2024-11-20

myths about Truth, Musk asked for X-rays, misery of diversity, Ig Nobels not so ignoble, wither Chrome? RHEL on WSL, USPS lost $9 Billion, Dems learned helplessness, cable sabotage, Europe vs Russia

etc

• We Found a 79-Year-Old Grandma Winning Burnout Contests in Her 1957 Caddy

• Which Power Plant Does My Electricity Come From? — Practical Engineering

Horseshit

• Avengers Dissemble - Low Status Opinions

• The number of exceptional people: Fewer than 85 per 1M across key traits

• Why can't we just launch all of Earth's garbage into the sun?

• Human in Bear Suit Was Used to Defraud Insurance Companies, Officials Say

• The Painted Protest: how politics destroyed contemporary art

• Romans rebel against Colosseum and Airbnb's plans to stage gladiatorial battles

• The World Has a New Most Powerful Supercomputer. It's Going to Build Nukes

• NYC Announces 'Drone as First Responder' Program to Reduce Response Times

• Emergent gravity may be a dead idea, but it's not a bad one

• Organized Labor Is Key to Governing Big Tech

celebrity gossip

• Hackers Steal MLB Star Kris Bryant's $200K Lamborghini by Rerouting Delivery

Obit

• The Debian Project mourns the loss of Jérémy Bobbio (Lunar)

Rank Propaganda / Thought Policing / World Disordering

• Was it better when we were manufacturing consent?

  Unburdened from the stifling editorial constraints and labyrinthine bureaucracy that define mainstream media, one might have imagined, back in the 1980s, that alternative media would ride into the information landscape like a gallant knight. Free from the stodgy dictates of corporate overlords, unencumbered by the subtle nudges of government regulators, rogue commentators could finally deliver that rarest of commodities: the unvarnished truth. But no, alternative media is mostly a hell-hole.

  Accuracy doesn’t go viral. Nuance doesn’t trend. A sober, balanced analysis of the latest economic crisis isn’t going to outperform an inflammatory, conspiratorial takedown of the lizard people who are running the Federal Reserve. The game isn’t about truth; it’s about engagement—the only real filter left. And engagement is a capricious and shallow deity, demanding spectacle over substance and outrage over understanding.

Musk

• Elon Musk Asked People to Upload Their Health Data. X Users Obliged - The New York Times

  Over the past few weeks, users on X have been submitting X-rays, MRIs, CT scans and other medical images to Grok, the platform’s artificial intelligence chatbot, asking for diagnoses. The reason: Elon Musk, X’s owner, suggested it. Although there’s been no similar public callout from Google’s Gemini or OpenAI’s ChatGPT, people can submit medical images to those tools, too. The decision to share information as sensitive as your colonoscopy results with an A.I. chatbot has alarmed some medical privacy experts.

• X's Moonshot for Circularity

  As X’s moonshot for the circular economy, we are developing new ways to reuse and recycle the world’s products and materials. Our goal is to make circularity so easy and economical that we no longer generate waste or extract raw resources that don’t have regenerative properties.

• xAI has shifted all AI server orders from troubled Supermicro to Dell

• Elon Musk's messy breakup with OpenAI

• Federal government could help Elon Musk with his robotaxi plans

Electric / Self Driving cars

• Austin CapMetro puts 46 new EV buses in storage due to CA Proterra bankruptcy

Religion / Tribal / Culture War and Re-Segregation

• The Misery of Diversity | NBER

  Evolutionary accounts assert that while diversity may lower subjective well-being (SWB) by creating an evolutionary mismatch between evolved psychological tendencies and the current social environment, human societies can adapt to diversity via intergroup contact under appropriate conditions. Exploiting a novel natural experiment in history, we examine the impact of the social environment, captured by population diversity, on SWB. We find that diversity lowers cognitive and hedonic measures of SWB. Diversity-induced deteriorations in the quality of the macrosocial environment, captured by reduced social cohesion, retarded state capacity, and increased inequality in economic opportunities, emerge as mechanisms explaining our findings. The analysis of first- and second-generation immigrants in Europe and the USA reveals that the misery of home country diversity persists even after neutralizing the role of the social environment. However, these effects diminish among the second generation, suggesting that long-term improvements in the social environment can alleviate the burden of diversity

Edumacationalizing / Acedemia Nuts

• Embattled Superconductivity Scientist, Ranga Dias, Is Out

  • Scientist behind superconductivity claims ousted

• Explicit deepfake scandal shuts down Pennsylvania school

• Nearly half of US thinks scientists are smug, and studies show humility helps.

• America's fractured trust in science, explained in 3 charts

• Canada's School Smartphone Ban Is Not Going Well

• How a silly science prize changed my career

  Other researchers have similar stories about winning the famous — some would say ‘infamous’ — awards. Abrahams created them in 1991, after years of collecting examples of weird research that he included in the Journal of Irreproducible Results, which he was editor of at the time. “I kept meeting people who’d unknowingly done very funny things that almost no one knew about.” The response from the scientific community was mixed at the start, but Abrahams says that the Ig Nobels are not out to harm anyone’s career. And last year, the prize received more than 9,000 nominations, a sign of how much it has grown, he says.

• Boston U Suspends Admissions to Humanities and Social Science PhD Programs

• Gadolinium, lutetium, and zirconium all have new atomic weights

  • Standard Atomic Weights of Three Technology Critical Elements Revised

  • gadolinium: to 157.249 ± 0.002 from 157.25 ± 0.03
  • lutetium: to 174.966 69 ± 0.000 05 from 174.9668 ± 0.0001
  • zirconium: to 91.222 ± 0.003 from 91.224 ± 0.002

Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising

• US Justice Department wants Google to sell Chrome, more

  • Google Faces Painful Reckoning as Antitrust Cases Rev Up

  • DOJ to ask judge to force Google to sell off Chrome, Bloomberg News reports

  • US Justice Department plans to push Google to sell off Chrome browser

  • DOJ Will Push Google to Sell Chrome to Break Search Monopoly

  • Google reacts to report that it will have to sell Chrome

  • Rumble CEO Chris Pavlovski Expresses Interest in Buying Google Chrome

• Google Merging Chrome OS into Android to Rival iPad

• Social media exodus may make us all calmer

• Bluesky Overwhelmed with Censorship Demands

  • Twitter rival Bluesky fights a flood of spam, scams, and harmful content as millions join

• The rise of Bluesky, and the splintering of social

• Bluesky is a new kind of social network. Decentralised and freed from the control of any single company, it is resistant to groupthink and censorship and if you say there are only two genders you will be banned instantly.

• Bluesky just crossed 20M users

  • Bluesky tops 20M users, narrowing gap with Instagram Threads

• Intern once saved Valve from near-fatal lawsuit; it all hinged on one email

• Sony is in talks to buy media powerhouse behind 'Elden Ring'

• Minecraft enters real world with $110M global theme park deal

• AP to slash staff by 8% as major news outlets stop buying its content | The Post Millennial | thepostmillennial.com

• Red Hat and Microsoft Bringing RHEL to WSL

  • Bringing Red Hat Enterprise Linux to Windows Subsystem for Linux

• Why Italy Sells So Much Spyware

• Online Age Verification as Trojan Horse for the Mass Rollout of Digital IDs?

• Apple is selling Apple News ads directly

• The Great Redbox Cleanup: One Company Is Hauling Away America's Last DVD Kiosks

• There are people for whom this will be like Disney buying the Vatican. Bose buys McIntosh, storied maker of high-end luxury audio equipment

• Apple TV+ spent $20B on original content. If only people watched

• Niantic announces "Large Geospatial Model" trained on Pokémon Go player data

  • Niantic uses Pokémon Go player data to build AI navigation system

TechSuck / Geek Bait

• FreeCAD 1.0 Released

• The missing text focused programming environment

  • Wanting a better EMACS because ... well, it EMACS! eww!

• Introducing Prusa CORE One: Our new fully-enclosed CoreXY 3D printer with active chamber temperature control

  It has a compact footprint but a large print volume (250×220×270 mm), and there are plenty of clever design choices, e.g. an exoskeleton design for maximum firmness and robustness. One of the standout things is that it allows you to print PLA and PETG with closed doors – which is not as common as you might think.

• Chinese memory makers are dumping DDR4 memory on the market

• weird facts about the most popular dictionary format

  Hunspell is the most used spellchecker in the world. It is built-in Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, Libre/OpenOffice, MacOS, Adobe products, and whatnot. Thus, Hunspell dictionaries are the most common open dictionaries format; they are available for almost a hundred of world languages. The temptation to reuse those dictionaries for text processing is high: they are somewhat suitable not only for spellchecking but also for determining the canonical (base) form of words, canonical capitalization, stemming, etc.

AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World

• Google.org's $20M fund for AI and science

• Perplexity's AI search engine can now buy products for you

• ChatGPT was little help for doctors in diagnosing diseases, study finds

Space / Boomy Zoomers / UFO

• Elon Musk's SpaceX successfully launches Isro's 4,700-kg GSAT-20 to space

• SpaceX rocket launch creates light display

• What to expect during SpaceX’s 6th Starship test flight.

• SpaceX Starship's Sonic Boom Creates Risk of Structural Damage, Test Finds

• SpaceX no-go for catching the booster today

• SpaceX launches sixth Starship but aborts booster landing.

Economicon / Business / Finance

• We Can't Give Up Paper Checks, and That's a Gold Mine for Scammers

• Antitrust Enforcers Prepare Final Blitz Against Big Tech

• Ghost Jobs

• Shoppers Are Ditching Classic Brands They Once Loved

• Insider Trading at the Fed

• Tech jobs are mired in a recession

Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making

• Over 800 IRS employees owe millions in back taxes after audits pushed by Ernst - Washington Examiner

• USPS Incurs $9.5 Billion Loss Despite Raising Stamp Prices | ZeroHedge

  Net loss for 2024 fiscal totaled $9.5 billion, up from $6.5 billion last year, said a Nov. 14 statement from the agency reflecting its earnings. The $3 billion increase in losses occurred at the same time the agency had a slight revenue increase from $78.18 billion to $79.53 billion. The revenue uptick was not supported by an increase in mail volume, which fell from 116 billion units to 112 billion units.

Trump

• Trump appoints Musk associate Brendan Carr as FCC chair

  • Trump's FCC chair is Brendan Carr, who wants to regulate everyone except ISPs

  • FCC attempt to regulate data caps will be scrapped under Trump's new chair

• Trump Picks TV's Dr. Oz to Run Medicare and Medicaid

• Trump picks Lutnick to run Commerce, have responsibility for USTR, tariffs

• Stanford’s Jay Bhattacharya emerges as a top candidate to lead NIH - The Washington Post

  When three academics in October 2020 insisted it was time to roll back coronavirus lockdowns — writing an open letter known as the Great Barrington Declaration that attracted hundreds of thousands of signatures — public health leaders rebuked their proposal as premature. Francis S. Collins, then director of the National Institutes of Health, privately dismissed the authors as “fringe” experts and called for a “take down” of their suggestions to reopen schools and businesses, according to emails subsequently released under the Freedom of Information Act. Now, one of the authors of that declaration — Jay Bhattacharya, a Stanford physician and economist — appears poised for a top government health role, perhaps as head of NIH itself. Bhattacharya is a strong candidate to lead the nearly $50 billion agency in the coming Trump administration, with his name on an internal list of contenders being compiled by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., according to four people who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private conversations. Kennedy was selected Thursday by President-elect Donald Trump to run the Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees NIH. The rise of Bhattacharya — from being scorned by the nation’s NIH director to possibly occupying his office four years later — reflects how the backlash to coronavirus policies has helped reshape conservative politics and elevate new voices. While Collins and other public health experts maintain that the Great Barrington Declaration’s ideas were rash and would have put vulnerable people at risk, many Americans have come to believe that school shutdowns and other pandemic-related policies lasted too long.

• Media Lie About Pete Hegseth’s Christian Faith To Falsely Smear Him As Racist.

  The Associated Press (AP) kicked off the weekend-long vilification campaign Friday evening, publishing a hit piece centered on one of the Army veteran’s Christian tattoos. Authored by Tara Copp, Michelle Smith, and Jason Dearen, the article attempts to tie Hegseth to “white supremacist groups” by claiming his “Deus Vult” bicep tattoo — which is Latin for “God wills it” — is “associated” with such organizations.

• Hacker Is Said to Have Obtained Damaging Testimony About Gaetz

  An unidentified hacker gained access to a file shared in a secure link among lawyers with clients who have given damaging testimony related to Matt Gaetz, President-elect Donald J. Trump’s choice to be attorney general, a person with knowledge of the activity said. The file is said to include sworn testimony by a woman who said that she had sex with Mr. Gaetz in 2017 when she was 17, in addition to testimony by a second woman who said that she had witnessed the encounter. The material does not appear to have been made public by the hacker.

• Vivek's 'jackhammer and chain saw' plan to force federal workers back to office

• Trump Team Targets Auto Mileage Rules He Blasted as 'EV Mandate'

• Trump election case: Georgia appeals court cancels oral arguments

• 'Do not pet': Why are robot dogs patrolling Mar-A-Lago?

Democrats / Biden Inc

• DNC union rips leadership for laying off employees without severance.

Left Angst

• Donald Trump's pick for energy secretary says 'there is no climate crisis'

  President-elect Donald Trump’s pick to lead the Department of Energy is fossil fuel executive Chris Wright — who has misleadingly claimed on LinkedIn that “there is no climate crisis, and we’re not in the midst of an energy transition either.”

• 4yr cruise: Skip Forward Tour to Avoid Trump's Second Presidential Term

• Scientific American Loses Its Bold Leader

  Trump spews insults and wins the election. Helmuth loses her job. Critics of cancel culture cheered Helmuth’s cancellation. I’m guessing we’ll see more of this sickening double standard in coming months and years. I’m writing this column, first, to express my admiration for Helmuth. She is not only a fearless, intrepid editor, who is passionate about science (she has a Ph.D. in cognitive neuroscience). She is also—and I’ve heard this from her colleagues and experienced it first-hand--a kind, considerate person. That’s a heroic feat in this mean-spirited age. I’d also like to address the complaint that Helmuth’s approach to science was too political and partisan. Yes, under Helmuth, Scientific American has had a clear progressive outlook, ordinarily associated with the Democratic party. The magazine endorsed Joe Biden four years ago, shortly after Helmuth took over, and Kamala Harris this year. Sci Am presented scientific analyses of and took stands on racism, reproductive rights, trans rights, climate change, gun violence and covid vaccines. Critics deplored the magazine’s “transformation into another progressive mouthpiece,” as The Wall Street Journal put it. Biologist Jerry Coyne says a science magazine should remain “neutral on issues of politics, morals, and ideology.” What??!! As Coyne knows, science, historically, has never been “neutral.” Powerful groups on the right and left have employed science to promote their interests and propagate lethal ideologies, from eugenics to Marxism. Science journalists can either challenge abuses of science or look the other way.

• We Need to Talk More About Trans People, Not Less

  Thanks to nearly $250 billion in campaign spending, Republicans have owned the discourse about trans people and have, in Steve Bannon’s memorable phrase, “flooded the zone with shit.” They have spread lies about trans identity, trans sports, and trans kids. They have Swift-Boated the Democrats, who were afraid to fight back and lost votes and credibility as a result. And while that disinformation blitz didn’t determine the outcome of the election — the economy did — it raised the intensity of anti-trans sentiment, to the point where the basic science and lives of trans people is now being denied. I got a small taste of that myself, when, on CNN last week, I objected to a fellow journalist describing trans girls as “boys playing girls’ sports.” In response, I’ve received thousands of hateful text messages, emails, and social media messages, which comes with the territory, but I’ve also been excoriated on Fox News, in the Atlantic, and elsewhere, which often repeated the same medically-inaccurate, historically-inaccurate right-wing talking points.

• Opinion | How Elon Musk’s and Vivek Ramaswamy’s Government-Slashing Spree Could Backfire - The New York Times

  Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy are the perfect partners for a president-elect whose signature phrase before his time in the White House was, “You’re fired.” About 80 percent of Twitter’s employees were laid off or quit after Musk bought the social media platform and renamed it X. Ramaswamy said on a September podcast that if the federal government fired 75 percent of its employees, “not a thing” would change “for the ordinary American, other than the size of their government being a lot smaller and more restrained, spending a lot less money to operate it.” Um, guys? Take a look at this chart of people directly or indirectly working for the federal government as a share of the U.S. population age 16 and older. It’s lower now than when President Reagan was in office.

• The Democratic Party's Cult of Powerlessness

  I find a curious dynamic that explains far more than any tactical mistake. From local field organizers to the most prestigious people in the Democratic Party, like Nancy Pelosi and Barack Obama, all seem to feel powerless. For instance, most insiders felt Joe Biden was far too old to win reelection, but did not feel able to act or say anything when it mattered. Similarly, Nancy Pelosi and Obama indicated they knew Harris was a bad candidate, but holding an open process to find a new one was, in Pelosi’s words, “impossible.” And it’s not just an electoral problem, it goes back to governing. It’s not that Democrats didn’t know the core problem they faced among voters. The main legislative effort they passed in 2022 was titled “The Inflation Reduction Act.” They knew that people were mad about inflation, hence the title. But did it actually do much about inflation? No. And they knew that too. It was a pre-baked set of solutions and they would have applied it to any problem. They knew they should do something about costs, but, well, there was just no way to do anything but ride off the cliff with everyone else. In other words, there is a cult of learned helplessness at the core of most American institutions, one that Trump punctured by appearing to be a man of action. And the Democratic Party in 2024, with its associated law firms, think tanks, elected officials, donors, and media outlets, was rejected by voters precisely because the core value on the left, center, and right is about embracing powerlessness. This pervasive belief has an intellectual and political origin, and it conflicts directly with the anti-monopoly framework.

• Health care organization launches ‘Stop RFK War Room.’

• Italian village offers $1 homes to Americans upset by the US election result

Law Breaking / Police / Internal Security

• SEC Charges Bit Mining for Bribing Members of Japanese Parliament

• US extradites Russian for extorting millions in Phobos ransomware payments

External Security / Militaria / Diplomania

• A Cash-Starved Russian Ally Detains Western Miners' Staff in Tax Raid

• US and Europe fear escalation of RU hybrid warfare amid Ukraine missile attacks

World

• Damage to Baltic Sea cables was sabotage, German minister says

  • Sabotage suspected after Baltic Sea telecom cable C-Lion1 suddenly stops working

  • Two undersea cables in Baltic Sea disrupted

  • HN comments

  • Severing of Baltic Sea Cables Was 'Sabotage,' Germany Says

  • Chinese vessel spotted where Baltic Sea cables were severed

• Joint Declaration by the Foreign Ministers of Germany, France, Poland, Italy, Spain and the United Kingdom in Warsaw - Federal Foreign Office

  Russia is systematically attacking European security architecture. For the last 1,000 days, in its war of aggression against Ukraine, Russia has killed many thousands and repeatedly violated international law. Russia’s reckless revisionism and constant refusal to stop the aggression and engage in meaningful talks challenges peace, freedom and prosperity on the European continent and in the transatlantic area. Russia is increasingly reliant on partners such as Iran and North Korea in order to sustain its illegal warfare. Moscow’s escalating hybrid activities against NATO and EU countries are also unprecedented in their variety and scale, creating significant security risks. To live up to this historic challenge, we are determined to stand united with our European and transatlantic partners to think and act big on European security. European countries must play a still greater role in assuring our own security, acting alongside our transatlantic and global partners.

• Germany vows not to be intimidated again by Russia's nuclear deterrent policy

• PF seeks 5 for alleged plan to kill Lula and Alckmin at the end of 2022 - News Room USA | LNG in Northern BC

  The Federal Police served five arrest warrants – including military personnel with Special Forces training, the so-called “black kids” – this Tuesday (19) for allegedly trying to promote a coup d’état after the 2022 presidential election. investigations that led to Operation Countercoup, the group planned to assassinate then-elected president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (PT) and vice Geraldo Alckmin (PSB). In addition to the five arrest warrants, three search and seizure warrants and 15 precautionary measures were executed in the states of Rio de Janeiro, Goiás and Amazonas and in the Federal District, authorized by Minister Alexandre de Moraes, of the Federal Supreme Court.

  • Lula Was Target of Assassination Plot, Brazilian Police Say

• Indian Capital, Delhi's air pollution reaches 'severe plus' levels

• (Japaneese language) Electromagnetic coil gun seized in Japan

• New European Wealth Gauge Helps Policymakers Address Inequality

• Apple to increase Indonesia investment tenfold to appeal iPhone 16 ban

• Australia increasingly hostile toward secure messaging apps

• 'We were horrified': parents heartbroken as baby girl registered as male

Iran / Houthi

• Iran offers to cap uranium stock to avoid IAEA resolution

Russia Bad / Ukraine War

• Ukraine fires US-supplied long range missiles into Russia, defence ministry says

China

• EU to demand technology transfers from Chinese companies

• Novo Nordisk sells hit weight-loss drug in China–at fraction of US price

Health / Medicine

• In defence of slouching: the bad science behind good posture

• More than half of U.S. adults could be candidates for Ozempic

• Why alarm is easing over a rise in pancreatic cancer among the young

• Mouth taping may help with snoring and sleep apnea

• Vegetarianism is causally correlated with negative mental well-being

Pox / COVID / BioTerror AgitProp

• The World Is Watching the U.S. Deal with Bird Flu, and It's Scary

• H5N1 bird flu virus in Canadian displays mutations demonstrating virus' risk

• Bird flu in Canada may have mutated to become more transmissible to humans

• 60% of Americans say they probably won't get an updated Covid-19 vaccine

Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda

• (Sep 2024) Former Monsanto exec's invite-only social network reveals the dark tactics of the pro-chemical lobby - ABC News

• Heat pump scheme for Edwardian social housing aims to bust low-carbon myths

• Cape Town may pump as much sewage into the sea as it likes

  The City of Cape Town is now allowed to pump an unlimited volume of untreated sewage out to sea, following a decision by Environment Minister Dion George. This was revealed in George’s parliamentary reply to a question posed by ActionSA MP Malebo Kobe on what steps the Department of Forestry, Fisheries and the Environment (DFFE) was taking against the City of Cape Town releasing more than 30 million litres of raw sewage into the marine reserve per day.

• Controlled burn revives rare plant in Bay Area for first time in 100 years

• Tribes engineered British Columbia's hazelnut forests more than 7K years ago

• Can India's 5k-Year-Old Disposable Clay Cups Compete with Plastic?

• Has New York's Ambitious Billion Oyster Project Worked?

• Brazil leads new international effort against climate lies at the G20 summit

• Largest coral discovered in Solomon Islands

• Microplastic Menace: North Pacific Garbage Patch Is Worse Than Anyone Expected