2024-03-01

Worthy

• Financial systems take a holiday

  A holiday is any day you and your counterparty mutually agree is a holiday. This is often an implicit agreement via Schelling points. No serious person disputes that Christmas Day is a holiday in the United States and accordingly no one needs to ask if Christmas Day is a holiday. (Many salarymen in Japan work on Christmas Day, of course, despite their coworkers Taro and Patrick skipping work to... go to a Jewish friend’s birthday party or something. Taro and Patrick are, of course, eccentric.)

  Easter is March 31st in 2024. Try explaining why it is March 31st this year and not a date in April to a Chinese banker not familiar with Judaism. (If one objects that Easter is not a Jewish holiday, one should not attempt to explain the timing of Easter to a Chinese banker, or anyone else really. If one objects “Easter on which side of which schism?”, one has a good understanding of the challenges here.)

  In Japan, a certain large e-commerce company you may have heard of instructed teams to appropriately celebrate the holiday. Japanese people do not typically celebrate Thanksgiving, and Japan consumes very little turkey, but Japanese salarymen given an order by their boss are socialized to comply with the utmost diligence and peformative enthusiasm even when that order has a puzzling basis (or no basis at all, for that matter). The salarymen did the natural thing: they organized a special promotion on—I swear on my honor as a salaryman, may my fax toner dry out forever if I lie— items which are black. It worked very well. And so, by ancient custom, some extremely large Japanese companies celebrate Black Friday, the day after the 4th Thursday in November, the day where people of good will come together to buy black things at attractive prices.

• Today's only half of the leap year fun

  Only half of the fun of a leap year happens on February 29th. The rest of it happens in ten months, when a bunch more code finds out that it's somehow day 366, and promptly flips out.

  One more random thought on the topic: some of today's kids will be around to see what happens in 2100. That one will be all kinds of fun to see who paid attention to their rules and who just guessed based on a clean division by four.

etc

• (Nov 2022) Monty Python and the Holy Grail: Airspeed Velocity of an Unladen Swallow - Interesting Engineering

  With the amusing background out of the way, let’s calculate the airspeed of an unladen swallow and determine whether said swallow would be able to carry a coconut to Europe to be used to create fake horse sounds for King Arthur.

• The 29th, and Other Calendar Quirks

• Grain Weevil grain bin management robot

Horseshit

• Millennials on course to become 'richest generation in history'

  While they wait for their inheritances, many millennials are still reeling from a series of economic shocks, with the 2008 crash followed by a series of financial headwinds brought about by the pandemic, Brexit and war in Ukraine. In reality, their future financial firepower is likely to be a divisive lottery, predominantly determined by inheritance from previous generations, including property.

• Palantir boss says software only reason 'goose step' has not returned to Europe

• NYC's plan to ease gridlock? A $15 toll for Manhattan drivers

• Overwhelmed? Just Say 'No.'

• Most U.S. Children Now Use Headphones Regularly. Is Their Hearing at Risk?

• I'm teaching my kids Japanese in ten days

• SawStop to Dedicate Key Patent for Safety Technology on All Table Saws

  On November 1, 2023, the CPSC published a supplemental notice of proposed rulemaking under the Consumer Product Safety Act proposing to issue a safety standard addressing blade-contact injuries ontable saws. The proposed rule would require all table saws to “limit the depth of cut to no more than 3.5 mm” when a test probe, acting as a surrogate for a human finger or other body part, contacts the spinning blade at a rate of 1 meter per second (m/s).

  Today, in response to proposed rulemaking regarding table saw safety by the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC), SawStop committed to dedicate U.S. Patent 9,724,840 to the public upon the rule’s effective date.The intent of the proposed rule is to prevent the thousands of amputations and hospitalizations that will continue to occur without industry-wide action.

• Why every eatery has a goddamn app now

• Mercedes-Benz Hearses Look Like Cars from a Pixar Movie

• Gas Pumps Didn't Work in New Zealand. Blame the Leap Year

• Using axis lines for good or evil

• A billionaire-backed campaign for a new California city is off to a bumpy start

Electric / Self Driving cars

• Biden Calls Chinese Electric Vehicles a Security Threat

  • The White House Warns Cars Made in China Could Unleash Chaos on US Highways

  • US Action to Address Risks of Autos from China and Other Countries of Concern

  • U.S. says to investigate national security data risks from Chinese vehicles

  • see also:

  • (May 2021) Tesla cars barred from some China government compounds - sources | Reuters

  • (Jun 2022) Tesla cars barred for 2 months in Beidaihe, site of China leadership meet | Reuters

  • (Jun 2022) Tesla is still battling spying suspicions in China | CNN Business

• Toyota was right about hybrid cars all along

• Behind Apple's Doomed Car Project: False Starts and Wrong Turns

• Cruise's Robotaxis Will Begin Test Runs Again

• Ford EVs gain access to Tesla Superchargers starting today

Obit

• Chuck Mawhinney, 74, Dies; Deadliest Sniper in Marine Corps History - The New York Times

  Mr. Mawhinney, who served in Vietnam from May 1968 to March 1970, had 106 confirmed kills and another 216 probable kills, averaging about four a week — more than the average company, which comprised about 150 soldiers.

Rank Propaganda / Thought Policing / World Disordering

• Brands Warned Not to Run Ads on Sites Covering 'Election Hoaxes' – PJ Media

• Meta's Plans to Downplay Political Content Is, Itself, a Political Decision

• The Future of Censorship Is AI-Generated | TIME

Musk

• Tesla to face nearly 6k black workers in factory racism lawsuit

• X revived anti-misgendering policy that Musk dropped last year

• Elon and the terrible, horrible, no good, bad legal week

• Elon Musk sues OpenAI, Sam Altman for breaching firm's founding mission

Trump / War against the Right / Jan6

• Judge Says Feds Can’t ‘Selectively’ Prosecute Right-Wing Rioters While Ignoring Antifa | The Daily Wire

  Judge Carney objected to the fact that federal prosecutors charged only right-wing participants, even though left-wing agitators performed identical conduct or worse at the same event—which prosecutors’ own evidence acknowledged. “No individuals associated with the left, who engaged in anti-far-right speech and violently suppressed the protected speech of Trump supporters, were charged with a federal crime for their part in starting riots at political events. That is textbook viewpoint discrimination,” he wrote. “Most telling in this case is the government’s silence as to why it never pursued a case against a single member of Antifa or related far-left groups with respect to their violent conduct at pro-Trump events.”

Pox / COVID / BioTerror AgitProp

• CDC: Excessive alcohol drinking drove about 488 daily deaths during the pandemic

  The average number of deaths related to excessive alcohol use increased more than 29% from 2016-17 to 2020-21, said the report, published Thursday. During 2016-2017 there were 137,927 alcohol-related deaths, but for 2020-2021, there were 178,307.

  The increase in deaths related to excessive alcohol seemed to hit all ages, and although there were more alcohol-related deaths among men, the increase was larger for women.

Edumacationalizing / Acedemia Nuts

• More Election Rigging: Biden Admin Now Using Financial Aid to Pay Students to Aid Voting – HotAir

  The U.S. Department of Education has guided colleges to use federal work-study aid to pay students to register voters, work as voting aides, and become poll workers.

Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising

• GitHub besieged by malicious repositories in ongoing attack

• Shane Smith and the Final Collapse of Vice News

• Google Phone is going to make talking more fun with sound reactions and effects

• Verizon selectively blocking DNS traffic to non-blessed DNS servers

• Popular video doorbells can be easily hijacked, researchers find

• Video Doorbells Have Terrible Security. Amazon Sells Them Anyway

TechSuck / Geek Bait

• Eric S. Raymond tweet on current C safety issues

  I've been a C programmer for 40 years. The problem with saying "the kids just suck" is that even highly-skilled and battle-scarred old farts like me remain somewhat prone to these errors. So yeah, it's the language.

  • The White House Memory Safety Appeal Is A Security Red Herring

  The full report (PDF) is pretty light on technical details, while citing only blog posts by Microsoft and Google as its ‘expert sources’. The claim that memory safety issues are the primary cause of CVEs is not substantiated, or at least ignores the severity of CVEs when looking at the CISA statistics for active exploits.

• The Raspberry Pi 'WiringPi' library is back from the dead

• Intel Rebrands Its FPGA Business Altera in an Awesome Branding Move

• The paradox of diffusion distillation – Sander Dieleman

AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World

• Google hit with $2.3B lawsuit by Axel Springer, other media groups

• Is Google's Gemini chatbot woke by accident, or design?

• Beverly Hills middle schoolers use AI to make nudes of classmates: Police

Space / Boomy Zoomers / UFO

• Have we just discovered aliens?

  What does it all mean? It is possible the three space-heads are referring to different discoveries, but the fact that they are all British, and all using similar language, suggests they are referring to the same thing: namely a scientific paper, probably British in origin, perhaps still being peer-reviewed, which will provide firm evidence of alien life on an exoplanet (a planet outside our solar system), using biosignatures, which generally means gases and chemicals in the atmosphere which are highly likely to emanate from organic creatures. These biosignatures might be combinations of methane and oxygen, or methane and CO2, and so on. Not surprisingly, this sequence of statements has set the space-rabbit of speculation running hard. Dedicated UFO-bods on Twitter/X are, for instance, claiming that this is merely stage one of ‘disclosure’ – the act of carefully educating humanity about alien life, without destabilising the world.

Crypto con games

• Bitcoin so high it crashed Coinbase today

• Winklevoss crypto firm Gemini to return $1.1B to customers

Economicon / Business / Finance

• Immigration powered the economy, job market amid border negotiations - The Washington Post

  “Immigration has not slowed. It has just been absolutely astronomical,” said Pia Orrenius, vice president and senior economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas. “And that’s been instrumental. You can’t grow like this with just the native workforce. It’s not possible.”

  • (Feb 16 2024) The surge in immigration is a $7T gift to the economy (Archive)

  The CBO has now factored in a previously unexpected surge in immigration that began in 2022, which the agency assumes will persist for several years. These immigrants are more likely to work than their native-born counterparts, largely because immigrants skew younger. This infusion of working-age immigrants will more than offset the expected retirement of the aging, native-born population. This will in turn lead to better economic growth. As CBO Director Phill Swagel wrote in a note accompanying the forecasts: As a result of these immigration-driven revisions to the size of the labor force, “we estimate that, from 2023 to 2034, GDP will be greater by about $7 trillion and revenues will be greater by about $1 trillion than they would have been otherwise.”

  Got that? The surprise increase in immigration has led a multitrillion-dollar windfall for both the overall economy and federal tax coffers.

• Three companies own 19,000 rental houses in Atlanta, GA

• Macy's to close 150 stores, or about 30% of its locations

• Tech Layoffs Keep Coming. Why Is Head Count Barely Budging?

• Yep, you are living in a Nvidia-led tech bubble

  To be fair, this feels like a much different bubble than the cannabis and crypto stock bubbles of years gone by, as tech giants like Nvidia (NVDA) and Microsoft (MSFT) have real money-minting business models. Their leaders also aren't inexperienced dopes (see the cryptosphere's bad actors of the last two years). But make no mistake: We are in a bubble, and it could end badly at some point.

• The rise of the freelancer: Gen Z are turning their backs on secure jobs

Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making

• The Billionaire-Fueled Lobbying Group Behind the State Bills to Ban Basic Income Experiments

  The Foundation for Government Accountability was founded in Florida in 2011 by Tarren Bragdon after cutting his chops in Maine at the Maine Heritage Policy Center and then as adviser to Maine's governor, LePage. It was in Maine where Bragdon and a cohort of fellow young conservatives gained a reputation for outrageous anti-welfare policies. “I remember them as a pack of inexperienced, activist right-wingers that went crazy on welfare reform,” said Cynthia Dill, a former state senator to the Washington Post in 2018. “It galled me that they had no expertise whatsoever in health and human services but were appointed to places of power by the LePage administration.” Bragdon's regressive work in Maine was only the beginning for him. He went on to export that work to every state he could and even the federal government too, starting in 2017 when the FGA attempted to expand the work requirements for SNAP to even include parents and limit waivers for states regardless of unemployment rates.

  • Numerous lobbyists could use this kind of take down.

• A List Of GOP Senate Chief's Worst Blunders In Leadership

  To conservative voters long frustrated by McConnell’s two decades in leadership, it’s long past time to usher in a new generation to the upper echelons of government. McConnell’s blunders leave a legacy of distrust among Republican voters eager for their elected leaders to fight for substantive change. It’s part of why the Kentucky lawmaker persistently polled as the most unpopular politician in the country.

• Biden Executive Order Bans Sale of US Data to China, Russia. Good Luck

• IRS targets wealthy 'non-filers' with new wave of compliance letters

• Proposed bill would prevent California landlords from banning pets in rentals

• So What Does the Inventor of the Bump Stock Have to Say As His Device Goes Before the Supreme Court? - The Truth About Guns

• California's fast food law exempts Panera Gov. Newsom's relationship

  • comment:

  It was found that the exemption will only apply to Panera, giving them an advantage over everyone else having to pay $20/hr whereas Panera will continue paying $11.70/hr.

• Voting machines are costly and black-boxed. Some towns are going open source

  Three companies—Dominion, ES&S, and Hart InterCivic—control roughly 90 percent of the U.S. voting technology market. All three are privately held, meaning they’re required to reveal little about their financial workings and they’re also committed to keeping their source code from becoming fully public. The second future was to gamble on VotingWorks, a nonprofit with only 17 employees and voting machine contracts in just five small counties, all in Mississippi. The company has taken the opposite approach to the Big Three. Its financial statements are posted on its website, and every line of code powering its machines is published on GitHub, available for anyone to inspect.

  • from the GitHub:

  Pick a machine with FHD (1920x1080) resolution and the ability to install Linux. Install Ubuntu 18.04.4+ Desktop, minimal installation. Software update. To configure and lock down the machine for production use, noting this is an irreversible process...

• Hunter Biden acknowledged Joe was 'the big guy' in $5M China deal

Law Breaking / Police / Internal Security

• The FBI Is Using Push Notifications to Catch Sexual Predators

External Security / Militaria / Diplomania

• Career US diplomat admits to spying for Cuba for decades

World

• Amazon lobbyists to be barred from European parliament

• ASIO has revealed an Australian politician betrayed the nation. Here's what we know

  The accusation from Mr Burgess that this individual tried to bring a member of a prime minister's family into the "orbit" of the spies suggests they were pretty well connected – although, that could be many people in politics. "A foreign government has attempted to infiltrate at the very top of Australian politics," Home Affairs Minister Clare O'Neil told the ABC's Afternoon Briefing.

• First North Korea spy satellite is 'alive' and being controlled

• Tech Is Changing the Way People Score and Sell Drugs in India

Israel

• 'Massacre': Dozens killed by Israeli fire in Gaza while collecting food aid

  • Aid Truck Stampede 'Massacre' In Gaza: Israel Accused Of Opening Fire On Crowd

• NYT Launches Leak Investigation over Report on Its Israel-Gaza Coverage

• Hamas Is Losing Every Battle in Gaza. It Still Thinks It Could Win the War. - WSJ

• Close scrutiny on Gaza-related fundraisers stalls GoFundMe aid efforts

Russia Bad / Ukraine War

• Leaked Russian military files reveal criteria for nuclear strike

• Chinese Retailer Caught Selling Starlink Terminals to Russia

China

• China Has Navalnys, Hidden from the Public

• New technologies, new totalitarians - by Noah Smith

  This book is basically an overview of various ways China tries to influence the world covertly. It includes a chapter on traditional espionage, highlighting Christine Fang, the spy who slept with a large number of U.S. mayors, and with Congressman Eric Swalwell. It discusses China’s coverups in the early days of Covid, and its attempts to control Zoom through that company’s China office. It covers China’s attempts to influence foreign politics through massive clandestine social media campaigns. It explains China’s illegal overseas “police stations”. And it also discusses how the Chinese government bullies U.S. companies and NGOs into toeing the CCP line on various political matters, usually by threatening to revoke access to China’s huge domestic market.

  As wide-ranging as Allen’s book is, though, it can’t hope to cover all the ways that China is covertly trying to influence the rest of the world. It doesn’t talk much about China’s massive campaign of scientific espionage via U.S. universities. It doesn’t give an in-depth treatment of China’s massive and pervasive digital surveillance apparatus (for a good treatment of that, I recommend Surveillance State, by Josh Chin and Liza Lin). It doesn’t cover China’s hacking of Apple’s AirDrop, its manipulation of TikTok content, or its attempts to subvert leaders in Western countries. Etc., etc. Beijing Rules could use a sequel, or maybe two sequels.

Health / Medicine

• Disruptive consequences of monosodium glutamate (MSG) on male reproduction

• Significant proportion of cancer drugs lack proof of added benefit, finds study.

Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda

• A big boost to Europe's climate change goals

• ExxonMobil is suing investors who want tougher action on climate change

• Toyota wants hydrogen to succeed so bad it's paying people to buy the Mirai

• Heinz’s sustainable ketchup cap

  • HN comments

• US spends billions on roads rather than public transport in 'climate time bomb'

• Frackers Are Now Drilling for Clean Power

• Japan's Mitsubishi Heavy invests in U.S. geothermal startup

• New York sues beef producer JBS for 'fraudulent' marketing around climate change

  New York state Attorney General Letitia James sued beef producer JBS in state court for allegedly misleading the public about a pledge the company made to slash its climate pollution in the coming decade. Prosecutors said JBS continued making deceptive marketing claims even after a consumer watchdog group recommended the company stop advertising because it didn't have a strategy to achieve its climate target.

  New York state prosecutors are trying to force JBS to stop making "fraudulent and illegal" marketing claims about its climate efforts. The state is also seeking civil fines, among other penalties.

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

  “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.

• Boiling Water May Help Remove Up to 90% of Microplastics

• A Indian frog has a mushroom sprouting out of it. Never been seen before