2021-07-27

Cool

• Naval Architecture

• Candide – Identify Plants with a Photo

• Hubble Finds First Evidence of Water Vapor at Jupiter’s Moon Ganymede | NASA

Worthy

• Contra Acemoglu On...Oh God, We're Doing This Again, Aren't We? - by Scott Alexander - Astral Codex Ten

• The Insecurity Industry - by Edward Snowden - Continuing Ed — with Edward Snowden

• Spiritual Bypassing | Robert Augustus Masters, PhD

• What time-weighted averages are and why you should care | Hacker News

• The Transhuman Olympics | Applied Divinity Studies

  As such, the notion of anti-doping as a path to fairness must be abandoned entirely. Instead, we should celebrate a drug-enabled Olympics that would outcompete the original in terms of viewership, athletic accomplishment, and cultural legitimacy.

• (April 2021) The thermocline of truth – Roblog, the blog of Rob Miller

etc

• US population could shrink for first time on record

• Last Meal of History's Most Famous 'Bog Body' Hints at Human Sacrifice

• An Israeli military search team helped recover majority of Surfside victims

• "Vehicles All Over" - Freak Sandstorm Causes 22-Vehicle Pileup In Utah

• The Sacred Polynesian Art of Wayfinding

Horseshit

• Israel launches maximum pressure campaign against Ben and Jerry's

• Pizza Hut Drops First-Ever Streetwear Collection

• Flush with innovation: 10 years of reinventing the toilet

• Man tries to go over water from Florida to NYC in makeshift human hamster wheel

• German lawyers wrangle over pensioner's WW2 tank in basement - BBC News

• 59 Million Americans Prohibited From Buying High-End Dell Gaming PCs | ZeroHedge

• Mercedes EQS Rear Steering to Be Locked Behind Subscription

• Why Adopting a Rescue Dog Is So Hard Right Now

• Marlboro Maker CEO Says the Company Plans to Stop Selling Smokes in the U.K

• Woman says she was refused entry to garage over ‘inappropriate’ top

celebrity gossip

• Tesla Is Reportedly Trying to Make People Delete Mean Posts About Elon Musk

• Boxer Mugged: 80-Year-Old Former Dem Senator Robbed In Oakland

• Elon Musk snipes at Apple twice on Tesla earnings call

• Huawei senior executive, Su Jing removed for “inappropriate remarks” about Tesla

  • Global Times on Twitter: "Su Jing, a senior executive of Huawei’s car unit, was removed from his position for “inappropriate remarks” about #Tesla. Su publicly said in July that Tesla has a “relative high accident rate” and is “killing people.” https://t.co/fRf25cLsOt" / Twitter

• United States sells Wu-Tang album forfeited by Martin Shkreli

• "I Was Just Shaking" - Simone Biles Explains Why She Abruptly Quit Olympic Event | ZeroHedge

Obit

• Former US Senator Enzi of Wyoming Dies After Bicycle Accident

Culture War / Re segregation / Identdoctrination

• Web Site Designer May Be Required to Design Site for Same-Sex Weddings

• So the vaccinated are "running out of patience," eh? – HotAir

  Marshall goes on to try to draw distinctions, saying that minorities are more “vaccine-hesitant” while white, Republican Trump voters are “vaccine-resistant,” as if there’s some sort of difference there. What he ignores in assigning all of this blame is a fact that even the CDC continues to admit on a regular basis. On a per-capita basis, both Hispanic and Black Americans are vastly less likely to take the vaccines than whites or Asians. But nobody is “fed up” with them, right? Only with a politically convenient group of people of a particular skin tone and party affiliation. Everyone else refusing to be vaccinated is just fine and needs to be allowed their space to process things.

• Med Schools Are Now Denying Biological Sex - by Katie Herzog - Common Sense with Bari Weiss

  In 2019, the New England Journal of Medicine reported the case of a 32-year-old transgender man who went to an ER complaining of abdominal pain. While the patient disclosed he was transgender, his medical records did not. He was simply a man. The triage nurse determined that the patient, who was obese, was in pain because he’d stopped taking a medication meant to relieve hypertension. This was no emergency, she decided. She was wrong: The patient was, in fact, pregnant and in labor. By the time hospital staff realized that, it was too late. The baby was dead. And the patient, despite his own shock at being pregnant, was shattered.

Media / Many Ministries of Truths / Censorship

• Twitter suspends the official account of the AZ Audit

• This is no ordinary spying. Our most intimate selves are exposed – Arundhati Roy

• Covid has become a media-driven panic disconnected from facts

• BuzzFeed Is Going Public. What Now for Vice and Vox?

• Advertisement has a negative return on investment for more than 80% of brands

• Social Media Platforms Are Eroding Free Speech | City Journal

TechSuck

• Video game developers at Activision Blizzard say they'll walk out Wednesday

• Adrian Chadd's Ramblings: When off is not off, or "why is my amplifier pulling 30mA when it's off?"

• “So to prove that anyone can be scammed, I was convinced to delete my YouTube

• Apple fixes an in-the-wild exploited 0-day (iOS 14.7.1)

• Tencent's WeChat suspends new user registrations as China cracks down on tech

• Instagram Debuts New Safety Settings for Teenagers

• Facebook Reduces Advertising Targeting for Teenagers

Economicon

• 'We All Quit': How America’s Workers Are Taking Back Their Power

  "It's an act of protest against abuses and exploitative conditions," said Patricia Campos Medina, executive director of the Worker's Institute at Cornell University. "It’s a sense of empowerment that workers don’t have to tolerate that kind of abuse."

  • ... or you could talk to some of the workers that quit but hey I guess this person must order fast food sometimes too, right? So they're "in touch" with the plight of the person behind the counter.

  and then:

  In reality, for decades saying "take this job and shove it" to McDonald's or Burger King has become increasingly hard thanks to the stagnant wages, a lack of benefits, non-compete clauses, and long stretches of economic recession that make it very difficult for workers to build up the kind of savings or emergency fund needed to quit without going through serious financial distress.

• Case-Shiller: National House Price Index increased 16.6% year-over-year in May

• On Medici and Thiel - by Rohit - Strange Loop Canon

• The largest fraud wave in history? Unemployment insurance fraud during Covid

• Tesla second-quarter profits top $1bn even as it struggles to handle demand

• Citadel Securities Fined by Finra for Trading Ahead of Clients

• Walmart announces plan to pay 100% of college tuition and books for associates

• Microsoft earnings: Cloud and personal computing growth power earnings beat

  • Microsoft Earnings Release FY21 Q4

• Google sets all-time records as search and YouTube profits soar

• Apple posts $81B quarterly results: Charts

  • (PDF) Apple Reports Third Quarter Results

Poilitcks

• Orwell's "The Lion and the Unicorn" - by Noah Smith - Noahpinion

  There is no endgame for this sort of smug anti-Americanism. A leftist revolution to overthrow the country and establish a new one in its place is highly unlikely. And barring that, there’s really nowhere for anti-Americanism to go. People like their country. Eventually they’ll tire of the America-bashing and look for someone who will tell them that the place they live, and the people they live with, are a positive force instead of a negative one. And if the Right ever actually pulls its head out of its Trump-shaped ass and figures out how to stop bashing the U.S. Olympic team and shitting on military families and calling veterans “losers” and storming the damn Capitol building, then people who just a few years ago were marching in the street wearing pussy-hats or yelling “defund the police” may find themselves voting Republican. Thus might the Left’s greatest generational advantage in American political history be squandered.

• Court bypasses 5th Amendment ordering man to unlock laptop with face

• Ajit Pai apparently mismanaged $9 billion fund—new FCC boss starts “cleanup” | Ars Technica

• EFF Sues US Postal Service for Records About Covert Social Media Spying Program

Security / Militaria / Crime / Police

• Afghan Civilian Casualties Hit Record High Amid Rapid Taliban Gains

• Say Their Names - by Spencer Ackerman - Forever Wars

• Former eBay employee gets 18 months in prison for cyberstalking campaign

World

• VPN servers seized by Ukrainian authorities weren’t encrypted | Ars Technica

• The China Model: What the Country’s Tech Crackdown Is About

• The two Koreas restore communication channels, agree to improve ties

• Lovely headline: Covid Mania Returns Australia to Its Roots as a Nation of Prisoners

• Kyle Bass Says There Is "No Defense" For Investing In China, Warns COVID Likely A Bioweapon | ZeroHedge

Health / Medicine / COVID

• The CDC will recommend that some vaccinated people wear masks indoors again

• The Farrago of International Travel Restrictions

  Even more ridiculous, Chinese, European and British citizens are still not allowed into the United States. Why? China, for example, has almost no COVID cases–thus there is no reason to restrict Chinese citizens from traveling to the United States. Indeed, President Trump rescinded these restrictions at the end of his term but Biden reinstated them immediately. Why? Travel is now banned from many countries with low COVID and high vaccination rates while allowed from many countries with high COVID rates and low vaccination rates. There is no rhyme or reason to the travel bans and restrictions.

• Covid-19 in Israel is taking a globally unique course

• Vaccines Don't Cause Male Infertility or Sexual Dysfunction, but Covid-19 Might

  My colleagues and I analyzed the autopsy tissues of the testicles of six men who died of COVID-19 infection. The result: COVID-19 virus appeared in the tissues of one of the men; decreased numbers of sperm appeared in three.

• Longitudinal analysis shows durable and broad immune memory after CoV infection

• Exclusive: Over half of Covid hospitalisations tested positive after admission

  More than half of Covid hospitalisations are patients who only tested positive after admission, leaked data reveal. The figures suggest vast numbers are being classed as hospitalised by Covid when they were admitted with other ailments, with the virus picked up by routine testing.

• Five Times More Children Died By Suicide Than Died From COVID In The UK

Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda

• Air quality alert issued for Boston due to West Coast and Canada wildfire smoke

• Get ready for many more record-shattering heatwaves

• A Soil-Science Revolution Upends Plans to Fight Climate Change | Quanta Magazine

• Salmon nearly roasted alive in Pacific north-west heatwave captured on video

• Who Will Pay to Protect Tech Giants from Rising Seas?

• Japan's cherry blossom: as indisputable as climate change evidence gets