EU to push members to cut tax rate below duty on gas, with 10%+ surge in sales also put down to fallout from Iran war
Sales of residential heat pumps jumped across Europe in the first six months of the year as the Iran war sent oil and gas prices rocketing and some countries lowered electricity taxes.
Homeowners bought 1.16m heat pumps across 12 European countries, up from 1.05m in the first half of 2025, according to the European Heat Pump Association (EHPA).
Continue reading...DirtyGlassEye has added a photo to the pool:
And now, after being there for 2 long weeks, I present a Japan photo... from last year's month-long adventure. It's been a long time since I had anything to declare from Kyoto so I wondered just what I could do. There was one area of the Arashiyama route I took on the first day that I never really talked about. The one way street at the foot of the mountain, Saga Toriimoto.
Really, I had no idea how I got an empty frame here considering the known popularity of what lied beyond this street (the two Nenbutsu-Jis). But I'll take any win I could get. Just know everything in this frame is real. To make matters somewhat more baffling, this was taken with my 200mm zoom (and not the smaller all-purpose lens I have now, I giant 20 pound telephoto that severely weighed me down physically as time went on), which means the segments displayed here are bigger than they seem. The equivalent of a Japanese ghost town (though I imagine that image has a much different cultural meaning to em).
I'm rambling, in editing I bleached the saturation and kept a majority of the shot highlighted, attempting to give it an older look. The curved street had a heightened brightness and some shadows were amplified. The mountains in the back have lower clarity. Even with all of that, it still looks like it draws you in. This was a gem that I missed for a while.
Speaking of which, I have a rather humiliating fact to discuss, I was in Japan for a whole month last year like I already said, and I returned for only 2 weeks this year. Somehow I took more shots this year by a margin of approximately 2.5K photos and I don't even know how that should be possible.
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Facial recognition is everywhere now. It’s in surveillance cameras; it’s soon going to be in Meta’s RayBan pervert glasses, and some students already did that. You now have massively viral accounts that take clips of people, run them through facial recognition software, and then post their name and other personal info for everyone to see. We haven’t fully come to terms with what it means to live in a world where anyone can basically dox anyone else now.
To talk through this, Joseph spoke to Kashmir Hill. She’s a reporter at the New York Times, and the author of Your Face Belongs to Us: A Tale of AI, a Secretive Startup, and the End of Privacy.
Listen to the weekly podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or YouTube. Become a paid subscriber for early access to these interview episodes and to power our journalism.If you become a paid subscriber, check your inbox for an email from our podcast host Transistor for a link to the subscribers-only version! You can also add that subscribers feed to your podcast app of choice and never miss an episode that way. The email should also contain the subscribers-only unlisted YouTube link for the extended video version too. It will also be in the show notes in your podcast player.
Darren Schiller has added a photo to the pool:
Sculpture by Lindy Lee.
Situated at the entrance of the Art Gallery of South Australia, Lindy Lee’s six-metre sculpture The Life of Stars links the Art Gallery of South Australia and its exterior forecourt. Fabricated by Lee in China, the work displays a densely perforated surface and creates dappled light, which together suggest a universe within, while its oval form suggests the beginnings of life itself.
Visible by day and night, The Life of Stars appears both to contain and radiate light. This delicate play between interior and exterior, form and emptiness is significant. The concentric circles on the surface reference Indra’s net, which is a metaphor of Mahayana Buddhism, symbolising the universe as a vast web of connections.
The Life of Stars was presented as part of the 2018 Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art: Divided Worlds.
