2022-06-22

Worthy

• Fail Gardening - Feast of Assumption

  All agronomy is local: everything works somewhere, nothing works everywhere, and the actual problem you’re trying to solve is confined to your backyard, so reading other people’s advice is just as likely to lead you in the wrong direction as in the right one.

Horseshit

• VHS copy of 'Back to the Future' auctioned for $75,000

• Gas station owner lowers prices to help customers

• Ohio State University secures trademark for use of the word 'THE' on clothing

Jan6

• Police Report Proves Undercover Cops Were Embedded With J6 Protestors.

• Democrat congressman’s staffer caught defacing posters in Capitol complex, but DOJ won’t prosecute.

Gun control / Mass shooting

• Texas DPS Officials Declare Uvalde Police Response to School Shooting an 'Abject Failure' – RedState

  the responding officers not only had tactical weaponry in hand, but they also had bullet-proof ballistic shields. Instead of attempting to neutralize the shooter, who eventually killed 19 children and two teachers, they stood idly by, not even trying to open the door and enter the classroom for another hour. Now, according to Texas DPS officials, within three minutes of the killer entering the school, there were sufficient officers present and the equipment needed to take the shooter out.

• ‘Abject failure’ | Uvalde school massacre could have been stopped in 3 minutes, DPS says.

Musk

• ‘Get your boy Elon in line’: NASA tell-all over private space race

Abortion

• US woman left traumatised after Malta hospital refuses life-saving abortion

Pestilence / Pox / COVID / VaxCult

• WHO chief ‘believes Covid DID leak from Wuhan lab’ after a ‘catastrophic accident’ in 2019 despite publicly maintaining ‘all hypotheses remain on the table.’

• The unnaturalistic fallacy: Covid-19 vaccine mandates should not discriminate

• Fertility tracker and AI used to identify Covid days before symptoms appeared

• Serious Adverse Events of Special Interest Following mRNA Vaccination in Trials

• Women are more likely than men to develop long COVID.

• Effects of Previous Infection and Vaccination on Symptomatic Omicron Infections

Culture War / Tribal / Re segregation

• NIH to discriminate against whites in awarding research grants.

• VICE: White nationalists are trying to reclaim nature as a safe space for racists – twitchy.com

• The Billionaire Family Pushing Synthetic Sex Identities.

Edumacationalizing / Acedemia Nuts

• Supreme Court strikes down Maine tuition aid policy barring religious schools

• When activist historians redefine 'plagiarism' to protect their own - Phillip W. Magness

Media / ShowBiz / Advertising

• Where Did the Long Tail Go? - by Ted Gioia

• DALL-E 2 Makes Its First-Ever Magazine Cover for Cosmopolitan

TechSuck

• Cloudflare outage on June 21, 2022 | Hacker News

• Microsoft stops selling emotion-reading tech, limits face recognition

• SpaceX Says 5G Interference Could Make Starlink Internet 'Unusable'

Crypto con games

• It's Time for Regulators to Put Crypto Down – David Gerard

• Crypto’s frozen mystery: The fate of billions in Celsius deposits

• The GPU Flood Is Here

• Blockchains Vulnerable to Centralized Control, DARPA Report Finds

• Tencent's WeChat wants no more talk of cryptocurrency and NFTs

• TerraUSD crash led to vanished savings, shattered dreams

  • HN comments

• Sam Bankman-Fried, FTX Give Credit Lines to Stem Crypto Contagion

• Crypto winter coming, companies announce more than 1.7K layoffs in June alone

• The Technium: The Maintenance of Wealth

Economicon / Business / Finance

• UK mortgage lenders told they can scrap affordability rule for buyers

• Pending home sales declined 30.6 percent in May in California

• Big, Boxy Apartment Buildings Are Our Rental Future

• GM and Ford, Driving to Beat Tesla, Turn on Each Other

• Cost of a typical house in the U.S. tops $400k for first time

• So, how can we lower gas prices?

• The End of the World Is Just Beginning for Shipping

  • HN comments

• Recession-Fearing Bosses Quietly Abandon Open Jobs.

• Americans gave a near-record $485B to charity in 2021, despite inflation

• Well, drivers, we've got good news and bad news about gas prices

  Good news: Some price relief could be on the way. The bad news: It's because traders are betting on a recession.

Shortages

• Explainer: Why is there a worldwide oil-refining crunch?

• Weird Monopoly: Football Helmets - BIG by Matt Stoller

• Lunchables shrinkflation frustrates father of autistic son

• There’s an ‘Unprecedented’ Sriracha Shortage

Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making

• A gas tax holiday sounds fantastic. Why Obama called it a 'gimmick'

  • Biden will call for 3-month suspension of gas tax

  • Biden calls on Congress to suspend federal gas tax

• U.S. Supreme Court rejects Bayer bid to Nix Roundup weedkiller suits

• FDA to Order Juul E-Cigarettes off U.S. Market

  • HN comments

• Biden administration wants to take the buzz out of cigarettes

  • Biden Administration Targets Removal of Most Nicotine from Cigarettes

• Watch Live: Fed Chair Powell Testifies Before The Senate

• The Next Phase of Regulatory Reform | National Affairs

  the suggestion that agencies review their regulations is an almost inexplicably divisive issue in Washington today. "Retrospective review" has become a dirty term, while cost-benefit analysis has morphed into a tool to judge intentions rather than predict real-world consequences. The shift highlights how far the modern administrative state has drifted from the rational, evidence-based system envisioned by the law-and-economics movement just a few decades ago.

Law Breaking / Police / Internal Security

• California Is Poised to Ban Prostitution-Related Loitering Arrests

• Chicago police will no longer be allowed to chase people on foot

• Bulldozer crushes illegal dirt bikes in New York City

External Security / Militaria / Diplomania

• Did Russian industrial malware blow up a Texas LNG pipeline June 8?

World

• UK to become 'true superpower' with first rocket launch

• Landlords will lose money by next year as buy-to-let Britain falls apart

• China sends dozens of warplanes into skies near Taiwan

• Polio virus detected in London sewage samples

  • National incident declared after UK detects polio virus in London sewage samples

Health / Medicine

• Exposure to any light during sleep linked to obesity, serious health issues

• Daily Harvest Recalls Lentil Crumbles After Customers Allege Liver Illness

• Arguments for a Potato Only Diet | Hacker News

• Had Enough, Eh? Come Back and Take What's Coming to You! | Science | AAAS

  The amyloid hypothesis has been targeted again and again and again from different directions with different drug candidates, and never, ever even once has it shown signs of truly helping Alzheimer's patients. I very much include Biogen's Aduhelm in that assessment. So I ask again: how long are we going to keep doing this?

• Alphabet is spending billions to become a force in health care

  • HN comments

Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda

• Canada to ban single-use plastics to combat climate change, pollution

• Mount Everest Base Camp Is Moving Due to Climate Change

• Largest freshwater fish, almost 660 pounds, is found in Cambodia

• Chasing utopian energy: How I wasted 20 years of my life – Brian Gitt

  • HN comments

• Impact of reading about climate science goes away almost instantly

• 'Substantial weather pattern change' bringing heat and monsoons to California

• Hot or Not? - by creon levit

  When I look, I see two big things: 1) The annual extremes at each location span a much larger range of temperatures than any slow wandering of the median temperatures over almost a century. And 2) the series of medians (and the minima and maxima) look pretty close to random walks.

  Do these data confirm the existence of a climate crisis? An existential threat to human civilization, the human race, or the biosphere? Does downloading and plotting data (from NOAA and the National Weather Service) make me a "science denier"? I don't want to believe that, but I suppose I am (almost) as biased as the next human.

Ukraine War

• IEA warns Europe to prepare for total shutdown of Russian gas exports

• Russia Is Making More in Oil Sales Now Than Before the War

• Ukraine: Could it join the EU, and how might Russia react?

• Corruption enables hackers to blow up a Gazprom pipeline

• In Russia, Western Planes Are Falling Apart