2024-03-05
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Perspective: Can we actually do anything about inbreeding? - ScienceDirect
The most marketable bulls are those with the highest genetic merit, and, in addition to having hundreds or thousands of milking daughters, elite bulls may have dozens of sons that, themselves, are used for AI. This intensive within-family selection also produces ever-increasing levels of relationship, which ultimately results in more inbreeding. As a result, reducing—or even limiting—inbreeding often means the selection of lower-index bulls.
Horseshit
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Why We’re More Exhausted Than Ever | TIME
We’re now in the era of “The Great Exhaustion,” what writer and computer science professor Cal Newport has called a time when people are looking to reestablish their relationship with work in order to reduce their pervasive sense of drain. Most people aren’t surprised to hear about “The Great Exhaustion.” We know that we are tired, and we see it in the choices we make every day: ordering dinner because we don’t have the energy to make it, trying to find ways to work from home so we don’t have to add a two-hour commute to our day, infrequent social outings because it is impossible to coordinate busy adult schedules, complete de-prioritization of hobbies—the list goes on and on. People feel so fatigued that they are cutting out activities that used to be commonplace and low stress, like working out and going to the supermarket. Factor in recovering from the pandemic, inflation, and global stressors, and you’ve got a recipe for complete physical, mental, and emotional exhaustion.
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American Office Workers Are Living Even Farther From Employers Now - The New York Times
Many Americans now live roughly twice as far from their offices as they did prepandemic. That’s according to a new study, set to be released this week, from economists at Stanford and Gusto, a payroll provider, using data from Gusto. The economists studied employee and employer address data from nearly 6,000 employers across the country and found that the average distance between people’s homes and workplaces rose to 27 miles in 2023 from 10 miles in 2019, more than doubling.
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Nascar driver caught wearing an amphibious-like glove in a cheating violation
NASCAR on Saturday displayed a clearly altered glove that Joey Logano wore in qualifying at Atlanta Motor Speedway, where aerodynamic-deflecting alterations were so obvious it looked as if he was wearing part of an amphibious costume. The black glove for Logano’s left hand had webbing made of an unspecified material in between every finger. The theory is that Logano, who qualified second at Atlanta last weekend, had the glove altered in order to place his hand out his window as an aerodynamic blocker during qualifying.
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For high-earning workers, it's hard to break free from 'golden handcuffs'
Electric / Self Driving cars
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Close enough: Flying car firm Alef hits 2,850 preorders, worth over $850M
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San Francisco police make arrest in Waymo Chinatown arson case
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Electric Cars Emit More Particulate Pollution - WSJ
Where do most particulate emissions attributed to cars come from? California speaks as if their primary source is the tailpipe. That was true in the past. But today most vehicle-related particulate matter comes from tire wear. Cars are heavy, and as their tires rub against the road, they degrade and release tiny, often toxic particles. According to measurements by an emission-analytics firm, in gasoline cars equipped with a particle filter, airborne tire-wear emissions are more than 400 times as great as direct exhaust particulate emissions.
Musk
Trump / War against the Right / Jan6
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Supreme Court Could Rule Monday on 14th Amendment Challenges to Trump’s Eligibility.
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Supreme Court rules Trump cannot be kicked off any ballot
The Supreme Court on Monday handed a sweeping win to former President Donald Trump by ruling states cannot kick him off the ballot over his actions leading up to the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol — bringing a swift end to a case with huge implications for the 2024 election. The court in an unsigned ruling with no dissents reversed the Colorado Supreme Court, which determined that Trump could not serve again as president under section 3 of the Constitution's 14th Amendment. The court said the Colorado Supreme Court had wrongly assumed that states can determine whether a presidential candidate is ineligible under a provision of the Constitution’s 14th Amendment. The ruling makes it clear that Congress, not states, has to set rules on how the 14th Amendment provision can be enforced. As such the decision applies to all states, not just Colorado.
For the reasons given, responsibility for enforcing Section 3 against federal officeholders and candidates rests with Congress and not the States. The judgment of the Colorado Supreme Court therefore cannot stand. All nine Members of the Court agree with that result.
The opinion is a “per curiam,” meaning it is behalf of the entire court and not signed by any particular justice. However, the three liberal justices — Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson — filed their own joint opinion concurring in the judgment.
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Supreme Court unanimously rules Trump can remain on ballot | Just The News
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Supreme Court rules states cannot remove Trump from ballot for insurrection
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In Major Blow To Democracy, Supreme Court Rules Voters Can Vote For Favorite Candidate | Babylon Bee
what isn’t funny is that our nation has a ruling class much of which is entirely unserious. The games it plays pose a real risk of civil disorder, or outright civil war. It doesn’t care, and is largely incapable of grasping the seriousness of what is really at stake, despite (because of?) the hyperbolic language it habitually employs. That’s not funny at all. But it’s where we are.
Raskin, D-Md., who chairs the Oversight Committee, said he was collaborating with colleagues like Eric Swalwell, D-Calif., and Debbie Wasserman Schultz, D-Fla., to 'revive legislation that we had to set up a process by which we could determine that someone who committed insurrection is disqualified by section three of the 14th amendment.'
Meanwhile political commentator Keith Olbermann wrote on X that the Supreme Court 'betrayed democracy.' 'Its members including Jackson, Kagan and Sotomayor have proved themselves inept at reading comprehension. And collectively the "court" has shown itself to be corrupt and illegitimate. It must be dissolved.' 'If the political whores on the court are overruling quite explicit language in the constitution to benefit one politician, your "separation of powers" died long ago,' he added.
Of course, the substance of the 14th Amendment case was what matters most. The notion that an arcane Civil War-era provision could be used to exclude Mr. Trump from presidential politics was always a bit too good to be true. The arguments in favor contained multiple points of failure: Did the insurrection clause even apply to the presidency, as opposed to the “offices” it explicitly named? Had the rule against rebels returning to power in Washington, approved soon after the Civil War, already been expunged with the Amnesty Act of 1872? Was the former president even an insurrectionist, and who should decide? As it happened, the Supreme Court didn’t need to bother with these intricacies. The justices turned instead, sensibly, to federalism.
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AI-generated images of Trump with Black voters being spread by supporters
BBC Panorama discovered dozens of deepfakes portraying black people as supporting the former president. Mr Trump has openly courted black voters, who were key to Joe Biden's election win in 2020. But there's no evidence directly linking these images to Mr Trump's campaign.
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Judges improperly enhanced sentences of Jan. 6 rioters: appeals court
Judges may have improperly applied federal sentencing guidelines to more than 100 people convicted of participating in the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the US Capitol, a federal court ruled Friday. “Brock’s interference with one stage of the Electoral College vote-counting process — while no doubt endangering our democratic processes and temporarily derailing Congress’s constitutional work — did not interfere with the ‘administration of justice,’” the appeals court ruled. Brock’s attorney argued that the misapplied enhancement likely increased his client’s sentence by about nine months.
Pox / COVID / BioTerror AgitProp
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Low iron levels resulting from infection could be key trigger of long Covid
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Investigating immune response of a man who received 217 Covid vaccines
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(Jan 2024) WEF 'Disease X' session fans pandemic conspiracy theories
The World Economic Forum (WEF) held a panel in January 2024 on preparing for a hypothetical future pandemic dubbed "Disease X," which social media posts claim is evidence of a plot to create a global health catastrophe -- repeating debunked Covid-19 conspiracy theories. This is false; the session included a dialogue on mitigating potential risks, and experts say these efforts can help limit the impact of new outbreaks.
Religion / Tribal / Culture War and Re-Segregation
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She was harassed at a tech conference. Now other women are sharing #MeToo moments
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Man wearing naked female body shirt at tech event shows industry's big problem
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They say the Church is a force for good, despite its flaws: The Vatican's History of Vicious Anti-Communism
Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising
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New technology to show why images and video are genuine launches on BBC News
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Apple hit with over 1.8B euro EU antitrust fine in Spotify case
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How Regulations Fractured Apple’s App Store - The New York Times
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FTC to Protect Data of 1.6B People Tracked by Now-Bankrupt Data Broker
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It’s Time to Give Up on Email - The Atlantic
The situation may not have always been this bad, but it was never any good. Email technology wasn’t owned by someone in particular, so anyone could use it. That fact alone should have been foreboding. Now add in the sudden ease of sending messages for free, at the speed of light, to anyone in the world, and take a wild guess at where this was always heading. If we didn’t know, we should have known that our current email nightmare was inevitable.
- So, roughly, "email is an example of the disasters of public standards and the lack of proper commercial stewardship." As we'd say in usenet days: plonk
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Nintendo Switch emulator Yuzu will fold and pay $2.4M to settle its lawsuit
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Paid placement or attempting to ride PR coat tails? The desert planet in 'Dune' is plausible, according to science
TechSuck / Geek Bait
AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World
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Elon Musk Claims AI will run out of electricity and transformers in 2025.
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"Booga, booga, 'AI!'" Your company probably knows you're reading this story at work
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Artificial Intelligence AI worm infects users via AI-enabled email clients
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Large language models can do jaw-dropping things. But nobody knows why
Space / Boomy Zoomers / UFO
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Why It’s So Challenging to Land Upright on the Moon - The New York Times
Why is there a sudden epidemic of spacecraft rolling on the moon like Olympic gymnasts performing floor routines? Is it really that difficult to land upright there? “So, on the moon, you have to design to keep the sideways velocities very low at touchdown, much lower than you would if landing the vehicle in Earth’s gravity,” Dr. Metzger wrote on X.
Crypto con games
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Bitcoin passes new all-time high in euros as price reaches $65K
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Bitcoin surges to a new record high as mainstream money flows into crypto
Bitcoin, the world’s first and by-far largest digital currency, was trading at $68,791, topping the previous record of $68,789 reached on November 10, 2021. Over the past several months, bitcoin’s rally has been turbocharged by US regulators’ approval of exchange-traded funds pegged to the digital asset, which created an on-ramp for more traditional investors to incorporate bitcoin into their portfolios.
The bitcoin rally has also been fueled by the crypto faithful, who are anticipating even more gains this spring following an event known as the “halving.” Roughly every four years, the number of bitcoin entering circulation gets cut in half — a built-in feature of the cryptocurrency, which is finite by design. As bitcoin approaches scarcity, the value is expected to rise.
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Coinbase Users See Zero Balances Again as Bitcoin Nears Record
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Coinbase Crashes Following Bitcoin Pump, CEO Cites 'Large Surge of Traffic"
Economicon / Business / Finance
Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making
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the ponzi bomb under the city walls - by el gato malo
those who have been paying attention, (a surprisingly small number in one gato’s opinion), have been increasingly wondering about major US cites going bankrupt. the folks at “truth in accounting” recently laid out some stark findings: last year, 53 of the 75 most populous US cities (70%) did not have enough money to pay their bills. they held $307bn in assets and $595bn in debt, a coverage ratio of only 52% and this is probably much too optimistic as future labilities look to be being systematically reduced and future income projections look implausibly rosy, especially given how trends are going.
the simple fact is that many cities, states, and likely the US as whole are past the point of fiscal irresponsibility where there is any path back that is not truly horrible for someone.
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The Supreme Court Must Be Stopped | The Nation
when the Supreme Court helps Trump get away with his crimes, or at least helps him delay his reckoning until after the election—as it did earlier this week when it agreed to hear his claims for immunity from federal prosecution—nothing happens. The Supreme Court must be made to pay a price—a political, institutional, professional price—for its ongoing political thuggery lightly disguised as jurisprudence. Its members will never stop acting like the only nine Americans who matter until we stop them from doing that. And the only way to stop them is to limit their power, their budgets, and their unearned belief in their own supremacy.
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Ahead of Super Tuesday, US elections face existential and homegrown threats
"This election cycle, the US will face more adversaries, moving at a faster pace, and enabled by new technology," warned FBI director Christopher Wray, speaking at the Intelligence and National Security Alliance breakfast on Thursday. A few days earlier, US senator Mark Warner (D-VA), who chairs the Senate's Intelligence Committee, told Trellix CEO Bryan Palma that the United States is less prepared to combat foreign intervention in the 2024 elections than was the case in 2020. In addition to China, Russia, Iran, and other nations meddling in American politics this year, homegrown criminals remain a very real menace to free and fair elections.
"With elections, the biggest threat is misinformation, disinformation, from foreign and domestic [sources]," Crystal Morin, a cybersecurity strategist at infosec tools vendor Sysdig told The Register. "Honestly, it doesn't really matter whether it's coming from a foreign adversary or someone in the US. None of it's good. We need to try to defend against that, and differentiate true from false as best we can."
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Hunter Biden Held Previously Undisclosed Meeting With The "F**king Spy Chief Of China" | ZeroHedge
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(Coverage of CPAC in our own legacy media, NBC in this case, identified attendees as Nazis, smearing the event by association, though I neither saw nor heard anything remotely of this kind.)
As I looked at the spinning, exuberant, innocently joyful young people, I realized in a flash — this is the Revolution. This was not the Moral Majority of my father’s era. Rather, this was a subversive, courageous subculture that was resisting the dominant narrative, and the morass of darkness that is our dominant cultural moment. These, I realized with a start — are the dissidents. This is the counterculture.
Law Breaking / Police / Internal Security
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Canadia: Justice Minister defends house arrest power for people feared to commit a hate crime in future.
he said the new power, which would require the attorney-general’s approval as well as a judge’s, could prove “very, very important” to restrain the behaviour of someone with a track record of hateful behaviour who may be targeting certain people or groups. If “there’s a genuine fear of an escalation, then an individual or group could come forward and seek a peace bond against them and to prevent them from doing certain things.”
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Chaos At Georgia Six Flags As Violent Mob Invades - Ends In Shootout With Police | ZeroHedge
"As officers followed the crowd out, ensuring they left the property, an unknown number of suspects fired at officers. An officer returned fire, striking one of the suspects," Cobb County Police Department said. The establishment media has decided to focus primarily on the shooting of the unnamed 15-year-old involved in the police altercation, and many outlets have ignored the events leading up to the incident. The suspect, whose name was not released by police, was transported to Grady Memorial Hospital after receiving medical treatment at the scene. His condition is unknown at this time.
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Biden Goes to Court, Demanding Warrantless Surveillance Powers
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Pentagon leaker Jack Teixeira agrees to accept 16-year prison sentence
External Security / Militaria / Diplomania
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CIA-Funded Experiments on Children in Europe During the Cold War
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War is Brutally Honest - Name it as Such
Sometimes, the defeated party never admits defeat. It never feels defeated. It never accepts defeat. Their opponent never completed the job of breaking their will. That formula is simply a recipe for a longer war. Take the American-Afghan War of 2001 to 2021. The Afghan people, their will manifested via the Taliban, simply had the will to win more than the Americans and their allies. Their definition of defeat and the American definition of defeat were different. The American’s knew the Taliban’s center of gravity, but did not have the will to undermine it.
A just, compassionate nation will always ensure that it is strong and ready for war because war will surely come. Someone will win that war. It can be the just and compassionate nation, or it can be the aggressive and brutal nation. For a just nation to win, it must be prepared to be more aggressive and in a fashion, as brutal - in context and constraints - than its enemy. The future is not granted, it is won and maintained through the successful execution of warfare.
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Opinion | Learn from Israel: Recruit civilian tech experts for reserve units - The Washington Post
The impact of experience extends beyond software engineering. One of us has witnessed several examples in Israel since Oct. 7: When Hamas’s financial transactions had to be analyzed, a volunteer who works in the financial industry quickly connected the necessary dots. In another case, a senior data scientist — whose day job is in advertising — was able to immediately handle complex data sets from media and tech sources. And skilled academics used cutting-edge AI algorithms to sift through the enormous amount of GoPro, phone and multimedia content posted by the terrorists, enabling Israel to track them and their hostages.
Unlike Israel, the United States should not — and, in fact, cannot — wait for a war of necessity to realize these benefits. Israel’s smooth integration of senior technical talent should serve as inspiration to act now. The newly established technical reserve units would set aside maximum age limits and seek individuals with a certain number of years of experience in fields such as software engineering, data science, AI and machine learning modeling, and technical project management. Their work would pay off not only during times of activation after a crisis but also during every single day they perform their reserve duty.
World
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EU antitrust chief Vestager to hold news conference, Apple in focus
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Japan to revise official romanization rules for first time in 70 years
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Kenya Signs Deal With Haiti to Send 1,000 Police to Caribbean - The New York Times
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Haiti declares state of emergency after mass jailbreak
Haiti’s government has imposed a 72-hour state of emergency and night curfew after gangs that control swaths of the capital Port-au-Prince over-ran two prisons and freed thousands of inmates. Most of the estimated 3,800 prisoners in the capital’s National Penitentiary escaped on Saturday, leaving the normally overcrowded jail mostly empty with no guards in sight. Photographs taken outside the entrance showed clothes and furniture strewn in the street. Authorities reported a second mass jailbreak from the Croix des Bouquets prison, which holds 1,450 people, on the capital’s outskirts.
Iran / Houthi / Red Sea / Mediterranean
Israel
Health / Medicine
Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda
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Nearly all of California's reservoir's are above their historical averages
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Greece records hottest ever winter, raising fears of summer fires
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Threatened in homeland, feral Mexican parrots thrive on LA's exotic landscaping
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SEC votes this week on controversial climate change rule: Here's what's at stake
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Sea levels around NYC could surge up to 13 inches in 2030s due to climate change: state study
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Plastic makers lied about recycling for decades. What do we do next?
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The growing industry of green burials
- Live fast, die wide, have a pyre / explosive dispersal memorial. Leave a crater. Put the "fun" back in "funeral"
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Historic California dam removal, meant to help salmon, sees die-off
Hundreds of thousands of young salmon are believed to have died this week at the site of a historic dam removal project on the Klamath River, after an effort to restore salmon runs on the newly unconstrained river went awry, the Chronicle has learned. The salmon die-off, discovered downstream of the 173-foot Iron Gate Dam, is thought to be the result of trauma the small fish experienced when they went through a tunnel at the dam’s base, which had been opened to allow the river to pass and dam demolition to proceed. Water pressure in the outlet tunnel was presumably too great, causing the fish to die of what appears to be gas bubble disease, California officials told the Chronicle.
State officials said the parties partnering on the dam removal project and fish restoration, which include agencies from California and Oregon, the federal government and tribes in the region, never suspected the tunnel would be a problem.
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As predicted by Neal Asher in The Owner
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Is California’s Klamath River Dam Removal a Ghoulish Experiment? – California Globe
He said the “water flows are likely to be low in the coming months compounding adverse conditions for any aquatic life, let alone tiny salmonids that are quite vulnerable to turbidity and pollutants from clay lake bottom sediments.” Simpson said he lives on the river and has been watching the “silty, sludgy, highly contaminated yuk we are calling a river” flowing by my house now for about 6 weeks. “Everything, every living mollusk, crawdad, turtle, fish, insect in and along the river is DEAD!”
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