2023-11-10

etc

• 33% of Americans can't name all their grandparents, according to Ancestry.com

• Red State Drivers Turn Up Their Noses at EVs Despite Incentives

  • HN comments

    The extreme reactionaryism is a problem for any policy. What is very dissapointing and disheartening to me is that the policymakers didn't anticipate it

• The first planned small nuclear reactor in the US has been cancelled due to spiraling costs.

• (video) Insane Motorcycle Chase - Brazil

• The parents hiking America's longest trails with five kids

• How did Van’s Aircraft get into this mess? : : FLYER

• Crew aboard a U.S.-bound plane discovered a missing window pane at 13,000 feet

Horseshit

• It's perfectly legal for cars to harvest your texts, call logs

  In response to five class-action lawsuits, a Washington appeals court has decided that Honda and several other automakers did nothing wrong by storing text messages and call records from connected smartphones.

  • HN comments

• A Church ban on cats didn't cause the Black Plauge On Medieval Cats

• We're sorry we created the Torment Nexus

  Possibly the most prominent contributor to far right thought in American science fiction was the editor John W. Campbell. Campbell edited Astouding Science Fiction, one of Amazing Stories rivals, from 1937 until 1971. (Astounding is still with us today, having changed its name to Analog in 1960.) Campbell discovered or promoted many now-famous authors, including Robert Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, E. E. Smith, and Jack Williamson. But Campbell was also an anti-communist red-baiter. He was overtly racist, an anti-feminist, and left his imprint on the genre as much by what he didn't publish as by what he did—and how he edited it.

  • HN comments

  • in their time, these people were celebrated / hated for their progressive views on race. But we're in our time now and we don't do "context".

• Pilot Accused of Trying to Kill Plane's Engines Recounts His 5-Day Shroom Trip

• Congress mandates new car technology to stop drunken driving (2021) | Hacker News

celebrity gossip

• Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak suffers minor stroke

  • HN comments

• Homer Simpson Won't Strangle Bart Anymore: 'Times Have Changed '

• The Curious Hacking of @craigmurrayorg - Craig Murray

• Meet Jeff Geerling - Raspberry Pi

• There never was a band like Rush. Geddy Lee doesn't want to forget it

• FBI informant Peter Thiel dished about two Kremlin invites to Putin meetings

Obit

• Apollo astronaut Frank Borman has died

  • HN comments

Rank Propaganda / Thought Policing / World Disordering

• Google, Meta, TikTok defeat Austria's plan to combat hate speech

• The Tragic Victimhood of "Disinformation Experts"

  Put bluntly, these people lie, but do it in a way that would impress even a politician. In one of the many times I was pestered this year by a mainstream reporter asking why a nice “scholar” like DiResta should be prevented from “just doing research,” I asked him to go back and find out what academic credentials qualified her for “scholar” status (she’s listed as a “research manager”), and to cite another type of “research” that involves flagging content for removal of speech on behalf of an intelligence agency. As my podcast partner Walter Kirn puts it, Stanford’s Observatory is the first one in history that destroys planets.

• How the GOP muzzled the quiet coalition that fought foreign propaganda

• Why the fight to counter false election claims may be harder in 2024

  Wilcox, who is a Republican, has had to shift his vocabulary to talk about those falsehoods because others in his party see the term as code for censorship of conservatives. "In Republican circles, 'misinformation' is a dog whistle," Wilcox said. "All of a sudden, man, you got skewered if you even mention the word."

  Experts say a campaign of legal and political pressure from the right has cast efforts to combat rumors and conspiracy theories as censorship. And as a result, they say, the tools and partnerships that tried to flag and tamp down on falsehoods in recent election cycles have been scaled back or dismantled.

  As Nina Jankowicz sees it, the opening salvo came in the spring of 2022, when a right-wing campaign quickly snuffed out a Department of Homeland Security initiative called the Disinformation Governance Board.

• Microsoft and Meta Detail Plans to Combat Election Disinformation

• Free speech is still worth fighting for

Musk

• One of Elon Musk's boldest Tesla promises is going in the opposite direction

• Musk startup Neuralink seeks people for brain-implant trial

• Musk's Tantrums So Bad, Staff Considered Calling for a Wellness Check

Trump / War against the Right / Jan6

• Trump Judge's Wife Denies Posting Anti-Trump Messages | ZeroHedge

Pox / COVID / BioTerror AgitProp

• Open-source drug discovery could help us in the next pandemic

  That was the idea behind the Covid Moonshot, an open-science initiative to develop antivirals against the coronavirus that began back in March 2020 with a Twitter plea for covid drug designs. This week the researchers behind the project published their results in Science. The effort, which relied on more than 200 volunteer scientists from 25 countries, produced 18,000 compound designs that led to the synthesis of 2,400 compounds. One of those became the basis for what is now the project’s lead candidate: a compound that targets the coronavirus’s main viral enzyme.

  • Leaving aside questions of how "open" this effort was as compared to open source software development... "began in March 2020" and "This week published the results" doesn't seem to have been more timely than the more traditional, commercial efforts either.

• Assessment and Characterization of Covid-19 Related Cognitive Decline

Religion / Tribal / Culture War and Re-Segregation

• Jimmy Carter Stood Up for Palestinians. Why Won't Today's Democrats?

• Transgender people can be baptized Catholic, serve as godparents, Vatican says

• Stepping Away due to Woke/DEI in Silicon Valley

  I got into trouble at work because I made a bad mistake: I committed the sin of using the word ‘female’. I said ‘60% female, 40% male’ and a coworker went nuts. She cursed me out during a meeting and then sent me this long rant via Slack (that I’ve attached here) on why I should never use that word and why it’s as offensive to women as the word ‘retarded’ is to mentally disabled people.

• Princeton Professor Suggests Sex With Animals Is ‘Thought-Provoking’ | The Daily Caller

  • Zoophilia Is Morally Permissible

• Algorithms Hijacked My Generation. I Fear For Gen Alpha.

Edumacationalizing / Acedemia Nuts

• The Hollow Men | Ricochet

  The students about whom the professor wrote in the essay linked above have not only been encouraged to devote their time to hoop-jumping, they have also been told again and again that their country and their society are evil – that their ancestors were evil, and their parents are probably evil as well. And that practically all aspects of culture more than five years old, whether traditional songs and folktales or classic movies, are harmful and certainly unworthy of study except for purposes of deconstructing their bad examples. And, of course, relatively few of these students are influenced by or have seriously studied any traditional religion.

• ‘B’ is for below grade level (and chronically absent).

  Achievement is down and absenteeism is way up, yet report cards show the same grades -- or higher -- as before the pandemic,

Entertainment / ShowBiz / Advertising

• Steam Deck OLED | Hacker News

• Feminist blog Jezebel shutting down - Washington Times

  • Jezebel: Feminist media site shuts down after 16 years

• In 2023, No Man’s Sky is a polished diamond - Polygon

  • HN comments

• Tumblr is downscaling after failing to 'turn around' the site

• OnlyFans top earner Bryce Adams makes millions selling a sex fantasy

• Is the NFL making progress in tackling its concussion crisis?

• The Expanse's James S.A. Corey Announces a New Sci-Fi Trilogy

• Zuckerberg 'vetoed,' 'ignored' plans to boost teen well-being on Meta platforms

• Amazon Fire Tablets and other gear will reportedly switch away from Android

TechSuck / Geek Bait

• Microsoft lays hands on login data: Beware of the new Outlook

• When An AOL Coder Sold the Whole Database: g — LiveJournal

AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World

• New for Amazon Comprehend – Toxicity Detection

• Microsoft hits Alt+F4 on ChatGPT access over security jitters, irony ensues

• AI could cause 'catastrophic' financial crisis – Yuval Noah Harari

Space / Boomy Zoomers / UFO

• If the next Starship makes it through staging, you can call that a win.

• 'Aliens,' or a foreign power? Pentagon UFO chief says someone is in our backyard

  While suspicious UFO cases will “continue to be investigated” for foreign links, the facts at hand appear to support Kirkpatrick’s more startling explanation for the UFO activity in America’s backyard: “aliens.”

  • Pentagon UFO boss says sightings are either 'aliens' or a foreign power

Crypto con games

• They halted "dollar" withdrawals 3wk ago Binance to terminate Russian ruble deposits

• Whatever Happened to NFTs?

• Why Are We So Obsessed with Sam Bankman-Fried's Parents?

• The Tragedy of SBF

  With the SBF saga, though, there seems to be a selective amnesia, where all the respectable people now always knew that FTX—and indeed, cryptocurrency, utilitarianism, and Effective Altruism in their entirety—were all giant scams from the beginning. Even if they took no actions based on that knowledge. Even if the top crypto traders and investors, who could’ve rescued or made fortunes by figuring out that FTX was on the verge of collapse, didn’t. Even if, when people were rightly suspicious about FTX, it still mostly wasn’t for the right reasons.

  With only “minor” changes, that is, SBF could still be running a multibillion-dollar cryptocurrency empire to this day, without lying, stealing, or fraud, and without the whole thing being especially vulnerable to collapse. He could have donated his billions to pandemic prevention and AI risk and stopping Trump. He conceivably even could’ve done more good, in one or more of those ways, than anyone else in the world was doing. He didn’t, but he came “close.” The tragedy is all the greater, some people might even say that SBF’s culpability (or the rage we should feel at him, or at fate) is all the greater, because of how close he came.

Economicon / Business / Finance

• One Hit Wonder Masa Son Continues To Incinerate Capital, Loses Another $6.2 BIllion After WeWork Bankruptcy | ZeroHedge

• Emails reveal Amazon and Google tap friends in government to influence policies

• A Grocery Chain Just Fired Its Self-Checkouts – They're Bringing the Humans Back

• At an average APR of 20%+ Average credit card balances top $6,000, a 10-year high, as delinquencies rise.

• Beyond Meat plans layoffs as US sales plummet.

Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making

• Illinois Senate approves plan to allow new nuclear reactors

• No bar exam required to practice law in Oregon starting next year

• Thomas Massie Failed to Stop "Kill Switch" Mandate That Could Disable Vehicles

  • HN comments

• Sen. Blackburn announces subpoena for Jeffrey Epstein flight logs | Just The News

  "Since we're in the business of issuing subpoenas now, here are a few more that I've filed: a subpoena to Jeffrey Epstein's estate to provide the flight logs for his private plane," Blackburn said during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing.

• Inside Mike Johnson’s Ties to a Far-Right Movement to Gut the Constitution - POLITICO

  For the last 10 years, the “Convention of States” movement has sought to remake the Constitution and force a tea party vision of the framers’ intent upon America. This group wants to wholesale rewrite wide swaths of the U.S. Constitution in one fell swoop. In the process, they hope to do away with regulatory agencies like the FDA and the CDC, virtually eliminate the federal government’s ability to borrow money, and empower state legislatures to override federal law.

  “Speaker Mike Johnson has long been a supporter of Convention of States,” Mark Meckler, co-founder of Convention of States Action (COSA), told me when I asked about Johnson’s ascension.

  Johnson has never directly endorsed COSA as a member of Congress, and he does not directly endorse it now. “Subcommittee hearings about a given subject should not be considered endorsements from the Chairman,” Corinne Day, Johnson’s spokesperson, told me this week.

• The FCC voted to reimplement net neutrality. Now comes the hard part

Law Breaking / Police / Internal Security

• A dogged journalist proved that the CIA lied about Oswald and Cuba

• The Secrets of the JFK Assassination Archive

External Security / Militaria / Diplomania

• China has a sweeping vision to reshape the world – and countries are listening

• Secret War New Wounds, Silence from The Pentagon

• Nvidia will reportedly sell new chips to China that still meet U.S. rules

World

• ICBC trying to curb impact of US ransomware attack, says China

Israel

• 'Hamas terrorists gang-raped Israeli woman before one shot her in the back of the head as he was still having sex with her': Horrifying account revealed as police gather evidence of sex assaults during October 7 attack | Daily Mail Online

• Pink Floyd’s Roger Waters ponders whether Hamas attacks were a ‘false flag operation.’

• NYT Puts Out Astonishing Statement on 'Photojournalist' Who Was With Hamas During Terror Attack – RedState

  The accusation that anyone at The New York Times had advance knowledge of the Hamas attacks or accompanied Hamas terrorists during the attacks is untrue and outrageous. It is reckless to make such allegations, putting our journalists on the ground in Israel and Gaza at risk. The Times has extensively covered the Oct. 7 attacks and the war with fairness, impartiality, and an abiding understanding of the complexities of the conflict

  Given that the Times was one of the chief outlets that spread the fake story about Israel bombing the Al-Ahli Hospital in Gaza, a story sourced directly from Hamas, I'm going to go ahead and say that no, they haven't covered the war with fairness, impartiality, and abiding understanding.

• Israeli Minister: We Will Hunt Down *ALL* Participants in the 10/7 Atrocities, Including the Fake “Journalists” That Played PR Agent for Hamas.

• Israeli Tanks Have Gaza Hospitals Surrounded As UN Decries "Hell On Earth"

Russia Bad / Ukraine War

• Ukraine reports most extensive Russian shelling of the year

• France condemns Russian disinformation campaign

• Is Ukraine Counter Offensive Over?

• Pentagon Is Starting To Restrict Flow Of Military Aid To Ukraine As Money Runs Out | ZeroHedge

Health / Medicine

• Getting Accelerated Approval Wrong | Science | AAAS

  if this is the way that we're going, I'm glad to be much closer to the end of my career in drug research than the beginning.

• CDC reports salmonella outbreak linked to dry dog food

  • Mid America Pet Food Expands Voluntary Recall to Include Additional Dog and Cat Food Products Due to Possible Salmonella Health Risk | FDA

  • Victor, Wayne Feeds, and Member's Mark brands.

Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda

• Hottest Days Ever? Don't Believe It

• World Population Estimated at 8 Billion

• Chimps use military-style tactics to gain advantage on rivals, study reveals