Category Archives: Technology

Another Big CBDC Flop… Here’s What Really Comes Next (Hint: It’s Not What the Elites Hoped For), by Nick Giambruno

Posted on November 2, 2022 | 1 comment

People are shunning central bank cryptocurrencies and flocking to the private alternatives. From Nick Giambruno at internationalman.com:

CBDC Flop

Last year, Nigeria launched its much-ballyhooed eNaira, Africa’s first central bank digital currency (CBDC).

Central bankers, academics, politicians, and an assortment of elites from over 100 countries hoping to launch their own CBDCs have closely followed the eNaira.

They used Nigeria—Africa’s largest country by population and size of its economy—as a Petri dish to test their nefarious plans to use CBDCs to enslave the people of North America, Europe, and beyond.

The jury is now in.

The eNaira has been a massive failure.

According to Bloomberg, only 1 in 200 Nigerians use the eNaira. That’s even after the government implemented discounts and other incentives as desperate measures to increase adoption.

This came as a surprise to the elites.

Nigeria has one of the highest Bitcoin adoption rates in the world—ranking #11 among all countries.

Bitcoin’s ability to bypass the government’s capital controls—which restrict the use of foreign currencies and sending and receiving money from abroad—was a big draw for Nigerians, as it is in other countries with these repressive policies.

A long history of rampant currency debasement in Nigeria—including six devaluations in recent years—also helped spur the adoption of Bitcoin, which is totally resistant to inflation.

In short, the elites have miscalculated. They figured Nigerians wouldn’t be able to differentiate between Bitcoin and the eNaira—they are both digital currencies, after all.

The Bloomberg article admitted, “Nigerians’ passion for cryptocurrencies doesn’t extend to the central bank offering.”

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‘Zero Emissions’ From Electric Vehicles? Here’s Why That Claim Has Zero Basis, by John Murawski

Posted on October 29, 2022 | Leave a comment

EVs require a lot of energy to make (more than comparable IC cars) and that charge comes from somewhere, usually a fossil fuel burning power plant. From John Murawski at realclearwire.com:

As California, New York, and other states move to phase out the sale of gasoline-powered cars, public officials routinely echo the Biden administration’s claim that electric vehicles are a “zero emissions” solution that can significantly mitigate the effects of climate change. 

Car and energy experts, however, say there is no such thing as a zero-emissions vehicle: For now and the foreseeable future, the energy required to manufacture and power electric cars will leave a sizable carbon footprint. In some cases hybrids can be cleaner alternatives in states that depend on coal to generate electricity, and some suggest that it may be too rash to write off all internal combustion vehicles just yet. 

“I have a friend who drives a Kia he’s had for about 15 years,” said Ashley Nunes, a research fellow at Harvard Law School. “He called me and said, ‘Hey, I’m thinking of buying a Tesla. What do you think?’” 

“I said, ‘If you care about the environment, keep the Kia,’” Nunes said. 

Nunes’ advice points to the subtle complexities and numerous variables that challenge the reassuringly simple yet overstated promise of electric vehicles. Few dispute that the complete transition to EVs powered by cleaner electricity from renewable energy sources will have a less dire environmental impact than today’s gas-powered automotive fleet. But that low-carbon landscape exists on a distant horizon that’s booby-trapped with obstacles and popular misconceptions. 

In the meantime, the growing efforts by governments in this country and abroad to ban people from buying a transportation technology that has shaped modern society for the past century is prompting some electric car advocates to warn against using best-case scenarios to promote unrealistic expectations about the practicalities, costs, and payoffs of EVs. 

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Meta Makes Huge Mess Afterhours, Enters my “Imploded Stocks,” after Tech & Social-Media Already Messed up the Day, by Wolf Richter

Posted on October 27, 2022 | Leave a comment

Maybe tech’s leftist garbage is catching up to it. From Wolf Richter at wolfstreet.com:

Meta shares plunge 19% after hours, for a total plunge of 24% for the day: metaverse woes, online advertising, expenses.

So now, after the mess that Big Tech and Social Media companies made during the day, Meta Platforms is making a huge mess afterhours, after it released its quarterly earnings, with its shares down 19% at the moment, after having already plunged by 5.6% during the day. Combined during regular trading and after-hours trading, shares have plunged 23.8%.

Shares are now trading at $104.78, the lowest since February 2016, down 72% from their high in September 2021 (data via YCharts):

Inducted into my “Imploded Stocks.”

Having plunged by over 70% from the high, Meta now qualifies for, and is thereby officially inducted into my Imploded Stocks. It’s the biggest name in this noble group so far, that started out in the spring of 2021 with just a bunch of crazies, SPACs, and IPOs but has been encompassing ever larger companies since then, in a sign of how the greatest stock market bubble ever started coming unglued beneath the surface in February 2021 and just keeps coming unglued.

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Amid Energy Crisis, the Green Delusion Collides With Reality… Here’s What Happens Next, by Nick Giambruno

Posted on October 26, 2022 | Leave a comment

There’s absolutely no way the electric grid can support the mass adoption of electric cars. From Nick Giambruno at internationalman.com:

Energy Crisis and the Green Delusion

25 refrigerators.

That’s how much the additional electricity consumption per household would be if the average US home adopted electric vehicles.

Congressman Thomas Massie—an electrical engineer—revealed this information while discussing with Pete Buttigieg, the Secretary of Transportation, President Biden’s plan to have 50% of cars sold in the US be electric by 2030.

The current and future grid in most places will not be able to support each home running 25 refrigerators—not even close. Just look at California, where the grid is already buckling under the existing load.

Massie claims, correctly, in my view, that the notion of widespread adoption of electric vehicles anytime soon is a dangerous fantasy based on political science, not sound engineering.

Nevertheless, Western governments are falling over themselves to shun hydrocarbons—especially of Russian origin—and promote so-called “green” technologies like electric vehicles and supposed renewables such as wind and solar, which are better termed as unreliables.

Here’s the big problem, though…

Wind and solar power might be useful in specific situations. Still, it’s ridiculous to think they can provide reliable base load power for an advanced industrial economy even as they are now—never mind when every household is running 25 refrigerators.

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EeeeeeeVeees Aren’t “Earth Friendly”, by Eric Peters

Posted on October 25, 2022 | Leave a comment

Eric Peters punctures The Grand Delusion. From Peters at ericpetersautos.com:

In the Department of there ain’t no such thing as a free lunch, it is reported that in order to supply the raw materials needed to make batteries for EeeeeeeVeeeees, it will be necessary to break ground – literally – for 384 new graphite, cobalt and nickel mines.

Plus vast leach fields for the lithium.

That’s a lot of Earth Rape – in the name of “the environment.” 

Well, in the name of forestalling the “crisis” that is “imminent” on account of the 0.04 percent of the Earth’s atmosphere that is carbon dioxide increasing by a fraction of that percent.

Of course, they don’t tell you that. About the 0.04 percent. Because they want you to believe it is a much larger percent. So as to make you afraid and thus amenable. Like “the cases” – as opposed to the deaths. (And the deaths . . . when it comes to the “vaccines.”)

They also don’t want you to know how much it will take to forestall a fractional increase in the 0.04 percent of the Earth’s atmosphere that is carbon dioxide. As in how much it will take – from the Earth. 

Every EeeeeeeVeeeee battery requires an enormous quantity of the materials mentioned earlier – because it takes an enormous battery to power a single EeeeeeeVeeee. One that is about twenty times the weight (and size) of the automotive batteries most people are familiar with, the lead-acid ones that start the engines in non-electric cars. These are typically about 9 inches long and about the same inches wide and weigh around 50 pounds. A small EeeeeeeeVeeeee battery pack for a small EeeeeeeVeeee such as a Tesla Model 3 weighs around 1,000 pounds and is spread out over most of the length and width of the EeeeeeVeeeee’s floorpan.

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Net Zero Bombshell: The World Does Not Have Enough Lithium and Cobalt to Replace All Batteries Every 10 Years – Finnish Government Report, by Chris Morrison

Posted on October 23, 2022 | Leave a comment

There are some things that wishing just doesn’t make true, and net zero is one of them. From Chris Morrison at dailyskeptic.org:

Net Zero Bombshell: The World Does Not Have Enough Lithium and Cobalt to Replace All Batteries Every 10 Years – Finnish Government Report

To cite just one example of how un-costed Net Zero is, Michaux notes that “in theory” there are enough global reserves of nickel and lithium if they are exclusively used to produce batteries for electric vehicles. But there is not enough cobalt, and more will need to be discovered. It gets much worse. All the new batteries have a useful working life of only 8-10 years, so replacements will need to be regularly produced. “This is unlikely to be practical, which suggests the whole EV battery solution may need to be re-thought and a new solution is developed that is not so mineral intensive,” he says.

All of these problems occur in finding a mass of lithium for ion batteries weighting 286.6 million tonnes. But a “power buffer” of another 2.5 billion tonnes of batteries is also required to provide a four-week back-up for intermittent wind and solar electricity power. Of course, this is simply not available from global mineral reserves, but, states Michaux, it is not clear how the buffer could be delivered with an alternative system.

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The US Government Sees Silicon Valley As Part Of Its Propaganda Machine, by Caitlin Johnstone

Posted on October 22, 2022 | Leave a comment

Remember when Silicon Valley was regarded as libertarian, revolutionary, and anti-establishment? Those days are long gone. From Caitlin Johnstone at caitlinjohnstone.com:

The Biden administration is reportedly considering opening a national security review of Elon Musk’s business ventures which could see the plutocrat’s purchase of Twitter blocked by the White House, in part because Musk is perceived as having an “increasingly Russia-friendly stance.”

Bloomberg reports:

Biden administration officials are discussing whether the US should subject some of Elon Musk’s ventures to national security reviews, including the deal for Twitter Inc. and SpaceX’s Starlink satellite network, according to people familiar with the matter.

US officials have grown uncomfortable over Musk’s recent threat to stop supplying the Starlink satellite service to Ukraine — he said it had cost him $80 million so far — and what they see as his increasingly Russia-friendly stance following a series of tweets that outlined peace proposals favorable to President Vladimir Putin. They are also concerned by his plans to buy Twitter with a group of foreign investors.

The “group of foreign investors” the Biden administration is reportedly worried about oddly includes Prince Alwaleed bin Talal of Saudi Arabia, who has already been a massive Twitter shareholder for years. The White House certainly never had a problem with foreign investors there before.

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China Calls Top Chip Execs For Emergency Talks After Biden Unleashes Economic War, by Tyler Durden

Posted on October 20, 2022 | 1 comment

The Biden administration is trying to cripple China’s high-end electronics industry with crippling restrictions. It may work. From Tyler Durden at zerohedge.com:

Last week, President Biden announced new restrictions on US firms selling semiconductors to China, including restrictions on US citizens working at Chinese chip plants. Nobody might have noticed, but this is a full-blown economic war on China, a means to prohibit the country’s rise as a high-tech superpower.

Since the new restrictions, China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) has summoned executives from the country’s top chip firms for emergency meetings over the past week to evaluate the damage, according to Bloomberg. Execs from Yangtze Memory Technologies Co. and supercomputer firm Dawning Information Industry Co. met with MIIT.

Biden’s strategy to paralyze its most dangerous opponent since the end of the Cold War could be promising. People familiar with the closed-door discussions between MIIT and top Chinese execs say there’s a lot of uncertainty on how to move forward. For now, there was no mention of counter-measures. MIIT said there would be enough domestic demand for the affected chip companies with US expertise pulled out of factories and chip shipments from the US and elsewhere stopped.

The discussions revealed that some participants feared the US strategy could doom China’s ambitions to accelerate the development and production of advanced chips. Someone familiar with the meetings said at least one person explained to MIIT that the country’s cutting-edge chipmaking could be in trouble.

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Is Wind Energy Becoming Too Expensive? by Felicity Bradstock

Posted on October 19, 2022 | Leave a comment

It sets back the renewables case even farther if they are not just intermittent, but more expensive than good old-fashioned fossil fuel. If that’s the case, renewables will never be a substantial portion of most countries’ energy supply. From Felicity Bradstock at oilprice.com:

General Electric (GE) plans to make major job cuts in its U.S. wind operations and will consider its other markets too as windfarms are proving to be a major expense in the wake of Covid and the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Continued supply chain disruption and the high cost of wind turbines are deterring companies from investing in wind energy, as they look for cheaper alternatives.  It’s a question that has been being asked for years – are wind and solar power more expensive and less reliable? The two renewable energy sources have been repeatedly criticised for their intermittent power provision. Meanwhile, as the prices of steel and other materials continue to rise, solar and wind farms are proving to be more expensive to construct than previously hoped.

The prices of solar and wind power had been decreasing as technological innovations were made, thanks to huge amounts of investment worldwide in research and development. But in the wake of a pandemic that has wreaked havoc on global supply chains, the price of components has risen again and again. So, can the improved efficiency of wind turbine technology balance with rising material prices?

This month, reports suggested that GE would be laying off around 20 percent of its onshore wind workforce in the U.S., with employees in North America, Latin America, the Middle East, and Africa being notified of changes to the company. An assessment of its Europe and Asia wind markets is expected to follow. Last week, GE employees received a letter stating, “We are taking steps to streamline and size our onshore wind business for market realities to position us for future success. These are difficult decisions, which do not reflect on our employees’ dedication and hard work but are needed to ensure the business can compete and improve profitability over time.”

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Biden’s Tech-War Goes Nuclear, by Mike Whitney

Posted on October 18, 2022 | Leave a comment

Biden just approved a package of sanctions against China that’s almost a declaration of war. From Mike Whitney at strategic-culture.org:

“Lots of people don’t know what happened yesterday. To put it simply, Biden has forced all Americans working in China to pick between quitting their jobs and losing American citizenship. Every American executive and engineer working in China’s semiconductor manufacturing industry resigned yesterday, paralyzing Chinese manufacturing overnight. One round of sanctions from Biden did more damage than all four years of performative sanctioning under Trump. Although American semiconductor exporters had to apply for licenses during the Trump years, licenses were approved within a month.

With the new Biden sanctions, all American suppliers of IP blocks, components, and services departed overnight – thus cutting off all service [to China]. Long story short, every advanced node semiconductor company is currently facing comprehensive supply cut-off, resignations from all American staff, and immediate operations paralysis. This is what annihilation looks like: China’s semiconductor manufacturing industry was reduced to zero overnight. Complete collapse. No chance of survival.”

Posted at Jordan Schneider’s Twitter account @jordanschnyc from a translated thread at @lidangzzz

The Biden administration intensified its war on China last week when it detonated a thermonuclear bomb at the heart of Beijing’s booming technology industry. In an effort to block China’s access to crucial semiconductor technology, Team Biden announced onerous new export rules aimed at a “comprehensive supply cut-off” of essential semiconductor technology which– according to one analyst– led to an “immediate operations paralysis.” The terror unleashed by the announcement was aptly summarized in a thread posted at Jordan Schneider’s Twitter account from a translated thread at @lidangzzz (See above quote)

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