Memia 2022.40: Escalatory🇺🇦// boomers reanimated🧓🏻// loudest dog whistle ever🦻// peripherally speaking👓// DACCS sucks🌬️// long live the mice🐁//AU-AO space industry🚀

The Universe is not (locally) real

Kia ora Bula!

Welcome to this week’s Memia newsletter: scanning across the latest emerging tech and the future as it unfolds, as viewed from Aotearoa New Zealand Fiji. I’ve been enjoying a holiday with family this week¹ so a bit briefer than usual this week, but lots to cover nonetheless…

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Weekly roundup

🥇The most clicked link in last week’s newsletter (9% of openers) was the punchy Chevron climate “commercial”. More like this, please.

This week’s ⏩Fast Forward Aotearoa instalment #16 (paid subscribers only) looked at the implications of computer operating system oligopolies on national sovereignty:

Memia @memialabs

⏩Fast Forward Aotearoa #16: Software operating systems: steering away from national vendor lock-in buff.ly/3fRUpwk

📅Upcoming event (TONIGHT)

You may want to attend this free KEA NZ webinar at 7pm this (Wednesday) evening with the excellent David Skilling (author of the Small World Substack if you don’t already subscribe). I always find David’s geopolitical and economic analysis on the mark and absolutely contemporary, with relevance to Aotearoa and our peer small economies around the world. (Thanks to regular Memia tipster Saya Wahrlich for the heads up… I think there’ll be a recording as well if you can’t make it live).

Memia @memialabs

WCNZ Speaker Series - Globalisation, geopolitics and the post-Covid economy | Kea NZ

buff.lyWCNZ Speaker Series - Globalisation, geopolitics and the post-Covid economy | Kea NZKea’s speaker series is to highlight the incredible stories of our World Class New Zealanders, click to find out more and join our webinar.

Also in the last week…

🇺🇦Escalatory

In Russia-Ukraine war news, the week began on a relatively lighthearted note, with Czech social media full of the “news” that Czechia had annexed the (“formerly”) Russian enclave in Kaliningrad:

Nezvaný host 🇺🇦🇨🇿🇺🇳 @nezvany_host

Visit the Czech Republic, the land of the future... #kaliningrad

Otherwise, it seemed like just another week of Ukraine’s army progressively continuing to hold and win back territory… THEN: *something happened* to severely damage the Kerch Bridge between Crimea and Russia…

Euan MacDonald @Euan_MacDonald

Astonishing new photo of attack on Kerch Bridge off Ukraine's Russian-occupied Crimean peninsula.

…Russia’s immediate response, to launch another wave of indiscriminate bombing of civilian targets, once again appears to meet the threshold for war crimes:

Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of Ukraine @CinC_AFU

This is how the aggressor state 🇷🇺 carries out air-to-surface & surface-to-surface missile attacks on 🇺🇦territory. Situation as of 10:20-11:00. Enemy used air-,sea- & land based missiles; ballistic missiles; surface-to-air missiles; reconnaissance & attack UAVs of Shahed-136 type

Peter Zeihan is grim in his assessment of Russia’s latest behaviour, War Crimes As Policy:

“On October 10 the Russians unleashed their biggest missile barrage of the war, sending over 100 large-scale munitions across Ukraine…nearly all missiles were aimed at densely populated regions, with the bulk of the assault occurring during rush hour when Ukrainians were out and about.
 
The targets and timing tell us one of two things: either that the Russians are running out of precision munitions and were doing little more than flinging ordinance in the general direction of population clusters, or that the express goal was to kill the maximum number of civilians. Both could be true. Both are very clearly war crimes. But this time, the war crimes are in the full light of day for the world to see. Russian state media is abuzz with excitement at the damage inflicted. And that is new.

The shift in approach is the hallmark of Russian General Sergei Surovikin, the new commander of the Russian war effort. He was appointed but two days before today’s missile swarm. Surovikin is greatly respected by the genocide wing of Russian society, … Specifically, Surovikin was the commander responsible for the siege-starve-surrender policy that destroyed Aleppo in the Syrian Civil War.”

(For an Aotearoa context, Reuben Steff’s piece from July in Newsroom is pretty emphatic on the need for firm foreign policy stamina for the long haul:)

Memia @memialabs

NZ can't kick the can on global crises

buff.lyNZ can’t kick the can on global crisesReacting to Putin’s war in Ukraine is arguably the most urgent priority facing our senior officials. Reuben Steff warns that we must prepare for the long-haul.

🇮🇷Iran spring?

Information coming out from Iran is sparse right now as the internet has been throttled down to a trickle. Occasional snippets of news like this do make it through, though…probability of regime change definitely > zero.

David Patrikarakos @dpatrikarakos

Incredible scenes. Riot police uniting with protestors against the regime. #IranRevolution

🧓🏻Boomers reanimated

To domestic matters…

Last weekend’s local election results disappointed progressives up and down the country with a wave of older, pakeha males sweeping into positions of responsibility (if not power) on, er, anti-progress platforms. (The one notable exception being Wellington with former Greens Chief of Staff Tory Whanau winning a landslide to become the new Mayor).

Bernard Hickey provides his usual no-holds-barred commentary in The Kaka:

Boomers lash back to ‘make Niuw Zullund grey again’

(One sensitivity: should we dial back on the “boomer” othering? Perhaps there’s a different word that’s more precise for “entitled older white property owners opposed to wealth redistribution”? Tbh I suspect not, it’s a lightning rod noun for what is lining up to be a society increasingly split on intergenerational grounds. Those of that age group not wanting to be included should perhaps advance a new “Definitely not OK Boomer” identity…)

Still digesting the commentary on the results, particularly since some votes are still being counted. (In reality once all the late and special votes have been counted many of the major city councils are finding themselves in a “hung” state between progressive and, er, anti-progress factions. Will be interesting to see how many of the new Councillors will have the skills and/or energy to effect any kind of change over 3 years.

A few impressions that caught my eye:

Thomas Coughlan @coughlthom

First take on the Whanau victory is it’s a major victory for the idea that campaigns matter. She was absolutely everywhere - great street level posters etc. Green Party machine is great at these insurgent campaigns too - reminiscent of Auckland a Central in 2020

Jane Gro @grouffles

pretending to be shocked by the outcome of a voting system that was easy for boomers who have lived in the same house for decades and a nightmare for young people who move about, didn't get voting papers and were largely at work when the very few in-person voting places were open

Toby Manhire @toby_etc

Wayne Brown has won Auckland mayoralty.

Ben Reid 🧠⏩☁ @ben_r

Thought now is a good time to dig this one out. memia.substack.com/p/memia-202215…

(See also last week’s commentary on Online Voting and also Politics needs a new user interface in Memia 2022.15.)

🤦Ōtepoti:

Richard Ram @richardram

Not the sharpest tool in the shed then.

Angela Cuming @AngelaCuming

“We’ve got a very low rate of sea level rise here in Dunedin because the ocean’s quite cold,” says new @DnCityCouncil Mayor Jules Radich. 🧐 https://t.co/BgPOH0xwt4

🤦🤦Ōtautahi: new mayor Phil Mauger wants adjacent councils to help fund the NZ$683M stadium:

Simon Britten @SimonInCHC

@TFaddy

🦻Loudest dog whistle ever

Perhaps of greater significance: immediately following these local election results (and also with the undercurrent of the Queen’s recent death bringing forward debate on “The Crown”’s future legitimacy), Aotearoa’s libertarian right ACT Party seized the moment, pushing a quasi-constitutional referendum on Co-Governance at next year’s General Election:

““Every child born in New Zealand, and every legal immigrant, has the same rights. Those are the rights of a citizen. Nobody should get an extra say because of who their great grandparents were. Nobody should have to be treated differently because of who they are…

…The Clerk of Parliament notified a new referendum in the name of Simon Lusk. This referendum asks: “Should New Zealand implement a form of co-governance where 50% of elected representatives to Parliament and local authorities (including community boards and local boards) be elected by voters of Māori descent, and 50% by non-Māori?”

It’s a dog-whistle which will be heard loud and clear by a great many around the country (and indeed there are robust democratic debates to be had…). If you thought boomers were riled up enough by cycleways and housing densification, wait until they get stuck into co-governance…

Given the weekend’s results, my take is that this move by ACT has the potential to completely dominate next year’s election, entirely shifting the agenda away from inequality, housing, tax reform and instead dragging home an ACT-National (!?) coalition. Triangulation rather than entrenchment needed rapidly to keep a progressive agenda on the rails…

(TBH, if the probable scenario of *welcoming* tens of millions of climate refugees to our shores becomes a reality within 10-20 years, personally I would argue that it’s in every current resident’s interest to drive towards a new, historically just constitution, which sets a precedent for fairly accommodating multiple waves of forced colonisation…or will history simply repeat itself?)

💉Bivalent when?

• As Omicron mutates wildly the virus shows first signs of convergent evolution:

“These mutations all seemed to be converging in a way to evade our pre-existing immunity, and a striking study recently appeared speculating the virus has the potential to completely escape our current immune responses. As many people around the world return to normality, deeming the pandemic over, these new evolutionary signals suggest we may be done with thinking about COVID but SARS-CoV-2 is most certainly not done with us … “

About time we got a vaccine upgrade, MoH…?

John Hart 🦗🦗🦗 🌳🌳🌳 @farmgeek

The new bivalent Covid vaccine is now available in Australia. How long until we start hopping over the ditch to get it?

sbs.com.auA new Covid booster is now available in Australia. This is who should get itStill not had that booster shot? A new vaccine has been released that will provide better protection against some COVID-19 variants circulating in Australia.

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[Weak] signals

As I mentioned, I’m on holiday so mostly just sharing links this week!

🌬️DACCS Sucks

Anti-Hopium scientist and engineer Paul Martin lays into hopes of DACCS ever working (economically) at scale. Good data in here, and some passion:

Memia @memialabs

Why Direct Air Capture Sucks (and not in a good way!)

buff.lyWhy Direct Air Capture Sucks (and not in a good way!)You’ve likely heard the sales pitch before: there will be fossil CO2 emissions we simply cannot eliminate even once we do reach actual or near-zero fossil CO2 emissions, we’ll need to “draw down” CO2 from the atmosphere to avoid the need to cope with global warming long-term renewable energy will be

“As you might have concluded from the foregoing, DAC sucks not just because of its obvious use as an insincere strategy to keep us burning fossils for longer based on a false hope- but also because the partial pressure of CO2 in the atmosphere, though higher than we can tolerate in climactic terms, is very low indeed in absolute terms: only 0.000416 bar. That means you're involved in not only an entropic fight, requiring lots of energy to capture even a little CO2, but you also generally have to move a lot of air around mechanically to make it work out. And there's a lot of other stuff in air- dust and dirt, water vapour and the like- which can screw up your equipment, depending on how you do it.“

🐁Long live the mice

else{} @leighelse

If you're a mouse, your lifespan can now be extended up to 34% with a cocktail of drugs. If you're not a mouse, watch this space.

lifespan.ioCombination of Rapamycin and Acarbose Extends LifespanIn a new study published in Aging Cell, researchers have tested several individual drugs and a combination of rapamycin plus acarbose as potential life extension agents in genetically heterogeneous mice [1]. Anti-aging […]

📈Exponential AI

Lots of commentary in the last couple of weeks that it’s becoming harder and harder to keep up with AI research, things are moving so fast (think DALL-E 2, Stable Diffusion, Imagen and then last week’s Meta and Imagen text-to-video proofs...expect open-source versions of these capabilities (eg StableDiffusion) to continue being provided for “free” … effectively all of humanity on the internet gets an upgrade.

Bojan Tunguz @tunguz

When you start following Machine Learning research

This week’s advance from phlegmatic Meta Chief AI Scientist Yann Lecun:

Memia @memialabs

Meta's AI Chief Publishes Paper on Creating ‘Autonomous’ Artificial Intelligence buff.ly/3RAYOB4

🤯Also, VR dreaming in AI (🎩 Justin Flitter for spotting)

ScottieFox @ScottieFoxTTV

WILD! Working to achieve my goals! Lot's of test effort today. Stable Diffusion in VR + touchdesigner = realtime immersive latent space. This proof of concept is the FUTURE! #aiart #vr #stablediffusion #touchdesigner #deforum

🦾Lifelike robots

Following last week’s, er, *underwhelming* Tesla humanoid robot launch, Clone Robotics is going much further:

Memia @memialabs

Clone gets deep into the uncanny valley with its lifelike robotic hand

buff.lyClone gets deep into the uncanny valley with its lifelike robotic handClone Robotics is going to impressive lengths to make sure its “intelligent androids” will have some of the most human-like hands in the business, and watching the way their hydraulic “muscles” move under a transparent skin is absolutely hypnotic.

🏗️Construction robots

The future of construction?

Memia @memialabs

Scientists can now build structures with swarms of flying drones - Global Construction Review

buff.lyScientists can now build structures with swarms of flying drones - Global Construction ReviewResearchers in Switzerland and the UK have developed flying 3D printing robots that can build structures on the wing as bees and wasps do.

🦿🦿🦿🦿Terrifying robots

The latest military robot use case out of China. (As reader John McDermott remarked, it’s Sharknado, but terrifying…)

(Also note the remarkable similarity between the robot pictured and Boston Dynamics’ Spot … industrial espionage at its finest…?)

Memia @memialabs

China Pairs Armed Robot Dogs With Drones That Can Drop Them Anywhere buff.ly/3RMdfCq

An international treaty banning killer robots is needed urgently… even the industry agrees:

Memia @memialabs

Boston Dynamics, Agility and others pen letter condemning weaponized ‘general purpose’ robots

buff.lyBoston Dynamics, Agility and others pen letter condemning weaponized ‘general purpose’ robotsBoston Dynamics, Agility, ANYbotics, Clearpath Robotics, Open Robotics have penned a letter condemning weaponized ‘general purpose’ robots.

⚡Wireless power

Kiwi startup Emrod has demonstrated some impressive advances in wireless power transmission:

TechCrunch @TechCrunch

Wireless power company Emrod beams 550 W across an Airbus warehouse tcrn.ch/3fLbhoE by @tdechant

tcrn.chWireless power company Emrod beams 550 W across an Airbus warehouseThe European Space Agency and Airbus teamed up with New Zealand-based startup Emrod to demonstrate a wireless power transfer system last week.

📉Open source markets

The “Gamestonk Terminal” developed last year to research stocks is now renamed to OpenBB… an open source challenger to the US$27,660 per year Bloomberg Terminal.

PyQuant News @pyquantnews

With the OpenBB Terminal (previously GameStonk Terminal): A Python-based environment for investment research. There are over 500 functions covering: • ETFs • Forex • Stocks • Crypto • Options • Portfolio • Economy • Mutual funds • Econometrics Let's dive in:

🛥️More electric ferries

Northern Ireland-based Artemis Technologies has unveiled its latest electric ferry design, looks sleek:

Memia @memialabs

Artemis Technologies unveils 100% electric Passenger ferry design buff.ly/3SDcson

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Mind expanding

Things I’ve been reading to stretch the neurons this week:

The Universe is not real (1)

Overview of the scientific discoveries of three physicists: John Clauser, Alain Aspect and Anton Zeilinger who split the 2022 Nobel Prize in Physics “for experiments with entangled photons, establishing the violation of Bell inequalities and pioneering quantum information science”:

Memia @memialabs

The Universe Is Not Locally Real, and the Physics Nobel Prize Winners Proved It

buff.lyThe Universe Is Not Locally Real, and the Physics Nobel Prize Winners Proved ItElegant experiments with entangled light have laid bare a profound mystery at the heart of reality

The Universe is not real (2)

Life is just LARPing now.

Memia @memialabs

Reality Is Just a Game Now — The New Atlantis

buff.lyReality Is Just a Game Now — The New AtlantisAnd we’re all losing.

Mind altering

A recent research study found that men and women infected by the endemic parasite Toxoplasma gondii ended up being rated as more attractive and healthier-looking than non-infected individuals. Go figure.

Memia @memialabs

Mind-Altering Parasite May Make Infected People More Attractive, Study Suggests

buff.lyMind-Altering Parasite May Make Infected People More Attractive, Study SuggestsThe brain-hijacking parasite Toxoplasma gondii seems to be almost everywhere.

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Watching list

👓Peripheral vision

William Gibson’s The Peripheral is one of my top 5 scifi books of all time, in particular its crazy inventive time trave/multiverse plot devices… Quote from a book review back in 2014:

"Like many Gibson books, The Peripheral is basically a noirish murder mystery wearing a cyberpunk leather jacket and, after an uncharacteristically dense first one hundred pages, a super enjoyable read—though perhaps less so when you consider just how accurate Gibson can be when he's thinking about what might come next. Because according to The Peripheral, what is coming next is, to borrow Gibson's phrase again, well…fucked."

Zach Baron, GQ, William Gibson Writes the Future

This TV adaptation has been a long time coming but *OMG* this trailer looks amazing. (I think out on Amazon Prime in NZ at the same time as US…)

Christopher S. Rice, Ph.D. @refuturing

Less than 2 weeks until #ThePeripheral. To hear those accents and have them be the heroes, not the fools, my heart. I’m so jazzed!!

About to re-read the book in time to watch the first episode…

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Rollcall

A couple of shout outs around the Motu:

AU-AO Space Industry

An overview of space tech innovations currently happening in Australia and Aotearoa:

Memia @memialabs

Down under startups are joining the new space race with an Australian moon rover and a Kiwi spaceplane

buff.lyDown under startups are joining the new space race with an Australian moon rover and a Kiwi spaceplaneAn Australian rover on the moon in search of oxygen that could help support human habitats, and a reusable New Zealand spaceplane powered by green fuel — trans-Tasman startups are joining the modern space race with big ideas to help the world’s clean energy transition. The space startup scenes in bo

Who wants to be an entrepreneur?

A big shout out to Fermentation Analysis firm Winely’s Abbe Hyde (and all of Aotearoa’s startup entrepreneurs!) for continuing to do the hard yards right now. It’s a long, relentless journey… you’re doing amazingly!!

Abbe_Hyde @abbe_hyde

This graph is making my head hurt ... maybe that's the point

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Nuggets and gems

Let’s see what caught in the meme-net this week:

Big bang

Fascinating @fasc1nate

A video by the Discovery Channel illustrating what it'd look like if the largest asteroid in the solar system collided with Earth.

Trussed up

How long is new UK PM Liz Truss going to last, do you reckon…?

Simon Winkler 💙 @simonwinkler

This is how I will always think of her now her with Morecambe and Wise behind

Cassetteboy truly is a craftsperson at work:

Minecraft goes galactic

Incredible.

Latest in space @latestinspace

Minecraft player builds an entire universe within the game

That’s it for this week! Thanks to everyone who gets in touch each week with ideas, thoughts, feedback, links — always appreciated and I always try to get back to you promptly!

See you again next weed.

Ngā mihi

Ben

1. Lots more trees to plant via Trees That Count when we get home (see Memia 2022.35) while hoping that the DACCS rabbit gets pulled out of the hat… oh, hang on…🙄