2024-03-18
etc
-
The super-strength Irish 'moonshine' making waves
Throughout the 16th and 17th Centuries, almost every sizeable farm had its own personal distillery, and by 1661, poitín became so endemic that it was deemed illegal by the British Crown in an attempt to control its untaxable spread. It wouldn't be re-legalised until 1997, but despite the legislation, people have continued to secretly distil poitín in hidden stills to avoid taxation.
The best-quality poitín is typically grain-based rather than potato, like many spirits. It can legally be sold as up to 90% pure alcohol, although Farrell's highest poitín is 60%. "It's like rocket fuel but really, really nice," he said. The spirit is a chameleon in the sense that its flavour takes on the body of its fermentation, distillation and mixing process. In its purest form, it has a light grainy taste and slight sweetness.
-
After 388 days, no barnacles were observed on the ivermectin coating while the barnacles on the control coating had reached a mean of 60 mm(2)
-
Iceland's latest volcanic eruption decreasing in power, and defenses are holding
-
How a Silicon Valley trend is impacting an $8B Canadian farm industry – CBC News
The business, which makes headers and swathers, has grown from a two-man family operation to a manufacturer that employs roughly 200 people and ships agricultural attachments all over the world. But Honey Bee is now monitoring a new challenge — one more commonly associated with Silicon Valley. Just as some devices don't work with other companies' charging cables, some farm equipment now comes with tech that prevents farmers from using other brands' attachments — and companies like Honey Bee are concerned the practice is growing. "It's becoming more and more prevalent every day and every year," said Jamie Pegg, Honey Bee general manager
Horseshit
-
Man banned from Buc-ee's after bringing his service duck inside store | Fox News
-
Why the US has the second-highest weather damages in the world - The Washington Post
Jerome Haegeli, the chief economist of Swiss Re, says the United States is unusually exposed to many different types of weather disasters — from severe thunderstorms to floods and hurricanes. But the country’s wealth also means it has a lot to lose when hurricanes or floods hit home: “The U.S. has the highest economic losses from weather events in the world in absolute terms,” he said. Keenan noted that the Swiss Re report didn’t capture the full scope of climate-related losses, since it only included property damage. “Particularly in floods, we’ve had auto damages that are close to parity with property losses,” Keenan said.
Part of the problem is that there aren’t national requirements to prevent building in disaster-prone areas. At the same time, high housing prices and limited stock push Americans to live wherever they can find affordable options. That means funds for infrastructure and housing are being poured into areas that may later be destroyed by wildfire, floods or hurricanes.“We’re setting ourselves up for a fiscal disaster,” Keenan said. “It’s going to be a burden on public debt no matter what way you look at it.”
The report also highlights how adapting to climate change now will prevent damages later on. A dollar invested to align construction with new building codes to better withstand floods or hurricanes can save between $6 and $10 down the road, the study shows. But only 31 percent of jurisdictions in the United States have adopted updated building codes, Haegeli said — leaving many more areas vulnerable.
-
British countryside can evoke ‘dark nationalist’ feelings in paintings, warns museum
new signage states that pictures of “rolling English hills” can stir feelings of “pride towards a homeland”. However, in a gallery displaying a bucolic work by Constable, visitors are informed that “there is a darker side” to the “nationalist feeling” evoked by images of the British countryside. It states that this national sentiment comes with “the implication that only those with a historical tie to the land have a right to belong”.
-
Luxury bunkers to tactical vehicles, ultra-rich are preparing for the Big One
-
Car Washes Are Taking Over the US. Here's Why - Bloomberg
In a country with roughly 280 million private cars and trucks, can there be such a thing as too many car washes? A growing number of city leaders seem to think so. Unlike stores, restaurants or other businesses, most self-service car washes don’t pay sales taxes to their host communities. And they don’t bring much else to the table in terms of local benefits, critics argue; like drive-through-only fast-food outlets (which have also been the target of local bans), the latest generation of automated facilities provide few jobs even as they pump out noise, traffic congestion and vehicle emissions.But where neighbors might see a too-crowded market, investors see the beginning of a boom. From the Snow Belt to the Sunbelt, companies are scrambling to add locations and grab a piece of a $14 billion-plus industry. With 60,000 locations across the US, the sector has been expanding at roughly 5% annually, with some forecasts predicting the market to double by 2030. More car washes were built in the last decade than all the preceding years combined.
"I don’t want to be too bullish and say there’s no way this could fail,” said Jeffrey Cicurel, director of capital markets at real estate brokerage JLL. “But Americans are moving to the suburbs, and Americans want quality retail, and car washes come with that.”
Electric / Self Driving cars
Rank Propaganda / Thought Policing / World Disordering
-
Combating Online Extremism in Global South: Lessons from Covid-19 Misinformation
The findings underscore the importance of understanding the interplay between cultural, linguistic, geographic, and thematic commonalities in shaping online information diffusion. It highlights the need for targeted and network-informed interventions to address the spread of problematic content and mitigate the influence of dangerous and extremist ideas and groups on vulnerable communities around the world, posing a potential for disproportionate harm. The belief in dubious ideas has been linked to extremist political, far-right views, especially when such beliefs become politicised. In recent years, few topics have become as politicised as the coronavirus pandemic, especially among politicians with extremist predispositions, like Donald Trump or Jair Bolsonaro. This link is the motivation for this piece, arguing that politicised scientific misinformation and conspiratorial beliefs at local and global scales are ripe areas for political extremism to fester.
-
How the abnormal gets normalised – and what to do about it
here's another kind of normalisation, and it's one that many people are far less aware of. It is less conscious, more pernicious – and can be harmful. This is the normalisation of trends, situations and events that really shouldn't be "normal" at all. You also might hear it referred to as "desensitisation", or "habituation". Think of the wars in Ukraine and Israel-Gaza. The shocking events at the start of these conflicts were new and unexpected, elements which psychologists know draws the mind's attention. As time has passed, media coverage still happens, but these events are now less likely to lead the news in countries like the US, nor arise quite as often in the cultural conversation. Sadly, when a war has lasted months or years, research suggests that an extra week of fighting does not have the impact it did on day one.
-
You're being targeted by disinformation networks that are vastly more effective than you realize.
How Russian networks fuel racial and gender wars to make Americans fight one another: In September 2018, a video went viral after being posted by In the Now, a social media news channel. It featured a feminist activist pouring bleach on a male subway passenger for manspreading. It got instant attention, with millions of views and wide social media outrage. Reddit users wrote that it had turned them against feminism. There was one problem: The video was staged. And In the Now, which publicized it, is a subsidiary of RT, formerly Russia Today, the Kremlin TV channel aimed at foreign, English-speaking audiences.
As an MIT study found in 2019, Russia's online influence networks reached 140 million Americans every month -- the majority of U.S. social media users.
Musk
Trump / War against the Right / Jan6
-
Biden-Harris campaign statement on Trump tonight promising a “bloodbath” if he loses
-
The comments came at an Ohio rally hosted by the Buckeye Values PAC where he discussed the possibility of an increasing trade war with China over auto manufacturing in general and electric vehicle types in particular. Trump said:
If you’re listening, President Xi — and you and I are friends — but he understands the way I deal. Those big monster car manufacturing plants that you’re building in Mexico right now … you’re going to not hire Americans and you’re going to sell the cars to us, no. We’re going to put a 100% tariff on every single car that comes across the line, and you’re not going to be able to sell those cars if I get elected. Now if I don’t get elected, it’s going to be a bloodbath for the whole — that’s gonna be the least of it […] It’s going to be a bloodbath for the country. That will be the least of it. But they’re not going to sell those cars. They’re building massive factories.
-
Media Reports Trump Threatened Nuclear War After He Says, ‘This Guacamole Is The Bomb!’
-
In on the Joke: The Comedic Trick Trump Uses to Normalize His Behavior - POLITICO
The audio track of the traveling Trump carnival is by now reliable to the point of ritualistic. Lee Greenwood to start, the odd, QAnon-coopted sort of liturgical dirge to close, the apocalyptic assessments of the condition of the nation and the prompts to harass the press and the jeers and the swears from the throngs in between. I could shut my eyes and know precisely where I was. For me, though, there’s one sound that’s come to stick out more than any of the many others. It’s the laughter.
Pox / COVID / BioTerror AgitProp
-
Mistakes Were Made – Consent Factory, Inc.
Come to think of it, the Inquiry Commission might also want to look into how the German authorities, and the overwhelming majority of the state and corporate media, accidentally systematically fomented mass hatred of anyone who dared to question the government’s arbitrary and nonsensical decrees or who refused to submit to “vaccination,” and publicly demonized us as “Corona deniers,” “conspiracy theorists,” “anti-vaxxers,” “far-right anti-Semites,” etc., to the point where mainstream German celebrities like Sarah Bosetti were literally describing us as the inessential “appendix” in the body of the nation, quoting an infamous Nazi almost verbatim.
-
Trump Platformed Fauci and Shut America Down Three Years Ago This Week
Though Donald Trump and his supporters do not want to admit it, this week, three years ago, American kids were forced out of schools and into their homes. The President of the United States had chosen to give Tony Fauci a big platform and advocated shutting everything down. On Donald Trump’s last day in office, instead of pardoning the people who’d stormed into the Capitol on January 6th, he was giving a presidential commendation to Fauci.
-
Why vaccine misinformation is winning the information war
Ultimately, undoing the negative effects of the anti-vaccine movement will clearly involve much more than just correcting falsehoods and sharing accurate information. In other words, it will take more than “countering misinformation.” If people don’t trust the agencies and scientists that are producing the information, then the facts will continue to fall on deaf ears. Rebuilding confidence in vaccines means first understanding why people fall for anti-vaccine misinformation in the first place — why it’s appealing, why it draws people in, and what it does for them. It also means acknowledging that some pro-vaccine voices — including some of our nation’s leading public health agencies — have not always been reliable or credible messengers, and it’s not “anti-science” to ask questions about things like how an agency as prestigious and well-resourced as the CDC could be so out-of-touch and get their messaging so wrong for so much of the pandemic.
That’s why contributing to the polarization around this topic is only going to make things worse. In fact, Russia engaged in that very strategy — promoting polarization by amplifying the loudest anti-vaccine and pro-vaccine voices — in an effort to poison discourse around vaccination and weaken our national security in the face of major public health threats. A good rule of thumb is that if you find yourself engaging in tactics that are nearly indistinguishable from those in Russia’s information warfare arsenal, it might be time to ask yourself what you’re doing.
Religion / Tribal / Culture War and Re-Segregation
-
It's Time to Reconceptualize What "Imposter Syndrome" Means for People of Color
In other words, for many people of color, IP is best understood as a reaction to racism and bias. While the original 1978 article clearly stated that the majority of women that Clance and Imes worked with were white women, a close reading of it shows that Clance and Imes were well-aware of how societal stereotypes about women’s intelligence exacerbated women’s feelings of self-doubt. To be sure, they could have spent more time connecting societal stereotypes for women and minoritized people to systematic discrimination and how this contributes to imposter feelings. But, more recently, researchers of color who examine IP among minoritized groups typically consider the role of environmental factors related to racism and discrimination.
-
As AI tools get smarter, they're growing more covertly racist, experts find
-
The journal "Cell" endorses the view that sex isn’t binary
the article is part of a series of five papers in the journal under “Focus on sex and gender” (May 14), all of which reflect gender activism. In rejecting the sex binary, both via this article and in its own behavior, Cell is rejecting science in favor of ideology. That’s very sad, but it’s what’s happening—and not just in biology. The ideological camel is sticking its nose into the tent of science—and actually, the whole head is now inside.
Edumacationalizing / Acedemia Nuts
-
High schoolers are losing confidence in the benefits of a college degree: study.
-
Scientific American’s Latest Foray into Gender-Based Science Analysis | Temple of Mut
-
EJMR Economics Forum Posts Unmask Field’s Racism and Sexism - Bloomberg
Over the years, the site has also developed a reputation as a swamp of misogyny and racism, with a strict moderation policy but lax enforcement that’s earned it comparisons to 4Chan, the ugly online forum. (Recent, more inflammatory topics on EJMR: “Would you ever hire a hot grad student as a postdoc?,” “Why do feminists, critical theorists, postcolonial writers, etc know so little” and “Does tenure allow me to refuse teaching black people?” Those are just the printable ones.)
This turned out to be the key that unlocked the EJMR vault. The sleuths enlisted Ederer’s friend, Paul Goldsmith-Pinkham, an assistant professor of finance at Yale SOM who studies econometrics, to help analyze the data. Goldsmith-Pinkham was already familiar with EJMR, having been accused of plagiarism in an anonymous post in 2021. “I don’t think anyone ever took it seriously,” he says. When Ederer approached him with the idea of running a statistical analysis to find IP addresses, Goldsmith-Pinkham says, “it was like catnip.”
Together they were able to determine with near certainty that a given post was sent from a given IP address. This was no small undertaking: Using an array of Nvidia A100 GPUs, it took four days of total computing time to run almost nine quadrillion calculations. Ultimately they were able to trace the IP addresses of about two-thirds of EJMR posts. That ability gave them a new window into EJMR and its users. They found that while the majority were posting from residential addresses, about 10% were posting from the networks of universities and research institutions. Of those, four universities—Notre Dame, Stanford, Columbia and Chicago—led the way with the largest number of posts among US institutions. They also found that about 13% of the posts from universities were “toxic,” as measured by a popular machine-generated dataset called ToxiGen. Spokespeople for the universities didn’t respond to requests for comment.
Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising
-
Landline Users Remain Proudly ‘Old-Fashioned’ in the Digital Age - The New York Times
To many, landline phones have come to seem as essential as steamships and telegrams in the smartphone era. But to those who still use them, they offer distinct advantages. Prompted by the AT&T outage on Feb. 22 and a push by AT&T to phase out traditional landlines in California, those who have them are speaking out in defense of their old phones. To them, the landline is a lifeline during power outages, a welcome throwback to the era before doomscrolling and push alerts, and a more comfortable, better-sounding alternative to tinny, thin smartphones.
-
Opinion | Dating Apps Like Hinge, Tinder and Bumble Are Getting Worse - The New York Times
What’s lamentable here isn’t only that dating apps have become the de facto medium through which single people meet. Since 2019, three in 10 U.S. adults have reported using them, with that figure rising to roughly six in 10 for Americans under 50 who have never been married. Not only are people not meeting partners in bars or any of the once normal in-person venues — they’re barely meeting them on the apps, either.
-
Gatekeeping is Apple’s Brand Promise
Apple’s promise to iPhone users is that it will be a gatekeeper. Gatekeeping is what allows Apple to promise greater security, privacy, usability and reliability. Gatekeeping is Apple’s brand promise. Gatekeeping is what the consumer’s are buying. The EU’s DMA attempts to make Apple more “open” but it can only do so at the expense of turning Apple into Android, devaluating the brand promise and ironically reducing competition.
-
Internet providers have left rural Americans behind. One county is fighting back
In the absence of service from companies like AT&T, Comcast, Verizon and Charter, counties and small towns in rural America could build broadband networks for their residents themselves, which can make the difference between prosperity and poverty. But large telecom corporations have also successfully lobbied at least 20 states to block municipalities from competing. The problem of rural internet access pits one democracy against another: local governments against state power. It also addresses information equity – the idea that someone in the rural US should have the same ability to participate in the country’s digital economy as someone in a big city. A digital democracy cannot abide unequal digital citizenship.
AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World
Economicon / Business / Finance
Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making
-
Biden jokes that one presidential candidate is mentally unfit – and it's not him
The big news this week, President Joe Biden said at a weekend Washington roast, was that two candidates had clinched their party's nomination for president. But one was too old, too mentally unfit for the job, he said. "The other's me," Bidden quipped.
-
Could parliamentary democracy save America?
Perhaps the worst single aspect of America's broken democracy is the fact that it seems virtually impossible to fix, since our system rests on a constitution written 230-odd years ago that is insanely difficult to amend. While the changes Stearns proposes are indeed radical in some respects, they fall well within the international norm for modern democracies, and do not come with strong, obvious disincentives that would lead political actors to reject them out of hand — particularly as other options may arise that appear more threatening.
-
Some states are fighting to protect voters from doxxing. They're losing
-
RFK Jr. Expected to Tap Nicole Shanahan (Sergei Brin's Ex) as Running Mate
Law Breaking / Police / Internal Security
External Security / Militaria / Diplomania
World
Russia Bad / Ukraine War
Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda
-
Rerouting planes to produce fewer contrails could help cool the planet
-
Mars Has Influence on Earth's Oceans and Climate, Repeating Every 2.4M Years
-
Mice have overrun a remote island and are feasting on seabirds
-
Seeding steel frames brings destroyed coral reefs back to life
-
Why the world cannot afford the rich
As environmental, social and humanitarian crises escalate, the world can no longer afford two things: first, the costs of economic inequality; and second, the rich. Between 2020 and 2022, the world’s most affluent 1% of people captured nearly twice as much of the new global wealth created as did the other 99% of individuals put together1, and in 2019 they emitted as much carbon dioxide as the poorest two-thirds of humanity2. In the decade to 2022, the world’s billionaires more than doubled their wealth, to almost US$12 trillion.
The evidence gathered by social epidemiologists, including us, shows that large differences in income are a powerful social stressor that is increasingly rendering societies dysfunctional. For example, bigger gaps between rich and poor are accompanied by higher rates of homicide and imprisonment. They also correspond to more infant mortality, obesity, drug abuse and COVID-19 deaths, as well as higher rates of teenage pregnancy and lower levels of child well-being, social mobility and public trust3,4. The homicide rate in the United States — the most unequal Western democracy — is more than 11 times that in Norway (see go.nature.com/49fuujr). Imprisonment rates are ten times as high, and infant mortality and obesity rates twice as high.
-
EPA announces final rule to slash toxic emissions of ethylene oxide