For those not in the know, Soviet -stans are somewhat unique in that they came in a region of islamic parts of Silk Road that were utterly primitive when Soviets rolled in. So primitive that they still had the early farming period style division between peoples. They had fairly modern islamic elite town dwellers, rural farmers and finally primitive nomads. Three peoples that didn't really meet outside raids/enslavement/murder in spite of living next to one another. Three life styles locked in constant existential conflict with two others.

So when Soviets arrived, these peoples fought each other in blood feuds going back millenia all the time. It was a stereotypical hell hole of primitive savagery.

So Soviets tried to civilize these people by giving them an idea of Communist man and a Communist state. It worked, more or less. Nomads were defined as "Kyrgyz" by Soviets and what they made into their nation is hilarious in that it's main two cities are mainly populated by other peoples because... well primitive nomads. They don't do the whole "city living" thing. They raid cities.

But Uzbeks are by far the best adapted ones. They were the agriculturalists in an incredibly fertile Ferghana valley. But to survive between constantly marauding and slaving nomads running around the edges of their valley and islamic township elites raping and enslaving from the other side, they had to create a hilariously insular and brutal culture.

They have a rather unique way of dealing with dissent in that they are to my knowledge the only people outside Africa who are known to have boiled people alive/drowned people in scalding water (reports differ on specifics) for political disagreements this century. This is not a too unusual thing in the Black Magic Belt of Africa where doing fucked up shit to people is a norm, but quite rare in Africa outside of it and unheard of outside Africa. Except Uzbekistan.

So yeah, monitoring license plates is not really relevant or interesting in comparison.

Turkmen were the islamic elites for those wondering, and they have their own -stan too. Led by a proper Caliph at this point in all but name, as an Islamic nation should be. That man makes Kim family look like paragons of liberalism and democracy. Fourth and final -stan being by far the largest, and something of an experiment in integrating everyone into a Russian society, which is why it's fundamentally two states in one and during early USSR was a part of Russian Federation. But it never really integrated. Its north is basically a state for Central Asian Russians, whereas south has a mix of all three original groups separated by a desert from the north.

To give you an idea of just how authoritarian post-Soviet -stans are, the most metropolitan, most Europeanized one with significant Russian population in the north? When its first president for life died, they renamed the capital after him. And that is indeed by far the most liberal of them.

P.S. It's worth noting that Turkmenistan's Berdimuhamedow is a living meme for this unironic publicity stunts, and a hilariously entertaining man to follow. Between having his government all do group aerobics to rebuilding his capital in white only because that's his lucky color, to doing rap songs with his grandson to thundering applause of entire theaters that would make Stalin himself blush, all of his horse related antics and his current push to become a "spiritual leader of the nation" he's an amazing source of laughs if you're a Westerner. I really recommend "chronicles of Turkmenistan", they have an amazing youtube channel where they just collect clips from Turkmenistan's national TV and cut them with hilarious music into short videos.

https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fen.hronikatm.com%2Fabout...

(Site may have an expired certificate, they don't maintain it all that well).

This is the one that is dirt cheap, but charges you extra for pretty much everything.

As a result, it's very popular, but every once in a while you get an idiot who doesn't understand what he's dealing with and he has to print a boarding pass at an airport, wants food and drink on his three hour flight, wants to have a "flying experience", etc.

There are plenty of national carriers that offer all that and more for free. As long as you pay way more for your ticket. Ryanair is for people who want to get from point A to point B cheap.

It's a growing and highly profitable airline.

Big tank isn't going to cut it. You'll need to pump everything through high surface high throughput heat exchangers. It's going to cause significant additional energy losses.

Yes. We store is in steel tanks by cryogenically cooling it prior to compression so it doesn't go supercritical during compression. After compression is done, we just need to maintain subcritical temperature and pressure.

Basic physics time: do you remember that when you compress something, it heats up? So what happens to a gas that goes supercritical at around 30 celsius if you attempt to rapidly compress it into a liquid without doing extreme cooling on it before compressing it?

Important part of the battery is that you can in fact move things between energy states EFFICIENTLY. Last I looked at compressed gas capacitors is that you use a gas like CO2 for cost reasons, but you cryogenically cool it before compressing it. That way you can actually rapidly compress meaningful volumes of gas without it going into supercritical range and causing a Significant Emotional Event for people nearby. This is one of the main reasons why compressed gas capacitors aren't anywhere near chemical battery efficiency.

These people are claiming that they got high efficiency without cryogenics. They never tell us how. Basic physics look very, VERY wrong for this claim. Either they have discovered laws of thermodynamics are wrong, they have devised some novel kind of a compressor that actively cools the gas as it compresses it. Or they're lying to sell ESG green credits.

First option is "lol no". Second is "would be amazing, but we'd have seen the patent, because it would revolutionize a lot of power production today". And third is "done all the time nowadays as all massive companies want to farm ESG green credits for cheap loans and to qualify for certain funds, so by far the likeliest option".

No, anti-AI luddites lost. Suno won.

It's not even a competition any more. Basically everyone in music uses Suno for everything from helping them with lyrics, to testing out tunes, to making entire compositions. Doesn't matter if you're a massively successful artist, or a kid just starting his music hobby.

They all use Suno now. It won.

There have been successful prototypes of gas compression capacitors "injecting electrons into the grid" for much longer than that.

What matters isn't "injecting electrons in the grid". What matters is doing this efficiently at low cost.

My entire point is that none of these sources, including this blog have a single word to say on the issue that matters. Instead they all focus on various language trick and creative wording to divert attention from thing that matters to things that don't.

You know, like "injecting electrons into the grid". That's the long solved part. It's the cost of doing it and efficiency with which it is done that actually matters, and we get nothing on that in all those pretty ESG green credit themed corporate blogs.

We're in agreement on lies catching up to people. They already have caught up to your types in music. Suno.ai won. Anti-AI liars lost. Relevant Majors are now all invested in AI. Mainline artists all use Suno for everything from figuring out a specific tune, to testing out how certain things could be done with specific voices under specific conditions. It's done and there's no going back.

We're well in progress of same being done the same to movie industry and gaming. Every single one of the activists will have to go back to Burger King. You can arrange all the bluesky cancellation campaigns and take back awards as you please. For a couple more years.

Meanwhile Expedition 33 guys will just have to wipe their tears with their fat wads of cash from product sales, while sitting at McDonalds. And then pay you in those salty, wet bills in your new, productive employment as a burger flipper.

Welcome home.

I've had some inside access to this tech in recent past. The main problem is efficiency. It's horrendous. You lose tremendous amounts of energy doing this, and you need quite a bit of energy to maintain the compressed state. We're nowhere near mainline chemical batteries in terms of efficiency numbers, and whatever numbers they're claiming on their website are likely specifically negating some critical losses. I've seen efficiency numbers as low as 20-25%, through they can really struggle to push into upper 30s for long term storage, and can probably get above 50 for very short term (i.e. minimal compressed state maintenance costs). Still nowhere near the required efficiency numbers to competitive with chemical batteries of current gen. These people claim 75%. Odd.

And it's completely unsuitable to any kind of "long term storage". This is very much a potential energy capacitor, and maintaining compressed state requires constant energy burn (which is one of the parts of it having awful energy efficiency). They claim "long term storage". Doubly odd.

Finally there's just basic physics. From memory, CO2 goes supercritical at just over 30C (liquid and gas phase become effectively indistinguishable no matter the pressure you put it under). Last 10 degrees or so before that, pressure needed to maintain it it liquid form goes from something like 50 bar to around 80 bar if memory serves me right. And as gas passes through turbines and such, it picks up impurities, increasing need to compress it, and often lowering supercriticiality point. This is why it's generally difficult to do this sort of battery as an actual battery (CO2 going all the way both ways), because it picks up a whole bunch of impurities quickly.

So you're constantly fighting your compressible medium, trying to keep it purified and cooled. These people claim no cryogenics, which is 100% impossible claim. When you pressurize the gas, it heats up. A lot. You will need an incredibly powerful cooling system to keep it under that supercritical temp unless your "charging" is hilariously slow. Also this will suck up power.

With this in mind, I started looking. First, the project page. It has all the markers of ESG green credit mill. It has a page that has a lot of pretty renders, a lot of outrageous claims about efficiency and readiness for deployment, and a lot of famous big company names participating to show that green credits are indeed available from this project.

Next is the website. No operating principles, no actual numbers, no relevant paper links, no direct phone contact to the rep, nothing. Just renders, slick page with basically no details, and a general contact form. Doesn't matter if you click "buy", "rent" or "contact" button on one of the several pages on the website. They all lead to that same form. Again highly unusual for an actual company, and completely normal for an ESG green credits mill.

Another marker of this being just another green credits scam is typing their address into google maps. Their headquarters is supposedly in Milan. Building shows that it's office building of Edison (one of the older energy companies in Italy). Meanwhile, they also have a separate legal office is another small residential building in Milan centre.

Neither building shows this company on google maps as having an office there. Odd for a company listing to have upper two to low three digits on staff, but completely normal for ESG green credit mill. ESG green credit mills basically hire existing experts that already work for power companies, as their primary focus is producing reports for the purpose of generating said credits for various green credit schemes and mechanisms that exist globally. I.e. people who already work in the field pick up part time work generating necessary red tape. And company will claim that them working at their actual employers office = being company office.

Finally the name of the head of the company. I'm going to just straight up quote Barclays, who calls him a "serial environmental enterpreneur". That is indeed what someone who runs many ESG green credits mills would be titled to be both truthful AND not reveal what he does.

Overall, this could be not just an ESG green credits mill. There's a tiny chance they're some kind of a tiny company too small to feature even their headquarters on google maps that actually have some kind of unique tech that actually did what none of the power majors who really threw everything into this in US and across Europe could do - make a viable compressible gas battery without complex cryogenics, with high efficiency, reliability and throughput.

But there's a lot of evidence pointing at it being just another ESG green credits mill, and very little evidence of it having such a breakthrough.

The best part about this denialist screeeching is that it doesn't matter even if you manage to claw back some of the progress and temporarily stall it.

Chinese are coming. They already showed how good they are. And they're all in on AI, just like all of the good studios are. And as we've seen with your ilk publishing the "very optimized, very efficient decolonization simulators" like the latest installment in Assassin's Creed that killed not just the studio that made it, not just the franchise, but got the entire parent company chopped up so that everything that is still of value in it could be sold to... Chinese.

Welcome home.

You can rage. You can moan. You can scream. You can deploy SIGN (Shame, Insults, Guilt, Need to be right) language. None of it matters. Consumers have already chosen. All the elite pressure groups you can muster cannot change it.

Good studios that deploy the latest technologies and build on good vision will stand. The rest will die to lack of income because their raging hatred will be unable to even break even to pay for their time spent ranting here and on bluesky.

It's worth noting that this seems to be another step in current US admin largely accepting that other nations have done some things better, and they should be copied.

This seems to copy how PRC treats internal party apparatus tech needs. Where you create a separate unit that ensures that technological workers within Party structures have mostly unified requirements and if applicable, training.

In wake of US Navy launching Shaheds off LCS, Air Force starting to talk about cheap drones, there may be hope that some form of actually competent IT force could be employed instead of another "skilled workers need not apply" welfare boondongle. Because it seems the realization of "we can't do even the simplest things in the most ludicrously expensive way possible and maintain edge in international inter-imperial competition.

No one who matters cares about AI being used, because AI is a tool that almost everyone uses at this point.

As for consumers, we care about games being good for purpose at a reasonable cost. Expedition 33 was great. "But we're going to cancel you after the fact" crowd are all going back to Burger King, McDonalds, etc after their jobs at their hilariously inefficient multi-thousand head studios who see it as their primary purpose to "subvert whiteness" and "decolonize gaming" instead of making games people want just go away. All of their jobs should go away. Save the next brand, don't let it become another Assassin's Creed, or another Dragon Age.

Meanwhile actually creative people will keep on winning as AI will let them scale their creativity even further with less need to take on these mentally ill freaks. And I mean that literally, as pretty much all of them list mental illnesses in their bio on the far left asylum that is bluesky. We'll have more Expedition 33s.

The future is bright, with few talented people being able to push their talent even further with AI, while talentless freaks trying to subvert games into far left propaganda will finally be amputated from this business.

This change cannot come fast enough.

This is how it works on global markets. Small ones do not have pockets to invest enough to remain competitive at volumes required. You need the capital and the people with narrow expertise in several fields that only really can find enough work in very large corporations.

But without whom you're not going to be competitive.

Notably Chinese understand this, which is why their model that crushed iRobot largely worked in the opposite direction.

Take Roborock for example. It started as a de facto part of Xiaomi (it remained a separate company de jure). Xiaomi is a massive conglomerate with all the know how and funding in becoming a large international business that is competitive. And all of its systems were available for Roborock to build the business and grow it to a global giant that it is today.

And once the systems were built and expertise of those deeply specialized and very rare and expensive people as well as capital needs became minimal, it was fully spun off as its own company, under its own name. Meanwhile Xiaomi got access to a lot of Roborock's technology and now also competes in the same market.

iRobot had its successful run on being a pioneer in tech. But as others caught up, its deficiencies on the business know how side became critical. A common problem for companies that are pioneering their own field. This is why they tend to get bought out when successful. You need growth to be supported by experts on the international business side to remain successful once your technological edge ceases being a primary selling factor, and you have to start competing on quality and price as well.

Amazon had the internal business know how that may have righted the ship. Without it, it got devoured by competition who had this advantage.

Let's test this hypothesis. Can you name a single thing where one molecule is enough to be meaningfully harmful?

Utterly hilarious that X is so powerful that it can make Microsofties making long term price plans (which must have passed multiple committees)... just surrender and cancel their plans within a day.

Granted they're "re-evaluating our approach" so they'll try again later. But it's still funny.