2024-02-19

etc

• Stop Basing Your Self-Worth on Other People's Opinions

  You simply need to recognize that you are worthy exactly as you. You are not your grade — whether it’s an A or an F. You are not your job, your age, your marathon time, your place on the org chart, your relationship status, your gold bars, or your prison bars. You have inherent value, and it’s not conditioned on anything you do or have done. It’s not conditioned by how virtuous you have been or how many mistakes you’ve made. Your virtue and your failures are not factored into the calculus of your value as a human being. Your value stems from your being, not your doing.

• Access Over 181,000 USGS Historical Topographic Maps

Horseshit

• Don't let 'FDA-approved' or 'patented' in ads give you a false sense of security

• Some Authors Were Left Out of Awards Held in China. Leaked Emails Show Why. - The New York Times

  Suspicions in the science fiction community have been building for weeks that something was amiss with last year’s awards, which rotate to a different city each year, and in 2023 were hosted in Chengdu, China. Now, newly released emails show that the awards were likely manipulated because of political concerns.

  • This fuss has been running almost a month; previous "Puppies" demonstrations had shown the Hugo awards to be completely gamed already, I thought. As if the political nature of the awards back into the 1970s hadn't demonstrated that to everyone's satisfaction already.

• Archaeologists Discovered a Massive Ancient 'Megastructure' Submerged Beneath the Sea

  the wall is submerged more than 20 meters below the surface of the Bay of Mecklenburg, on the northern coast of Germany. Researchers think the nearly one kilometer-long megastructure was once used for hunting reindeer, and it gives them clues to how Stone Age hunter-gatherers in the region lived.

• (May 2023) She Stole $54 Million From Her Town. Then Something Unexpected Happened. - POLITICO

  The irony is that a system designed in part to prevent elected officials from accumulating too much power left an opening for an unelected official to seize a great deal of her own. Crundwell’s turn as comptroller started soon after she graduated high school and spanned 20 years — through five city councils, three mayors and three finance commissioners. She’d designed the city book-keeping system, which was impenetrable to basically all city officials but her, and everyone seemed fine with that. As Bryan Smith detailed in a Chicago Magazine profile of the case, Dixon’s checks, deposits, financial statements and funding requests were all in the grip of one person: Crundwell. She wasn’t just exploiting the system. She was the system.

• District heating and cooling networks are getting to be a hot trend

• Candy sells faster than fentanyl in San Francisco's open-air drug markets

Electric / Self Driving cars

• Chinese electric carmakers are taking on Europeans domestically – and succeeding

celebrity gossip

• Kara Swisher Is Sick of Tech People, So She Wrote a Book About Them

Musk

• Teslas are a target in anti-ecocapitalism attacks

  Early in February, a letter was published by a left-wing liberal group in Berlin calling for Tesla vehicles and charging stations to be set on fire on the page Indymedia. In the meantime, the state security is investigating the matter.

Trump / War against the Right / Jan6

• In New York, the Trump Brand Is Costing Some Condo Owners - The New York Times

  When Donald J. Trump became president, condominiums in buildings emblazoned with his name began selling for less, according to an analysis.

• Parler: The far-right’s favoured social-media platform plots a comeback

• Hochul tells NY businesses not to fear about Trump verdict: ‘Nothing to worry about’

  New York Gov. Kathy Hochul (D) addressed New York business owners in a new interview and told them there was “nothing to worry about” after former President Trump was hit with a $355 million fine and the inability to conduct business in New York for three years. Hochul joined John Catsimatidis on “The Cats Roundtable” on WABC 770 AM where she was asked if other New York businesspeople should be worried that if “they can do that to the former president, they can do that to anybody.” “I think that this is really an extraordinary unusual circumstance that the law-abiding and rule-following New Yorkers who are business people have nothing to worry about because they’re very different than Donald Trump and his behavior,” Hochul responded. Hochul said there was no way she would overrule Engoron’s decision because “we need a clear separation of powers.” She added that “that’s what was envisioned by our Founding Fathers.”

  • As a nobody with nothing; watching Trump's legal troubles makes me ever more certain that there will be no justice for me if I am ever in front of a court again. I think that's the real point of the effort. Law serves Class, not Wealth, certainly not equity.

Religion / Tribal / Culture War and Re-Segregation

• Trans-women's milk as good as breast milk, says NHS trust

  In a letter to campaigners, the University of Sussex Hospitals NHS Trust (USHT), said that the milk produced by trans women after taking a combination of drugs is “comparable to that produced following the birth of a baby”.

• ADA Doesn’t Require Employer to Keep Customer-Facing Employee Whose Tourette’s Leads Him to Use Slurs.

Edumacationalizing / Acedemia Nuts

• (Nov 2023) Scientists Censoring Science

  All of us are concerned about what appears to be an increasing tendency within science to stifle certain unpopular claims - not because of low scientific quality but for other, non-scientific reasons. The claims in question tend to revolve around hot-button political issues such as sex, gender, and colonialism, and the attempts to censor these claims tend to come from a leftist or progressive perspective.

  Science has made enormous strides in the last few centuries, greatly enhancing the quality of life of billions of the planet’s inhabitants. It has often done this in the face of considerable opposition from external, authoritarian institutions. Arguably, though, the biggest threat to science today, at least in the West, comes from within science rather than without. In many ways, scientific self-censorship is a more insidious and intractable problem than censorship by outside forces, and the battle against this form of censorship may be a harder one to wage.

  • Prosocial motives underlie scientific censorship by scientists: A perspective and research agenda | PNAS

Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising

• Release Notes: How to make self-hosted maps that work everywhere and cost next to nothing • MuckRock

• French telecom company Orange fined €650k for violation of GPL license

TechSuck / Geek Bait

• Python datetime pitfalls, and what libraries are (not) doing about it

  • HN comments

• More 128TB SSDs are coming as almost no one noticed this launch

• (2019) Discovering Hard Disk Physical Geometry through Microbenchmarking « Blog

AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World

• Jim Keller to Sam Altman's $7T AI chips plan – 'I can do it for under $1T'

• With the rise of AI, web crawlers are suddenly controversial

  The Internet Archive, for example, simply announced in 2017 that it was no longer abiding by the rules of robots.txt. “Over time we have observed that the robots.txt files that are geared toward search engine crawlers do not necessarily serve our archival purposes,” Mark Graham, the director of the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, wrote at the time. And that was that.

  As the AI companies continue to multiply, and their crawlers grow more unscrupulous, anyone wanting to sit out or wait out the AI takeover has to take on an endless game of whac-a-mole. They have to stop each robot and crawler individually, if that’s even possible, while also reckoning with the side effects. If AI is in fact the future of search, as Google and others have predicted, blocking AI crawlers could be a short-term win but a long-term disaster.

Space / Boomy Zoomers / UFO

• Life Spreads Across Space on Tiny Invisible Particles, Study Suggests.

Crypto con games

• Crypto Con Games Span From Caymans to El Salvador

  The glaring failure of Lewis, of all people, to spot a fraudster is baffling. As he should know, con men are charming by default—and yet he comes to the conclusion that this guy couldn’t possibly have stolen everyone’s money; there must be some mistake. Lewis paints crypto as hilariously inept and corrupt nonsense that makes everything around it just as inept and corrupt—but somehow our boy Sam remains innocent.

Economicon / Business / Finance

• Higher for Longer Inflation Rates Not over Until the Fat Lady Sings?

• No more free ride. Returning stuff you buy online is about to get expensive

• The Death of Free Shipping

• Systemic Risk Concerns Grow Among Fund Managers Amid Real Estate Tremors - Bloomberg

Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making

• True the Vote admits it can't backup dropbox fraud claims featured in 2000 Mules film - Greg Palast

  In response to a subpoena issued by the Superior Court of Fulton County, Georgia, on behalf of the State Election Board, who had made a request for information, True the Vote admitted that they don’t know the name of their “anonymous” source, and they have no confidentiality agreement, which they had previously claimed existed. Indeed the right-wing group now say they have no physical evidence whatsoever in their “possession, custody, or control”.

  What makes the story so sickening is that the Republican controlled Georgia state Election Board was quick to denounce True The Vote’s claims about stuffed dropboxes. Nevertheless, to stop this crime wave that never happened, Gov. Brian Kemp radically reduced the number of dropboxes in Black counties, while increasing them in white counties. Despite the lack of any evidence of a single case of a fraudulently cast absentee ballot, they have choked off almost entirely access to mail-in ballots, used overwhelmingly by Democrats.

• Illinois mayor is now accused of shutting down businesses that refuse to donate to her campaign

  One resident, Lawrence Gardner, claimed that Henyard forced the closure of his trucking business after he refused to renew a $3,500 contribution to her political fund. 'I made the payment,' he said. 'Then every year she started coming and required the same thing, and we had a problem about that.'

• Biden administration to reportedly relax EV rule on tailpipe emissions

• Kids Online Safety Act gains enough supporters to pass the Senate

• Byelection fuels U.S. debate: Are Democrats in better shape than polls suggest?

• Tech giants sign accord to combat AI-generated 'deep fake' election year info

• Election security threats in 2024 range from AI to … anthrax • The Register

  A separate CISA alert focuses on election workers' physical safety. It indicates thugs are moving beyond leaving threatening voicemail messages and social media posts, and reverting to early 2000s tactics of sending powdery substances in the mail. This specifically included suspicious letters mailed to election offices in California, Georgia, Nevada, Oregon, and Washington in 2023, according to the Homeland Security agency.

  Fentanyl, anthrax, and ricin are the "potentially lethal powers of greatest concern," we're told. In addition to taking precautionary measures such as handling the post in an isolated area and giving mail handlers a smock, mask, respirator, and gloves, the Feds also suggested having on hand a minimum of two doses of the opiate overdose medication Naloxone for everyone handling mail.

• Frozen embryos are 'children,' Alabama Supreme Court rules

• Antony Blinken’s Family Is the Latest Target of Washington’s Ugliest Protest Trend - POLITICO

  • Suddenly, Politico Discovers DC's 'Ugliest Protest Trend' Over Antony Blinken

• WHCA v. WHCO: White House Correspondents Blast the White House Over Heavy-Handed Media Memo – JONATHAN TURLEY

Law Breaking / Police / Internal Security

• Police: Woman, 28, Busted For Battering Her Mother With Grits | The Smoking Gun

World

• ‘Naked-person-on-bus is surprisingly common’: meet the cool-headed controllers who really run the country | Transport | The Guardian

  The biggest challenge we’ve faced in years was Operation London Bridge, when the Queen died. We got the call and whirred into action. Our next 10 days were meticulously planned. Roads needed clearing, buses diverting, traffic managed. The queue, for instance, was an entirely unexpected challenge – we were adapting to events in real time. I work long shifts.

• Orbán pledges to back Sweden Nato bid as he seeks to dispel domestic scandal

  The Hungarian leader, one of Europe’s strongest backers of Nato sceptic Donald Trump, is engaged in a long-standing row with other EU member states over his waning loyalty to western alliances amid the war in Ukraine and his country’s moves towards becoming a self-styled “illiberal democracy”.

Israel

• 'Hostile elements' attempted to take over Israeli flight from Thailand - The Jerusalem Post

  "Hostile elements" attempted to take over the communication network of an El Al plane flying from Phuket to Ben-Gurion Airport on Saturday night and divert it from its destination, KAN Reshet Bet reported on Sunday. The plane reached its destination safely. The incident took place over an area where the Iran-backed Houthis are active, although sources in Somalia told KAN that a group in the de-facto state Somaliland, which recently signed an agreement with Ethiopia, is responsible for the attempted attack.

• Israel uses new remote sniping weapon on teen who threw rocks

Russia Bad / Ukraine War

• Gold for Drones: Massive Leak Reveals the Iranian Shahed Project in Russia - National Security & Cyber - Haaretz.com

  Last week, Ukrainian intelligence said that Russian soldiers are trained to operate Iran's Shahed 136, Ababil-3 and Raad drones in Syria. The trainers, it added, are provided by both Hezbollah and the Iranian Revolutionary Guards.

• Alexei Navalny's body was bruised, paramedic says

  • Alexei Navalny died of ‘sudden death syndrome,’ authorities claim as devastated mom forbidden to see Putin critic’s body.

• Russia raises its flag in Avdiivka, presses advantage on a vulnerable Ukraine

• For Ukraine's defence industry goals against Russia, the sky's the limit

• 'It is urgent': European leaders appeal for greater support for Ukraine

Health / Medicine

• Low-Intensity Zone 2 Workouts Benefit All Exercisers

Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda

• February on course to break unprecedented number of heat records

• Mercury: Council and Parliament strike a deal to phase out mercury in the EU

• Nature Has Value. Could We Literally Invest in It? - The New York Times

  How about granting a long-term lease to a company that values your property for the same reasons you do: long walks through tall grass, the calls of migrating birds, the way it keeps the air and water clean. It sounds like a scam. Or charity. In fact, it’s an approach backed by hardheaded investors who think nature has an intrinsic value that can provide them with a return down the road — and in the meantime, they would be happy to hold shares of the new company on their balance sheets.

  The concept almost hit the big time when the Securities and Exchange Commission was considering a proposal from the New York Stock Exchange to list these “natural asset companies” for public trading. But after a wave of fierce opposition from right-wing groups and Republican politicians, and even conservationists wary of Wall Street, in mid-January the exchange pulled the plug. That doesn’t mean natural asset companies are going away; their proponents are working on prototypes in the private markets to build out the model. And even if this concept doesn’t take off, it’s part of a larger movement motivated by the belief that if natural riches are to be preserved, they must have a price.

  • When the first round of the "waters of the United States" / wetlands fuss kicked off in the early 90s, one proposal was for the Government to pay landowners for all the territory it had just assumed legal control over. They decided prosecuting the victims of those takings was easier than compensating them. Much fuss ensued. Meanwhile there's been a lot of people conserving land by owning it. Personal stewardship or natural resources that will outlive them. I expect their results are better, in aggregate, than the lands held under coerced "conservation easements" or outright seized by government.

• The War over Burying Nuclear Waste in America's Busiest Oil Field

• Humans have altered the Earth so much that migratory animals face extinction

• Climate experts sound alarm over thriving plant life at Greenland ice sheet