ELIZABETH HENDERSON, Contributing Writer - COUNTERPUNCH
Stephan:
You don’t often read, hear, or see anything about the far-right’s views on agriculture, but here taken directly from the Right’s Plan 2025 they are, and they are dangerous to wellbeing of humans and the matrix of life, and disgusting. They display no awareness of the impact of climate change, or any real understanding of the impact of pollution. One has to be deliberately willfully ignorant to hold views such as those expressed in Plan 2025. This is what Trump and the Republicans will do if they are elected.
During the public debates on the Farm Bill every five years—that compendious package of legislation that regulates food and farming—politicians from all camps praise the iconic American farmer and defend proposals that […]
Sand batteries. It is a fascinating post-carbon technology, and here is some good news about this energy production that is actually being implemented in Scandinavia.
Credit: De an Sun
Could plain old beach sand be the next frontier in renewable energy?
In the ongoing quest for sustainable energy solutions, innovative technologies are necessary to implement renewable sources like solar and wind power.
One such potential breakthrough revolves around an unexpected but abundant resource: beach sand.
Sand batteries represent an emerging approach to energy storage, particularly effective in harnessing and retaining energy from intermittent sources like solar and wind.
The physical properties of sand, such as its ability to store heat at high temperatures, make it an excellent medium for energy retention. This capacity is being leveraged by innovative technologies to create a more stable and reliable energy supply, as sand can efficiently accumulate and release heat as required.
The science behind sand batteries involves heating sand to high temperatures using surplus energy generated from renewable sources. This stored heat can then be converted back into energy when needed.
This system capitalizes on the thermal properties of sand to create a natural battery that can offer both heating solutions and electricity generation.
The American illness profit system is the most expensive in the world and one of the worst in the developed world in terms of social outcome data. Now it is getting even more expensive as this article describes. Because the bribery of politicians is legal in this country none of the Congressional whores who benefit from this bribery are willing to do anything to transform this greedy approach to a universal birthright single-payer healthcare system. And you peasant cow being milked. Look at what your insurance costs, or if you are on Medicare what the supplemental you have to have now costs. And God help you if you are caught up in Medicare Advantage.
Illustration: Guardian Design
Hospitals are gobbling up doctor’s offices – and they’re bringing higher prices to patients when they do, even if a patient never sets foot on a hospital campus.
Enter the “hospital facility fee”: a charge hospitals can add to bills from doctors’ offices, outpatient surgical clinics and diagnostics centers that they own, rebranding them as “outpatient hospital departments”, even if the facility is miles from a hospital campus.
“It’s one of the most egregious examples of hospital financing at the expense of consumers,” said Liz Hagan, director of policy solutions at the United States of Care, a non-profit advocacy group that released a new report on the practice.
The report, “Behind the Bill” argues that “hospitals are at the center of a massive market failure”, where consolidation is driving price hikes for patients.
There is no data on how often people are hit with the charges. But it’s widespread enough that one of US of Care’s own staff members was charged while writing the report – a facility fee of $154.52 was added to a bill for a flu test.
AI generating police reports for law enforcement, as this article describes. What could possibly go wrong? Everything, and it will be incredibly racist. AI is slowly taking over the structure of our culture, and nothing good is going to come of this.
Image by Axon / Futurism
Taser maker and police contractor Axon has announced a new product called “Draft One,” an AI that can generate police reports from body cam audio.
As Forbes reports, it’s a brazen and worrying use of the tech that could easily lead to the furthering of institutional ills like racial bias in the hands of police departments. That’s not to mention the propensity of AI models to “hallucinate” facts, which could easily lead to chaos and baseless accusations.
“It’s kind of a nightmare,” Electronic Frontier Foundation surveillance technologies investigations director Dave Maass told Forbes. “Police, who aren’t specialists in AI, and aren’t going to be specialists in recognizing the problems with AI, are going to use these systems to generate language that could affect millions of people in their involvement with the criminal justice system.”
“What could go wrong?” he pondered.
Axon claims its new AI, which is based on OpenAI’s GPT-4 large language model, can help cops spend less time writing up reports.
Abortion is illegal statewide in Texas, but residents in the city of Amarillo want to go a step further — banning even the use of the city’s roads by people seeking the procedure elsewhere. Texas, a state that already has anti-abortion laws with no exception for rape or incest, has towns such as Amarillo that want to take the control of women still further, as this report explains. They don’t want a woman seeking an abortion to drive on their roads. It isn’t clear to anyone how this would be enforced. Will fertile girls and women in that city be forced to register their menstrual cycle and check in each month by sending a bloody tampon to Amarillo’s mayor? One thing is clear. If you get pregnant in Texas, you better keep it a secret, particularly if you want to terminate. Of course, if you are pregnant and something goes wrong, your doctor will have to know, and they will next compel him to report you.
The Amarillo City Council is considering a new ban on using local roads to seek an abortion, despite the procedure already being outlawed across Texas Credit: Moisés ÁVILA / AFP
Abortion is illegal statewide in Texas, but residents in the city of Amarillo want to go a step further — banning even the use of the city’s roads by people seeking the procedure elsewhere.
Dismissed as grandstanding and extremist by critics, such laws are legally dubious and almost impossible to enforce — yet that hasn’t stopped their proliferation across conservative locales in the United States.
The highways passing through Amarillo connect Republican-led Texas with New Mexico, Colorado and Kansas, where abortion is still legal.
“We’re experiencing all these horrors, like abortion trafficking,” Mark Lee Dickson, the founder of the group Sanctuary Cities for the Unborn, told AFP.
The term “sanctuary city” typically refers to liberal towns that offer certain protections for undocumented immigrants — but is increasingly being used by conservatives seeking to restrict abortion rights at the local level.
Some cities have voted to outlaw abortion within city limits, […]
