It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
Thursday, November 20, 2025
Study finds 41% of EV drivers would avoid Tesla over politics
The Tesla store opened its doors in India's financial capital Mumbai - Copyright AFP Punit PARANJPE
More than 40 percent of electric car drivers worldwide would avoid owning a Tesla, the brand run by controversial billionaire Elon Musk, for political reasons, according to a recent survey.
More than half of electric vehicle (EV) drivers — 53 percent — said they would avoid certain brands or countries of production for political reasons, according to the survey published Monday.
More than 26,000 electric car owners in 30 countries were queried on behalf of the Global EV Alliance, an international network of national electric vehicle driver associations.
When asked to specify which brand or country of production they would avoid, 41 percent of all EV drivers named Tesla, 12 percent said China, and five percent said the United States.
The survey was conducted in September and October, and the results were weighted based on the share each country represents in the global EV market.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk, the world’s richest person, was almost inseparable from US President Donald Trump as he headed the cost-cutting “Department of Government Efficiency,” or DOGE, but the pair later fell out bitterly over government spending plans under the Trump-led budget.
Musk has also made headlines by supporting European far-right movements, criticising diversity policies, and making a gesture many observers interpreted as a Nazi salute.
There have been calls for a boycott around the world, but their impact has been hard to quantify.
According to the survey, reservations against Teslas were particularly strong in the United States (52 percent), Germany (51 percent), as well as in Australia and New Zealand (45 percent).
In Norway, which is leading the world in the adoption of electric vehicles, 43 percent of respondents said they would avoid a Tesla.
However, in India the figure was just two percent.
Globally, 12 percent of electric car drivers said they would avoid buying cars produced in China, though there were significant disparities between countries on this issue, with 43 percent of Lithuanian drivers wanting to avoid Chinese-made EVs compared to only two percent of Italian and Polish drivers.
“It has to do with the availability of cars,” Ellen Hiep, a member of the Global EV Alliance steering committee, told AFP.
Hiep noted that Chinese models, which are less expensive, are much more common in developing countries than higher-end brands like Tesla.
“In the Global South, people don’t have too much choice. So I think sometimes they want to drive electric, and they want to have an affordable car while maybe in Europe and the US, we’ve got a bigger choice,” she said.
Ireland’s data centres power digital age, drain the grid
Irish data centres are a quietly purring economic engine, but doubts are mounting over the environmental cost - Copyright AFP PAUL FAITH
Peter MURPHY
Ireland hosts one of the world’s fast-growing clusters of data centres, but is running headlong into the difficult consequences.
The server farms powering global tech giants now consume a fifth of the small nation’s electricity, igniting concerns over both grid stability and Ireland’s commitments to boost renewable energies and cut gas emissions.
Already home to over 80 data centres, a 2024 report by US-based researchers Synergy ranked Dublin behind only the US state of Virginia and Beijing in its density of such state-of-the-art facilities built for colossal amounts of data.
Vast energy-hungry warehouses around Dublin’s ring road host thousands of servers handling massive amounts of cloud computing, storage and AI demands for data giants like Google, Meta, Microsoft and Amazon.
The facilities are a quietly purring economic engine, injecting billions in investment, employment and anchoring the tech multinationals which, coupled with big pharma, fund over half of Ireland’s corporate-tax take, according to analysts.
But doubts are mounting over the environmental cost.
– ‘Unsustainable’ –
Campaigner group Friends of the Earth told AFP such centres are “completely unsustainable”.
“It’s one of the fundamental climate justice issues of our times,” said spokesperson Rosi Leonard.
Data centres’ share of Irish metered electricity consumption reached 22 percent by 2024, compared to an EU-wide average of 2-3 percent, according to official data.
National grid operator EirGrid projects that data centres could account for 30 percent of demand by 2030 as the growth of artificial intelligence technology accelerates.
That is equivalent to powering two million homes for a full year, energy analysts Wood Mackenzie said in July.
Some data centres in high-pressure areas in Dublin have already turned to generators for back-up, which are usually gas and oil-powered, said Leonard.
That could hamper Ireland’s already fraught efforts to meet EU 2030 climate targets that threaten multi-billion euro fines if missed.
Leonard said the server farms are also gobbling up much of the renewable energy like wind and solar that is being added to the grid.
“We want a moratorium on further expansion of data centres until they pose no threat to our climate and carbon budgets,” she said.
– ‘Limbo’ –
EirGrid plans capacity upgrades to accommodate future data centre demand more evenly nationwide. And the government has said a new strategy will be published soon with a pledge to update the grid within five years.
But experts doubt whether those plans will deliver in time to meet demand.
As Ireland aims “to reduce emissions… expanding a sector that’s going to increase emissions very significantly just… doesn’t make sense,” said Barry McMullin, a climate change expert at Dublin City University.
Data centre compatibility with emissions goals “is unlikely for another decade”, he told AFP.
Some planning authorities have already pushed back.
Last year, a local council in Dublin refused a Google data centre development, citing “insufficient (grid) capacity” and a “lack of significant on-site renewable energy”.
Ireland’s digital sector contributes an estimated 13 percent to GDP.
But Maurice Mortell, head of Digital Infrastructure Ireland (DII), a group representing data centres, warns the nation could lose out on AI-driven investment due to grid and planning blockages.
“We’ve over 18 billion euros ($21 billion) of investment in digital infrastructure here already, with another 5.8 billion planned, but without power, so potentially marooned,” he said.
“Ireland’s lead, particularly in cloud computing, is at risk,” he told AFP, highlighting its fading appeal and frustrations from large US firms.
“Our sector is in limbo, we need a grid that’s capable, and a clear policy environment,” he said.
– Waste heat –
A 2022 government strategy paper said data centres should demonstrate a “clear pathway to decarbonise” and “net-zero data services by design”.
Meanwhile, a project launched in 2023 by Amazon Web Services (AWS) in partnership with a local Dublin authority shows how some climate impacts could be offset.
Waste heat provided from an AWS data centre is carried via hot water through pipes to a local heating hub next door to heat offices and a library, and soon hundreds of homes.
“There is potential for other data centres to do the same,” said Admir Shala, a project manager at the heating hub called Heatworks.
But expert McMullin was sceptical.
“We don’t really have heat networks to plug this waste heat into,” he said, adding that data centres run year-round whereas homes only need to be heated for about six months a year.
Sugary sodas cause deadly diseases. Coca-Cola worked to discredit the science.
Decades of health campaigns and scientific research about the risks of sugary soft drinks are a big reason that Americans have been drinking less soda since consumption peaked around 2000. A January paper in Nature Medicine found that in 2020, 2.2 million new cases of type 2 diabetes and 1.2 million new cases of cardiovascular disease worldwide were attributable to sugar-sweetened beverages. But many of us still have not gotten the memo — the average American today drinks about 12 ounces of sugary sodas a day. For each person who doesn't drink any soda, there's someone chugging 24 ounces every day.
Why are we still drinking so much of a beverage that makes people sick?
Eight years ago, two pastors sued Coca-Cola, by far the country's most popular soda company, and the American Beverage Association over "their deceptive marketing, labeling, and sale of Coca-Cola's sugar-sweetened beverages." The complaint, filed in Washington, DC, alleged that Coca-Cola knew about the science linking sugar-sweetened beverages to chronic diseases but obscured those links through aggressive public relations campaigns. Some thought that the suit would finally tip the balance of public opinion against Coke — the same way a court case in 2007 over misleading marketing on OxyContin's addictiveness shifted the tide against Purdue Pharma. But as I cover in my new book, "Sweet and Deadly," every jab by health advocates has been deftly parried by Coke and its allies.
Like the tobacco companies, Coke has spent millions spinning science to hide soda's health costs from the public and downplay the risks of sugar. In fact, Coke has been at this game longer than the tobacco industry. When the Tobacco Industry Research Committee started launching disinformation campaigns in 1954, it imported its staff and strategies lock, stock, and barrel from the Sugar Research Foundation, a nonprofit funded partly by Coke. The soda companies were pioneers of the PR strategy now known as the tobacco playbook.
For decades, the $300 billion corporation has duped consumers by promoting messages that are either misleading or flat-out false. It's used an extensive network of allies and proxy groups to carry its messages, including co-opting scientists and their research, and spent billions of dollars on ads that associate Coke with warm and fuzzy feelings represented by polar bears, Santas, and happy families. Coca-Cola has yet to face a major reckoning for its outsize role in America's health crisis.
One of the dietary falsehoods that Coca-Cola spreads is the concept that a calorie is a calorie. "We don't believe in empty calories," Katie Bayne, Coke's former chief marketing officer, said in 2012. The following year, James Quincey, now the CEO of the corporation, said, "When we talk about obesity, a calorie is a calorie. The experts are clear — the academics, the government advisors, diabetes associations — we need to have balance in the calories. And if you're taking in too many, or burning them off, that is a problem; wherever they're coming from, a calorie is a calorie."
But in the human body, not all calories are created equal — far from it. Research has long shown that a calorie of liquid sugar is not metabolized in the same manner as a calorie of whole grain, for example, or a calorie of fruit or nuts. Those calories have fiber, vitamins, and other nutrients that are not present in soda.
Coke also promotes the related message of "energy balance." The simplest energy balance argument posits that a calorie of food will be metabolized the same whether it comes from cashews, kale, or Coca-Cola, so consumers should focus not on the type of food but on trying to burn as many calories as they consume. Coke has been especially interested in emphasizing the calories-out side of the equation. Coke is in the business of selling sugar water. If it tries to reduce sales of its products, it would be violating its obligations to its shareholders.
This was the focus of the Global Energy Balance Network, an organization launched in 2014 by researchers affiliated with the University of Colorado and the University of South Carolina. One of the academics, Steven Blair, did yeoman's work to shift Americans' focus from the elements of the diet to the concept of balancing calories in and calories out. In a video for the organization, Blair said, "Most of the focus, in the popular media, in the scientific press, is 'Aww, they're eating too much, eating too much, eating too much.' Blaming fast foods, blaming sugary drinks, and so on, and there's really virtually no compelling evidence that that in fact is the cause."
But it was far from the only misleading messaging Coke had spread. In a May 2013 blog post, Coca-Cola trumpeted its success in removing calories from the American diet through changing its product formulation, portion size, and promotion. "Yesterday, America's top food and beverage manufacturers announced an important milestone: more than 1.5 trillion calories have been removed from the US marketplace," the now-removed post read. "This achievement is the result of efforts made by the Healthy Weight Commitment Foundation (HWCF), a coalition of 16 food and beverage corporate partners, including The Coca-Cola Company, and over 230 organizations, who are working together to help reduce obesity, especially childhood obesity."
The post ran beneath a photo of the former Department of Agriculture secretary Dan Glickman, Lisa Gable of HWCF, and the author Hank Cardello at an event sponsored by the Obesity Solutions Initiative at the Hudson Institute. While the photo appears to be three independent experts cordially discussing the problem of obesity, the whole event was paid for by Coke, Pepsi, and other food corporations. Coke alone had given hundreds of thousands of dollars to the Hudson Institute and $5 million to HWCF.
What the company didn't mention is that Coca-Cola could remove far more calories from the marketplace in a heartbeat by taking full-sugar beverages off the market or reducing its advertising of those products. Not only does it aggressively market these calorie-dense drinks, but it continues to introduce new Coke blends that in some cases, such as Coca-Cola Spiced, have even more sugar than the original Coca-Cola.
Coke is in the business of selling sugar water. If it tries to reduce sales of its products, it would be violating its obligations to its shareholders. (Woe to the CEO who announces on an earnings call — "We did it, we finally succeeded in reducing the amount of Coke we sell, thus reducing calories!") What is unexpected is for Coca-Cola to concurrently sell more sugar-sweetened beverages than any other corporation while taking credit for reducing calories.
One front group ended up taking the pro-sugar stance a bit too far. The International Life Sciences Institute, founded in the 1980s by a Coca-Cola executive, spent decades spinning food science in favor of its corporate funders, including Hershey, Kraft, and Kellogg. But when it funded a 2016 research paper critiquing the growing body of science on the health risks of sugar, it was a step too far for some of its corporate members. Matthias Berninger, a Mars spokesperson at the time, said the paper would not help consumers make better choices. When Mars left ILSI in 2018, Berninger said, "We do not want to be involved in advocacy-led studies that so often, and mostly for the right reasons, have been criticized." Two years later, Coke quietly left the group as well.
In 2018, Coke was part of an elaborate front group to help it push back against the soda taxes several California municipalities had enacted. Coke and its soda industry allies, under the guise of a campaign called "Californians for Accountability and Transparency in Government Spending, Sponsored by California Businesses," gathered signatures to support a statewide initiative that would require municipalities to get the approval of two-thirds of voters before implementing any local tax change. By crafting an initiative so abhorrent to municipalities and unions that California lawmakers would do anything to make it go away, Coke gained bargaining power. With signatures in hand, the soda alliance went to Sacramento and swung a deal. We'll withdraw the initiative, they said, in exchange for a law banning new taxes on groceries, including sodas, through 2030. Legislators took the deal and pushed that provision through as a rider on a budget bill. This strategy, known as preemption, has also proven effective for gun rights groups.
Coke has created this elaborate parallel world to mislead consumers about the health risks of sugar-sweetened beverages and take strategic actions like preventing soda taxes. All of the innocuous-sounding, Coke-funded groups named above are part of a plan that has prevented the balance of public opinion from tipping against Coca-Cola, as it has for other corporations such as the tobacco company Philip Morris, Purdue Pharma, and Exxon. In the 2024 Axios Harris Poll 100, which ranks company reputations, Coke placed 27th with a "very good" score compared to Exxon's "fair" score at No. 86. The PR strategy ensures that Coca-Cola appears shrouded in an aura of goodness while staying profitable and steadily rewarding their shareholders.
And that DC lawsuit? It dragged on for years, as Coke's top-notch legal team successfully whittled it down. The plaintiffs finally withdrew the suit in 2019. Coke won again.
Murray Carpenter is a health and science journalist and the author of "Sweet and Deadly: How Coca-Cola Spreads Disinformation and Makes Us Sick" and "Caffeinated: How Our Daily Habit Helps, Hurts and Hooks Us."
Sugar, or sucrose (C12H22O11), is manufactured photosynthetically by green plants. We humans can't make sugar. The best we can do is to extract it, and change its form. We have been doing so zealously, for more than 2,000 years.
Memory chip crunch set to drive up smartphone prices
While AI-led demand is surging, chip-makers are also winding back spending on capacity, which is keeping prices elevated - Copyright AFP STR
Katie Forster
Shoppers could face higher prices for phones, laptops and other gadgets next year, manufacturers and analysts warn, as AI data centres hoover up memory chips used in consumer electronics.
The world’s biggest tech companies are ploughing head-spinningly huge sums into building the hardware that powers artificial intelligence tools like ChatGPT.
Their insatiable demand is snarling up a supply chain kept tight on purpose by chipmakers who are keen to avoid price drops that dent profits, experts say.
In 2026, supply chain pressure for memory chips “will be far greater than this year”, Lu Weibing, president of Chinese electronics giant Xiaomi, said this week.
“Everyone will likely observe that retail prices for products will see a significant increase,” he told an earnings call.
William Keating, head of semiconductor and tech consulting firm Ingenuity, expects the same.
“All companies that manufacture PCs, smartphones, servers etc will be impacted by the shortage,” Keating told AFP.
“End result: consumers will pay more.”
In high demand are key chips known as DRAM and storage components called NAND, which are found in everyday gadgets but are also needed to help process the vast amounts of data crunched by generative AI.
That’s driving up memory chip prices, which in turn is turbocharging revenue for the firms that produce them such as South Korea’s Samsung and SK hynix, and Micron and SanDisk in the United States.
“AI-related server demand keeps growing, and this demand significantly exceeds industry supply,” Kim Jae-june of Samsung Electronics said last month.
– ‘Keep prices high’ –
Samsung said Sunday that it plans to build a new semiconductor plant in South Korea to meet the soaring demand, while SK hynix recently reported its best-ever quarterly performance, “driven by the full-scale rise in prices of DRAM and NAND”.
Industry analysts TrendForce have lowered their 2026 global production forecasts for smartphones and notebook laptops.
“The memory industry has begun a robust upward pricing cycle,” which “forces downstream brands to hike retail prices,” TrendForce said.
Cars may also be affected, although Keating noted that a smaller portion of their tech relies on memory chips.
Last week China’s largest contract chipmaker SMIC said customers were hesitant to place orders owing to uncertainty over how many phones, cars, or other products the memory chip industry can supply.
The cause of the shortage is two-fold.
AI-driven demand is greater than anticipated, but memory chip makers have also been “drastically cutting” spending on expanding capacity in recent years, Keating explained.
“Keep capacity tight, keep prices high is basically their mantra,” he said.
“They’ve done this deliberately to ensure that there’s no repeat of the most recent memory price collapse, which cost the memory makers tens of billions in losses.”
Price jumps for memory chips “are huge and the trend is continuing”, said Stephen Wu, founder of the Carthage Capital investment fund.
“Consumers and enterprises should expect higher memory prices, longer lead times, and more take-or-pay contracts through at least early 2026,” Wu said.
burs-kaf/dan
Smartphone sharing demands a new approach to cybersecurity
Does your partner know the password to your phone? Probably. A study by Griffith University researchers reveals that 70 per cent of Australians share access to their phone with their partner, despite dominant cybersecurity guidelines
A study by Griffith University researchers reveals that 70 per cent of Australians share access to their phone with their partner, despite dominant cybersecurity guidelines advising the opposite.
Professor of Criminology and Criminal Justice, Molly Dragiewicz, who led the study with Dr Jeffrey Ackerman and research assistant Marianne Haaland, said the most common reasons for smartphone sharing were positive, but that does not guard against negative impacts.
“People usually share for convenience, out of trust, and to help each other,” Professor Dragiewicz said.
“However, if one partner turns out to be abusive later on, shared access can be dangerous.”
In fact, 20 per cent of identity theft perpetrators identified by Australian police are current or former intimate partners or individuals related to an ex-partner.
The report’s findings show that younger people are more likely to share, suggesting this is a growing issue.
Professor Dragiewicz argues that the one-user/one-device threat model created for commercial and government contexts is inadequate for addressing interpersonal cybersecurity risks.
Phone and app design can help to reduce the risks by using Safety by Design, as recommended by the Australia’s eSafety Commissioner.
“Cybersecurity advice and design based on not sharing your device or credentials are a really bad fit with how people actually use their phone.
The first step in Safety by Design is understanding how technology is used in real life,” Professor Dragiewicz said.
Most graph-based models and variants (red, purple) outperform BERT (yellow) with higher mean model performance (y-axis) and lower standard deviation of model performance (x-axis) across repeated training runs.
Bank reconciliation is an essential part of maintaining the financial health of a business, requiring bookkeepers to match incoming bank statement lines to invoices. For large businesses that process thousands of records, it is both time‑consuming and tedious, which is why many rely on automated tools that suggest likely matches for bookkeepers to confirm. While these tools work reasonably well for simple one-to-one matches, they often perform poorly when a single payment needs to be reconciled against multiple invoices (one-to-many matches).
In a new study published in The Journal of Finance and Data Science, a team of Australian researchers explored whether graph representation learning could improve the accuracy of match suggestions in these scenarios.
"Instead of modelling each transaction in isolation, a system could leverage a network mapping out the entire general ledger, where each historical record and its reconciliation are represented as a node and edge in a graph." shares Justin Munoz, lead author of the study. "New records can then be added to this graph, transformed into numerical representations or embeddings, and fed into a downstream machine learning model that scores the match likelihood for any pair of records."
Trained and evaluated on three years of real‑world bookkeeping data, the graph‑based method was shown to significantly improve match accuracy, outperforming an industry standard, with the largest gains on one-to-many matches. The researchers attributed these gains to higher-quality embeddings that capture both the structural properties of the ledger graph and the contextual information contained in transactions.
Further, the team found that graph-based models exhibited much lower prediction instability than other non-graph embedding methods such as Google's BERT, a popular language model. In this context, prediction instability refers to variation in model performance when a model is retrained multiple times. As shown in Figure 1, the best models cluster in the top-left region of high accuracy and low prediction instability.
“For high‑risk domains such as finance and accounting, stability matters just as much as accuracy.” adds Munoz. “Our findings highlight a promising direction for accounting technology that bookkeepers can rely on in day‑to‑day work, improving both trust and reliability.”
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Contact the author: Justin Munoz, School of Engineering, RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia,justin.munoz@rmit.edu.au
The publisher KeAi was established by Elsevier and China Science Publishing & Media Ltd to unfold quality research globally. In 2013, our focus shifted to open access publishing. We now proudly publish more than 200 world-class, open access, English language journals, spanning all scientific disciplines. Many of these are titles we publish in partnership with prestigious societies and academic institutions, such as the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC).
