2024-02-12

etc

• How Venus Ended Up with a Mini-Moon Named Zoozve

• Attention Economy

• A Cycle of Misery: The Business of Building Commercial Aircraft

  Predictably, the incident triggered a new round of discussion about the decline of Boeing as an aircraft manufacturer. Nearly every source points to the same instigating event: the 1997 merger with McDonnell-Douglas, which changed Boeing from an engineering-driven company focused on building the best airplanes possible to one which focused overwhelmingly on financials and stock price. As far as I can tell, this characterization is accurate. And yet it misses a big part of the picture: the brutal structure of the commercial aircraft industry that drives companies like Boeing to create things like the 737 MAX (an update to a 50-year-old airplane) instead of creating a new model from scratch.

Horseshit

• Could a Rogue Billionaire Make a Nuclear Weapon? - WSJ

• Awkward branding attempts on Lunar New Year

• A dating app with credit scores: what’s not to love?

• Southwest Airlines Reveals Thinner Seats to Cram More People Onboard

Electric / Self Driving cars

• Waymo robotaxi goes up in flames in Chinatown after crowd attacks vehicle

  • Vandals set off fireworks in driverless Waymo car

  • A crowd destroyed a driverless Waymo car in San Francisco

celebrity gossip

• Meta Blocks Taylor Swift Jet Tracking Accounts, Leaves Up Others

Musk

• Miffed Musk relocates Neuralink from Delaware after Tesla pay package ruling.

• Musk ordered to testify again in SEC investigation of Twitter takeover

  • Court orders Elon Musk to testify in SEC investigation of his Twitter takeover

• Tesla critic buys Super Bowl ads urging Tesla boycott over Autopilot

Trump / War against the Right / Jan6

• Mail-In Ballot Fraud Study Finds Trump 'Almost Certainly' Won In 2020 | ZeroHedge

• The “Unassailable” Theory Faces a Potential Unanimous Rejection – JONATHAN TURLEY

Pox / COVID / BioTerror AgitProp

• Deadly fungal infection ‘Candida auris’ with death rate of 60% spreading rapidly.

  • (Apr 2019) A Mysterious Infection, Spanning the Globe in a Climate of Secrecy - The New York Times (Archive)

Religion / Tribal / Culture War and Re-Segregation

• Floating in the Trope-Sphere – Chicago Boyz

  Looking at TV shows, commercials and print media, you might assume that practically every American marriage or relationship is interracial, that every judge and elected official is wise, kindly and black, and that just about all non-city dwellers are toothless, illiterate rednecks. Deliberate, or just laziness on the part of scriptwriters, show-runners and advertising executives?

• Sticky norms

  The researchers found that young men paid for all or most of the dates around 90 percent of the time, while women paid only about 2 percent (they split around 8 percent of the time). On subsequent dates, splitting the check was more common, though men still paid a majority of the time while women rarely did. Nearly 80 percent of men expected that they would pay on the first date, while just over half of women (55 percent) expected men to pay. Surprisingly, views on gender norms didn’t make much of a difference: On average, both men and women in the sample expected the man to pay, whether they had more traditional views of gender roles or more progressive ones.

• Techrights Faces Legal Consequences for Roy Schestowitz's Transphobic Content

  She even wrote an extremely creepy poem about me.

• Couple to Throuple: How polyamory is becoming a ‘new normal.’

Edumacationalizing / Acedemia Nuts

• Bill Ackman became the unlikely leader of the campaign to end DEI

Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising

• Amazon is working on a new paid subscription plan for its Alexa voice assistant

• Microsoft denies it went back on its word on Activision job cuts

• Viral news story of botnet with 3 million toothbrushes was too good to be true | Ars Technica

TechSuck / Geek Bait

• Pi 5 And SDR Team Up For A Digital Scanner You Can Actually Afford

• Neat trick: Cross My Heart – A Frogger Demake in 256 Bytes of HTML/JS

  • Unobfuscated

  • HN comments

• Reverse-engineering an analog Bendix air data computer: part 4, the Mach section

AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World

• AI Is Starting to Threaten White-Collar Jobs. Few Industries Are Immune

Space / Boomy Zoomers / UFO

• Are we visible to advanced alien civilizations?

  we found that the maximum distance where the detection is possible is of the order of 3000 ly

  • HN comments

Economicon / Business / Finance

• Immigration explains the recent GDP boom

• U.S. credit card users have $1.13T in debt: How did we get here?

• S.F. home sales hit a record low in 2023. Here's why

• Why is the US economy so resilient?

Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making

• Media Defend Biden After Special Counsel Trashes His 'Poor Memory'

• The President's "interview began the day after the October 7 attacks on Israel."

• Green Subsidies More Wasteful Than Previously Reported - WSJ

  One might reasonably ask, if a policy is crazy enough to pay people for not supplying a commodity, why should a non-supplier not charge for the largest possible volume of nothing?

• The week Biden lost the New York Times: Liberal paper's Editorial Board unleashes astonishing broadside warning of 'a dark moment' as it runs back-to-back opinion pieces knifing the elderly president after damning special counsel report | Daily Mail Online

• Democrat insiders say it is now 'PANIC TIME' and party should DUMP Joe Biden, 81, at its summer convention with Gavin Newsom 'waiting in the wings' after Justice Department said president had 'diminished faculties' | Daily Mail Online

  Increasingly, behind the scenes, a nuclear option is being considered to remove the 81-year-old president as the Democrat nominee at the party's convention in Chicago in August. The leading candidates to replace him include California Governor Gavin Newsom and Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer.

• either private information that Biden is toast, or private information that he isn’t toast

• Abraham Lincoln's Oft-Overlooked Campaign to Promote Immigration to the U.S.

• Could Democrats replace Biden as their nominee?

• Lloyd Austin taken to hospital ‘for symptoms suggesting an emergent bladder issue.’

• Maj. Michael Haley Hits Back At Donald Trump Slur With Scathing Fact About Animals

• Senate clears major hurdle on $95 billion aid bill

• Biden's campaign joins TikTok, even as administration warns of national security concerns with app

• Marco Rubio Backs Trump's Alarming Remarks On NATO And Russia

  • Rubio Unbothered by Trump’s Indifference to a Russia Attack on NATO

  • Rubio dismisses Trump's NATO comments: 'Zero concern'

• Biden's legal team went to Justice Dept. over what they viewed as unnecessary digs at his memory

  • Biden's Legal Team Went to DOJ Over What They Viewed as 'Cherry Picked' Digs at His Memory

  • President Biden's personal attorney Bob Bauer says Hur report was "shoddy work product"

• Hunter’s lawyer pal was ‘at the center’ of talks relating to Biden’s handling of classified docs.

External Security / Militaria / Diplomania

• What Would America Look Like If It Lost World War III? - Bloomberg

  how will we react if — say, later this year — we are informed that Iran has successfully built a nuclear weapon and has unleashed its proxy in Lebanon, Hezbollah, to rain missiles down on Israel? Will we threaten to use our own nuclear weapons against Iran to save Israel from destruction, as we threatened to the Soviet Union in 1973, when it considered intervening on the Arab side in the Yom Kippur War? Or will Washington issue yet another of its warnings to Israel not to “escalate” the struggle for its own survival?

  The interesting thing is to imagine daily life in CCP-US. At first, quite normal, aside from a lot of burnt-out inner cities and an influx of newly demobilized soldiers and sailors. Taylor Swift would probably keep singing and the Kansas City Chiefs keep playing. Only gradually would our friends from Beijing start to make their presence felt.

  Only after a few months would you start to worry seriously about what you might have said in your phone calls and emails and old columns. And then you would start to delete things. And then you would have to worry that deletion didn’t really get rid of those offending words because they were backed up on the big-tech servers regardless.

  Speaking for myself, I would loathe nothing more than to walk around New York or San Francisco with my eyes half-closed, to avoid noticing the telltale signs of CCP surveillance.

World

• Sweden's freedom of information laws lead to wave of deadly bombings

  The blast was one of hundreds of instances of potentially deadly explosives planted at residential addresses across Sweden in the past three years. In 2020 there were a total of 107 detonations, according to police figures, and 13 attempts. In 2023 the number soared to 149 detonations and 62 attempts.

  In most countries, tracking down the address of a potential victim could be a laborious process. But not in Sweden, where it is possible to find out the address and personal details of just about anybody with a single Google search. Experts say criminals are being greatly helped by a 248-year-old law, forming part of Sweden’s constitution.

  • Silly Europeons. You're supposed to farm the "harassment house call" service out to the police SWAT teams. Allowing "DIY" efforts like this is messy and inefficient.

• Social isolation takes a toll on a rising number of South Korea's young adults

• Army-backed Nawaz Sharif fails to win Pakistan election. What went wrong?

  • Imran Khan Uses A.I. To Give Victory Speech in Pakistan

  • Jailed Imran Khan Claims Pakistani Electoral Win

• Finland Elects Alexander Stubb President as It Ushers in NATO Era

Israel

• Israel Has Ramped Up Attacks on Jenin Camp in the West Bank

• Hamas a future partner for peace, says Northern Ireland’s First Minister

• Dozens killed in airstrikes on Rafah as 2 hostages rescued

Russia Bad / Ukraine War

• Tucker Carlson Promised an Unedited Putin. The Result Was Boring

• Ukraine Repels Barrage of Iran-made Shaheed Drones

Health / Medicine

• Women less likely to receive bystander defibrillation than men

• We asked. You answered. Here are your secrets to healthy aging

Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda

• (2016) Why wind turbines have three blades | I, Cringely

  In the case of this question the answer wasn’t “because that’s the way it has always been done.” The answer was, instead, “because we have a mathematical proof that three turbine blades extract the most energy from the wind stream.” “The most energy,” in this case refers to the maximal efficiency of any wind turbine as calculated in 1919 by Albert Betz of Germany. According to Betz’s Law, no turbine can capture more than 16/27ths or 59.3 percent of the wind energy passing through the turbine disk. So 59.3 percent is the best you can hope for… or is it?

  Our calculated result of a Lipps wind farm compared to the same farm using current state-of-the-art wind turbines and control is the Lipps farm would cost no more (probably less) and generate 5-8 times as much power per acre per year, all without violating Betz.

• His Best Friend Was a Warthog. It Decided to Kill Him. – Texas Monthly

• 'Holy grail of shark science' caught by drone off California coast

• Beware, a Cheese Crisis Looms