2024-03-06
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European crash tester says carmakers must bring back physical controls
"The overuse of touchscreens is an industry-wide problem, with almost every vehicle-maker moving key controls onto central touchscreens, obliging drivers to take their eyes off the road and raising the risk of distraction crashes," said Matthew Avery, Euro NCAP's director of strategic development.
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Libertarianism as Deep Multiculturalism
A shallow “multiculturalism” tolerates and even celebrates diverse cultural markers, such as clothes, food, music, myths, art, furniture, accents, holidays, and dieties. But it is usually also far less tolerant of diverse cultural values, such as re war, sex, race, fertility, marriage, work, children, nature, death, medicine, school, etc. It seeks a “mutual understanding” that that we are (or should be) all really the same once we get past our different markers.
Horseshit
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Parent shaming causes the demographic collapse
Since they don't act as individuals, but are responsible for the wellbeing of other individuals, parents are legitimate objects of shame. All moralists know this. Whoever feels like shaming some group of people, is likely to pick parents who are not good enough one way or another. In itself, this makes people anxious not to have children before they have assembled enough social capital to parry all or most shameful situations. This probably explains a good deal of the increase in the age of new parents.
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Grandmother left dangling 7ft upside down after getting stuck in shop's shutters
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6 Months After New York Banned Airbnb, New Jersey Is Doing Great
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Can a mathematical model decide best how to spend opioid settlement cash?
Loyd provided an answer: Use statistical modeling and artificial intelligence to simulate the opioid crisis, predict which programs will save the most lives, and help local officials decide the best use of settlement dollars. Loyd serves as the unpaid co-chair of the Helios Alliance, a group that hosted the event and is seeking $1.5 million to create such a simulation for Alabama.
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Russia considering putting a nuclear power plant on the moon with China
Russia and China are considering putting a nuclear power plant on the moon from 2033-35, Yuri Borisov, the head of Russia's space agency Roscosmos said on Tuesday, something he said could one day allow lunar settlements to be built. Borisov, a former deputy defence minister, said that Russia and China had been jointly working on a lunar programme and that Moscow was able to contribute with its expertise on "nuclear space energy".
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Doritos Faces Backlash for Transgender Ambassador's Tweet About 12-Year-Old
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Topics in conversation that show lack of emotional intelligence
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Polyamorous Scheduling is NP-hard
Finding schedules for pairwise meetings between the members of a complex social group without creating interpersonal conflict is challenging, especially when different relationships have different needs. We formally define and study the underlying optimisation problem: Polyamorous Scheduling.
Electric / Self Driving cars
celebrity gossip
Rank Propaganda / Thought Policing / World Disordering
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"Naked Capitalism Blog" vs Google Google Demands That We Censor Our Content
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The don't have to silence opinions; they could forgo the ads. and hosting services. and anyone else upset by their content. And build their own! There's some other folks on the other side of the political spectrum had similar problems not long ago. Perhaps their alternative networks provide an opportunity for you? They been through this already.
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BBC developed standards for digitally signed information about media provenance
Content credentials can be used to help audiences distinguish between authentic, trustworthy media and content that has been faked. The digital signature attached to the provenance information ensures that when the media is “validated”, the person or computer reading the image can be sure that it came from the BBC (or any other source with its own x.509 certificate).
Musk
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Tesla Berlin gigafactory goes dark after alleged eco-sabotage
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IP address X-posure now a feature on Musk's social media platform
X even admits that its audio and video calling exposes user IPs on the help page for the feature. Referring to an enhanced call privacy feature, X said "once our servers facilitate the initial setup, the call itself is routed peer-to-peer such that each parties [sic] IP address may be visible to the other." The enhanced call privacy feature is disabled by default, we note.
- What's better? end to end encryption? Not having a third party in you traffic path at all?
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Could the $6B legal fee in Musk's Tesla pay case be reasonable?
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Musk Dethroned As World's Richest Person After Two-Day Tesla Spill | ZeroHedge
Trump / War against the Right / Jan6
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Unglued ‘Father of Fake News’ Dan Rather Demands Media End ‘Both-Sides-Ism’ When Covering Trump
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Donald Trump, Seeking Cash Infusion, Meets with Elon Musk (Archive)
Donald Trump, who is urgently seeking a cash infusion to aid his presidential campaign, met on Sunday in Palm Beach, Fla., with Elon Musk, one of the world’s richest men, and a few wealthy Republican donors, according to three people briefed on the meeting who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe a private discussion. Mr. Trump and his team are working to find additional major donors to shore up his finances as he heads into an expected general election against President Biden. Mr. Trump has praised Mr. Musk to allies and hopes to have a one-on-one meeting with the billionaire soon, according to a person who has discussed the matter with Mr. Trump.
Pox / COVID / BioTerror AgitProp
Religion / Tribal / Culture War and Re-Segregation
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The WPATH Files — Environmental Progress
Newly leaked files from within the leading global transgender healthcare body have revealed that the clinicians who shape how “gender medicine” is regulated and practiced around the world consistently violate medical ethics and informed consent. The files, which were leaked from within the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH), were published today by the US-based think tank Environmental Progress. the WPATH Files reveal that the organization does not meet the standards of evidence-based medicine, and members frequently discuss improvising treatments as they go along. Members are fully aware that children and adolescents cannot comprehend the lifelong consequences of “gender-affirming care,” and in some cases, due to poor health literacy, neither can their parents.
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Meet the 'Transableists': Able-Bodied Men Who Identify as Disabled Women – The Daily Sceptic
Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising
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A strange kind of dance between Google’s Founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the company’s Board, and CEO Sundar Pichai leaves most employees with no real sense of who is actually in charge. Uncertainty is a familiar theme throughout the company, surrounding everything from product direction to requirements for promotion (sales, where comp decisions are a bit clearer, appears to be an outlier). In this culture of uncertainty, timidity has naturally taken root, and with it a practice of saying nothing — at length.
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Paid? The Bene Gesserit can kill with voices: the musicians mining Dune for tunes
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Facebook, Instagram Down? Users Report Problems, Being Logged Out
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Facebook, Instagram, Messenger Are Down in Worldwide Outage - WSJ
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Meta Says Access Is Restored After Facebook and Instagram Outage
Early today Facebook was down or unreachable for many of you for approximately 2.5 hours. This is the worst outage we’ve had in over four years, and we wanted to first of all apologize for it. We also wanted to provide much more technical detail on what happened and share one big lesson learned. The key flaw that caused this outage to be so severe was an unfortunate handling of an error condition. An automated system for verifying configuration values ended up causing much more damage than it fixed. The intent of the automated system is to check for configuration values that are invalid in the cache and replace them with updated values from the persistent store. This works well for a transient problem with the cache, but it doesn’t work when the persistent store is invalid.
The way to stop the feedback cycle was quite painful - we had to stop all traffic to this database cluster, which meant turning off the site. Once the databases had recovered and the root cause had been fixed, we slowly allowed more people back onto the site.
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Meta Has Had Enough of Australia's Link Tax Shakedown; Will Not Renew Any Deals
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Microsoft to end its Android apps on Windows 11 subsystem in 2025
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AWS follows Google in announcing unrestricted free data egress
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Amazon Cancels Fees for Customers Moving to Rival Cloud Services
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It’s Time to Give Up on Everything but Email – Manu
I was sitting there, minding my own damn business, surfing the web, clicking around, enjoying my time, when I stumbled on this article, by Ian Bogost on The Atlantic, that is so painfully stupid that I had to take the time and comment on it. Because, as you know, I love emails.
There’s a reason why emails are still here. They’re still here because they work. Is email perfect? No. Is there a better alternative? Also no.
AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World
Space / Boomy Zoomers / UFO
Crypto con games
Economicon / Business / Finance
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Target launches paid membership program as it chases new revenue streams
The subscription tier, Target Circle 360, will include unlimited free same-day delivery for orders over $35 in as little as one hour with no delivery fees and two free-day shipping, along with other perks. The company is looking at a wide range of potential benefits to sweeten the membership offer, said Cara Sylvester, Target’s chief guest experience officer, who announced the program at an investor event Tuesday in New York City. The paid membership tier will launch in early April and initially cost $49 per year, Sylvester said. It will cost $99 per year after the company’s promotional period, which ends May 18. Customers who have a Target Circle credit card will be able to pay the lower price of $49 per year beyond that.
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Credit card late fees capped at $8 as part of Biden crackdown on junk fees
Federal regulators finalized a rule on Tuesday to cap most credit card late fees at $8 as part of a broader push by the Biden administration to eliminate junk fees. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau estimates the new regulation, first proposed last summer, will save families more than $10 billion a year by cutting fees from an average of $32.
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There's a New Financial Crisis Brewing in Uninsurable US Homes (Archive)
Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making
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A new proposal could ban landlords from charging for cable and internet in bulk
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'Playing politics to win': Crypto spends big on Super Tuesday
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The biggest problem is that it’s not yet clear these investments are going to pay off. They are being paid for with borrowed money, not higher taxes or lower spending elsewhere. It is always possible to boost wages and employment in the short run by funding new investments with borrowed money. The critical question is whether those investments will succeed in the long run.
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Biden VA Confirms Authenticity Of Memo To Ban Iconic WWII Photo From Facilities | The Daily Caller
“Let me be clear: This image is not banned from VA facilities – and we will keep it in VA facilities,” McDonough said in a social media statement. “A memo was sent out that should not have been, and it has been rescinded,” a VA official told the Daily Caller News Foundation.
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Victoria Nuland Leaving Post While Ukraine On The Ropes, US Policy In Shambles | ZeroHedge
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So we have multiple reason to do the "ban lead pipes and rebuild infrastructure" thing. Trillions of gallons leak from aging drinking water systems
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It Wasn't Me: Biden Activates FTC-DOJ Task Force To Peddle 'Corporate Greed' Conspiracy Theory | ZeroHedge (Archive)
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9 Ways The Feds Are Using ‘Bidenbucks’ To Rig The 2024 Election.
Law Breaking / Police / Internal Security
External Security / Militaria / Diplomania
World
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France enshrines 'freedom' to abortion in Constitution, in world first
The constitutional reform amends Article 34 of the French Constitution to specify that "the law determines the conditions by which is exercised the freedom of women to voluntarily terminate a pregnancy, which is guaranteed."
after the US Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade almost two years ago, America has, for some nations, become a model … of what not to do. As one French senator, Laurence Rossignol told Le Monde, the Roe v. Wade decision was “an electric shock.” Rossignol, who is also vice president of the women’s rights delegation of the senate, added, “From then on, the fight for the constitutionalization of abortion was no longer a matter for underground militant feminist groups.”
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EU aims to shift European arms industry to 'war economy mode'
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Can Javier Milei rely on social media to shake up Argentina?
Nicolás Pino, head of agribusiness lobby La Sociedad Rural Argentina, says cutting spending without also delivering deep reforms of Argentina’s state in the legislature is “no solution”. He urges the president to “lower tensions” with Congress and try again. “He will find many people ready to help him.” But Milei appears to think otherwise. People who deal with the government say the president is now more dependent than ever on a small inner circle of true believers and his army of social media followers, to whom he devotes more than two hours a day online. His closest advisers include his sister Karina, who used to sell specially decorated cakes on Instagram and is now the presidential chief of staff, and Santiago Caputo, a 38-year-old political consultant and social media guru whose father is a cousin of Luis Caputo, the former Wall Street trader now serving as finance minister.
Sergio Berensztein, a political consultant, says the main problem “is that the government doesn’t allow itself to be helped. It doesn’t listen and it’s very closed.” Milei’s eccentric style and aggressive all-or-nothing approach to politics have sparked speculation about how long he can last running a turbulent country in the middle of a deep crisis. Some diplomats have already begun to speculate about whether his administration will implode prematurely and leave behind a mess for someone else to unscramble — perhaps the ambitious and more pragmatic vice-president Victoria Villarruel, said to be already manoeuvring behind the scenes.
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9000 Striking Korean doctors face license suspensions and prosecution
Iran / Houthi / Red Sea / Mediterranean
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What cut the lines remains unclear. There has been concern about the cables being targeted in the Houthi campaign, which the rebels describe as an effort to pressure Israel to end its war on Hamas in the Gaza Strip. The Houthis have denied attacking the lines, however. Responding to questions from The Associated Press, Seacom said that “initial testing indicates the affected segment lies within Yemeni maritime jurisdictions in the Southern Red Sea.” It said it was rerouting the traffic that it was able to change, though some services were down.
Israel
Russia Bad / Ukraine War
Health / Medicine
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Over-the-Counter Birth Control Pill to Be Available Within Weeks on Retail Shelves - WSJ
“This is a historic breakthrough,” said Dana Singiser, co-founder of the nonprofit Contraceptive Access Initiative, which supported the Food and Drug Administration’s over-the-counter approval of the pill last year. “Without a prescription this becomes a game changer for people who can’t afford to go to doctor’s visits or hourly workers who need to take time off to schedule appointments.” Dublin-based Perrigo has shipped its Opill to major U.S. retailers and expects it to be widely available by the end of the month. The company said it would sell a one-month pack for $19.99 and a three-month pack for $49.99.
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"See? its not just the caffeine bombs!" Sweetened drinks linked to increased risk of irregular heartbeat
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New study links hospital privatisation to worse patient care
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Powerful Psychedelic Drug Gains New Notice as an Opioid Addiction Therapy - The New York Times
scientists who have studied ibogaine have reported startling findings. According to a number of small studies, between a third and two-thirds of the people who were addicted to opioids or crack cocaine and were treated with the compound in a therapeutic setting were effectively cured of their habits, many after just a single session. Ibogaine appears to provide two seemingly distinct benefits. It quells the agony of opioid withdrawal and cravings and then gives patients a born-again-style zeal for sobriety.
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Swapping meat for Quorn lowers bad cholesterol by 10-percent.
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Alzheimer’s Might Not Actually Be a Brain Disease, Expert Reveals.
Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda
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Half of young voters won't pay more than $10 per month to fight climate change
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The worst wildfire in Texas' history has a complex link with climate change
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Why Europe is dismantling its dams
The removal of the three dams was the result of decades of work, which took into consideration not only the health of the river, but also the economic context, says Ollikainen. Evaluations concluded that their electricity production had become unprofitable for the power plant owners – especially when the costs of maintenance and mandatory environmental protections, such as fish-ladder introductions, were taken into account, Ollikainen says. So the dams were sold and dismantled. Across Europe, many dams are either approaching the end of their operational life, or the costs of their maintenance are outweighing the benefits they provide. Similarly, in the United States, many are due to be re-licensed, sparking discussions about whether they are still fit to yield services.
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How to 'decouple' emissions from economic growth? These economists say you can't
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World on brink of fourth mass coral reef bleaching event, NOAA says
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Climate change and a whale native to the North Pacific observed off New England
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How You Can Easily Delay Climate Change Today: SO2 Injection
We need to inject particles into the stratosphere that reflect 1-2% of sunshine.
- We have a better solution: TP the Planet
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Apples, Oranges, and Normalized Hurricane Damage
Contrary to every other normalization study, of U.S. hurricanes or otherwise, G18 conclude that even after normalizing historical hurricane loss data for changes in population and wealth, there remains an underlying increasing trend in losses which can be attributed to human-caused climate change. I can report today — in jaw-dropping fashion — that the increasing trend reported in G18 and promoted by IPCC and the USNCA is not the result of human-caused climate change, but rather, it is the result of a human-caused data error that is obvious and undeniable. I have contacted PNAS to request a retraction and reached out to Dr. Grinsted.
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We need to talk about water – and the fact that the world is running out of it