September 12 2024

1 Household incomes rise for the first time since Covid-19
2 Oil prices fall amid fears of global economic slowdown
3 Space Age milestones: SpaceX conducts first commercial spacewalk and NASA heads to Jupiter’s moon Europa
4 AI and data centers set to drive global electricity demand surge
5 Iran uses criminal networks like Hell’s Angels to do bidding in the West
5.5 Europe in a tweet-sized excerpt
2009 Tea Party protest draws thousands to Washington, D.C.

See the new Ad Astra Podcast! Released on Apple and Spotify around 8a CST.

1 Household incomes rise for the first time since Covid-19

Household incomes rose last year for the first time since the Covid-19 pandemic began, reflecting the effects of easing inflation and a strong job market. The new data from the U.S. Census Bureau on Tuesday signaled an improvement in 2023 after inflation that spiked to a 40-year-high the prior year swallowed up household income gains.   Inflation-adjusted median household income was $80,610 in 2023, up 4% from the 2022 estimate of $77,540, the bureau said in its annual report card on households’ financial well-being. This move returned incomes to about where they were in 2019, the peak that was hit just before the pandemic.

Article Source: WSJ

2 Oil prices fall amid fears of global economic slowdown

The price of oil has tumbled out of its year-long trading range as investors grow increasingly nervous about the impact of a slowdown in the world’s largest economies on the demand for crude. Brent crude, which had traded between $73 and $92 since October last year, fell as low as $68.68 on Tuesday, its lowest level since December 2021. That came as a report showed Chinese oil imports are still below last year’s levels, adding to growing concerns about the strength of global demand. Despite regaining some ground on Wednesday, the international benchmark is down 13 per cent since August 26  Opec on Tuesday downgraded its forecast for 2024 oil demand growth for a second consecutive month, just days after eight members of the enlarged producer group, Opec+, said they would delay by two months a plan to unwind voluntary production cuts that were due to start in October. “Everyone is shifting to the bearish side . . . [saying] China is bad, the US is heading lower and suddenly you are all consumed in bearish talk and very bearish sentiment,” said Bjarne Schieldrop, chief commodities analyst at SEB.

Article Source: FT

3 Space Age milestones: SpaceX conducts first commercial spacewalk and NASA heads to Jupiter’s moon Europa

Private-citizen astronauts traveling with SpaceX started to conduct the first commercial spacewalk, an operation that aimed to push new boundaries at the Elon Musk-led company. SpaceX kicked off the spacewalk, a centerpiece on the privately funded Polaris Dawn spaceflight, Thursday at 6:12 a.m. ET, when oxygen began flowing inside the SpaceX-developed suits.  The Polaris Dawn mission launched early Tuesday on a SpaceX rocket from Florida, and crew members began preparing for the spacewalk shortly after liftoff. On Tuesday, SpaceX said its Crew Dragon vehicle reached a distance of 870 miles above Earth, meaning the Polaris Dawn crew members were more than three times higher than the International Space Station—the highest altitude humans have reached in space since the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s Apollo program decades ago.   

Live spacewalk stream

After decades of dreaming of Jupiter’s moon Europa — and the vast ocean that probably lies beneath its icy surface — scientists are now weeks away from sending a spacecraft there. NASA confirmed yesterday that its Europa Clipper mission will launch on schedule, following a scare that it might have to be significantly delayed owing to possibly faulty transistors installed on the US$5-billion spacecraft. “We are confident that our beautiful spacecraft and capable team are ready for launch operations and our full science mission at Europa,” Laurie Leshin, the director of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California, said at a 9 September press conference. If it takes off successfully next month, the orbiter will arrive at Jupiter in April 2030. Its nine instruments will then investigate both Europa’s icy crust and the ocean that scientists suspect lies beneath it, to determine whether the moon could support life as we know it. Previous missions have suggested1 that Europa’s icy surface hides a subterranean ocean of brine with more than twice the volume of water in Earth’s oceans. The moon’s fissured, seemingly young surface also implies that the satellite has active geology — hinting that Europa’s interior could be warm and dynamic enough for the complex chemistry of life. 

Ed note: History will likely look back on this era as the Space Age, just as it remembers the 16th century as the Age of Exploration. The Space Age began in the 1960s with the US-Soviet space race, much like the Age of Exploration began in 1492 with Columbus's voyage to the Americas and lasted several centuries.

Article Source: WSJ, Nature

4 AI and data centers set to drive global electricity demand surge

Electricity consumption from data centres, artificial intelligence (AI) and the cryptocurrency sector could double by 2026. Data centres are significant drivers of growth in electricity demand in many regions. After globally consuming an estimated 460 terawatt-hours (TWh) in 2022, data centres’ total electricity consumption could reach more than 1 000 TWh in 2026. This demand is roughly equivalent to the electricity consumption of Japan.   

“We’re in the middle of designing a data center that’s north of a gigawatt,” he said on the company’s earnings call. “The location and the power place we’ve located, they’ve already got building permits for three nuclear reactors. These are the small modular nuclear reactors to power the data center. This is how crazy it’s getting. This is what’s going on.”  Artificial intelligence training models and the giant computer warehouses that run them and the rest of the internet are very expensive, electricity-wise. Arm Holdings chief marketing officer Ami Badani said in April that data centers eat up 2% of all global energy needs. That number is almost certain to grow if the technology continues to become more widely adopted. “We won’t be able to continue the advancements of AI without addressing power,” Badani said. “ChatGPT requires 15 times more energy than a traditional web search.”

Article Source: IEA, Quartz

5 Iran uses criminal networks like Hell’s Angels to do bidding in the West

In the months before his attackers tracked him down, the exiled Iranian journalist had been moved in and out of safe houses by London’s Metropolitan Police, given a secret way to signal rescue units and had monitoring devices installed in his home. British authorities had done even more to protect Iran International, the London-based satellite news channel that airs the weekly program of the journalist, Pouria Zeraati, and has built an audience of millions in Iran despite being outlawed by the Islamic republic.  Police assigned a team of undercover officers to safeguard the channel’s employees, arrested a suspect caught surveilling the station’s entrances, put armored cars outside its headquarters and, for one seven-month stretch last year, convinced the network to move temporarily to Washington. None of these measures managed to protect Zeraati from the plot that Iran is suspected of setting in motion this year. On March 29, he was stabbed four times and left bleeding on the sidewalk outside his home in the London suburb of Wimbledon by assailants who were not from Iran and had no discernible connection to its security services, according to British investigators. Instead, officials said, Iran hired criminals in Eastern Europe who encountered few obstacles as they cleared security checks at Heathrow Airport, spent days tracking Zeraati and then caught departing flights just hours after carrying out an ambush that their victim survived — perhaps intentionally, investigators said, to serve as a warning but not trigger the fallout that would come with the murder of a British citizen. Iran’s alleged reliance on criminals rather than covert operatives underscored an alarming evolution in tactics by a nation that U.S. and Western security officials consider one of the world’s most determined and dangerous practitioners of “transnational repression,” a term for governments’ use of violence and intimidation in others’ sovereign territory to silence dissidents, journalists and others deemed disloyal.  Senior security officials said that the use of criminal proxies by governments has compounded the difficulty of protecting those who have sought refuge in the United States, Europe and elsewhere. Security services formerly focused on tracking operatives from Russia’s GRU spy agency or Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) now confront plots handed off — often through encrypted channels — to criminal networks deeply embedded in Western society.   In recent years, Iran has outsourced lethal operations and abductions to Hells Angels biker gangs, a notorious Russian mob network known as “Thieves in Law,” a heroin distribution syndicate led by an Iranian narco-trafficker and violent criminal groups from Scandinavia to South America.

Article Source: WaPo

5.5 Europe in a tweet-sized excerpt

“America innovates, China replicates, Europe regulates. It is an extraordinary picture of our situation, because it’s true,” said Italy’s prime minister, Giorgia Meloni. “In 1990 the EU of 12 states made up 26.5 percent of world GDP. Today the EU of 27 states makes up 16.1 percent, while the US is still at 26 percent.

Article Source: Telegraph

2009 Tea Party protest draws thousands to Washington, D.C.

Ed note: elements of the Tea Party have turned into the MAGA movement, a major political movement in American history

Sources

1. https://www.wsj.com/economy/consumers/household-income-2023-census-report-38b7d21d?st=at98fe9o3v4xvsw&reflink=article_copyURL_share

2. https://on.ft.com/3ZjUPjK

3. https://www.wsj.com/science/space-astronomy/spacex-launch-polaris-dawn-space-walk-bfed7f84?st=WzGpHv&reflink=article_copyURL_share; https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-02939-9

4. https://www.iea.org/reports/electricity-2024/executive-summary; https://qz.com/oracle-earnings-nuclear-reactors-1851645219

5. https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2024/09/12/iran-criminal-gangs-target-dissidents/

6. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2024/09/10/eu-elites-are-in-despair-over-europes-economic-death-spiral/