2024-02-28
Worthy
Horseshit
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Surfing dangers: How a ruling in California might make things worse.
The ruling may have the unintended consequence of emboldening the practice of kooks who ‘shoulder-hop’ and ‘burn’ other generally more experienced surfers who have the right of way on a wave,” writes Los Angeles attorney Vic Otten in an email to Slate. “People who follow the rules of the sport may be denied access to the courts when they are injured by someone who can only catch a wave by dropping in on a surfer who has the right of way—or, as in the case of localism, a person who feels that outsiders should not surf at a local spot.”
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Run out of butter or eggs? Here's the science behind substitute ingredients
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Meet the Amazon ‘influencers’ making money off everything they own - The Washington Post
Leatherby is an “Amazon Influencer,” an increasingly popular side hustle that pays regular people to promote products on the e-commerce website. The program, started in 2017, was initially aimed at driving customers from social media to Amazon’s site. As Amazon continued to recapture online shoppers from sites like Instagram and TikTok, it’s been flooded by applicants looking to take advantage of new features that make it easy for regular people who don’t have big follower counts to make money.
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Big Candy Is Watching You: Facial Recognition In Vending Machines Upsets University
The good news is that this probably doesn’t mean that facial recognition and similar personalized information is stored (or sent to the big vaporous mainframe) as this would violate the GDPR and similar data privacy laws, but there is precedence of information kiosks at a mall operator taking more liberties. Although the University of Waterloo has said that these particular vending machines will be removed, there’s something uncomfortable about knowing that those previously benign vending machines are now increasingly more like the telescreens in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four.
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New data shows which states were more deadly for pedestrians in 2023
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Buying a Home Near Nvidia’s Headquarters Is Nearly Impossible Right Now - WSJ
The housing market in Santa Clara, Calif., is cutthroat right now. But that is not because Nvidia, a local tech juggernaut, just became one of the most valuable companies in the country.Instead, the Santa Clara real-estate market’s driving forces are its lack of inventory and its relatively affordable prices compared with other cities in Silicon Valley. It attracts tech employees from all corners of the region looking for entry-level housing, according to Dave Walsh, vice president and manager of Compass’s San Jose office.
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Mom loses $800K disability case after photos of her tree-throwing contest win
Newspaper reports, however, soon surfaced of Grabska competing in a Christmas tree-throwing event on Jan. 8, 2018, nearly a year after the accident supposedly left her with "disabling" pain." The Irish High Court reviewed a photo of Grabska launching a tree, which the judge, Carmel Stewart, described as a "very graphic picture," according to the Telegraph. The competition involves people throwing roughly 5-foot spruce trees as far as they are able.
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Merriam-Webster says you can end a sentence with a preposition
- ITYM "A preposition is cromulent to end a sentence with"
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Resurrecting loved ones as AI 'ghosts' could harm your mental health
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Man Running AI-Powered Porn Site Horrified by What Users Are Asking For
Electric / Self Driving cars
Rank Propaganda / Thought Policing / World Disordering
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Conspiracy theorists keep getting things right; experts warn that’s dangerous - AFRU
More recently, the lab leak theory regarding the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic has yet again sparked totally unnuanced “conspiracy theorists were right” discourse. While initially the lab leak theory was clamped down on for being a dangerous conspiracy theory, the hypothesis has — more or less by random chance — been the one to recently gain traction in expert opinions. And while the true origins of the virus remain unclear, the fact that a modern conspiracy theory could potentially hold elements of truth has raised alarm bells among guardians of democracy like journalists and experts.
Musk
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SpaceX discloses cause of Starship anomalies as it clears an FAA hurdle
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Elon Musk's Tunnel Reportedly Oozing with Skin-Burning Chemical Sludge
At one of the dig sites, which sits underneath the Encore Las Vegas hotel, the chemical sludge was filled not only with the commonplace byproducts of sand, silt, and water, but also accelerants used to set the grout to build the tunnels. As the sludge built up, so too did its associated safety risks — and as the workers told Nevada's Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), people getting burned by the sludge was an almost routine occurrence. The state OSHA opened its own investigation into the outrageous safety hazards said to be present in the Boring Company tunnels, and as Bloomberg learned from documents it accessed via a Freedom of Information Act request, some workers were scarred permanently from their accelerant burns.
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Musk accused of polluting German rivers with Tesla gigafactory
Religion / Tribal / Culture War and Re-Segregation
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Humane genomics education can reduce racism – Science
People who endorse genetic essentialism believe that such essences are genetic (4), which leads them to believe that same-race individuals are genetically homogeneous, that races are nonoverlapping genetic groups, and that most racial differences are therefore determined by genes (4).
Essentialist beliefs are socially dangerous and a biological misconception (1, 2, 4). For example, genetic essentialist beliefs about race facilitate intergroup hostility (5), support for eugenic policies (6), discrimination (4), and disinterest in cross-racial friendships (7). Psychological essentialism also inhibits biology learning because it involves misunderstandings of intraspecific genetic variation (1), such as the erroneous belief that human races are like dog breeds (8). For example, US high school students and adults inaccurately estimate that 37% of human genetic variation exists between racial groups (9), which is similar to the proportion of genetic variation across dog breeds (~27 to 33%) (8), but is 7.4 times more than the genetic variation that exists across human continental populations (~5%)
- Reference 4 is "I. Dar-Nimrod, S. J. Heine, Psychol. Bull. 137, 800 (2011)"; there's 15 total and they all get multiple links. Arguing on stilts?
Edumacationalizing / Acedemia Nuts
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Academics can no longer speak freely
For many years, left-wing opinion-makers have told us that there is no crisis of free speech in British universities, that the whole idea is a fiction put about by right-wing bigots upset that they can no longer sound off with impunity, or by politicians and journalists intent on stirring up a culture war. To quote Nesrine Malik, writing in the Guardian in 2019, “the purpose of the free-speech-crisis myth is…to blackmail good people into ceding space to bad ideas”. Anyone who works in a university knows that this is balderdash. The crisis in academia is of course a godsend to the right, but that doesn’t mean that it isn’t also real and serious. Indeed, it is much more serious than most people realise. High-profile cancellations are what make the headlines, but they are merely the occasional effect of something deeper: the capture of entire sections of the academic bureaucracy by ideological lobbies, which insist on imposing their beliefs on all and sundry. We have seen this sort of thing before.
Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising
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Kara Swisher warns news organizations need to 'reinvent' themselves amid crisis
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Vice Media Collapse Entirely Fault of Incompetent, Fail-Upward Brunchlords
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Vertex Is the Last Good Place Online | WIRED
Vertex is the New York Times game you’ve probably never heard of and almost certainly never played. The crossword, Spelling Bee, Wordle, and Connections are household names, and colossal moneymakers. Vertex, meanwhile, was relegated to a third of a sentence in a recent story about how the Times became the undisputed king of online brain teasers. “A version of connect the dots” was the writer’s perfunctory mention.
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Netflix No Longer Allowing Subscribers to Pay Through Apple's App Store
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Netlify just sent me a $104k bill for a simple static site | Hacker News
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Majorities in most countries surveyed say social media is good for democracy
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The Internet Archive taking over a dead website domains and URL's makes sense
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Threads widens the gap with X, with triple the daily downloads on iOS
TechSuck / Geek Bait
AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World
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Big Tech’s jumbled AI portfolios tell a story of self-preservation
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Google launches "Gemini Business" AI, adds $20 to the $6 Workspace bill
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The Gemini Incident Continues - by Zvi Mowshowitz
Do you see what The New York Times did there? They took the fact that Gemini systematically refused to create images of white people in most circumstances, including historical circumstances where everyone involved would almost certainly be white. Where requests to portray white people were explicitly replied to by a scolding that the request was harmful, while requests for people of other races were eagerly honored. They then turned this around, and made it about how this adjustment was unfairly portraying people of color as Nazis. That this refusal to portray white people under almost all circumstances was racist, not because it was racist against white people, but because it was racist against people of color.
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Large Apple shareholders seek AI disclosures
The shareholder proposal asks the company to “disclose any ethical guidelines that the company has adopted regarding [its] use of AI technology”.
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Apple Cancels Work on Electric Car, Shifts Team to Generative AI (Archive)
Apple Inc. is canceling a decade-long effort to build an electric car, according to people with knowledge of the matter, abandoning one of the most ambitious projects in the history of the company. Apple made the disclosure internally Tuesday, surprising the nearly 2,000 employees working on the project, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the announcement wasn’t public.
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Becuz the overlap between the engineering skills required for the two efforts is so high, its a natural fit. Sign that the effort was mostly marketing.
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Apple Ends Quest to Build Its Own Electric Vehicle (Archive)
Space / Boomy Zoomers / UFO
Crypto con games
Economicon / Business / Finance
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Kellogg CEO faces backlash for suggesting people eat ‘cereal for dinner’ to save money.
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Food Is Taking a Bite Out of Your Income. These Consumers Are Getting Creative. - WSJ
Eating rice and beans instead of meat. Planning out meals a month in advance. Trying to raise more food in backyard gardens. Americans are changing the way they eat, shop and live to cope with a stretch of record food inflation.
Nancy Randall’s family is making more use of the food they harvest themselves—the deer they hunt and fish they catch. Her family fishes for snapper in the Gulf of Mexico and shoots about eight deer a year, processing the meat into venison sausage and hundreds of tamales. Typically, Randall’s family of six freezes and eats the meat gradually throughout the year. Now they are buying less protein at the grocery store and consuming their own supplies more quickly, sometimes as often as four times a week.
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Researchers show Reddit users caused the famous GameStop 'short squeeze'
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Rise of fast-fashion Shein, Temu roils global air cargo industry
Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making
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Nikki Haley’s home-state loss is unique in US politics.
Of the candidates who make it to their home state primaries, only four have lost their home states since 2004 — and just two remained in the race.
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Republicans would crush the IRS by forcing its workers back into the office | The Hill
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Why Uber and Etsy came up so much in the Supreme Court's social media arguments
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H&R Block used deceptive marketing and unfairly deleted tax filer data, FTC
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FTC chair Lina Khan takes victory lap on blocking Nvidia-Arm merger
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Gas export pause could scramble Biden’s chances in Pennsylvania.
Law Breaking / Police / Internal Security
External Security / Militaria / Diplomania
World
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‘Free fall’: Nightmare coming our way as iron ore price bottoms out
The red dirt is the golden goose of the Australian economy and pockets the nation $124 billion a year. It is used to make steel, which in turn is used to create buildings, infrastructure, ships, trains, cars, machines and electrical appliances. It’s all stuff that China smashes out in massive numbers and it means our two countries are bound together on iron ore in a mutual dependency.
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Japan births hit record low, population down by largest margin in 2023
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Canadian 'online harms' bill to make online hate punishable up to life in prison
Iran / Houthi / Red Sea / Mediterranean
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Submarine cables linking Africa-Asia-Europe severed
Update(1440ET): The Houthi military spokesman has explicitly denied any intention to knock out undersea regional internet cables in a fresh Tuesday statement, however, he reiterated that the Iran-linked group's top goal is to block commercial shipping and supplies to Israel. The full statement is as follows, cited in Al Mayadeen news: "We are keen to spare all cables and their services from any risks and to provide the necessary facilities for their maintenance. The decision to prevent the passage of Israeli ships does not include ships belonging to international companies licensed to carry out marine cable work."
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Begun, the Cable Wars Have: No attractive target is ignored forever.
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(Feb 4 2024) The Next Casualty of the Red Sea Attacks: Undersea Cables - Gulf International Forum
On December 24th, 2023, a Telegram channel linked to the Houthis published a map showing the networks of submarine communications cables in the Mediterranean Sea, the Red Sea, the Arabian Sea, and the Persian Gulf. The image was accompanied by an ominous message: “There are maps of international cables connecting all regions of the world through the sea. It seems that Yemen is in a strategic location, as internet lines that connect entire continents — not only countries—pass near it.”
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Russia Bad / Ukraine War
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Rodents incapacitate millions in eco-friendly military equipment in Ukraine: the unforeseen problem.
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Sri Lanka ends visas for hundreds of thousands of Russians staying to avoid war
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First M1 Abrams Tank Destroyed In Ukraine Shortly After Appearance On Battlefield
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In Ukraine, Russia Is Inching Forward Death by Death (Archive)
Russian forces have a different threshold of pain, one senior Western official said this month, as well as an unorthodox view of what is considered an acceptable level of military losses.
Health / Medicine
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Lead-Tainted Applesauce Highlights Failings in Food Safety System - The New York Times
Cinnamon-flavored applesauce pouches sold in grocery and dollar stores last year poisoned hundreds of American children with extremely high doses of lead, leaving anxious parents to watch for signs of brain damage, developmental delays and seizures. The Food and Drug Administration, citing Ecuadorean investigators, said a spice grinder was likely responsible for the contamination and said the quick recall of three million applesauce pouches protected the food supply. But hundreds of pages of documents obtained by The New York Times and the nonprofit health newsroom The Examination, along with interviews with government and company officials in multiple countries, show that in the weeks and months before the recall, the tainted applesauce sailed through a series of checkpoints in a food-safety system meant to protect American consumers.
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CBD shown to ease anxiety without the risks that can come with THC
Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda
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Klamath Dam Removal: ‘It’s an Environmental Disaster.’
“I’ve been around natural disasters all of my life, and I’ve never seen anything like this,” Siskiyou County Supervisor Ray Haupt recently told the Globe. “The river is essentially dead, as is everything in it.”
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(2022) Rainwater everywhere on the planet is unsafe to drink due to chemicals
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Feedbacks offset up to a third of forestation's CO2 removal benefits
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U.S. Kale Contains "Disturbing" Amounts of "Forever Chemicals," Research Finds
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The Smokehouse Creek Fire in Texas has charred more than 250k acres