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2025-02-22

humanoid robots, funding the Atlantic Council, Apple integrity, Bezos in bed, NASA's bad dreams, Democrat complicity, reintegrating USPS? Trumpist hockey, criminal police, another cable cut, COVID25

etc

Horseshit

celebrity gossip

Rank Propaganda / Thought Policing / World Disordering

  • (Jan 2025) Big Ideas and Big Money: Think Tank Funding in America - Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft

    In the past five years, foreign governments and foreign government-owned entities donated more than $110 million to the top 50 think tanks in the United States. The most generous donor countries were the United Arab Emirates, the United Kingdom, and Qatar... . The Atlantic Council, Brookings Institution, and German Marshall Fund received the most money from foreign governments since 2019: $20.8 million, $17.1 million, and $16.1 million, respectively.

    In that same period, the top 100 defense companies have contributed more than $34.7 million to the top 50 think tanks. The top donors include Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin, and Mitsubishi... The Atlantic Council, Center for a New American Security, and the Center for Strategic and International Studies were the top recipients of Pentagon contractor money: $10.2 million, $6.6 million, and $4.1 million, respectively.

    The U.S. government has directly given at least $1.49 billion to American think tanks since 2019. However, the vast majority of this funding — $1.4 billion — goes to the Rand Corporation, which works directly for the U.S. government.

    • Rand then passes funding on...

Musk

Electric / Self Driving cars

Religion / Tribal / Culture War and Re-Segregation

Edumacationalizing / Acedemia Nuts

  • Please Commit More Blatant Academic Fraud

    because everybody is complicit in this subtle fraud, nobody is willing to acknowledge its existence. Who would be such a hypocrite as to condemn in others, behaviors they can see clearly in themselves? And yet, who is willing to undermine their own achievements by admitting that their own work does not have scientific value?1 The sad result is that, as a community, we have developed a collective blind-spot around a depressing reality: even at top conferences, the median published paper contains no truth or insight. Any attempts to highlight or remedy the situation are met with harsh resistance from those who benefit from the current state of affairs. The devil himself could not have designed a better impediment to humanity’s progression. But now that blatant academic fraud is in the mix, the AI community has a fighting chance. By partaking in a form of fraud that has left the Overton window of acceptability, the researchers in the collusion ring have finally succeeded in forcing the community to acknowledge its blind spot. For the first time, researchers reading conference proceedings will be forced to wonder: does this work truly merit my attention? Or is its publication simply the result of fraud?

  • Another win for geology’s Theory of Everything

    Plate tectonics could explain continental plateaus and mini mass extinctions

  • Claims of college grade inflation and dumbing-down are overblown

Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising

TechSuck / Geek Bait

  • LKML: Linus Torvalds on Rust kernel policy

    I am not looking for yes-men, and I like it when you call me out on my bullshit. I say some stupid things at times, there needs to be people who just stand up to me and tell me I'm full of shit.

    But now I'm calling you out on YOURS.

    So this email is not about some "Rust policy". This email is about a much bigger issue: as a maintainer you are in charge of your code, sure - but you are not in charge of who uses the end result and how.

  • History: what really happened with Ciscogate

    The event is famous in the hacker community. In typical fashion, a cybersecurity researcher found vulnerabilities in a product, in this case, Cisco routers. He was set to disclose them in the normal, responsible manner, at a talk at the BlackHat cybersecurity conference. But things went crazy. Cisco swooped in with a bunch of lawyers the night before the talk and forced BlackHat to remove all materials from the printed program, with a large team ripping out pages early into the morning. Nonetheless, the researcher (Michael Lynn) gave the talk. It was pretty good, one of the most entertaining.

    From what I saw, this was not the case of a company suppressing vulnerability research. Instead, it was corporate politics gone awry, crushing an individual employee. I suspect there is a little of this in every such story: it's never really "corporations" making such decisions so much as individuals. How they make decisions is often flawed, such as pursuing their own corporate politics goals. This recent (horrible) paper cites the Ciscogate scandal as everyone knows it, "thin skinned lawyers" suppressing a vulnerability. It's wrong, it was thick skinned lawyers who knew next to nothing about vulns but who were protecting trade secrets.

AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World

Space / Boomy Zoomers / UFO

  • (May 2024) The Lunacy of Artemis

    the first Artemis landing involves a dozen or two heavy rocket launches and costs so much that NASA refuses to give a figure (one veteran of NASA budgeting estimates it at $7-10 billion).[1] The single-use lander for the mission will be the heaviest spacecraft ever flown, and yet the mission's scientific return—a small box of rocks—is less than what came home on Apollo 17. And the whole plan hinges on technologies that haven't been invented yet becoming reliable and practical within the next eighteen months.

    In the past, whatever oddball project NASA came up with, we at least knew they could build the hardware. But Artemis calls the agency’s competence as an engineering organization into question. For the first time since the early 1960's, it's unclear whether the US space agency is even capable of putting astronauts on the moon.

    the minds behind SLS achieved a first in space flight, creating a rocket that is at the same time more powerful and less capable than the Saturn V. While the 1960’s giant could send 49 metric tons to the moon, SLS only manages 27 tons—not enough to fly an Apollo-style landing, not enough to even put a crew in orbit around the moon without a lander. The best SLS can do is slingshot the Orion spacecraft once around the moon and back,

  • X-37B Spaceplane Shares Earth Image for First Time as New Mission Details Emerge

Crypto con games

Economicon / Business / Finance

Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making

Trump

Democrats

  • Why Democrats Won’t Throw a Real Punch | The Nation

    this argument—that the Democrats are not raising nearly enough hell as Apartheid’s Chestburster, Elon Musk, vivisects the government from the inside—is all over the liberal left. The phrase going around is, “The Democrats have brought a lectern to a social media war.” Masses of enraged, terrified people are looking at the analog, slow-motion leadership of Democratic Senate leader Chuck Schumer and the zero-calorie rhetoric of House leader Hakeem Jeffries and want them replaced by people who know how to fight. As The Nation has reported, when Democratic politicians have shown up to protests, people aren’t cheering their presence. They are howling at them to do more. To be clear, people aren’t criticizing the efforts of individual Democrats trying to expose this deadly grand theft taking place in plain sight. The cry is, “Why aren’t the Democrats as unified and ruthless toward their enemies as Republicans?”

    As Moira Donegan wrote in The Guardian, “Why are the Democrats so spineless?” The conventional wisdom is that they simply “don’t know how” to wage a social media and public-relations attack that can, to use one blaring example, define people like JD Vance as a Nazi-curious Manchurian Candidate. But we need to lose the theory that these Dems are “spineless” and just don’t understand how to wage political war. We know they can be vicious because we’ve seen them execute that kind of operation against the left since Ralph Nader caught them sleeping in 2000. We have seen them do it maliciously during Senator Bernie Sanders’s two primary runs. We saw Black and brown women stamped as “Bernie Bros” with enough, yes, ruthless, repetition to make it stick. We’ve seen President Barack Obama with all his rhetorical powers hector young Black men, but not aim his electric cadence at Musk and his Palo Alto brownshirts. It’s not that they cannot—they will not. When it was Sanders or an individual who demanded even a modest change in policy on Gaza, they brought out the knives. When it’s Musk and his apartheid army of incels, they wield sporks. Yet, as we keep seeing, spork fighting is demoralizing.

Left Angst

Law Breaking / Police / Internal Security

External Security / Militaria / Diplomania

World

Russia Bad / Ukraine War

China

Health / Medicine

Pox / COVID / BioTerror AgitProp

Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda

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