2024-02-22
Cool
Horseshit
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Parenting Advice YouTuber sentenced to 30 years for child abuse
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Passenger sees "wing coming apart" on United flight from San Francisco to Boston
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Teen Subcultures Are Fading. Pity the Poor Kids (Archive)
“That,” I told my daughter, “is not preppy.” I did not have much hope of persuading her that millions of teenagers on TikTok were wrong and her 50-year-old mother — who does, in fact, own a copy of Lisa Birnbach’s 1980 “The Official Preppy Handbook” — was right, but it seemed worth trying. I looked around her room, and for lack of any stray loafers or rumpled chinos to use as examples, I touched the top of an antique oak dresser that was once her grandmother’s. “This is preppy,” I said. She rolled her eyes: “Mom, that dresser is super cottagecore, and that is not my aesthetic at all.” My daughter’s “preppy” is not my idea of preppy — the prep of actual New England prep schools, of frayed Oxford cloth and WASPy noblesse oblige. Nor is it the aspirational varsity style of Tommy Hilfiger and 1990s rappers in rugby shirts, or even J. Crew’s self-conscious 2010s update on old-money style.
- Simpsons did it:
Homer: You wouldn't understand, Dad, you're not with it!
Grampa: I was with it once! And then they changed what it was! And now what I'm with isn't it and what's it seems weird and scary to me! And it'll happen to you!
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Insecure vehicles should be banned, not security tools like the Flipper Zero | Hacker News
- Or we could just ban "stealing cars"
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Are You Richer Than You Think?
The report, based on interviews and a nationwide survey of over 1,000 Americans who earn at least $175,000 annually — placing them in the top 10% of U.S. tax filers — reveals that a quarter of respondents view themselves as "very poor," "poor" or just "getting by." This sentiment persists despite their high incomes, ownership of homes and the ability to save for retirement, suggesting that the American Dream's traditional markers of success are no longer sufficient for many.
Electric / Self Driving cars
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GM is expanding its hands-free driving system to rural highways
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California EV sales are falling. Is it temporary or a threat to climate goals?
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$258k Electric wake sport boat with 570hp, 226kWh
The 23-foot Arc Sport can carry up to 15 people at a time. It boasts a large battery with enough power to last for 4 to 6 hours and has a top speed of 40 miles per hour
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France Halts Public €100-a-Month EV Leases Due to Overwhelming Demand
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Waymo's robotaxi expansion plans in California put on hold by regulators
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"Corolla killer:" BYD launches $US15,000 EV in direct attack on legacy makers
celebrity gossip
Rank Propaganda / Thought Policing / World Disordering
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Conspiracy Theorists Can Change Their Minds, Surprising Study Shows
Despite contemporary concerns about a "pandemic of misinformation" or "infodemic", we found no evidence that individual beliefs in conspiracy theories increased on average over time. This was despite our data collection happening during the tumultuous second year of the COVID-19 pandemic. Lockdowns were still happening occasionally in both Australia and New Zealand, and anti-government sentiment was building. While we only tracked participants for six months, other studies over much longer time frames have also found little evidence that beliefs in conspiracy theories are increasing over time.
Musk
Trump / War against the Right / Jan6
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"No One's Got To Me... I Ain't Scared Of Sh!t" - NYC Trucker Boycott Leader 'Chicago Ray' Steps Down
Chicago Ray, the trucker who ignited the righteous anger of his fellow truckers and of millions of other Americans, has stepped down from his boycott leadership. Does that mean the end of the trucker boycott of New York City? Newsweek reported Chicago Ray took down his original post and posted a new one on Monday "in which he distanced himself from the boycott calls and stressed that he was not encouraging anyone to do anything." That post was also later deleted, but a screen grab of it was shared (with Newsweek) by the progressive MeidasTouch in which he said, "Just to be clear… I'm no figurehead of any movement..."
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AG Nessel levels charges against two Republican political fundraisers
Attorney General Dana Nessel unveiled criminal charges Wednesday against two longtime Republican fundraisers who were allegedly involved in an effort to conceal the names of donors to a campaign to reduce Gov. Gretchen Whitmer's emergency powers during the COVID-19 pandemic. Heather Lombardini and Sandy Baxter helped raise money for the Unlock Michigan ballot proposal committee in 2020 and 2021 through nonprofit organizations that didn't have to identify their contributors, Nessel said at a press conference. By moving the dollars through the nonprofits first, the donors didn't have to be revealed publicly. If they had given directly to the controversial Unlock Michigan petition effort, the committee would have had to report their names.
Pox / COVID / BioTerror AgitProp
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Tax records reveal the lucrative world of covid misinformation - The Washington Post
Children’s Health Defense, an anti-vaccine group founded by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., received $23.5 million in contributions, grants and other revenue in 2022 alone — eight times what it collected the year before the pandemic began — allowing it to expand its state-based lobbying operations to cover half the country. Another influential anti-vaccine group, Informed Consent Action Network, nearly quadrupled its revenue during that time to about $13.4 million in 2022, giving it the resources to finance lawsuits seeking to roll back vaccine requirements as Americans’ faith in vaccines drops. Two other groups, Front Line Covid-19 Critical Care Alliance and America’s Frontline Doctors, went from receiving $1 million combined when they formed in 2020 to collecting more than $21 million combined in 2022, according to the latest tax filings available for the groups.
The four groups routinely buck scientific consensus. Children’s Health Defense and Informed Consent Action Network raise doubts about the safety of vaccines despite assurances from federal regulators. “Vaccines have never been safer than they are today,” the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said on its webpage outlining vaccine safety.
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Largest Covid Vaccine Study Yet Finds Links to Health Conditions - Bloomberg
Religion / Tribal / Culture War and Re-Segregation
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Smith, a 34-year-old woman from Newcastle and a lifelong soccer fan, said she received an email from team security in November that her membership was suspended pending an investigation for an alleged hate crime. The investigation stemmed from tweets Smith had posted on X that she was told “could be seen as transphobic.” Smith, who is gay and helps her mother run a tea shop to pay the bills, assumed the matter would soon be cleared up since she had not engaged in anything she considered “hate speech.” She assumed wrongly. For tweets stating that transgender women are not really women, Smith was banned for the remainder of the season and the following two, a decision she described as “devastating.”
Edumacationalizing / Acedemia Nuts
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Less Meat, More Plants: A Rules of Evidence Controversy Pt I
Not only had Guyatt et al concluded that the universal consensus on diet had no basis in evidence, implying that the nutritionists were laboring under serious delusions, but they also made clear that observational studies could not provide sufficiently reliable evidence (high enough quality) to tell us what to eat at all. If the consensus in medicine and public health is that evidence from observational studies is unreliable, why is this evidence considered of value in nutrition (let alone, as Nina has pointed out, the near-entire for the Dietary Guidelines for Americans)?
The controversy faded, of course, as controversies do. Guyatt and his colleagues moved on to other issues. The nutritionists and epidemiologists (and defenders of the health benefits of plant-based diets) who took umbrage with the Annals papers, also went back to business as usual. They had defended their beliefs, and nothing more needed to be said. The belief that a mostly plant diet is best continues to be a point of almost universal consensus, and the media, with its day-to-day approach to the news, follows along reporting on the results of each observational study as it arises, as though they provide meaningful evidence. Inconvenient truths, in science as in life, can have short half-lives.
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Education Isn’t What It Used To Be - Cremieux Recueil
People are spending more of their lives retired, and that’s good. The primary reason is that we now live longer lives than we used to. But we’re also spending more and more of our lives in education, and that threatens the time in the parts of our lives where we really enjoy being adults. Through reducing school lengths—even in combination with higher schooling intensity or earlier starts—we can take back some of those stolen years.
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Researchers increasingly view tech as having human-like qualities | New Scientist
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Biden administration cancels student loans of more than 150k borrowers
A borrower can qualify for the forgiveness if they're enrolled in the administration’s Saving on a Valuable Education (SAVE) repayment plan and "have been making at least 10 years of payments, and have originally taken out $12,000 or less for college," a White House fact sheet said. It also said that "for every $1,000 borrowed above $12,000, a borrower can receive forgiveness after an additional year of payments."
Those who receive the relief are expected to receive an email with a message from President Joe Biden saying, "I hope this relief gives you a little more breathing room."
Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising
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Apple Officially Warns Users to Stop Putting Wet iPhones in Rice
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Cox Communications wins order overturning $1B US copyright verdict
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EA Sports College Football 25 is back after 10 years with no NCAA games
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Disney Reportedly Strikes Deal for Sony to Take over Its Physical Media Business
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Keep your phone number private with Signal usernames | Hacker News
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C-Infinity is a bulky, quixotic solution to VR's nausea problem
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Apple reverses course: app must pay 30% App Store fee on tips sent to teachers
TechSuck / Geek Bait
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Preview edition of Microsoft OS/2 2.0 surfaces on eBay • The Register
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Water cooling is overkill for Pi 5 | Jeff Geerling
The kit is the purest expression of the phrase "a solution in search of a problem"—though, sadly, I don't blame Seeed Studio or 52Pi here. I know when they started the design process for this cooling kit, nobody had confirmed the Pi 5's 3.0 GHz overclock ceiling.
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Microsoft Will Use Intel to Manufacture Home-Grown Processor
AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World
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Deepfake Audio Boom Exploits One Billion-Dollar Startup's AI
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In 1989: John C. Dvorak on Intel's First Neural Network Chip
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Scientists say they can use AI to solve a key problem in nuclear fusion energy
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Google's AI spits out 'diverse' images of Founding Fathers, popes, Vikings
A series of posts shared by Twitter users claimed that Gemini (named after the worst astrological sign) refuses to generate images of Caucasians. In one example, a user asked for images of the pope, and was allegedly sent images of an Asian woman and a black man in papal garb, despite the fact a woman cannot be the pope and there has never been a black pope, as far as the Catholic Church will tell us.
Space / Boomy Zoomers / UFO
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(Feb 2023) How many satellites can we safely fit in Earth orbit?
The space environment is like a system where you have flows in and flows out," said Lewis. "We launch things into space and the flow coming out, typically, due to atmospheric drag, is the only mechanism we've got really to naturally remove things from the environment. But above 1,000 kilometers [600 miles], the atmosphere doesn't really do anything, because it's so sparse. There's no sink; the numbers can only go up." OneWeb's constellation inhabits this treacherous altitude range, and so does the smaller Globalstar.
McDowell says that humankind is likely going to discover the natural capacity of near-Earth space "the hard way." Despite the pledges of megaconstellation operators, the astrophysicist doubts that things will remain manageable in the years ahead.
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ERS-2 reentry – live updates – Rocket Science
Using data acquired in the last few hours, ESA’s Space Debris Office predicts that the reentry of ESA’s ERS-2 satellite will take place at: 15:41 UTC (16:41 CET) on 21 February 2024
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Blue Origin has emerged as the likely buyer for United Launch Alliance
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Intuitive Machines' Odysseus moon lander on track for Feb. 22 lunar landing
Economicon / Business / Finance
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Amazon Is Replacing Walgreens in the Dow Jones Industrial Average
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It’s Been 30 Years Since Food Ate Up This Much of Your Income - WSJ
even as overall inflation has eased from the blistering pace consumers endured throughout much of 2022 and 2023. Prices at restaurants and other eateries were up 5.1% last month compared with January 2023, while grocery costs increased 1.2% during the same period, Labor Department data show.
In 1991, U.S. consumers spent 11.4% of their disposable personal income on food, according to data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture. At the time, households were still dealing with steep food-price increases following an inflationary period during the 1970s. More than three decades later, food spending has reattained that level, USDA data shows. In 2022, consumers spent 11.3% of their disposable income on food, according to the most recent USDA data available.
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Atlas Obscura looks to raise $10M at a $24M valuation
“It has not been a good venture capital market lately,” Webster said. “But because the business is growing so fast and there’s so much opportunity for Atlas [Obscura] right now, it just seemed like it would be worth it to go out and raise… a reasonable-sized $10 million round.”
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Staff: Dell's return to office mandate is a stealth layoff, especially for women
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The high cost of promoting homeownership
There are obviously some offsetting reasons why it’s congenial to own your own home. But precisely because it seems like something a lot of people would want to do anyway, it doesn’t seem like we need to go out of our way to encourage it. And precisely because a world of owner-occupants involves so much exposure to idiosyncratic risks, it encourages people to adopt other risk-averse policy preferences that hurt growth. I know that the “you’ll own nothing and you’ll be happy” guy has sparked a ton of paranoid reactions, so I want to be clear that I’m not against people owning things. But I think the world would be better if people owned a much more diversified portfolio of assets that was much more robust to risks, and allowed for more professional management of real estate and an overall attitude to local politics that is less dominated by risk-aversion.
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Nvidia Announces Financial Results for Fourth Quarter and Fiscal 2024
Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making
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Executive order on cybersecurity of US ports forthcoming
The Biden administration plans to invest billions in the domestic manufacturing of cargo cranes, seeking to counter fears that the use of China-built cranes with advanced software at many U.S. ports poses a potential national security risk.
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Noncitizens Aren't Just Voting In San Francisco Elections, But Running Them
While ineligible to vote in elections, Wong told KQED that she aims to use her new position, as the outlet described, to “increase engagement among the city’s immigrant and non-English speaking communities” and “ensure that voter materials are translated in a way that people can understand.” To illustrate the latter, Wong noted how there’s currently no Cantonese or Mandarin equivalent to English terms such as “reparations.”
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Section 702 Powers Back on the Ropes Thanks to Partisan Infighting
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Well-functioning democracy for neither me nor for thee?
I am not saying these arguments are true (mostly I don’t know), I am merely reporting that I am reading and hearing them, and yes I mean from Democrats. Most of all, I am struck by how skeptical and cynical these arguments are about democracy. It’s not even democracy in the “can we beat the Trumpers?” sense, but democratic processes internal to the Democratic Party.
Skepticism about democracy — yet never ever explicitly voiced — is a growing problem among Democratic Party thinkers (though not Ezra). On one hand, they wish to turn around and call people on the Right, or libertarians, “undemocratic,” or “anti-democratic,” or whatever. On the other hand, when it comes to actual decisions of great consequence, they are the ones terrified of the democratic processes they themselves have created. They know that, but can’t quite bring themselves to voice their doubts in those terms.
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Tuckers "Benz" interview: Government-Backed Censors Who Rigged The 2020 Election Are Now Stealing 2024.
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Supreme Court allows 'race neutral' Virginia high school admissions policy that bolsters diversity
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Alabama health system pauses IVF treatments after court embryo ruling
Law Breaking / Police / Internal Security
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Hunter Biden Says DOJ Misrepresented Sawdust As Cocaine To Make Him Look Bad | ZeroHedge
Another example they gave was a photograph that Mr. Weiss included as an exhibit attached to a public Feb. 13 court filing that he claimed was one of “multiple photographs of videos apparent cocaine, crack cocaine, and drug paraphernalia.” The photograph shows three lines of yellow dust arranged on a carpenter’s table saw workbench that look like lines of cocaine but that Mr. Biden’s attorneys say aren’t. The defense attorneys said the picture was sent to Mr. Biden by his psychiatrist, who they say told him they were “lines of sawdust sent to me by a master carpenter who was a coke addict.” The message and the photograph were “meant to convey that Mr. Biden, too, could overcome any addiction,” the defense attorneys wrote, while alleging that the misrepresentation of the sawdust as cocaine is another example that “amplifies why Mr. Biden and the Court cannot take the prosecution’s assertions at face value.”
- There's no shortage of Hunter party pics; why use this, less incriminating, doubtful provenance etc? Almost as if they wanted to fail ...
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Oregon turned on its own trailblazing drug law:'Not the utopia we were promised'
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US Attorney: Nuclear Material Trafficking Charges Against Japanese Yakuza Leader
External Security / Militaria / Diplomania
World
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What the fuck is going on in Argentina? - by Yakko
we toured most of the country and didn’t see a fraction of the things we openly saw during the time we spent in both Brazil and Chile during the trip (which combined was less than Argentina). We saw (keyword) a lot of extreme poverty in both Chile and Brazil that we did not see in Argentina. Speaking to locals, the main sense I got is that while a lot of people might not necessarily be living in conditions that are supposedly as bad as in other places, the vast majority of people are struggling and working hard just to stay afloat. There’s also no expectation of a future — the goal is to get by today.
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Japan bets $67B to become a global chip powerhouse once again
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Millennials overtake baby boomers as dominant generation in Canada
Russia Bad / Ukraine War
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Denmark to give all of its artillery to Ukraine
“We decided to donate our entire artillery,” Mette Frederiksen said at the Munich Security Conference, suggesting that other European nations should follow suit. “I’m sorry to say friends, there is still ammunition in stock in Europe. This is not only a question about production because we have weapons, we have ammunition, we have our defences that we don’t have to use at the moment, that we should deliver to Ukraine,” she said. “We have to do more.”
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Putin still believes he can win in Ukraine, says western assessment
China
Health / Medicine
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Too few people donate their organs, dead or alive. How can we make it easier
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We Need Major, But Not Radical, FDA Reform
Every week, thousands of people died while the FDA waited for more information even after we were confident that the vaccine would not hurt anybody and was likely to prevent death. The extra information that the FDA waited months to get was not worth the tens of thousands of lives it cost. Scaling back the FDA’s mandatory authority to safety and ingredient testing would correct for this deadly bias.
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'Gut Health' Has a Fatal Flaw: The obsession with digestion has gone too far
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Unvaccinated Florida kids exposed to measles can skip quarantine, officials say
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FDA warns against using smartwatches and smart rings to measure blood sugar
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Nitazenes are a powerful class of street drugs emerging across the US
Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda
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Exxon Threatens to Take Billions of Dollars in Climate Investment Out of the EU | OilPrice.com
The Financial Times cited the company today as saying that there was way too much red tape in the EU and it took too long to get a project going, which prompted the supermajor to consider spending its $20 billion in decarbonization investments for 2022-2027 elsewhere. “When we make investments, we’ve got very long time horizons in mind. I would say that recent developments in Europe have not instilled confidence in long-term, predictable policies,” Karen McKee, president of Exxon Product Solutions, told the FT.
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Google, Environmental Defense Fund will track methane emissions from space