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2024-07-26

Cool

Worthy

  • 1977-04 Zappa on Air

    I would say the illusion will continue as long as it's profitable to continue the illusion. At the point where the illusion becomes too expensive to maintain they will just take down the scenery, they will pull back the curtains, they will move all the tables and chairs out of the way, and you will see the brick wall at the back of the theatre.

    as long as you pay, that's the bottom line. For every one of these things you're paying – nobody was ever a Catholic for free. Nobody ever went to TM for free. Fact of the matter is there is no hip world, there is no straight world, there's a world, you see, which has people in it who believe in a variety of different things. Everybody believes in something and everybody, by virtue of the fact that they believe in something uses that something to support their existence. Who is to decide that this guy over here is really right. Who decides that stuff?

etc

  • Why Levittown Didn't Revolutionize Homebuilding

    Levitt is most famous for building “Levittowns,” developments of thousands of homes built rapidly in the 1940s, ‘50s, and ‘60s. By optimizing the construction process with improvements like standardized products and reverse assembly line techniques, Levitt and Sons was able to complete dozens of homes a day at what it claimed was a far lower cost than its competitors. William Levitt styled his company as the General Motors of housing, and both he and it became famous. Levitt graced the cover of Time magazine in 1950, and Levittowns became a household name.

    Levitt’s model of large-scale, efficient homebuilding using mass production-style methods worked for a brief window in the 1950s, but by the end of the 1960s a changing housing market and increasingly strict land use controls meant that such methods were no longer feasible. And even at its peak, Levitt likely pushed large-scale building beyond what could be justified on pure economic terms. Levittown was ultimately a response to a temporary set of housing market conditions, not the herald of a new, better way of building.

  • (May 2021) Japanese homes aren't built to last, and that's the point

  • Southwest Airlines Is Ditching Open Seating on Flights

  • Robot dog with blowtorch stops weeds

  • Is there a homeless crisis?

    I downloaded 7372 different .pdf files, wrote a script to convert each .pdf to plain text, wrote a parser for that text, compensated for 8 billion infuriating inconsistencies in how they do all the reports, damn you HUD, damn you to tell, extracted the data on substance abuse and mental illness, and made plots.

Horseshit

  • A chemist explains the chemistry behind decaf coffee

  • Is a Universal Basic Income System Even Possible?

  • We bought everything needed to make $3M worth of fentanyl

  • History Illustrated: A soft landing for Boeing?

  • 2.6B people don't use the internet

  • Silicon Valley’s ‘Audacity Crisis’ - The Atlantic

    Yet these companies, emboldened by the success of their products and the war chests of investor capital, have brushed these problems aside and unapologetically embraced a manifest-destiny attitude toward their technologies. Some of these firms are, in no uncertain terms, trying to rewrite the rules of society by doing whatever they can to create a godlike superintelligence (also known as artificial general intelligence, or AGI). Others seem more interested in using generative AI to build tools that repurpose others’ creative work with little to no citation. In recent months, leaders within the AI industry are more brazenly expressing a paternalistic attitude about how the future will look—including who will win (those who embrace their technology) and who will be left behind (those who do not). They’re not asking us; they’re telling us. As the journalist Joss Fong commented recently, “There’s an audacity crisis happening in California.”

  • Raw Milk Is Booming. A Salmonella Outbreak Highlights Its Risks (Archive)

    Public health officials have long warned that drinking raw milk could cause food-borne illness, which in rare cases can be deadly, especially for children, older adults and those who are pregnant or who have weakened immune systems. In milder cases, it can cause symptoms like diarrhea, stomach cramping and vomiting. The concern about raw milk has been heightened this year by the rapid spread of bird flu among dairy cattle in the United States. Yet consumer interest in raw milk seems only to have grown — retail sales were about 35 percent higher this June compared with a year earlier, according to data from the market research firm NielsenIQ. “Drinking raw milk has always been playing Russian roulette with your health,” said Dr. Michael Payne, a researcher at the Western Institute of Food Safety and Security at the University of California, Davis. What’s alarming, experts said, is how little the public seems to understand about the seriousness of those risks.

    It is “tragic” to see children continue to be sickened by raw milk from the same farm, Ms. McGonigle-Martin said. “It just makes me so sad for these families.” Jackie’s son has fully recovered; he’s back to swimming and hanging out with his friends, she said. She and her husband still believe there are certain health benefits of raw milk. But they now buy pasteurized milk, which her son won’t drink. After his hospitalization, he lost his appetite for milk altogether.

  • Cardboard beds have returned to the Olympics. What do they do?

celebrity gossip

  • Paul Graham reached out to the key SV firms to attempt to get Jewish VCs fired post October 7th

    Y Combinator co-founder Paul Graham entered the conversation, writing: “Do you really want the full story of what you did to Parker to be told publicly? Because it’s the worst case of an investor maltreating a founder that I’ve ever heard, and I’ve heard practically all of them.” In another post he called Sacks, “evil.” Sacks wrote a lengthy, scathing reply saying that the two had never met, pointing to the SEC investigation, and accusing Graham of some underhanded behavior toward Jewish VCs, although Sacks (who is Jewish) did not supply evidence to support such allegations. Then Cloudflare cofounder Matthew Prince weighed in, siding with Conrad against Sacks, who he says he knew in college. “know this story. It’s very bad. Don’t know if David is most evil person in SV. Lots of competition.”

  • What Rupert Murdoch Owns, and How He Built His Media Empire - The New York Times

    With dozens of acquisitions, Mr. Murdoch created the media conglomerate known for the rise of the modern tabloid and conservative commentary. His tenure has not been without scandal: One of his properties in Britain folded in 2011 after a phone-hacking inquiry, and he admitted last year that Fox News had spread falsehoods about the 2020 U.S. presidential election.

Musk

Electric / Self Driving cars

Religion / Tribal / Culture War and Re-Segregation

  • NYU law school project seeks to obtain rights for non-living entities: trees, rocks, and nature itself.

  • A Racial Change in Economic Opportunity

  • America Is Not a Racist Country

    Charles: What may distinguish me from others is that I don’t think talking about race and IQ need be a big deal. If we treat people as individuals, then we don’t have to think about group means or averages. All you have to do is evaluate a black person, or any person, as an individual. There are brilliant black intellectuals in every challenging field. The problem is that people find it very difficult to think in terms of overlapping frequency distributions instead of differences in means.

    Tom: That’s, of course, one of the reasons people use for not wanting to talk about race and IQ at all. Most people stereotype, they say. If you tell people that blacks as a group are not as intelligent as whites, then they interpret this to mean that all blacks are less intelligent than all whites.

Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising

ClownStrike

TechSuck / Geek Bait

AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World

Space / Boomy Zoomers / UFO

Crypto con games

Economicon / Business / Finance

Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making

TBA 2024 / Democrats Demonstrate "Our Democracy"

  • Opinion | Hillary Clinton: How Kamala Harris Can Win and Make History - The New York Times

    Elections are about the future. That’s why I am excited about Vice President Kamala Harris. She represents a fresh start for American politics. She can offer a hopeful, unifying vision. She is talented, experienced and ready to be president. And I know she can defeat Donald Trump. Ms. Harris’s record and character will be distorted and disparaged by a flood of disinformation and the kind of ugly prejudice we’re already hearing from MAGA mouthpieces. She and the campaign will have to cut through the noise, and all of us as voters must be thoughtful about what we read, believe and share.

  • Obama doesn’t believe Kamala Harris can beat Trump, which is why he hasn’t endorsed her.

  • Media’s Soviet-Style Airbrushing of Kamala Harris’ Problematic History

    GovTrack had rated her in 2019 as the most liberal senator in the Senate. That means to the left of Bernie Sanders. That’s a problem for Kamala Harris, and that is something that Republicans are hitting her on. And in completely Soviet style. GovTrack simply took down her page and posted a notice saying that they’ve reconsidered things. And their whole methodology that they used in 2019, not just for her, but for everybody, was now wrong. And they removed the page much like the Soviets would remove pages from the encyclopedia.

  • Billionaire Orders Kamala Harris to Fire Lina Khan

  • Kamala Harris makes history on 'RuPaul's Drag Race All Stars 9' finale

    Vice President Kamala Harris is turning the RuPaul's Drag Race All Stars 9 finale into an important campaign stop with Mama RuPaul — and making her-story in the process. The 59-year-old political figure — endorsed by President Joe Biden as his preferred successor on the Democratic ticket in the upcoming 2024 presidential election — will have a special guest appearance during Friday's All Stars 9 finale, making her the first-ever sitting V.P. to ever sashay into the RuPaul's Drag Race Werk Room.

Biden Inc

  • The Beginning of Biden’s Long Goodbye - The New York Times

    What there was not much of was introspection about how he had gotten to this moment of indignity. He may be focused on the soul of America, but he revealed little of his own. Indeed, if there has been much soul searching over these past days and weeks of personal and political trauma that led to this reluctant end of his storied half-century political career, the search has been called off. Or at least the results were not reported. He said it was time to “pass the torch to a new generation,” but said nothing about his own age, health or capacity that led so many Democrats to desert him since the calamitous debate on June 27. He did not describe the journey from supreme confidence that he and he alone could beat former President Donald J. Trump to the conclusion that in fact he could not. He offered no elaboration on how he had finally decided to give up his bid for a second term, but at the same time, he held back any bitterness he may have felt.

Trump / Right / Jan6

  • Judge denies dismissing Trump’s defamation suit against ABC, Stephanopoulos

    A federal judge on Wednesday denied ABC News and George Stephanopoulos’s motion to dismiss former President Trump’s lawsuit claiming the anchor defamed him in a March interview. The ruling enables Trump’s suit against the network and Stephanopoulos to move forward over the anchor repeatedly stating on-air while interviewing a lawmaker that the former president had been found “liable for rape” in a lawsuit brought by advice columnist E. Jean Carroll. The jury had found Trump liable for sexual abuse, but not rape.

  • AP News removes a fact-check claiming JD Vance has not had sex with a couch

    The Associated Press has apparently retracted a fact-check published yesterday with the headline, “No, JD Vance did not have sex with a couch.” As of Thursday morning, the article page displayed a “page unavailable” error message. But there’s also technically no proof that Vance didn’t have sex with a couch — there’s no way a journalist could truly know that. He just didn’t write about it.

Law Breaking / Police / Internal Security

External Security / Militaria / Diplomania

World

Israel

Russia Bad / Ukraine War

China

Health / Medicine

Pox / COVID / BioTerror AgitProp

Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda

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