2024-02-13

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• Science fiction must escape the dystopia it has trapped itself in - Nitin, you can't be serious!

  To add to Orwell’s totalitarian state, Huxley’s eugenics, Atwood’s patriarchy, Miller’s nuclear annihilation, we are now filled with dread from artificial intelligence, techno-capitalist and post-human futures. Quite a number of books feature a post-apocalyptic world brought about as a result of climate change. In comparison to the dozen or so ways in which we will arrive at a dystopia, there are very few that offer hopeful or balanced visions of the future world.

  And young people are growing up on this literary diet, adding to the several anxieties they are already surrounded by. There more young people in the developing world and a hopeful vision of the future could channelise their aspirations into positive outcomes. Hopelessness, gloom and zero-sumness can easily become self-fulfilling, because the strongest prisons are those of the mind.

Horseshit

• A tiny robot set to simulate remote-controlled surgery in space : NPR

  Developers plan to use MIRA to conduct a surgical simulation via remote-controlled technology, with a surgeon directing its movements 250 miles away from Nebraska.

• Gen-Zers Give Up On Tiny Homes As 'Car Living' Takes Off | ZeroHedge

• Cousins are disappearing. Is this reshaping the experience of childhood? | Hacker News

• Astronomer's lament: Satellite megaconstellations are ruining space exploration

• Firearms officers raid hotel after Harry Potter fan's wand mistaken for a knife

• The Doomsday Clock Keeps Ticking

• The state of California is selling bongs now

Electric / Self Driving cars

• The Chevy Equinox EV will get 319 miles of range and start at around $35,000

celebrity gossip

• Bill Gates reveals 1997 incident that decided his life post-retirement - The Statesman

  “I had a long period from about age 18 to 40 where I was very monomaniacal. Microsoft was everything. I was lucky enough that as other people took over Microsoft, I got to go and read and learn about all the health challenges, why children die,” said the Microsoft founder.

  • The Bill Gates Problem

• Jeff Bezos will save over $600M in taxes by moving to Miami

Obit

• Bob Moore, founder of Bob's Red Mill, has died

Rank Propaganda / Thought Policing / World Disordering

• The Great British porn block is back

Trump / War against the Right / Jan6

• Could Trump Win By Simple Attrition Rather than Vindication? – JONATHAN TURLEY

Pox / COVID / BioTerror AgitProp

• Alternating Arms May Dramatically Boost the Effect of Covid-19 Vaccines

Religion / Tribal / Culture War and Re-Segregation

• Queer.af Mastodon instance has been shut down by the Taliban | Hacker News

  • Queer.af has been seized by Afghanistan's network authority

  • After 2 decades of re-education and outreach, the people promoting a fundamentalist interpretation of religious principles haven't exchanged those for the new values people were attempting to impose upon them. Now, do we admire their integrity and respect their self-determination; or do we castigate them as ignorant, violent, censorious abusers of others?

  • Taliban Shuts Down 'Queer.af' Domain, Breaking Mastodon Instance

  • Queer.af Mastodon instance has been shut down by the Taliban

• Married people tend to be far happier than those who are not, per new data

• Tech Strikes Back: "Accelerationism" is an overdue corrective to years of gloom

Edumacationalizing / Acedemia Nuts

• Biden has forgiven $136B in student debt. More relief is on the way

• The software says my student cheated using AI. They say they're innocent

• Bill Ackman's fight against Harvard

Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising

• Deleting and destroying finished movies

  • HN comments

• Developers Are in Open Revolt over Apple's New App Store Rules

• Protect Act Could Require Removal of All Existing Porn Online

TechSuck / Geek Bait

• SCSI isn't dead yet – new SSD for old or obsolete systems

• How SSH port became 22 | Hacker News

• AMD Funded a Drop-In CUDA Implementation Built on ROCm: It's Now Open-Source

  • HN comments

• Ethernet For Hackers: The Very Basics | Hackaday

• Unicomp's "New" Model M Keyboard | Hacker News

AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World

• AI 'resurrects' long dead dictator in murky new era of deepfake electioneering

Space / Boomy Zoomers / UFO

• The launch of Hubble in 1990 marked a turning point in our quest for deep space

• Four different Super Bowl ads incorporated UFO themes

Crypto con games

• Bitcoin Breaks $50K for First Time Since Hitting All-Time High in 2021

  • Bitcoin Soars Above $50,000 For The First Time Since Dec 2021, After Surge In ETF Inflows

Economicon / Business / Finance

• Nvidia is now worth as much as the whole Chinese stock market

• Household Debt Tops $17.5 Trillion And Americans Are Feeling The Strain | ZeroHedge

  On an annual basis, credit card balances rose by $143 billion. The bigger problem is the double whammy of rising debt and rising interest rates. Average credit card interest rates eclipsed the previous record high of 17.87 percent months ago. The average annual percentage rate (APR) currently stands at 20.75 percent.

• Uber ends the year in the black for the first time ever

• There’s apparently just so much bacon Americans care to eat, leaving pork producers scrambling.

• "PayPal took $80k from me and banned me" | Hacker News

• Google lays off 12,000 jobs, 6% of the workforce

• BlackBerry to lay off more staff in cost-cutting drive

Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making

• Tech billionaires' push to reshape San Francisco politics: 'a hostile takeover'

  • The Tech Plutocrats Dreaming of a Right-Wing San Francisco

• Biden Sinks Own Ship; Trump Says, "Hold my beer."

• New York City's Vacancy Rate Reaches Historic Low of 1.4 Percent

• Biden Announces He's On TikTok, A Year After He Banned It On All Federal Devices | ZeroHedge

• Joe Biden Dragged For Bizarre Super Bowl Tweet

• People in the meeting later told others in frustration that his winding process and irritability were making it more difficult to reach decisions about the border.

  Much of the current crisis is rooted in factors Biden's team has had little control over — including unprecedented global calamities that have pushed millions of migrants to the U.S., decades of congressional inaction, and the state of key agencies after the Trump administration.

• Michigan lawmaker loses staff and committee assignment after online racist post

• Maui Fire Victims’ Families Offered Up to $1.5 million in Compensation if They Don’t Sue State Agencies.

Law Breaking / Police / Internal Security

• Joel Osteen Houston Megachurch shooting: What we know about woman who walked in with child and started firing

  • "Free Palestine" written on the rifle

  • Houston Police Announce Results of Their Investigation Into Church Shooter’s Pronouns

• Violent crime is dropping fast in the U.S. – even if Americans don't believe it

External Security / Militaria / Diplomania

• “Logistics” Base Where 3 U.S. Troops Died Secretly a Drone Base

  What the Pentagon hasn’t mentioned is that Tower 22 is also a drone base conducting long-range reconnaissance on militants in neighboring Syria and Iraq for airstrikes, according to two U.S. military sources. The base also serves as a staging facility for special operations forces and a medevac helicopter home base.

World

• Canada Bans Flipper Zero Over What It Imagines It Does | Hackaday

  The Government of Canada recently hosted a national summit on combatting vehicle theft, and Minister of Innovation, Science and Industry François-Philippe Champagne proudly declared immediate actions being taken to ban devices used to steal vehicles by wirelessly bypassing keyless entry, the Flipper Zero being specifically named as one such device. And yet, defeating a rolling code keyless entry system is a trick a device like the Flipper Zero simply cannot pull off.

• The Last Latin American Revolution: Javier Milei’s early success in Argentina is a harbinger of what may soon be coming to the rest of Latin America.

• France uncovers a Russian disinformation campaign in Europe (Archive)

  On February 12th Viginum, the French foreign-disinformation watchdog, announced it had detected preparations for a large disinformation campaign in France, Germany, Poland and other European countries, tied in part to the second anniversary of Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine and the elections to the European Parliament in June.

  Viginum said it had uncovered a Russian network of 193 websites which it codenames “Portal Kombat”. Most of these sites, such as topnews.uz.ua, were created years ago and many were left dormant. Over 50 of them, such as news-odessa.ru and pravda-en.com, have been created since 2022. Current traffic to these sites, which exist in various languages including French, German, Polish and English, is low. But French authorities think they are ready to be activated aggressively as part of what one official calls a “massive” wave of Russian disinformation.

• Australia to ban doxxing

Iran / Houthi / Red Sea / Mediterranean

• Houthis Say "American Ship" Hit By Missiles In Red Sea  | ZeroHedge

Israel

• Dutch court orders halt to export of F-35 jet parts to Israel

Russia Bad / Ukraine War

• Russia using Elon Musk’s Starlink on Ukraine front line, says Kyiv

  Responding to those reports, Musk’s SpaceX, which owns Starlink, said on X last week that it “does not do business of any kind with the Russian government or its military. Starlink is not active in Russia, meaning service will not work in that country. SpaceX has never sold or marketed Starlink in Russia, nor has it shipped equipment to locations in Russia.”

  Musk provided thousands of Starlink terminals to Ukraine to help it fend off Russian troops soon after their full-scale invasion in February 2022, giving Kyiv’s forces a valuable technological advantage in the form of high-speed internet for communications, targeting and battlefield management software. However, Kyiv’s praise for the businessman turned to fury when Musk started to limit the operation of Starlink in areas of Ukraine that Russian forces have occupied since 2014, including Crimea.

  • Isn't "internet access" a humanitarian good, of universal application, that should be available to anyone regardless of their beliefs, or the system of governance they're currently suffering? Should Starkink be available only to the Ukrainians? or to neither side in this conflict? Are the phone providers getting flak for serving russians here? Is this just another chance to have a "Musk is Bad" two minute hate?

  • HN comments

  • Ukraine says Russia uses Musk's Starlink terminals at front

China

• How China Miscalculated Its Way to a Baby Bust - WSJ

• China airbrushed away its foreign minister. Why?

Health / Medicine

• Measles and tuberculosis should be long-forgotten. Why are cases rising in the U.S.?

• Weight-loss drugs aren't magic bullet, Lifestyle changes key to lasting health

• Boomers Will Define the Ozempic Era

Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda

• US court bans three weedkillers and finds EPA broke law in approval process

  This is the second time a federal court has banned these weedkillers since they were introduced for the 2017 growing season. In 2020, the ninth circuit court of appeals issued its own ban, but months later the Trump administration reapproved the weedkilling products, just one week before the presidential election at a press conference in the swing state of Georgia. But a federal judge in Arizona ruled on Monday that the EPA made a crucial error in reapproving dicamba, finding the agency did not post it for public notice and comment as required by law. US district judge David Bury wrote in a 47-page ruling that it was a “very serious” violation and that if EPA had done a full analysis, it probably would not have made the same decision.

• Solar Power Decline: Why the Industry Is Struggling

• Revealed: The 1,200 big methane leaks from waste dumps trashing the planet

• Assessing ExxonMobil's global warming projections – Science

• Atmospheric river storms are getting stronger, and deadlier

• Aramco shifts focus to renewables, halts oil expansion plans

• Why are great animal migrations collapsing?

• Spain sets up ranger patrol to protect villages from massive bears that were once nearly extinct.

• Scientists explore whether to add a "Category 6" designation for hurricanes

• Someone is going to dim the sun, and it will be soon.

• Litigation terrorism: the obscure tool that corporations use against green laws

• A bunch of handy charts about climate change

• Car tyres produce more particle pollution than exhausts, tests show