Tootfinder

London-based Isembard, which helps hardware makers in defence, aerospace, and robotics make components, raised a $50M Series A to build "AI-powered factories" (Ingrid Lunden/Resilience Media)
https://resiliencemedia.co/isembard-raises-50m-plans…

Isembard raises $50M, plans to open 25 ‘AI-powered factories’
Isembard, a London startup that’s built a platform to help hardware makers in defence, aerospace and robotics manufacture components and

Local governments across China are funding dozens of "robot training centers", where human trainers mimic movements like folding clothes to teach the robots (Rest of World)
https://restofworld.org/2026/china-robots-training-centers-workers/

In Chinese data factories, workers teach humanoid robots boring tasks
Local governments are building training centers to address a shortage of robotic data, as China makes embodied intelligence a national priority.

RE: https://tldr.nettime.org/@tante/116018578553272595
Fun fact: "Washing machines" are not that good an example because they did not reduce load for women, they shifted types of work around to free men to work in factories and raised expectations…

New database reveals how Americans use water #UnitedStates

New database reveals how Americans use water
Water powers our lives. It feeds our crops, keeps factories running, generates electricity, and fills our taps. But until now, no one had a clear, national picture of how much water we're using—and for what.

Trump's Trade Policies Sort Manufacturers Into Winners and Losers (New York Times)
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/29/business/economy/manufacturing-factories-tariffs.html
http://www.memeorandum.com/260129/p77#a260129p77

🔥 RUSSIAN MISSILE FACTORIES DYING! Orban heads to Moscow to SAVE Putin!: https://benborges.xyz/2025/12/09/russian-missile-factories-dying-orban.html

Boston Dynamics unveils a new iteration of its Atlas humanoid robot designed to work in Hyundai's plants starting in 2028, including at a factory in Georgia (Hyonhee Shin/Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/20

So blöd, auf Love-scam hereinzufallen ist doch keiner. So würde ich normalerweise urteilen.
Leider kenne ich schon 2 Fälle aus meinem unmittelbaren Umfeld, die fest überzeugt waren, dass ihr neuer Online Fake-Gesprächspartner echt ist. Dabei waren sie bereit, auch die verrücktesten Erzählungen für bare Münze zu nehmen.
Deshalb ist diese ZDF Doku sehr wichtig, auch wenn sie erzählerische Mängel hat.

Crime Factories: ZDF-Doku über die brutalen Machenschaften der Love-Scamming-Mafia aus Asien
Online-Flirts werden zur grausamen Betrugsmasche: Hinter Pig Butchering-Scams stecken Kriminelle in Asien, die Menschen versklaven, zum Scam zwingen.

Was there a massive leak of a dangerous greenhouse gas in Iceland🇮🇸 in 2011 - or was it just a data📈 reporting error? European emission databases show that the Norðuršl aluminium factory🏭 in Iceland released 60 tons of SF₆ in 2011 — but no such emissions in any other year. It's so much that it is hard to believe this really happened. And that is not the only odd thing I found in emission databases.

Errors and Inconsistencies in European Emission Data
Factories that suddenly have emissions a thousand times lower than before, unexplained data gaps, and inconsistent CO₂ emissions from different data sources are some of the issues one finds when having a closer look at the European Union's emission databases.

Underlings are so annoying!
Sometimes you can make this problem go away by exploiting weak labor power (see: factories, agriculture, sanitation).
Sometimes you can create a toxic org culture when information •only• flows down the hierarchy, so no pushback can ever reach your sensitive ears. (Public school administrations are rife with this.)
Sometimes you can do it by making your catastrophic failures look like a string of successes to the people up the chain. (Large corporations are swimming in this.)
5/

🇺🇦 #NowPlaying on KEXP's #SonicReducer
The Scoffs:
🎵 Factories In Heaven
#TheScoffs
https://volumebomb.bandcamp.com/track/the-scoffs-factories-in-heaven
https://open.spotify.com/track/3Ugy6PWILhwMWxDWd1QYMy

Back in the 90s we had a great term for stuff like “building AI satellite factories on the Moon” and “we’ll just envelop the solar system with a Dyson Sphere”.
It’s pretty technical and I forgive you if you’ve never heard of it, the term is “investment scam”.

“They won’t imprison us all, they know if they fill the prisons with activists, we will overpower them from within. So flood the damn streets in your millions. Shut down these factories in your thousands! They can never arrest the resistance in our smiles. We will use the shards of our broken hearts to spear the system of injustice.” -- Qesser Zuhrah
#SayHerNamee

Qesser Zuhrah – Prisoners For Palestine
On remand since: November 19th 2024

Which countries are paying the highest price for particulate air pollution? #environment

Which countries are paying the highest price for particulate air pollution?
Polluted air causes an estimated 7 million deaths worldwide each year, according to the World Health Organization. Much of the mortality comes from PM2.5, particulate pollution smaller than 2.5 micrometers in diameter that can enter the lungs and bloodstream and cause respiratory and cardiovascular problems. In addition to particles emitted directly into the atmosphere, ammonia (NH3), nitrogen oxides (NOX), and sulfur dioxide (SO2), which are emitted by factories, ships, cars, and power plants,…

From Bill McKibben
The tsunami of tech spilling from China’s factories has changed the country’s energy landscape—and its physical one, too. For decades China’s development was synonymous with coal, which produced choking air pollution and massive carbon emissions, still greater than those of all other developed nations combined. Now, solar panels carpet deserts and the high, sunstruck plateau of Tibet, and wind turbines up to 300m tall guard coastlines and hilltops

The Crucial Years | Bill McKibben | Substack
Working on Winning the Climate Fight. Click to read The Crucial Years, by Bill McKibben, a Substack publication with hundreds of thousands of subscribers.

The schizophrenia of these people is mind-blowing:
"Europe faces growing tensions with the US – its chief supplier of liquefied natural gas – over Donald Trump’s desire to take over Greenland. At a summit in Davos on Tuesday, the US commerce secretary, Howard Lutnick, criticised Europe’s adoption of solar and wind, arguing that its lack of domestic battery factories risked making it “subservient” to China.
“If you are going to be dependent on someone, it had better be your be…

The focus of turning phones into slop factories had one positive outcome.
Upgraded a older iPhone to the latest and wow the battery life is just crazy, really happy with this outcome

BREAKING: Workers should own factories.

"Satellites are now tracking big polluters around the world"
#Pollution #AirPollution

Satellites are now tracking big polluters around the world
Climate Trace is mapping data from power plants, factories, and other industrial facilities.

"the drops in sales volumes are largely the results of French and EU car manufacturer’s own strategic choice to prioritise large, more profitable models [.] Despite lower sales volumes, their operating margins have increased. This premiumisation trend is not new, but it has accelerated in recent years, to the point of backfiring, with manufacturers now facing a sharp drop in sales and factories standing idle.
Rolling back the EU’s 2035 targets won’t solve the problem."

Maintaining the 2035 target: Ensuring a viable future for Europe’s automotive industry - I4CE
In the run up to the publication of the European Commission’s proposals for an automotive package on 10 December, car manufactures have stepped up the calls to relax the CO2 standards and the 2035 phase-out of new combustion-engine vehicles by including some flexibilities. They highlight the challenges the industry has faced in recent years, growing competitive pressure from China, and insufficient demand for electric vehicles in Europe as reasons for the sector needing more time for the tra…

Just started to read a #VOX article about the glorious AI future but I had to quit right away at this nugget: „we could all be so much more wealthier than we can even imagine today…AI and robots will be able to produce a lot more goods and services than when we have in today’s economy.“
Yeah. Because the lack of stuff that is churned out of factories and the artificial scarcity of digital goods…

I got a few updates about my investigations on EU emission databases after the 39C3 talk and the corresponding newsletter I published. Update below the article:
https://industrydecarbonization.com/news/errors-and-inconsistencies-in-european-e…

Errors and Inconsistencies in European Emission Data
Factories that suddenly have emissions a thousand times lower than before, unexplained data gaps, and inconsistent CO₂ emissions from different data sources are some of the issues one finds when having a closer look at the European Union's emission databases.

15 Ukrainians are suing US tech factories over chips in Russia's deadly weapons: https://benborges.xyz/2025/12/12/ukrainians-are-suing-us-tech.html

The Department of Commerce says the US and Taiwan have reached a trade agreement as part of which Taiwan will invest $250B in chip production capacity in the US (Kif Leswing/CNBC)
https://www.cnbc.com/2026/01/15/us-taiwan-chips-deal-china.html

Taiwan will invest $250 billion in U.S. chipmaking under new trade deal
The U.S. and Taiwan have reached a trade agreement to build chips and chip factories on American soil, the Department of Commerce announced Thursday.

Q&A with Siemens CEO Roland Busch on the company's 170 year history, automation, managing 320K staff, US manufacturing investments, augmenting LLMs, and more (Nilay Patel/The Verge)
https://www.theverge.com/podcast/875233/sie…

Siemens CEO Roland Busch’s mission to automate everything
Roland Busch on AI-powered factories, tariffs in the Trump era, trade, and the future of NATO.

#Kanada öffnet seinen Markt für #EAutos aus #China und senkt die #Einfuhrzölle im Rahmen eines Dea…

Canada is going to start importing Chinese EVs — will the US follow?
Canada made a deal with China that slash tariffs on Chinese EV imports. President Trump has also said he’s OK with China building car factories in the US.