2022-02-09

Worthy

• (Nov 2021) Some Advice Gathered from People Smarter than Me

etc

• Heuristics That Almost Always Work - by Scott Alexander

• How to Live with Your Regrets

• California bullet train estimates a $5B cost increase

• Pluralistic Ignorance

Horseshit

• How the World Wildlife Fund tried – and failed – to create an eco-friendly NFT

• OK, WTF Are Wordcels and Shape Rotators?

• Ask HN: Does Anyone else working in a crypto company feel this is all a scam? | Hacker News

• Love and logins: Who gets custody of passwords in a breakup?

• I’m Making My Kids Millionaires by Hiring Them and Investing Their Income

celebrity gossip

• Body of John McAfee still in Barcelona morgue seven months after death

• Barack Obama's Father Identified as CIA Asset in Drive to 'Recolonize' Africa

Obit

• Douglas Trumbull, Who Pioneered VFX on ‘2001’ and ‘Blade Runner,’ Dies at 79

Rank Propaganda / Thought Policing

• Fake news: The game that shows people how to spread misinformation

• You cannot police misinformation in a fair, reproducible, and representative way | Hacker News

• How Wanting Less Leads to Satisfaction

• Cyberattack Misinformation Could Be Plan for Ukraine Invasion

• Watch GOP Ad Yanked From Airwaves Due to Images of Illegal Border Crossings

Ottowa / Truckers

• Dispatch from the Ottawa Front: Hot dogs, horns and hard men

  Someone has gone down the fence with a Sharpie correcting all the grammatical errors on the signs,

  If you want to believe, or convince someone else, that it's just a big friendly group of patriotic Canadians, you can pick and choose from many examples to support that case. But that's a lie. There’s a nasty edge to this group — small, but real. If you believe that it's a crowd full of dangerous people, well, that's true, too, but it's not the majority, not even close. There's good and bad, mingled all together, and that, as much as the thousands of tonnes of heavy steel parked bumper to bumper, is what's going to make resolving this such a Godawful mess.

• Outrage as Trudeau smears anti-vax mandate Freedom Convoy as ‘swastika-wavers’ in Canadian parliament despite no evidence: Protesters blockade busiest border crossing to the US at Detroit

• Trudeau accused of fueling anger after claiming anti-vax protesters are ‘waving swastikas’.

• Media Covers Itself in Shame With Its Coverage of Canadian Freedom Convoy

• Right-Wing Americans Want In on Canada’s ‘Freedom Convoy’

COVID / VaxCult

• Severity and Vaccine Effectiveness for SARS-CoV-2 Variants

• Link Between Vitamin D and Covid-19 Reaffirmed in 'Striking' New Findings

• James Carville — ‘I want to punch these piece of shit Unvaccinated people right in the face’… – CITIZEN FREE PRESS

• Preprints on the coronavirus have been impressively reliable

• Why the World Needs China’s Covid-Zero Policy

• Several States Start Rolling Back Mask Mandates as Infections Fall

• Brain stimulation improves cognitive performance in long-Covid

• Is the Omicron subvariant BA.2 more transmissible?

• Prevalence and Durability of SARS-CoV-2 Antibodies Among Unvaccinated US Adults

• Alberta ditches proof-of-vaccine program midnight, masking for students Monday

• UK report did not find Covid-19 vaccines damage immune response

• Biden Admin Asks For Recount On COVID Deaths - Victory Girls Blog

• Pfizer expects $54B in 2022 sales on Covid vaccine and treatment pill

• Photographer Documents His Time in Hong Kong’s ‘Covid Jail’

• Fauci says ‘full-blown pandemic phase’ of COVID-19 coming to end

• 'Pandemic' Truths: Time for a New Narrative | The Pipeline

  A Danish study shows that “the effectiveness of the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna mRNA vaccines against omicron is actually negative. The Pfizer vaccine makes recipients 76.5 percent more likely and the Moderna recipients 39.3 percent more likely to be infected than unvaccinated people.”

• Denmark is overflowing with virus cases, but the population is partying

• Data misreporting during the COVID19 crisis: The role of political institutions

• Boris Johnson plans to lift England’s last Covid rules a month early

• The First Evidence of Omicron Spilling over into Wild Animals Has Been Found

• Boston University epidemiologist Dr. Eleanor Murray speaks on COVID-19 and endemicity

• The Doctor Will See You Now—Wait, Not You

• Ask HN: How do you recover from the Covid vaccine?

  Asking this out of desperation. For the record I am pro-vaccine but after receiving my booster vaccine (Moderna) a few weeks ago I haven't been able to shake the symptoms. I am an avid runner but my resting heart rate seems to have jumped suddenly and I feel fatigued more easily. When coding I am struggling to concentrate and have what feels like a fog. No other medical conditions either. I saw my family practitioner who I trust but he couldn't offer me anything. Opening this up to the HN community for more diverse suggestions; what has worked for you? Is there anything else I should be trying beyond exercise and eating healthy? And: is this normal?

• New York lifts indoor mask mandate, with California and N.J. mandates to end

Culture War / Tribal / Re segregation

• Tech Giants ‘Failing’ to Block Global LGBTQ Conversion Therapy Network

• ACLU-MN Wins Settlement, Reforms to End State Patrol Attacks on Journalists

• The data are clear: the boys are not all right

Edumacationalizing / Acedemia Nuts

• Totally UNHINGED: Loudoun County Public Schools’ email sent to all principals reads like an authoritarian nightmare (screenshots) – twitchy.com

• Elite universities should stop prizing victimhood

Media / ShowBiz / Advertising

• ‘Newsroom Dissonance’: digital platforms are influencing the work of journalists

• Beijing 2022: Winter Olympics hit by deluge of complaints from athletes

  • Olympians in tears over poor living conditions, lack of food at Winter Games.

• The dangers of high status, low wage jobs – Economist Writing Every Day

  journalism, however, is different, because it is not the capital or labor market opportunities, but specifically the labor itself that is concentrated in a narrow location. The “Writer living in Brooklyn” Twitter/LinkedIn/Muckrack bio is a cliche at this point for a reason. But why are they all in Brooklyn? And why do I get the sense that I can summarize at least half of them as White children of the upper-middle class who paid full-freight for an English-adjacent degree from an expensive liberal arts college?

  So yeah, a bunch of writers live in Brooklyn and they are currently a hilariously homogeneous monolith of progressive cosplay, often producing little in the way of insight or information, surviving emotionally off the status returns of living in a bubble of mutual-affirmation and shared anxiety. It’d all be pretty innocuous if I didn’t worry that today’s progressive writer’s commune is also a breeding ground for tomorrows purveyors of reactionary fearmongering and misinformation.

  • (Nov 2019) Have journalists and academics become modern-day clerics? « The Story's Story

• On this day in 2004: the first story about Facebook

• Duolingo to shutter their discussion forum

TechSuck

• Starlink lost 40 satellites to a geomagnetic storm

  • Geomagnetic storm takes out 40 of 49 new Starlink satellites

• GCP just cost me over $1k because of a small OSS bug | Hacker News

• Valve’s Steam Deck wows reviewers: ‘The most innovative gaming PC in 20 years’

Economicon / Business / Finance

• Prepare to Shell Out for Warehouse Space–If You Can Find It

• The Passage Of Polymarket - by Scott Alexander

• Biden Touts 'American Manufacturing Comeback,' New Tennessee Plant

• JPMorgan Estimates Bitcoin’s ‘Fair Value’ at $38,000, 12% Below Current Price

• Facebook market cap falls below $600B, threshold for antitrust scrutiny

  The $600 billion market cap figure also happens to be the number House legislators picked as the threshold for a “covered platform” under a package of competition bills designed specifically to target Big Tech. If Meta were to remain below that threshold, it could avoid the additional hurdles the bills would install for how it can conduct its business and make deals, while its larger peers like Amazon, Alphabet, Apple and even Microsoft become subject to the rules.

• Peloton’s future is uncertain after a swift fall from pandemic stardom

• Male economists are freaking out over a NYT profile of Stephanie Kelton and MMT - Axios

• Why Airbus Is Canceling Orders from Qatar Airways, One of Its Best Customers

• Key Supplier of Wafers for Chips Says It’s Sold Out Through 2026

• Rivian Loses Its Shine as Investors Fret About Production Delays

• U.S. Refinery Outages Are Another Headache For Biden

Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making

• The White House Now Says It Never Really Wanted Lockdowns | ZeroHedge

• VP's Husband Whisked from Event Over Bomb Threat

• GOP Rep. Claims Capitol Police Secretly Broke Into His Office

• House OKs Bill Easing Budget Strains on Postal Service

• Pelosi buckles, pushes stock-trading ban

• McConnell calls Jan. 6 a ‘violent insurrection,’ breaking with RNC

• How to Lose a Supreme Court Nominee in 24 Days

• Why the Biden Admin Is Handing Out Free Crack Pipes

Law Breaking / Police / Internal Security

• Biden DHS Declares Heightened Terrorism Threat Due To "Mis-, Dis-, & Mal-Information" | ZeroHedge

External Security / Militaria / Diplomania

• The fatigue factor: the ongoing marathon of European diplomacy is a useless distraction

• Going to War with Russia Over Ukraine May Be Suicide for America – Larry Johnson

• We must do everything possible to avoid an enormously destructive war in Ukraine

• Ukraine and the Threat of Nuclear War

• White House Authorizes US Troops In Poland To Spearhead Ukraine Evacuation Plan | ZeroHedge

  • U.S. troops in Poland prepare for Americans potentially fleeing Ukraine

World

• UK.gov to make adults give credit card details for access to Facebook or TikTok

• What Is 'Finlandization,' a Status Proposed for Ukraine?

• UK Revives Dangerous Attempt to Verify Age of People Who Watch Porn

  • Reddit and Twitter users face age checks under UK porn law plans

Health / Medicine

• Changing your diet could add up to 13 years to your life

• Fentanyl kills more 18 – 48 year old Americans than Covid

• A gentler strategy for avoiding childhood dental decay

Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda

• Frozen, dried, powder forms of yellow mealworm added to EU authorised novel food

• The urine revolution: how recycling pee could help to save the world

• Obsolete rainfall records blocking cities’ climate change preparations

• Italy makes constitution greener, environmentalists call for action

• My best estimate is gas stoves decrease life expectancy by 53 days on average

• The world is on fire and our leaders are failing, poll finds