2024-03-10
Horseshit
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United flight goes off runway, forcing passengers to evacuate in latest drama with a Boeing jet
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'Prepping' for disaster diversifies as more Americans lose trust
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New Research: Are Well-Being Apps Harming Us?
Launching today is Well-being Struggle, an art-and-research project that examines how apps and AI use positive psychology, mindfulness, and meditation to distract from systemic problems in the workplace — and hinder opportunities for tangible cultural changes and mental health resources. Well-being Struggle is a 2023 Mozilla Creative Media Awardee and part of a cohort investigating AI and responsible design.
Despite ostensibly helping vulnerable workers, these apps frequently harm them in three key ways. They promote unrealistic expectations; they shift the responsibility for maintaining a healthy workplace away from the employer and toward the employee; and they amplify harmful mentalities such as performative positivity. (See more on each of these findings below.)
- Mozilla Foundation has way too much money. noted. Browser software, dammit. Not "well being", not "social justice", not "Correct behavior". Your job is to maintain a thin application that puts bits on screen. Apparently that got boring.
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Prominent MLB team physician sounds alarm on pitching injuries
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Secret Doors Are Having a Major Moment - The New York Times
Homeowners are adding hidden doors and rooms to foil burglars, eke out extra storage space and prepare for Armageddon.
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Beyond the water flow rate: pressure and smart timers for shower efficiency
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An obsessed insect hunter: The creepy-crawly origins of daylight savings
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only $550 CD Demagnetizer
The RD-3 removes residual magnetism from any disc - the RD-3 does not spin, as spinning the disc creates even more of a static charge. What you get is a better tonality, a wider, taller and deeper soundstage and more air between instruments.
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Florida middle-schoolers charged with making deepfake nudes of classmates
Electric / Self Driving cars
Rank Propaganda / Thought Policing / World Disordering
Musk
Trump / War against the Right / Jan6
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Why Trump now opposes banning TikTok
Why it matters: Trump spearheaded the original U.S. threat to ban TikTok over national security concerns. Four years later, President Biden and Congress have picked up the mantle — with a bipartisan bill targeting Bytedance set to hit the House floor next week.
Driving the news: "If you get rid of TikTok, Facebook and Zuckerschmuck will double their business. I don't want Facebook, who cheated in the last Election, doing better. They are a true Enemy of the People!" Trump posted on Truth Social Thursday.
Religion / Tribal / Culture War and Re-Segregation
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How Long Do Muslims Fast For Ramadan Around The World? | ZeroHedge
while the number of days of Ramadan are equal for all Muslims observing it around the world, the length of the daily fast is not. During Ramadan, observers vow to abstain from eating, drinking, smoking and sexual activities through daylight hours.
Edumacationalizing / Acedemia Nuts
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'You Can Hear a Pin Drop': The Rise of Super Strict Schools in England (Archive)
When a digital bell beeped (traditional clocks are “not precise enough,” the principal said) the students walked quickly and silently to the cafeteria in a single line. There they yelled a poem — Ozymandias, by Percy Bysshe Shelley — in unison, then ate for 13 minutes as they discussed that day’s mandatory lunch topic: how to survive a superintelligent killer snail. In the decade since the Michaela Community School opened in northwest London, the publicly funded but independently run secondary school has emerged as a leader of a movement convinced that children from disadvantaged backgrounds need strict discipline, rote learning and controlled environments to succeed.
Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising
AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World
Space / Boomy Zoomers / UFO
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Roswell UFO sightings can be explained by classified programme
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What you won’t find in this report is any mention of Nimitz, Gimbal, or any of the other more puzzling cases about observed objects — on multiple sensors with independent verifications — that defy current explanation. No real discussion of the more serious pilot eyewitness reports (and no, these pilots are not saying they saw aliens, they are reporting they cannot explain what they saw). On p.26 you will find the concession: “A small percentage of cases have potentially anomalous characteristics or concerning characteristics. AARO has kept Congress fully and currently informed of its findings. AARO’s research continues on these cases.”
So overall there is no reason to revise whatever your current views might be, at least provided those views were not the crazy ones in the first place.
Economicon / Business / Finance
Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making
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Big blue cities are embracing conservative anti-crime measures. Here’s why. - POLITICO
The country’s biggest, bluest cities are embracing tough-on-crime policies that would have been politically heretical just a few years ago — ratcheting up criminal penalties and expanding police power amid fear and anger over a rash of brazen crimes like carjackings and retail theft. These Democrat-led policy changes mark a stark reversal from 2020, when the growing influence of progressives fueled a national effort to curb police powers and scale back law enforcement budgets following the murder of George Floyd. Now the left is in retreat on criminal justice.
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Underdog Who Beat Biden in American Samoa Used AI in Election Campaign
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Biden backs effort to force sale of TikTok by Chinese owners
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Inside A Secret Society Prepping for a 'National Divorce'
A secret, men-only right-wing society with members in influential positions around the country is on a crusade: to recruit a Christian government that will form after the right achieves regime change in the United States, potentially via a “national divorce.”
Group members hold a distinct vision of America as a latter-day ancient Rome: a crumbling, decadent empire that could soon be replaced by a Christian theocracy. To join, the group demands faithfulness, virtue, and “alignment,” which it describes as “deference to and acceptance of the wisdom of our American and European Christian forebears in the political realm, a traditional understanding of patriarchal leadership in the household, and acceptance of traditional Natural Law in ethics more broadly.” More practically, members must be able to contribute either influence, capability, or wealth in helping SACR further its goals.
Once in the group, the statement says, members can expect perks: “direct preferential treatment for members, especially in business,” and help in advancement “in all areas of life” from other members.
Because Boise State is a public university, TPM was able to obtain via public records requests in January and February a trove of Yenor’s office emails that mention SACR. The trove included internal SACR correspondence, documents, and other materials from when the group was first being conceived in late 2020, was founded the following year, and began to grow.
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'She's going to prevail': FTC head Lina Khan is fighting for anti-monopoly
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Commentators have noted that CHIPS and Science Act money has been sluggish. What they haven’t noticed is that it’s because the CHIPS Act is so loaded with DEI pork that it can’t move. The law contains 19 sections aimed at helping minority groups, including one creating a Chief Diversity Officer at the National Science Foundation, and several prioritizing scientific cooperation with what it calls “minority-serving institutions.” A section called “Opportunity and Inclusion” instructs the Department of Commerce to work with minority-owned businesses and make sure chipmakers “increase the participation of economically disadvantaged individuals in the semiconductor workforce.”
Law Breaking / Police / Internal Security
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TSA unveils first self-screening security lane at Las Vegas airport (Archive)
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Of particular concern was an article about Zhang’s thread published on a hacker website that shared the default password for the underlying software that starts the laptop’s operating system, presenting what the Department of Corrections considered a security concern.
The department then announced Thursday, five days after Zhang’s viral post, that it would collect all secure laptops from incarcerated students statewide “to provide an immediate system update.” By Saturday, corrections staff had collected around 1,200 laptops, spokesperson Chris Wright said in an email. Wright confirmed no one incarcerated in Washington prisons had attempted to unlock their devices but said the decision was “made out of an abundance of caution.” It wasn’t immediately clear whether other states whose corrections departments use Securebook 5 laptops have also pulled the devices.
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So many official idiocies get justified as "an abundance of caution." One might almost hope the phrase itself would become a warning sign of impending mistake; allowing officials to avoid the predictable disasters that follow.
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Top US cybersecurity agency hacked and forced to take some systems offline
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The Feds Are Coming for "Extremist" Gamers
The exact nature of the cooperation between federal agencies and video game companies, which has not been previously reported, is detailed in a new Government Accountability Office . The report draws on interviews conducted with five gaming and social media companies including Roblox, an online gaming platform; Discord, a social media app commonly used by gamers; Reddit; as well as a game publisher and social media company that asked the GAO to remain anonymous.
External Security / Militaria / Diplomania
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Killer drones pioneered in Ukraine are the weapons of the future (Archive)
The exponential growth in the number of Russian and Ukrainian drones points to a second trend. They are inspired by and adapted from widely available consumer technology. Not only in Ukraine but also in Myanmar, where rebels have routed government forces in recent days, volunteers can use 3D printers to make key components and assemble airframes in small workshops. Unfortunately, criminal groups and terrorists are unlikely to be far behind the militias. This reflects a broad democratisation of precision weapons. In Yemen the Houthi rebel group has used cheap Iranian guidance kits to build anti-ship missiles that are posing a deadly threat to commercial vessels in the Red Sea. Iran itself has shown how an assortment of long-range strike drones and ballistic missiles can have a geopolitical effect that far outweighs their cost. Even if the kit needed to overcome anti-drone jamming greatly raises the cost of the weapons, as some predict, they will still count as transformationally cheap.
World
Iran / Houthi / Red Sea / Mediterranean
Russia Bad / Ukraine War
Health / Medicine
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With Cyberattack Fix Weeks Away, Health Providers Slam United
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The Phase III trial has just read out, and Relyvrio shows no hint of actually working. Not against the primary endpoint (improvement on an ALS functional rating scale, versus placebo), nor against any of the secondary ones (patient self-reports, respiratory function, overall survival, etc.) This drug doesn't work, and it never did. It did have a very good safety profile, fortunately, so it seems unlikely that anyone was physically harmed by it over the last year and a half. But ALS patients (or their insurance companies) had the chance to pay for a drug ($158,000/yr list, who knows what the real price was somewhere below that) for what is in the end a combination of two generic medicines. And they might as well have been given peppermint candy for all the good it did. Amylyx says that they will announce their plans for the drug in the coming weeks, but what plans can those possibly be? Which landfill to take it to?
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FDA clears Wegovy manufacturer to market weight-loss drug for heart health.
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Updates to Cystic Fibrosis Conditions Qualifying for a Wish
Given the ongoing life-changing advances in cystic fibrosis, beginning in January 2024, cystic fibrosis will no longer automatically qualify for a wish. CF will be eligible when accompanied by additional complications or factors that make the current situation critical.
Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda
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SEC's Rules to Enhance and Standardize Climate-Related Disclosures for Investors
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How much water is in Earth's crust?
"There are approximately 43.9 million cubic kilometers [10.5 million cubic miles] of water in the Earth's crust," Grant Ferguson, a hydrogeologist at the University of Saskatchewan and lead author of the 2021 study, told Live Science.