I’m coming toBURNING MAN! OnTUESDAY(Aug 27) at1PM, I’m giving a talk called “DISENSHITTIFY OR DIE!” atPALENQUE NORTE(7&E). OnWEDNESDAY(Aug 28) atNOON, I’m doing a “Talking Caterpillar” Q&A atLIMINAL LABS(830&C).
Once you learn about the “collective action problem,” you start seeing it everywhere. Democrats – including elected officials – all wanted Biden to step down, but none of them wanted to be the first one to take a firm stand, so for months, his campaign limped on: a collective action problem.
Patent trolls use bullshit patents to shake down small businesses, demanding “license fees” that are high, but much lower than the cost of challenging the patent and getting it revoked. Collectively, it would be
much cheaper for all the victims to band together and hire a fancy law firm to invalidate the patent, but individually, it makes sense for them all to pay. A collective action problem:
Musicians get
royally screwed by Spotify. Collectively, it would make sense for all of them to boycott the platform, which would bring it to its knees and either make it pay more or put it out of business. Individually, any musician who pulls out of Spotify disappears from the horizon of most music fans, so they all hang in – a collective action problem:
Same goes for the businesses that get fucked out of 30% of their app revenues by Apple and Google’s mobile business. Without all those apps, Apple and Google wouldn’t have a business, but any single app that pulls out commits commercial suicide, so they all hang in there, paying a 30% vig:
That’s also the case with Amazon sellers, who get rooked for 45-51 cents out of every dollar in platform junk fees, and whose prize for succeeding despite this is to have their product cloned by Amazon, which underprices them because
it doesn’t have to pay a 51% rake on every sale. Without third-party sellers there’d be no Amazon, but it’s impossible to get millions of sellers to all pull out at once, so the Bezos crime family scoops up
half of the ecommerce economy in bullshit fees:
This is why one definition of “corruption” is a system with “concentrated gains and diffuse losses.” The company that dumps toxic waste in your water supply reaps all the profits of externalizing its waste disposal costs. The people it poisons each bear a fraction of the cost of being poisoned. The environmental criminal has a fat warchest of ill-gotten gains to use to bribe officials and pay fancy lawyers to defend it in court. Its victims are each struggling with the health effects of the crimes, and even without that, they can’t possibly match the polluter’s resources. Eventually, the polluter spends enough money to convince the Supreme Court to overturn “Chevron deference” and makes it effectively impossible to win the right to clean water and air (or a planet that’s not on fire):
Any time you encounter a shitty, outrageous racket that’s stable over long timescales, chances are you’re looking at a collective action problem. Certainly, that’s the underlying pathology that preserves the scholarly publishing scam, which is one of the most grotesque, wasteful, disgusting frauds in our modern world (and that’s saying something, because the field is crowded with many contenders).
Here’s how the scholarly publishing scam works: academics do original scholarly research, funded by a mix of private grants, public funding, funding from their universities and other institutions, and private funds. These academics write up their funding and send it to a scholarly journal, usually one that’s owned by a small number of firms that formed a scholarly publishing cartel by buying all the smaller publishers in a string of anticompetitive acquisitions. Then, other scholars review the submission, for free. More unpaid scholars do the work of editing the paper. The paper’s author is sent a non-negotiable contract that requires them to permanently assign their copyright to the journal, again, for free. Finally, the paper is published, and the institution that
paid the researcher to do the original research has to pay again – sometimes tens of thousands of dollars per year! – for the journal in which it appears.
The academic publishing cartel insists that the millions it extracts from academic institutions and the billions it reaps in profit are all in service to serving as neutral, rigorous gatekeepers who ensure that only the best scholarship makes it into print. This is flatly untrue. The “editorial process” the academic publishers take credit for is virtually nonexistent: almost everything they publish is virtually unchanged from the final submission format. They’re not even typesetting the paper:
The vetting process for peer-review is a joke. Literally: an Australian academic managed to get his
dog appointed to the editorial boards of
seven journals:
Far from guarding scientific publishing from scams and nonsense, the major journal publishers have stood up entire divisions
devoted to pay-to-publish junk science. Elsevier – the largest scholarly publisher – operated a business unit that offered to publish fake journals full of unreveiwed “advertorial” papers written by pharma companies, packaged to look like a real journal:
Naturally, academics and their institutions
hate this system. Not only is it purely parasitic on their labor, it also serves as a massive brake on scholarly progress, by excluding independent researchers, academics at small institutions, and scholars living in the global south from accessing the work of their peers. The publishers enforce this exclusion without mercy or proportion. Take Diego Gomez, a Colombian Masters candidate who faced
eight years in prison for accessing a
single paywalled academic paper:
And of course, there’s Aaron Swartz, the young activist and Harvard-affiliated computer scientist who was hounded to death after he accessed – but did not publish – papers from MIT’s JSTOR library. Aaron had permission to access these papers, but JSTOR, MIT, and the prosecutors Stephen Heymann and Carmen Ortiz argued that because he used a small computer program to access the papers (rather than clicking on each link by hand) he had committed
13 felonies. They threatened him with more than 30 years in prison, and drew out the proceedings until Aaron was out of funds. Aaron hanged himself in 2013:
Academics know all this terrible stuff is going on, but they are trapped in a collective action problem. For an academic to advance in their field, they have to publish, and they have to get their work cited. Academics all try to publish in the big prestige journals – which also come with the highest price-tag for their institutions – because those are the journals other academics read, which means that getting published is top journal increases the likelihood that another academic will find and cite your work.
e360: How did the sites look different after the work that you did on them?
Stevenson: They became basically beautiful meadows of native plants that were flowering, and now there are bees and birds and all sorts of life coming through. We had a very high success rate. In three months we saw a more than 50 percent reduction in all [petrochemical] pollutants. And then by the 12-month period, they were pretty much not detectable.
also according to michael collins when the three of them were discussing what neil armstrong should say when he first stepped on the moon, collins suggested armstrong say “Oh, my God, what is that thing?” and then scream and cut out his mic.
all you’ve done is convince me that michael collins was one of the funniest men alive tbh
Okay, I was just going to reblog this without commentary, but I can’t keep this to myself. I’m a PhD student in environmental science and this is my fucking highway.
The first published study about climate change (that I am aware of– feel free to point out if there’s an older one) is an 1896 paper by Svante Arrhenius. He pointed out the link between the greenhouse effect and changes in atmospheric CO2.
Plate tectonics, which the geoscience community now recognizes as near indisputable, was a fringe theory until about the 1960s.
Just in case anyone thought that climate change was a “recent fad” in research.
For the first time in art history, the powerful depictions of “Saturn Devouring His Son” by Rubens (Left) and Goya (Right) are being presented together.
In the westernmost banner of Inner Mongolia, in the middle of the Gobi Desert, there once stood a prosperous kingdom. It was a center of religious learning, of art and a trading hub.
According to one of the many Mongolian legends, the first descendants of the gods built Khara-Khoto, a beautiful and rich city, which housed sages, merchants, brave soldiers and skilled craftsmen.
Khara-Khoto means “black city”. It was a Medieval Tangut fortress on the Silk Road, built in 1032 near Juyan Lake Basin.
The remains show 9.1 m-high ramparts and 3.7 m-thick outer walls.
It became a centre of Western Xia trade in the 11th century.
In The Travels of Marco Polo, Marco Polo described a visit to a city called Etzina or Edzina, which was identified with Khara-Khoto.
The walled fortress was first taken by Genghis Khan in 1226. It continued to flourish under the Mongols and during Kublai Khan’s time it was expanded.
Fifteenth century tarot cards, possibly the oldest known deck. Look how beautiful they are! These are from way back before they were used for cartomancy.
NASA is contemplating bringing astronauts Barry Wilmore and Suni Williamshome from the International Space Station on a SpaceX Crew Dragon and flying the Boeing Starliner back empty. There’s just one problem: Boeing removed the Starliner’s autonomous undocking feature from its software. The aerospace manufacturer wants to push a software update to the spacecraft in orbit, but NASA fears it could do more damage.
It’s been over two months since the Boeing Crew Flight Test launched from Cape Canaveral. Multiple technical issues with the Boeing Starliner have drastically elongated the eight-day mission, with no return date in sight. NASA planned to decide whether the crew should fly the spacecraft back last week….
average United States contains 1000s of pet tigers in backyards" factoid actualy [sic] just statistical error. average person has 0 tigers on property. Activist Georg, who lives the U.S. Capitol & makes up over 10,000 each day,has purposefully been spreading disinformationadn [sic] should not have been counted
I have a big mad today, folks. It’s a really frustrating one, because years worth of work has been validated… but the
reason for that fucking sucks.
For almost a decade, I’ve been trying to fact-check the claim that there “are 10,000 to 20,000 pet tigers/big cats in backyards in the United States.” I talked to zoo, sanctuary, and private cat people; I looked at legislation, regulation, attack/death/escape incident rates; I read everything I could get my hands on. None of it made sense. None of it lined up. I couldn’t find data supporting anything like the population of pet cats being alleged to exist. Some of you might remember the series I published on those findings from 2018 or so under the hashtag #CrouchingTigerHiddenData. I’ve continued to work on it in the six years since, including publishing a peer reviewed study that counted all the non-pet big cats in the US (because even though they’re regulated, apparently nobody bothered to keep track of those either).
I spent years of my life obsessing over that statistic because it was being used to push for new federal legislation that, while well intentioned, contained language that would,
and has, created real problems for ethical facilities that have big cats. I wrote a comprehensive - 35 page! - analysis of the issues with the then-current version of the Big Cat Public Safety Act in 2020. When the bill was first introduced to Congress in 2013, a lot of groups promoted it by fear mongering:
there’s so many pet tigers! they could be hidden around every corner! they could escape and attack you! they could come out of nowhere and eat your children!! Tiger King exposed the masses to the idea of “thousands of abused backyard big cats”: as a result the messaging around the bill shifted to being welfare-focused, and the law passed in 2022.
The Big Cat Public Safety Act created a registry, and anyone who owned a private cat and wanted to keep it had to join. If they did, they could keep the animal until it passed, as long as they followed certain strictures (no getting more, no public contact, etc). Don’t register and get caught? Cat is seized and major punishment for you. Registering is therefore highly incentivized. That registry closed in June of 2023, and you can now get that registration data via a Freedom of Information Act request.
Guess how many pet big cats were registered in the whole country?
97.
Not tens of thousands. Not thousands. Not even triple digits.
97.
And that isn’t even the right number! Ten USDA licensed facilities registered erroneously. That accounts for 55 of 97 animals. Which leaves us with 42 pet big cats, of all species, in the entire country.
Now, I know that not everyone may have registered. There’s probably someone living deep in the woods somewhere with their illegal pet cougar, and there’s been at least one random person in Texas arrested for trying to sell a cub since the law passed. But - and here’s the big thing - even if there are ten times as many hidden cats than people who registered them - that’s
nowhere near ten thousand animals. Obviously, I had some questions.
Guess what? Turns out, this is because
it was never real. That huge number
never had data behind it, wasn’t likely to be accurate,
and the advocacy groups using that statistic to fearmonger and drive their agenda knew it…
and didn’t see a problem with that.
Allow me to introduce you to an article published last week.
This article is good. (Full disclose, I’m quoted in it). It’s comprehensive and fairly written, and they did their due diligence reporting and fact-checking the piece. They talked to a lot of people on all sides of the story.
But thing that really gets me?
Multiple representatives from major advocacy organizations who worked on the Big Cat Publix Safety Act told the reporter that they knew the statistics they were quoting weren’t real. And that they don’t care. The end justifies the means, the good guys won over the bad guys, that’s just how lobbying works after all. They’re so blase about it, it makes my stomach hurt. Let me pull some excerpts from the quotes.
“Whatever the true number, nearly everyone in the debate acknowledges a disparity between the actual census and the figures cited by lawmakers. “The 20,000 number is not real,” said Bill Nimmo, founder of Tigers in America. (…) For his part, Nimmo at Tigers in America sees the exaggerated figure as part of the political process. Prior to the passage of the bill, he said, businesses that exhibited and bred big cats juiced the numbers, too. (…) “I’m not justifying the hyperbolic 20,000,” Nimmo said. “In the world of comparing hyperbole, the good guys won this one.”
"Michelle Sinnott, director and counsel for captive animal law enforcement at the PETA Foundation, emphasized that the law accomplished what it was set out to do. (…) Specific numbers are not what really matter, she said: “Whether there’s one big cat in a private home or whether there’s 10,000 big cats in a private home, the underlying problem of industry is still there.””
I have no problem with a law ending the private ownership of big cats, and with ending cub petting practices. What I do have a problem with is that these organizations purposefully spread disinformation for years in order to push for it.
By their own admission, they repeatedly and intentionally promoted false statistics within Congress. For a decade.
No wonder it never made sense. No wonder no matter where I looked, I couldn’t figure out how any of these groups got those numbers, why there was never any data to back any of the claims up, why everything I learned seemed to actively contradict it. It was never real. These people decided the truth didn’t matter. They knew they had no proof, couldn’t verify their shocking numbers… and they decided that was fine, if it achieved the end they wanted.
So members of the public - probably like you, reading this - and legislators who care about big cats and want to see legislation exist to protect them? They got played, got fed false information through a TV show designed to tug at heartstrings, and it got a law through Congress that’s causing real problems for ethical captive big cat management. The 20,000 pet cat number was too sexy - too much of a crisis - for anyone to want to look past it and check that the language of the law wouldn’t mess things up up for good zoos and sanctuaries. Whoops! At least the “bad guys” lost, right? (The problems are covered somewhat in the article linked, and I’ll go into more details in a future post. You can also read my analysis from 2020, linked up top.)
Now, I know. Something something something facts don’t matter this much in our post-truth era, stop caring so much, that’s just how politics work, etc. I’m sorry, but no. Absolutely not.
Laws that will impact the welfare of living animals must be crafted carefully, thoughtfully, and precisely in order to ensure they achieve their goals without accidental negative impacts. We have a duty of care to ensure that. And in this case, the law also impacts
reservoir populations for critically endangered species! We can’t get those back if we mess them up. So maybe, just maybe, if legislators hadn’t been so focused on all those alleged pet cats, the bill could have been written narrowly and precisely.
But the minutiae of regulatory impacts aren’t sexy, and tiger abuse and TV shows about terrible people are. We all got misled, and now we’re here, and the animals in good facilities are already paying for it.
I don’t have a conclusion. I’m just mad. The public deserves to know the truth about animal legislation they’re voting for, and I hope we all call on our legislators in the future to be far more critical of the data they get fed.
The goal of de novo protein design (DNPD) is to build novel protein sequences from scratch without using pre-existing protein templates. Nevertheless, existing deep learning-based DNPD methods are sometimes constrained by their concentration on particular or poorly defined protein designs, which prevents more extensive investigation and the identification of a wide range of useful proteins. In order to solve this problem, scientists from Westlake University present Pinal, a probabilistic sampling technique that produces protein sequences by employing rich natural language as a guide. In order to improve search inside the large sequence space, the work employs a language-based method to construct novel protein structures within a smaller structure space. Tests reveal that Pinal works better than current models and can adapt to new protein configurations, which is beneficial to the biological community.
Proteins are essential to life as they are involved in every biological function in living things. Customizing proteins for particular biological or medicinal uses is the goal of protein design. Despite their effectiveness, traditional protein design techniques are frequently constrained by their dependence on pre-existing protein templates and inherent evolutionary restrictions.
De novo design, on the other hand, gains from both viewpoints. First, just a small portion of the potential protein landscape has been investigated by nature. Second, the biological traits that evolution has chosen might not match the unique functional needs. By creating completely new proteins with desired shapes and functionalities through de novo design, researchers are able to overcome the limits of conventional approaches.
After years of observing these caddisfly larvae, French naturalist and artist, Hubert Duprat, wondered if the caddis flies would use any materials to build their cocoon. He introduced flakes of gold, pearls and opals to the caddis flies and they did in fact use them for their cocoons. They use their own silk as the glue to hold their pupal constructions together.
do you guys use any kind of quirky/unusual/atypical notation in your notes? I love to use ∃? to signalize that I’m trying to prove existence of something while not knowing if the object I’m searching for exists a priori (saw somebody doing it, so I took it from them)
years & years of being told “righty tighty lefty loosey” have been erased by overhearing a kindergartner tell her friend “twisty tighty lefty righty” while they were trying to open a water bottle. any time i try to remember which way to turn now thats all i can think of
“The sort of lawbreaking going on here is, I think, a special subspecies of collective action. It is not often recognized as such, in large part because it makes no open claims of this kind and because it is almost always self-serving at the same time. Who is to say whether the poaching hunter is more interested in a warm fire and rabbit stew than in contesting the claim of the aristocracy to the wood and the game he has just taken? It is most certainly not in his interest to help the historian with a public account of his motives. The success of his claim to wood and game lies in keeping his acts and motives shrouded. And yet, the long-run success of this lawbreaking depends on the complicity of his friends and neighbors who may believe in his and their right to forest products and may themselves poach and, in any case, will not bear witness against him or turn him in to the authorities.
One need not have an actual conspiracy to achieve the practical effects of a conspiracy. More regimes have been brought, piecemeal, to their knees by what was once called “Irish democracy,” the silent, dogged resistance, withdrawal, and truculence of millions of ordinary people, than by revolutionary vanguards or rioting mobs.”
theres a popular brand in canada called no name brand and it manufactures everything you can imagine in a grocery store and it kind of makes me feel like im in a world no one bothered to do much world building for
things that sure are.
things that are.
This is peak design
Can’t believe no one posted chair (for sitting)
All products should be like this actually
Springer Graduate Texts in Mathematics… Is that you…?
I’m coming toDEFCON! OnFRIDAY(Aug 9), I’m emceeing theEFF POKER TOURNAMENT(noon at the Horseshoe Poker Room), and appearing on theBRICKED AND ABANDONEDpanel (5PM, LVCC - L1 - HW1–11–01). OnSATURDAY(Aug 10), I’m giving a keynote called “DISENSHITTIFY OR DIE!How hackers can seize the means of computation and build a new, good internet that is hardened against our asshole bosses’ insatiable horniness for enshittification” (noon, LVCC - L1 - HW1–11–01).
Here’s an open secret: the confusing jargon of finance is not the product of some inherent complexity that requires a whole new vocabulary. Rather, finance-talk is all obfuscation, because if we called finance tactics by their plain-language names, it would be obvious that the sector exists to defraud the public and loot the real economy.
Take “leveraged buyout,” a polite name for
stealing a whole goddamned company:
Identify a company that owns valuable assets that are required for its continued operation, such as the real-estate occupied by its outlets, or even its lines of credit with suppliers;
Approach lenders (usually banks) and ask for money to buy the company, offering the company itself (which you don’t own!) as collateral on the loan;
Offer some of those loaned funds to shareholders of the company and convince a key block of those shareholders (for example, executives with large stock grants, or speculators who’ve acquired large positions in the company, or people who’ve inherited shares from early investors but are disengaged from the operation of the firm) to demand that the company be sold to the looters;
Call a vote on selling the company at the promised price, counting on the fact that many investors will not participate in that vote (for example, the big index funds like Vanguard almost
never vote on motions like this), which means that a minority of shareholders can force the sale;
Once you own the company, start to strip-mine its assets: sell its real-estate, start stiffing suppliers, fire masses of workers, all in the name of “repaying the debts” that you took on to buy the company.
This process has its own euphemistic jargon, for example, “rightsizing” for layoffs, or “introducing efficiencies” for stiffing suppliers or selling key assets and leasing them back. The looters – usually organized as private equity funds or hedge funds – will extract all the liquid capital – and give it to themselves as a “special dividend.” Increasingly, there’s also a “divi recap,” which is a euphemism for borrowing even more money backed by the company’s assets and then handing it to the private equity fund:
If you’re a
Sopranos fan, this will all sound familiar, because when the (comparatively honest) mafia does this to a business, it’s called a “bust-out”:
THESIS: the real reason that people stay on this hellsite is not “chronological order” or “the drama” or whatever (per se), but is instead linked to how tumblr, unlike most social media, is not optimised to give content as short of a half-life as possible, but instead is optimised to let content continue to cycle for months, years, even decades. this has in turn led to a more consistent centralised site “culture” in which there is more coherent linkage among different areas of the site, thus also explaining why its content permeates so thoroughly throughout the internet.
biography: one of the most revolutionary numbers in all of mathematics, and not just because of its rotund symbol.
the notion of “nothingness” as a number in and of itself rather than merely as a placeholder was discovered independently in many parts of the world at many different times, particularly in cultures that used forms of positional notation (ie. writing numbers in a way where every symbol has some numerical value, and its position within a number indicates that the value is multiplied by some power of a “base”, often ten). due to its strange nature as a number with no value, many properties that are often taken for granted with other numbers do not apply to zero.
in the Number Tournament, zero has beaten some incredibly iconic numbers seemingly effortlessly. fifteen, thirty-six, sixty-four, the golden ratio, and negative one were all no match for naught. it is truly a force to be reckoned with.
zero is a number associated with emptiness, with the void, as well as with new beginnings. it is one of the foundations of all of mathematics, and it is certainly one of the best numbers.
biography: another groundbreaking number, discovered much more recently than zero. much like zero, in its earliest uses i (the imaginary unit) was considered more of placeholder than a number in its own right, as the name “imaginary number” might suggest.
the imaginary numbers (and the complex numbers they are a part of) were born as an elegant solution to a practical problem, and they’ve persisted as a tool for modeling things in the physical world, no less real than the “real numbers”. complex numbers are useful for “translating” statements about shapes into statements about numbers, and vice versa. they are crucial to the Fourier transform, which itself is a vital part of signal processing and many areas of physics.
in the Number Tournament, i faced off against a series of increasingly tougher challengers: forty-seven, twenty-seven, e, two, and Not a Number, each race closer than the last. i fought hard to get here, and we’re all very proud of it for making it this far.
i is associated with the mathematical tradition of taking “you can’t do that” as a challenge, and with thinking outside of the box. it is a fundamental component of our modern understanding of the world, and it is certainly one of the best numbers.
“The most fashionable bathing station in all Europe”. British industrialists and American mining investors plotting the colonization of the Congo, while mingling at Ostend’s seaside vacation resorts. Extracting African life to build European railways, hotels, palaces, suburbs, and other modern(ist) infrastructure. “Towards infinity!”
—
In 1885, King Leopold II achieved an astonishing and improbable goal: he claimed a vast new realm of his own devising, a conjury on a map called […] the Congo Free State. […] [A] fictional state owned by the king, ruled by decree, and run from Brussels from 1885 to 1908. […] This was […] a private entrepreneurial venture [for the king]. The abundance of ivory, timber, and wild rubber found in this enormous territory brought sudden and spectacular profits to Belgium, the king, and a web of interlocking concession companies. The frenzy to amass these precious resources unleashed a regime of forced labor, violence [millions of deaths], and unchecked atrocities for Congolese people. These same two and a half decades of contact with the Congo Free State remade Belgium
[…] into a global powerhouse, vitalized by
an economic boom, architectural burst, and imperial surge.
Congo profits supplied King Leopold II with
funds for a series of monumental building projects […]. Indeed,
Belgian Art Nouveau exploded after 1895, created from Congolese raw materials and inspired by Congolese motifs. Contemporaries called it “Style Congo,” […].
The inventory of this royal architecture is astonishing […]. [H]istorical research […] recovers
Leopold’s formative ideas of architecture as power, his unrelenting efforts to implement them […]. King Leopold II harbored lifelong ambitions to “embellish” and beautify the nation […]. [W]ith his personal treasury flush with Congo revenue, […] Leopold - now the
Roi Batisseur (
“Builder King”) he long aimed to be - planned renovations
explicitly designed to outdo Louis XIV’s Versailles.
Enormous greenhousescontained flora from every corner of the globe, with a dedicated soaring structure completed
specifically to house the oversize palms of the Congolese jungles. […]
—
The Tervuren Congo palace […]. Electric tramways were built and a wide swath of avenue emerged. […] [In and around Brussels] real estate developers began to break up lots […] for suburban mansions and gardens. Between 1902 and 1910, new neighborhoods with luxury homes appeared along the Avenue […]. By 1892, Antwerp was not only the port of call for trade but also the headquarters of the most profitable of an interlinking set of banks and Congo investment companies […].
As Antwerp in the 1890s became once again the “Queen of the Scheldt,” the city was also the home of what was referred to as the “Queen of Congo companies.” This was the ABIR, or Anglo-Belgian India Rubber Company, founded in 1892 with funds from Britishbusinessman “Colonel” John Thomas North […].
Set on the seaside coast, Belgium’s Ostend was the third imperial cityscape to be remade by King Leopold […] [in a] transformation [that] was concentrated between 1899 and 1905 […]. Ostend encompassed a
boomtownnot of harbor and trade, like Antwerp, but
of beachfront and leisure […]
[developed] as a “British-style” seaside resort. […] Leopold […] [w]as said to spend “as much time in Ostend as he did in Brussels,” […]. Ostend underwent a
dramatic population expansion in a short period, tripling its inhabitants from 1870–1900. […] Networks of steamers, trams, and railway lines coordinated to bring seasonal visitors in, and hotels and paved walkways were completed. […] [A]nd Leopold’s favorite spot, the 1883 state-of-the-art racetracks, the Wellington Hippodrome. Referred to with
an eye-wink as “the king incognito” (generating an entire genre of photography), visitors to the seaside could often see Leopold in his top hat and summer suit […], riding his customized three-wheeled bicycle […]. By 1900, Ostend’s expansion and enhancement made it known as “the Queen of the Belgian seaside resorts” and
“the most fashionable bathing station in all Europe.”Opulence, convenience, and spectacle brought the Shah of Persia, American tycoons, European aristocrats, and Belgian elites, among others, to Ostend.
—
Leopold’s interventions and the Congo Free State personnel and proceeds played
three pivotal and understudied roles in this transformation, all of which involved ABIR [British industrialists].
First,
it was at Ostend that an early and decisive action was taken to structure the “red rubber” regimeand set it in motion. In 1892, jurists such as [E.P.] had ruled, contravening […] trade laws, that the king was entitled to claim the Congo as his domanial property […]. Leopold […] devised one part of that royal domain as a zone for private company concessions […] to extract and export wild rubber.
Soon after, in 1892, King Leopold happened to meet the British “Colonel” John Thomas North at the Ostend Hippodrome. North, a Leeds-born mechanic […] had
made a fortune speculating on Chilean nitrates in the 1880s. He owned monopoly shares in nitrate mines and quickly expanded to acquire
monopolies in Chilean freight railways, water supplies, and iron and coal mines. By 1890 North was a high-society socialite worth millions […].
Leopold approached North at the Ostend racecourse to provide the initial investments to set up the Anglo-Belgian India Rubber Company (ABIR). […]
—
One visible sign of Ostend’s little-known character as Congo boomtown was the Royal Palace Hotel, a lavish property next to the king’s Royal Domain, which opened in 1899. With hundreds of rooms and a broad sweep of acreage along the beachfront,
the palace “occupied the largest space of any hotel in Europe.” […]
King
Leopold met American mining magnateThomas Walsh there, and as with North, the meeting proved beneficial for his Congo enterprise:
Leopold enlisted Walsh to provide assessments of some of his own Congo mining prospects. The hotel was part of […] [a major European association of leisure profiteers] founded in 1894, that
began to bundle luxury tourism and dedicated railway travel, and whose major investors were King Leopold, Colonel North […].
At the height of Congo expansionism, fin-de-siècle Antwerp embodied an exhilarated launch point […].
Explorers and expeditioners set sail for Matadi after 1887 with the rallying call “Vers l’infini!” (“towards infinity!”) […].
—
Text above by: Debora Silverman. “Empire as Architecture: Monumental Cities the Congo Built in Belgium”.
e-flux Architecture (
Appropriationsseries). May 2024. At: e-flux.com/architecture/appropriations/608151/empire-as-architecture-monumental-cities-the-congo-built-in-belgium/ [Bold emphasis and some paragraph breaks/contractions added by me. Italicized first paragraph/heading in this post was added by me. Presented here for commentary, teaching, criticism.]
There’s a lithium bonanza happening at the Salton Sea.
The boom started when one of the world’s largest supplies of lithium was discovered one mile below the dying lake. The metal is required to produce electric car batteries and is essential to reducing carbon emissions.
Yet lost in the excitement about the money and new jobs that the mining projects could bring are the concerns of the people who live there.
The impoverished area — which is more than 80% Latino — already has a childhood asthma rate that is more than twice the national average.
The asthma cases have been tied to the toxic dust created as the Salton Sea recedes from lack of water. And some local residents fear that the number of respiratory cases could soar even higher as the lithium mining projects drink up more of the area’s much fought over allocation from the Colorado River.
Residents also worry about the hazardous waste that the mining projects could create. And the area’s Indigenous tribes are concerned that sites they consider sacred, including Obsidian Butte, a volcanic outcropping on the Salton Sea’s shore, could be disturbed.
In March, a local community group called Comite Civico del Valle, along with Earthworks, a national nonprofit, filed a legal petition to stop the first of the planned lithium mining projects, which is known as Hell’s Kitchen.
The groups say the potential hazards of the project by Controlled Thermal Resources, a privately held company, were not properly studied before the Imperial County Board of Superiors unanimously approved it in January.
“Controlled Thermal Resources boasts about the sustainability attributes of direct lithium extraction, yet public health, hazardous waste, and water concerns remain unresolved,” said Luis Olmedo, executive director of Comite Civico del Valle.
The two groups want the project halted until the risks are studied and measures are taken to mitigate any harm that could happen to the communities or environment.
The county and company disagree and say that the project’s potential risks were properly considered in the environmental impact statement that California law requires.
“The County believes that the concerns were adequately addressed during the initial stages of the project development,” said Eddie Lopez, a county spokesperson.
Jim Turner, Controlled Thermal Resources’ president, said the company spent two years performing studies to ensure that the lithium could be extracted safely. The board of supervisors agreed that the company had completed that work, he said. “The official opinion is that the job was done very well,” he said.
Government officials are among those who want to move quickly. They say the Salton Sea could be the cleanest major source of lithium in the world and make the U.S. a major player in production.
Controlled Thermal Resources and two other companies with mining projects in the works use a process in which the metal is extracted from the hot, steaming brine that geothermal power plants bring up from the depths to produce electricity.
Lithium is removed from the brine before it is reinjected back into the geothermal reservoir deep underground.
The process, known as direct lithium extraction, is said to be far less damaging to the environment than hard rock mining or by pumping brine into large evaporation ponds.
The U.S. produces very little lithium even though the demand is great and growing fast with the rising purchases of electric vehicles.
Already 11 geothermal plants have been built around the lake. Controlled Thermal Resources’ project would be the first to combine electricity generation with lithium extraction.
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