2023-12-02

Worthy

• Recalibrating Respect - by Robin Hanson - Overcoming Bias

  I’ve recently come to estimate that the world population and economy will suffer a several centuries fall, with innovation grinding to a halt, ended by the rise of Amish-like insular fertile subcultures, much like how Christians came to dominate the Roman Empire. And even though this hasn’t actually happened yet, my new estimate pushes me to recalibrate my respect. I not only want to respect such cultures more, I want guess which of their choices and features are most responsible for their coming success, to more respect those choices and features. And to contrast those with the features of others, to be respected less.

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• Astronomers posit that we live in an area with below average density

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• (Apr 2023) Researchers Taught Parrots to Video Call Other Parrots

• No More Dry Burgers: McDonald's Overhauls Its Biggest Item

• The Physics Lesson I Keep Re-Learning | Hackaday

Horseshit

• Mammon | No Mercy / No Malice

• Your burning holiday sex questions — answered by sexologists.

• Ask HN: How would you do renewable clothing as a service?

• Ozempic could change the economy as we know it

• Drunk and Asleep on the Job: Air Traffic Controllers Pushed to the Brink

• (Sep 2023) The Huberman Husbands and Their Long-Suffering Wives

• Can one book explain it all?

• Ask HN: Will we be forced to pass laws against filming anyone in public? | Hacker News

• Kentucky two-year-old's high IQ makes her youngest female member of Mensa

Rank Propaganda / Thought Policing / World Disordering

• Lol: Before and After, in House Testimony - by Matt Taibbi

  It turns out the time between Troye statements “Instead of continuing to spread conspiracy theories about government censorship” and “I’ve never said this was a conspiracy, you have not heard that comment from me” was exactly one hour.

• Britain's scariest libel firm can pursue anyone, anywhere

Musk

• The End of Elon Musk

• The Cybertruck Is a Disappointment Even to Cybertruck Superfans

• Ask HN: Why was Elon Musk forced to buy Twitter?

• Walmart Stops Ads on X, Joining the Advertising Exodus

Trump / War against the Right / Jan6

• Inside the Operation to Bring Down Trump’s Truth Social | WIRED

  The North Atlantic Fella Organization (NAFO) is an online activist group founded last year to combat pro-Russia propaganda related to the invasion of Ukraine. Last month, the group turned its attention to Trump’s social network and launched a campaign to take over the trending topics section on the website. The group says that the operation, which included 50 “NAFO commandos,” as members targeting Truth Social call themselves, was so successful that those running the campaign now have a long-term goal: Take down Truth Social completely.

• Jan. 6 Committee Tapes Have Disappeared, Says House Republican

• Trump Can Be Prosecuted for Trying to Overturn Election, Judge Rules

• Judge rejects Trump's immunity claim in 2020 election case

Pox / COVID / BioTerror AgitProp

• Turning back the clock on brains aged by Covid-19

• Exhaled SARS-CoV-2 aerosol infectivity enables Covid-19 transmission in minutes

Religion / Tribal / Culture War and Re-Segregation

• BBC radio star says he struggles with being around "too many white colleagues" at work.

• Derek Chauvin was stabbed 22 times by federal inmate who says he attacked him on Black Friday as symbolic connection to BLM.

• The Anti-Israeli Left Is Turning into QAnon

  This is QAnon shit. To be honest, it’s actually far more popular and widespread than QAnon! But it is just as insane. And this is a recurring theme of the Left going back to the afternoon of October 7th. They have seen conspiracies and lies everywhere. The plans found on the dead Hamas terrorists? Those couldn’t be real because Hamas couldn’t possibly have color printers.

  At every point, the Left has had some new insane conspiracy theory, and they can basically all be summed up as “the powerful Israelis have faked this to justify their oppression and slaughter of the oppressed Palestinians, BUT they are also so incompetent at it that random lunatics on Twitter can catch them!” There are dozens of these every day. I’m sure there are new ones happening right now.

• Ho, Ho, Ho/Ho Chi Minh/The PLO/Is Sure to Win | Power Line

• "Cosmo" promotes Satanic Abortion Ritual: Killing Babies to “Empower” Women

• Post-affirmative action, Asian American families are more stressed about college

• Protestor sets self on fire outside Israeli consulate in Atlanta

• The lesser-known history of the Monroe doctrine

  Retracing the legacies of racism and colonialism on the 200th anniversary of the Monrine Doctrine

Edumacationalizing / Acedemia Nuts

• Minnesota school brings sanity back to the classroom by banning smart phones.

• Largest US publisher, bestselling authors sue over Iowa law banning K-12 books

Entertainment / ShowBiz / Advertising

• What went wrong with 'the Metaverse'? An insider's postmortem

• News outlets turn to Reddit as Musk's X descends into chaos

• 4,789 Facebook Accounts in China Impersonated Americans, Meta Says

• Did you buy any Discovery Channel content on the PlayStation Network? Because it turns out you didn't.

• Behind the Tragic, Instagram-Perfect Life of an Ex-Disney Executive

• The Fall of Sports Illustrated

TechSuck / Geek Bait

• You don't need JavaScript for that - HTMHell

AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World

• The Inside Story of Microsoft's Partnership with OpenAI | Hacker News

• 1960s chatbot ELIZA beat OpenAI's GPT-3.5 in a recent Turing test study

• We now have more details on what the heck happened at OpenAI

• Elon Musk: OpenAI is lying when it says it is not using copyrighted data

• The copyright case against AI art generators just got stronger

• Good old-fashioned AI remains viable in spite of the rise of LLMs

Space / Boomy Zoomers / UFO

• Amazon Hires Elon Musk's SpaceX for Three Rocket Launches

• DNA from ‘non-human’ alien corpses is from ‘unknown species,’ analysts claim.

Economicon / Business / Finance

• Tech layoffs hitting Bay Area again. Here's why – and what comes next

• "hip waders aint gonna do it; this is scuba diving" Should we believe Americans when they say the economy is bad?

  So what’s going on? Last weekend FocalData ran a poll for me, asking a representative sample of 2,000 US adults whether they thought economic circumstances had improved or deteriorated over recent years. The results were startling: Americans are consistently wrong in the negative direction on almost every measure we polled. By huge margins, they believe inflation is still rising (it’s falling), that it has outstripped wage growth (wages have outpaced prices), and that they have become less wealthy (they’ve become much wealthier).

  One explanation I heard is that the despondency comes from young people struggling with runaway rents. But wages have risen faster for them than the old, outpacing rents. Plus young consumers are the most positive, per the Michigan survey. Similarly, wages have risen faster for those on the lowest incomes, reversing more than a third of the increase in wage inequality over the past four decades. Wealth has risen for the least and most wealthy alike.

• Just How Bad Is the US Cost-of-Living Squeeze? We Did the Math

• Bidenomics Winning? 60% Of Americans Report Their Income Does Not Keep Up With Inflation | ZeroHedge

• Tiger Global's Biggest Venture Fund Has 18% Loss After Markdowns

• US credit unions offline after ransomware infects back end cloud outfit

  "I can confirm that approximately 60 credit unions are currently experiencing some level of outage due to a ransomware attack at a third-party service provider," the NCUA spokesperson said. We're told the unions' IT provider Ongoing Operations – ironic – was hit by ransomware on Sunday, sparking days of disruption for the biz's clients. It's believed the cloud provider was infiltrated via the Citrix Bleed vulnerability.

• Vox Media Lays Off 4% of Staff in 2nd Round of Cuts This Year

• Traders Are Betting That GameStop Will Jump 50% Within Two Weeks

Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making

• Biden Administration to Require Replacing of Lead Pipes Within 10 Years

  • To protect kids, the EPA wants total removal of lead pipes

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• Floating Down De Nile: Goldman Declares Hunter Biden Laptop May Be a Fake – JONATHAN TURLEY

• Oh, well that ought to do it - by Tom Knighton

  prices are still higher than Willie Nelson on a SpaceX flight. Luckily, President Joe Biden has figured out the solution to all our problems. He’s going to just tell companies to drop prices.

• The Left’s fear of fascism under Trump is the ultimate example of projection

• Tommy Tuberville Promises to End His Military Appointment “Mess” | Vanity Fair

  Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer is planning to unveil a resolution that would go around the Alabama senator and “swiftly confirm” the more than 350 nominations he’s blocked by the end of the year. “Extreme and unprecedented obstruction by a single Republican Senator has eroded centuries of Senate norms and injected extreme partisanship into what has long been a bipartisan process,” Schumer wrote in a Dear Colleague letter Sunday, as lawmakers prepared to return to work after the Thanksgiving holiday.

• No new boss at NSA until it answers questions on buying location, browsing data

  Is the NSA buying up Americans' location and browsing data? Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) is tired of asking and has now moved to block the confirmation of a new NSA director until he gets answers.

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• Rand Paul successfully used the heimlich maneuver on Joni Ernst

• Biden Administration Unleashes Powerful Regulatory Tool Aimed at Climate

• Congress Members want $26B for programs The Pentagon didn't seek

• ‘To hell with this place’: George Santos sharpens attacks after expulsion

• Johnson: Impeachment inquiry vote is a ‘necessary step’

Law Breaking / Police / Internal Security

• Philadelphia union boss accused of stealing hundreds of thousands of dollars

• This Louisiana Village Brought in $1 Million Through a Court Where the Mayor Is the Judge — ProPublica

  • Investigation Exposes Yet Another Small Town That Is Little More Than A Law Enforcement Honeypot | Techdirt

External Security / Militaria / Diplomania

• The future of air defense must be smarter, more affordable, and reusable

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• Latest Draft of UN Cybercrime Treaty Is a Big Step Backward

• U.S. Navy Works to Salvage Plane from Fragile Hawaiian Bay

• US Navy Will Test AI System to Help Crews Track Chinese Submarines

World

• Why far-right Wilders won the Dutch election

  To my mind, this is the great oversight of the political left in recent years. We are so focused on avoiding economic uncertainty that we forget to paint a picture of what we’re progressing towards. In the wake of Piketty’s Capital in the twenty-first century (which was hugely popular in the Netherlands too), GreenLeft leader Jesse Klaver even published his own monograph called The myth of economism, begging for an ideological revival. But in the last election campaign, his party (now teamed up with Labor) mostly emphasized economic issues such as the minimum wage. While these are critically important policy points, a sole focus on the economy can make even a very wealthy and equal populace feel slighted. Economic issues must be embedded in an overarching vision for what our society ought to strive toward.

  Nietzsche wrote: “He who has a why to live for, can bear almost any how.” Conversely, those who can’t stand even an excellent how might be lacking a why in their life. Meaning, in this case, is an antidote to precarity.

• Paraguay official resigns after signing agreement with fictional country

• Heavy snow brings chaos to southern Germany as Munich suspends flights

• 'Leaning tower' in Italy on 'high alert' for collapse

  the days of the Garisenda tower in Bologna, Italy, could be numbered. Following investigations last month, the city is instigating a civil protection plan for the “sudden and unexpected collapse of the tower,” which has dominated the Bologna skyline since the 12th century.

  • Bologna's leaning tower sealed off over fears it could collapse

Israel

• Israel-Hamas war live updates: Rocket barrage bombards Israeli cities, IDF strikes hundreds of targets in Gaza as truce deal collapses.

• Bloody Fighting Resumes in Gaza After Ceasefire Talks Falter

Russia Bad / Ukraine War

• Surrounded by Russians, Ukrainian soldier called in a strike on his own position

Health / Medicine

• Despite advances, medicine can only go so far

• Tinnitus linked to undetected auditory nerve damage

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• Autoimmunity Has Reached Epidemic Levels

• Singing to babies is vital to help them learn language, say scientists

Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda

• Climate change leads to higher GDPs in the North and declines in the South

• World Bank to boost climate financing share to 45%

• Microbiologists at COP28 push for a seat at the climate-policy table

• Climate Inequality Report 2023

• Roar of cicadas was so loud, it was picked up by fiber-optic cables

• US to slash powerful planet-warming methane by nearly 80% from oil and gas

• At COP28, More Than 20 Nations Pledge to Triple Nuclear Capacity