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The world's chemical pollution: Current state of research #environment

The world's chemical pollution: Current state of research
Two authors from ETH Zurich and RPTU Kaiserslautern-Landau have concluded that the rapid production and distribution of chemicals in the environment means that regulatory risk assessment can no longer keep pace with their ever-increasing numbers.

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[…] Paradoxically, the more a population grew, the more precious it became, as it offered a supply of cheap labour, and by lowering costs allowed a greater expansion of production and trade. In this infinitely open labour market, the ‘fundamental price’, which for Turgot meant a subsistence level for workers, and the price determined by supply and demand ended up as the same thing. A country was all the more commercially competitive for having at its disposal the virtual wealth that a large population represented.
Confinement was therefore a clumsy error, and an economic one at that: there was no sense in trying to suppress poverty by taking it out of the economic circuit and providing for a poor population by charitable means. To do that was merely to hide poverty, and suppress an important section of the population, which was always a given wealth. Rather than helping the poor escape their provisionally indigent situation, charity condemned them to it, and dangerously so, by putting a brake on the labour market in a period of crisis. What was required was to palliate the high cost of products with cheaper labour, and to make up for their scarcity by a new industrial and agricultural effort. The only reasonable remedy was to reinsert the population in the circuit of production, being sure to place labour in areas where manpower was most scarce. The use of paupers, vagabonds, exiles and émigrés of any description was one of the secrets of wealth in the competition between nations. […]
Confinement was to be criticised because of the effects it had on the labour market, but also because like all other traditional forms of charity, it constituted a dangerous form of finance. As had been the case in the Middle Ages, the classical era had constantly attempted to look after the needs of the poor by a system of foundations. This implied that a section of the land capital and revenues were out of circulation. In a definitive manner too, as the concern was to avoid the commercialisation of assistance to the poor, so judicial measures had been taken to ensure that this wealth never went back into circulation. But as time passed, their usefulness diminished: the economic situation changed, and so did the nature of poverty.
«Society does not always have the same needs. The nature and distribution of property, the divisions between the different orders of the people, opinions, customs, the occupations of the majority of the population, the climate itself, diseases and all the other accidents of human life are in constant change. New needs come into being, and old ones disappear.» [Turgot, Encyclopédie]
The definitive character of a foundation was in contradiction with the variable and changing nature of the accidental needs to which it was designed to respond. The wealth that it immobilised was never put back into circulation, but more wealth was to be created as new needs appeared. The result was that the proportion of funds and revenues removed from circulation constantly increased, while that of production fell in consequence. The only possible result was increased poverty, and a need for more foundations. The process could continue indefinitely, and the fear was that one day ‘the ever increasing number of foundations might absorb all private funds and all private property’. When closely examined, classical forms of assistance were a cause of poverty, bringing a progressive immobilisation that was like the slow death of productive wealth:
«If all the men who have ever lived had been given a tomb, sooner or later some of those sterile monuments would have been dug up in order to find land to cultivate, and it would have become necessary to stir the ashes of the dead in order to feed the living.» [Turgot, Lettre Š Trudaine sur le Limousin]
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(Michel Foucault, History of Madness)

The scale of investment and the involvement of governments means ROI must be found (or rather created) now, by any means necessary! Demand already is being forcefully created to justify these expenditures. Business models, regulations and policies/politics are pivoted in lockstep. Aside from all the conceptual, ethical and environmental issues of LLMs and their required infrastructure, these shifts are already also impacting chip/hardware production pipelines and start spelling the end of pe…

samim (@samim@mastodon.social)
Attached: 1 image The AI infrastructure build-out is so gigantic that in the past 6m, it contributed more to the growth of the U.S. economy than /all of consumer spending/ The 'magnificent 7' spent more than $100 billion on data centers and the like in the past three months *alone* As a % of GDP, spending on AI infra has already exceeded spending on telecom and internet infrastructure from the dot-com boom—and it’s still growing. This spending is so big it’s acting as a sort of privat…

Series A, Episode 05 - The Web
NOVARA: Flutonic power cells. As you can see from the registers one of them is totally exhausted. The other almost so.
BLAKE: And you have no means of recharging them.
https://blake.torpidity.net/m/105/349 B7B5

Comrade Trump Seizes The Means Of Production
https://www.levernews.com/comrade-trump-seizes-the-means-of-production/

Entanglement and particle production from cosmological perturbations: a quantum optical simulation approach
Pramod Kamal Kharel, Mausam Ghimire, Ashish Khanal, Samyam Pudasaini, Nabaraj Khatri, Sayujya Bhandari, Divash Rai, Kiran Adhikari, Rajeev Singh
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.04249

Entanglement and particle production from cosmological perturbations: a quantum optical simulation approach
In this work, we develop a computational framework based on the Gaussian formalism and symplectic circuit representation to explore cosmological perturbations during inflation. These tools offer an efficient means to study entanglement generation and particle production, particularly when analytical methods become insufficient and numerical simulations are essential. By evolving an initial Bunch-Davies vacuum through a two-mode squeezer, we simulate the behavior of the von Neumann entropy and l…

Production of the $ X(3872)$ state via the $B^0 \to K^{\ast 0} X(3872)$ decay
Luciano M. Abreu
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.21223 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.…

Production of the $ X(3872)$ state via the $B^0 \to K^{\ast 0} X(3872)$ decay
In this work the production of the state $X(3872)$ is estimated via the reaction $B^0 \to K^{\ast 0} X(3872)$ through triangle mechanisms described by the sequence $B^0 \to D_s^{(*)+} (\to K^{\ast 0} D^{(*)+} ) \ D^{(*)-} \to K^{\ast 0} \ ( D^{(*)+} D^{(*)-} ) \to K^{\ast 0} X(3872) $. The molecular configuration $(D\bar D^* - c.c. )$ of the $X(3872)$ is considered. By means of the effective Lagrangian approach, the branching ratio $\mathcal{B}(B^0 \to K^{\ast 0} X(3872))$ is calculated as a fu…