2024-02-10

etc

• Floridians feel magnitude 4 earthquake with epicenter off state’s east coast.

• (2018, PDF) Understanding Wood Bonds – Going beyond what meets the eye

• (1999, PDF) Foundations of Mechanical Accuracy

• Bioluminescent houseplant hits US market for first time

Horseshit

• I Broke Some Old Laws in Front of Police to See If They'd Arrest Me

• The Norwegian sovereign wealth fund's $92M Excel error (Archive)

  • Much like companies get "billion dollar valuations"; these numbers may not be totally made up; but they're not very close to real, either.

• If you yearn for the void, try floating naked in a dark tank

• A former mine at a fossil-rich site is causing the BLM headaches | Ars Technica

• 'Reading is so sexy': Gen Z turns to physical books and libraries

• Diving horse - Wikipedia

  However, changes in sea level at the pier turned out to have been caused by the weight of the crowds gathered to watch the diving horses. Measurements from 1929 to 1978 indicated sea level rise – when the crowds were regular and caused the pier to settle slightly in the soft, sandy bottom – except during the horse-jumping hiatus from 1945 to 1953 when the lack of regular crowds allowed the pier to rise slightly.

• US Navy creating revolutionary submarine that can reach supersonic speeds

  • deafening opponent's sonar?

• In Reversal, Guinness Gives a Frenchman's Matchstick Eiffel Tower the Record

• The Flying Car Is Dead

• Why The Line - by Robin Hanson - Overcoming Bias

  consider The Line, a trillion dollar megastructure city now under construction in Saudi Arabia. It is to be 200m wide, 500m tall, 170km long, and host 9 million residents.

Electric / Self Driving cars

• 'Mr Bean' actor Rowan Atkinson blamed for slumping electric car sale in the UK

  In his 2023 column Atkinson says he felt “duped” by electric cars despite being an early adopter. He claimed that electric cars aren’t as environmentally friendly as they seem.

  • HN comments

celebrity gossip

• Assange: UN expert urges London not to extradite WikiLeaks founder to US

• 'The Joe Rogan Experience' Returns to Apple Podcasts After 3-Year Hiatus

Rank Propaganda / Thought Policing / World Disordering

• Feds simulate response to AI deepfake election threat

• Instagram and Threads will stop recommending political content

  • Instagram and Threads will no longer recommend political content

Pox / COVID / BioTerror AgitProp

• New Evidence Suggests Long Covid Could Be a Brain Injury

Religion / Tribal / Culture War and Re-Segregation

• Polyamory Is a Luxury of the Affluent, Just Like Everything Else We Have and Do

Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising

• Ring video doorbell 43% price hike

• Reddit Doesn't Have to Share IP-Addresses of Piracy Commenters, Court Rules

  Early last year, the film companies subpoenaed Reddit for the first time, requesting the personal details of several users. Reddit refused to cooperate, defending their users’ right to anonymous speech, and found a California federal court in agreement. In a second attempt a few weeks later, several film companies sent a similar subpoena to Reddit. This time, the request was more targeted, as all comments specifically referred to the ISP being sued; Grande Communications.

• America Tires of Big Telecom, Driving Boom in Community-Owned Broadband Networks

• Fortnite Is Winning the Metaverse

• The Far Right's Favorite Web Host Has a Shadowy New Owner

• Coyote vs. Acme in Peril: Why Warner Bros Hasn't Sold It

  What makes the situation with “Coyote vs. Acme” more baffling is that unlike “Batgirl,” the film consistently received great scores from test audiences. Several Warner Bros. executives have gone out of their way to claim that “Batgirl” was un-releasable; that simply wasn’t the case with “Coyote vs. Acme.”

TechSuck / Geek Bait

• Figure out who's leaving the company: dump, diff, repeat | Hacker News

AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World

• OpenAI on track to hit $2B revenue milestone as growth rockets

• OpenAI CEO Sam Altman seeks as much as $7 Trillion for new AI chip project

  • HN comments

Space / Boomy Zoomers / UFO

• Amateur astronomer finds X-37B spaceplane

• Flipped Bit Could Mark The End Of Voyager 1 ‘s Interstellar Mission

Crypto con games

• Craig Wright claims to have used std:chrono in 2007

  Wright's lies continue to be of another realm, far away the land of the believable. My favorite today was the anachronisms in "his" C++ code. How could he have used std:chrono in 2007 (or so) when it only came out in 2011, as part of C++ 11? Oh, it wasn't the C++ 11 feature, see, he worked on Project Chrono and they put everything in the std namespace, see. He actually found a real project by that name, but their code is of course not structured like that – it wouldn't even be valid.

Economicon / Business / Finance

• Arm's post-earnings pop leaves stock trading at over 100% premium to Nvidia

• Small Banks Are Teetering. Expect More Failures. | Barron's

  Banks hold capital (equity) to offset the risk of failure. Unfortunately, many community banks do not hold enough capital to offset a large group of loan failures in their portfolio. Another pandemic program allowed community banks to decrease their rates of capital buffers to under 9%. But not all the banks have been able to return to this level. This and many other factors have increased the likelihood of large-scale failures in the small banking sector. As the charge-offs continue, more small bank failures should be expected.

• JPMorgan to open more than 500 new bank branches

• Moody's Failed to Warn About Silicon Valley Bank's Problems

• New SEC Insider Trading Tool Is 'Massive, Unprecedented' Surveillance, Suit Says

• Investors Are Almost Always Wrong About the Fed on Interest Rates - WSJ

• Inflation in December was even lower than first reported, the government says

• Another 'Great Retirement' Wave Hits the US After Stocks Rally

• Big Tech jobs have lost their glamour

• Cisco to cut thousands of jobs as it seeks to focus on high growth areas

Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making

• Biden Can’t Remember When He Was Vice President Or When His Son Died: DOJ.

• Secret Service orders ‘no response’ to RFK Jr.’s protection plea.

• Tech Millionaires Take on Politicians in Fight to Fix San Francisco

• Some Calif. cops still sharing license plate info with anti-abortion states

• Nebraska bill would hire hacker to probe the state's computer, elections systems

• California officials take a rare stance against YIMBYs, side with Bay Area city

• Biden rejects report's suggestion that he's feeble and forgetful

• How the Rockefellers and Billionaire Donors Pressured Biden on LNG Exports - WSJ

  The billionaire-backed campaign, starting around four years ago, worked to identify and fund community leaders already campaigning against fossil-fuel projects. The activists buttonholed White House and federal officials in Washington, Houston and Dubai as part of a high-intensity grassroots campaign.

  • "Grass roots." Some pretty tall grass, there. Watch for snakes.

• Americans Should Be Less Complacent About Social Security. We are fast approaching a fundamental restructuring of the program that would abandon its historic design and place future benefits at risk.

Law Breaking / Police / Internal Security

• Democrats Turn On Each Other Over Crime in D.C. - POLITICO

  They’re raising money, circulating petitions and planning door-knocking strategies in the name of a recall campaign against the D.C. councilmember they blame for the city’s shocking wave of homicides, carjackings and robberies.

  That wave made national news last week after the death of Mike Gill, a former Trump administration official and the rare political type who kept a hand in both Company-Town Washington and Hometown D.C., where he’d been the GOP member of the city’s election board. Gill was shot while waiting to pick up his wife from her office on downtown’s busy K Street, the first victim in a carjacking spree that left three dead and ended with a police shooting of the alleged gunman in suburban Maryland.

  The rampage itself was atypical: Police said they believed the assailant was having a mental-health crisis, not actually trying to steal cars. But the slaying of a beloved father of three from the political universe put local crime on the radar of even more people who don’t usually follow metro news. Many of them, recall advocates said, soon contributed to the recall campaign, which had started raising money just a couple weeks earlier.

  The target of the campaigners’ ire is a fellow Democrat named Charles Allen, the councilmember most associated with championing the force reductions, budget cuts and new transparency rules that followed the 2020 murder of George Floyd. As it happens, Allen represents D.C.’s Ward 6, which includes Mercado’s Capitol Hill home and houses a hefty number of others with day jobs in national politics.

  • All those stories re-assuring us crime rates were way down were about as real as all the "The economy is wonderful!!1" stories.

• Persistent Speeders in D.C. Could Have Limiters Installed on Their Cars for Life

External Security / Militaria / Diplomania

• Retired officers, enlisted members can rejoin active duty to offset personnel shortfalls

  Applications must be submitted by Jan. 31, 2026, and the program allows up to 1,000 retired officer or enlisted personnel to active duty at any given time. Additionally, under this VRRAD program, the period of active duty service is limited to no more than 48 months. Personnel will only fill vacant active duty authorizations. Retired officer applicants are limited to Line of the Air Force commissioned officers retired in the grade of captain through lieutenant colonel. Retired enlisted applicants are limited to members retired in the grade of staff sergeant through senior master sergeant.

World

• Huawei's offices in France raided by financial prosecutors

• Venezuela Deploys Tanks, Armored Carriers To Guyana Border

Israel

• Israeli soldier videos from Gaza could breach international law

Russia Bad / Ukraine War

• Sweden Closes Investigation of Pipeline Blasts, but Stays Silent on Cause

China

• China to export deflation to the world as economy stumbles

Health / Medicine

• The Race Is on to Stop Ozempic Muscle Loss

  • Ozempic's Muscle-Loss Problem

Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda

• EU Bends The Knee To Farmers: Drops Key Provisions In 2040 Climate Proposal

• A leading data scientist's journey from doomism to climate hope

• Freeing trees of their liana load can boost carbon sequestration in forests

• Fruit farmers in Tohoku are coping with climate change

• Trustworthy Satellite Earth Observations for Science and Society - Eos

  Ideally, satellite Earth observations (EO) data should be accompanied by a quantitative and standardized assessment of their quality and suitability for intended applications. This criterion is often unmet, however, because accuracy standards and methodologies used for assessment vary greatly across EO missions. The lack of standardization hampers our ability to monitor Earth system processes effectively, despite the ever-increasing amount of satellite EO data at our disposal.

  • Why do I feel this is going to turn out like efforts to ensure "trustworthy COVID information."

• Climate scientist Michael Mann wins defamation case against conservative writers

  • Jury awards climate scientist Michael Mann $1M in defamation lawsuit

  • Renowned climate scientist Michael Mann wins $1M in defamation suit

• Opinion | Cultivated Meat’s Empty Promise of Revolution - The New York Times

  despite nearly a decade of work and a great many messianic pronouncements, it is increasingly clear that a broader cultivated meat revolution was never a real prospect, and definitely not within the few years we have left to avert climate catastrophe. Interviews with almost 60 industry investors and insiders, including many who have been employed by or been part of the leadership teams of these companies, reveal a litany of squandered resources, broken promises and unproven science. Founders, hemmed in by their own unrealistic proclamations, cut corners, such as using ingredients derived from slaughtered animals. Investors, swept up in the excitement of the moment, wrote check after check despite significant technological obstacles. Costs refused to enter the realm of plausible as launch targets came and went. All the while, nobody could achieve anything close to meaningful scale. And yet companies rushed to build expensive facilities and pushed scientists to exceed what was possible, creating the illusion of a thrilling race to market.

• Man who diverted national park river to ease boat access on Lake Michigan convicted of misdemeanors

  “Within days, the natural power of the water and the constructed dam caused the river to divert and created a new channel to Lake Michigan that grew to approximately 200 feet (61 meters) wide,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Lauren Biksacky said. “It stayed approximately that wide for the summer and fall season,” she added. “There was then an influx in the number of fishermen that came to Platte River boat launch to take advantage of the favorable conditions of access created by the new channel.” U.S. Attorney Mark Totten said Howard had a policy dispute with the National Park Service and “took matters into his own hands.” The Park Service no longer dredges the Platte River. As a result, sediment and sand build up, reducing the ability to get boats to Lake Michigan.

• Critical Atlantic Ocean current system is showing early signs of collapse

• Nine US states are teaming up to accelerate the adoption of heat pumps

  • HN comments