2023-09-08

etc

• Asteroid hit by NASA's DART spacecraft is behaving unexpectedly

• (2012) How Tortoiseshell Cats Show the Limits of Cloning

• China's ancient water pipe networks show no evidence of a centralized authority

• I rode with an ice road trucker to the Arctic Circle

  • HN comments

• The Area 51 of the East Coast

Horseshit

• Kessler Syndrome and the space debris problem

• A police officer took down the largest match-fixing ring in tennis

• Gun deaths among US kids continue to rise; Southern states have worst rates

• It’s Time for Greater San Francisco

celebrity gossip

• Bill Gates Booked Entire Michelin-Star Restaurant Just to Sip a Diet Coke

Rank Propaganda / Thought Policing / World Disordering

• When the BBC’s disinformation correspondent lied on her CV

Musk

• Elon Musk ordered Starlink to be turned off during Ukraine offensive

• Twitter ‘unfit’ for banking over alleged complicity in Saudi rights abuses

• FAA has closed the SpaceX Starship Super Heavy mishap investigation

  • FAA orders Musk’s SpaceX to take 63 corrective actions on Starship

  • SpaceX can't launch its giant rocket again until fixes are made, FAA says

Pestilence / Pox / COVID / VaxCult

• How Covid Affects the Heart

• Metformin cuts risk of long Covid by 40% in patients with obesity trial suggests

• New Covid variant may be less threatening than first feared

Media / ShowBiz / Advertising

• The Decomposition of Rotten Tomatoes

  • HN comments

• Substack Is Leaning into Politics

  • HN comments

• Mattel’s Windfall from ‘Barbie’

• Friday Facts 375 – Quality

• Chrome now tracks users and shares a “topic” list with advertisers

  • HN comments

• Tell HN: Facebook now requires login to read public timelines | Hacker News

• Nobody Will Tell You the Ugly Reason Apple Acquired a Classical Music Label

  The company plans to buy up the rights to music so it doesn’t have to pay royalties to labels. It will use every trick it knows to substitute the tracks it owns for competitive offerings.

TechSuck

• Active North Korean campaign targeting security researchers

  • HN comments

• Microsoft will assume liability for legal copyright risks of Copilot

  • HN comments

• Pointers in Far Memory: A rethink of how data & computations should be organized

  • invariant pointers in a distributed global address space? how very database-y.

Crypto con games

• Fourth Top FTX Executive to Plead Guilty Ahead of Sam Bankman-Fried Trial

Economicon / Business / Finance

• Ask HN: Why was Square down for 13 hours?

  • Square says it has resolved day-long outage

• Theft losses near $1B at Lowe’s: here’s how much they’re costing other retailers

Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making

• Is the Supreme Court Crooked?

• Senate Confirms Anna Gomez to Break Joe Biden’s FCC Deadlock

• Neurologists say McConnell didn't have stroke or seizure in connection with two recent health scares | Just The News

• Early warning: Feds alerted to whistleblower concern over Hunter Biden business deals in 2015 | Just The News

• Beware the Special Counsel’s New Indictment Plans for Hunter Biden.

External Security / Militaria / Diplomania

• US has outsourced national security to the poor countries?

World

• UN expert sounds alarm over ‘contemporary forms of slavery’ in Canada

Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda

• September heatwave in UK longest on record

• Extreme heat poses heightened risk of death for those with schizophrenia

• Air pollution: Nearly everyone in Europe breathing bad air

• More wild Atlantic salmon found in U.S. rivers than any time in the past decade

• Our climate change debates are out of date