder) new company Redwood Materials has developed a pyro-metallurgical and hydro-metallurgical process to separate most of the valuable materials. Dunno about the logistics or economics of getting the vehicle batteries to processing centers.
Most sane countries have a lead acid battery recycling deposit to divert batteries from landfill. Might be a good idea to implement one for large lithium batteries as well.
Yeah, half of the Kimberley is Ni-Cu sulfides. We've got hundreds of billions of tonnes of the stuff. Stick a shovel anywhere.
With the exception of the Mount Gunson Copper Mine in South Australia, Australia has traditionally dumped cobalt back into the hole as it hasn't been economically viable to separate. At $50k per tonne "tailings" suddenly becomes "valuable resource".
New NCA and NCMA batteries are using less than a tenth of the cobalt of old NCA chemistries in old Tesla and Nissan Leaf vehicles, and more than half of electric vehicles being built today use a LFP or LMFP chemistry with no cobalt or nickel at all.
Cobalt demand could be met almost entirely by recycling batteries at end of life.
Due to it's climate, national parks and beaches, Sydney is one of the most desirable cities on the planet. As a result this has lead to sustained and very high (3% year on year) internal (rural/regional to city) and external migration.
In response to this migration, local governments close to the city center have done everything in their power for the last half century to oppose high density construction in any form, and to ensure that construction that does occur is not paired with adequate parks, walking/cycling routes, schools, transit, or external parking garages. Eastern suburb train stations in the 70's were protested and cancelled mid construction, and several new rail lines in the 80's and 90's have been cancelled due to thinly veiled race politics.
This has resulted in suburban sprawl and some of the worlds worst road congestion and gridlock that extends all the way to Sydney's periphery, and for 12+ hours per day during weekdays.
Back in the 200x's Sydney had a pretty amazing centrally fulfilled online grocery delivery service called Shopfast that offered next day delivery for orders before 5pm.
The Coles-Woolworths supermarket duopoly saw it as an existential threat to their business, so Coles purchased it and shut it down. Coles and Woolworths then simultaneously killed their own online offerings. Shopfast was cashflow positive at the time it was acquired and murdered.
Money is being thrown at Silicon Valley by clueless pension and sovereign wealth funds and the Softbank guy. This irrational exuberance started around the Windows 95 launch when bankers finally realized that computers and the internet weren't going to disappear in a few years as some sort of a fad and that they had no "tech" in their portfolio, hence the mad rush to buy any business with a website. The mad scramble to jump on these next big thing hasn't gotten less ridiculous since the dotcom era, but quantitative easing since the 2000 crash has increased the size of the speculative investments made available by an order of magnitude.
The "textbook" example of Silicon Valley hubris favored by so called "journalists", Theranos, was laughed out of Sand Hill Road and had to go to Washington and the Walmart Brats for capital. In fact, most companies with negative return business plans (Ride sharing, food delivery, commercial realestate subletting, etc) weren't funded by Silly Valley investors at all beyond angel, seed, and A rounds.
It's Kissinger's wet dream.