2024-12-21

the Sun will come back, magic beans, Spotify ghost artists and chum tracks, pr0xxies for all, risk transfer to whom really?, shutdown averted, "rigorous oversight" != prevention, whale ages

etc

• What's the Winter Solstice? (Archive)

  “If you look at the three-dimensional sphere that’s around us, known as the celestial sphere, the sun as well as all other solar system objects move through a plane in this celestial sphere, known as the ecliptic plane.” “While doing so, the sun changes its declination,” he says. Declination and right ascension are the two primary axes of the celestial sphere. “In this reference frame, the sun is at the most southern location when it’s the winter solstice from our perspective in the Northern Hemisphere.” A winter solstice in the Northern Hemisphere happens when the North Pole is tilted farthest away from the sun. The Arctic Circle is cloaked in darkness and experiences its longest night of the year. In the southern hemisphere, a summer solstice simultaneously happens with the South Pole angled towards the sun and the Antarctic Circle experiencing midnight sun.

Horseshit

• More Men Are Addicted to the 'Crack Cocaine' of the Stock Market

• Fentanyl Almost Killed Michael Brewer. Now He Wants Snap to Pay

• The Age of Quantum Software Has Already Started

• Carpet fibres delay or stop concrete cracking

  Engineers in Australia have found a way to make stronger and crack-resistant concrete with scrap carpet fibres, rolling out the red carpet for sustainability in the construction sector.

  • I'm standing on a 20+ year old slab with polyfill fibers in the mix. I don't think the idea was new then.

• Liquid Death's leather mosh pit diaper sells out after viral bathroom incident

• People Are the New Brands

• Cory Doctorow's prescient 2019 novella about health insurance and murder

• The secret to long-lasting connection? Shared rituals

• The USDA Say It's Time to Replace Meat with Beans

  The committee doesn’t just suggest having more beans and lentils — it recommends using them to replace how much red and processed meats you have. In fact, the report proposes reordering the recommendations of protein sources to include beans, peas, and lentils first, followed by nuts, seeds, and soy products. After that, the committee suggests mentioning seafood and meats, poultry, and eggs.

Musk

• X may launch an email service in the format of " X.com" in the future

• Elon Musk gives nod to German far-right party as election looms

  • Germany's far-right AfD welcomes Musk backing

• Sam Altman calls Elon Musk a 'bully'

Electric / Self Driving cars

• Rivian Has Delivered over 20,000 Electric Vans to Amazon So Far

Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising

• Valve will be Lenovo's 'special guest' at just-announced gaming handheld event

• The Ugly Truth About Spotify Is Finally Revealed

  Spotify has gone to war against musicians and record labels. Congress should investigate ethical violations at music streaming businesses—just like they did with payola. Laws must be passed requiring full transparency. Even better, let’s prevent huge streaming platforms from promoting songs based on financial incentives. I don’t do that as a critic. People sometimes try to offer me money for coverage, and I tell them off. It happened again this week, and I got upset. No honest person could take those payoffs. Streaming platforms ought to have similar standards. And if they won’t do it voluntarily, legislators and courts should force their hand.

  • The Ghosts in the Machine, by Liz Pelly (Archive)

  the owner of an independent record label in New York dropped me a line to let me know about a mysterious phenomenon that was “in the air” and of growing concern to those in the indie music scene: Spotify, the rumor had it, was filling its most popular playlists with stock music attributed to pseudonymous musicians—variously called ghost or fake artists—presumably in an effort to reduce its royalty payouts. Some even speculated that Spotify might be making the tracks itself. At a time when playlists created by the company were becoming crucial sources of revenue for independent artists and labels, this was a troubling allegation. At first, it sounded to me like a conspiracy theory. Surely, I thought, these artists were just DIY hustlers trying to game the system. But the tips kept coming. Over the next few months, I received more notes from readers, musicians, and label owners about the so-called fake-artist issue than about anything else.

• What happens to our culture when websites start to vanish?

• Amazon pauses $1B Microsoft 365 rollout following Russian security concerns

• As firms abandon VMware, Broadcom is laughing all the way to the bank

• Community plans to fork Puppet, unhappy with changes to open-source project

• This VPN Lets Anyone Use Your Internet Connection. What Could Go Wrong? | WIRED

  A free VPN app called Big Mama is selling access to people’s home internet networks. Kids are using it to cheat in a VR game while researchers warn of bigger security risks.

• LG has just released a 77" $60k transparent TV

TechSuck / Geek Bait

• DOS APPEND | OS/2 Museum

  For a long time, I couldn’t quite grasp what the DOS APPEND command could possibly be good for. Until I came across a situation which APPEND was made for.

• Intel Abandons "X86S" Plans to Focus on the Regular x86-64 ISA Advisory Group

  • Intel Terminates X86S Initiative

• FreePBX is being destroyed by the current owners, and it's disheartening | Hacker News

• Computer Cousins: The Atari ST and DOS PCs

  GEMDOS, as its name might suggest, was very similar to PC-DOS. Its APIs were similar, but more importantly the disk format was identical. This meant that the Atari ST used the same format as PC disks! At the time, this was not commonly known because the ST used 3.5” disks and PCs generally were still using 5.25” floppies. Plus there was a slight incompatibility with disks formatted by the ST Desktop — they could not be read by a PC. Disks formatted by a PC could be read by the ST. Other tools on the ST could format PC-compatible disks and later versions of the ST OS (TOS) would also format PC-compatible disks.

  • They had compatibility, but then they took an extra effort to wreck it. That was a common pattern... Still is.

AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World

• Is the Tech Industry on the Cusp of an A.I. Slowdown?

• Study: Almost all leading AI chatbots show signs of cognitive decline

Space / Boomy Zoomers / UFO

• FCC Chairwoman Rosenworcel Proposes New Spectrum Allocation for Space Launches

• We're about to fly a spacecraft into the Sun for the first time

• NASA Sees Progress on Starlab Commercial Space Station Development

• NASA, Axiom Space Change Assembly Order of Commercial Space Station

• FAA updates Starship launch license for next flight – SpaceNews

Crypto con games

• N Korea hackers stole $1.3B of crypto this year

• CoinDesk ownership Bullish fires top editorial staff amid newsroom controversy

• Rumble Gets $775M Investment from Crypto Firm Tether

Economicon / Business / Finance

• CFPB: Mortgage Companies Create Obstacles for Homeowners After Death or Divorce

• Rage against the (checkout) machine: Why I won't do self-service with a smile

• Novo Nordisk Falls Most on Record After New Weight Drug Disappoints

• How innovation died at Intel? Uncertain future ahead

• Intel sued again over struggling foundry business

• Key Fed inflation measure shows 2.4% rate in November, lower than expected

• CFPB Sues Chase, BofA, and Wells Fargo for Allowing Fraud to Fester on Zelle

• Inside Wall Street’s booming $1tn ‘synthetic risk transfer’ phenomenon

  When Wirecard went belly up a few years ago, Deutsche Bank ended up with a loss of just €18mn — miraculously little for a bank that had up until then made a habit of ambling into nearly every major financial cow pie in the world. And this had been a giant pile of manure right on its own doorstep. Deutsche had previously underwritten Wirecard bonds, arranged loans for the company, and handed its chief executive a giant margin loan. Fellow German lender Commerzbank took a €175mn hit. How did Deutsche manage to avoid this doo-doo? FT Alphaville gathers that it was probably at least partly thanks to something known as a “synthetic risk transfer” — one of the hottest bits of high-octane financial engineering these days. Deutsche Bank declined to comment. In SRTs, a bank offloads some or all of the risks of some of its loans to ease how much capital it has to set aside for regulatory purposes. The loans remain on the bank’s balance sheet, but the buyer of an SRT typically promises to cover a chunk of the losses if the loans go bad. The buyers are investors such as insurance companies, hedge funds and (increasingly) private credit funds, which take on the risk in exchange for a fee.

  • "risk" == "they cover the loss" but there is some question in my mind of ability. sounds like the beginnings of anther "bailout to save the economy" scam, to cover loans when they fail. Who gets these loans? Not you and me.

• Starbucks Baristas Walk Out and Picket in Three Cities in Bid for Contract

• Remote Work Is Increasingly a Right of the Rich

• Carlos Ghosn Says Nissan Is 'Desperate' Amid Merger Talks with Honda

• Why online returns are a hassle now

Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making

• US Funding Plan Fails with Less Than 24 Hours to Shutdown

• Senators slam automakers for selling data and blocking the right to repair

• Cutting Government Is Easy If You Go After McKinsey

• House Weaponization panel releases 17,000-page report exposing ‘two-tiered system of government.’

  "The Weaponization Committee conducted rigorous oversight of the Biden-Harris administrations weaponized government and uncovered numerous examples of federal government abuses," Jordan told Fox News Digital. "Through our oversight, we protected the First Amendment by investigating the censorship-industrial-complex, heard from numerous brave whistleblowers, stopped the targeting of Americans by the IRS and Department of Justice, and created serious legislative and policy changes that will benefit all Americans." "For too long, however, the American people have faced a two-tiered system of government—one of favorable treatment for the politically-favored class, and one of intimidation and unfairness for the rest of American citizens," it continues. "Under the Biden-Harris Administration, the contrast between these two tiers has become even more stark."

• House passes bill to avert shutdown hours ahead of deadline

Trump

• Trump tells EU to buy US oil and gas or face tariffs

  “I told the European Union that they must make up their tremendous deficit with the United States by the large scale purchase of our oil and gas. Otherwise, it is TARIFFS all the way!!!” Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform on Friday. Trump’s threat follows overtures already made by Brussels offering to buy more US liquefied natural gas, which has been a lifeline for the bloc after Russia squeezed supplies of fossil fuels following its full-scale invasion of Ukraine. European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen said in November that the EU would consider buying more gas from the US. “We still get a lot of LNG from Russia and why not replace it by American LNG, which is cheaper for us and brings down our energy prices,” she told reporters. “It seems odd as a ‘threat’ given that von der Leyen alluded to the possibility of doing precisely this,” one EU official observed.

Democrats / Biden Inc

• Senators urge Biden to grant ByteDance 90-day reprieve from law requiring sale

• WSJ, NYT Agree: Biden Was In Obvious Cognitive Decline Not Just at the End But For His Entire Term as Fake President

  Biden has Schrodinger's Senility -- he only is senile when he's being observed.

Left Angst

• And Now a Word from House Minority Leader Maxwell Smart

  Years of build-up to assign a meaning to Donald Trump: power, danger, menace, ambition, ego, cruelty. The triumph of the will! Also, now, this world-historically terrifying figure who carries nearly infinite power and danger in his being is…just a puppet.

• Canada's retaliation for Trump tariffs is biggest concern, says Japan's Komatsu

• The Government Is Shutting Down Because Elon Musk Has Factories in China

Law Breaking / Police / Internal Security

• Lawyer for Luigi Mangione says dueling charges 'highly unusual'

External Security / Militaria / Diplomania

• Group Led by Ex-CCP Officials Is Quietly Funding US Govt Climate Research, Filings Show: CCP-tied group wired more than $1 million to a Department of Energy laboratory.

• (PDF) CISA: Do not use SMS as a second factor for authentication

World

• Malaysia Renews Search for Vanished Flight MH370 a Decade On

  • Malaysia approves new search for missing flight MH370

• The Economist declares Bangladesh as Country of the Year

• NZ Transport Agency closes passing lanes to help holiday traffic flow

• An Indian state used citizens' data on political beliefs to deny benefits

• Norway has paused its plans to open up its seabed for deep-sea mining

• $2B luxury 'eco-district' has increased Monaco's size by 3%

• Germany – Car Drives into Crowd

  • Multiple casualties after car drives into crowd at Christmas market in Germany

Israel

• 'No Civilians. Everyone's a Terrorist': IDF Soldiers Expose Arbitrary Killings

• Americans Stuck in Gaza Sue the U.S. for Leaving Them "Trapped in a War Zone"

Russia Bad / Ukraine War

• Ukraine collects vast war data trove to train AI models

• Zelensky calls Putin a 'dumbass' for challenging a missile 'duel'

China

• China nears record launch year with Ceres-1 and SAR satellite missions

• Chinese GPU designers received key technologies from British company Imagination

• Why China-Taiwan Relations Are So Tense

• Like this hasn't been happening in the USA for the last 4 years: China Tells Chief Economists: Be Positive, or Else

Health / Medicine

• The FDA has a new definition for food labels

• He went in for a colonoscopy. The bill was $19,000

Pox / COVID / BioTerror AgitProp

• Louisiana forbids public health workers from promoting Covid, flu and mpox shots

Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda

• A controversial plan to refreeze the Arctic

• Model predictions of global geologic hydrogen resources

• Climate-warming gas leaks must be fixed by utilities in a new proposed rule

• Forest fires are devastating America. I'm helping to start more of them

• In a Major Reversal, the World Bank Is Backing Mega Dams

• We're burning more coal than ever thanks to China

• Microplastics in the Air May Be Leading to Lung and Colon Cancers

• Scientists know our bodies are full of microplastics. What are they doing to us?

• Scientists issue urgent warning after discovering impact of IV treatments

• Study reveals right whales live 130 years – or more

• Even NASA Can't Explain the Alarming Surge in Global Heat We're Seeing