2021-03-20

Cool

• (2007) The Secret of Nanda Devi

• US Military Has "A Lot More" on UFOs Ex-Intelligence Director Confirms - The Debrief

  “There are a lot more sightings than have been made public,” (former Director of National Intelligence) John Ratcliffe told Fox News host Maria Bartiromo. “Some of those have been declassified. And when we talk about sightings, we are talking about objects that have been seen by Navy or Air Force pilots, or have been picked up by satellite imagery that frankly engage in actions that are difficult to explain. Movements that are hard to replicate that we don’t have the technology for. Or traveling at speeds that exceed the sound barrier without a sonic boom.”

• (2015) The Complexity of a WW II P-47 Thunderbolt’s Powerplant | The Lyncean Group of San Diego

Worthy

• Overcoming Bias : Sell Tax Rights To Make Agents

  Assume the federal government is owed X% of a certain person’s future wages w(t). Or some fixed function F(w(t)). You might not think the government entitled to such income taxes, but you gotta admit the odds of changing this situation anytime soon look slim.

  I propose that the government auction off this right to collect these income taxes. Ideally at birth, if not sooner. Government could use the auction revenue to pay off part of their government debt, and thus in effect convert one kind of debt into another. So the government’s expected tax revenue need not suffer.

• Machinist’s Accuracy Vs. Woodworker’s Precision

  This ends up expressing perfectly the distinction between accuracy and precision. Sometimes you need to hit the numbers right on, and other times, you just need to get the parts to fit. And it’s useful to know which of these situations you’re actually in.

• Skylab: The Myth of the Mutiny in Space

  Amazingly, he says, in the last 48 years only one other reporter has been in touch with the Skylab 4 crew apart from the BBC, to ask them for their account of what happened.

etc

• Dallas nightclub shooting leaves one person dead and 7 wounded

• Prosecutor: Man charged with 1 murder confessed he killed 16

• The Invention of a New Pasta Shape

• Volcano Erupts In Southwestern Iceland After Thousands Of Earthquakes

• Archaeologists Uncover a 1,300-Year-Old Skeleton of a Maya Diplomat

• Ancient Native Americans were among the world’s first coppersmiths

• Historic Georgian African American newspapers dating from 1886-1926 are now available freely online, thanks to a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities – the DLG B

  Savannah Tribune, 1886-1888 – Founded in 1875, the Tribune, except for two hiatuses, is one of the longest-running African American newspapers in the South. Athens Republique, 1921-1924 – From 1919 until its cessation in 1927, the Republique served the African American community in Athens and surrounding towns.

Horseshit

• Defrauded students to receive loan forgiveness

• French drugs haul 'was strawberry Haribo'

• How Jacques Derrida became one of the most influential thinkers in the world

• Scott Galloway on recasting American individualism and institutions

• Japan’s Gun Laws Worked So Well They Need to Ban Crossbows

• Lawmaker pressures FCC to rethink proposal affecting truck platooning - FreightWaves

• Don’t be surprised by the administration’s decision on Seth Lloyd | The Tech

Media / Ministry of Truthy

• So it appears some of you really don't want us to use the word 'hacker' when we really mean 'criminal' • The Register

  Well, my friend, the Reg-frequenting internet believes some points are more valid than others: 84 per cent of votes cast were in favor of the motion, and 16 per cent against. The for motion – the media should stop using the word hacker as a pejorative – wins.

  Soon, only hack writers will use "hacker" negatively!

• Matthew Yglesias: Here’s how the Substack “scam” worked

• How Would the Publishing World Respond to Lolita Today? ‹ Literary Hub

• How the media grotesquely distorted the Atlanta massacres

  Accompanying one original piece on the known facts, the NYT ran nine — nine! — separate stories about the incident as part of the narrative that this was an anti-Asian hate crime, fueled by white supremacy and/or misogyny. Not to be outdone, the WaPo ran sixteen separate stories on the incident as an anti-Asian white supremacist hate crime. Sixteen! One story for the facts; sixteen stories on how critical race theory would interpret the event regardless of the facts. For good measure, one of their columnists denounced reporting of law enforcement’s version of events in the newspaper, because it distracted attention from the “real” motives.

• VICTORY: Court Delivers Huge Win for Project Veritas Against The New York Times | Project Veritas

  This ruling means Project Veritas will now be able to put New York Times reporter Maggie Astor and New York Times executive editor Dean Baquet under oath where they will be forced to answer our questions.

• Federal Judge Laurence Silberman slams media, accusing it of left-wing bias

• The Hand-Wringing Media Freak-Out over Substack | National Review

• TikTok banning some accounts in Myanmar in attempt to stop the spread of violent videos

Identity Politics / Race Baiting / Re segregation

• How the Irish Became White

• Biden Stimulus Checks Prompt Middle-Class Debate - Bloomberg

  fewer than 16% of U.S. households earn more than $150,000 per year. That would certainly seem to put those families in the country’s elite.

• Who Is Making Sure the A.I. Machines Aren’t Racist?

• Online Hate and Zeitgeist of Fear: A Five‐Country Longitudinal Analysis of Hate\

• Migrant Families at U.S.-Mexico Border Deported by Surprise

• Protesters Gather in Atlanta to StopAsianHate

• Father Arrested After Continuing To Call His Child "She" Following Court-Ordered Gender-Transition Treatments

TechSuck

• Swiss Firm Says It Has Accessed Servers of a SolarWinds Hacker

• A Breakup Plan to Save Intel and Preserve National Security

• AMD refuses to limit cryptocurrency mining: We will not be blocking any workload

• Elon Musk and Amazon Are Battling to Put Satellite Internet in Your Backyard

  • As far as I know: Amazon has so far only acted to impede Starlink, they have a competing program but it isn't flying yet and there's interesting holes in their organization that suggest it wasn't meant to be a public "global communications system".

• Acer hit by $50M ransomware attack

• Apple bent its rules for Russia–and other countries will take note

• Undocumented x86 instructions in Intel CPUs that can modify microcode

  • HN thread

• Apple to pay more than $300M after infringing DRM patent

  • Jury awards 308M for patent infringment in suit against Apple

• Telegram: Voice Chats 2.0:Channels, Millions of Listeners, Recorded Chats

• Why printers add secret tracking dots (2020)

Economicon

• Tesla orders its first 8,000-ton Cybertruck Giga Casting machine - Tesla Oracle

• Binance Smart Chain’s TurtleDex rugpulls shortly after launch

• SpaceX engineer pleads guilty to selling insider trading tips on dark web

• Young Goldman Sachs bankers ask for 80-hour week cap

• Here's How Bored Rich People Are Spending Their Extra Cash

• Brokerage app Webull seeing ‘an uptick in deposits’ as stimulus checks roll out, says CEO

• CFTC Fines Coinbase $6.5M over 'Reckless' Reporting

Poilitcks

• D.C. statehood moves to the center of the national Democratic agenda

• Biden says he's 'proud' of his secretary of state for confronting China's top diplomat in a ...

• Putin challenged Biden to debate. History shows why that's bad for Putin

• Trump Was Right: Michigan Judge Rules State's 2020 Almost-Anything-Goes Ballot Signature Rule Was 'Invalid' – PJ Media

• Oops, he did it again! Biden refers to Kamala as "President Harris"

• Louisiana To Hold 2 Special Elections Saturday To Fill Congressional Seats

• The US needs to have a 9/11 Commission style reckoning with its COVID policy failures

• The Deadly Precedent of the Waco Whitewash – The Future of Freedom Foundation

Security / Militaria

• FBI conducts bulk seizure of cellphone records relating to Capitol attack

• Defiant US Soldiers Openly Questioning Why BLM Riots Weren't Treated Like Capitol 'Insurrection' | ZeroHedge

World

• Magnitude-7 earthquake shakes Japan, triggers tsunami concerns

• China to ‘tap policy brakes’ amid global commodity price rebound

• India Romances the West

• Tokyo Olympics to be held without overseas spectators

• Mouse plague grows to biblical proportions across eastern Australia

Health / Medicine / COVID

• Fertility rate: 'Jaw-dropping' global crash in children being born

• New Lockdowns In Europe As COVID-19 Cases Soar; Pakistan's PM Tests Positive

• COVID-19 Pathophysiology: Are Platelets and Serotonin Hiding in Plain Sight? by Farid Jalali, Salim Rezaie, Philippe Rola, Cameron Kyle-Sidell :: SSRN

• Effect of Vitamin D3 on Hospital Length of Stay in Patients with Covid-19

• Drugmakers Promise Investors They’ll Soon Hike Covid-19 Vaccine Prices

• Don’t Be Surprised When Vaccinated People Get Infected

• Covid: Rich states 'block' vaccine plans for developing nations

• COVID: The pandemic almost didn't happen, a new genetic study shows

• Your Unvaccinated Kid Is Like a Vaccinated Grandma

Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda

• China's new coal power plant capacity in 2020 more than 3x rest of world's

• Florida bans 16 invasive reptile species - The Washington Post

• Plummeting sperm counts: toxic chemicals threaten humanity

• Trillions for Oil, Millions for EVs: The Big Lie of Ineffectual Government