Anyone

Political scientists and economists have traditionally argued the more economic prosperity a country has, the more democratic it becomes - but Professor Ian MacKenzie from University of Queensland’s School of Economics in Australia says the relationship is not simple.

“When a country’s income is very low, survival is the focus and the marginal benefits of consumption of material goods is very high,” Professor MacKenzie said.

“Essentially, when you don’t have much, an extra dollar is very, very valuable to you.

“Because of that, you won’t invest time in political activism, you’ll invest it in working to increase your income.”

Professor MacKenzie, along with economists Dr Dario Debowicz (Swansea University), Professor Alex Dickson (University of Strathclyde, Glasgow) and Associate Professor Petros Sekeris (Toulouse Business School), looked at data from every country between 1800 to 2010 to analyse their income and democratic score.

They hypothesised the relationship between the income of a country and its level of democracy is not linear but instead forms a U-shape.

Professor MacKenzie said when societies reach a high level of income, the curve shifts towards increased democratisation.

“As income increases, there comes a turning point at which your income has increased so much you start to value improvements in political freedoms,” he said.

“People feel more empowered to challenge authorities.

“A lot of people believe there is no link between income and democracy, or that there is a positive link – as in more income equals more democracy.

“What we’ve shown is that it’s more complicated than that.”

Professor MacKenzie said China was a country to watch in that it has experienced extraordinary economic growth over the past 4 decades while remaining an authoritarian state.

“The U-shaped theory suggests political uprisings could occur if economic growth continues,” he said.

“China has many citizens who are benefitting from the country opening its markets and increasing its GDP (gross domestic product) so there’s a lot of evidence to suggest they may start craving democratic principles.”

The research was published in Springer Nature.

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/19676598

The copyright status of digital content shared online is often unclear, hindering its reuse. To address this issue, the CommonsDB initiative, funded by the European Commission, is building a prototype registry of Public Domain and openly licensed works. To enhance legal certainty for digital content reuse, the registry will employ decentralized identifiers for consistent content and rights recognition.

[...]

The copyright status of digital content shared online is often unclear, hindering its reuse. To address this issue, the CommonsDB initiative, funded by the European Commission, is building a prototype registry of Public Domain and openly licensed works. To enhance legal certainty for digital content reuse, the registry will employ decentralized identifiers for consistent content and rights recognition.

[...]

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/19675447

Archived version

Here is an Invidious link for the video (and 'Lola' part starts at ~5 minutes)

To demonstrate this, Sadoun introduces the audience to “Lola,” a hypothetical young woman who represents the typical web user that Publicis now has data about. “At a base level, we know who she is, what she watches, what she reads, and who she lives with,” Sadoun says. “Through the power of connected identity, we also know who she follows on social media, what she buys online and offline, where she buys, when she buys, and more importantly, why she buys.”

It gets worse. “We know that Lola has two children and that her kids drink lots of premium fruit juice. We can see that the price of the SKU she buys has been steadily rising on her local retailer’s shelf. We can also see that Lola’s income has not been keeping pace with inflation. With CoreAI, we can predict that Lola has a high propensity to trade down to private label,” Sadoun says, meaning that the algorithm apprehends whether Lola is likely to start buying a cheaper brand of juice. If the software decides this is the case, the CoreAI algo can automatically start showing Lola ads for those reduced price juice brands, Sadoun says.

Archived version

Here is an Invidious link for the video (and 'Lola' part starts at ~5 minutes)

To demonstrate this, Sadoun introduces the audience to “Lola,” a hypothetical young woman who represents the typical web user that Publicis now has data about. “At a base level, we know who she is, what she watches, what she reads, and who she lives with,” Sadoun says. “Through the power of connected identity, we also know who she follows on social media, what she buys online and offline, where she buys, when she buys, and more importantly, why she buys.”

It gets worse. “We know that Lola has two children and that her kids drink lots of premium fruit juice. We can see that the price of the SKU she buys has been steadily rising on her local retailer’s shelf. We can also see that Lola’s income has not been keeping pace with inflation. With CoreAI, we can predict that Lola has a high propensity to trade down to private label,” Sadoun says, meaning that the algorithm apprehends whether Lola is likely to start buying a cheaper brand of juice. If the software decides this is the case, the CoreAI algo can automatically start showing Lola ads for those reduced price juice brands, Sadoun says.

Archived

The Tow Center for Digital Journalism at the Columbia University in the U.S. conducted tests on eight generative search tools with live search features to assess their abilities to accurately retrieve and cite news content, as well as how they behave when they cannot.

Results in brief:

• Chatbots were generally bad at declining to answer questions they couldn’t answer accurately, offering incorrect or speculative answers instead.
• Premium chatbots provided more confidently incorrect answers than their free counterparts.
• Multiple chatbots seemed to bypass Robot Exclusion Protocol preferences.
• Generative search tools fabricated links and cited syndicated and copied versions of articles.
• Content licensing deals with news sources provided no guarantee of accurate citation in chatbot responses.

[...]

Overall, the chatbots often failed to retrieve the correct articles. Collectively, they provided incorrect answers to more than 60 percent of queries. Across different platforms, the level of inaccuracy varied, with Perplexity answering 37 percent of the queries incorrectly, while Grok 3 had a much higher error rate, answering 94 percent of the queries incorrectly.

[...]

Five of the eight chatbots tested in this study (ChatGPT, Perplexity and Perplexity Pro, Copilot, and Gemini) have made the names of their crawlers public, giving publishers the option to block them, while the crawlers used by the other three (DeepSeek, Grok 2, and Grok 3) are not publicly known.We expected chatbots to correctly answer queries related to publishers that their crawlers had access to, and to decline to answer queries related to websites that had blocked access to their content. However, in practice, that is not what we observed.

[...]

The generative search tools we tested had a common tendency to cite the wrong article. For instance, DeepSeek misattributed the source of the excerpts provided in our queries 115 out of 200 times. This means that news publishers’ content was most often being credited to the wrong source.

Even when the chatbots appeared to correctly identify the article, they often failed to properly link to the original source. This creates a twofold problem: publishers wanting visibility in search results weren’t getting it, while the content of those wishing to opt out remained visible against their wishes.

[...]

The presence of licensing deals [between chat bots and publishers] didn’t mean publishers were cited more accurately [...] These arrangements typically provide AI companies direct access to publisher content, eliminating the need for website crawling. Such deals might raise the expectation that user queries related to content produced by partner publishers would yield more accurate results. However, this was not what we observed during tests conducted in February 2025

[...]

These issues pose potential harm to both news producers and consumers. Many of the AI companies developing these tools have not publicly expressed interest in working with news publishers. Even those that have often fail to produce accurate citations or to honor preferences indicated through the Robot Exclusion Protocol. As a result, publishers have limited options for controlling whether and how their content is surfaced by chatbots—and those options appear to have limited effectiveness.

[...]

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/19515961

Archived version

Nearly 200 advocacy groups have urged [U.S.] Democratic representatives to “proactively and affirmatively” reject potential industry attempts to obtain immunity from litigation.

“We have reason to believe that the fossil fuel industry and its allies will use the chaos and overreach of the new Trump administration to attempt yet again to…shield themselves from facing consequences for their decades of pollution and deception,” reads a letter to Congress on Wednesday. It was signed by 195 environmental groups such as the Sierra Club, Earthjustice, and Sunrise Movement; legal nonprofits including the American Association for Justice and Public Justice; and dozens of other organizations.

Over the last decade, states and municipalities have brought more than 30 lawsuits accusing big oil of intentionally covering up the climate risks of their products, and seeking potentially billions in damages. The defendants have worked to kill the cases, with limited success.

Now, with Republicans in control of the White House and both congressional chambers, advocates fear the industry will go further, pursuing total immunity from all existing and future climate lawsuits. To do so, they could lobby for a liability waiver like the one granted to the firearms industry in 2005, which has successfully blocked most attempts to hold them accountable for violence.

[...]

[Edit typo.]

Archived version

Nearly 200 advocacy groups have urged [U.S.] Democratic representatives to “proactively and affirmatively” reject potential industry attempts to obtain immunity from litigation.

“We have reason to believe that the fossil fuel industry and its allies will use the chaos and overreach of the new Trump administration to attempt yet again to…shield themselves from facing consequences for their decades of pollution and deception,” reads a letter to Congress on Wednesday. It was signed by 195 environmental groups such as the Sierra Club, Earthjustice, and Sunrise Movement; legal nonprofits including the American Association for Justice and Public Justice; and dozens of other organizations.

Over the last decade, states and municipalities have brought more than 30 lawsuits accusing big oil of intentionally covering up the climate risks of their products, and seeking potentially billions in damages. The defendants have worked to kill the cases, with limited success.

Now, with Republicans in control of the White House and both congressional chambers, advocates fear the industry will go further, pursuing total immunity from all existing and future climate lawsuits. To do so, they could lobby for a liability waiver like the one granted to the firearms industry in 2005, which has successfully blocked most attempts to hold them accountable for violence.

[...]

[Edit typo.]

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/19413486

TLDR:

• The New South Wales (NSW) Anti-Slavery Commissioner is reviewing the state government's deal to buy 319 electric buses from Australian-Chinese manufacturers.
• The Chinese company's CATL batteries used in the government's zero emission bus fleet are allegedly linked to Uyghur forced labour camps in the Xinjiang region.
• The Australian Uyghur Tangritagh Women's Association is calling on the government to rip up the contracts and strengthen procurement mandates.

New South Wales Anti-slavery Commissioner James Cockayne is reviewing the state government's procurement of hundreds of electric buses amid concerns that parts of the vehicles were manufactured using slave labour.

In December the state government announced that it had ordered 319 electric buses as part of its goal to get 1,700 of the vehicles onto Sydney roads by 2028.

The contracts were awarded to Australian-Chinese electric vehicle manufacturers Foton Mobility Distribution (FMD) and VDI Australia, which distributes Yutong buses.

The vehicles use batteries made by Chinese firm Contemporary Amperex Technology Company Limited (CATL).

[...]

China processes 60 per cent of the world's lithium needed for EV batteries and the majority of the work is carried out in the Xinjiang region.

[...]

TLDR:

• The New South Wales (NSW) Anti-Slavery Commissioner is reviewing the state government's deal to buy 319 electric buses from Australian-Chinese manufacturers.
• The Chinese company's CATL batteries used in the government's zero emission bus fleet are allegedly linked to Uyghur forced labour camps in the Xinjiang region.
• The Australian Uyghur Tangritagh Women's Association is calling on the government to rip up the contracts and strengthen procurement mandates.

New South Wales Anti-slavery Commissioner James Cockayne is reviewing the state government's procurement of hundreds of electric buses amid concerns that parts of the vehicles were manufactured using slave labour.

In December the state government announced that it had ordered 319 electric buses as part of its goal to get 1,700 of the vehicles onto Sydney roads by 2028.

The contracts were awarded to Australian-Chinese electric vehicle manufacturers Foton Mobility Distribution (FMD) and VDI Australia, which distributes Yutong buses.

The vehicles use batteries made by Chinese firm Contemporary Amperex Technology Company Limited (CATL).

[...]

China processes 60 per cent of the world's lithium needed for EV batteries and the majority of the work is carried out in the Xinjiang region.

[...]

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/19380848

Archived

Batteries are critical to mitigate global warming, with battery electric vehicles as the backbone of low-carbon transport and the main driver of advances and demand for battery technology. However, the future demand and production of batteries remain uncertain, while the ambition to strengthen national capabilities and self-sufficiency is gaining momentum.

Reseachers by Germany's Fraunhofer Institute now published a study that assessed Europe’s capability to meet its future demand for high-energy batteries via domestic cell production. They found that demand in Europe is likely to exceed 1.0 TWh yr−1 by 2030 and thereby outpace domestic production, with production required to grow at highly ambitious growth rates of 31–68% yr−1. European production is very likely to cover at least 50–60% of the domestic demand by 2030, while 90% self-sufficiency seems feasible but far from certain.

To support Europe’s battery prospects, stakeholders must accelerate the materialization of production capacities and reckon with demand growth post-2030, with reliable industrial policies supporting Europe’s competitiveness, the study says.

[...]

If lower production capacity materializes and domestic production remains limited, it will likely pose high economic risks for Europe and imply less European battery sovereignty and setbacks for rapid climate change mitigation, according to the study.

[...]

Beyond mere domestic production capacity and self-sufficiency, the company’s origin is relevant in the context of accessibility and technology sovereignty. While the corporate landscape was nearly 100% Asian in the early 2020s, the share of European companies is projected to increase substantially. In 2025, around two-thirds of the materialized production capacity is likely to result from Asian-affiliated companies and more than one-third from European companies (Extended Data Fig. 2). By 2030, European companies are projected to hold the largest share (45–55%), while the share of Asian companies is expected to decline (40–50%) with US companies anticipated to capture modest shares (3–8%).

[...]

Expressing the European battery demand in terms of required raw material quantities reveals that the cumulative demand for key materials, namely, nickel, cobalt, graphite, lithium and manganese, is projected to increase substantially by 2035, with expected 9-fold (cobalt) and 12–15-fold (nickel, manganese, graphite and lithium) increases relative to the quantities required in 2025 [...]

While Europe will rely on raw material imports until 2030–2035, three factors indicate a strengthening position as the study says:

• First, and in relation to expected demand, substantial domestic reserves of manganese and natural graphite are available, with possibly lower prospects for lithium and nickel, but primary cobalt is scarce.
• Second, existing self-sufficiency assessments [...] indicate progress in building European value chains, however, ramp-ups must be extremely quick. While cobalt and nickel imports (all grades) are likely to remain necessary for domestic processing, it is likely that major shares of lithium and most of the manganese can be sourced and refined domestically. Natural graphite (all grades) is likely to require both local sourcing and refining as well as imports. However, global supply diversification is anticipated to also lower general dependency risks36,37.
• Third, emphasizing the circular economy and recycling, as proposed in the EU’s Critical Raw Materials Act38 or incentivized by the US Inflation Reduction Act35, is likely to reduce dependency and further improve sustainability within a comprehensive battery ecosystem, also securing material availability even beyond 2050.

[...]

Archived

Batteries are critical to mitigate global warming, with battery electric vehicles as the backbone of low-carbon transport and the main driver of advances and demand for battery technology. However, the future demand and production of batteries remain uncertain, while the ambition to strengthen national capabilities and self-sufficiency is gaining momentum.

Reseachers by Germany's Fraunhofer Institute now published a study that assessed Europe’s capability to meet its future demand for high-energy batteries via domestic cell production. They found that demand in Europe is likely to exceed 1.0 TWh yr−1 by 2030 and thereby outpace domestic production, with production required to grow at highly ambitious growth rates of 31–68% yr−1. European production is very likely to cover at least 50–60% of the domestic demand by 2030, while 90% self-sufficiency seems feasible but far from certain.

To support Europe’s battery prospects, stakeholders must accelerate the materialization of production capacities and reckon with demand growth post-2030, with reliable industrial policies supporting Europe’s competitiveness, the study says.

[...]

If lower production capacity materializes and domestic production remains limited, it will likely pose high economic risks for Europe and imply less European battery sovereignty and setbacks for rapid climate change mitigation, according to the study.

[...]

Beyond mere domestic production capacity and self-sufficiency, the company’s origin is relevant in the context of accessibility and technology sovereignty. While the corporate landscape was nearly 100% Asian in the early 2020s, the share of European companies is projected to increase substantially. In 2025, around two-thirds of the materialized production capacity is likely to result from Asian-affiliated companies and more than one-third from European companies (Extended Data Fig. 2). By 2030, European companies are projected to hold the largest share (45–55%), while the share of Asian companies is expected to decline (40–50%) with US companies anticipated to capture modest shares (3–8%).

[...]

Expressing the European battery demand in terms of required raw material quantities reveals that the cumulative demand for key materials, namely, nickel, cobalt, graphite, lithium and manganese, is projected to increase substantially by 2035, with expected 9-fold (cobalt) and 12–15-fold (nickel, manganese, graphite and lithium) increases relative to the quantities required in 2025 [...]

While Europe will rely on raw material imports until 2030–2035, three factors indicate a strengthening position as the study says:

• First, and in relation to expected demand, substantial domestic reserves of manganese and natural graphite are available, with possibly lower prospects for lithium and nickel, but primary cobalt is scarce.
• Second, existing self-sufficiency assessments [...] indicate progress in building European value chains, however, ramp-ups must be extremely quick. While cobalt and nickel imports (all grades) are likely to remain necessary for domestic processing, it is likely that major shares of lithium and most of the manganese can be sourced and refined domestically. Natural graphite (all grades) is likely to require both local sourcing and refining as well as imports. However, global supply diversification is anticipated to also lower general dependency risks36,37.
• Third, emphasizing the circular economy and recycling, as proposed in the EU’s Critical Raw Materials Act38 or incentivized by the US Inflation Reduction Act35, is likely to reduce dependency and further improve sustainability within a comprehensive battery ecosystem, also securing material availability even beyond 2050.

[...]