2025-07-09


etc

  • The Texas Flooding Tragedy: Could It Have Been Avoided?

    But what is particularly disturbing is that the National Weather Service (NWS) provided excellent warnings and forecasts before the event that clearly predicted a substantial threat. And yet, no attempt at evacuation was made. Furthermore, weather model forecasts indicated the potential for a major precipitation event over this historically flood-prone region during the prior days.

    Any media or other organization suggesting that the National Weather Service was not on top of this event is not only not telling the truth, but doing a deep disservice to the highly professional and skillful folks in that organization. Some folks are making such suggestions for patently political reasons. Extraordinarily unethical and wrong. The Texas flooding is another example of large numbers of deaths, even when weather forecasts are excellent, with all too many other examples, including the Maui wildfires, the LA wildfires, and flooding from Hurricane Helene. But if you really want to experience media and advocacy group loss of moral compass, consider those claiming this event is the result of global warming.

  • Teen 3D-printed a beehive for his bedroom

  • Nuclear reactors smaller than a semi truck to be tested in Idaho


Musk

TechSuck / Geek Bait

  • Back to the Future came out 40 years ago: A hacker's look at the gear

  • The Tandy Corporation, Part 2

    According to InfoWorld, during a photo shoot for the Asimov Pocket Computer ads, a Radio Shack employee asked Asimov: “How close is that to the computer you described in the first volume of the Foundation trilogy?” Isaac Asimov looked at the computer for a bit, then nodded and said “this is it.”

  • Xorg neglect and XLibre slander | Felipe Contreras

    Influential people like YouTuber ThePrimeagen misinform their audience making them believe that tear-free rendering is not possible under Xorg. It’s extremely easy to get rid of tearing without Sultan’s patch, but making a release with this patch could only help. So why are Xorg developers not releasing this patch? Why do they not rectify these myths? One would be tempted to say that perhaps they have a vested interest in making it seem like Xorg can not be fixed, even though this patch was merged in 2022, normal users still cannot use this feature in 2025. It’s interesting enough that the news site Phoronix published an article about it: xf86-video-modesetting X.Org Driver Sees Patch For “TearFree” Page Flipping. This is just one patch out of more than a thousand. Who knows how many gems Xorg maintainers aren’t particularly eager for users to have.

Space / Boomy Zoomers / UFO

Economicon / Business / Finance

Left Angst

  • Detainees allege inhumane conditions at immigration concentration camp

  • One Day in Kentucky and What Makes America Great

    You’ll forgive me if I’m not feeling particularly patriotic on this 4th of July. The president, an authoritarian felon, recently boasted that migrants who escape from their purpose-built cages will get eaten by aligators.

  • 'There's a knife at my throat'. A tax code time bomb hammered small businesses

    Like many small businesses, Agile Six was blindsided and hammered by a quiet shift in the U.S. tax code, a change to what’s known as Section 174. The change radically rewrote the tax rules on research and development. And it has helped fuel the loss of hundreds of thousands of high-paying, white-collar jobs, a Quartz investigation revealed last month. The tweak dates back to the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA), the first Trump administration’s signature tax legislation. That bill slashed the corporate tax rate from 35% to 21% — a massive revenue loss on paper for the federal government. To make the bill appear deficit-neutral over the standard 10-year budget window, lawmakers inserted delayed provisions that would raise future revenue. The change to Section 174 was one of them. It didn’t take effect until 2022. But when it did, the impact was brutal.

    • If only the Democrats had been given an opportunity to "fix" things at some point between then and now, eh?
  • What Is American Exceptionalism, and Is It Coming to an End?

  • Founders sign letter to Sequoia on Shaun Maguire's Mamdani remarks

    Almost 600 people have signed an open letter to leaders at venture firm Sequoia Capital after one of its partners, Shaun Maguire, posted what the group described as a “deliberate, inflammatory attack” against the Muslim Democratic mayoral candidate in New York City. Maguire, a vocal supporter of President Donald Trump, posted on X over the weekend that Zohran Mamdani, who won the Democratic primary last month, “comes from a culture that lies about everything” and is out to advance “his Islamist agenda.” Those signing the letter are asking Sequoia to condemn Maguire’s comments and apologize to Mamdani and Muslim founders. They also want the firm to authorize an independent investigation of Maguire’s behavior in the past two years and post “a zero-tolerance policy on hate speech and religious bigotry.”

  • DOJ goes after US citizen for developing anti-ICE app

  • Learning to See America's Promise Through Its Failures

    The United States was the original author of the restrictive, "guilty-until-proven-innocent" immigration regime that is the global standard today. These laws made it so impossible for me to get a visa that I was forced into a nightmare I can barely speak about—becoming a sex slave to a trafficker, just to get the permission to escape from Iran. The permission which they had taken away from me simply because of where I was born. Today’s immigration system has its roots in the Confederate states, and it became federal law through the Immigration Act of 1924. A legislation so restrictive and exclusionary that it inspired and fueled the Nazi movement, unleashing a wave of nationalist hatred across the world.

  • Trump Fired Them. Now They’re Plotting to Stop Him.

    Former USAID and State Department officials worried about the future of democracy in America say they’re actively organizing to resist Trump, inside and outside of government.

    “Take it from those of us who worked in authoritarian countries: We’ve become one,” said a currently employed federal official, who spoke to NOTUS on condition of anonymity. “They were so quick to disband AID, the group that supposedly instigates color revolutions. But they’ve done a very foolish thing. You just released a bunch of well-trained individuals into your population. If you kept our offices going and had us play solitaire in the office, it might have been safer to keep your regime.”

  • Take Off the Mask, ICE

  • Science Makes the U.S. a Great Nation

  • Trump's NASA budget could cede solar system to China, scientists warn

  • All living NASA science chiefs unite in opposition to unprecedented budget cuts

  • Masked, Armed and Forceful: Finding Patterns in Los Angeles Immigration Raids

Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda