2024-02-16

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• Electrical Steel: The Material At Heart Of The Grid | Hackaday

  The root cause of the three-year wait for large power transformers comes down to raw material supply chain problems, particularly with electrical steel. The electrical steel market is global both on the supply and demand side, so disruptions in one part of the world can ripple through the entire market. The electrical steel market’s current disruptions can be blamed on a host of factors: pandemic-era shutdowns of mines and factories, international sanctions, tariffs and trade disputes, off-shoring of manufacturing, and probably about a dozen other things. What it all means, though, is too little of this specialized material to go around.

• Mushroom sprouting from live frog in India leaves scientists stunned | The Independent

Horseshit

• The Carry-On Baggage Bubble Is About to Pop

  We know that airlines overbook their seats, then count on no-shows and rebookings to make the system work. This helps ensure that each flight will be as full as possible, but it also leads to situations where passengers must be paid to take a different flight. What if the airlines are doing the same thing with overhead bins and “allowing” more carry-on luggage than a plane can even hold? What if they’re overbooking those compartments in the hopes or expectation that some passengers won’t bother with a Rollaboard and will simply check their bags instead?

  • Frontier Airlines pays agents a bonus for charging passengers for oversized bags

• Boeing Disaster Proves Americans Businesses Greedy Mentality Is Broken

• Chocolate Chip Ice Cream Has Fallen Out of Favor

• I'm eating raw chicken every day for 100 days – or until I'm hospitalized

  • HN comments

• Younger generations have gained more wealth than other age groups since 2019

• Unpredictable Power Surges Threaten US Grid – and Your Home

• Taste games - DYNOMIGHT INTERNET NEWSLETTER

  Basically, he says, “What’s great about America is that we’ve abolished taste games so taste no longer signals class and everyone gets the best of everything, horray!” He’s wrong, let’s not waste time debating it. But did he really believe that? Was it more true in 1977 for America than for Europe? Had Warhol climbed the taste ladder so high that the entire game became invisible to him? Was he playing some kind of Meta Game where he screws with everyone by denying that taste games even exist?

• McDonald's Making Job Applicants Take Weird AI Personality Tests

• OK, WTF Are Wordcels and Shape Rotators?

celebrity gossip

• Julian Assange: Australia wants WikiLeaks founder back home

Obit

• Anthony Epstein, pathologist behind Epstein-Barr virus find, dies at 102

Rank Propaganda / Thought Policing / World Disordering

• Wired Publishes Screed Against Section 230 That Gets Almost Everything Wrong

Musk

• Take the money and run? I tested X's paid-promotion model, and it was woeful

• Matt Taibbi shares past chat messages with Elon Musk

Trump / War against the Right / Jan6

• Gov't Hiding Docs That Incriminate IC for Illegal Spying, Election Interference

  • Is This What the Biden Admin Was Really After When It Raided Mar-a-Lago? – PJ Media

• Ocasio-Cortez says Trump win would result in ‘grave impacts’ on democracy

Pox / COVID / BioTerror AgitProp

• Researchers find many 'natural' and Covid-19 deaths likely related

• First state-level look at long Covid reveals the seven hardest-hit states

• What is the specific role of schools and daycares in Covid-19 transmission?

Religion / Tribal / Culture War and Re-Segregation

• X Fact Check: Does Gender Integration Moderate Politics?

Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising

• British intelligence able to read and flag private Snapchat messages

• Nitter is over – Twitter blocked access to their network without a user account

  • Ask HN: Nitter officially declared "over" today, alternatives?

  • Twitter-viewer Nitter folds as Musk's X kills "guest-account" workaround

• Amazon Prime Video drops Dolby Vision and Atmos unless you pay extra

• The reasons people are sending back their Apple Vision Pro headsets

• Sitting inside with the blinds closed reading comics, the $3500 Vision Pro is perfectly fine, until you throw up.

TechSuck / Geek Bait

• (2020) Security: Reverse engineering a forgotten 1970s Intel dual core beast: 8271, a new ISA

  • HN comments

• Feds want to ban the Flipper Zero – Experts say it's a scapegoat

  • HN comments

• Rejected chips, hidden microSD cards plague the USB stick market

AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World

• The Third Gemini

• Sam Altman owns OpenAI's venture capital fund

Space / Boomy Zoomers / UFO

• "Lunar Lander Deployed": SpaceX Rocket Launches US Spacecraft Towards Moon | ZeroHedge

  • SpaceX successfully launches the next US lander set for the Moon

Crypto con games

• You'll Never Believe What Senator Elizabeth Warren Just Did | ZeroHedge

  In participation of the Capitol Flag Program, Senator Warren’s office submitted a request to commemorate Nakamoto’s accomplishment of creating the first “truly inclusive financial system,” with the colors of the United States being flown above the Capitol on December 18, 2023 – a date known to Bitcoiners as HODL Day.

• Coinbase swings to profit on interest income strength

Economicon / Business / Finance

• Commercial property deals in the US are starting to pick up at deep discounts

  • HN comments

• The high cost of Uber's small profit

• Could vacant office spaces across the U.S. be the solution to a national problem?

  "I think the long-term trajectory is that the office is a central part of the economy," he said. "I think this is an opportunity for the office market as well to redevelop itself. And actually, in 10 or 15 years, we'll look back and the office market will have revolutionized itself in a really exciting way."

• Lyft's Risher Says 'My Bad' on Margin Error, 'It Was One Zero'

• Welcome to the New 'Good' Economy, Where Millions Get Left Behind

  • High inflation is still squeezing Americans' budgets

• Is working from home about to spark a financial crisis?

Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making

• White House CyberSec chief urges developers 'Switch to memory safe coding'

• Biden attacked Hur for asking him when Beau died. That didn't happen, sources say.

  “How in the hell dare he raise that?” Biden told reporters in an impromptu White House press conference. “Frankly, when I was asked the question, I thought to myself, it wasn’t any of their damn business.” But Hur never asked that question, according to two people familiar with Hur’s five-hour interview with the president over two days last October. It was the president, not Hur or his team, who first introduced Beau Biden’s death, they said.

  Biden raised his son’s death after being asked about his workflow at a Virginia rental home from 2016 to 2018, the sources said, when a ghost writer was helping him write a memoir about losing Beau to brain cancer in 2015. Investigators had a 2017 recording showing that Biden had told the ghost writer he had found “classified stuff” in that home, the report says.

• Senate Poised to Pass Kids Online Safety Act KOSA (Archive)

• The surge in immigration is a $7T gift to the economy (Archive)

  The CBO has now factored in a previously unexpected surge in immigration that began in 2022, which the agency assumes will persist for several years. These immigrants are more likely to work than their native-born counterparts, largely because immigrants skew younger. This infusion of working-age immigrants will more than offset the expected retirement of the aging, native-born population. This will in turn lead to better economic growth. As CBO Director Phill Swagel wrote in a note accompanying the forecasts: As a result of these immigration-driven revisions to the size of the labor force, “we estimate that, from 2023 to 2034, GDP will be greater by about $7 trillion and revenues will be greater by about $1 trillion than they would have been otherwise.”

  Got that? The surprise increase in immigration has led a multitrillion-dollar windfall for both the overall economy and federal tax coffers.

• I'm a neuroscientist. Our presidential candidates have shrinking prefrontal cortexes.

  As of right now, Biden doesn’t seem like he’s going to be taking another cognitive test. Meanwhile Trump gets sketchy doctors who say things like “Trump is healthier than a draft horse!” There’s not even going to be a presidential debate this cycle. But can we please, just please, be honest about our presidential candidates not being magically immune to cognitive decline? People have eyes and ears, and scientists don’t have a bunch of prestige left to burn of late.

• "AI Generated Political Disinformation" was bad 'til it wasn't: Parkland mass shooting victims send AI robocalls to NRA-supporting politicians

• What Would Happen If Biden Stepped Aside?

• John Podesta Was Behind Biden’s Decision To Pause Natural Gas Exports. His Lobbyist Brother Stands To Benefit. Tony Podesta represents foreign companies involved in the natural gas industry.

Law Breaking / Police / Internal Security

• The US over-reliance on incarceration is lazy and cruel

  • HN comments

• Georgia Attorney-General claims that not having a phone makes you a criminal

  During the Jan. 8 hearing in Fulton County Superior Court, Fowler argued that a cellphone in King’s possession on the day of their arrest, which he characterized as a “burner phone,” should be admissible as evidence of wrongdoing, even though it contained no data. He went even further to suggest that not possessing a cellphone at all also indicates criminal intent. Judge Kimberly Adams agreed to admit evidence of King’s cellphone.

External Security / Militaria / Diplomania

• U.S. missile-defense satellites headed for low-Earth orbit.

• Why is the U.S. Navy Running Out of Tomahawk Cruise Missiles? | The National Interest

  Firing off more weapons than America buys causes stockpiles to decline quickly.

• Air Force OKs Autonomous Cargo Flights Across California After Successful Test

  • HN comments

• Yesterday's Hysteria-Inducing Intelligence On Scary New Russian Space Weapon Quickly Downgraded | ZeroHedge

World

• UK Fell into Recession in 2023

  The UK is in recession if GDP falls for two successive three-month periods - known as quarters. The latest figures show that the economy shrank 0.3% between October and December 2023. That followed a 0.1% fall between July and September and means the economy went into recession at the end of 2023.

• Japan Loses Its Spot as Third-Largest Economy as It Slips into Recession

• EU cuts growth and inflation forecasts

• Bangkok Says Work from Home as Pollution Blankets City

• Immigration surge fuels male population boom in Canada

• India's Supreme Court strikes down fundraising scheme in blow to Narendra Modi

• Greece legalizes same-sex marriage in a first for an Orthodox Christian nation

• EU cuts growth and inflation forecasts for 2024

Iran / Houthi / Red Sea / Mediterranean

• More Attacks On Red Sea Vessels As US Coalition Pounds Houthi-Held Port City | ZeroHedge

Russia Bad / Ukraine War

• Russia is developing nuclear capability to threaten satellites, source says

• Experts assess Russian nuclear space threat

• Why Is the American Right Pandering to Putin? | The Free Press

• Aleksei Navalny: Outspoken Putin Critic Is Dead, Russian State Media Reports - The New York Times

  • Alexei Navalny Dies in Prison

  • Alexei Navalny, the Kremlin's Most Ardent Critic, Dies

  • News: Alexey Navalny Is Dead

  • Alexei Navalny Died in Prison

  • HN comments

China

• China Set to Lose 60 Percent of Population by Century's End

• China Revives Socialist Ideas to Fix Its Real-Estate Crisis

• What a Viral Post on Giraffes Says About China's Fed-Up Investors

Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda

• Climate Finance Is Targeting the Wrong Industries

• Scientists Try Risky Air and Water Experiments Hoping to Stop Climate Change – MishTalk

• Google is making a map of methane leaks for the whole world to see

• National Archives close after two people dump red powder on case holding Constitution – NBC New York

  Video posted to social media shows two men standing in the Archives Rotunda, in front of the case holding the Constitution, with red powder dusting them and the case behind them. As security guards stand to the side of the men and the case, the two men make what appear to be pre-prepared statements about climate change. "We all deserve clean water, air and a livable climate," one of the men says in the video. As the two men continue talking, security guards can be seen in the video ushering other people out of the Rotunda, and approaching the men, trying to get them to leave the area.

• Plastics producers deceived public about recycling, report reveals

• Shark-Ray Hybrid? Aquarium Suggests Shark May Have Impregnated Its Lone Stingray

  • Stingray could be first in its species to be pregnant through parthenogenesis