2021-01-31

Cool

• FM Reception with the GNU Radio Companion

Worthy

• An Archeologist’s Guide to Beer Cans | JSTOR Daily

• Black Bart – The Buried TV Sequel To Blazing Saddles – The Reprobate

  As Brooks explained, “Warner Bros comes to me and says they want to make another Blazing Saddles, and I say, ‘No. You don’t have the right to do that.’ They say, ‘Yes we do, we’ve been making a TV series and still control the rights.’ What TV series? I haven’t seen a TV show. They take me onto the lot, into a projection booth, and show me three episodes. My lawyers never thought to put in language that said they had to air the damn thing, only that they had to make it.”

• The Cantillon Effect and GameStop - BIG by Matt Stoller

  As with any complex event, there are multiple narratives at work.

  Cuz reporting "facts" just isnt done all there is to talk about is the competing narratives.

  Still, how did we wind up in a situation where the populist argument is not that cheating is wrong, but that everyone should be allowed to cheat?

  With an economy of monopolies, there are now large profits with nowhere to go because investment in new production doesn’t make sense if you have market power. Workers have little bargaining power, so the extra money doesn’t go to them. Taxes on capital are low, so the money isn’t heading back to the government. Moreover, a lot of small businesses have been shut down because of the pandemic, so people can’t put their savings into new business even if they wanted to. Monopolies and a corrupted financial system have broken the ability to put money into useful enterprises. So where is it going? Speculation.

  I think we’re going through a 1920s mania again. The defining event of our politics is still the great financial crisis of 2008-2012, when our leaders engineered a foreclosure wave for the middle class while reflating financial assets for Wall Street. We did it again with the CARES Act in the spring, where billionaires got everything they needed, but the plumbing to the rest of us is still creaky.

etc

• New OCC Rule Is a Win in the Fight Against Financial Censorship | Electronic Frontier Foundation

  Under the new rule, banks will still be empowered to refuse to serve certain customers, but must use individual, quantifiable, customer-by-customer risk assessment, rather than refusing to serve an entire industry.

• Gig Workers Have Nowhere to Pee

• A Survival Guide for Beating Information Addiction

• Reindeer lichens reproduce sexually far more than scientists thought - UPI.com

• Iran's blogfather: Facebook, Instagram and Twitter are killing the web | Technology | The Guardian

• Meshtastic: Open-source, off-grid, hiking, climbing, GPS mesh communicator

• Body of double murder suspect found at Tennessee lake - ABC News

• Is it possible to change a chicken's sex before it hatches?

• COVID-19 and the Global Shift Towards Authoritarian Governance |

• Russian hack brings changes, uncertainty to US court system

Horseshit

• FCC slaps Montana man with $9.9M fine for racist robocalls

• S.F.'s elite Lowell High School would permanently switch to lottery admission

• Americans Don’t Know What Urban Collapse Looks Like

• Google union in turmoil following global alliance announcement - The Verge

  The news was an unwelcome surprise to union members who expect the Alphabet Workers Union to run democratically.

  The upheaval points to the difficulties facing AWU. As a so-called minority union, it isn’t recognized by the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) and can’t require Alphabet or its subsidiaries like Google to negotiate a contract for its members.

  • comments mention another non-traditional feature of this union; the dues are "suggested 1% of total Compensation". The parties are epic, its said.

• Payday Publishers | www.splicetoday.com

• Shootings in Oakland soar as cuts to Police Department take hold

• The 'invented' free speech crisis - Politics.co.uk

  There are, of course, real threats to free speech in the form of online bullying and threats of violence that many (particularly women and people of colour) experience. These, however, do not appear to be a focus for pseudo-free speech activists and are not touched on in Davis’ bill.

• from a crypto / netsec forum, re "Anti-Vax / No Mask / COVID Deniers" (who are also 5g nuts and Trumpists, of course):

  Here’s hoping the police/military get a little kinetic on one or two of these nutbars because there is little doubt they are going to make people ill if not dead and will deny it due to their cognative deficiencies. Then there is the strain they add to healthcare staff that are already at or even past physical breaking point, and close to mental collapse.

Economicon

• It Feels Like the Game is Rigged - The Irrelevant Investor

• Silver futures jump 7% as Reddit traders try their squeeze play with the metal

• New chart shows China could overtake the U.S. as the world's largest economy earlier than expected

• Opinion: The good guys in the GameStop story? It’s the hedge funds and short sellers

• Elizabeth Warren on GameStop: SEC should get off their duffs and do their jobs - CNN

• ZH on silver:

  Update (1800ET): It was the one print everyone was waiting for, and here it is: silver futures opened up 7%, surging from $27/oz to a high of $29.095 following a weekend of speculation that the next big squeeze on WSB's radar is silver. And whether that's true or not, may no longer matter in a world where - as described below - there is virtually no physical silver to be purchased.

• Dear Retail Whale Shorting GME Tomorrow | by Human Being | Jan, 2021 | Medium

  A mill or 2 is not gonna bankrupt you either way, & all it takes is one awesome whale at the right time to keep that line held, to make that squeeze pop, whether at an open, during a lunchtime, or before a close.

• Hedge fund Melvin sustains 53% loss after Reddit onslaught

• Three listed units of China's HNA disclose embezzlements of nearly $10B

  A total of 61.5 billion yuan ($9.57 billion) had been embezzled by shareholders and other related parties, Shanghai-listed Hainan Airlines Holding Co, HNA Infrastructure Investment Group Co and Shenzhen-listed CCOOP Group Co said late on Friday.

• Visa May Add Cryptocurrencies to Its Payments Network, Says CEO

• Record Vessel Backlog at Southern California Ports

• Why Robinhood Disabled Buys but not Sells

  that's a real reason to stay away from Robinhood. But for the love of god do not swap to WeBull or something if that's your concern.

• "Everyone Is Afraid Ahead Of The Open" - Reddit-Raiders Spark Nationwide Physical Silver Shortage | ZeroHedge

  • Reddit Forum Sparks Physical Silver Shortage on Major Dealers’ Websites

    • kitco shows spot @ $27; Silver Eagle coins being advertised around at $35, still.

  • Silver Coin Sites Grind to a Halt as Reddit Horde Takes Aim

• (from 2005) Naked shorting: The curious incident of the shares that didn't exist /Euromoney magazine

• This Is The Stunning Way Some Desperate Funds Covered Their Gamestop Shorts | ZeroHedge

TechSuck

• Facebook Knew Calls for Violence Plagued ‘Groups’, Now Plans Overhaul

• YouTube Deletes Testimony of Doctors Refuting COVID-19 Hysteria From Senator's Page - Big League Politics

  “Bottom line, it’s an example of big tech singling out conservative voices to silence them. For proof, the same testimony is still up on Bloomberg News’ youtube page,” Voelkel said.

• The free speech row tearing apart the tech community | The Spectator

  What is clear, as we have seen over the last month, is that the far-right can thrive in the space created by the (admirable, if at times naive) defence of absolute free speech. And it will fall on communities, like the blockchain one, to find a way to navigate these choppy waters.

• Huawei can reportedly resume buying Samsung displays and Sony image sensors

• Musk vs Bezos, NYT Billionaires Bicker over Space Toys

• Apple CEO sounds warning of algorithms pushing society towards catastrophe

• Google's Saudi Arabia data centers draw scrutiny - Protocol — The people, power and politics of tech

• Spamcop.net email blacklist domain expired making every IP blacklisted

• This is how Google will collapse - HCCR - Human Capital Consulting Recruiting

• Google CEO and HBCU leaders discuss talent pipeline for Black tech workers

• M1 battery life is terrible, Rosetta to blame?

  • First story since "M1 Macs" were introduced to suggest they are not utterly perfect and miraculous.

• SoftBank will invest $100M to make Miami a new tech hub

  • Miami's Mayor Woos Techies. What Does He Need to Succeed?

Unity

• Activists Seek To Purge Suspected Pro-Trump White House Sign-Language Interpreter

• Former lawmaker calls out "disease" flowing through the GOP: "It's not just Marjorie Taylor Greene"

BidenTime

• Two Biden Priorities, Climate and Inequality, Meet on Black-Owned Farms

• Biden plans first major foreign policy speech on restoring 'America's place'

• 10 Senate Republicans Plan To Detail Slimmed-Down COVID-19 Counteroffer

• Howie Carr: John Kerry's back, in all of his tone-deaf glory

  “I had the pleasure of driving down to the inauguration in an electric car, a Tesla, back down to Washington and back to the United — to to ah Massachusetts uh and it was great. I loved it.”

  By the way, Washington is 439 miles from Boston. Top range for one of those coal-fired Teslas is about 400 miles, and cold weather reduces it further. Did anyone see Liveshot recharging his Tesla’s lithium batteries at, say, the Vince Lombardi rest stop on the New Jersey Turnpike while he partook of a snack with the hoi polloi at the local Pizza Hut or Quizno’s?

• How Biden's 'pathway to citizenship' would change their lives

Trumpoline

• Trump's new legal team includes an attorney who declined to prosecute Bill Cosby and another who met with Jeffrey Epstein just days ...

• Trump’s legal team is disintegrating ahead of his Senate impeachment trial - Vox

  These resignations came, (CNN Reporter) Collins’ sources said, because “Trump wanted the attorneys to argue there was mass election fraud and it was stolen from him rather than focus on proposed arguments about constitutionality.”

  • Donald Trump Doesn’t Appear to Have a Lawyer for His Impeachment Trial

• Kinzinger: GOP 'is not a Trump first party'

• The Lincoln Project threatens Rudy Giuliani with legal action after he linked the ...

• Trump Raised $250 Million Since Election To Challenge Outcome—Here’s Where Most Of The ...

• The Trump Organization’s Website Is Full Of Falsehoods

Capitol Riots / Fortification

• Disproportionate number of current and former military personnel arrested in Capitol attack, CNN analysis shows - CNN

  Analysis by CNN of Pentagon records and court proceedings show 21 of the 150, or 14%, are current or former members of the US military. That is more than double the proportion of servicemen and women and veterans in the adult US population, calculated from Census Bureau and Department of Defense statistics. In 2018, there were 1.3 million active-duty members of the services and 18 million veterans. Together, they comprised just 5.9% of the overall 327 million US population at the end of 2018.

• Why Hasn’t The House Held Hearings To Establish “Incitement To Insurrection”? – JONATHAN TURLEY

  The National Guard deployment is clearly a place to start. Did Trump delay or obstruct deployment? We still do not know despite this being one of the easier questions to answer. Those questions will not be answered by calling the “Shaman” on whether he felt that Trump wanted him to riot or engage in insurrection. Such testimony will show how Trump’s words were received (which is relevant) but not what he intended.

  Maj. Gen. William Walker, the commanding general of the D.C. National Guard, has also given interviews and said that deployment of his troops were delayed by over an hour because he needed approval from the Pentagon. He said that he usually has authority to deploy without approval. If that is true, why was he not called for testimony in the House to explain the timeline and whether the authority was removed specifically for that day?

World

• Myanmar military takes control of country after detaining Aung San Suu Kyi

  • Internet disrupted in Myanmar amid apparent military uprising

• Were headlines from Sputnik and Russia Today yesterday about two different sets of riots in France, didn't see any other reporting on them.

• How an elite family's decades-old secret sparked a reckoning about sexual abuse in France | CBC News

• Clashes, arrests as thousands face off with riot police at protest against Covid-19 lockdown in Vienna

• Putin critic's wife detained as protests sweep Russia

• Ongoing siege following car explosion at hotel gate in Somalia's capital

COVID

• Single Covid case in Western Australia leads to 5-day lockdown for 2 million

• Anti-vax 'mob' that closed Dodger Stadium vaccination site sparks outrage

• India’s tumbling Covid cases raises question: Is the pandemic burning itself out

• First batch of coronavirus vaccines due to arrive in South Africa | Coronavirus pandemic News | Al Jazeera

  Initially scheduled for the end of January, the first one million shots of the AstraZeneca-Oxford vaccine produced in India will be used to inoculate healthcare workers over the next three months. The second batch of 500,000 jabs is scheduled to arrive later in February.

• COVID-19 easing as death tolls pass 2.2 million, cases hit 103 million

• ‘I’m A Freaking Grad Student’: Philly Fighting COVID CEO Andrei Doroshin Defends Work After City Cuts Ties With Group – CBS Philly

  • Philly Fighting COVID CEO attacks city Health Department - WHYY

  Doroshin, who was not wearing a mask as he spoke with the media, also did not seek authorization from his apartment building to host the indoor press conference, which drew more than 10 reporters from various news outlets.

• WHO Team Visits Wet Market Linked to First Coronavirus Cases

• Even Salon is reporting this one now N.Y. Gov. Andrew Cuomo undercounted nursing home deaths by as much as 50%, report finds

• Vaccines For Data: Israel's Pfizer Deal Drives Quick Rollout — And Privacy Worries

Climate

• Wired Magazine Special Issue: How We Will All Solve the Climate Crisis

Obit

• Andrew Brooks, Who Developed a Covid Spit Test, Dies at 51