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2024-02-20

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Horseshit

  • Why are shopping carts always broken?

    A long-circulating urban myth holds that retailers deliberately make the carts unwieldy to slow your roll down the aisle, hoping to divert your attention to more merchandise. But the national frustration is not the work of a business psychology mastermind. Grocery store carts are more likely to have carts with wonky wheels than other types of retailers, like clothing stores or drugstores, where the carts don’t leave the store as much; merchandise is typically carried out in a bag or two. That’s because they are exposed to the elements much more often, and that environmental damage affects the wheels. The primary culprit, however, is often not the wheel itself, but the way it’s attached to the cart.

  • What if public housing were for everyone?

    By offering private companies more favorable financing terms, Montgomery County hoped to move forward with new construction that they’d own for as long as they liked. They had plans to build thousands of publicly owned mixed-income apartments by leveraging relatively small amounts of public money to create a revolving fund that could finance short-term construction costs. Eighteen months ago, this “revolving fund” plan was still mostly just on paper; no one lived in any of these units, and whether people would even want to live in publicly owned housing was still an open question.

  • The executive hubris driving five-day in-office mandates

  • NASA explains how it would alert the public of an apocalyptic asteroid strike

    “I don’t have a red phone on my desk or anything,” Johnson said. “But we do have formal procedures by which notification of a serious impact would be provided.” If the asteroid was headed toward the US, NASA would notify the White House, and the government would release a formal statement to the public. If it was big enough to pose an international threat, IAWN would notify the United Nations Office of Outer Space Affairs.

  • Broke Chinese real estate developer left LA with empty, graffiti-covered towers

  • Using math and data to reveal why societies collapse, and clues about the future

  • Domestic Pet Cloning Goes Mainstream

  • Your fingerprints can be recreated from the sounds made when you swipe on a touchscreen

    Following tests, the researchers assert that they can successfully attack “up to 27.9% of partial fingerprints and 9.3% of complete fingerprints within five attempts at the highest security FAR [False Acceptance Rate] setting of 0.01%.” This is claimed to be the first work that leverages swiping sounds to infer fingerprint information.

Electric / Self Driving cars

celebrity gossip

Trump / War against the Right / Jan6

  • President Trump's Kafkaesque Civil Trial in New York State

    The bottom line is that a never before used New York State penalty has been twisted into a tool for a grossly excessive fine and more seriously the completely inappropriate appointment of Judge Jones as an "independent monitor" who can micromanage the Trump business, which she is not competent to do, and to even order the dissolution of the Trump Business in New York State. This outcome was pursued by Letitia James, a politically ambition Democrat, who is the Attorney General of New York State, and who hopes to win a future Democratic primary for Governor of or Senator from New York State.

    Ms. James and Judge Engeron have essentially turned a vaguely worded New York State law into a modern day Bill of Attainder targeted at Donald Trump both for political gain and because they despise his political views and desperately want to call his truthfulness into question as he runs for President of the United States inn 2024.

  • Still mainly "Chicago Ray" Truckers Vow to Cut Off Deliveries to NYC in Protest of Trump’s $355 Million Civil-Fraud Ruling.

    Ray went on to claim without evidence that 95 to 96 percent of truckers are for Trump and that the prosecution of Trump is “election interference.”

Religion / Tribal / Culture War and Re-Segregation

Edumacationalizing / Acedemia Nuts

Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising

TechSuck / Geek Bait

AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World

Space / Boomy Zoomers / UFO

  • SpaceX wants to take over a Florida launch pad from rival ULA

    SpaceX was previously looking at building another Starship launch pad from scratch on NASA property at the Kennedy Space Center. NASA environmental studies for this location, known as Launch Complex 49, kicked off in 2021. Patti Bielling, a NASA spokesperson, told Ars on Friday the agency is no longer working on Launch Complex 49. "At this time, there are no activities involving LC-49 on Kennedy," Bielling said. "Any previous activities regarding LC-49 were suspended, and no actions were taken."

    SpaceX needs to build more launch pads to make all this possible. Although SpaceX has backpedaled on several of its Starship launch pad ideas, the company's interest in SLC-37 suggests it still has big plans for Starship in Florida.

Economicon / Business / Finance

  • GlobalFoundries wins $3.1B in CHIPS Act subsidies for NY, Vermont

  • Magnificent 7 profits exceed almost every country in the world. Should we worry?

    The meteoric rise in the profits and market capitalizations of the Magnificent 7 U.S. tech behemoths — Apple, Amazon, Alphabet, Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia and Tesla — outstrip those of all listed companies in almost every G20 country, the bank said in a research note Tuesday. Of the non-U.S. G20 countries, only China and Japan (and the latter, only just) have greater profits when their listed companies are combined.

  • Red state economies are surging under Biden. Here's why. - ABC News

    The disparity between red and blue states has little to do with anything Biden has done, experts interviewed by ABC News said, noting that federal policy typically holds minimal influence over state-by-state economic trends. Instead, they added, the dynamic owes in large part to the appeal of warm weather states for workers and businesses, as well as the combination of company-friendly state policies and Democrat-leaning cities that attract young, educated workers. "The climates are better in red states, and Americans like good climates," Mark Partridge, a professor of economics at Ohio State University, told ABC News.

  • Investing in commodities has become nightmarishly difficult

  • Opinion | It’s Not Just Wages. Retailers Are Mistreating Workers in a More Insidious Way. - The New York Times

    The unpredictability of the hours made life difficult for my co-workers — as much as, if not more than, the low pay did. On receiving a paycheck for a good week’s work, when they’d worked 39 hours, should they use the money to pay down debt? Or should they hold on to it in case the following week they were scheduled for only four hours and didn’t have enough for food?

    Most frustrating of all, my co-workers struggled to supplement their income elsewhere, because the unstable hours made it hard to work a second job. If we wanted more hours, we were advised to increase our availability. Problem is, it’s difficult to work a second job when you’re trying to keep yourself as free as possible for your first job.

    • Retail workers have been saying this stuff for 20+ years. "39.5 hour fulltime" jobs suck.

  • Capital One Is Buying Discover Financial

  • America’s Oil Power Might Be Near Its Peak - WSJ

    The country’s crude oil output is expected to increase by just 170,000 barrels a day in 2024 from last year, down from a jump of 1 million barrels a day in 2023, according to federal record-keepers. That is the smallest annual increase since 2016, not counting the pandemic. Gushers of new U.S. crude have helped cap soaring oil prices despite OPEC production cuts and global turmoil, including most recently in the Middle East. The gains were driven by private producers that commandeered rigs after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine sent prices soaring to more than $120 a barrel in early 2022. Now, that growth is expected to slow dramatically. Declining oil prices led producers to lay down rigs last year. Then, many of the operators that had been drilling with abandon were acquired by bigger players looking for ways to expand in the U.S. Those big public companies have given priority to returning cash to shareholders over drilling new wells.

    • Neither of the words "Government," nor "permit" appear in this article.

Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making

  • Special Counsel Indictment Looks As Bad For Weiss As The CHS

    Thursday’s indictment of Smirnov suggests the Delaware U.S. attorney’s office sat on the FD-1023 for nearly three years, until after Grassley released a copy to the public. Instead, Weiss’s office offered Hunter Biden a sweetheart plea agreement, which fell apart only because the federal judge assigned to the case inquired into the strange arrangement that appeared to give Hunter Biden blanket immunity in a pretrial diversion agreement — something she had never seen before.

  • Pelosi cease-fire protesters face charges in San Francisco

    The activist, Heather Phipps, is accused of damaging Pelosi’s garage door along with city streets and sidewalks outside the Pacific Heights home she shares with her husband, Paul Pelosi. A spokesperson for the Department of Public Works said it incurred $5,648 in cleanup costs, largely involving paint on the sidewalk, roadway and street trees. Phipps is set to be arraigned on March 12. A second protester, Cynthia Papermaster, is facing a misdemeanor vandalism charge for leaving handprints on Pelosi’s garage but has yet to be arraigned, according to a Code Pink spokesperson.

  • AI Transcript of Tucker / Mike Benz interview: The End of Democracy: "What I’m Describing is Military Rule"

    what Mike Benz is describing is functionally a silent coup by the US Military and the Deep State. And yes, Barack Obama’s fingerprints are all over this. Yet another “conspiracy theory” is now being validated.

  • Free Speech Is Truly Under Assault - by Jeffrey Carter

    I had some information that was damaging to Obama. He lied about his relationship with Bill Ayers. They were close personal friends. It was interesting to be exposed to “Journolist” at the time. Ben Smith was then of Politico, and scooped up the information and ran it back to the Obama campaign to make sure they could do damage control. Funny, when I spoke with Ol Ben he told me he was raised a “Republican” but now was objective. Ben is an extreme partisan Democrat and a person unworthy of your trust. To make a long story short, I hadn’t given my cell phone out to anyone yet the week before the election a reporter from the Washington Post gave me a call to see if we were going to go public with our story. Don’t believe me? Ask Stanley Kurtz. How did the reporter get my number and what was behind it? Guarantee you it wasn’t innocent. I wish I would have recorded that conversation.

  • Biden’s brother used his name to promote a hospital chain. Then it collapsed. - POLITICO

    The consultant, Jim Biden, had no experience running hospitals. But he did understand the federal government and had ties to labor unions. Perhaps more important, he was the younger brother of Joe Biden. The final years of the Obama administration had cemented the former vice president’s towering stature in the world of health care, where he had made the fight against cancer a top federal priority and, then, a centerpiece of his legacy-building efforts. For then 67-year-old Jim Biden, the third of four Biden siblings, his ties to his older brother made up much of his pitch as he pursued deals that could help Americore make money from drug rehab, lab testing and even cancer treatment.

  • FedEx Founder Fred Smith: U.S. record debt 'unsustainable'

Law Breaking / Police / Internal Security

  • FBI warns Chinese malware could threaten critical US infrastructure

    (FBI Director) Wray said he was acutely concerned about “pre-positioning” of malware. He said the US recently disrupted a Chinese hacking network known as Volt Typhoon that targeted American infrastructure including the electricity grid and water supply, and other targets around the world. “We’re laser focused on this as a real threat and we’re working with a lot of partners to try to identify it, anticipate it and disrupt it,” Wray said on Sunday after attending the Munich Security Conference.

External Security / Militaria / Diplomania

  • Can Europe defend itself without America?

    for leaders gathered at the Munich Security Conference, an annual gathering of defence and security bigwigs, Mr Navalny’s demise was just one of several ominous developments for the continent. On February 17th Ukraine’s army, starved of American ammunition by Congress’s failure to pass a supplemental aid bill, was forced to withdraw from the eastern town of Avdiivka. That handed Vladimir Putin his first military victory in almost a year.

    The deadlock in Congress reflects the baleful influence of Donald Trump, whose fierce opposition to aid for Ukraine has cowed Republicans into submission. But the spectre of Mr Trump’s return to office in November’s presidential election cast an even darker pall over Munich. A week earlier Mr Trump had boasted of telling an ally that he would not come to their defence if they fell short of NATO spending targets: “You’re delinquent? No, I would not protect you. In fact, I would encourage them to do whatever the hell they want.”

    The confluence of Russia’s rearmament, Ukraine’s deteriorating position and Mr Trump’s possible return to the White House has brought Europe to its most dangerous juncture in decades. European states and armies are wondering whether they must navigate this crisis without their ally of nearly 80 years. The question is not just whether America will abandon Ukraine, but whether it might abandon Europe.

  • Russian nukes in space: Intelligence leak more serious than the threat itself

World

Iran / Houthi / Red Sea / Mediterranean

Israel

Russia Bad / Ukraine War

China

Health / Medicine

  • The case against caffeine

    I'm gonna be real with you. The only reason I started drinking coffee as an adult was to help me take a shit every morning. It was a daily habit for years, until one morning on the throne I thought: Isn't it wild that I rely on a drug to help me perform such a basic biological function? So I quit.

  • AstraZeneca unveils successes in treatment of lung cancer

  • The Adderall Shortage: Is One Factory Magnifying the Crisis?

    There’s been a national shortage of ADHD medication for more than a year and a half. According to the government and industry experts, there are multiple overlapping causes: manufacturing problems, labor issues, supply-chain failures, and a huge rise in demand during the pandemic. But Ascent claims there’s another factor exacerbating the shortage, one that’s completely sui generis: the fact that it’s been shut down by the Drug Enforcement Administration.

    The agency has accused Ascent of shabby recordkeeping that might have allowed millions of pills to go unaccounted for. Ascent makes painkillers in addition to stimulants, and, amid the ongoing opioid epidemic, the DEA has been under pressure to show it is aggressively policing the industry. (The agency did not respond to requests for comment.) Ascent has said that its paperwork is in order and has sued the Department of Justice to get its assembly lines working again.

Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda

<< 2024-02-19 (-1 day)
<< 2024-02-13 (-1 week)
<< 2024-01-23 (-1 month)
<< 2023-02-20 (-1 year) 		Archive (+1 day) 2024-02-21 >>
(+1 week) 2024-02-27 >>
(+1 month) 2024-03-19 >>