2024-03-16
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Horseshit
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LVMH’s Loro Piana Relies on Free Labor in Peru for $9,000 Vicuña Sweaters
Once a year, Andrea Barrientos, a 75-year-old subsistence farmer in the Peruvian Andes, works free of charge for the world’s richest person. She does that by joining dozens of people from her village in herding wild vicuñas for miles on a remote plain 13,000 feet above sea level and shearing them for their soft, golden-brown wool. Vicuñas, big-eyed camelids that roam the southern Andes, produce the finest and most expensive wool there is. In New York, Milan or London, the fashion house Loro Piana sells a vicuña sweater for about $9,000. Barrientos’ Indigenous community of Lucanas, whose only customer is Loro Piana, receives about $280 for an equivalent amount of fiber. That doesn’t leave enough to pay Barrientos, whose village expects her to work as a volunteer.
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CEO of data privacy company Onerep.com founded dozens of people-search firms
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Sami Reiss, a journalist and Dwell contributor who operates Snake, a newsletter about furniture design, modern consumers "are buying a couch online that looks four times as good, costs two times the price, and is made twenty times more poorly." A combination of factors, including world-altering shifts in labor, manufacturing, transportation logistics, and middle-class American aesthetics, has created a grim scene: a two-year-old, $1,200 Instagram sofa—busted, on the curb, waiting for the large-item trash pickup or an enterprising scavenger who doesn’t realize just how shitty this thing is.
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Man who married a hologram can no longer communicate with his virtual wife
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'It's still hard to just be': how workaholism can leave lifelong scars
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Florida Man Sues G.M. and LexisNexis over Sale of His Cadillac Data
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Trafalgar Square Fourth Plinth: Winning sculptures announced
Tschabalala Self's bronze and blue homage to a metropolitan woman of colour, and Andra Ursuța's resin sculpture of a horse and rider covered in a shroud, were chosen from a shortlist of seven. A giant sweet potato and colourful ice cream van were among those shortlisted.
Boeing
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Europe regulator says it would pull Boeing approval if needed
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Dave Calhoun was hired to fix Boeing. Instead, ‘it’s become an embarrassment.’
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Boeing whistleblower Barnett tells friend before death 'It's not suicide'
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Boeing tells airlines to check pilot seats after shift led plane to plunge
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Security footage of Boeing repair before door-plug blowout was overwritten
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United-operated Boeing 737 with a missing external panel lands safely in Oregon
Electric / Self Driving cars
Rank Propaganda / Thought Policing / World Disordering
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Why the TikTok Ban Is So Dangerous
passage of the TikTok ban represents a perfect storm of unpleasant political developments, putting congress back fully in line with the national security establishment on speech. After years of public championing of the First Amendment, congressional Republicans have suddenly and dramatically been brought back into the fold. Meanwhile Democrats, who stand to lose a lot from the bill politically — it’s opposed by 73% of TikTok users, precisely the young voters whose defections since October put Joe Biden’s campaign into a tailspin — are spinning passage of the legislation to its base by suggesting it’s not really happening.
A “foreign adversary controlled application,” in other words, can be any company founded or run by someone living at the wrong foreign address, or containing a small minority ownership stake. Or it can be any company run by someone “subject to the direction” of either of those entities. Or, it’s anything the president says it is. Vague enough? As Newsweek reported, the bill was fast-tracked after a secret “intelligence community briefing” of Congress led by the FBI, Department of Justice, and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI). The magazine noted that if everything goes as planned, the bill will give Biden the authority to shut down an app used by 150 million Americans just in time for the November elections.
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Is Modern Mass Media A Mind Prison? - by jasonpargin
The first thing you need to understand is that the alienation the Qanon types endure is a feature, not a bug. This is the same mechanism that allows cults to survive, a technique experts call, “Encourage the members to act like weird assholes so that nobody else will want to be friends with them.” It is necessary, because social isolation keeps fragile beliefs intact. This is why political outrage influencers have always trained their followers to repeat talking points in the most off-putting, dehumanizing tone possible. Knowing this, we should be suspicious of anyone who implies that cutting off loved ones is a virtue. It tends to be a method of control.
I’m not saying that teens have stopped having sex because they’re too busy canceling each other over their political views, I’m saying that a whole bunch of different currents are pulling us in the same direction. This is what the system “wants” in the sense that entire multibillion dollar industries have arisen to fill social voids. DoorDash doesn’t make a dime if you go out and eat with friends, Uber would have to dissolve if everyone had a buddy who could drive them to the airport and a whole bunch of influencers would have to get real jobs if it wasn’t for a generation of lonely kids willing to settle for parasocial friendships.
Musk
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Tesla is the worst performing stock in the S&P 500
The once red-hot electric vehicle maker — heralded as part of the so-called Magnificent Seven behemoth tech stocks — is currently the worst performer in the S&P 500 this year, down nearly 32% since January.
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SpaceX douments show company forbids employees sell stock if they've misbehaved
Trump / War against the Right / Jan6
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CIA played key Jan. 6 roles, texts reveal.
Some 88 pages of documents that Judicial Watch shared with Secrets reveal the spy agency put “several” dog teams on alert near the Capitol and that it assigned “bomb techs” to the House side neighborhood where explosive devices were found at Republican National Committee and Democratic National Committee headquarters.
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Slap On The Fani: Fulton DA Told She Can Stay On Trump Case If Lover Pulls Out, Trump Attorney Slams
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Special Prosecutor Nathan Wade Withdraws from Trump Case in Response to Judge’s Ultimatum
Pox / COVID / BioTerror AgitProp
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My body can't tolerate alcohol anymore after Covid. I'm not alone
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The persistent cough taking over the Bay Area
when I called my doctor’s office, they couldn’t have sounded more unsurprised. “Yep, we’ve been hearing about this from a lot of patients lately,” they told me. Didn’t they know I was probably dying? I was instructed to show up for an appointment the following day for a chest X-ray to make sure I didn’t have walking pneumonia — multiple COVID-19 tests had already yielded all negative results. Ultimately, they cleared me and sent me home with a shrug, a swag bag of Tessalon Perles (aka cough suppressants that didn’t help me) and few to no answers.
By my third visit, I was exasperated and dog-tired from staying up with my cough for hours the night before. I took a seat on the flimsy white paper covering the exam chair, and my doctor shone a light in my ears, down my throat and inside my nostrils. “Aha!” he said when he reached the last orifice, as though he’d won the diagnosis lottery. “You have inflamed nasal passages.”
“I don’t have any specific data on whether or not this is rising,” he said over the phone. “But I will tell you that anecdotally, a lot of people have been asking me the exact same question.” In most people, including me, the culprit was a postinfectious cough — essentially one that lasts longer than two or three weeks after an acute upper respiratory infection. When your body is done fighting off the illness, you’re left with lingering mucus and sinus congestion that manifest in the form of postnasal drip or inflammation, which irritate the throat and airways enough to generate a cough that just won’t stop, he said.
Edumacationalizing / Acedemia Nuts
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The exponential enshittification of science
In my opinion, every article with ChatGPT remnants should be considered suspect and perhaps retracted, because hallucinations may have filtered in, and both authors and reviewers) were asleep at the switch.
Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising
TechSuck / Geek Bait
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Walmart begins selling the Mac for the first time: M1 MacBook Air for $699
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Vision Pro is an over-engineered "devkit"
Vision Pro is a meticulously over-engineered “devkit” that is far too heavy to have product-market fit but good enough to seed curiosity into the world
AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World
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SXSW crowd boos at video of conference speakers gushing about how great AI is
Video emerged on social media of the audience loudly booing a conference sizzle reel that featured several industry leaders speaking positively about AI. The sizzle reel played before several film premieres at the festival, including "The Fall Guy" and "Immaculate," Variety reported. SXSW did not return a request for comment before publication.
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Electricity inputs: How to Feed the AIs – Casey Handmer's blog
It seems that AGI will create an irresistibly strong economic forcing function to pave the entire world with solar panels – including the oceans. We should probably think about how we want this to play out. At current rates of progress, we have about 20 years before paving is complete.
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ASCII art elicits harmful responses from 5 major AI chatbots
Space / Boomy Zoomers / UFO
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Surprise: An ‘Extraterrestrial’ Gadget Was Something More Familiar - The New York Times
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Extraterrestrial Life in the Thermosphere: Plasmas, UAP, Pre-Life
Plasmas" up to a kilometer in size and behaving similarly to multicellular organisms have been filmed on 10 separate NASA space shuttle missions, over 200 miles above Earth within the thermosphere. These self-illuminated "plasmas" are attracted to and may "feed on" electromagnetic radiation. They've been filmed accelerating, slowing down, stopping, congregating, engaging in "hunter-predatory" behavior and intersecting plasmas leaving a plasma dust trail in their wake. Similar lifelike behaviors have been demonstrated by plasmas created experimentally. "Plasmas" may have been photographed in the 1940s by WWII pilots (identified as "Foo fighters"); repeatedly observed and filmed by astronauts and military pilots and classified as Unidentified Aerial-Anomalous Phenomenon.
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"Call your Congress critter," flashy version: Save the Chandra X-ray Observatory
Discovery is human-powered, and Chandra’s mission is animated by a national and global community of stakeholders reliant on its generational power to reveal the high energy Universe.
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After third successful test flight, FAA grounds Starship for “mishap” investigation.
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The Most Surprising Achievement of Starship's 3rd Launch
I want to talk about something unique on this flight that was truly awe inspiring. See, spacecraft have long relied upon ground stations and a small, low bandwidth, expensive network of satellites to communicate back to the ground. These are incredibly complex systems because maintaining communications between two systems while both of them are moving at 10,000km/hr is one of the most difficult feats in technology. Yet communication for this launch was provided by Starlink. That is to say, a spacecraft moving in one direction at incredible speeds maintained constant communication with other spacecraft moving in different directions also at incredible rates of speed.
Economicon / Business / Finance
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Realtors Reach Settlement That Will Change How Americans Buy and Sell Homes
The National Association of Realtors, a powerful organization that has set the guidelines for home sales for decades, has agreed to settle a series of lawsuits by paying $418 million in damages and by eliminating its rules on commissions. Legal counsel for N.A.R. approved the agreement early Friday morning, and The New York Times obtained a copy of the signed document.
The lawsuits argued that N.A.R., and brokerages who required their agents to be members of N.A.R., had violated antitrust laws by mandating that the seller’s agent make an offer of payment to the buyer’s agent, and setting rules that led to an industrywide standard commission. Without that rate essentially guaranteed, agents will now most likely have to lower their commissions as they compete for business.
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America's Plumber Deficit Isn't Good for the Economy (Archive)
Despite the decent salary, the pace at which the US is minting new plumbers is lagging retirements. The widening plumber deficit matters for households facing hefty charges to fix a leak and businesses trying to get new buildings completed on time and on budget. This shortage cost the economy about $33 billion in 2022, according to an analysis by John Dunham & Associates, a research company in Longboat Key, Florida, which projects the country will be short about 550,000 plumbers by 2027.
The perception that plumbing is physically arduous dirty work with long hours is among the reasons younger people aren’t signing up, according to several people interviewed for this story.
The large number of job openings—not only for plumbers but also across a swath of occupations—also matters to policymakers at the Federal Reserve. Chair Jay Powell and his colleagues have said that they’re intent on guiding inflation back to the Fed’s long-term target of 2% a year. Yet the persistence of a tight labor market—the latest data show the ratio of vacancies to unemployed workers is 1.4 to 1, which is historically high—may influence how low they’ll allow interest rates to fall. The thinking among some economists is that the cheap-money days that preceded the pandemic will not soon return, because the so-called natural rate of interest—which permits the economy to keep humming along without overheating—will need to be higher to counteract inflationary pressures.
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Opinion | The Capital One-Discover Deal Won’t Fix Our Broken Credit Card System - The New York Times
Credit-card companies found they could command ever-greater swipe fees from merchants while at the same time offering their wealthiest consumers more deluxe credit cards that reward big spending with cash back, travel points, access to fancy airport lounges and the like — and then pass on the cost of those rewards to merchants. Merchants must then choose whether to accept and pay the higher swipe fee demanded by these platinum expensive cards or not take any from that card company. In our increasingly digital economy, most merchants have little alternative but to accept the pricey versions and to pay for the privilege. Naturally, merchants pass on their increased cost to all of their customers. That’s how the rest of us, whether we pay with cash, a debit card or a middle-of-the-road credit card, wind up paying more — because we are subsidizing these rewards cards for whom only the wealthiest qualify. One study from economists at the Boston Federal Reserve estimated that the highest-income households profit over $1,000 a year tax-free from the payment system, adjusted for inflation.
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Uber, Lyft to stop operations in Minneapolis over minimum wage law
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Rents are finally falling in Los Angeles. But it's still not enough for many
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IKEA slashes prices on products as transportation and materials costs ease
Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making
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The FTC and DOJ want it to be legal to fix McDonald's ice cream machines
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Four-day workweek will threaten 'millions' of small businesses
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Supreme Court to hear case on how the government talks to social media companies
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Public officials can block haters–but only sometimes, SCOTUS rules
According to the Supreme Court, the key question is whether officials are speaking as private individuals or on behalf of the state when posting online. Issuing two opinions, the Supreme Court declined to set a clear standard for when personal social media use constitutes state speech, leaving each unique case to be decided by lower courts. Instead, SCOTUS provided a test for courts to decide first if someone is or isn’t speaking on behalf of the state on their social media pages, and then if they actually have authority to act on what they post online.
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SCOTUS defines legalities of public officials blocking social media critics
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Supreme Court Sets Rules for Blocking Citizens from Officials' Accounts (Archive)
Justice Amy Coney Barrett, writing for the court in the lead case, said two things are required before officials may be sued by people they have blocked. The officials must have been empowered to speak for the government on the issues they addressed on their sites, she wrote, and they must have used that authority in the posts in question.
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Law Breaking / Police / Internal Security
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Recent Botnet Takedowns Allow U.S. Government to Reach into Private Devices
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Toronto Cops Tell Citizens to Leave Car Keys Where Thieves Can Get Them.
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US Probing Indian Billionaire Gautam Adani and His Group over Potential Bribery
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How Chinese Organized Crime Is Dominating America's Illegal Marijuana Market
From California to Maine, Chinese organized crime has come to dominate much of the nation’s illicit marijuana trade, an investigation by ProPublica and The Frontier has found. Along with the explosive growth of this criminal industry, the gangsters have unleashed lawlessness: violence, drug trafficking, money laundering, gambling, bribery, document fraud, bank fraud, environmental damage and theft of water and electricity. Chinese organized crime “has taken over marijuana in Oklahoma and the United States,” said Donnie Anderson, the director of the Oklahoma Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs, in an interview.
External Security / Militaria / Diplomania
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Remember When the U.S. Built a Social Network to Destabilize Cuba?
The most famous tech service launched by the U.S. in Cuba was called ZunZuneo, a play on Cuban slang for a hummingbird’s call, and clearly a nod to Twitter’s bird-based branding. Twitter launched in 2006 but exploded in popularity by 2009, boasting over 58 million users globally. Unfortunately for the people of Cuba, they couldn’t enjoy the social media service, since it was banned in the country, but the U.S. stepped in to fill the void in 2010 with ZunZuneo, which was set up through shell corporations in Spain and the Cayman Islands. ZunZuneo was decidedly more low-tech than Twitter, but that was largely a product of the technological constraints in Cuban communications infrastructure. Cuba only lifted a ban on cell phones in early 2008 and access to the internet was highly restricted until 2015. ZunZuneo worked by letting users send and receive messages to large groups of people through text messages, a social network design not too different from Twitter in its earliest days.
World
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BC takes aim at big tech, sugary drinks with new health bill
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Berlin's techno scene added to Unesco intangible cultural heritage list
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BOJ to end negative rates, marking 1st hike in 17 years - Nikkei Asia
The Bank of Japan is expected to end its negative interest rates when its policy board meets on Monday and Tuesday, Nikkei has learned, marking the first rate hike since February 2007 in a turning point for the BOJ's long-running monetary easing policy. The BOJ began coordinating both within and outside the bank Friday on ending its negative interest rate policy, which was adopted in February 2016. The leading plan is to raise the policy rate, currently at negative 0.1%, by more than 0.1 point to guide short-term interest to the 0%-0.1% range.
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Cut submarine cables cause web outages across Africa; 6 countries still affected
Iran / Houthi / Red Sea / Mediterranean
Israel
Russia Bad / Ukraine War
China
Health / Medicine
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Urban humans have lost much of their ability to digest plants
Amazingly, humans also play host to bacteria that can break down cellulose—something that wasn't confirmed until 2003 (long after I'd wrapped up my education). Now, a new study indicates that we're host to a mix of cellulose-eating bacteria, some via our primate ancestry, and others through our domestication of herbivores such as cows. But urban living has caused the number of these bacteria to shrink dramatically.
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Bacterial Transfer Associated with Blowing Out Candles on a Birthday Cake
Blowing out the candles over the icing surface resulted in 1400% more bacteria compared to icing not blown on. Due to the transfer of oral bacteria to icing by blowing out birthday candles, the transfer of bacteria and other microorganisms from the respiratory tract of a person blowing out candles to food consumed by others is likely.
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Abnormal brain structure seen in children with developmental language issues
Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda
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97% of sampled Antarctic seabirds found to have ingested microplastics
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Deadly morel mushroom outbreak highlights big gaps in fungi knowledge
But the FDA reported that "samples of morel mushrooms collected from the restaurant were screened for pesticides, heavy metals, toxins, and pathogens. No significant findings were identified." In addition, the state and local health officials noted that DNA sequencing identified the morels used by the restaurant as Morchella sextelata, a species of true morel. This rules out the possibility that the mushrooms were look-alike morels, called "false morels," which are known to contain a toxin called gyromitrin. The health officials and the FDA tracked down the distributor of the mushrooms, finding they were cultivated and imported fresh from China. Records indicated that 12 other locations in California also received batches of the mushrooms. Six of those facilities responded to inquiries from the California health department and the FDA, and all six reported no illnesses. They also all reported cooking the morels or at least thoroughly heating them.
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Ecuador project empowers cacao farmers to save spider monkey habitat
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12 months of record ocean heat has scientists puzzled and concerned
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Snake Steak Could Be a Climate-Friendly Source of Protein
With some eight billion people on the planet today, all of whom require protein to stay healthy, finding new sources of these nutrients is a crucial issue. “The general conundrum we somehow need to solve is: Where do we get the appropriate amounts of protein for a still-growing global population without the big environmental footprint?” says Monika Zurek, a food systems scientist at the University of Oxford, who was not involved in the new research.
- Chickens have a broader range of input feeds, and turn that into human edible calories much more quickly and probably more efficiently.
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Texas farmers say company sold them sludge with PFAS that killed livestock
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Rise in Legionnaires' disease correlates with declining atmospheric SO₂