2024-04-02
Cool
etc
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What Happened When This Italian Province Invested in Babies - The New York Times
the Alto Adige-South Tyrol area and its capital, Bolzano, more than any other part of the country, bucked the trend and emerged as a parallel procreation universe for Italy, with its birthrate holding steady over decades. The reason, experts say, is that the provincial government has over time developed a thick network of family-friendly benefits, going far beyond the one-off bonuses for babies that the national government offers. Parents enjoy discounted nursery schools, baby products, groceries, health care, energy bills, transportation, after-school activities and summer camps. The province supplements national allocations for children with hundreds of euros more per child and vaunts child-care programs, including one that certifies educators to turn their apartments into small nurseries.
All of that, experts say, helps free up women to work, which is vital for the economy. As in France and some Scandinavian countries, it also shows that a policy of offering affordable day-care services has the power to steer Italy from the impending demographic cliff as the birthrate falls.
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Jonathan Haidt on why today's young people are so anxious - The Spectator World
Why are people born after 1996 so, well, different? So much more anxious, so much more judgmental, so much more miserable? Phone culture is half of Haidt’s answer; the other is a broader argument about “safetyism,” which Haidt defines as “the well-intentioned and disastrous shift towards overprotecting children and restricting their autonomy in the ‘real world.’” Boys suffer more from being shut in and overprotected. Girls suffer more from the way digital technologies monetize and weaponize peer hierarchies. Although the gender differences are interesting, it’s the sheer scale of harm depicted here that should galvanize us. Haidt’s suggested solutions are commonplace and commonsensical: stop punishing parents for letting their children have some autonomy. Allow children plenty of unstructured free play. Ban phones in school.
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Stanford researchers publish subsurface thermal map for continental US
Horseshit
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McDonald's serves up a master class in how not to explain a system outage
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Dystopias are so 2020. Meet the new protopias that show a hopeful future
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Silicon Valley Used to Reward Innovation. Now It Tries to Sabotage It
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How Much Would You Pay to Make Sure You Never Sawed Off a Finger? - The New York Times
What if the government said you had no choice but to pay up? And what if only one company held the patents for the safety mechanism? Government mandates of new safety technology are classic trade-offs, whether the product is a power tool or a car or a pill. In this case, regulations requiring that table saws be sold with this safety device might mean a few thousand fingers saved per year. But they might also lead to higher costs for consumers.
SawStop holds over 100 patents, many directly related to the safety mechanism. Its table saws cost several hundred dollars more than the most popular competing models, and sometimes more than $1,000 extra. Few consumers choose to pay the price. In 2016, the most recent year with available sales data, less than 2 percent of the 675,000 table saws sold in the United States were SawStop saws. Now the safety commission is considering mandating that the finger-detection system be included in every new table saw. SawStop currently produces the only consumer table saws that could be sold under the proposed rule.
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Worried about a bump on your date's genitalia? There's an app for that
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Good information still pollutes the epistemic ecosystem
One of the reasons why content creators post on a regular schedule is to satisfy their advertisers. This means that they have the same problem as most old school anime; occasionally they have to create "filler" episodes — a plot line or character arc which is not present in the corresponding source material.
In the last two months the host of this podcast has had no less than one, two, three, four, five, six different health experts on to give guide advice, each of which contradict one another. Even in the comments of these videos, the people are confused as to what advice they should actually take. In a rare moment of simultaneous self-awareness and lack of self-awareness, podcaster Chris Williamson acknowledges this issue while completely sidestepping any responsibility for it about 1 hour and 13 minutes into this video. He basically puts the onus back onto the audience to decipher which pieces of advice are actually applicable to their situation. This effectively makes the information useless; without providing a framework as to when either piece of advice is applicable, and to who, then it doesn't matter. One might as well not take the advice in the first place.
- OMG someone's not telling you what to think; but that there are options? "Epistemic pollution!"
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Property owner stunned after $500,000 house built on wrong lot: ‘Are you kidding me?’
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Hospital carries out abortion on wrong woman in horror mix up
Electric / Self Driving cars
Rank Propaganda / Thought Policing / World Disordering
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China’s Advancing Efforts to Influence the U.S. Election Raise Alarms - The New York Times
Covert Chinese accounts are masquerading online as American supporters of former President Donald J. Trump, promoting conspiracy theories, stoking domestic divisions and attacking President Biden ahead of the election in November, according to researchers and government officials. The accounts signal a potential tactical shift in how Beijing aims to influence American politics, with more of a willingness to target specific candidates and parties, including Mr. Biden. In an echo of Russia’s influence campaign before the 2016 election, China appears to be trying to harness partisan divisions to undermine the Biden administration’s policies, despite recent efforts by the two countries to lower the temperature in their relations.
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The efforts of foreign governments to misinform and deceive the American public are tiny compared to the domestic efforts.
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Which sentiment means i'm a Chhina bot: HN comments
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Chinese social media accounts are stoking political chaos ahead of 2024 election
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Experts war-gamed what might happen if deepfakes disrupt the 2024 election
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The Mayor of London Enters the Bullshit Cinematic Universe | WIRED
Since the UK’s highly divisive 2016 vote to leave the European Union, the country’s political discourse has spun wildly off center. The economy is in deep decline, the cost of living has spiraled, and public services are collapsing—water deregulation has left Britain swimming in a moat of its own excrement. The national conversation has been dominated by the Conservative government’s cartoonish policies and culture wars over gender, “wokery,” and climate change. The ruling party has abandoned the political center ground to govern from the fringes. In doing so, it has thinned the membrane that separates the mainstream from the dark currents of far-right extremism and misinformation that flow online.
In that bullshit cinematic universe, Khan is a recurring character, a unifying figure for a dissonant global coalition of racists, conspiracists, anti-vaxxers, and climate change deniers. There’s a fictional Sadiq Khan who lives on the internet and in the heads of the far right, and a fictional London that he runs—a “Londonistan” given over to migrants, extremism, and knife crime; a dire warning of the cost of liberal leftist rule. This is partly why Khan needs that police protection. Threats to his life are routine now, part of the violence that has returned to British politics for the first time in decades.
Musk
Trump / War against the Right / Jan6
Pox / COVID / BioTerror AgitProp
Religion / Tribal / Culture War and Re-Segregation
Edumacationalizing / Acedemia Nuts
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The consequence of not offering classes on IQ and human intelligence
The answers to my survey suggest that psychology students do not simply lack a proper background in the science of intelligence, but instead (and worse), have been exposed to superficial (but often dogmatic), outdated, and misleading claims. Despite knowing very little, my students expressed strong opinions that suggested that they believed that IQ tests were necessarily biased, might be used for nefarious purposes and/or provide misleading results, don't really measure “intelligence”.
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Opinion | Elite College Admissions Have Turned Students Into Brands - The New York Times
a boom in the college consulting industry, now estimated to be a $2.9 billion business. In recent years, many of these advisers and companies have begun to promote the idea of personal branding — a way for teenagers to distinguish themselves by becoming as clear and memorable as a good tagline.While this approach often leads to a strong application, students who brand themselves too early or too definitively risk missing out on the kind of exploration that will prepare them for adult life.
Like a corporate brand, the personal brand is meant to distill everything you stand for (honesty, integrity, high quality, low prices) into a cohesive identity that can be grasped at a glance. On its website, a college prep and advising company called Dallas Admissions explains the benefits of branding this way: “Each person is complex, yet admissions officers only have a small amount of time to spend learning about each prospective student. The smart student boils down key aspects of himself or herself into their personal ‘brand’ and sells that to the college admissions officer.”
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An emeritus professor of law, Barnhizer has written a no-holds-barred exposé of the tragic fall of our institutions of higher education. Our colleges, he states, “have turned into a one-sided process where true believers who see the world through an ideological lens have taken control.” Instead of graduating thoughtful, mature people who can employ reason to evaluate claims and arguments about the world, our schools produce increasingly large numbers of people who act as “social justice warriors,” single-mindedly following the lessons drummed into them in college.
Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising
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Execute your best ideas with Google Registry's .exe top-level domain
Starting today, .exe domains are available for registration as part of our Early Access Period (EAP) for an additional one-time fee. This fee decreases according to a daily schedule until April 5. On April 5 at 16:00 UTC, .exe domains will be publicly available at a base annual price through your registrar of choice.
- Gives "ILOVEYOU.exe" as an example early site: ILOVEYOU - Wikipedia
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Microsoft unbundles Office and Teams globally following years-long criticism
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1998's Unreal was big deal, but its free editing tool was the true game changer
The biggest revelation about it all was that I didn't need any specialised hardware to make a game. Here was the creation kit that Epic had used to make Unreal, running on my Pentium 2 and Voodoo 2. The barrier for entry into game development was the exact same as the barrier for playing the game. Regardless of how we Unreal Editor inductees fared individually, we all internalised that much. Game development was right there at our fingertips, sometimes even bundled in with the games we bought. All we had to do was figure out how to build something worth playing.
TechSuck / Geek Bait
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HN Jobs:
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What we know about the xz Utils backdoor that almost infected the world
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Flipper Zero Panic Spreads To Oz: Cars Unaffected
Canada and Australia are both countries with a free press; that press should be doing their job on these stories by fact-checking and asking pertinent questions when the facts don’t fit the story. When it comes to technology stories it seems not doing this has become the norm.
AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World
Crypto con games
Economicon / Business / Finance
Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making
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'Vaccine lettuce' bill (food containing a vaccine is a drug) passes in Tennessee
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Moves to ban lab-grown meat intensify in Republican US states
“Some folks would probably like to eat bugs with Bill Gates, but not me,” Bud Hulsey, a Tennessee state representative, said at a March subcommittee hearing on cultivated meat legislation. “I think the Nuremberg code was all set up so you would not experiment on human people with new products and new experimentations without it being tested and tried and found out what it can do,” he said in support of a cultivated meat ban. “We just came through Covid with an experimental shot that had a whole lot more problems than anyone wanted to talk about.”
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'Didn't Do That': Biden Denies He Proclaimed Easter Sunday 'Transgender Day of Visibility'
In Biden's official proclamation posted to the White House website, the president issued his "call upon all Americans to join us in lifting up the lives and voices of transgender people throughout our Nation and to work toward eliminating violence and discrimination based on gender identity" on March 31, Easter Sunday. Biden says he "didn't do that," but the proclamation makes it pretty clear he did:
NOW, THEREFORE, I, JOSEPH R. BIDEN JR., President of the United States of America, by virtue of the authority vested in me by the Constitution and the laws of the United States, do hereby proclaim March 31, 2024, as Transgender Day of Visibility.
Law Breaking / Police / Internal Security
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NYPD Purchases Expensive AI Metal Detectors That May or May Not Actually Work
“This is our Sputnik moment,” Adams said at a news conference at Fulton Transit Center in Lower Manhattan. “Like when Kennedy said we’re going to put a man on the moon. ... Let’s bring on the scanners.” Adams displayed scanners manufactured by Evolv, a Massachusetts-based weapons detection company that announced last month it was being investigated by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, following an October disclosure that it was being examined by the Federal Trade Commission. The company's share price dropped after it announced the SEC investigation, which prompted a lawsuitfrom its shareholders this month, alleging the company had misled investors about its technology's effectiveness.
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El Paso judge orders release of migrants accused of ‘border riot.’
External Security / Militaria / Diplomania
World
Iran / Houthi / Red Sea / Mediterranean
Israel
Russia Bad / Ukraine War
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These are Truly Dangerous People – Interview with Ilya Kharkow – The Left Berlin
Today in Ukraine, being a guy means being a mobilization reserve, not a human. Recently, I learned that only 3 countries in Europe don’t compel men to participate in war in the event of martial law: Germany, Sweden, and Switzerland. I hope this is a mistake. But if it’s true, then we have problems. And I want to talk about it.
Q: So, you think there is no need to defend a country?
A: If that’s your sincere desire, then do it. But I believe that you can’t become a hero by force. No one has the right to demand that you risk your life for anything. Why? Because your life is the highest value. If you do not realize the value of your own life, then you should not expect the state to do it for you in the midst of war.
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The Russian Shadow Trade for Weapons Parts, Fueled by Crypto
Health / Medicine
Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda
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Surge of new US-led oil and gas activity threatens to wreck Paris climate goals
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I moved to rural New Mexico to report on the aftermath of a wildfire
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Wait, does America suddenly have a record number of bees? - The Washington Post
After almost two decades of relentless colony collapse coverage and years of grieving suspiciously clean windshields, we were stunned to run the numbers on the new Census of Agriculture (otherwise known as that wonderful time every five years where the government counts all the llamas): America’s honeybee population has rocketed to an all-time high. We’ve added almost a million bee colonies in the past five years. We now have 3.8 million, the census shows. Since 2007, the first census after alarming bee die-offs began in 2006, the honeybee has been the fastest-growing livestock segment in the country! And that doesn’t count feral honeybees, which may outnumber their captive cousins several times over.
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Mining industry touts green pledges to attract talent, but Gen Z isn't buying it
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Hate mosquitoes? Who doesn't? But maybe we shouldn't
mosquitoes primarily feed on plant sugars, not blood. Only female mosquitoes consume blood, and only when they need it to complete their reproductive cycle. Also, it is possible some may serve as pollinators like bees, allowing plants to produce fruit, seeds, and more young plants. The bottom line is that while mosquitoes have a bad rap, the truth is probably much more complex, given how diverse they are and how much we don't know about them.
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Can We Engineer Our Way Out of the Climate Crisis? - The New York Times
If all goes as planned, the enormous vacuum will soon be sucking up vast quantities of air, stripping out carbon dioxide and then locking away those greenhouse gases deep underground in ancient stone — greenhouse gases that would otherwise continue heating up the globe.
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Bradford pear trees banned in few states – More are looking to eradicate them