"Google March 2025 Core Update Is Rolling Out - Here Is A Deeper Dive" (GOOG; EVIL)

The GOOG knows they have a problem with surfacing a whole lot of sites, a problem that goes back at least nine years and they realize that with AI-based or AI-assisted search engines coming on strong (plus the probability that Mr. Musk's xAI will likely enter the fray) that unless Google reworks the algorithms their crown jewel, and more importantly the source of the bulk of the ad revenue will slowly become irrelevant.

From Search Engine Roundtable, March 14: 

Google officially announced the rollout of the March 2025 core update yesterday at around 12:30 pm ET. This core update is expected to take up to two weeks to roll out. Google said this is a regular core update but did make a note about helping surface content from content creators.

Google wrote on LinkedIn two points:

(1) "This is a regular update designed to better surface relevant, satisfying content for searchers from all types of sites," Google wrote

(2) "We also continue our work to surface more content from creators through a series of improvements throughout this year. Some have already happened; additional ones will come later," Google added. My gut, based on the wording here, is that we won't see much change in terms of improvement for most content creators hit by previous core updates or helpful content updates. But let's wait it out and see what happens over the coming weeks.

I am surprised this is the first core update we had of 2025, I was expecting more core updates, more often but who knows...

....MUCH MORE 

If interested see also:

"To Break Google’s Monopoly on Search, Make Its Index Public" (GOOG)

 Treat them like the utilities they are.

The author,  Dr. Robert Epstein is the former editor-in-chief at Psychology Today, search-engine researcher, Huffington Post contributor etc....

From Bloomberg Businessweek....

Or at the Huffington Post:

Google Critic Killed in “Ironic” Car Accident: Struck by Google Street View Vehicle

By Camille Johnson, San Diego Union-Tribune

San Diego, CA. Prominent research psychologist and author Dr. Robert Epstein, age 60, was killed yesterday afternoon by a Google Street View vehicle while crossing Front Street in San Diego, where he has long resided. Although foul play is not suspected, Epstein’s friends are calling the accident “ironic.”

According to Daryn Thompson, a 30-year friend of Epstein’s who also lives in San Diego, “We all know that Google isn’t evil, so there’s no chance this was deliberate, but it’s troubling and ironic that it just happened to be an outspoken critic of Google who was hit. I’m sure it was just a coincidence, though.”...MORE

Or maybe "Warped sense of humour could be ‘sign of impending dementia’"

Following last week's "Long-winded speech could be early sign of Alzheimer's disease, says study" a "friend" sent this along.
I can't catch a freaking break this month....

"Using Drones for Peeping, Burglaries on Rise: “It’s Gotten Dramatically Worse"

In Ukraine both sides are reverting to shotguns as a last line of defense though, granted, some of the shotguns are mounted on drones for drone-counterdrone battles.

From the Hollywood Reporter, March 21:

It's attack of the drones as flying cameras stalk stars and serve as burglary lookouts, all while becoming tougher to detect. But security companies are offering high-tech solutions. 

Emilia Clarke was sitting on the sofa in her Venice, California, home when she heard an insectile buzzing. She glanced up and there it was: a drone, hovering outside her living room’s tall windows, its camera trained on the Mother of Dragons as she gave an interview.

“There’s a drone looking in my house!” a stunned Clarke exclaimed. “That’s really creepy.”

Once spotted, the drone shot off. About 20 minutes later, however, the whirring device crept back to gawk some more at her personal space. Clarke was exasperated and more than a little unnerved.

This happened in 2019 — four years after a California law passed banning drone operators from violating the airspace of private property. Illicit drone use has not only continued despite states passing strict laws but in recent years has proliferated, says Mike Fraietta, an FAA drone pilot and founder of security company Gargoyle Systems. Drone security systems are on the rise as companies and event producers look to secure their airspace. Professional, military-grade drone-detection systems — the kind used for sporting events, for instance — can cost about $200,000.

Drone misuse “has gotten dramatically worse,” Fraietta says. “There was legislation passed, but that doesn’t necessarily stop them. Especially with high rises in places like New York and Austin, people assume they’re so high up that nobody can see them, but drones can.”

Prince Harry and Meghan Markle, for example, called the L.A. Police Department multiple times to report drone peepers in 2020. And drones continue to plague on-location film sets; Ryan Reynolds says he and the rest of the Deadpool & Wolverine cast had a “run for cover” plan in place if anybody spotted a drone while staging a spoiler-filled scene. And while a recent viral drone video showing Drake in a high-rise suite furiously shooing off a spy-copter was faked, it reinforced the prevalence of these buzzing breaches of privacy.

Drones are not just being employed by lurkers and paparazzi to spy on stars. They are reportedly also being used by criminals to case targets and can serve as lookouts when burglaries are underway. “We’re seeing robberies happen every day with the assistance of drones,” Fraietta says.

The L.A. County Sheriff’s Department said in November that drones were being used in a string of burglaries in Stevenson Ranch. Around the same time, the Associated Press obtained a memo sent by the NBA to team officials warning that “transnational South American theft groups” were using drones and other tech to target wealthy players. Also last year, The San Diego Union-Tribune reported that drones were believed to have been used in burglaries of beachside homes.

Siete Hamminga, CEO of Netherlands-based Robin Radar, which sells high-end detection systems, says drone-assisted burglaries have occurred in Europe, as well. “I don’t think it’s super common, but we have seen a number of cases in which drones were used for reconnaissance in high-end burglaries. Drones can be used to plan and to understand how a home is protected and they can also be used in real time, to help warn that they need to get out of there.”

The issue is getting more complicated due to rapid advancements in drone technology driven by the theater of war in Ukraine. The European Council on Foreign Relations says that more than 100 different types of drones have been used in the conflict over the past three years.

“The scary thing with the innovation that’s coming out of conflict zones is drones are becoming harder to detect and the rate this is happening is kind of unbelievable,” says Fraietta, who recently returned from working with Ukrainian drone teams to test a civilian protection system under development.

Drones are typically detected by their noise or the radio frequency (RF) an operator uses to pilot the craft. Fraietta says the technology is innovating in three ways: using AI to program portions of a preplanned flight path instead of relying on RF, making drone wings quieter, and using a wire like a kite string. “A tethered drone sounds silly at first,” he says. “But they’re fiber optic wires that also allow for 4K streaming, and the drone is not detectable by the police looking for a radio frequency. So they’re able to get away and move drones a lot quicker and quieter than a year ago.” Such teathers can literally be miles long.

Such cutting-edge drone tech hasn’t become a major issues outside the war zone — at least not yet. “In the private sector, we don’t see that much yet,” Hamminga says.

So what can a drone-harassed homeowner — celebrity or otherwise — do about it?....

....MORE

"Bayer Shares Plunge After U.S. Court Defeat in Roundup Case"

Reprising an introduction from 2021's "Pension Funds Allowed to Sue Bayer Over Due Diligence in Monsanto Acquisition":

There have been some bad mergers and/or acquisitions over the years, AOL - Time Warner comes to mind both for its top-tick timing and the $54 billion write-down of some of the intangibles in the deal two years after consummation, but Bayer's purchase of Monsanto may be the worst in history.

And from the Wall Street Journal, March 24: 

The decision marks the latest legal setback for a company that has been for years fighting lawsuits stemming from its $63 billion acquisition of Monsanto

Bayer shares fell sharply after the company was ordered to pay $2.1 billion by a jury in a Georgia state court, the latest legal defeat for the company in a case about its Roundup weedkiller.

The German agricultural and pharmaceutical group said the jury in a trial in the State Court of Cobb County, Georgia, on Friday reached a verdict in favor of the plaintiff. The verdict includes $2 billion in punitive damages and $65 million in compensatory damages, the company said.

Shares in Bayer were down 6.6% at 22.48 euros in European morning trade Monday, having fallen as much as 8.8% earlier. The stock is up about 16% since the start of the year, amid a rally in German shares.

“We disagree with the jury’s verdict, as it conflicts with the overwhelming weight of scientific evidence and the consensus of regulatory bodies and their scientific assessments worldwide,” Bayer said. “We believe that we have strong arguments on appeal to get this verdict overturned and the excessive and unconstitutional damage awards eliminated or reduced.”

The company said damages in cases that reached final judgments were reduced by 90% overall compared with the original jury awards.

The decision marks the latest legal setback for a company that has been fighting for years lawsuits stemming from its $63 billion acquisition of U.S. agrochemical firm Monsanto, which developed Roundup, closed in 2018. Critics have argued that glyphosate, the active ingredient found in Roundup, causes cancer though Bayer has long maintained that glyphosate is safe to use....

....MORE

 It's not as though the potential liability just crept up on the chemical behemoth. Here's a January 2019 post:

Safe Or Not, Monsanto's Roundup Is Toxic for Bayer—Spiegel

Panama Canal—"Pro-Beijing paper: Anti-sanctions law can block Li’s ports deal"

Highlighting  by climateer investing.

From Asia Times, March 23:

Anti-sanctions law can stop Li Ka-shing fom selling Panama ports but it will hit many other Hong Kong firms  

A media mouthpiece of the Chinese Communist Party has suggested using China’s anti-sanctions mechanism to deal with Hong Kong tycoon Li Ka-shing’s proposed selling of his global ports, including two at the Panama Canal, to BlackRock.

In its latest article titled “Stop the transaction, avoid losing a lot to save a little,” Ta Kung Pao, a pro-Beijing newspaper, urges Li to scrap his ports deal. 

Since its first attack on Li on March 13, the newspaper has published more than 10 commentaries and news articles on the topic. While previous ones called Li a “traitor” and an unpatriotic businessman, its latest opinion piece mentions a concrete legal tool – the anti-sanctions law – for the first time.

“Both at the national and Hong Kong Special Administrative Region levels, our legal system is quite complete,” writes Wan Yunping. (The name may be a pseudonym as the author has no title and has not published any article before.)

“In response to the United States and Western sanctions in recent years, our country has accumulated rich experience in anti-sanctions and formed an effective response mechanism,” Wan says. “Both the state and the SAR have legal mechanisms to deal with so-called ‘legal transactions’ that harm national interests.”

He says those who have stressed that Li’s proposed deal is a “legitimate transaction” under the principle of freedom of contract are “too naive and senile.”

“From the operational level of commercial mergers and acquisitions, I advise relevant companies and individuals to stop delivery, avoid miscalculations and avoid losing a lot to save a little,” Wan says.

The author also says Li’s deal violates the principle of Hong Kong’s National Security Ordinance, which states that “the highest principle of the policy of ‘one country, two systems’ is to safeguard national sovereignty, security and development interests.” The Legislative Council passed the ordinance, drafted on the basis of Article 23 of the Basic Law, in March 2024.

“This transaction directly violates this highest principle as it will hurt China’s national security and development interests,” he says. “Violating the principle of the law is also a violation of the law.”

“Throughout the legal system, not every legal provision directly states the consequences of violation,” he adds. “However, the lack of written legal consequences does not mean the law has no legal effect.”....

....MUCH MORE

The Chinese are going bust-up the Panama ports deal. It is one of their all-star choke point positioning plays.

If interested see: "Chinese EV battery makers are building huge factories in Morocco to cash in on U.S. electric vehicle subsidies" (and China is now camped at most of the world's chokepoints)"

Here are a collection of previous post snippets addressing exactly these laws as they are playing out between Beijing, Hong Kong, and Panama under the January 2025 headline "DeepSeek and Chinese Security Laws: There Are No Secrets":

....Some years ago China implemented a series of laws that require Chinese companies to work with the state security organs and not just in China but around the world - universal jurisdiction.

Some of our posts from that time:

July 2019
"How the state runs business in China"
.... The author rather blithely skips over the National Security Law.
Here via China Law Translate:

There is not a lot of wiggle room in Article 7

Article 7: All organizations and citizens shall support, assist, and cooperate with national intelligence efforts in accordance with law, and shall protect national intelligence work secrets they are aware of.
The State protects individuals and organizations that support, assist, and cooperate with national intelligence efforts.

All means all, including foreign companies operating in China.
Ditto articles 14:

Article 14: National intelligence work institutions lawfully carrying out intelligence efforts may request that relevant organs, organizations, and citizens provide necessary support, assistance, and cooperation.

And 16:

Article 16: When national intelligence work institutions staff lawfully perform their tasks in accordance with relevant national provisions, with approvals and upon the presentation of relevant identification, they may enter relevant restricted areas and venues; may learn from and question relevant institutions, organizations, and individuals; and may read or collect relevant files, materials or items.

And then there's The Cybersecurity Law and the Foreign NGO Law (2016) and the Counter-espionage Law (2014) and all worded vaguely enough that the laws can mean whatever the Party and the authorities want them to mean.

****

July 2020 claiming universal jurisdiction for an ostensibly Hong Kong focused law:

 

"Hong Kong’s National Security Law: a first look"

....The law also applies to everyone everywhere in the world. This means if one were to be seen by Beijing as breaking this new legislation in another country and then enter Hong Kong, or transit through it, or even fly in a vehicle registered in Hong Kong, then one would be at risk. Possibly this could even apply to residing in a country with an extradition treaty with Hong Kong (or one day China?). In short, it is a very large, sharp Sword of Damocles....

From The China Collection, June 30:

It’s not the substantive crimes and their definitions that count; it’s the institutions that will investigate, prosecute, and judge them that count. Language matters only if there are institutions that will make it matter. This whole law is about avoiding the involvement of such institutions.

---

Everyone is doing their hot take on the new Law of the People’s Republic of China on Safeguarding National Security in the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (the “Nat Sec Law” or the “Law”) [Chinese | English], just revealed to the public and made effective today (consultation? schmonsultation!), so why not me?
Two things first:

1. As these are just quick notes, I’m going to comment on the various parts of the law pretty much in the order they appear instead of in a more organized way.
2. An important point: I’m not going to talk much about the substantive offenses and their definitions. There’s a reason for that. If mainland practice to date is any guide—and it is—then the definitions don’t matter that much. Anything can be stretched as necessary to cover something done by the person being targeted. As the old cliché goes, 欲加之罪何患无辞 (roughly, “if you are determined to convict, you needn’t worry about the lack of grounds”). The key is in the institutions and procedures the law establishes and empowers. Who has power to do what? What are the procedures under which they operate? Who appoints and pays for them? To whom are they responsible? Etc.

All right, let’s begin.
Article 2 begins with a weird provision stating that nobody may violate the rules of Article 1 and Article 12 of the Hong Kong Basic Law. But Article 1 and Article 12 of the Basic Law aren’t rules about anything. Article 1 states a proposition, not a rule: “The Hong Kong Special Administrative Region is an inalienable part of the People’s Republic of China.” How could one “violate” that statement? Article 12 is grammatically the same: ” The Hong Kong Special Administrative Region shall be a local administrative region of the People’s Republic of China, which shall enjoy a high degree of autonomy and come directly under the Central People’s Government.” Again, how does one “violate” a proposition?

Article 4 says that Hong Kong should protect rights under the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights. Given the rest of the law, whether this will happen seems unlikely.

Article 5 states that all persons shall be considered innocent until declared guilty by a judicial organ. As we shall see, this is contradicted by the bail provisions in Article 42.

Article 6 says that protecting the country’s sovereignty, unity, and territorial integrity is the common duty of all the people (renmin 人民) of China. This seems an odd formulation to me. Why not say all the citizens (gongmin 公民) of China? “People” in PRC officialese has a special meaning: it is a subset of the citizenry, and consists of those who are allies of the Communist Party at any given moment. It would be odd to say that reactionaries and counterrevolutionaries, who are not part of the people, get a pass on this duty.

Article 12 calls for the establishment of a Committee for Safeguarding National Security (the “National Security Committee” or the “Committee”), said to be under the supervision of and accountable to the Central People’s Government (the “CPG”), i.e., the State Council and the Premier.

It’s not quite clear how this accountability is to work in practice, since the membership is prescribed by law: the Chief Secretary for Administration, the Financial Secretary, the Secretary for Justice, the Secretary for Security, the Commissioner of Police, the head of the department for safeguarding national security of the Hong Kong Police Force established under Article 16 of this Law (the “Nat Sec Head”), the Director of Immigration, the Commissioner of Customs and Excise, and the Director of the Chief Executive’s Office. (To understand where all these fit within Hong Kong’s administrative structure, check out this handy chart. I’ll just note here that they are not all of equal rank. The Nat Sec Head, for example, is under the Commissioner of Police, who is under the Secretary for Security, who is under the Chief Secretary for Administration.) The Committee is to be chaired by the Chief Executive.....MUCH MORE

 Finally, more on that universal jurisdiction (tweet disappeared but she was right):

Oh my god am I reading this right???

Article 38: The law applies to persons who do NOT have permanent resident status in HK and commit crimes under this law OUTSIDE Hong Kong.

Did Beijing just grant itself sweeping extraterritoriality to...everyone on the planet?

— B. Allen-Ebrahimian (@BethanyAllenEbr) June 30, 2020

THREAD

Here's Bethany:

Head of China investigations @aspi_cts. Was @axios @foreignpolicy @yale
@HopkinsNanjing. Author BEIJING RULES, FT Best Books 2023. bethanyallen AT aspi org au
https://x.com/BethanyAllenEbr/

Meanwhile In France: Mining For Hydrogen

A bit late getting to this but something that might be worth the wait.

From EU-Startups, February 7:

Natural hydrogen exploration startup Mantle8 raises €3.4 million to scale 

Mantle8, a Grenoble-based natural hydrogen exploration company, has announced today the close of its €3.4 million Seed financing round to run a technological pilot to image and quantify hydrogen systems in the ground.

The funding round saw participation from Kiko Ventures and Breakthrough Energy Ventures Europe (BEV-E), with additional participation from prominent angel investors.

“Our science-first approach represents a paradigm shift in hydrogen exploration. It makes hydrogen discovery more scalable, accurate, faster and profitable,” said Emmanuel Masini, Founder and CEO of Mantle8. “Our technology was founded on broad and intimate collaboration with the scientific community. The next step was finding the right partners that would enable us to deliver this technology boldly. With the support of our investors, we now have the fuel to move at the necessary pace.”

Mantle8 was founded in 2024 and comprises a team of geologists with 20 years of experience in the field. Mantle8 has developed geological models and imaging technologies that detect the best natural hydrogen locations with “world-first accuracy“. The company’s validated technologies visualise the entire hydrogen generating system – including the amount and quality of hydrogen present.

This technology enables Mantle8 to identify optimal natural hydrogen reservoirs and target hydrogen production at €0.77/kg – a price point that could “revolutionise the clean energy market“.

The new funds will be used to run a technological pilot to image and quantify hydrogen systems in the ground. Mantle8 will also further develop the cross-border scalability of its technology and expand its team by hiring new AI and geochemistry experts.

Natural hydrogen is produced by nature when water reacts with iron rich rocks underground. Unlike conventional hydrogen production methods, natural hydrogen does not require energy-intensive separation processes.

While low-carbon alternatives such as electrolysis from renewable energies have emerged, Mantle8 argues that they remain costly. As industries worldwide seek sustainable alternatives for hard-to-decarbonise sectors like steel, cement and aviation, natural hydrogen has the potential to eliminate the green premium and become the sustainable solution for achieving net-zero goals.

“Most existing approaches to natural hydrogen extraction are based on trial and error, but Mantle8’s proprietary technology is based on rigorous science,” added Rob Trezona from Kiko Ventures. “We are big believers in the hydrogen economy and exited our last investment in hydrogen at over a billion; this could be even more valuable.”....

....MORE

Previously:

Meanwhile, In Albania: Hydrogen"

Want To Be A Hydrogen Tycoon? Maybe Prospect For Ophiolite And Chromite Ore

"There's hydrogen in them thar hills" 

Grizzled prospector intently looking for hydrogen.

just kidding, that's Tom Waits in the Coen brothers film “The Ballad of Buster Scruggs.”

Media: "Yahoo is selling TechCrunch"

From The Verge, March 21:

Private equity firm Regent has purchased TechCrunch after acquiring PCWorld, Macworld, and TechAdvisor. 

TechCrunch has a new owner, again. Yahoo has sold the tech news site to the private equity firm Regent for an undisclosed sum, according to an announcement on Friday.

Regent is the same company that snapped up Foundry, the firm behind outlets like PCWorld, Macworld, and TechAdvisor on Thursday. Founded in 2005, TechCrunch has experienced many shakeups in ownership after AOL acquired the site in 2010.

When Verizon acquired AOL in 2015 and Yahoo in 2017, the company folded TechCrunch, Engadget, Yahoo Sports, and other sites into a new division called Oath, which later became Verizon Media. In 2021, Verizon sold its media division to Apollo Global Management for $5 billion, and it was renamed Yahoo!....

....MORE

"New desalination technology being tested in California could lower costs of tapping seawater"

From the Los Angeles Times, March 21:

• A new deep-sea desalination technology is undergoing testing in Southern California. Water managers hope it will offer an economical and environmentally friendly way of tapping the Pacific Ocean for fresh water.
• The CEO of the company that developed the technology calls it a moonshot to revolutionize how California — and the world — can transform seawater into drinking water.
• If the system proves viable, the company plans to build what it calls a water farm anchored to the ocean floor several miles off the coast of Malibu.

Californians could be drinking water tapped from the Pacific Ocean off Malibu several years from now — that is, if a company’s new desalination technology proves viable.

OceanWell Co. plans to anchor about two dozen 40-foot-long devices, called pods, to the seafloor several miles offshore and use them to take in saltwater and pump purified fresh water to shore in a pipeline. The company calls the concept a water “farm” and is testing a prototype of its pod at a reservoir in the foothills of the Santa Monica Mountains.

The pilot study, supported by Las Virgenes Municipal Water District, is being closely watched by managers of several large water agencies in Southern California. They hope that if the new technology proves economical, it could supply more water for cities and suburbs that are vulnerable to shortages during droughts, while avoiding the environmental drawbacks of large coastal desalination plants.

“It can potentially provide us Californians with a reliable water supply that doesn’t create toxic brine that impacts marine life, nor does it have intakes that suck the life out of the ocean,” said Mark Gold, director of water scarcity solutions for the Natural Resources Defense Council. “If this technology is proven to be viable, scalable and cost-effective, it would greatly enhance our climate resilience.”

During a recent demonstration at Las Virgenes Reservoir, Tim Quinn, the company’s water policy strategist, watched as the 12-foot-long cylindrical prototype was lowered underwater on a cable.

“We pull fresh water only up out of the ocean, and the salt stays down there in low concentrations, where it’s not an environmental problem,” Quinn said.

The testing at Las Virgenes Reservoir will help the company’s engineers check how the system works in filtering out plankton and discharging it back into the water. When the pod was nearly 50 feet underwater, Mark Golay, the company’s director of engineering projects, turned on the pumps and water flowed from a spigot.

The next step, expected later this year, will involve conducting trials in the ocean by lowering a pod from an anchored boat into the depths about 5 miles offshore.

“We hope to be building water farms under the ocean in 2028,” Quinn said.

Quinn previously worked for California water agencies for four decades, and he joined Menlo Park-based OceanWell two years ago believing the new technology holds promise to ease the state’s conflicts over water.

“Ocean desal has never played a prominent role in California’s water future,” he said, “and this technology allows us to look to the ocean as a place where we can get significant sources of supply with minimal, if any, environmental conflict.”....

....MUCH MORE

"China's EV Boom Is Bad For U.S.Tech"

Om Malik at Crazy Stupid Tech, March 16: 

Sometimes, a car is not just a car.

Take the new Volvo ES90, as an example.

In its press release, Volvo touts computing power of 508 trillion operations per second (TOPS), thanks to dual NVIDIA Orin chips. The ES90 features lidar technology, five radars, seven cameras, and 12 ultrasonic sensors. Its neural network can process 200 million parameters. The electric vehicle’s range matches Tesla’s top models. This isn’t just a car — it’s more of a supercomputer on wheels.

Goodbye Torque. Hello TeraFLOPS!

The future of cars is code, not chrome. Volvo’s ES90 is the latest example of computing’s conquest of the automotive industry. Industry insiders might shrug and say “so what.” But Volvo’s announcement serves as a stark reminder: While Tesla may appear to dominate the electric vehicle market, it’s facing intense competition. Chinese automakers aren’t just coming – they’ve already arrived.

Volvo may be Swedish in name and heritage, but that’s where it ends. The automaker is a subsidiary of Zhejiang Geely Holding Group, a Chinese multinational automotive company. Geely purchased Volvo Cars from Ford Motor Co. in 2010 for $1.8 billion. The Chinese company also owns Polestar and holds minority stakes in Lotus and Aston Martin. Perhaps most significantly, Geely stands as China’s second-largest battery electric vehicle seller, trailing only its domestic rival BYD.

While Tesla remains the largest electric vehicle company by total sales and market capitalization, its dominance faces mounting pressure from Chinese automakers. In 2023, Tesla delivered 1.8 million cars, while BYD delivered 1.57 million. In 2024, Tesla delivered 1.79 million electric vehicles, while BYD sold 1.76 million. BYD is nipping on its heels, and poised to take a lead.

However, these numbers don’t tell the complete story. BYD reported higher revenues in the third quarter of 2024 and delivered more fully electric vehicles than Tesla in the fourth quarter. According to China Passenger Car Association data released March 4, Tesla’s wholesale sales in the Chinese market fell 49% in February compared to the same period last year, reaching 30,688 units. Even though Chinese data is notoriously unreliable, you can hear the bad news bears grumbling.

BYD, Geely, and Xiaomi, the latter until recently known only as a smartphone maker, are increasingly dominating global electric vehicle sales. This shift poses challenges not only for Western automakers but also for Silicon Valley, particularly as technology evolves beyond personal computers and phones. The automotive sector has become the spearhead threatening American technological dominance and its ability to shape the industry’s future.

China is about 40% of all vehicle manufacturing already, but it has the capacity to produce at least another 10 million vehicles a year, says Nathaniel Bullard, who publishes an annual report on clean technology. Even Japan at its peak was nowhere close to that. China’s focus is no longer on fossil fuel cars -- it is focused on battery electric vehicles and hybrid vehicles. “China has reset the global auto market full stop, not just electric vehicles,” Bullard said. “We’ve never seen a nation control this much of global auto manufacturing.” 

What works for Chinese auto-industry is that Chinese manufacturers benefit from both a robust supplier network and vertically integrated companies like BYD, which, similar to Tesla, controls much of its production process. “The implications are big for Europe and profound for Asia-Pacific and the rest of the world,” Bullard said. “European, U.S. and Japanese automakers are already losing their share in China proper and are also seeing China compete with them elsewhere.”....

....MUCH MORE

"Transformative AI, existential risk, and real interest rates"

Over the last couple years the drive-by commentariat has come to a consensus that artificial intelligence will prove to be deflationary for the world economy. It is still too early to tell if this hypothesis is true as AI adoption has not yet reached levels that would prove up the guesses but the headline paper gives us clues to what to watch to tease out what may be one of the more important features of AI.

Via one of the authors of the paper,  Basil Halperin:

I am a postdoc at the Stanford Digital Economy Lab. In fall 2025, I’ll join the University of Virginia as an assistant professor of economics.

My research focuses on topics in monetary economics, macroeconomic growth, and AI.

I received my PhD in economics from MIT in 2024. In past lives, I worked as a data scientist at Uber and as a quant at AQR Capital Management. I did my undergrad at the University of Chicago.

If you have questions or comments about my research – or want to discuss research ideas – I’d love to talk with you (email, Twitter). 

December 2024

Abstract
We study how financial market prices can be used to forecast the likelihood of
transformative artificial intelligence. Transformative AI is a double-edged sword:
while advanced AI could lead to rapid economic growth, some researchers argue
that superintelligence misaligned with human values could pose an existential risk
to humanity. Theoretically, we show that either possibility would predict a large in-
crease in long-term real interest rates, due to consumption smoothing. We then use rich
cross-country data on real rates and growth expectations to show that, contrary to
other recent findings, higher long-term growth expectations do indeed cause higher
long-term real interest rates

....MUCH MORE (43 page PDF)
*Forbes, April 2023 - The Great AI Deflation Bomb

Reuters, June 2023 - AI’s deflationary winds will blow away profits 

Forbes, October 2023 - Cathie Wood Predicts AI Will Lead To Deflation And Drive Markets Higher

World Economic Forum, August 2024 -  Technology, including artificial intelligence (AI), must be deflationary to have a macroeconomic impact. It can reduce costs and prices and boost real incomes and demand, thereby creating new jobs and offsetting automation-driven losses.

December 2023 - OpenAI investor Vinod Khosla predicts AI will deflate the economy over the next 25 years

Money Metals, December 2024 - Will AI Cause Mass Deflation? 

LinkedIn February 2025 - AI Stands for Answer to Inflation: The Deflationary Power of Technology

And many, many more.

Our short term guess is a continued downtrend in reported year-over-year CPI due, not to AI, but to higher prints from last year falling off.

If interested see February 9's "Prepare for a Springtime CPI Collapse"

 

Regarding the inflationary impact of tariffs, President Trump seems, despite his "tariff is a beautiful, beautiful word" rhetoric to have decided on tariffs as the cudgel to beat the rest of the world into smaller trade surpluses rather than as a revenue generator or protectionist measure, lending some credence to our slightly snarky comment of seven weeks ago:

Now the good news is that after the tariff costs work their way through the economy the inflation effect will be transitory. And I have it from multiple very good authorities that transitory is nothing to worry about.

So who knows? We shall see. 

But the thought we could have deflation but higher interest rates is intriguing.

Speaking of Corrections, here's one from the journal 'Nature'

Following on March 21's "Media: There are corrections and then there are corrections". 

From the journal Nature, March 21:

Author Correction: AI models collapse when trained on recursively generated data
Correction to: Nature https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-024-07566-y Published online 24 July 2024

In the version of the article initially published, in the “Theoretical intuition” section, the text 

“For the mathematical models to come, we consider αi = γi = 0” should have read “For the mathematical models to come, we consider “βi = γi = 0”... 

"9 Takeaways from the JP Morgan Chase Energy Study You Won't Want to Miss"

Or maybe you will want to miss it, your call.

From Energy Bad Boys, March 15:

We read it so you don't have to

On March 4th, JP Morgan Chase released its 15th Annual Energy Paper. The report, written by Michael Cembalest, is a 55-page analysis with hundreds of graphs and charts on the state of the energy industry.

It spans most aspects of the energy industry, discussing costs for wind and solar, conventional fuels, electrification and heat pump adoption, a status update on the deindustrialization of Europe, and the use of green hydrogen.

Here are the nine takeaways we found most interesting from the study, hereafter referred to as the JPMC report.

1. Wind and Solar Prices Continue to Rise

Remember when we were told that wind and solar would always get cheaper? Well, that hasn’t been the case since 2018 for wind or 2020 for solar. According to the JP Morgan Chase Report, power purchase agreement (PPAs) prices for wind have more than doubled since 2019, and solar PPAs are near $60 per megawatt hour.

Prices are rising due to US tariffs on Chinese solar panels, a tripling of insurance premiums in MISO, ERCOT, and SPP due to weather events, supply/demand gaps due to permitting delays, higher interest rates, and increased corporate demand for green power. Keep in mind that PPAs almost always show the subsidized cost of an energy source, so in reality, the cost of these resources is even higher.

As we have written about before, these rising price trends are a key reason why we believe the use of the National Renewable Energy Laboratory’s (NREL) Annual Technology Baseline in energy modeling amounts to utilities and “renewable” special interest groups fudging their numbers to justify massive capital spends on wind, solar, and battery storage technologies.

2. Battery Costs Are Coming Back Down

Battery storage prices are falling again after a price spike in 2022. According to Energy Storage News, the main drivers of the fall are cell manufacturing overcapacity, economies of scale, low metal and component prices, a slowdown in the EV market, and increased adoption of lithium iron phosphate (LFP) batteries, which are cheaper than nickel manganese cobalt (NMC) batteries.

In other battery news, global storage capacity is growing quickly, with the vast majority of batteries being installed in China, the United States, and Germany.

3. U.S. Transmission Line Growth is Far Below DOE Targets

As our friend Robert Bryce frequently notes, the “energy transition” depends on massive expansions of our high-voltage transmission grid, but capacity additions are falling, and per-mile costs and utility product costs are soaring.

The JPMC report notes that annual additions of transmission lines are far, far below the levels envisioned by the Biden Administration’s Department of Energy, as you can see in the graph below.

Rather than increasing, transmission line growth has fallen as projects in the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT), Southwest Power Pool (SPP), and the Midcontinent Independent System Operator (MISO) regions were completed. More interregional transmission lines have been approved by MISO and PJM, but given the delays inherent with building new transmission lines, when or if those projects come online is an open question.

In our view, the idea that we need a massive buildout in interregional transmission infrastructure is incorrect. It is necessary to add more wind and solar generators, but that doesn’t mean that it is imperative that we build it when other sources of electricity, like new natural gas plants, would require far less new transmission and deliver more reliable, affordable electricity—if you can get a turbine....

....MUCH MORE

"Global debt exceeds $100 trillion as interest costs surge, OECD says"

That interest cost is the problem. Everyone knows that sovereign debt will never be repaid, just rolled for the next generation to deal with, but those current interest payments will really put a damper on the ongoing party.

Speaking of parties, the current "live for the moment" nihilistic zeitgeist brings to mind a comment by  Viktor Chernomyrdin, former head of Gazprom:

On the future: "We will live so well that our children and grandchildren will envy us!"  

And from Reuters March 20:

• OECD member govts' interest costs rise to 3.3% of GDP, surpassing defence spending
• OECD warns of refinancing risks for low-income, high-risk countries
• Geopolitical tensions may disrupt international portfolio flows, OECD cautions

Outstanding government and corporate bonds globally exceeded $100 trillion last year, the OECD said on Thursday, with rising interest costs leaving borrowers facing tough choices and needing to prioritise productive investments.

 

Between 2021 and 2024, interest costs as a share of output rose from the lowest to the highest in the last 20 years. Spending by governments on interest payments reached 3.3% of GDP in its member countries, higher than what they spend on defence, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development said in a global debt report.

 

While central banks are cutting interest rates now, borrowing costs remain much higher than before 2022's rate hikes, so low-rate debt is continuing to be replaced and interest costs are likely to continue rising ahead.

 

That comes at a time when governments face big spending bills. Germany's parliament approved a massive plan to boost infrastructure and support a broader European defence spending push this week. Long-standing costs from the green transition to ageing populations loom for major economies.

"This combination of higher costs and higher debt risks restricting capacity for future borrowing at a time when investment needs are greater than ever," the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development said in its annual debt report.

 

Despite their sharp rise, interest costs are still below prevailing market rates for over half of OECD countries' and nearly a third of emerging market government debt, as well as for just under two thirds of high-grade corporate debt and for nearly three quarters of junk corporate debt, the report said.

Nearly half of the government debt of OECD countries and emerging markets and around a third of corporate debt will mature by 2027....

....MUCH MORE

 One more from Viktor:

On economic reform: "We meant to do better, but it came out as always"

Hydrogen—"World's First Ammonia-Fueled Ship Hits a Snag: The promise of zero-carbon shipping has been delayed until at least 2026"

From IEEE Spectrum, March 10:

The Viking Energy, an oil platform supply shipundergoing a pioneering retrofit to run on ammonia fuel, is now scheduled to begin operations in 2026—two years later than initially planned. Once completed, it will be the first vessel capable of operating full-time on ammonia, marking a major milestone in efforts to reduce carbon dioxide (CO₂) emissions in the maritime industry.

IEEE Spectrum previously reported on ammonia as a potential replacement for petroleum fuels in the shipping industry in 2021, at which time key stakeholders—including Norwegian energy giant Equinor, technology provider Wärtsilä, and shipping company Eidesvik Offshore—expected the Viking Energy to set sail in 2024. However, progress has slowed.

Industry experts attribute the delay to the complex infrastructure required to handle ammonia safely. “Ammonia is toxic, explosive, and corrosive....

....MUCH MORE

Yeah, but other than that...

I too have heard the siren call of ammonia and can tell you straight up: IEEE Spectrum goes deep in this story.

West Palm Beach Real Estate: Paul Tudor Jones Is Taking Over An Entire Street, The Neighbors Are Not Happy

From The Robb Report, March 21:

A Billionaire Is Taking Over a West Palm Beach Street for His Private Estate—and Neighbors Aren’t Happy
Hedge funder Paul Tudor Jones is building a waterfront compound spanning over two acres

Paul Tudor Jones is building a sprawling waterfront estate in Florida‘s West Palm Beach, and he plans to incorporate a chunk of public street into his private domain.

The billionaire hedge funder just won approval from the West Palm Beach City Commission to acquire a portion of Essex Court, a slender, dead-end lane in Southend—also known as the Soso neighborhood—for $220,000, Realtor.com reported. And why does he want this bit of blacktop? So he can create a private, gated compound connecting two luxury homes he’s currently building along the Intracoastal Waterway.  

The legendary investor, worth more than $8 billion, already owns three contiguous properties he will combine into a single compound. Tax records show he picked up two side-by-side waterfront parcels for nearly $10 million in 2021—one of the lots had a modest house on it, and together they span almost 2.3 acres, and last year he shelled out another $6.4 million for a neighboring property with an existing home sitting on a .43-acre plot. With this latest land grab, Jones now controls roughly 2.7 acres—plenty of space to craft a secluded estate. 

The section of Essex Court he’s acquiring is only about 65 feet long and does not provide access to any driveways of neighboring homes, according to the Palm Beach Daily News. His team, led by planner Brian Cheguis of iPlan & Design, made sure the plan passed muster with the city’s Plats and Review Committee, and they even got the fire department’s green light....

.... Jones owns several impressive properties across the country, including a $30 million mansion in Cambridge, Maryland, and a waterfront estate in Belle Haven, Connecticut. He isn’t the first finance titan to assemble a mega-compound in South Florida, either. Citadel’s Ken Griffin famously spent years piecing together 25 acres of prime ocean-to-lake land, while Kenneth G. Tropin and William P. Lauder have also combined properties to create sprawling estates....

....MUCH MORE 

Also at The Robb Report (actually their sister pub. ArtNews):

3 Men Have Been Convicted for Stealing a $6 Million Gold Toilet

"How the AI Boom Created the Most Valuable Monopolies in History"

From Bloomberg, March 20:

Since ChatGPT arrived, Nvidia and its key manufacturing partners have dominated the market for AI chips. Will it last? 

Every time you type a question into ChatGPT, you are, probably without knowing it, making several monopolies richer.

Actually, it’s no different if you use one of ChatGPT’s many competitors. Nearly all of them use chips from Nvidia Corp., which sells around 92% of the particular components — called artificial intelligence accelerators — that make chatbots function. Nvidia relies on a trio of partners to produce its semiconductors: South Korea’s SK Hynix Inc., Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. and ASML Holding NV of the Netherlands. Each supplier has a market position almost as fortified as Nvidia’s, or even more so.

In many industries, that kind of dominance might have antitrust watchdogs threatening a breakup. In technology, it’s long been accepted that important innovations can lead to companies dominating their markets and then staying on top for years by exploiting the laws of scale. It happened with mainframe and personal computers, web browsers, search engines, social networks and mobile software.

When some of those earlier monopolies ended, it was largely because rivals brought them down rather than that government regulators took them apart, Standard Oil-style. It’s possible that AI will have its “iPhone moment,” when a new invention renders companies at the top of their market obsolete almost overnight. It’s also conceivable that AI simply won’t have the world-changing economic impact that the industry promises, ending the gold rush. For now, the monopolies of artificial intelligence are taking a star turn. 

*****

Never has so much money been riding on the outcome. Together, Nvidia and its three critical partners had a combined market value of more than $4 trillion as of mid-March. Nvidia alone accounted for 6% of the S&P 500 Index of leading US stocks. TSMC and ASML have become the most valuable companies in their home countries. Those valuations are predicated largely on the idea that these companies will have this growth market to themselves for years to come.

Yet the artificial-intelligence boom is already proving unpredictable and erratic, and Nvidia’s rivals are spending fortunes to develop chips that can compete with its own products for power, speed and reliability.

Here’s more on the new generation of tech monopolies, and the threats they face.

How they got so big

For decades, Nvidia was known for gaming, not AI. It designs graphics processing units, or GPUs — components that render realistic images in video games such as Call of Duty. The GPUs use a technique known as parallel computing, in which multiple processors solve many computational problems simultaneously, and much faster than a traditional computer. A little over a decade ago, some enterprising researchers discovered these chips were well suited for deep learning, a type of computing that works much like the human brain and became the foundation for today’s ChatGPT boom.

Nvidia Chief Executive Officer Jensen Huang made an early bet on some of those researchers, delivering a set of chips costing $129,000 to nonprofit startup OpenAI in 2016, when it was a small lab. “At first, it was almost an accident,” said Jason Furman, an economic policy professor at Harvard University. “Then they shrewdly capitalized on that accident.”

Nvidia had already built an extensive library of code for using its GPU chips centered on a programming language, called Compute Unified Device Architecture, that became the only way to use its chips for the new type of computing. Because so many AI engineers grew accustomed to using CUDA, alternative chips developed by well-funded startups and Google failed to make a dent. Even Intel Corp., the one-time chip king, couldn’t keep up.

On March 18, Huang introduced the latest line of Nvidia’s more powerful chips and related software, called Dynamo, that he described as “the operating system of an AI factory.”

Who does what

For Nvidia GPUs to work, they need a powerful memory chip — an integrated circuit designed to hold data while a processor works through it. For this, Nvidia turns to SK Hynix, a Korean company that controls about four-fifths of the market for the most powerful high-bandwidth memory (HBM) chips. SK Hynix long labored in the shadow of local rival Samsung Electronics Co. Then, in 2019, its engineers devised a novel way to package the memory chips used in the data-heavy processing of AI without overheating. Samsung has yet to catch up....

....MUCH MUCH MORE

"NATO Expansion: What Gorbachev Heard"

From the National Security Archive at George Washington University, December 12, 2017:

Declassified documents show security assurances against NATO expansion to Soviet leaders from Baker, Bush, Genscher, Kohl, Gates, Mitterrand, Thatcher, Hurd, Major, and Woerner

Slavic Studies Panel Addresses “Who Promised What to Whom on NATO Expansion?”

U.S. Secretary of State James Baker’s famous “not one inch eastward” assurance about NATO expansion in his meeting with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev on February 9, 1990, was part of a cascade of assurances about Soviet security given by Western leaders to Gorbachev and other Soviet officials throughout the process of German unification in 1990 and on into 1991, according to declassified U.S., Soviet, German, British and French documents posted today by the National Security Archive at George Washington University (http://nsarchive.gwu.edu).

The documents show that multiple national leaders were considering and rejecting Central and Eastern European membership in NATO as of early 1990 and through 1991, that discussions of NATO in the context of German unification negotiations in 1990 were not at all narrowly limited to the status of East German territory, and that subsequent Soviet and Russian complaints about being misled about NATO expansion were founded in written contemporaneous memcons and telcons at the highest levels. 

The documents reinforce former CIA Director Robert Gates’s criticism of “pressing ahead with expansion of NATO eastward [in the 1990s], when Gorbachev and others were led to believe that wouldn’t happen.”[1] The key phrase, buttressed by the documents, is “led to believe.”

President George H.W. Bush had assured Gorbachev during the Malta summit in December 1989 that the U.S. would not take advantage (“I have not jumped up and down on the Berlin Wall”) of the revolutions in Eastern Europe to harm Soviet interests; but neither Bush nor Gorbachev at that point (or for that matter, West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl) expected so soon the collapse of East Germany or the speed of German unification.[2]

The first concrete assurances by Western leaders on NATO began on January 31, 1990, when West German Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher opened the bidding with a major public speech at Tutzing, in Bavaria, on German unification. The U.S. Embassy in Bonn (see Document 1) informed Washington that Genscher made clear “that the changes in Eastern Europe and the German unification process must not lead to an ‘impairment of Soviet security interests.’ Therefore, NATO should rule out an ‘expansion of its territory towards the east, i.e. moving it closer to the Soviet borders.’” The Bonn cable also noted Genscher’s proposal to leave the East German territory out of NATO military structures even in a unified Germany in NATO.[3] 

This latter idea of special status for the GDR territory was codified in the final German unification treaty signed on September 12, 1990, by the Two-Plus-Four foreign ministers (see Document 25). The former idea about “closer to the Soviet borders” is written down not in treaties but in multiple memoranda of conversation between the Soviets and the highest-level Western interlocutors (Genscher, Kohl, Baker, Gates, Bush, Mitterrand, Thatcher, Major, Woerner, and others) offering assurances throughout 1990 and into 1991 about protecting Soviet security interests and including the USSR in new European security structures. The two issues were related but not the same. Subsequent analysis sometimes conflated the two and argued that the discussion did not involve all of Europe. The documents published below show clearly that it did.

The “Tutzing formula” immediately became the center of a flurry of important diplomatic discussions over the next 10 days in 1990, leading to the crucial February 10, 1990, meeting in Moscow between Kohl and Gorbachev when the West German leader achieved Soviet assent in principle to German unification in NATO, as long as NATO did not expand to the east....

....MUCH MORE 

I have a friend who went to GWU. I think he's a spy. 

He says he's not at liberty to discuss it.

He's also a smart-ass.

"Apple and Meta are set to go toe-to-toe in another emerging area: AI-powered humanoid robots." (AAPL; META)

Zuckerberg is getting a little scary in his willingness to try new things. Sure, the metaverse didn't take off and Zuck and Andreessen were shown to be false prophets but Meta seems to have weathered that detour just fine, thank you very much and now it's on to humanoid robots which may actually turn into a $20 trillion industry.

First up, from Bloomberg, February 16:

Apple and Meta are set to go toe-to-toe in another emerging area: AI-powered humanoid robots. Also: Apple ramps up development of a new external Mac display, ponders monetizing its maps app for the first time and is racing to bring AI features to China. In other product news, the company is hitting snags with the new Siri, releasing a TV+ app for Android phones and preparing a major Vision Pro software update.

Last week in Power On: Apple’s new iPhone SE will kick off a pivotal year for its smartphone lineup.

The Starters

Apple Inc. and Meta Platforms Inc. are already facing off in the market for mixed-reality headsets. Now, they could soon be competing in an even more exciting arena: humanoid robots.

It’s the stuff of science fiction — robots at home that can fold your laundry, bring you a glass of water, load up the dishwasher or even push the kids on the swing in the backyard. For years, that future seemed far off. But it’s getting closer, with help from some of the world’s largest technology companies.

Just like the last two years have focused on artificial intelligence, the coming years promise to bring a frenzy of robotic development — including humanoids and other devices that can move around the home.

This past Friday, Meta staked out a place in this emerging area. It’s starting a new unit within its Reality Labs hardware division that’s dedicated to the development of humanoid technology. While we may see a Meta-branded robot one day, its near-term goal is to build an underlying software platform — the Android, so to speak — that hardware makers can use to get into this space.

Meta thinks it already has an edge in the market. The company has developed sensors and computing technologies for mixed reality, which melds augmented and virtual reality. And it has an AI model called Llama that’s already caught on with much of the industry.

That gives it the best underlying tools for robotic hardware, the company figures. Meta is going to start hiring engineers for the project and believes that it could begin helping other firms bring new humanoids to market in the coming years.

But Meta isn’t alone here. Apple has its own designs on robots, though it will likely go after the category differently. The iPhone maker prefers products where it controls all the inputs — hardware, software and more — and it’s exploring a machine where it could do just that. The idea would be a humanoid that spotlights Apple’s AI and tightly integrated technology.

Apple has advanced AI research teams within its larger machine-learning group focused on developing robotics technologies. There’s also a home hardware engineering group interested in the space. In the near term, the company plans to launch a tabletop device that essentially attaches a robotic limb to a display. It would be a higher-end version of a smart home hub that Apple expects to release this year. There’s also exploratory work being done on a mobile robot — something akin to the Astro from Amazon.com Inc.

An Apple humanoid remains several years away, but it could end up being a rival to Tesla Inc.’s Optimus. That device will see limited production this year, according to Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk. He believes the product could ultimately cost $30,000.

Google’s DeepMind group has also been investigating robotics technology, and it wouldn’t be surprising if the company creates its own software — in line with Android — for this emerging category....

....MUCH MORE

And though Apple and Meta are not yet producing their robots, The Edge, Singapore graphically points out that other companies are further along:

 

The Edge, March 20

https://www.theedgesingapore.com/views/tech/humanoid-robots-are-here