2021-12-01

Cool

• Study suggests Sun is likely an unaccounted source of the Earth's water

Worthy

• The Internet's Casino Boats

  Crypto is a cesspit of people swapping claims on non-economic nonsense in one giant orgy of internet memes and fools trying to screw each other playing mutual harm negative-sum games while chanting “we’re all going to make it”. All this while the house takes an enormous rake and changes the rules of the game to its liking whenever it likes. It’s a great racket, but like the poker idiom goes: “If after ten minutes at the table you do not know who the mark is—you are the mark.”

etc

• Overdue library book returned more than 110 years later

• Sheriff: FedEx driver dumped boxes in woods at least 6 times

Horseshit

• Right-clickers vs. the monkey JPG owners

  I need to pause here and just acknowledge that I am very aware of how wildly stupid all of this is. But, like all things that have ever happened on the internet, just because it’s stupid right now, that doesn’t mean that it also couldn’t snowball into a genuine sociopolitical movement. A cartoon frog meme was on flags held by the insurrectionists that broke down the doors of the Capitol building, ok?

• Did the CEOs of Twitter, Walmart & CNBC resign on the first day of the Ghislaine Maxwell trial? | 6NewsAU

  • "Mostly False"; it was the Walmart "CFO", and no one from CNBC ...

• The American Prison System’s War on Reading

• Alien hunters have spent 60 years finding new solutions for the Drake Equation

• Investors Snap Up Metaverse Real Estate in a Virtual Land Boom

  • Metaverse Real Estate Piles Up Record Sales in Sandbox and Other Virtual Realms

• Alt Buys Majority Stake in Steph Curry Rookie Card Valued at $5.9M

• Cyberwhistle

  • Elon Musk jokes about whistleblowing in Tesla merchandise tweet

• CNN Medical Analyst: Donald Trump Was ‘Willing To Endanger The Life Of Joe Biden’ By Attending Debate

celebrity gossip

• Searchable flight logs from Jeffrey Epstein’s plane

  • Ghislaine Maxwell Joined In Sexual Encounters With Epstein, Accuser Testifies

  • New York City chief medical examiner resigning - ABC News

• Holmes recounts sexual, emotional abuse by Theranos exec Balwani

• Dorsey’s Twitter Departure Hints at Tech Moguls’ Restlessness

• Kyle Rittenhouse says he is destroying AR-15 used in Kenosha protest

• Biden Family Christmas Stocking Photo Leaves Out Hunter Biden’s 3-Year-Old Daughter, Born Out Of Wedlock | The Daily Wire

Obit

• Jim Warren, a trade show impresario, editor and computer activist, dies at 85

COVID / VaxCult

• (Nov 6, 2019) Pandemic simulation exercise spotlights massive preparedness gap | Hub

• Omicron already in the Netherlands a week before South Africa alerted the WHO

• WHO advises at-risk groups to postpone travel due to Omicron variant

• Covid: Greece to fine over-60s who refuse Covid-19 vaccine

  • Greece To Fine Elderly $114 For Every Month They Remain Unvaccinated

• Omicron variant: the case for cautious optimism

• Los Angeles Now Enforcing Vaccine Mandates For Indoor Businesses

• Over 7,000 Marines Unvaccinated As COVID-19 Vaccine Mandate Deadline Hits | ZeroHedge

• Why the Omicron variant is not a punishment for vaccine inequity

• New UK Covid restrictions to last until March next year

• Federal judge blocks Biden vaccine mandate for health care workers nationwide

  • Courts block Covid vaccine mandates for healthcare workers nationwide

  • Federal judge blocks COVID-19 contractor vaccine mandate, grants AG request | Lexington Herald Leader

• Brazil reports first Latin American cases of Omicron variant

• Simpson’s Paradox in Vaccination Data

• The epidemiological relevance of Covid-19-vaccinated population is increasing

• Lithuania's Covid Pass week 8

• Efficacy of Merck’s Thor-inspired Covid pill crumbles, vexing experts

• West Virginia offers free guns as incentive to get Covid vaccines

• Raw Wastewater “Leading Indicator” of Future Covid-19 Outbreaks, Yale Study

• Teenagers arrested after escape from Covid quarantine facility

  • Widespread Manhunt Underway For Three Men, Possibly Aborigines, Who Escaped Australian Involuntary Quarantine Camp - Video - The Last Refuge

• Hong Kong's zero-Covid policy keeps movers busy, gives recruiters headaches

• Omicron Fails to Halt Art Basel Miami as People Crave Normalcy

• Two Triple Vaccinated Israeli Doctors Infected with Omicron

• Why Moderna won’t share rights to vaccine with the U.S. GOV that paid for it

• Stricter coronavirus testing being weighed for all travelers to U.S.

• Maybe the Coronavirus was lower hanging fruit?

• Epidemiology of Acute Myocarditis in HK Adolescents After Pfizer Vaccination

• Jim Cramer Demands Biden Impose Military-Enforced Vaccine Mandate For All Americans | ZeroHedge

  "The federal government needs to require vaccines, including booster shots, for everyone in America by, say, January 1st".

• COVID topics: what did the news actually talk about? - Renato Budinich

• EU must consider mandatory Covid jabs, says Von der Leyen

  • EU chief: It’s time to ‘think about’ mandatory Covid vaccination

• They Died from Covid. Then the Online Attacks Started

• Nassim Nicholas Taleb: No, Covid 19 Is Not an Old Person Problem | naked capitalism

• WHO recommends over-60s ‘postpone travel’ due to Omicron fears as CDC director says US is increasing COVID testing at four US airports in effort to stop spread

• comment:

  This is about how molnupiravir will create variants by accelerating viral evolution while not killing the virus.

  Curiously, Gauteng was one of the places where they trialed it. That does not change the fact that the branch is very long and dates back to 2020. So if this was indeed a chronic infection, it probably started there. But what if this was an HIV patient that someone tried to cure with the drug and that gave it the final mutagenic boost? We will never know…

  And yet the FDA approved it despite quiet vigorous objection by many on the panel pointing to precisely these issues. We are doing our absolute best to help the virus…

• FDA advisers narrowly endorse Merck’s Covid-19 drug

  • FDA Panel Backs First-of-a-Kind COVID-19 Pill From Merck

• More than half of employers to require Covid vaccines as omicron fears grow

• A reason for optimism on Omicron: Our immune systems are not blank slates

• Domestic Travel Ban for Unvaccinated 'Not Off the Table' Says Psaki – PJ Media

• Biden Admin Unleashes Omicron Dragnet: CDC Demands Airlines Hand Over Names Of All Southern African Passengers

• Omicron Variant Found in California

Culture War / Re segregation / Faith Fights

• Jordan Peterson spent an hour on Twitter dropping tactical nukes on climate doomsayers and BLM and it was truly breathtaking to witness | Not the Bee

• Why Woke Organizations All Sound the Same: The Sociology of Organizations

• Propaganda, Technology, and Woke Public Relations

• The Kyle Rittenhouse Propaganda Machine - by Kenneth Drew

• WTF is Wrong with Open Source Communities?

• The White House's ugly secret

• The Old Pocket Knife - The Misfit Farmer

• What happens when you’re the investment? Social capital becomes economic capital

• Immigrants keep us out of nursing homes

  The estimates imply that a typical U.S-born individual over age 65 in the year 2000 was 0.5 percentage points (10 percent) less likely to be living in an institution than would have been the case if immigration had remained at 1980 levels. We show that immigration affects the availability and cost of home services, including those provided by home health aides, gardeners and housekeepers, and other less-educated workers, reducing the cost of aging in the community.

• Why Big-Tech Censorship will Fail - by Nicholas

  The justification for censorship always finds itself more in ethics and appeals to emotion than in its underlying mechanics. From the Dataist viewpoint, it’s all about the data of course! Harari concludes that “capitalism did not defeat communism because capitalism was more ethical, because individual liberties are sacred...Rather, capitalism won the Cold War because distributed data processing works better than centralized data processing, at least in periods of accelerating technological change.”

  • See also "What happened in 1971?": "the elites" decided this thesis was correct, and decided to remove the "accelerating technological change" or "expanding economy" parts of it. Or maybe demographics / birth rate explains it well enough.

Edumacationalizing / Acedemia Nuts

• The Teenagers Getting Six Figures to Leave Their High Schools for Basketball

• Gay Men Earn Degrees at Highest Rate in USA, Study Finds

• Alumni Withhold Donations, Demand Colleges Enforce Free Speech

• Israel ‘cancels’ prize to mathematician – and dishonors itself

• Campus Reform | University offers racially segregated 'processing space' after Rittenhouse verdict

Media / ShowBiz / Censorship

• CNN Suspends Chris Cuomo Indefinitely

  • CNN suspends Chris Cuomo indefinitely

• Researchers Have a Method to Spot Reddit’s State-Backed Trolls

Facebook

• Facebook deleted photo albums uploaded with Adobe Lightroom

• Facebook risks meta flop, metaverse developers say

TechSuck

• HN Jobs threads:

  • Ask HN: Who is hiring? (December 2021)

  • Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (December 2021)

  • Ask HN: Freelancer? Seeking freelancer? (December 2021)

• Had to shift some Starlink satellite orbits to reduce probability of collision

• Fisher Price Chatter Telephone with Bluetooth | Hacker News

• Microsoft shareholders back protest vote over sexual harassment claims

• Tesseract 5 released by a random person who has been thanklessly maintaining it

• Price increase on .io domains on January 1, 2022 (Renewal: $55.00) | Hacker News

• Qualcomm’s new always-on smartphone camera is a privacy nightmare

• Sent my phone to Google for replacement. They fixed the old one and used it to post nudes on my wife's social media and steal money : legaladvice

Economicon / Business / Finance

• Fed Chairman Jerome Powell retires the word 'transitory' in describing inflation

• Microsoft CEO sells half his stake in company

• Fed Chair rebrands inflation after securing second 4 year term

• PayPal "buy now, pay later" soared nearly 400% on Black Friday

• Ghost Kitchens Are Proving to Be a Messy Business, as Reef Global Shows

  • Food delivery “ghost kitchens” face major obstacles

• Why inflation can actually be good for everyday Americans and bad for rich people - CNN

  But on the whole, inflation can actually be a good thing for many working-class Americans, especially those with fixed-rate debt like a 30-year mortgage. That's because wages are going up, which not only empowers workers but also gives them more money to pay down debt. Plus, in the case of a mortgage, your monthly payment will be the same but your house will increase in value.

• Private payrolls post better-than-expected growth of 534K in November, ADP says

• Capital One ditches all consumer overdraft fees ($150M in annual revenue)

• U.S. Workforce Falling Behind Competitors in Digital Skills

Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making

• As Biden Goes Off-Script, White House Tech Team Cuts the Mic and Blasts Music

• Please Don’t Elect Dr. Oz–He’s a Disgrace to Our Profession

• (Nov 23 2021) New York Moves to Allow 800k Noncitizens to Vote in Local Elections

• 'How will we survive?' Supreme Court Justice Sotomayor sounds alarm in fight to overturn Roe v. Wade

  + [Breaking911 on Twitter: "JUSTICE SOTOMAYOR: Evidence of fetal
  pain is not proof of life" /
  Twitter](https://twitter.com/Breaking911/status/1466080275843239945)
  

  • Country Braces For Historic SCOTUS Decision That Could Uproot Roe V Wade | ZeroHedge

• Joe Biden greeted in Minnesota with 'FJB' and 'You Suck' signs

Law Breaking / Police / Internal Security

• Court Throws Out Messages Obtained by FBI Honeypot Phone Company Anom

• Texas woman wins round in lawsuit challenging swat teams destruction of her home

• Looting charges against Union Square theft suspects. It’s a legal gamble

• Capitol riot: Michael Jackson imitator clashes with judge in court - BBC News

• Pregnant Florida library worker killed after pulling gun on biker she intentionally hit with car – KIRO 7 News Seattle

• Police Bodycam Footage Of MSNBC 'Producer' Who Tailed Rittenhouse Jury Way Worse Than Reported | ZeroHedge

  The video then fast forwards to Morrison handing his phone to the officer so he could speak with NBC News' booking producer Irene Byon. The officer asks Byon why the network 'has a reporter following vehicles,' to which she replies: "We, we, we were just trying to respectfully... just trying to see if it's possible to, um, find any leads about, um, about the case, and so we were just keeping our distance just to see where people involved in the trial, um, are positioned. By no means are we trying to get in contact with any of the jury members or whoever's in the car, we just were, um, trying to see where, um, where key players in the trial may be at."

External Security / Militaria / Diplomania

• U.S. Satellites Are Being Attacked Every Day According to Space Force General

  • China's Mysterious Hypersonic Weapon Can Stay In Orbit According To Space Force General

• China's Aircraft Carrier Killers, and Who Else Has Them News

• Putin lays down ‘red line,’ threatens retaliation if missiles placed in Ukraine

• Biden nearly ended the drone war, and nobody noticed | The Week

  • It seems Biden has cut back on the drone war

World

• RAF on high alert due to increased Arctic activity

• EU draft pulled after Vatican complains Christmas 'canceled'

• China’s queer internet is being erased

• What happens if Europe runs out of gas?

• Study links high cholesterol, cardiovascular disease to plastics

• Belarusian President Lukashenko Threatens To Halt Transit Of Energy Products From Russia | ZeroHedge

Health / Medicine

• Why Does Coffee Make Me Poop?

  • With enough coffee, one can see the Universe Caffeine improves dynamic visual acuity

  • Coffee may help lower odds for Alzheimer’s disease, study suggests.

• New Zealand Becomes First Country in the World to Fully Legalise Drug Checking

• Nation’s First Supervised Drug-Injection Sites Open in New York

• Majority of mumps cases are among the vaccinated, CDC finds

Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda

• Humans Are Doomed to Go Extinct

• Wildfires are erasing Western forests. Climate change is making it permanent

• 19th century New England whaling logs offer clues to 21st century climate change

• Sperm is being used to create an eco-friendly alternative to plastic