2023-12-10

etc

• Apply For An ACX Grant (2024) - by Scott Alexander

• Batteries are the environmental Achilles heel of electric vehicles

• 65% increase in "significant" Air Traffic Control incidents in 2023

  • HN comments

• Tennessee Residents Clean Up after Severe Weekend Storms

  • Cleanup, power restoration continues in Tennessee after officials say six died in severe storms

Horseshit

• CPSC Warns: Stop Using Carrara High-Powered Magnetic Ball Sets: Ingestion Hazard

  CPSC issued a Notice of Violation to the seller, MXN Commerce Inc., of South Korea, doing business as myKmarket.com, but the firm has not agreed to recall these magnetic ball sets or offer a remedy to consumers.

  • If only this agency was able to communicate with the other agencies whose purview includes the importation of goods. Perhaps they could prevent these products being sold in the USA. There certainly doesn't seem to be much issue enforcing American laws in other countries when movie piracy is involved... Consumer safety laws are different I guess. Altho... How was it that "Fake Ibuds seized" stories were a thing a while back? Would that be so hard to do here?

• Does That Potato Count as a Vegetable? The New Polarizing Food Debate

• Friday Fun: Homeowner Finds Exterminator's Notebook, Hilarity Ensues – Twitchy

• Modern world as seen via Doordash

  I picked up a large order from a seafood place. There were two kid's meals in the order. Kid's meals often include a drink, which these did. The customer specified water as the drink to accompany both. I got to transport about a quart of ice water total in two plastic cups, covered with plastic lids, accompanied by plastic straws wrapped in paper, and cradled in a cardboard drink carrier, a distance of eight miles to a house presumably equipped with glassware, running water and the means to make ice.

  It felt like being in some elaborate con, where the mark is manipulated little by little over time into an increasingly ridiculous situation that they never would have fallen for in fewer steps. I delivered cups of tap water to a house. Try putting that on a resume.

• A Matter of Millimeters: The story of Qantas flight 32 | Hacker News

• Air Traffic Controllers Pushed to the Brink | Hacker News

• American Dynamism

• "is this diaper rash, or chiggers?" Traditional cultures used moss as a diaper alternative

• Why Frozen Pizza Is the Best Pizza

  Red Baron—along with its many mass-market, corporate-produced, grocery-store-freezer-case contemporaries, such as DiGiorno—represents a kind of culinary miracle, the product of decades of technological innovation and industrial processes, as well as the complex cultural evolution of pizza itself, which began not as an artisanal delicacy but as a lowly, versatile, inexpensive street food for the poor.

• GM's hydrogen 'power cubes' will be used in cement mixers and terminal tractors

• Marc Andreessen: MrBeast Feastables are the "future of consumer products"

• Permit nightmare: One S.F. homeowner's 'absurd' journey to build small balcony

Rank Propaganda / Thought Policing / World Disordering

• How the Federal-Private Speech Police Operated in Election 2020: With Radar Highly Attuned to the Right | RealClearWire

• Signs Of Military Discipline Behind Counterpopulist Messaging

  this limited number of “frames” displays, I believe, a level of message discipline that is uncharacteristic of genuinely grassroots political movements. Having worked on various activist political causes for 35 years, one defining characteristic is their lack of message discipline. Activists and NGOs struggle to work together in coalitions because they all want to emphasize different messages.

  That’s not the case in these counterpopulist movements. Across seven years, every major counterpopulism effort used one of those four interpretative frames when they could have drawn on many alternatives, including framing populism as economically inefficient, which was the dominant counterpopulist frame before 2016.

• “Must Stop Immediately”: United Nations Declares UNRWA Terrorism Story “Misinformation” – JONATHAN TURLEY

Musk

• Elon Musk Says He May Bring Conspiracy Theorist Alex Jones Back to X

  • Elon Musk reinstates Alex Jones to X after poll

  • Elon Musk Signals Alex Jones Could Be Reinstated to X 5 Years After Twitter Ban

  • Elon Musk restores X account of conspiracy theorist Alex Jones

• Elon Musk says Ilya Sutskever should jump ship for xAI or Tesla

• Why Tesla Autopilot shouldn't be used in as many places as you think

• Elon Musk's Grok AI Is Pushing Misinformation and Legitimizing Conspiracies

Trump / War against the Right / Jan6

• What price will Rudy Giuliani pay for smearing Georgia election workers?

  • Giuliani could pay millions as Ga. election worker defamation trial starts

• J.D. Vance Ignores Trump’s Pledge to Be a ‘Day One’ Dictator

Pox / COVID / BioTerror AgitProp

• RAF intelligence officers joined Whitehall and Army in 'spying' on Covid critics

Religion / Tribal / Culture War and Re-Segregation

• TikTok driving antisemitism? Firm that ran survey didn't reach that conclusion

Edumacationalizing / Acedemia Nuts

• Scottish schools have tumbled from top of the class. This is what went wrong

• University of Pennsylvania President Resigns over Comments on Antisemitism

  • Penn president Elizabeth Magill resigns after a week of intense backlash.

  • comment seen on net... can you say "reactionary?":

    She had to go, "Is it harassment to misgender a student? Yes! Is it harassment to call for the death of a Jewish student's whole race? It depend on the context. That's a gift to the opposition."

  • Penn's Leadership Resigns Amid Controversies over Antisemitism

• The Day The Empress’ Clothes Fell Off

  In the hearings, President Gay actually said, with a straight face, that “we embrace a commitment to free expression even of views that are objectionable, offensive, hateful.” This is the president whose university mandates all students attend a Title IX training session where they are told that “fatphobia” and “cisheterosexism” are forms of “violence,” and that “using the wrong pronouns” constitutes “abuse.” This is the same president who engineered the ouster of a law professor, Ronald Sullivan, simply because he represented a client, of whom Gay and students (rightly but irrelevantly) disapproved, Harvey Weinstein.

• As Fury Erupts Over Campus Antisemitism, Conservatives Seize the Moment - The New York Times

  • HN comments

• (Apr 2022) The Curious Case of Claudine Gay

• Bill Ackman Is on a McCarthyite Witch Hunt

  • HN comments

• Scholars Who Study the Middle East Are Afraid to Speak Out

  heated debates have focused on the pressures on university presidents to take a stand, the behavior of student groups, allegations of antisemitism, and the censorship of pro-Palestinian speech. But less attention has been paid to one group directly affected by the controversies: the scholars who work on and teach about the Middle East, who every day concentrate professionally on issues related to the Israeli-Palestinian dispute.

  • HN comments

Entertainment / ShowBiz / Advertising

• The Babylon Bee Writers Stand In Solidarity With Our Fellow Fake News Writers Going On Strike At The Washington Post | Babylon Bee

• Sony debuts first PS5 controller for disabled gamers

  • HN comments

• A Warrant Showing the U.S. Government Is Monitoring Push Notifications

• Doom At 30: Romero remembers his seminal FPS so that we don't remember it wrong

• Apple responds to the Beeper iMessage saga: 'We took steps to protect our users'

• Microsoft Stopped Announcing Xbox Console Sales

  • Xbox Will "Exit the Gaming Business" If Game Pass Doesn't Get Enough Subscribers

TechSuck / Geek Bait

• Linux: Ext4 data corruption in 6.1.64-1

• (2012) Remembering Jon Postel – and the Day He Hijacked the Internet

• PysimpleGUI

  • HN comments

• Bad NEWS, Emacs

  Emacs registers (used to) provide a perfect UX. Silky smooth, really. But no more, not in GNU Emacs 30. It’s gone, without as much as a NEWS entry to inform the unwary user about this regression. Surely, it’s not too late to revert one bad change, right? That’s what I thought, unfortunately the Emacs maintainers seem bent on dismissing the community’s outcry in an unwarranted and misguided attempt to save face.

  • HN comments

• The diminishing half-life of knowledge | Hacker News

AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World

• Three Things That LLMs Have Made Us Rethink – Rodney Brooks

• Does Section 230 cover generative AI?

• Tech firms failing to 'walk the walk' on ethical AI, report says

• Mistral, French A.I. Startup, Is Valued at $2B in Funding Round

Space / Boomy Zoomers / UFO

• Pentagon X-37B Plane Launch Tomorrow Aboard SpaceX Falcon Heavy on 7th Mission

• The Case of the Missing Vega AVUM Propellant Tanks - European Spaceflight

• Missing tomato found in space station after eight months

Crypto con games

• One Year on from the NFT Crash, the Digital Art Scene at Miami Art Week Matures

Economicon / Business / Finance

• Shopping for Luxury Online Has Fallen Out of Fashion

• Grocery stores are becoming data brokers

Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making

• Sheila Jackson Lee soundly defeated in Houstan mayoral race.

• Arizona's Democrat Governor Demands $512 Million Reimbursement From Biden For Border Security 'Failure'

• McCarthy endorses Trump for president: ‘We’re very honest with each other’

Law Breaking / Police / Internal Security

• Police surround former cop's home after shooting, then just leave

• Tennessee’s prison population grows as violent crime drops steeply - MLK50: Justice Through Journalism

• Man arrested in slaying of 16-year-old cheerleader found dead in bathtub of Texas apartment

External Security / Militaria / Diplomania

• U.S. 'beginning' internal discussions about renewing North American trade pact

• Number Of Attacks On US Bases In Iraq & Syria Pushes Past 80

  There have been dozens of US troop injuries, with all of them reported as minor.

World

• 6 teens involved in beheading of French teacher convicted, sentenced

• The Venezuela-Guyana Dispute Explained In 3 Charts | ZeroHedge

• Taliban Members Fed Up with Office Work, Ready to Quiet Quit

• Japan's deepest economic contraction since pandemic clouds path for BOJ

• Philippines says the Chinese coast guard attacked its vessels for a second day

Israel

• US blocks Gaza ceasefire call

  • US Explains Veto of UN Resolution for Gaza Cease-Fire

• Calls to reform UN Security Council after US vetoes Gaza ceasefire

• Heavy Fighting Continues in Southern Gaza

• Petraeus says Israel should try U.S.-style counterinsurgency in Gaza

Health / Medicine

• Newly discovered path between heart&brain may explain why healthy people faint

• Oregon launches legal psilocybin access to the public

• Are Low-Fat Dairy Products Healthier?

• Many Americans impacted by widespread drug shortages

• U.S. 'beginning' internal discussions about renewing North American trade pact

• Weight-loss drug Zepbound now available at U.S. pharmacies.

Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda

• The Second-Biggest Coal Company Is Looking to Exit the Industry

• Cop28: China 'would like to substitute renewables for fossil fuels' in agreement

• Massachusetts charts a new energy future beyond natural gas

• The Climate Change We've Already Created Will Last 50k Years, Scientists Warn

• Combat corporate greenwashing with better science

• Methane under the seabed is thawing as oceans warm – it's worse than we thought

• Saudi Arabia Is Trying to Block a Global Deal to End Fossil Fuels

• Rising sea levels threaten hazardous waste facilities along U.S. coast

• Inert pesticide ingredients may be more toxic to bees than scientists thought

• Erythritol, a Non-Nutritive Sweetener, Is a Palatable Ingested Insecticide

• Eat less meat: Will the first global climate deal on food work?