Jouni Kaipainen

Yliopistotutkija. Taloustieteilijä./ Keskustelen täällä yksityishenkilönä. Senior Researcher. Economist.

[Space and Technology @spaceandtech_]

A greenhouse in the Netherlands is using robots with AI and smart cameras to identify and pick ripe tomatoes with precision.

The system, developed by Four Growers using a FANUC robot arm, ensures fast and damage-free harvesting.

These robots work continuously, reducing labor needs while allowing workers to focus on plant care and quality checks.

[Paul Novosad @paulnovosad]

AI survey respondents are indistinguishable from human survey respondents.

This renders any online survey (i.e. most surveys that you read about) near useless.

You're better off just polling the chatbots directly, then you can at least understand / direct the bias.

[Ulmer @Ulmer62336950]

Regional TFR in the Nordics in 2025 (NUTS3 3)
Highest Nordsjælland 🇩🇰1.81
Lowest Pohjois-Karjala 🇫🇮1.13

🇫🇮Keski-Pohjanmaa 1.62
🇫🇮Pohjois-Karjala 1.13
🇳🇴Rogaland 1.65
🇳🇴Oslo 1.33
🇸🇪Hallands län 1.62
🇸🇪Västerbottens län 1.28
🇩🇰Nordsjælland 1.81
🇩🇰Byen København 1.41

[(TCAG) Командир Бред Кроуфорд (CDR Brad Crawford) @evo1tactical]

Estonia cancels €500M combat vehicle purchase, boosts drone defense.

This is exactly the kind of decision that shows Estonia is paying attention to the reality of modern war.

Legacy platforms and heavy armor still have a role, but their dominance is fading in a battlefield shaped by drones, AI, and persistent surveillance.

Estonia understands that if you are serious about national defense, especially on Russia’s doorstep, you cannot afford to prepare for the last war. You have to prepare for the one that is already happening. This is a smart, disciplined move, and it deserves recognition.

The rest of NATO needs to take a hard look at this and start making real changes. Investment has to shift toward drone and AI enabled capabilities at scale, not small test programs.

Short range air defense must focus on fast, effective systems designed to defeat drones at low altitude. Not everything needs to be missile based. Radar guided gun systems in the 30mm range and below are going to be critical when facing mass drone threats.

At the same time, we need to build depth. National level stockpiles of drone components, batteries, and repair parts are essential. Standardized training programs must be implemented across the force so every soldier understands how to operate drones, counter them, and survive under constant aerial observation.

This capability cannot sit at the top. It has to be pushed down. We need company level attack drone teams as a standard, with that capability extending down to the platoon level. That is how you increase combat power without increasing manpower.

Small, well trained drone teams are already delivering precision effects that used to require heavy weapons, indirect fire, or air support. When that capability is embedded directly into tactical units, leaders gain immediate options to find, fix, and strike targets in real time without waiting on higher headquarters.

At the company level, these teams should be organized, trained, and equipped to conduct continuous operations alongside infantry, armor, and artillery.

At the platoon level, smaller, agile drone elements should support maneuver in close contact. This creates layered capability across the formation and dramatically increases lethality, responsiveness, and survivability.

This is not a future problem. It is happening now. The battlefield has already changed, and the window to adapt is closing.

The nations that move now will be ready. The ones that wait will learn the hard way.

Слава Україні. Героям слава. 🇺🇦

https://t.co/1kXX2uq0S3

[Jan Rosenow @janrosenow]

BREAKING: The blackout in Spain and Portugal in April 2025 did NOT happen because of renewables.

The final ENTSO-E report on last year's Iberian blackout is out — and it's essential reading for anyone working on the energy transition.

https://t.co/Gslk8hYX7I

[Shanaka Anslem Perera ⚡ @shanaka86]

There are two clocks running in the Hormuz crisis. One belongs to the insurance industry. The other belongs to biology. They cannot be reconciled. And that irreconcilability is the single most important fact in the global food system right now.

The insurance clock: P&I clubs cancelled Gulf war-risk cover on March 5. Premiums surged from 0.25 percent to 5 percent of hull value. For commercial shipping to resume at scale, insurers require a sustained period of incident-free stability before reinstating cover. Industry precedent from the Red Sea Houthi crisis shows what that timeline looks like. Houthi attacks began in November 2023. It is now March 2026. Twenty-six months later, Red Sea war-risk premiums remain elevated. Lloyd’s and the International Group of P&I Clubs do not respond to military press releases. They respond to actuarial loss ratios measured over quarters, not days.

Even in the most optimistic scenario, if a full ceasefire were announced tomorrow morning and every Iranian provincial command stood down simultaneously, maritime insurers would require a minimum of 30 to 60 days of zero incidents before beginning to normalise premiums. Underwriters would then need to reassess hull values, renegotiate reinsurance treaties, and reprocess hundreds of individual vessel policies. The fastest realistic timeline for commercial shipping to resume normal Hormuz transit after a verified ceasefire is 60 to 90 days. More realistically, based on the Red Sea precedent, partial normalisation takes six months or longer.

The planting clock: Corn Belt nitrogen application must occur by mid-April. India’s Kharif preparation runs through May. Bangladesh’s Boro season is underway now. Australia’s winter crop urea window opens in June. These are not political deadlines that can be extended by negotiation. They are biochemical windows defined by soil temperature, moisture content, and crop physiology. Nitrogen applied outside these windows either volatilises into the atmosphere or fails to metabolise in time to support yield formation.

The two clocks do not overlap.

The insurance clock says: even under perfect conditions, commercial shipping cannot resume normal fertiliser transit through Hormuz before late May at the earliest. The planting clock says: nitrogen must reach American soil by mid-April, Indian soil by May, and Bangladeshi soil now. The insurance recovery timeline structurally exceeds the biological deadline by weeks to months.

This means that even a ceasefire tomorrow does not save the 2026 spring planting season. The military victory has been achieved. The enrichment programme is destroyed. The anti-ship missile sites are penetrated. But the insurance architecture that governs whether a commercial vessel can legally carry urea through the strait operates on a timeline that no military operation can compress.

NOLA urea at $683 per ton reflects this. The market is not pricing a shortage that might happen. It is pricing a shortage that is already locked in by the structural mismatch between two clocks that no ceasefire, no escort convoy, and no deep-penetrator strike can synchronise.

A bomb can destroy a bunker in seconds. An insurer takes months to forget it happened. And a corn plant needs nitrogen in four weeks regardless of what either of them decides.

The planting clock does not wait for the insurance clock. The insurance clock does not accelerate for the planting clock. And somewhere between the two, the yield losses that will feed into food prices, import bills, and hunger statistics for the rest of 2026 are being determined right now by a mismatch that has no solution inside the current architecture.

Full deep dive analysis here - https://t.co/iFmUcarGdV

[Science girl @sciencegirl]

Luxembourg has made most public transport free for both residents and visitors. Since March 2020, buses, trams and second-class train travel within the country can be used without paying a fare. The policy was introduced to help reduce traffic congestion and pollution and to encourage greater use of public transport instead of cars.

[Jouni Kaipainen @kaipjo]

Heliumista tulee pulaa, kun kriisi jatkuu. Moderni teknologia tarvitsee heliumia, mutta sen varastointi on lähes mahdotonta.
Lannoitepula voi tulla, mutta fossiilisille polttoaineille on jo paljon vaihtoehtoja. Polttamisen sijaan öljy syytä käyttää muoveihin ym. Käyttöihin.

[Shanaka Anslem Perera ⚡ @shanaka86]

BREAKING: Everyone is watching the Strait of Hormuz for oil and fertilizer. Almost nobody has noticed that it is also shutting down MRI machines, semiconductor fabs, and the global aerospace supply chain.

Helium. The second lightest element in the universe. No substitute exists for it. You cannot synthesize it. You cannot replace it. And roughly one-third of the world’s supply just went offline.

Qatar produces 30 to 33 percent of global helium as a byproduct of LNG processing at Ras Laffan, home to the largest helium production facilities on Earth. When the Hormuz blockade triggered LNG force majeure declarations and attacks hit Qatari infrastructure, the helium stopped flowing with it. Prices have doubled in spot markets. And helium has a property that makes this crisis structurally different from oil, fertilizer, or any other commodity caught behind the strait.

It evaporates. Continuously. Even in sealed containers, helium boils off. The global supply chain operates on roughly 45 days of buffer before existing inventory simply ceases to exist. You cannot stockpile helium the way you stockpile crude oil in salt caverns or grain in silos. If the supply stops for six weeks, the buffer is gone. Not depleted. Gone. Returned to the atmosphere where it is too diffuse to economically recapture.

This is why the industries that depend on helium are facing a crisis that no financial instrument can solve.

Semiconductor manufacturing requires ultra-pure helium for wafer cooling in lithography and for leak detection in sub-5-nanometre chip fabrication. TSMC, Samsung, and Intel cannot produce advanced processors without it. Every AI chip, every smartphone processor, every data centre GPU in the current generation traces its manufacturing lineage through a helium-cooled process. If fabs run dry, the production lines stop. Not slow. Stop.

MRI machines require liquid helium to cool superconducting magnets to near absolute zero. Hospitals cannot substitute another gas. When helium supply tightens, MRI availability falls. During previous shortages, hospitals rationed scans. A sustained one-third supply cut puts diagnostic imaging capacity at risk across every healthcare system that depends on magnetic resonance.

Aerospace depends on helium for purging rocket fuel systems, pressurising tanks, and testing for leaks in systems where failure means explosion. NASA, SpaceX, ULA, and every launch provider in the Western world runs on helium. Fibre optic cable manufacturing requires helium atmospheres. Quantum computing research requires helium-3 isotopes for cryogenic cooling.

The US is the world’s largest helium producer and has some buffer capacity. Algeria and Russia produce meaningful volumes. Overland rerouting from Qatar through Oman and Saudi Arabia is theoretically possible but logistically slow and capacity-limited. None of these alternatives can replace one-third of global supply within the 45-day evaporation window that defines the crisis timeline.

The same 21-mile strait that is starving the food system is now threatening the technological infrastructure of modern civilization. The fertilizer trapped behind Hormuz determines whether four billion people eat. The helium trapped behind Hormuz determines whether the chips powering the AI revolution get manufactured, whether cancer patients receive diagnostic scans, and whether rockets carrying communications satellites reach orbit.

One chokepoint. Two invisible supply chains. Both irreplaceable. Both operating on biological or physical deadlines that no ceasefire retroactively extends.

The world built petroleum reserves. It never built fertilizer reserves. It never built helium reserves either.

The pattern keeps repeating. The lesson keeps being ignored.

Full analysis:
https://t.co/iFmUcarGdV

[Jouni Kaipainen @kaipjo]

Keski-Pohjanmaa on keskiarvon perusteella mitalisijoilla! Lapissa mediaanikasvu on myös huikea.

[Juha Varis @JuhaVaris]

2024-2025 nopeimmin kasvanut maakunta oli Lappi!

Netvisor/ Talouspulssi 2026

[Dustin @r0ck3t23]

Geoffrey Hinton just reframed the biggest supposed flaw in artificial intelligence. And it changes everything.

Hinton: “They shouldn’t be called hallucinations. They should be called confabulations.”

One word swap. Entire paradigm shifts.

When the legacy tech industry calls AI hallucinations a bug, they’re revealing a fundamental misunderstanding of what intelligence actually is.

They’re expecting the machine to behave like a database. Store a fact. Retrieve the fact. Return the exact same fact every time.

That’s not how intelligence works. Not artificial. Not biological.

Hinton: “It’s not that there’s a file stored somewhere in your brain, like in a filing cabinet or in a computer memory.”

Your brain doesn’t store memories. It reconstructs them.

Every time you recall something, your neural network uses connection strengths shaped by past experience to build the most plausible version of what happened.

It fills the gaps. Smooths the inconsistencies. Constructs a coherent story from incomplete signal.

And then presents that story to you as fact.

Hinton: “If I ask you to remember something that happened a few years ago, you’ll construct something that seems very plausible to you. And some of the details will be right and some will be wrong.”

Here’s the part that should stop you cold.

You will be equally confident about the wrong details as the right ones.

Think about that. Really think about it.

Every argument you’ve had about who said what. Every memory you’ve defended as certain. Every time you told a story about your own life with complete certainty.

Some of those details weren’t real. You constructed them. Confidently. Fluently.

And you had no idea.

This isn’t a flaw unique to people with bad memories.

Eyewitness testimony is the most confabulated evidence in the human justice system. Innocent people have spent decades in prison because someone remembered something that felt absolutely certain and was absolutely wrong.

Your brain didn’t lie to you. It did exactly what brains do.

It built the most plausible story it could from the signal it had.

AI does the exact same thing. Because it was built on the exact same architecture.

The mechanism that makes an AI invent a plausible but wrong answer is the same mechanism that makes it brilliant.

You cannot have one without the other.

The ability to reason creatively, synthesize across domains, construct explanations for things it has never been told. All of it runs on the same engine as the confabulation.

Hinton: “Psychologists have been studying confabulation in people since at least the 1930s.”

This isn’t a new phenomenon. It isn’t a software bug. It isn’t something to be patched in the next model update.

It is the price of dynamic intelligence. The shadow cast by the same light that makes these systems remarkable.

We aren’t building better search engines.

We are building synthetic minds that think the way minds actually think.

Messy. Confident. Occasionally wrong.

And for exactly that reason, capable of something no database ever was.

[Jouni Kaipainen @kaipjo]

@Its_ereko In Central Osthrobothnia, Finland, we have just build litium value chain (from mine to factory). Nice that You support our rural economy. Keep up the good work!

[China pulse 🇨🇳 @Eng_china5]

In China, buses display traffic lights... on their backs! 🤯

To avoid obstructing the view of cars behind them due to the bus's size, the screen displays the traffic light in real time.

[Jouni Kaipainen @kaipjo]

Kun hyvinvointialueet ovat pulassa asiakkaiden määrän kanssa, niin pitäisikö ottaa oppia Kiinasta? Avoimin silmin, ei omaa mallia puolustaen viimeiseen asti.

[Arnaud Bertrand @RnaudBertrand]

I've been wanting to write this for a while: an article on the key characteristics of the Chinese health system, as a patient.

It's something that I - perhaps unfortunately - have come to have a lot of experience with in my eight years in China.

I've been to the doctor as a patient dozens of times. My wife delivered our first daughter in a Chinese hospital, and had cancer surgery in Shanghai. My younger daughter - who once completely severed her thumb in an unfortunate accident in rural Gansu - had emergency surgery in a small clinic there (her thumb is fine now!). We spent the entire covid episode in China. And, to this day, I still go back to China every year to do my routine health tests or the occasional procedure (like a thyroid biopsy in Harbin last year).

In other words, when it comes to the Chinese health system, I've seen a lot.

What's fascinating about the Chinese health system, and that's true in general about many things in China, is that it never inherited Western dogma about how things were supposed to work, it's completely unconstrained by what everyone else has decided is "normal".

And, as a result, you end up with things that would simply sound impossible to any Western patient: a consultation with the head cardiologist of one of Shanghai's best hospitals for less than $10, blood test results in under 30 minutes, and a system where you can walk in, see three specialists and walk out with a diagnosis and your medicine - all before noon.

As I argue in the article that's all enabled by 3 characteristics that sound super unorthodox:
1) extremely short consultation times, less than 5 minutes
2) no GP gatekeepers (you go straight to see specialists)
3) systematic testing for every patient, even if you just have a cold

Each one sounds wrong. And in fact when I describe them to doctor friends in the West they immediately explain to me why that can't possibly work, and how their own system is far superior.

Except that it does work, I checked the numbers (on top of my personal experience): the Chinese system handles close to 10 billion total outpatient visits a year (https://t.co/b1xd45O73F), or about 7 visits per person per year on average, and the average wait time is only about 18 minutes (https://t.co/S3At5DtbJP).

Contrast this with France, my country, where people already go to the doctor A LOT, but still less than in China: only 5.5 visits per person per year (https://t.co/sk1kQt59tK). And the French system can't even handle this lower volume: when you can see a specialist straight away in China - you don't even need to make an appointment in advance - you need to wait months to see one in France (50 days on average for a cardiologist, for instance: https://t.co/ZKZmhzoFFO).

I've personally managed to see 3 specialists AND do all related tests AND get the test results AND get diagnoses AND buy the medicine to cure me - all in the space of a morning at a hospital in Shanghai. That would have undoubtedly taken me a whole year in the French system.

My purpose here is not to argue that the West should replicate the Chinese health system wholesale, but to ask an honest question: what if some of the things we take for granted about healthcare aren't nearly as inevitable as we think? Is it completely unthinkable that we've developed some dogmas that are costing us - in money, in time, and occasionally in lives?

That's the whole point of my article: describing a health system built from first principles by people who never assumed we in the West knew better - up to you to decide if they have a point.

Enjoy the read here: https://t.co/cNXNmo195l

[Jouni Kaipainen @kaipjo]

Eläke siintää 2,5 vuoden päässä, mutta Musk esittää niukkuuden loppuvan 15 vuoden sisällä. Pitäisikö tuhlata kaikki vararahastot? Toisaalta jos kaikki varallisuus keskittyy Muskille, kun me tavikset tuhlaamme rahamme, niin sekin voi harmittaa…

[Dustin @r0ck3t23]

Elon Musk just said saving for retirement becomes pointless in 10 to 20 years. Not speculation. Math.

Musk: “Don’t worry about squirreling money away for retirement in like ten or 20 years. It won’t matter.”

We passed the event horizon. Retirement savings assumes scarcity persists. It won’t.

AI and robotics collapse labor costs to zero. Living costs follow. You’re not saving for security. You’re saving for a world that stops existing.

Musk: “If any of the things that we’ve said are true, saving for retirement will be irrelevant.”

Age of Abundance isn’t vision. It’s physics. Economic laws executing whether you believe them or not.

5,000 days. Fourteen years. Global GDP uncaps. Production approaches infinite. Net worth as concept dies.

Only scarcity left is meaning. Money stops being the constraint.

Timeline is shorter than your brain accepts. Fourteen years. We transition from survival work to Universal High Income in that window.

Event horizon isn’t coming. You’re in it. Operating under old rules while ground disappears beneath you means you already lost.

Production costs hit zero through automation. Everything priced on human labor reprices instantly. Housing. Food. Goods. Services. All reset when scarcity evaporates.

Traditional planning assumes structure persists. Save for decades. Retire on capital returns in scarcity markets. That model shatters when abundance becomes baseline.

You’re optimizing for a world vanishing while the replacement materializes. Your strategy becomes obsolete before you finish executing it.

The retirement you’re building toward assumes costs stay high. They collapse. And your savings designed for expensive scarcity become irrelevant in cheap abundance.

Every dollar you put away for future scarcity is a bet against the transformation already happening. And that bet loses the moment production costs hit zero and the economy you planned for stops functioning.

You’re not preparing for the future. You’re clinging to a past that’s ending whether you accept it or not. And fourteen years from now, the question won’t be whether you saved enough. It’ll be why you wasted time saving for conditions that don’t exist anymore.

[Interesting Engineering @IntEngineering]

This unique electronic flower generates solar power by folding, unfolding, and turning with the sun. This makes solar energy more efficient and saves the machine from damage in bad weather.

🎥 SmartFlower / YT

[Esa Vakkilainen @EsaVakkilainen]

Toimisiko Suomessa?

[Pascal Bornet @pascal_bornet]

This one actually made me pause.

Scientists built a robot made of liquid.
Not flexible.
Liquid.

It can split, merge, squeeze through tiny spaces, and then re-form.
When it breaks, it heals itself.

No motors.
No joints.
No rigid body.

I’ve spent years thinking about AI as the brain of machines.
This feels like the first glimpse of something else.

A body that does not have a fixed shape.

Today it’s millimeter-scale.
Tomorrow, it’s medicine moving through the body, or machines exploring places nothing solid can reach.

That thought excites me.
And honestly, it unsettles me too.

So here’s the question.
When machines no longer have a stable form, what does “control” even mean?

#AI #Robotics #SoftRobotics #Innovation #Technology #FutureOfWork

[EU_Eurostat @EU_Eurostat]

The number of women working as scientists and engineers in the EU reached 7.9 million in 2024. 🧑‍🔬🔬

Highest shares in:
🇪🇸Canarias (58.8%)
🇵🇹Região Autónoma dos Açores (57.3%)

Lowest:
🇭🇺Közép-Magyarország (30.0%)
🇫🇮Manner-Suomi (30.7%)

👉https://t.co/i6n7m91W4n

#WomenInScience

[Simon Kuestenmacher @simongerman600]

Good lord! Air pollution was linked to 182,000 deaths in the EU in 2023. This explains why the EU wants to cut air pollution. I knew that air quality in the Italian Po Valley and in part of Poland were particularly bad but wouldn't have expected such high numbers. EVs would certainly help but industrial pollutants must be addressed. Source: https://t.co/GM6aRlpAn1

[Crémieux @cremieuxrecueil]

When I go on a conservative-leaning podcast and they ask me 'Do immigrants explain a lot of the rise in housing costs?' and I'm like 'No, their contribution is pretty small' they're always kind of shocked.

A bigger contributor is the decline of partnering.

Pic related: