2021-02-18

Cool

• Internet Of Clams

• The Death Of The Cool - The Commonplace by Thomas J Bevan

  So cool- as the generally accepted anthropological view goes- originated in West Africa. It comes out of the ancient Yoruba city-states whose religious philosophy valued cool (or composure) as one of its three main pillars, the others being command (ashe) and character (iwa).

  Cool became something that a product had, not that a person embodied. Cool became something that you bought, not an attitude you projected.

Worthy

• OSHA, but its a start Most U.S. firms hit with Covid-19 safety fines aren't paying up

• New Model M Is an American-Made Keyboard That Puts a Spring Back in Your Typing | Hacker News

etc

• Power outages in Texas | Notes On Liberty

• The Enduring Myth of Stranger Danger

• Toward a disease sniffing device that rivals a dog's nose

• FAA Releases Remote ID, the Largest Regulatory Change for Drones In Years - Nextgov

• Nearly 5,000 National Guard troops to stay in DC over concerns of potential violence in March | TheHill

• NJ Governor Phil Murphy, Wife Implicated in Federal Immigration Fraud Scheme | Police Blotter | Shore News Network %

• South Dakota's attorney general charged in fatal crash

• Rare Roman penis carving found in Cambridgeshire

• Earth's magnetic field flipping linked to extinctions 42,000 years ago

  • Ancient relic points to a turning point in Earth's history 42,000 years ago

Horseshit

• South Carolina governor signs abortion ban

• ESA recruiting astronauts with physical disabilities for parastronaut project

• How Centrism Loses, Even When It Wins: A Mathematical Model ❧ Current Affairs

• Sci-Hub: Elsevier and Springer Nature Obtain UK ISP Blocking Order

• BLM Activist Working At Library Fired After Allegedly Burning Library Books By Trump, Coulter. Now He’s Claiming Racial Discrimination. | The Daily Wire

  A Black Lives Matter activist who worked as a library staffer in Chattanooga, Tennesse, allegedly posted an Instagram video showing him burning books he’d taken home authored by former President Trump and columnist Ann Coulter. The library ultimately fired him. According to the former employee, he was a victim of racial discrimination.

• New Kalashnikov comes with WiFi, Bluetooth and phone sync

• School Board Mocks Parents Who Support Reopening: 'They Want Their Babysitters Back'

Ice Weasel Apocalypse

• local via Rhe:

  As of 9:00AM on 02/18/2021 Walmart in Paris, TN is currently only allowing a max. occupancy of 50 customers. We have not received a grocery, frozen/dairy, or meat/produce truck since Saturday the 13th.

• The 2021 Texas power outage is a nation wide problem :: Gwoplock's Blog

• Several Days Into The Texas Deep Freeze, Food Is Scarce

• Electricity over $900/MWh in most of Western US now

• Texas Residents told to boil tap water amid power blackouts

• Texas weather: Thousands of cold-stunned turtles rescued

• Texas Electric Reliability Council Removes Board Members From Website as Their Residencies Are Questioned.

TechSuck

• Nvidia announces mining GPUs, cripples hash rate of RTX-3060

  NVIDIA has finally conceded to the overwhelming mining demand facing the GPU market right now and launched a lineup of dedicated cryptocurrency mining GPUs (can we even call them that considering they have no display port?) called CMP. This is short for Cryptocurrency Mining Processor While AIBs have previously rolled out mining variants of GPUs without display ports, this is the first time we are seeing an official product launch straight from NVIDIA itself. It is accompanied by an action that will likely be very controversial: software limiting the hash rate of NVIDIA's RTX 3060 GPU (which will be launching on the 25th) to just 50% of its actual rate.

  • they get away with this on "Gamer GPU" vs "Deep Learning" GPUs, so why not? Having bought the hardware, do you think its yours to do with as you wish?

  • Nvidia Nerfs Ethereum Hash Rate and Launches CMP Dedicated Mining Hardware

  • Nvidia says the crypto mining hash rate limiter cannot be hacked

• Google Is Discontinuing Unlimited Storage for All Education Customers

• Bosch, Microsoft join forces to develop vehicle software platform

  • "Andriod for cars" got announced the other day; kindof recognizing fiat acompli.

• Facebook knew for years ad reach estimates were based on ‘wrong data’

  • Facebook Employee Called Inflated Ad Metrics ‘Deeply Wrong’

• Facebook 'unfriends' Australia: news pages go dark in test for global publishing

• Toxic: Intel ordered to pay chip fab worker almost $1m after he was gassed at its facility in 2016 • The Register

Economicon

• Watch Live: Leaders Of Citadel, Robinhood, Reddit Face Off Against 'Mad Maxine' In "Game Stopped" Hearing | ZeroHedge

  • Hedge funds, Robinhood face grilling by Congress over GameStop Reddit rally

  • Another Big Conflict Of Interest Emerges For Citadel Just Minutes Before The Congressional Hearing | ZeroHedge

• Swiss Canton of Zug Has Started Accepting Bitcoin, Ether for Tax Payments

• Cryptocurrency Sleuths Point to Robinhood as Dogecoin Whale

• Walmart Promises Raises for 425,000 Workers After Strong Holiday Sales

• Share of U.S. workers holding multiple jobs is rising

Politickles

• Sen. Ted Cruz arrives back in Texas with armed police escort

• Joe Biden should declare a food and nutrition war

• The Librarian War Against QAnon

• Biden Removes ‘We the People’ Petitioning from White House Website

• FBI, U.S. attorney in Brooklyn probing Cuomo administration on nursing homes

• H.R. 484, the “No Glory for Hate Act of 2021”

  • bars former President Donald Trump from being buried at Arlington National Cemetary.

World

• Vanished 150k elderly residents raise doubts about Wuhan's Covid death toll

• Armed gunmen abduct dozens of students, teachers from Nigeria school

Health / Medicine / COVID

• We’ll Have Herd Immunity by April

• Thousands of service members saying no to Covid vaccine

• Mechanistic transmission modeling of Covid-19 on the Diamond Princess

• The coronavirus is here to stay – here’s what that means

• In Hunt for Covid-19 Origin, WHO Team Focuses on Two Animal Types in China

Green Propaganda

• Climate scientist blames global warming for protracted cold wave

• Facebook to Label Climate Change Posts

  Facebook Inc. will begin labeling some user posts that mention climate change in the same way it has annotated posts discussing elections and Covid-19, a sign the social network is taking climate-related misinformation more seriously.

• Texas Power Outage Underscores Looming Climate Tests

• Heating Arctic may be to blame for snowstorms in Texas, scientists argue

• Parched Oystermen, Farmers Face Off in Supreme Court Water War

• Proof of work—the reason behind Bitcoin’s horrendous energy consumption – Amy Castor

  When bitcoin was first introduced in 2009, you could mine bitcoin with the CPU on your own personal computer. Those days are a distant memory. As bitcoin mining became more profitable, miners switched to graphic processing units (GPUs). And in 2011, they migrated to field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs). But starting in 2013, the field was taken over by application-specific integrated circuit equipment (ASIC) rigs—which is the only way to make a profit mining bitcoin these days.

  • And this 1,000x efficeincy gain is just another bad thing to throw on the heap of "reasons bitcoin is bad"; somehow.

• Climate change likely drove the extinction of North America's largest animals

Obit

• Bruce Blackburn, Designer of NASA Worm Logo, Has Died