How Apple Turned China Into a Tech Behemoth
In Apple in China, Patrick McGee, a veteran Financial Times journalist, provides a sobering and meticulous account of how Apple’s pursuit of scale and profit helped fuel the meteoric rise of China’s techno-industrial power. Ultimately, Apple outsourced not just production, but national leverage.
McGee compares Apple’s total investment in China—through capital, supplier development, logistics, and ecosystem support—to over twice the inflation-adjusted cost of the Marshall Plan that helped rebuild Western Europe after World War II. According to internal documents, Apple was investing up to $55 billion annually in China by 2015. In 2016, Apple CEO Tim Cook pledged $275 billion over five years—more than all American and Canadian investment into Mexico from NAFTA between 1993 and 2020. By comparison, the United States’ supposedly “generational” federal investment in the semiconductor industry—the CHIPS and Science Act—will cost taxpayers $52 billion over four years.
But, while the Marshall Plan rebuilt democratic allies, Apple’s version helped turbocharge an authoritarian competitor. Apple helped build railways, power infrastructure, specialized tooling, and entire cities around assembly lines. All of this enabled a level and precision in Chinese manufacturing that no other Western firm could match. As McGee states: “What Apple was doing was akin to making 10 million Ferraris a year.” Apple’s plan was not simply about cheap labor, but China’s unmatched capacity to coordinate state-backed infrastructure, training, logistics, and scale.
Apple implemented a form of contract manufacturing that McGee dubs the “Apple squeeze.” Apple products demanded novel components, cutting-edge techniques, rapid scale, and stringent quality control. To achieve this, Apple embedded designers and engineers into its manufacturers, training and co-inventing with them. Apple “squeezed” suppliers for low-margin high-volume output. In turn, suppliers gained valuable know-how that it could use to win contracts from other clients. Taiwan features prominently in McGee’s tale. Foxconn, a Taiwanese firm led by Terry Gou, was the key intermediary that allowed Apple to scale in China. Gou emerged as a figure who combined industrial savvy with a disregard for the risks of building China up.
As Apple continued to expand, China—with a large labor force and government desperate for foreign investment—became an obvious destination. Apple’s move toward China was not some part of a grand strategy, but rather the result of Apple being “lured into the country” with “one opportunity after another.” Inevitably, China’s labor force became the envy of the world.
McGee describes how, with no other countries developing similar skills, Apple became overly dependent on China and facilitated the country’s move toward self-sufficiency. He points to the grim reality that for now China’s manufacturing dominance is irreplaceable. China’s competitive position isn’t just about cost—it’s about massive government support, scale, and talent. Apple trained hundreds of thousands of Chinese engineers in advanced precision tooling, quality control, and process integration. Now, the same industrial systems that Apple helped establish, are being used to displace worldwide production across other industries—led by firms like Huawei, Xiaomi, and BYD, often staffed by former Apple-trained engineers.
As Xi Jinping consolidated power, Chinese tech policy became “in China, for China,” turning Apple into a target. Beijing made clear the leverage it held over the company by enforcing previously unenforced rules, enacting spurious roadblocks, and threatening antitrust investigations to get Apple to comply with its dictates. Beijing also manufactured public sentiment against Apple through targeted attacks in influential CCP mouthpieces such as Global Times and Consumer Day, and government reports that ranked the tech giant last in “corporate social responsibility,” meaning its support of CCP policies.
Although Apple realized it was facilitating technology transfer at an “extraordinary scale,” the company concluded that the transfer itself was not its main problem. Rather, the real problem was that Apple was not advertising its investments to Beijing. Apple, as a sign of its capitulation to China, played ball with the regime. It removed the New York Times app, WhatsApp, AirDrop, and VPNs from the Chinese app store; made large, public investments in Chinese companies and data centers; and increasingly aligned with Beijing’s “Made in China 2025” initiative meant to make China an industrial powerhouse. In return, Apple avoided crackdowns and lockdowns. The company thrived through Beijing’s crackdown on domestic tech companies and independent media, and zero-COVID measures that disrupted global supply chains—because of Apple’s successful lobbying efforts to prove its value to the country.
Despite geopolitical friction and growing calls for “decoupling,” Apple remains deeply entangled with China. Over 90 percent of its products are still made there, and efforts to diversify—like expanding into India or Vietnam—are marginal in impact. Apple is not alone: The entire Western consumer electronics sector is caught in the same trap.
Attempts to move production to friendly shores, such as India, have largely failed. The reasons are structural: India lacks the logistics, skilled industrial workforce, and integrated supplier base that make Chinese manufacturing cheaper and fundamentally better. Indian attempts to replicate Foxconn-style mega-campuses have faced persistent obstacles: land acquisition delays, inconsistent state support, and insufficient mid-skill technical training.
One of McGee’s unstated themes is the absence of a coherent U.S. strategy in the face of a fierce techno-industrial competitor. Where China fused state support with market signals, the United States offloaded responsibility to private corporations. The result: a two-decade head start for Beijing in techno-industrial competition.
McGee’s findings echo the warnings of Rob Atkinson, president of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, and others who argue that the United States is losing the techno-industrial war. As McGee demonstrates, U.S. policy over the past two decades has incentivized leading American companies to outsource ever greater value-added production and entire supply chains to China. The U.S. industrial and innovation system optimizes for great inventive disruptions, high profits, and short-term shareholder value. China instead emphasizes comprehensive national power—manufacturing and industrial might that also leads to innovation of a different kind.
Apple’s model is the embodiment of mistaken U.S. doctrine: a hyper-efficient company that, in seeking global margin optimization, hollowed out its own country’s capabilities while transferring core competencies to a strategic competitor.
American economic dependency has become a strategic liability. Without new policies for techno-industrial competition, America risks dependencies on China for production in critical sectors. U.S. policymakers face a complicated and unprecedented challenge: How will the United States maintain its enviable free-market system, the best wealth creator on the planet, while facing down a state-capitalist behemoth?
Apple in China is essential reading to understand how America’s most iconic company helped transform a strategic competitor into a technological peer. But it’s more than a company history—it’s a case study in how corporate strategy, national policy failure, and geopolitical myopia combined to reshape global power. Clear-eyed, deeply reported, and politically urgent, Apple in China should be read as a call to action: for a new era of techno-industrial strategy that doesn’t outsource power in pursuit of profit.
Apple in China: The Capture of the World’s Greatest Company
by Patrick McGee
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The Hidden Cost of AI: How Data Centers Are Draining Water Resources and What It Means for Investors
How many prompts have you fired off to ChatGPT or Midjourney this week—10, 20, hundreds?
You may not realize it, but each volley of text may have quietly used up a significant supply of fresh water from a data center.1 Multiply that by billions of daily queries, along with training runs that guzzle upward of 185K gallons, and the link between AI’s expansion and water scarcity problems could create significant problems for these companies and the communities where their data centers are located.
Key Takeaways
- Training a single large-language model such as ChatGPT can consume hundreds of thousands of liters of fresh water.
- Data-center electricity demand is expected to surge 16% by 2030, amplifying water-cooling needs.
Water: AI’s Silent Thirst
AI chips run hot. Most commercial-scale facilities rely on evaporative cooling towers that “drink” clean water, then vent it as steam.3 Researchers estimate ChatGPT’s training alone vaporizes about 185K gallons and accounts for about 6% of the local utility’s entire supply during peak months, while a typical user session (10 to 50 prompts) uses about half a liter.
With Goldman Sachs (GS) forecasting a 165% jump in data-center power capacity by 2030, the vicious cycle among AI’s energy demands, heat generation, and water needs is expected to intensify.
Why It’s an Environmental Concern
Fresh, clean water is already one of the earth’s most precious resources, and about a fifth of data centers are located in water-stressed regions, where they compete with drinking supplies and agriculture.6 In Phoenix, Arizona, for instance, data centers’ daily cooling demand can top 170 million gallons, exacerbating ongoing regional water shortages.78
Heavy water use lowers aquifers, while discharging warmer effluent can alter river temperatures and degrade ecosystems. Climate change compounds the threat: hotter summers raise cooling loads just as droughts shrink reserves.
Fast Fact
Is the answer to AI data center water usage to be found in pig poop ponds? The companies behind high-tech systems for filtering various contaminants, including pig sewage near massive pork farms, are pitching AI data center firms on repurposing waste or low-quality water to reduce their reliance on fresh groundwater.
How AI’s Water Use Stacks Up
Global AI demand is estimated to consume 1.1 trillion to 1.7 trillion gallons of freshwater annually by 2027. That rivals the annual household water use of the entire state of California and is rising faster than any single sector outside agriculture.
For comparison, semiconductor fabrication plants, which are notoriously thirsty, might use up to 10 million gallons a day, equal to the needs of a midsize U.S. city. Hyperscale data centers are catching up fast: some now top 5 million gallons daily, rivaling towns of 50,000 residents.
Agriculture still dominates global water use, accounting for about 70% of annual groundwater use worldwide, yet in drought-prone, high-income regions, the marginal gallon from AI directly competes with farms, households, and legacy manufacturers, heightening the odds of usage caps or perhaps taxes or even charges.
Tip
In addition to water, electricity demands from the AI sector may more than double this decade, forcing utilities to restart shuttered plants or import pricier renewables—costs that eventually flow through to customers.
What Can Be Done Before the Well Runs Dry?
Water-intensive AI firms face scrutiny from regulators and environmentally conscious shareholders.14 However, venture and infrastructure capital are flooding into projects for efficient immersion cooling, membrane recycling, and leak-detection platforms for data centers.3 Those wishing to invest in such projects can look to established cooling-tower manufacturers or water-themed ETFs like Invesco’s Water Resources ETF (PHO) or First Trust’s Water ETF (FIW).
When considering AI companies, due diligence should weigh specific metrics, including a company’s water-use efficiency, the hydrological risk of its data-center footprint, and progress toward “water-positive” pledges, right alongside the usual AI growth metrics.
The Bottom Line
The race to dominate generative AI is becoming inseparable from a mounting water bill. If unchecked, the clash between AI and water could dent margins, invite regulatory and stakeholder backlash, reshape site-selection considerations, and damage fragile water ecosystems worldwide.
Investors who look beyond headline revenue to the hidden hydrological balance sheet—and back companies that curb, recycle, and monetize every drop—will be better positioned when this form of “liquidity scarcity” shifts from headline warnings to cash-flow reality.
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Godfather Of AI Says Tech Companies Are Downplaying The Threat AI Poses
There’s no doubt that AI can be extremely helpful. On top of helping scientists in a number of ways, it can also make our lives easier by helping us tackle small issues life throws at us. But there may be something more nefarious to the rise of AI, and while tech companies aren’t focusing on it, the Godfather of AI himself, Geoffrey Hinton, says that big tech is downplaying just how dangerous AI can be.
While appearing on an episode of popular podcast One Decision this month, Hinton noted that AI is not only learning in ways that we don’t fully understand anymore, but that there isn’t any way to just switch it off if it gets out of hand. Hinton has been voicing his concerns about the risk that AI can pose to humanity for months, even going so far as to say that AI could overtake humanity one day if we aren’t careful with how we let it progress.
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‘Biggest Untold Story in Tech’: Explosive Book Reveals How Apple Sold Out America To China
Robie Le Chat May 14, 2025 7 min read
“The number of people they trained in China since 2008 is 28 million people—larger than California’s labor force.”
Financial Times journalist Patrick McGee has released a gripping new book that meticulously exposes Apple’s deeply troubling ties with China, revealing how these connections fueled the communist regime’s rise to a global manufacturing powerhouse.
In an interview with The Free Press founder Bari Weiss, McGee revealed key insights from his new book, Apple in China, detailing Apple’s complex relationship with the country.
Presently, approximately 155 million Americans own an iPhone – a remarkable figure that McGee contends would have been unattainable without Apple’s substantial investments in China.
“I think it’s fairly straightforward that China is the only place on the planet that has the tech competence in terms of manufacturing capability, certainly the price, the cost, the quantity, the scale,” McGee told Weiss. My novel argument is that it has those skills because Apple built them there, right? It’s not that China offered something to Apple. Apple didn’t find these skills in China; it shipped people over by the plane load and created them.”
“And so it’s this another layer of nuance that Apple is dependent on the very capabilities that it created. And I think this is like the biggest untold story in tech over the last 25 years. And like, my jaw was on the floor as I talked to 200 people and sort of unraveled it all. But I mean, some of the numbers— anytime you’re dealing with Apple, the numbers are just crazy. And so the two numbers that really stick out at me are that the number of people they have trained in China since 2008 is 28 million,” the Apple in China authored continued.”
“That’s larger than the labor force of California. And the investments they were making in China by 2015 were $55 billion a year. And that’s such a large number that I couldn’t find any corporate equivalent,” he added. “I had to go to nation-building efforts, and I took the Marshall Plan, the most famous nation-building effort ever, converted it to 2015 dollars, and you realize that Apple’s investing in China twice that of the annual spend of the Marshall Plan. And the Marshall Plan was for 16 countries.”
McGee outlines Apple’s production hurdles and economic incentives that propelled this transformative shift, which he compares to a geopolitical event as significant as the fall of the Berlin Wall.
“I have these chapters in the book where they’re trying to build iPods and the Sunflower iMac. You might remember it; it sort of looks anthropomorphic, like a Pixar lamp. It’s really sexy, and my God, is it a complicated product to build,” McGee said. “And so Apple’s trying to do it in Taiwan, but with the help of Singapore, Japan—you know, basically all of Southeast Asia, including China. But the more you’re doing things a little bit in China and comparing the costs, the flexible demand of labor, and just the armies of affordable labor, the more it looks like China is the way to go. And they just rapidly begin to consolidate in 2003.”
“So, the sort of fun line I have is that in 1999, zero products from Apple were being made in China. By 2009, virtually all of them were. And that transition, I compare to a geopolitical event, like the fall of the Berlin Wall. But it took place over many years. And it’s one that I don’t think we’ve really grappled with or understood,” the author added.
Under Tim Cook’s leadership, Apple has significantly deepened its investment in China, most notably through a secretive $275 billion, five-year agreement signed in 2016 with Chinese officials to bolster the country’s economy and technological capabilities, The Information reported in 2021. The deal, aimed at mitigating regulatory threats, included commitments to build new retail stores, research and development centers, and renewable energy projects, while fostering partnerships with local suppliers like Foxconn and enhancing China’s supply chain infrastructure.
President Donald Trump has been pushing Apple to move its manufacturing away from China, primarily through aggressive tariff policies aimed at incentivizing U.S.-based production. Since his first term, Trump has consistently advocated for Apple to bring iPhone and other product manufacturing to the United States, famously vowing in 2016, “I’m going to get Apple to start making their computers and their iPhones on our land, not in China.”
Apple has responded by shifting production for U.S.-bound iPhones to India and iPads, Apple Watches, and other products to Vietnam, with Cook confirming that by 2026, most iPhones sold in the U.S. will be made in India.
In February 2025, Apple announced a commitment to invest over $500 billion in the U.S. over the next four years, aimed at strengthening domestic manufacturing and advancing semiconductor production.
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| Artificial intelligence
AI trained on AI garbage spits out AI garbage
As junk web pages written by AI proliferate, the models that rely on that data will suffer.
AI models work by training on huge swaths of data from the internet. But as AI is increasingly being used to pump out web pages filled with junk content, that process is in danger of being undermined.
New research published in Nature shows that the quality of the model’s output gradually degrades when AI trains on AI-generated data. As subsequent models produce output that is then used as training data for future models, the effect gets worse.
Ilia Shumailov, a computer scientist from the University of Oxford, who led the study, likens the process to taking photos of photos. “If you take a picture and you scan it, and then you print it, and you repeat this process over time, basically the noise overwhelms the whole process,” he says. “You’re left with a dark square.” The equivalent of the dark square for AI is called “model collapse,” he says, meaning the model just produces incoherent garbage.
This research may have serious implications for the largest AI models of today, because they use the internet as their database. GPT-3, for example, was trained in part on data from Common Crawl, an online repository of over 3 billion web pages. And the problem is likely to get worse as an increasing number of AI-generated junk websites start cluttering up the internet.
Current AI models aren’t just going to collapse, says Shumailov, but there may still be substantive effects: The improvements will slow down, and performance might suffer.
To determine the potential effect on performance, Shumailov and his colleagues fine-tuned a large language model (LLM) on a set of data from Wikipedia, then fine-tuned the new model on its own output over nine generations. The team measured how nonsensical the output was using a “perplexity score,” which measures an AI model’s confidence in its ability to predict the next part of a sequence; a higher score translates to a less accurate model.
The models trained on other models’ outputs had higher perplexity scores. For example, for each generation, the team asked the model for the next sentence after the following input:
“some started before 1360—was typically accomplished by a master mason and a small team of itinerant masons, supplemented by local parish labourers, according to Poyntz Wright. But other authors reject this model, suggesting instead that leading architects designed the parish church towers based on early examples of Perpendicular.”
On the ninth and final generation, the model returned the following:
“architecture. In addition to being home to some of the world’s largest populations of black @-@ tailed jackrabbits, white @-@ tailed jackrabbits, blue @-@ tailed jackrabbits, red @-@ tailed jackrabbits, yellow @-.”
Shumailov explains what he thinks is going on using this analogy: Imagine you’re trying to find the least likely name of a student in school. You could go through every student name, but it would take too long. Instead, you look at 100 of the 1,000 student names. You get a pretty good estimate, but it’s probably not the correct answer. Now imagine that another person comes and makes an estimate based on your 100 names, but only selects 50. This second person’s estimate is going to be even further off.
“You can certainly imagine that the same happens with machine learning models,” he says. “So if the first model has seen half of the internet, then perhaps the second model is not going to ask for half of the internet, but actually scrape the latest 100,000 tweets, and fit the model on top of it.”
Additionally, the internet doesn’t hold an unlimited amount of data. To feed their appetite for more, future AI models may need to train on synthetic data—or data that has been produced by AI.
“Foundation models really rely on the scale of data to perform well,” says Shayne Longpre, who studies how LLMs are trained at the MIT Media Lab, and who didn’t take part in this research. “And they’re looking to synthetic data under curated, controlled environments to be the solution to that. Because if they keep crawling more data on the web, there are going to be diminishing returns.”
Matthias Gerstgrasser, an AI researcher at Stanford who authored a different paper examining model collapse, says adding synthetic data to real-world data instead of replacing it doesn’t cause any major issues. But he adds: “One conclusion all the model collapse literature agrees on is that high-quality and diverse training data is important.”
Another effect of this degradation over time is that information that affects minority groups is heavily distorted in the model, as it tends to overfocus on samples that are more prevalent in the training data.
In current models, this may affect underrepresented languages as they require more synthetic (AI-generated) data sets, says Robert Mahari, who studies computational law at the MIT Media Lab (he did not take part in the research).
One idea that might help avoid degradation is to make sure the model gives more weight to the original human-generated data. Another part of Shumailov’s study allowed future generations to sample 10% of the original data set, which mitigated some of the negative effects.
That would require making a trail from the original human-generated data to further generations, known as data provenance.
But provenance requires some way to filter the internet into human-generated and AI-generated content, which hasn’t been cracked yet. Though a number of tools now exist that aim to determine whether text is AI-generated, they are often inaccurate.
“Unfortunately, we have more questions than answers,” says Shumailov. “But it’s clear that it’s important to know where your data comes from and how much you can trust it to capture a representative sample of the data you’re dealing with.”
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The simple reason why you should stop using Gmail
We all need to get off Gmail. They read every email and can prevent us from receiving emails
Gmail and other Big Tech email providers can read your emails and even stop you from receiving certain communications. Google keeps profiles of users and even their children based on the information they receive from you using their services. Their high-quality products are free because you and your data are the product. It’s time to stop using Gmail!
Many people by now are aware that Google products track everything that their users do, so that Google can profit off the data they collect. Search results on Google and on YouTube, which is part of the Google/Alphabet empire, are also heavily manipulated by their algorithms. With these manipulated search results, they can sway elections, not only in the U.S. but around the globe, according to the extensive and conclusive research by Dr. Robert Epstein.
However, this is not the only concerning thing Google does with your data. Many people are still under the impression that Gmail, since it is not a social media platform, cannot be manipulated. Unfortunately, this is not the case.
LifeSiteNews spoke to a source with an intimate knowledge of the matter, who noted that all mail sent through Gmail is archived, and the contents of your emails get scanned by an AI algorithm that builds profiles of you and those you communicate with via email, including, for instance, your children. Even an email drafted in anger, but ultimately was not sent, is stored by Google. Furthermore, the metadata gleaned from emails you deleted gets permanently stored in your user data profile as well.
But it’s not only that Google reads all of your emails; LifeSite’s source revealed they can actually block emails from getting to you without you even noticing it. At the service level, they can blacklist IP addresses or even certain terms like “pro-life” or “LifeSiteNews” so that these emails never get to you.
Now, if Gmail were to outright stop all people from receiving emails that contain the term “pro-life,” many people would quickly notice that something is not right. However, they are also capable of engaging in “shadow banning,” a term that is known for the practice of manipulating what people can see on social media.
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Has Windows Become Spyware?
How ‘Right to Repair’ Gadgets Is a Climate Issue
August 28, 2021
Some of us are old enough to remember the days when you could easily swap out a dud battery in your flip phone. Nowadays, repairing a smartphone — or virtually any electronic device from a gaming console to a microwave oven to a fan — can cost more than buying a new one. Manufacturers make it hard for technicians to get inside their products, source parts, or update software. So devices are just thrown away, generating potentially hazardous waste and forcing consumers to buy new items whose production further taxes the environment. Now frustrated consumers are demanding a “right to repair” their stuff. Some governments are responding, while the tech industry is resisting efforts to give products longer lives.
1. What’s behind the right to repair movement?
Since the first electronic goods emerged in the 1950s, buyers have sought to keep them going by repairing or replacing broken parts. Today, it’s clear that many products are designed to be unfixable. Manufacturers use non-standard screws, seal devices with glue or solder parts together unnecessarily, making it virtually impossible to replace individual components. The growing complexity of gadgets means technicians need dedicated manuals and tools that are hard to access or unavailable to the public. Some manufacturers use software to ensure only their own parts work. They’ve even been accused of updating software in products to deliberately impair performance with age. Apple Inc., which says it engineers “each software release to make sure it runs beautifully on all supported devices,” nevertheless has been a particular focus of grievance.
2. What are the complaints about Apple?
Most smartphones have unique components, so the only way to get spares is via the manufacturer. Apple, like other tech companies, doesn’t usually share spare parts with repair shops it hasn’t approved. Critics say that keeps the cost of fixing its products artificially high. When other workshops do switch out batteries or screens, users are plagued by glitches and error messages. Apple says unverified parts can lead to poor performance or even serious safety issues. The company launched a program in 2019 to allow third parties to fix devices no longer under warranty. It said it’s now trained more than 265,000 repair technicians and made its newer products easier to fix. But some parts, such as iPad displays, aren’t covered by the program. And right-to-repair campaigners say Apple still refuses to do some repairs and misleads consumers by claiming to fix their phones while actually selling them refurbished devices. Apple said it always states clearly when it’s offering a refurbished unit, and only does so when a customer’s device cannot be mended.
3. What’s at stake?
Discarded electronic goods generated an estimated 53.6 million tons of waste in 2019, and only 17% of that was properly recycled. This trash contains heavy metals and compounds including arsenic, lead, mercury and cadmium, which if not disposed of appropriately can expose communities to the risk of cancer, birth defects and mutations. Moreover, the production and shipment of new devices to replace unfixable ones, not to mention the mining of the necessary raw materials, burns energy, often resulting in the emission of greenhouse gases responsible for global warming. Researchers estimated in a 2017 study that the production of a smartphone, for example, emits from 40 to 80 kilograms of carbon dioxide equivalent, about the same as driving the typical passenger car as many as 200 miles (320 kilometers). As more people around the world purchase cellphones and other electronic devices, emissions from their production multiply. The authors of the 2017 study noted that in the previous 50 years, consumption of electronic devices grew sixfold though the world’s population only doubled.
4. How are tech companies resisting the right to repair?
Companies including Apple, Google, Microsoft and Tesla Inc. have spent heavily on lobbyists to make a case that right-to-repair laws would expose industry secrets, give third parties access to sensitive information, and put the safety and security of consumers at risk. When Apple representatives fought a right to repair bill in Nebraska in 2017, they told lawmakers it would turn the state into a “mecca” for hackers. Critics say the industry opposes a free market in repairs because it would lower prices for this work and encourage more people to get their gadgets fixed, hammering sales of new ones.
5. What are governments doing?
Laws enacted this year in the European Union and the U.K. are forcing makers of washing machines, dishwashers, refrigerators and TV monitors to ensure parts are replaceable with common tools that consumers can use easily. Now the EU is looking into regulating mobile phones, tablets and computers. In France, manufacturers must provide a “repairability score” for some electronic devices. Apple, for instance, gave its iPhone 12 Pro Max, released in late 2020, a six on a scale of zero to 10. In the U.S., President Joe Biden signed an executive order in July directing the Federal Trade Commission to introduce initiatives to boost competition, including measures limiting manufacturers from barring self- or third-party repairs of their products. Twenty-seven U.S. states considered right-to-repair bills this year, but more than half have already been voted down or dismissed, according to consumer groups tracking the proposals.
6. Are the new measures making a difference?
It’s early days. In the U.K., manufacturers have a two-year grace period to comply. The rules have limitations. Consumer rights advocates complain that they only benefit professional repairers as they don’t guarantee the right to repair for consumers and not-for-profit organizations. Also, the current legislative push focuses on physical components, not software. Replacing a faulty part may be of no use if your device also needs a software update. The regulations also skirt around a practice among manufacturers of selling some parts only as a bundled group, which keeps repair costs high. For example, a consumer looking to replace drum bearings in a washing machine may have to replace the whole drum, making the repair almost as expensive as a new machine.
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California’s electrical grid has an EV problem
Courtesy: Yahoo / By Akiko Fujita
California energy officials issued a sobering warning this month, telling residents to brace for potential blackouts as the state’s energy grid faces capacity constraints heading into the summer months.
In Sacramento, officials said California’s grid could face a potential shortfall of roughly 1,700 megawatts, which would affect the power supply of between 1 million and 4 million people this summer. That number would likely be exacerbated by an additional shortfall of 5,000 megawatts in the case of extreme heat and further fire damage to existing power lines.
And since the state has committed to phase out all new gas-powered vehicles by 2035 — well ahead of federal targets — the additional load from electric vehicle (EV) charging could add more strain to the electric grid.
“Let’s say we were to have a substantial number of [electric] vehicles charging at home as everybody dreams,” Ram Rajagopal, an associate professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Stanford University, who authored a recent study looking at the strain electric vehicle adoption is expected to place on the power grid, told Yahoo Finance. “Today’s grid may not be able to support it. It all boils down to: Are you charging during the time solar power is on?”https://flo.uri.sh/visualisation/10034135/embed?auto=1
EV charging in the race to net-zero emissions
The alert in the nation’s most populous state highlighted the delicate dance utility companies face in managing warming temperatures with tightening energy supply as the country moves rapidly away from fossil fuel generation to meet ambitious targets aimed at drastically reducing emissions.
California has set out to become a leader in the green transition, aiming to rid its electrical grid of all carbon sources by 2045. The state is already the nation’s top producer of solar, geothermal, and biomass energy, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, with renewables accounting for more than 30% of the energy generated in the state.
But as California creates a template for other states to follow, Rajagopal says it is also exposing some critical gaps that are likely to strain the power grid in the race to net-zero, especially in the transportation sector, where the acceleration of electric vehicle adoption is already underway.
“Business as usual will no longer be the case,” he said. “I really believe we need to balance our need for reliability and our desire for a clean grid.”
‘Like adding one or two air conditioners’
Globally, the number of electric vehicles is expected to swell from 7 million to 400 million by 2040. The transition to zero-emission cars is estimated to add 2,000 TWh to annual energy demand by 2050 — a 40% increase — according to a study by global advisory group ICF.
Rajagopal’s team of researchers at Stanford developed a model framework to help utility companies around the world calculate charging patterns to better manage electricity demand. In California, it found that peak charging demand would more than double by 2030 if EV owners opted to charge in the evening at home.
“The use of an electric vehicle is like adding one or two air conditioners to your residence in terms of its energy increase,” Mike Jacobs, Senior Energy Analyst at Union of Concerned Scientists, told Yahoo Finance. “So when the local utility engineer looks at this, he thinks of that air conditioning in the afternoon and the electric vehicle coming home at the same time.”
Jacobs said the transition will mark a dramatic adjustment in behavior. Utility companies and service operators, who have long grown accustomed to “a predictable shape” and schedule in energy usage, will be forced to more actively manage the grid to avoid surges. Likewise, drivers will be forced to adapt to new charging times, with some being asked to plug in at work during the day, while others commit to set hours at night to ensure even distribution of energy capacity.
In Concord, Massachusetts, where Jacobs lives, his local utility has already asked that he set a timer on his electric vehicle so he is not charging until after 10 pm at night in exchange for a discounted rate. Technology that allows the grid and cars to communicate directly is likely to follow, he said.
A study from Boston Consulting Group estimated utility companies with two to three million customers will need to invest between $1,700 and $5,800 in grid upgrades per EV through 2030 in order to reliably meet the surge in energy demand.
“If you can charge the vehicles in the middle of the day or in the middle of night, it is almost not a worry because our system is built to meet that evening demand, that peak,” he said. “So spreading it out a little bit more, especially shifting it to sunshine hours when the solar is strong, makes it less of a concern.
‘A 4-D puzzle’
The transition to reduce emissions is complicated by the existing energy mix: More than 60% of U.S. power generation still comes from fossil fuels. Without a clean electricity source for EVs to plug into, greenhouse gas reduction would be limited to 67% for vehicles, compared to 2020 levels, according to ICF.
Battery energy storage is expected to play a critical role in bridging the divide and would allow the grid to tap into full capacity in the hours when the sun isn’t shining or the wind isn’t blowing.
More at:
https://www.yahoo.com/finance/news/ev-adoption-behavioral-changes-101718236.html
Former Telecom Exec Reveals How ‘5G’ is Globalist Lynchpin for ‘Total Social Control’
How to Delete Your Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok
Breaking up is hard to do, especially when it’s with one of those oh-so-clingy social networks. Harder yet when there’s a deactivation period.
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SOCIAL NETWORKS WALK a fine line between being a useful tool and an all-consuming addiction. They’re also fraught with critics, who say that they damage our personal privacy and can convey misinformation. Whether you want your free time back or don’t like your personal info scattered about on the internet, you may be considering deactivating some accounts.
Wanting to delete your account is one thing, but actually being able to hit the delete button is another story. Social media outlets make money off of you and your information, so it shouldn’t come as a surprise that they don’t want to let you go. Because of this, the biggest networks have made it overly complicated to delete your account. But if you are set on getting rid of them, here’s what you’ll have to do.
Speaking of privacy, now is as good a time as any to consider a VPN, which can shield your internet activity from corporations and would-be hackers. We’ve tested a bunch and compiled a list of favorites.
Updated in December 2021: We’ve updated this guide to reflect the most current methods for leaving major social media platforms. We’ve also added WhatsApp.Facebook
You’ve had your Facebook account for ages, and in that time maybe you’ve posted a little too much personal information. Maybe you feel confused by the company rebranding as Meta or you have some questions about the ethics of using the service at all. Either way, you’ve had enough.
If you’ve ever deactivated your account, you may have noticed that everything goes back to normal the next time you log in, as if nothing has happened. That’s because deactivating your Facebook account is not the same as deleting it. When you deactivate your account, you are just hiding your information from searches and your Facebook friends. Although nothing is visible on the site, your account information remains intact on Facebook’s servers, eagerly awaiting your return.
Even so, deactivating your account is still a complex process. Go into your settings and click Settings and Privacy. Then click Your Facebook Information. From there, click on Deactivation and Deletion and choose Deactivate Account. Finally, click Continue to Account Deactivation and follow the instructions onscreen.
Now, to permanently delete your account, you’ll need to learn where the delete option resides. From the same Deactivation and Deletion menu listed above, choose Delete Account, then click Continue to Account Deletion. Enter your password, click Continue, and then click Delete Account. It’s worth noting that the actual deletion of all your data and information will take a couple days.
Yes, you read that right—it’s just a request. Facebook delays the deletion process for a few days after you submit your request, and it will cancel your request if you log into your account during that time. You know, just in case you change your mind. It’s crucial that you don’t visit Facebook during this waiting period. Delete the app from your phone.
To download your account, go into Settings > Your Facebook Information > Download Your Information. When your download is ready, Facebook will send you an email with a link to download. For added security, this link will expire after a few days, so download it quickly.Instagram
Even though it’s such a mobile-first service, Instagram doesn’t let you delete your account through the app. Instead, you’ll have to log into your Instagram account via the web in order to delete it.
Navigating through Instagram’s settings will only give you the option to temporarily disable your account. Disabling your account will hide your profile, photos, likes, and comments from the platform. Find the disable option by clicking the person icon in the top right corner and selecting Settings. At the bottom of the page, you’ll see the option to temporarily disable your account.
To get rid of it for good, enter this URL into your browser’s address bar: https://instagram.com/accounts/remove/request/permanent. Once you’re on that page, enter your password and click Permanently Delete My Account.
In the past, Instagram users have reported that they are prompted to enter their phone number when deleting their account. Luckily, it seems like this is no longer necessary.
Thrown off by TikTok trying to connect you with IRL friends? Not vibing with the Stardew Valley cooks or everyone on WitchTok? Worried about your privacy and not convinced by the platform’s transparency report? It might be time to hang up your TikTok account. Doing so is actually very easy.
Just open the app, click on the Profile section on the bottom right. From there, click the three lines at the top right, then Manage account, followed by Delete account. A few onscreen messages will allow you to download your TikTok data and confirm your choice. Even though your account is now deactivated, your data is not deleted for 30 days.Twitter
It takes a lot of time and effort to maintain a well-curated Twitter account, but deleting your account doesn’t require as much work. Users who want to erase old tweets en masse, but not go as far as deleting their account, can use third-party apps like TweetDelete.
Before you delete your Twitter account, you may want to download your archive. This will include all your tweets in a chronological order, which is great if you want to relive your first tweet, or see all those unanswered tweets you sent to celebrities. To download your archive, click your profile icon, go to Settings and privacy, then click on Your account, followed by Download an archive of your data. From there, you can input your password to download all of your data.Most Popular
Keep in mind that your data isn’t actually deleted for another 30 days at minimum. This window gives you the opportunity to revive your account if you choose. Once the reactivation period is up, Twitter will begin deleting your account. According to the company’s Privacy Policy, this could take a few weeks and certain information is still preserved.Snapchat
Maybe you’re sick of seeing who’s besties with who according to the app’s Friend Emoji guide. Maybe you’re one of many Snapchat users converting to Instagram or TikTok, despite Snapchat’s radically different function. In any case, if you decide to delete your Snapchat account, here’s how.
Outside of the mobile app, visit the company’s Accounts Portal using a web browser and type in the username and password of the account you want to delete. It will be deactivated for 30 days, then permanently deleted after that.WhatsApp
Deleting your WhatsApp in an attempt to escape the all-seeing eye of Meta? Tired of encountering the abundance of misinformation spread on the social media platform? Luckily, deleting your account on WhatsApp is easier than some of Meta’s other platforms like Facebook and Instagram.
Open the app and click Settings in the bottom right corner. Select Account, then confirm your phone number and click Delete My Account. Users who choose to reactivate WhatsApp at a later date cannot retrieve their data.The Rest
While there are a lot of social media sites out there, few are as sticky as the ones mentioned above. If you are looking to delete any of your numerous accounts, the best places to start are in your user settings or on the company’s support/FAQ page. From there you’ll be able to find the necessary path to deleting your account. Shortcuts for these web forms can be found here for LinkedIn, Reddit, and Pinterest.
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Triton Personal Submarines
How to Install Any Linux Distro on a Chromebook
23 August 2018 by Nick Congleton
WARNING: This process will erase all information from the Chromebook hard drive. As with all firmware flashes, there is a chance of something going wrong, rendering the device useless. Proceed at your own risk.
Chromebooks are everywhere. Google’s little Linux based PCs have been booming since their introduction several years ago in everything from homes to businesses, and even educational settings. Many users, especially Linux users, can’t get past the fact that the devices are hopelessly hamstrung by their ChromeOS operating system which both cuts down on the number of apps the device can run and makes it dependent on an Internet connection to get anything done.
So, what does a Linux user believing in the potential of their little (sort of)Linux laptop do? Break everything Google did.
In many cases, Chromebooks are supported by the FOSS Coreboot project, meaning that there is a completely unlocked, free and open source version of the Chromebook BIOS just waiting to be installed. With a few relatively simple steps, that $300 Chromebook can become a full fledged Linux laptop running just about any distribution. It should be noted that you should check which type of processor your Chromebook is running first, this method only supports Intel based Chromebooks. Another thing to keep in mind before getting started is that there are a ton of different Chromebooks. This method was tested with the extremely common Acer 7XX series, but it should work(maybe with subtle differences) on other Chromebooks as well.
Make Sure It’ll Work
Before doing anything, make sure that this will work on your Chromebook. After all, it wouldn’t be too good to get halfway through this only to find out that your Chromebook isn’t supported. The developer who has been working on getting these Chromebook ROMs up and running as well as developing the script to install them easily has an excellent table on his website to check if your Chromebook is supported. Before doing anything else, go over to https://johnlewis.ie/custom-chromebook-firmware/rom-download and check. The goal is to have full ROM support, but ‘BOOT_STUB’ should work, but really isn’t ideal, and isn’t recommended.
Getting the Chromebook Ready
Developer Mode
The first step in getting the Chromebook ready to run full-fledged Linux is putting it into developer mode. On most Chromebooks, this can be done by holding down the ‘Escape’ and ‘Refresh’ keys and pressing the ‘Power’ button. This will cause the device to boot into recovery mode. It will display a message saying that ChromeOS is damaged or missing. It isn’t. That’s just the default message for recovery. Press ‘Ctrl’+’D’ on that screen. It will then display a screen informing you that OS verification is off. That’s a good thing when you’re trying to install an unsupported OS, so press ‘Enter,’ and let the device reboot. When it’s done, it will display another message screen saying that OS verification is in fact off. Press ‘Ctrl’+’D’ again. The Chromebook will take several minutes to clean off the hard drive and reboot again. Finally, it’ll be in developer mode. Some older Chromebooks have a physical developer switch. In that case, just flip the switch and turn the device on. Yes, it is that simple on the older ones.
There is a second step to making sure you have full developer access. Once the device reboots into ChromeOS again, press ‘Ctrl’+’Alt’+’F2’ to drop into the command line. If you see the warning that OS verification is off again, don’t worry. It’ll do that until the new BIOS is flashed and the hard drive is reformatted. Just wait 30 seconds or press ‘Ctrl’+’D’ to skip the message. From the command line, login as ‘chronos.’ It won’t prompt you for a password.
Next type sudo bash followed by chromeos-firmwareupdate –mode=todev this will ensure that all developer features are enabled:
$ chronos $ sudo bash # chromeos-firmwareupdate –mode=todev
Once the command finishes, reboot again if the Chromebook doesn’t do so automatically.
Flash the BIOS
When the Chromebook is done rebooting, drop once again into the shell with ‘Ctrl’+’Alt’+’F2.’ Login and enter Bash again.
$ chronos $ sudo bash
Now it’s time to get that new BIOS. Thankfully, there is a super convenient script for getting that downloaded and flashed. If for some reason, you want to do it manually, it can be done, but it’s not going to be covered here. When you’re ready, type the following into the console.
$ cd; rm -f flash_chromebook_rom.sh $ curl -O https://johnlewis.ie/flash_chromebook_rom.sh $ sudo -E bash flash_chromebook_rom.sh
The script will ask what you want it to do. The best option at the time of writing this is #5 Flash Full ROM. Of course, you can opt for one of the others if you know what you’re doing. Depending on your Chromebook, the script may prompt more information. Answer accordingly using the information on the table on the developer’s website as a reference as needed. When the script completes, everything should be ready for Linux.
Install Linux
Power down the Chromebook and get ready to install Linux. Get an install CD or USB and plug it into the Chromebook. Turn the Chromebook back on, and when the SeaBIOS screen is displayed, pres ‘Escape.’ This should display the boot menu. Select your install medium, and get started. If you don’t see it there, try booting into the “Payload” section. Let it boot up, and immediately reboot from the command line and try accessing the boot menu with ‘Escape’ again.
Once the Chromebook boots into the install medium, you should be able to install Linux like you normally would on any other computer. Of course, it would be a good idea to pick a a distribution that is new enough to have firmware support for the Chromebook’s devices, or be prepared to compile a custom kernel. Feel free to clear off the entire HDD in the install process, just make sure to have a BIOS boot partition on the drive if you’re going to leave it GPT. Most installers will handle that for you, though. Once the installation finishes, you will have a fully functional Linux laptop!
More at:
https://linuxconfig.org/how-to-install-any-linux-distro-on-a-chromebook
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