2024-03-02

etc

Leap year: French readers enjoy only four-year newspaper
Peak Pike-Phalanx

the assumption is generally that the Parthian military system, in particular, represented a fatal weakness to the Hellenistic military system. And at 20,000 feet, you can see the case: the Parthia ends up breaking away from the Seleucid Empire and then absorbing most of its eastern provinces, so clearly they could win against Seleucid armies. And, of course, in Total War games, horse archers are ‘hard counters’ for the slow-moving sarisa-phalanx units. As always, history is more complicated.
Tower of London has a new ravenmaster. His mission is unflappable
Helium discovery in northern Minnesota may be biggest ever in North America
- Perhaps the world won't end from the sale of the US Helium Reserve.

Horseshit

Electric bike injuries, hospitalizations increased significantly in recent years
- Electric bike usage has increased significantly in recent years.
Is Buffett too old for the job?
Reading on screens is a less effective way to absorb and retain information
Millennials to become the richest generation, after $90T wealth transfer
Can Data Centers Be Sources of Sustainable Heat?
A software engineer wore Vision Pro to his wedding, much to his bride's chagrin
Why faulty streetlights are turning cities purple

Electric / Self Driving cars

celebrity gossip

Sam Altman Is Worth $2B – That Doesn't Include OpenAI

Rank Propaganda / Thought Policing / World Disordering

MSNBC legal analyst says First Amendment makes US 'vulnerable,' calls for 'common sense' speech restrictions

“Actually, Rachel, I think we’re more susceptible to it than other countries, and that’s because some of our greatest strengths can also be our Achilles Heel,” McQuade said. “So, for example, our deep commitment to free speech in our First Amendment. It is a cherished right. It’s an important right in democracy, and nobody wants to get rid of it, but it makes us vulnerable to claims [that] anything we want to do related to speech is censorship.” She argued, “Of course, the Supreme Court has held that all fundamental rights, even the right to free speech, can be limited as long as there is a compelling governmental interest and the restriction is narrowly tailored to achieve that interest. But I think any time someone tries to do anything that might limit free speech, people claim censorship.”
- Common sense thought control - Don Surber
Her best line was “We need to have a conversation and common-sense solutions to these things. Instead, we throw out terms like censorship, call each other names, use labels and retreat to our opposite sides. We need to be pragmatic and come up with real solutions.” Liberals have no problem with liberals calling Trump and any other Republican candidate Hitler, but calling a tranny “he” is a hate crime worthy of a lengthy prison sentence.

Oh it could be worse. We could be Canada. Canada Proud, a conservative group, tweeted last night, “Trudeau Liberal justice minister Arif Virani says that putting Canadians under house arrest on suspicion that they may commit a hate crime in the future will ‘help to deradicalize people who are learning things online.’”
Canada's Justice Minister Wants To Arrest People Before The Crime Is Committed | the deep dive

Musk

Elon Musk Sues OpenAI and CEO Sam Altman over Contract Breach

Both Musk and Altman have been making headlines. Musk, considered the world’s richest person, runs electrical vehicle maker Tesla, rocket and satellite maker SpaceX, and bought X for $44 billion in October 2022. He recently reported the advances of the brain chip technology implants produced by his startup Neuralink. Musk also announced the debut of his own AI company called xAI in July last year.

Altman has meanwhile had a rocky relationship with OpenAI. He was suddenly fired from the company in November of last year, in a move that sent shock waves across the tech industry. The American entrepreneur — one of the leading figures in the AI boom — returned to the firm a few days later.
- Elon Musk sues OpenAI and Sam Altman over 'betrayal' of non-profit AI mission
Through the lawsuit, Musk is seeking to compel OpenAI to adhere to its original mission and bar from monetizing technologies developed under its non-profit for the benefit of OpenAI executives or partners like Microsoft. The suit also requests the court rule AI systems like GPT-4 and other advanced models in development constitute artificial general intelligence that reaches beyond licensing agreements. In addition to injunctions forcing OpenAI’s hand, Musk asks for accounting and potential restitution of donations meant to fund its public-minded research should the court find it now operates for private gain.
- Elon Musk Sues OpenAI and Sam Altman
Musk alleged a breach of contract, saying Altman and co-founder Greg Brockman originally approached him to make an open source, non-profit company, but the startup established in 2015 is now focused on making money. He sought a court ruling asking OpenAI to make its research and technology available to the public and prevent the startup from using its assets, including its most advanced AI model GPT-4, for the financial gains of Microsoft or any individual.

Musk, who runs Tesla, and rocket maker SpaceX and bought Twitter for $44 billion in October 2022, has on several occasions called for regulation on AI. He stepped down from OpenAI's board in 2018 and has often criticized Microsoft's ties with the startup. "Microsoft has a very strong say, if not directly controls, OpenAI at this point," Musk had said in an interview with Tucker Carlson in April last year.
- Elon Musk Sues OpenAI and Sam Altman for Violating the Company's Principles (Archive)
The lawsuit is the latest chapter in an ongoing fight between the former business partners that has been simmering for years. After Mr. Musk left OpenAI’s board of directors in 2018, the company went on to become a leader in the field of generative A.I. and created ChatGPT, which can produce text and respond to queries in humanlike prose. Mr. Musk, who has his own A.I. company, called xAI, said OpenAI is not focused enough on the technology’s existential risk to humanity.
- Elon Musk sues OpenAI founder for 'betrayal' of company's values (Archive)
The lawsuit, which was first reported by Courthouse News, claims that, since then, OpenAI has been turned into a “de facto subsidiary” of Microsoft that is seeking to “maximise profits”. Last year, Mr Musk launched his own AI venture, xAI, under which he has developed an alternative to ChatGPT, called Grok. He has claimed it will be “politically neutral”. When Mr Altman was sacked in November, Mr Musk demanded the board explain its reasoning. The true reason has never been made public, aside from the board claiming Mr Altman had not been “candid”.
Starlink Terminals Sold in Russia Despite Musk's Denial

The terminals, which provide users with high-speed internet via the Starlink satellite constellation, are available on the Russian website of a reseller claiming to be an "official distributor" of leading Chinese drone maker DJI. The revelation follows allegations Russian forces are deploying Starlink in their invasion of Ukraine, now in its third year. DJI says it forbids distributors from selling its products in instances of suspected combat end-use. In April 2022, the tech firm announced it was temporarily suspending business in both Russia and Ukraine pending "compliance assessments." "We can confirm that this is not an official DJI website," a company representative told Newsweek on Thursday when asked about the Starlink sales. DJI said its legal team was looking into possible copyright infringement. Musk has categorically denied Starlink sales are happening in Russia.
Judge skeptical of lawsuit brought by Elon Musk's X over hate speech research

in a hearing over Zoom on Thursday, U.S. District Judge Charles Breyer appeared highly skeptical of the case, devoting the majority of the proceeding to grilling Musk's lawyer over why the lawsuit was brought at all. "You put that in terms of safety, and I've got to tell you, I guess you can use that word, but I can't think of anything basically more antithetical to the First Amendment than this process of silencing people from publicly disseminated information once it's been published," Breyer said.
- Judge mocks X for "vapid" argument in Musk's hate speech lawsuit
Grok will summarize key laws before Congress passes them, explaining their aim
To my horror, gen X is turning to voice notes

Trump / War against the Right / Jan6

Trump And Jack Smith Request Competing Trial Dates In Classified Documents Case | ZeroHedge
"This Judge Should Be Impeached": Journalist Catherine Herridge Fined $800 Per Day Until She Gives Up Confidential Source | ZeroHedge
Cutting Down the Law to Get at the Devil

The proliferation of lawfare against Trump is intended to deny him the “benefit of the law” and to deprive millions of voters of their right to choose their president. This is precisely the oppression of political opponents that has been anathema to our legal tradition since 1215. King John signed the Magna Carta in that year to avoid a civil war.

Pox / COVID / BioTerror AgitProp

Canadian Doctors Admit Covid ‘Booster’ Shot Paralyzed Woman, Offer to Euthanize Her to ‘Make Up for It’
It's Official: We Can Pretty Much Treat Covid Like the Flu Now (Archive)

You should now follow the same precautions with Covid as you take with the flu, according to new guidelines from the CDC. That means staying home until you’ve gone a day with no fever and improving symptoms. Take other precautions for the next five days, including wearing a mask and limiting close contact with others. Those are the same steps the CDC recommends for other respiratory viruses.
Mpox outbreak slowed because of behavior changes, not vaccine.
Virologists at Canada's BSL4 Lab Worked for China

Religion / Tribal / Culture War and Re-Segregation

For girls, silence is the bad bargain with patriarchy

Last spring when I was again interviewing girls, I found myself saying again what I had said to Iris in the 1980s. When Liza at 16 tells me that she is ‘holding [her]self back’ so as not to jeopardise ‘deeper connections’, I say: ‘Should I ask the obvious question?’ which is obvious to her as well. She speaks about ‘care and protection’, and from other girls I hear about not hurting people’s feelings or keeping the peace or not making trouble or not provoking exclusion and retaliation – reasons girls give for silencing an honest voice and for concluding, as Liza does, that the fight for relationship is ‘a battle not worth fighting’. ‘People won’t appreciate it if you say that,’ I hear people tell girls, over and over again, in one way or another. I know what they are talking about.

I am back in girls’ schools because I have come to see them as lab schools: educational experiments in freeing democracy from patriarchy. What this means is that the fight for relationship is a battle worth fighting and an inescapable part of girls’ education. To educate girls, it is necessary first to join their healthy resistance and strengthen their courage to not make what is a bad bargain: the bargain of silence that women make with patriarchy.

Edumacationalizing / Acedemia Nuts

Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising

HP wants you to pay up to $36/month to rent a printer that it monitors | Ars Technica
Subscription services are changing our relationship to gaming - The Verge
- comment: "I'm not sure The Verge intended to write a 2000-word diatribe against socialism, but it did."
Sony claims to offer subs "appropriate value" for deleting digital libraries
CenturyLink left customers without Internet for 39 days
Retailers including Amazon and Walmart are selling unsafe knockoff video doorbells, report finds.
Google Paying Journalists to Generate Articles Using Unreleased AI
Opinion | The Oscars Give Hollywood a Chance to Celebrate. After That? It’s Grim. - The New York Times

For Hollywood, 2023 was not so much a disaster as a preview of disasters to come. Sure, one of the big stories last year was the Barbenheimer phenomenon — two celebrated hits that marched arm in arm toward a combined 21 Oscar nominations — but everywhere else you look, the prognosis is grim. The industry, still staggering back from the pandemic shutdowns, was hit with twin strikes that brought production to a halt for six months. Writers, actors and virtually the rest of Hollywood’s work force were united in animus against the studio bosses, who, in their refusal to cut necessary deals, blithely cast themselves in the roles of supervillains. That fury persists: Each new headline about the huge compensation package for Robert Iger, Disney’s chief executive, or decisions by David Zaslav, the chief executive of Warner Bros. Discovery, to shelve entire projects for tax write-offs undergirds a prevailing narrative that the people who finance the movies are becoming the enemies of the people who make them.

That’s where the movie business is right now: The system, it seems, is once again sick of itself. The industry has, for the past four years, been wondering when it can get back to normal, and it’s becoming increasingly clear that there may be no such thing. There is only forward to something new. The industry is about to find out what that might look like. In the ashes of last year, an outline of this new normal started to emerge. It’s a landscape that consists not of just big studios (this isn’t the 1950s) or big studios competing with upstart indies that steal their awards (this isn’t the 1990s) but of a mix of new and old models: studios; indies; streamers like Apple, Amazon and Netflix; and the kind of out-of-nowhere hits, faith-based movies and red-state phenomena like “Sound of Freedom” that keep taking people on the coasts by surprise.
The Era of the Joyless Blockbuster

I was walking out of the theater when my friend called me. I picked up the phone and asked “what did you think?” He replied “it was joyless…” and I thought to myself, “damn… that is the perfect one-sentence review.” What he meant by “joyless” is lazy, rote filmmaking. He meant that the movie prioritized brand management and fan service over thematic coherence and great storytelling. And he meant that the filmmakers took the easy road by playing to the expectations of the audience rather than subverting or exceeding them.
Number of agencies have concerns about 'sideloading' on iPhone, Apple says
World's toughest man v. world's worst company

Amazon had a monopoly on David Goggins. He self-publishes through a small Austin-based firm called Lioncrest. Apart from a few signed copies he sold on Shopify and in a small New Jersey bookstore, Can’t Hurt Me for years was only available on Amazon, either in hardcover or print-on-demand paperback. “No party other than Amazon, through its subsidiary Amazon Fulfillment Services Inc., has had a right to sell new copies of that hardcopy book on the Amazon marketplaces, or any other website or marketplace,” reads the complaint.

Any other business with a monopoly on an author selling millions of copies would bend over backwards to ensure the author is happy. Not Amazon, even though it has the ability to know whether or not the books being sold on the platform are legitimate.
Court orders Meta to cease using name in Brazil
TurboTax wants to use your tax return to show you ads. You can say no
The Crisis at Google

TechSuck / Geek Bait

AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World

Space / Boomy Zoomers / UFO

The Transit of Earth from Mars, November 10, 2084
- The image gives a sense of the scale of the Earth-Moon system

Crypto con games

As banks buy up bitcoins, who else are the 'Bitcoin whales'?

Economicon / Business / Finance

Despite Booming Economy and Record Profits Google, Amazon, Microsoft Lay Off 42K
Inflation’s Impact: The Penny’s Plunge into Irrelevance | SchiffGold
Cocoa Panic? World's Largest Chocolatier Plans 19% Workforce Cut As Prices Hit Record Highs | ZeroHedge

The world's largest maker of bulk chocolate is planning to cut about 19% of its workforce, totaling 2,500 jobs, as part of a cost-reduction strategy in response to a worsening cocoa shortage in West Africa, which has driven prices to record highs. "It's about reducing complexity and eliminating duplication and inefficient structures," Swiss chocolate maker Barry Callebaut CEO Peter Feld said in an interview with German newspaper Handelsblatt on Monday.
Hands up if you want to volunteer for layoffs, IBM tells staff
Google cuts team of contractors who went on strike
Amazon's financial shell game let it create an "impossible" monopoly

Here's what we know for sure about Amazon's retail business. First: merchants can't live without Amazon. The majority of US households have Prime, and 90% of Prime households start their ecommerce searches on Amazon; if they find what they're looking for, they buy it and stop. Thus, merchants who don't sell on Amazon just don't sell. This is called "monopsony power" and it's a lot easier to maintain than monopoly power. For most manufacturers, a 10% overnight drop in sales is a catastrophe, so a retailer that commands even a 10% market-share can extract huge concessions from its suppliers. Amazon's share of most categories of goods is a lot higher than 10%!
Study: 61 UK firms tried a 4-day workweek and after a year, they still love it
Dell share price jumps 16% on mention of AI server backlog
Reddit seeks up to $6.5B valuation in IPO, source says
- Reddit seeking a valuation of up to $6.5B in IPO
- Reddit Is Targeting Up to $6.5B Valuation in IPO

Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making

Mitch McConnell will step down as the US Senate Republican leader in November
MSNBC, Paul Krugman Panic Over "White Rural Rage"

White Rural Rage, which I made the mistake of reading, is a vicious manifesto in the anti-populist tradition nailed by Thomas Frank in The People, No. When rural voters in the late 1800s defied New York banking interests and demanded currency reform to allow farmers an escape from one of the original “rigged games” in finance, relentless propaganda ensued. Rural populists were depicted as dirty, bigoted, ignorant. They refused expert wisdom, represented a “frantic challenge against every feature of our civilization,” and waged a “shameful insurrection against law and national honesty.”

The theme is back, condescension multiplied. Despite a pandemic that just graphically demonstrated the social contributions of farmers, truckers, train operators, and other “essential workers,” the people working those jobs were demonized during the crisis as murderous horse-paste eaters and insurrectionists. Their chief crimes: protesting lockdowns and school closures that disproportionately affected them, and being consumers of supposed foreign-inspired “misinformation” that led them to refuse appropriate political choices offered them.
Joe Biden got $40K from China funds, brother James admits

Law Breaking / Police / Internal Security

Thousands of Millionaires haven't filed tax returns for years (Archive)

The IRS will send notices to thousands of people who made more than $400,000 and did not file returns in at least one year from 2017 to 2022, the first step to collecting any tax owed. About 25,000 cases involve people whose income is known to the agency to be above $1 million, IRS Commissioner Danny Werfel said. About 100,000 instances stem from people with income from $400,000 to $1 million, as reported to the IRS by their employers and banks. Although the IRS will send out 125,000 notices, the actual number of taxpayers involved may be less, as many of them failed to file in multiple years.
UnitedHealth says Blackcat is the reason healthcare providers are going unpaid
NSA says it's tracking Ivanti cyberattacks as hackers hit US defense sector
Fentanyl users steal ice cream daily. They even have a favorite flavor
Thieves using cellular and Wi-Fi jammers to enter homes for robbery

External Security / Militaria / Diplomania

Pentagon Chief: If Ukraine Is Defeated, NATO Will Be At War With Russia
- recent stories about NATO members participating in the war in Ukraine make it sound like we're already at war with Russia. Which I assume was the point of the stories; breaking the truth gently.
Viasat links up with Northrop Grumman for Air Force communications experiment

World

Israel

The New York Times October 7 Exposé

The New York Times, however, does have rules and norms. Schwartz had no prior reporting experience. Her reporting partner Gettleman explained the basics to her, Schwartz said in a podcast interview on January 3, produced by Israel’s Channel 12 and conducted in Hebrew. chwartz said she was initially reluctant to take the assignment because she did not want to look at visual images of potential assaults and because she lacked the expertise to conduct such an investigation.

The resulting report, published in late December, was headlined “‘Screams Without Words’: How Hamas Weaponized Sexual Violence on Oct. 7.” It was a bombshell and galvanized the Israeli war effort at a time when even some of Israel’s allies were expressing concern over its large-scale killing of civilians in Gaza. Inside the newsroom, the article was met with praise from editorial leaders but skepticism from other Times journalists. The paper’s flagship podcast “The Daily” attempted to turn the article into an episode, but it didn’t manage to get through a fact check, as The Intercept previously reported. (In a statement received after publication, a Times spokesperson said, “No Daily episode was killed due to fact checking failures.”)
CNN leak shows internal distress about double standards on Israel coverage

Russia Bad / Ukraine War

Fugitive Wirecard COO Jan Marsalek exposed as decade-long GRU spy
Snowden was a huge propaganda asset for Russia. He wouldn't release suspicious activity from Russia, but tried to blame the west in everything.
British soldiers helping fire Ukrainian missiles, Olaf Scholz reveals
Russia's military uses volunteer fighters to plug gaps in Ukraine
Russia's 'VPN Ban' Is Live as Authorities Warn of Bad VPNs and U.S. Spying

Health / Medicine

Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda

Winter is Getting Warmer: Warming Winter Syndrome
Daddy Longlegs Have Been Hiding Extra Eyes from Us
Emergency atmospheric geoengineering wouldn't save the oceans
Problems for the Degrowth Movement
When in 1972 the Club of Rome published The Limits to Growth, the term décroissance came to the mainstream. Today décroissance is having another moment, this time under its English moniker, as degrowth enters both policy circles and popular discourse. It is, however, a distraction for left climate movements, one that we can ill afford when the world has such limited time to decarbonize. Degrowth provides neither empirically grounded, actionable solutions nor a credible theory of social and political change.
1. Degrowth often confuses correlation for causation and overextrapolates from the past.
2. Degrowth doesn’t acknowledge that redistribution can drive growth.
3. Degrowth adopts unjustified assumptions from orthodox economics.
4. Degrowth doesn’t have an adequate theory of political transformation.
- "We wanted Socialism, not Nihilism!"
MethaneSAT will partner with Google to map leaks from the oil and gas industry
- Anyone think Google will provide unbiased data or processing?
First known photos of 'lost bird' captured by scientists

For the first time, scientists have captured photos of a bird long thought lost. Known as the Yellow-crested Helmetshrike, or Prionops alberti, the species is listed as a 'lost bird' by the American Bird Conservancy because it had not seen in nearly two decades.
Large, invasive Joro spiders are adapting well to U.S. life - The Washington Post