2024-03-30

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Ship owner in Baltimore crash likely to invoke 1851 law to cap damages
These Are the Ships Stuck Behind the Baltimore Key Bridge
Algorithms can aid price collusion, even with no humans in, US enforcers say
Why family-friendly policies don’t boost birth rates

Analysed across all rich countries, birth rates are no higher among those where childcare is fully subsidised than those where parents pay eye-watering fees — the link between births and total spending on family-friendly policies is negligible. This often prompts head-scratching, but it should not. Unsurprisingly perhaps, the decision on whether to have children, and how many if so, turns out to be about far more than money. To be clear, family-friendly policies can have other positive impacts on individuals and on society. They make it easier for those who have already chosen to have children to juggle family and work. They alleviate child poverty. But when it comes to the heavy lifting on birth rates, culture is far more powerful than policy, often exerting its influence several steps before the point at which childcare costs might become a serious consideration.

Online Gambling Is Changing Sports for the Worse
We must stop the smartphone social experiment on our kids (Archive)

China was way ahead in seeing the danger. Its cyber space regulator announced last year that children under 18 should be limited to a maximum of two hours a day on smart devices. Makers must limit use through “minor modes” similar to those which followed curfews for the country’s teenage video gamers in 2021. Chinese teenagers can’t watch Douyin, ByteDance’s Chinese version of TikTok, for more than 40 minutes per day. The western TikTok, meanwhile, has introduced a one-hour daily time limit default for teens but this is cosmetic: it can simply be turned off.
Too Few Americans Are Eating Breadfruit

Pope skips Good Friday event to preserve health ahead of Easter, Vatican says | Fox News

Francis had been expected to preside over the Way of the Cross procession, which re-enacts Christ’s Passion and crucifixion, and composed the meditations that are read aloud at each station. But just as the event was about to begin, the Vatican announced that Francis was following the event from his home at the Vatican.
- Pope Leads Good Friday Service Ahead of Colosseum Procession

Why School Absences Have 'Exploded' Almost Everywhere (Archive)

Nationally, an estimated 26 percent of public school students were considered chronically absent last school year, up from 15 percent before the pandemic, according to the most recent data, from 40 states and Washington, D.C., compiled by the conservative-leaning American Enterprise Institute.
- HN comments
The Department of Education’s FAFSA Fiasco.
Too Many Labs Run Like This

the university managed to run three separate investigations into the Dias lab and its publications without managing to come to any conclusions of misconduct. That's impressive. The students who spoke (anonymously) to the Nature reporters say that they were never contacted during any of these efforts and were not even aware that some of them were taking place at all. Universities as well are very reluctant to face the facts in these situations, for their own reasons. A fourth investigation, which (finally) brought in outside experts, seems to have resulted in Dias being stripped of his students and his lab space.
Red States File Lawsuit Challenging New Biden Student Loan Forgiveness Plan
- Kansas, other Republican states sue Biden over student loan forgiveness

'Green bubble shaming' at play in DOJ suit against Apple

For some singles, Anderson points out, green bubbles are a deal breaker. "I have heard of friends who actually got ghosted because of that," he said. "And you wouldn't want to go on a date with those type of people anyway, but it's really pervasive." As anyone who has experienced the blue-green divide knows, the bubble culture wars involve more than just a carping over color differences.
The race to replace Redis.
America Made a Bet on Sports Gambling. The Backlash Is Here
Advertisers sue Meta for allegedly inflating ad viewership in $7B lawsuit

Backdoor found in widely used Linux utility breaks encrypted SSH connections | Ars Technica

The malicious code has resided only in the archived releases—known as tarballs—which are released upstream. So-called GIT code available in repositories aren’t affected, although they do contain second-stage artifacts allowing the injection during the build time. In the event the obfuscated code introduced on February 23 is present, the artifacts in the GIT version allow the backdoor to operate. The malicious changes were submitted by JiaT75, one of the two main xz Utils developers with years of contributions to the project.

Woman Records Very Creepy Visit by the FBI.

Three individuals who claimed to be FBI agents visited a woman in Oklahoma. If there were any examples of the Department of Justice becoming Joe Biden’s personal Stasi, this is it—they were there to ask the woman about the anti-Biden memes she posted on Facebook. Of course, she wasn’t going to answer any of their questions, only declaring that what she did was an exercise of her constitutional right to free speech on a social media platform.
- FBI Agent Says He Hassles People 'Every Day, All Day Long' over Facebook Posts
The FBI spends "every day, all day long" interrogating people over their Facebook posts. At least, that's what agents told Stillwater, Oklahoma, resident Rolla Abdeljawad when they showed up at her house to ask her about her social media activity. Three FBI agents came to Abdeljawad's house and said that they had been given "screenshots" of her posts by Facebook. Her lawyer Hassan Shibly posted a video of the incident online on Wednesday.

Global Warming Is Slowing the Earth’s Rotation | Scientific American

As rising global temperatures melt Earth’s polar ice sheets, the shifting water is creating such a huge redistribution of our planet’s mass that its rotation speed is dropping. This unusual result of climate change is interacting with other forces that affect the planet’s rotational speed in ways that could ultimately even alter the way we keep time. In just a few years, we may have to make the first-ever deletion of a “leap second”—according to a new study published on Wednesday in Nature.
- A global timekeeping problem postponed by global warming
Antarctica, Earth's largest refrigerator, is defrosting (Archive)
Iowa Fertilizer Spill Kills Nearly All Fish Across 60-Mile Stretch of Rivers - The New York Times