Photo by Ian Turnell via Pexels
Welcome back to this bi-weekly installment of What Just Happened?!, a semi-comical digest of the most important news from the UK, US and the World. Look out for us every now and again, and follow us on Facebook and Twitter.
The World
All Sparks, No Love
Last Saturday the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania severed their soviet-era connections to the Russian electricity grid. Although none of the countries had purchased any power from Russia since the 2022 invasion of Ukraine, the connection left them exposed to Russian control and interference in their energy systems.
They operated independently for 24 hours before connecting to the European Union grid, a change both practical and very symbolic. An interesting quirk of this move is that they now leave the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad as an isolated energy island, with no link to its motherland’s grid, which will make it increasingly tricky for Russia to maintain a stable energy supply in its outpost.
Oh, and naturally, there was a bizarre switching-on ceremony with thumping music, strobes and lasers, held in the manner of a German techno act’s entry in Eurovision.
No Boom, Boom?
Okay, so we wrote about this in our last edition as well, but from an engineering and technology perspective it’s pretty bloody exciting: Boom Supersonic revealed this week that their supersonic test flights created no audible sonic boom on the ground.
The reason this is so exciting is that it totally changes the economics of commercial supersonic flight. When aircraft fly at speeds greater than the speed of sound, they create a shockwave due to the air’s compression, which is heard on the ground as a ‘sonic boom’ following the course of the aircraft’s flight. And it does what it says on the tin: makes an extremely loud noise that is powerful enough to shatter windows, scare animals to death, and well, piss everyone off.
Arguably Concorde’s greatest commercial challenge was that it wasn’t permitted to fly over populated land, which made many potentially profitable flight routes impossible. This is especially annoying as the economics of supersonic flight work better with longer distances. Boom’s XB-1 made use of a phenomenon of ‘Mach cut-off’. In essence the aircraft travelled to high altitude at subsonic speeds, then using an altitude and speed calculated based on atmospheric conditions, it produced a shockwave that was reflected back upwards by denser air in the lower atmosphere before it reached the ground.
In a commercial application, this would theoretically mean all sorts of longer, and potentially more profitable routes opening up, such as Europe to the West coast of the US. Moreover, some calculations actually predict that the fuel burn to achieve this much faster flight, would be lower than conventional subsonic flight, which is just pretty bloody exciting.
The Internet
It’s just a Scratch
Generative AI’s market leading chip maker, Nvidia, broke the world record for the largest one-day loss that’s occurred on Wall Street as $593 billion evaporated (albeit temporarily, with most of that value having been recovered since) as the world responded to an apparently cheaper and more efficient competitor (DeepSeek.com) entering the public market. DeepSeek cost a lot less to build than the competition because it benefited from the existing prior art, by which we mean, their competition’s work. The funny part of this is that OpenAI and others are complaining that using their data to train other models is unfair, though that’s exactly how OpenAI’s tools were made (using other people’s data).
The UK
From Gaza with love, via Ukraine
A Gazan family that applied to join a family member in the UK, via the Ukrainian Family Scheme, had a judge rule in their favour that the UK would be violating their human rights in turning them away. The Ukrainian Family Scheme (which ended in February 2024) and its successor, the Ukraine Sponsorship Scheme, have collectively received some ~350,000 Visa applications, seen some ~270,000 Visas issued and enabled ~220,000 people to have arrived in the UK.
One person’s “loophole” is another’s European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), or so it would seem for UK labour leader Keir Starmer as he says a judge was wrong for granting a Gazan family the right to live in the UK under Article 8 of the ECHR which entitles individuals to a “right to a family life”.
This naturally puts Starmer in the unfortunate position of trying to defend that which is indefensible. Rather unimpressively, Starmer is also talking about how this “loophole” needs to be fixed, where surely the easiest and most comprehensive “fix” along such reasoning would be to just remove the UK from the ECHR (to be clear, we’re not advocating for this); something which Starmer has vowed to not do.
The US
United States Agency for Dismantling the World Order
The United States Agency for International Development (USAID), a federal agency created in 1961 by congress, has been among the first targets of the new administration. The usaid website currently loads a blank page after Musk and Trump decided to shut down the organization. This, naturally, triggered a lawsuit from the American Foreign Service Association against Donald Trump, et al., which is already tempering the worst instincts to cut costs at, apparently, any and all costs. A federal judge has ruled to delay Trump & Musks placing thousands of USAID staffers on leave; and, also ordered that no overseas employees should immediately be involuntarily evacuated from their host countries. The fact that a judge needed to rule on this tells you just how much chaos has been sowed for the USAID staff stationed abroad. Furthermore, pulling the funding out from USAID on a whim costs lives.
Insights into the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (not actually a department) have been abounding as the U.S. courts have been gathering information, on their activities, during various lawsuits. One of the many lawsuits alleges that Musk and co have had access to all sorts of confidential information that they shouldn’t have. 19 states sued DOGE to prevent their accessing sensitive treasury data. It was only a couple of weeks ago that we found ourselves here at What Just Happened?! relying on Reddit posts to try and make any sense of what was going on inside the new US administration (see our January 31st issue, story: The Exceptions that Prove the Rules (How strong are the Checks and Balances?)).
It would appear that one of Musk’s promising young tech bros took a break from killing innocent animals at Neuralink to go and cause suffering elsewhere by working towards dismantling the US government, also with no apparent benefit. Wired recently reported that 1,500 test animals are estimated to have been euthanized throughout Nueralink’s almost 10 year history. This follows a Federal Probe into the needless suffering and deaths associated with Musk’s business dealings.
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