Ryan Burge, a Professor of Practice at the Danforth Center on Religion and Politics at WashU, says fewer Americans are getting more conservative as they age. People born between 1940 and 1954 still are, but among people born from 1955 to 1979, there's no change in political outlook as they age. For those born in 1980 or later, it looks like they are becoming more liberal as they age.

I take this as a hopeful sign. I don't think anyone on the political right has any idea how to organize the new world AI is quickly taking us to.

In a few years, driving jobs and unskilled work will be gone to cheap robots. AI is poised to be able to do more and more white-collar work. At some point, the choice will be the chaos of collapse if we insist the old free-market economy is the only way to do things, or figuring out how everyone lives, gets fed, and gets healthcare in a world where most people won't have jobs.

The fact that more people will be left-leaning and liberal than conservative in this world is a hopeful sign that they won't choose collapse and clinging to the old order.

Ryan Burge

Research data in Graph form

Deanonymizing online accounts isn't new. Speech patterns & unique combinations of identifiers have been able to do it for a while. What's different now is that AI can do this at scale, and its getting better at it. What's also true is that most people are underestimating the danger they are in.

If you don't fear being identified and monitored by the government via Palantir (you should), then you should at least fear cyber-attackers and criminals being able to do the same. If you think the latter sounds far-fetched, consider that Big Tech is insisting AI has no boundaries or regulations. If you don't think criminals won't take advantage of that situation, then you're a fool.

Research - Large-scale online deanonymization with LLMs, 24 pages PDF

"BYD also claims to have addressed the well-known issue of lithium iron phosphate cells losing performance in cold temperatures. After the cells were stored for 24 hours at –30 degrees Celsius and therefore completely frozen, charging from 20 to 97 per cent reportedly took just twelve minutes."

As the US sabotages the globe's fossil fuel infrastructure at the behest of Israel, China continues to build the future that will replace it. One by one, the naysayers' objections to EVs melt away. Can't do cold climates, they said - fixed. Can't cope with long journeys, they said - fixed.

As Napoleon once famously observed, 'never interrupt your enemy while they're making a mistake'. China must be thinking that, as the US helps hand it total dominance of the 21st century energy infrastructure.

10–97% in nine minutes: BYD presents second generation of Blade Battery

The Straits of Hormuz, through which 20% of global fossil fuels supply needs to flow, are closed; perhaps for months. It's not just gasoline prices that are about to sharply rise. LNG supplies are just as affected. In many places, notably Europe, this will sharply increase electricity prices. Renewables and EVs were booming before; now they'll have even more advantages. It's not just that they'll be cheaper; they'll also come to be seen as a hedge against global instability and conflict.

China, the major global producer of solar/batteries/EVs, will have even more incentive to abandon fossil fuels. The rest of the world will have even more incentive to buy from them.

There's still a contingent of people who think renewables/EVs are 'woke' or for 'do-gooders'; they're about to get a practical lesson in economics and cold hard cash, when they see other people paying a fraction of what they are to power their cars and homes.

"Healthier Comforts has rolled out an animal-free egg white protein powder in the US, which features The Every Company’s precision-fermented OvoPro ingredient, the company has confirmed to Green Queen."

Precision fermentation is a biotechnology that uses genetically engineered microorganisms (yeast, fungi, or bacteria) as cell factories to produce specific, high value functional ingredients like proteins, fats, and enzymes. It creates identical, sustainable alternatives to animal derived products with 96% less land and 87% less water.

I'm glad to see this tech taking off as it could have huge impacts on the environment while reducing costs for food and no killing and suffering of animals for things like eggs or milk.

Storing heat for months is more effective than you might think. There are systems across northern Europe where insulation is used to store excess heat from summer for winter use. This approach is theoretically simpler. It does away with the need for insulation. In this case, pyrimidone, a molecule related to DNA, changes molecular structure. Solar energy provides the energy to do it, and it's being undone, releases energy.

But there are still problems commercializing this for home use. In particular, the chemical reactions to change the pyrimidone depend on other chemicals, are multi-step, and relatively inefficient. Still, the promise is there. Combining this tech, heat pumps, and insulation means we should have future buildings that need little or no external energy for seasonal heating & cooling.

A fluid can store solar energy and then release it as heat months later - Sunlight can cause a molecule to change structure, and then release heat later

The 'Will AI Kill Hollywood Narrative?' had a moment back in 2024 when OpenAI released their SORA video generation model. For the first time, people saw an AI-generated video that was nearly equal to what they saw on TV and in the movies. OpenAI didn't capitalise on that, but a new video AI model called Seedance looks like it might be about to fulfil that promise.

The US TV & film industry is already struggling. It rapidly expanded during Covid, but has now shrunk to be much smaller than it was before Covid. This isn't down to AI. The hours spent watching TV & movies are shrinking, as more and more people spend their time watching online videos. These are mostly made for free by other users, or in a content-creator ecosystem separate from traditional TV/movies.

AI like Seedance looks set to turbo-charge the online content-creator ecosystem. Soon they'll have (almost) all the advantages Hollywood has, but won't have its costs. It's hard to imagine that the era of movie budgets in the hundreds of millions can last much longer.

Seedance in Action - Tom Cruise Vs. Brad Pitt

Study: Social Video Beats Traditional TV for Young Viewers

"New figures reveal that total payroll growth was revised downward by approximately 403,000 jobs. Crucially, this downward revision occurred while real GDP remained robust, including a 3.7 per cent growth rate in the fourth quarter. This decoupling — maintaining high output with significantly lower labour input — is the hallmark of productivity growth………..and I identified a cooling in entry-level hiring within AI-exposed sectors, where recruitment for junior roles………But there is cause for further optimism…..."

Optimism? It's worth bearing in mind that, as AI companies suck up hundreds of billions in cash and get their electricity costs subsidized, for them to succeed, humans with jobs must fail. They'll argue that's zero-sum thinking, and AI will create more jobs than it destroys, but how many people really believe them?

The AI productivity take-off is finally visible New economic data suggests the US is transitioning to a phase of measurable gains from the technology