2024-02-21

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• The State of the Culture, 2024 - by Ted Gioia

  The fastest growing sector of the culture economy is distraction. Or call it scrolling or swiping or wasting time or whatever you want. But it’s not art or entertainment, just ceaseless activity. The key is that each stimulus only lasts a few seconds, and must be repeated.

  Sure, let’s give it a name, something like TikTok depression or Silicon Valley zombification or whatever. The key fact is that users can feel it, even if they don’t have a label or a diagnosis. They feel it even if the technocrats refuse to tell them about it. Just listen to the words people use to describe their toxic online interactions: doomscrolling, trolling, doxxing, gaslighting, etc. In the year 2024, this is what we do for fun.

• The Surprising Rise of BMX Popularity in the United States - Tresna

• Median distance from mother

  • I'd love to see the county level representation of the data. This is the "Census divisions."

• "It's complicated," as are the Apple family genetics Citrus taxonomy - Wikipedia

• Eclipse viewing at 30k feet: Delta to offer path-of-totality flight

• Two-Parent Families Are More Important Than College

• (PDF) Chicken of the Trees: Iguana Recipes

Horseshit

• Saw ads for fake "forever" stamps this morning: Counterfeit Stamps – United States Postal Inspection Service

• The Hugo Awards Scandal Is a Mess

• Tech Leaders Fled San Francisco During the Pandemic. Now, They're Coming Back

• Legal Weed in New York Was Going to Be a Revolution. What Happened?

• Socialists Won Historic Tenant Protections in Tacoma

• Life in a 'Death Trap': Tenants Rose Up Against a Federally Funded Mega-Landlord

  Friends, family, and neighbors of the deceased in both states were furious. According to legal complaints filed later on, tenants alerted Millenia about the gas leak in Mississippi but the company failed to fix it, and Arkansas tenants had complained to management about the smell of gas in the building just one day before the explosion. (The Arkansas Public Service Commission later investigated the site and said that it “cannot be determined that the explosion was caused by or associated with a natural gas leak.”)

• The case for liberal socialism in the 21st century | Aeon Essays

  Internalising a host of conservative arguments, liberals like Isaiah Berlin or Friedrich Hayek argued that big dreams were dangerous and contrary to liberalism, its revolutionary past aside. The best one could hope for was a competitive and highly inequitable neoliberal society defined by ordered liberty and at most a minimal welfare state. That such a consciously deflated vision became associated with technocratic aloofness, a lack of principled conviction and a wariness of democratic accountability came as a surprise only to neoliberals c2016. More thoughtful commentators followed Samuel Moyn’s claim in Liberalism Against Itself (2023) that if liberals couldn’t rediscover how to not just fearmonger, but inspire, they were unlikely to see their doctrine survive much longer and, ‘anyway, survival is not good enough.’

• American Air Raises Bag Fees as Industry Total Tops $33B

• Metal Prices Are Soaring. So Is Metal Theft (Archive)

  Metal theft is certainly not new. For instance, historians surmise that as well as gold and precious stones, ancient thieves stole metal razor blades from the tomb of the Egyptian pharaoh Tutankhamun. These implements were possibly melted down and traded.

  • I note that scrap prices are still nowhere near the peaks they hit in 2007.

• Why Britons have 546 words for drunkenness

• Paul Krugman vs. Paul Krugman on Immigration - Tablet Magazine

  Krugman again in 2006, when both immigration and the immigrant share of the U.S. labor force was much lower: “Second, while immigration may have raised overall income slightly, many of the worst-off native-born Americans are hurt by immigration—especially immigration from Mexico. Because Mexican immigrants have much less education than the average U.S. worker, they increase the supply of less-skilled labor, driving down the wages of the worst-paid Americans.” The soundness of Krugman’s 2006 views on labor economics and immigration has not diminished. What has changed since, however, is the political environment. In 2024, what Krugman said 18 years ago now counts as white nationalist, nativist bigotry, and economic illiteracy.

  • "The soundness of Krugman’s 2006 views has not diminished." ... what? Just because the parrot squawks sounded melodious to you then vs what it's spewing now? When a person has shown themselves to lack integrity, to hold rationalization higher than reason, as Krugman has, how can you respect anything they have ever said? Even when they were agreeing with you, you know it was because it favored their purpose of the moment, not because of any principle or recognition of a shared, objective reality. These folks show their quality every day, in every way. Recognize it.

• A novel elderly care robot could soon provide personal assistance, enhancing seniors’ quality of life.

• Notting Hill residents' capital gains exceed people of 'three cities combined'

• Billionaires' Survivalist Bunkers Go Bonkers

Electric / Self Driving cars

• Effort to Build Out EV Charging Stations in Wyoming Struggling to Find Traction

celebrity gossip

• First Photo of Sam Bankman-Fried in Jail at MDC Brooklyn

  • Crypto Jesus; whose suffering redeems the Sins of the whole business.

• 'Beginning of the End' as Assange Case Returns to Court

  • Assange faces his last legal roll of the dice in Britain to avoid US extradition

  • EU parliamentarians call for protection of Julian Assange

  • WikiLeaks founder Assange starts final legal battle to avoid extradition to U.S.

  • The Guardian removes mention that Julian Assange's life at risk if extradited

• Beatles to get biopics, with a movie each for Paul, John, George and Ringo

Obit

• Daiso: Billionaire founder of Japanese discount store dies

Musk

• Musk's SpaceX Forges Tighter Links with U.S. Spy and Military Agencies (Archive)

  “When I’m never sure what I can say in a public forum, I tend to zip it. But I can say that there is very good collaboration between the intelligence community and SpaceX,” Gwynne Shotwell, the company’s president, said at an event last May.

• Neuralink's first human patient able to control mouse through thinking

  • "First human with Neuralink's brain chip has made a full recovery" – Elon Musk

• X social media platform suspends account of Navalny's widow, Yulia Navalnaya

  • X suspends account of Navalny's widow

  • X suspends the account of Yulia Navalnaya

  • Yulia Navalnaya’s X account was suspended

  • HN comments

• Elon Musk nominated for Nobel Peace Prize for defending free speech

Trump / War against the Right / Jan6

• Trump Q&A: How much does he owe and how fast is the $355M tab growing? | The Hill

• Pelosi Goes On Unhinged Rant About Trump Being ‘Blackmailed’ By Putin - modernity

  “Putin is among the top three or four evil people in the world,” Pelosi ranted, before stating “What does he have on Donald Trump that he has to be constantly catering to Putin?” She went on to claim that Trump, whose name she struggled to remember, has “brought disgrace,” to the White House and “didn’t consider it an honour” to serve as President or take seriously the oath to defend the Constitution.

• Trump's 'slurred speech and gross, repeated errors' show his cognitive decline is 'MORE apparent' than Biden's, UBC professor claims, in frightening assessment of presidential front runners | Daily Mail Online

Pox / COVID / BioTerror AgitProp

• Does 'zombie deer disease' pose risks for humans?

• "Debunking bait," it even quotes the Book of Revelations: Covid shot recipients emit fluorescent glow in faces under UV light

  New research shows that those who received the COVID shots emit a fluorescent orange glow in their faces that is visible under a UV light of 365 nano-meters. And those who have been exposed to shedding emit this glow around their nose.

  After a hot shower, filaments are expelled through the skin of the vaxxed. And these filaments also emit a glow under UV light. These filaments not only glow, but they have been shown to move on their own in spastic movements. And they are also attracted to people. In videos they can be seen trying to latch on to a finger. And when a person who has received the shot has dry skin, these expelled filaments will become airborne.

  • Excellent example to use when writing punditry about "see how foolish the anti-vaxxer crowd is." So much so that I cannot help but suspect that might've been the original purpose.

Religion / Tribal / Culture War and Re-Segregation

• (Apr 2022) Why do so many of America's white evangelicals support Putin?

  Even though they have declined from 23 per cent of the population in 2006 to 14.5 per cent in 2022, evangelicals still comprise one quarter of all American voters. Hence the stances they adopt matter to America’s domestic and international politics. Not only did 84 per cent of white evangelicals vote for Donald Trump in 2020, but many have voiced support for Russian President Vladimir Putin for nearly a decade. Why? Those who believe that evangelicals embrace Putin out of some fundamentalist proclivity for authoritarianism have the story backwards. It’s more a tale of freedom gone awry.

• Rantz: Seattle activists declare a 'homosexual intifada' - MyNorthwest.com

• Child removed from home after parents refuse to use his chosen name, pronouns | Fox News

  in 2021, Indiana officials began investigating the Coxes after a report found they were not referring to their child by his preferred gender identity, removing the teen from their custody and placing him in a "gender-affirming" home. Despite the unsubstantiated claims of abuse, they claimed the Coxes made the child's eating disorder worse even though it worsened after he was removed and placed in a transition-affirming home.

Edumacationalizing / Acedemia Nuts

• Satirical ways to measure academics - Austin Z. Henley

• Why Joe College can't read

• Faculty group calls on Yale to make teaching 'distinct from activism'

• Supreme Court won't review admissions at VA.'s Thomas Jefferson school

Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising

• Walmart to buy TV maker Vizio for $2.3B

  • Walmart is buying Vizio for $2.3B

  Walmart doesn’t want to just sell groceries and t-shirts. It wants to be a media and advertising giant like Amazon. Walmart announced Tuesday that it’s buying TV maker Vizio for $2.3 billion to shore up its advertising business and create a more potent rival to Amazon’s booming ad business.

  • Walmart Seals $2.3B Deal for TV Maker Vizio

  • Walmart isn't buying Vizio for its hardware. It wants the TV-maker's ad business

• Rotten Apple

  Apple’s petulant policy of malicious compliance is extremely maddening. What they’re about to do to users in the EU is just nasty. This is a very dark time for the web. I really hope that Apple won’t get away with their plan to burn down web apps on iOS in the EU. But hope isn’t enough. We need to tell the EU commission how much damage this will do.

• The New Yorker: Is The Media Prepared for an Extinction-Level Event?

• Ask HN: Why isn't there a Rotten Tomatoes for consumer electronics? | Hacker News

• Court Tosses $1B Verdict Against Cox Communications for Music Piracy

• Google's retiring of Internet archiving tool draws ire of China researchers

TechSuck / Geek Bait

• Sketchy Logg Dogg Logging Robot Remote Control Hacking

  This requires a PWM signal, which [Wes] generated using two MOSFETs in a closed-feedback system, probably because open loop controls with multi-ton hydraulic machinery are not the kind of excitement most people look forward to.

AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World

• Why The New York Times might win its copyright lawsuit against OpenAI

• The Growing Environmental Footprint of Generative AI

  • Generative AI's environmental costs are soaring – and mostly secret

• "AI will cure cancer" misunderstands both AI and medicine

• A lot of weird behaviors and problems of LLMs trace back to tokenization

  • HN comments

  • I can rant on this at length; just not in a way anyone else understands. Screw tokenizing; start with 256 bytes and model from there. A real model will infer HTML (as spoke) and the human languages it is associated with... eventually.

• Early Adopters of Microsoft's AI Bot Wonder If It's Worth the Money

• Can OpenAI create superintelligence before it runs out of cash?

• Microsoft develops AI server gear to lessen reliance on Nvidia

Space / Boomy Zoomers / UFO

• Before snagging a chunk of space junk, Astroscale must first catch up to one

• U.N. committee to take up issue of satellite interference with astronomy after refusing to do so last year.

• A year out of this world: NASA seeks volunteers to simulate Mars mission

• NASA's final tally shows spacecraft returned double the amount of asteroid rubble | AP News

• There is no copy of the Voyager I software on Earth

  Voyager Mission Control used to be a couple of big rooms full of busy people, computers, giant screens. Now it’s a single room in a small office building in the San Gabriel Valley, in between a dog training school and a McDonalds. The Mission Control team is a handful of people, none of them young, several well past retirement age. And they’re trying to fix the problem. But right now, it doesn’t look good. You can’t just download a new OS from 15 billion kilometers away. (For starters, there isn’t the bandwidth.) They would have to figure out the problem, figure out if a workaround is possible, and then apply it… all with a round-trip time of 45 hours for every communication with a probe that is flying away from us at a million miles a day. They’re trying, but nobody likes their odds. So at some point — not tomorrow, not next week, but at some point in the next few months — they’ll probably have to admit defeat. And then they’ll declare Voyager 1 officially over, dead and done, the end of a long song.

• Space debris: 'Grandfather satellite' due to fall to Earth

Economicon / Business / Finance

• Capital One is acquiring Discover

  • Capital One to Acquire Discover for $35.3B

  • Capital One, Discover merger will break Visa-Mastercard 'duopoly'

• Bad property debt exceeds reserves at largest US banks (Archive)

  The average reserves at JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley have fallen from $1.60 to 90 cents for every dollar of commercial real estate debt on which a borrower is at least 30 days late, according to filings to the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. US banks now hold $1.40 in reserves for every dollar of delinquent commercial real estate loans, down from $2.20 a year ago, according to the FDIC data, and the lowest cover banks have had to absorb potential commercial real estate loan losses in more than seven years.

  • HN comments

• How Texas came to rival New York as a finance hub

  Texas recently passed the state of New York in finance employment for the first time ever in a 33-year period, according to an analysis by Yahoo Finance of Bureau of Labor Statistics data from 1990 to 2023. It happened in December, when Texas had 384,900 such workers. That was 100 more than New York state.

• Plans to Expand U.S. Chip Manufacturing Are Running Into Obstacles.

• Nvidia dethrones Tesla as Wall Street's most traded stock

• Moves Walmart is making to overhaul its business for the future

• Court to rehear Nasdaq board diversity rule challenge, putting mandate at risk

• Rents are finally falling but not in Orange County. People are feeling the pain

• Intel is asking for an additional $10B from CHIPS Act subsidies

• Detroit automakers splurge on shareholders with big stock buybacks.

• Amazon Is Joining the Dow Jones Industrial Average

Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making

• Kamala Harris: Inside her quiet effort to break through the Biden campaign’s information bubble | CNN Politics

  More than two dozen sources tell CNN that Harris has been gathering information to help her penetrate what she sometimes refers to as the “bubble” of Biden campaign thinking, telling people she’s aiming to use that intelligence to push for changes in strategy and tactics that she hopes will put the ticket in better shape to win. “The ‘bedwetting’ complaints are running thin with people,” said a person who attended one of the meetings, describing the general state of anxiety circulating in top Democratic circles. “The West Wing and the campaign need to be better.” Harris did a good job fielding those responses, the person added, “and deserves credit for it.”

• It's time for the White House to put up or shut up

  Since then, Biden’s situation has become considerably worse. If he were 10 years younger, he might still be a 65/35 favorite. But if his campaign is substantially encumbered by his age, he's probably the underdog. If you’re someone who would rather not see Trump re-elected again or who cares about the election for other reasons, it’s time to face the facts. You need to adjust to the new reality and not be mired in anchoring bias by your previous impression of the race.

  Personally, I crossed the rubicon in November, concluding that Biden should stand down if he wasn’t going to be able to run a normal reelection campaign — meaning, things like conduct a Super Bowl interview. Yes, it's a huge risk and, yes, Biden can still win. But he's losing now and there's no plan to fix the problems other than hoping that the polls are wrong or that voters look at the race differently when they have more time to focus on it. Neither is so implausible and it is likely to be a close race. But even the most optimistic Democrats, if you read between the lines, are really arguing that Democrats could win despite Biden and not because of him. Biden is probably a below-replacement-level candidate at this point because Americans have a lot of extremely rational concerns about the prospect of a Commander-in-Chief who would be 86 years old by the end of his second term. It is entirely reasonable to see this as disqualifying. The fact that Trump also has a number of disqualifying features is not a good reason to nominate Biden. It is a reason for Democrats to be the adults in the room and acknowledge that someone who can't sit through a Super Bowl interview isn't someone the public can trust to have the physical and mental stamina to handle an international crisis, terrorist attack or some other unforseen threat when he'll be in his mid-80s.

• NYT Publisher Defends Coverage Of Biden's Age, Says It's Made White House "Extremely Upset" | ZeroHedge

  Those comments have drawn criticism not only from the president’s supporters, but also from members of the press. Margaret Sullivan, a former editor for the NY Times, said the newspaper’s coverage of President Biden’s age has become an “obsession,” suggesting that Mr. Sulzberger tell his editorial team to stop “going overboard with both coverage and commentary” on it and “keep this in better perspective.” Specifically, Ms. Sullivan argued that the NY Times, as well as other media outlets, should focus on former President Donald Trump’s age—he’s currently 77—his legal problems, and how he is “poised to take down American democracy.”

• Nikki Haley Vows to Stay in Presidential Race

  “South Carolina will vote on Saturday. But on Sunday, I’ll still be running for president. I’m not going anywhere,” said Haley, who is down some 30 points in polling in her home state.

• Alabama Court Rules Frozen Embryos Made by IVF Are "Children"

• Don't Fall for the Latest Changes to the Dangerous Kids Online Safety Act

• Administration announces $5.8B in funding to clean up drinking water

• Democrats Unveil "Hip-Hop Task Force" To Address Injustice In Society (This isn't satire) | Not the Bee

• Federal court jams brakes on Biden admin's effort to shut down major petrochemical plant | Fox News

  the sole domestic plant that produces neoprene, a synthetic rubber common in military equipment

Law Breaking / Police / Internal Security

• What Do We Owe a Prison Informant?

• FBI and allies seize dark-web site Lockbit

  • Five Russian nationals charged after disruption of cyber crime gang Lockbit

External Security / Militaria / Diplomania

• Trump is right about NATO burden-sharing.

  President Joe Biden’s U.S. ambassador to NATO, Julianne Smith, recently took to X in a not-so-subtle attempt to push back on Trump’s recent comments on alliance burden-sharing in an attempt to show members were paying up. But her post instead highlighted two other things. First, according to her figures, growth in defense spending by allied NATO countries nearly doubled at the start of the Trump administration, from an increase of 3.0% per year in 2016 to 5.9% in 2017, and then decreased from 4.6% in 2020 to 2.8 % in 2021 after Biden took office. It’s no wonder European leaders were excited about Joe Biden’s election.

  Smith also highlighted the fact that Americans are investing more than twice the amount in defense expenditures in 2023, with $743 billion compared to Europe and Canada’s $356 billion, even though the combined economies of our NATO allies are roughly the same as the United States. Our country can no longer afford this disproportionality.

• The Pentagon’s Silicon Valley Problem, by Andrew Cockburn

  Hamas’s devastating attack on October 7 caught Shin Betand the rest of Israel’s multibillion-dollar defense system entirely by surprise. The intelligence disaster was even more striking considering Hamas carried out much of its preparations in plain sight, including practice assaults on mock-ups of the border fence and Israeli settlements—activities that were openly reported. Hamas-led militant groups even posted videos of their training online. Israelis living close to the border observed and publicized these exercises with mounting alarm, but were ignored in favor of intelligence bureaucracies’ analyses and, by extension, the software that had informed them.

World

• German government's witch hunt against AfD paves road to dictatorship

  Early on, the government’s campaign against the AfD seemed to be a success. The anti-immigrant party’s popularity saw a slight decline, but the trend has quickly come to a halt and the AfD is back above 20 percent nationally. This situation can no longer be tolerated by the liberal government, so it is now resorting to a variety of legal means that will put the principles of the rule of law to the test. The highly controversial Interior Minister Nancy Faeser has trodden on legally shaky ground and gone to a level of extremes not seen in Germany since the end of the Second World War, warning that “no one who donates to a right-wing extremist party can go unnoticed.”

• Ireland and NATO enter new agreement to counter Russia threat

• Cuba Restores Ties with South Korea After 65 Years

• Eiffel Tower closed for second day as staff extend strike over financing

• Aerial photos reveal work progressing on The Line megacity at Neom

• Poverty in Argentina hits 20-year high at 57.4%, study says

Iran / Houthi / Red Sea / Mediterranean

• U.S. military reports 1st Houthi unmanned underwater vessel in Red Sea.

• Houthis Boast Of Fresh Attack On 'Several' American Warships | ZeroHedge

Israel

• (Jun 2023) US weapons abandoned in Afghanistan reach Palestinian resistance

  Small arms left behind in Afghanistan by the US army after their disastrous pullout from the country in 2021 have reached Palestinian resistance factions in the Gaza Strip, according to an unnamed senior Israeli military official that spoke with Newsweek The official made the remarks after expressing "concerns" that US weapons flooding the battlefield in Ukraine could end up "in the hands of Israel's foes."

Russia Bad / Ukraine War

• Russia Says NATO Troops, Disguised As Mercenaries, Control Air Defenses In Ukraine | ZeroHedge

• Killing Navalny

• The Secret Oil-Trading Ring That Funds Russia's War (Archive)

  a little-known trader from Azerbaijan named Etibar Eyyub, who swiftly assembled a clandestine trading and shipping empire that now moves vast quantities of oil to buyers in China, India and other new markets, according to people who have worked with or done deals with him. He cobbled together a fleet of aging tankers and disguised the trading by using a maze of companies registered in Dubai and Hong Kong, those people said. Nord Axis and four other companies those people say are operated by Eyyub exported at least $33 billion in Russian crude and fuel in 2023, according to trade data from the Kyiv School of Economics, which represented one-fifth of the Russian exports captured by the data. Those people said Eyyub also operated other firms involved in the Russian market.

  • "according to trade data from the Kyiv School of Economics" ...

China

• China coast guard boards Taiwan tourist boat in escalation of tensions

• Quality from Quantity: Chinese Navy's Plan to Achieve American Skill via Size

Health / Medicine

• Measles erupts in Florida school where 11% of kids are unvaccinated

  At Manatee Bay Elementary School, the number of children at risk could be over 100 students. According to a Broward County vaccine study reported by the local CBS outlet, only 89.31 percent of students at Manatee Bay Elementary School were fully immunized in the 2023/2024 school year, which is significantly lower than the target vaccination coverage of 95 percent. The school currently has 1,067 students enrolled, suggesting that up to 114 students are vulnerable to the infection based on their vaccination status.

  • What else can we find about this school? It's highly rated (10/10) and diverse:

  • U.S. News

  73% of students scored at or above the proficient level for math, and 81% scored at or above that level for reading.The school’s minority student enrollment is 78%. The school enrolls 18% economically disadvantaged students.

  • GreatSchools

  Hispanic (56% of students), White (23% of students), Asian (12% of students), Black (6% of students)

Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda

• Hawaii poised to slap tourists with $25 climate tax: ‘Small price to pay to preserve paradise’.

• US will relax pollution-limiting rules for vehicle emissions

• Why African filmmakers aren't producing nature documentaries

• Paris's New Weapons in Climate Fight Are Metro Turnstiles and the Seine

• EPA's proposed lead pipe crackdown spurs debate

• What Europe's egg-hurling farmers can teach us about climate progress

• They bought big for this one: Study finds little-known toxic crop chemical in four out of five people tested

• The EU is formalizing rules for taking CO2 out of the atmosphere

• How We used gigabytes of shipping data to show risks to endangered whales

• The social anatomy of climate change denial in the United States