The Guardian Today in Focus: The rise of Netflix: an empire built on debt

Netflix has risen from obscurity to be one of the most powerful media companies in the world with more than 150 million global subscribers. It has launched critically acclaimed hits such as House of Cards, The Crown and Unbelievable, as well as showcasing the back catalogues of popular television series. But as part of its rapid growth, the company has racked up huge debts.

Joining Anushka Asthana to discuss the long-term sustainability of Netflix are the TV critic Mark Lawson and the Guardian’s deputy business editor Dan Milmo.

Also today: Lara Spirit on why you should register to vote before the 26 November deadline for being able to take part in this year’s general election.

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Scientific American: The Downside of Solar Energy

The Downside of Solar Energy Credit: Gerard Julien Getty Images The solar economy continues its dramatic growth, with over a half-terawatt already installed around the world generating clean electricity. But what happens to photovoltaic (PV) modules at the end of their useful life? With lifespans measured in decades, PV-waste disposal may seem to be an issue for the distant future. Yet, the industry ships millions of tons every year, and that number will continue to rise as the industry grows. Total e-waste—including computers, televisions, and mobile phones—is around 45 million metric tons annually. [...]

At the same time, demand for everything from sand to rare and precious metals continues to rise. While supplying only about 1 percent of global electricity, photovoltaics already relies on 40 percent of the global tellurium supply, 15 percent of the silver supply, a large portion of semiconductor quality quartz supply, and smaller but important segments of the indium, zinc, tin, and gallium supplies. Closing the loop on these metals and embracing circular economy concepts will be critical to the industry’s future. [...]

The primary challenge to recycling PV today is finding value in the recovered materials compared to the costs of collection and recovery. The International Renewable Energy Agency reported that recovered materials could exceed $15 billion dollars (U.S.) by 2050. But a cost-effective PV-waste collection and recovery system capable of high-value material recovery remains elusive. Most of the value in PV-waste is in the aluminum frame and the silver in the metallization paste. Getting higher-value PV recycling will require expertise in managing glass. 80–90 percent of a module by weight is made from glass.

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Wired: Inside Momentum's data-driven march to put Corbyn in Number 10

“Almost every constituency Momentum targeted, we won,” Jeremy Parkin, an organiser with the group, told The New Statesman after the election. Labour lost five seats to the Conservatives, but won 28 from them, as well as six from the SNP and two from the Lib Dems.

This time around, Momentum’s ambitions have grown: they want to paint the electoral map red and put Jeremy Corbyn in Number 10. To do so, their strategy has become smarter and their digital tools sharper. “Politics is inherently digital, and tech is inherently political,” says 25-year-old Jan Baykara, a software engineer for Momentum’s technology team. He’s one of the people who built the group’s new organising tool, MyCampaignMap (MCM). To date, the tool’s been accessed 1.4 millions times (compared to about 100,000 times for MNM in 2017) and used to set up more than 21,000 canvassing events. It’s the centrepiece of the group’s updated mobilisation strategy. [...]

Momentum has explicitly sought out volunteers with technical skills. While Baykara is only one of two permanent staff members in the tech team, up to 50 volunteers have signed up to its Slack channel. Momentum’s flat hierarchical structure means that everyone’s input is welcome. The team has been giving volunteers access to the repo where the code is, encouraging them to constantly propose tweak and changes to the tools themselves. Suggestions can range from whole features to little fixes and performance improvements.

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The Atlantic: The Crisis of American Christianity, Viewed From Great Britain

In England, people are a bit embarrassed about the word. But I’ve taken the view that the word evangelical is far too good a word to let the crazy guys have it all to themselves, just like I think the word Catholic is far too good a word for the Romans to keep it all to themselves. And while we’re at it, the word liberal is too good a word for the skeptics to have it all for themselves. It stands for freedom of thought and exploration.

Everything gets bundled up together, whether it’s abortion or gun rights or homosexuality or whatever. All issues are seen as either you’re on that side, and it’s the whole package, or you’re on this side, and it’s the whole package. [...]

In the early Church, one of the great attractions of Christianity was actually a sexual ethic. It is a world where more or less anything goes, where women and children are exploited, and where slaves are exploited often in hideous and horrible ways. In the Greco-Roman world, if you’d already had one daughter, and then you had another, the regular thing was either to sell her into slavery or literally to leave her out for the wolves.

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Nautilus Magazine:

Several things. People have long wondered, why has the Great Red Spot been around for such a long time? The Great Red Spot is a storm, and we are used to storms on Earth. The average hurricane lasts a couple of weeks at most, and it has a definite mechanism for destruction: It either goes into cool water, which cuts off its fuel supply, or it goes over land, which really cuts off its fuel supply. Tornadoes are quite impressive, but they’re very ephemeral—they only last a few hours. So why do we have a Great Red Spot lasting so long? People used to say, “Oh, it’s clouds hanging around a mountain top.” Or “It’s an iceberg in a sea of hydrogen.” Those theories pretty much stopped around 1979, when Voyagers 1 and 2 flew by the planet. Nobody really knew it was a vortex, a huge hurricane that takes about six days for a single rotation. The United States would fit into the Red Spot a couple of hundred times. I mean, it’s really huge. One of the great things about the Voyager missions was that they took hundreds of pictures of the clouds that make up the Red Spot, so we could finally see the whole thing swirling around, and that’s how we knew for sure it was a vortex. Nobody knew it was really spinning. [...]

The harvest of that energy is what balances the loss of the Great Red Spot’s energy from thermal radiation. In a computer simulation, you can actually measure the direction and magnitude of all the energies that go in and out of the Great Red Spot, and the whole energy budget balances very nicely. You’ve got this great drain of potential energy in the atmosphere in the area surrounding the Great Red Spot due to this circulation of gas, but it’s OK because the sun re-establishes radiative equilibrium in that surrounding area and re-supplies its energy. So, ultimately, the source of energy that prevents the Great Red Spot from being destroyed is the sun. [...]

I am speculating that the Red Spot is, from top to bottom, somewhere between 50 and 70 kilometers tall. From side to side, it’s about 26,000 kilometers. So it’s a pancake. Just like with a tube of toothpaste, if I squish the pancake with high pressure at its center, something is going to squirt out the sides and top and bottom. It’s known that the Great Red Spot has a high pressure at its center, but its gases don’t go squirting out horizontally from its sides because of the Coriolis force in those directions—instead they squirt out vertically from the top and bottom. So, what can prevent the gases from squirting out vertically? The only way that I know to prevent that is if the top of the Great Red Spot has a dense cold lid of atmosphere above it. It’s that extra density that pushes the gases in the Great Red Spot back down. And, below the Great Red Spot, there must be a warm buoyant floor of atmosphere, and that floor prevents the high pressure center from pushing the gases in the Great Red Spot downward and out its bottom. That’s the balance.

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