2024-04-04

etc

• How a saltine cracker can help you see next week's solar eclipse

• Space Mirrors: Dreams Of Turning The Night Into Day Around The Clock

• The Baltimore bridge collapse; Who owes what may come down to laws from Greece

• Anatomy of a credit card rewards program

  Interchange is generally a percentage fee based on the final transaction size plus optionally a per-transaction fee. You can just look up the rates, but I strongly recommend you don’t, as you will be reduced to gibbering madness. (It took many smart people many years of work before Stripe could deterministically predict almost all interchange it was charged in advance of actually getting billed for it.) To highlight something which is routinely surprising for non-specialists: interchange fees are not constant and fixed. They are set based on quite a few factors (gibbering madness intensifies) but, most prominently, based on the rank of card product you use. The more a card product is pitched to socioeconomically well-off people, the more expensive interchange is. Credit card issuers explicitly and directly charge the rest of the economy for the work involved in recruiting the most desirable customers.

• ‘The Population Bomb’ was wrong: The world’s now struggling to make more babies.

Horseshit

• (2022) The Urgent Need for Adversarial Journalism

  The U.S. government is currently making a series of factual claims about aggression by the government of Russia, which has built up military forces along the border with Ukraine. The United States has responded by dispatching thousands of troops to Poland, Germany, and Romania. The U.S. has warned that a Russian invasion of Ukraine is “imminent,” though after Ukraine’s government publicly disagreed with this, the Biden administration backed off the claim a bit. One important lesson we should learn from history is that we need to be especially critical and scrupulous when a government claims that another government is committing aggression that may require a military response. This is for several reasons. First, a “military response” almost inevitably means “mass killing.” Militaries exist to kill. War is the greatest horror human beings are capable of producing, and any claim that could justify a war needs to be examined with the highest possible scrutiny. The Iraq war is not the only devastating conflict to have been justified with “fake news.”

• Judge Sides with Tech Billionaires in CA Forever Case Against Family Ranchers

• Gen-Z is shunning college to take up traditional trades like welding, plumbing

• As obesity rises, Big Food and dietitians push 'anti-diet' advice

• The New Magic Number for Retirement Is $1.46M

• The Moral and Religious Incompatibility with Contemporary Politics

  Right-wing lawmakers in Alabama effectively banned in-vitro fertilization treatments. The policy states that life begins in embryo, and if life does begin in embryo, then the embryos lost in unsuccessful treatments and other operating room mishaps are tantamount to murder. Or at least that’s what the law suggests.

  this news from Alabama frustrates me. There is a blatant hypocrisy that the supposedly pro-life, pro-family party would enact laws that deny willing and desiring parents the chance of children. Like I said, this news is a month old now. Fate would have it that more faux Christianity would make it into the news when Trump, in another one of his egregious assaults on irony, began shilling “Freedom Bibles” at $60 a pop. I need not describe all the ways this is blasphemous. It does feel as if there’s one political party constantly betraying the religious roots on which it professes to be built. Yet while the left wing doesn’t claim as close of ties with religion, you won’t find much moral consistency in the far reaches of progressivism, either.

  To give one example, the conflict in Gaza has exposed a lot of horrific logic that somehow excuses and even celebrates the murder of women and children in the name of decolonization.

• Welcome to the First Ever McDonald's Where You're Served by Robots

• All billionaires under 30 have inherited their wealth, research finds

• They came for Florida's sun and sand. They got soaring costs and a culture war

Electric / Self Driving cars

• Waymo self-driving cars are delivering Uber Eats orders for first time

• Chinese smartphone maker Xiaomi delivering the first of 100k EVs ordered

• Fisker's Ocean SUV investigated for doors that won't open

• Ford hasn't shipped the F-150 Lightning since Feb 9 due to undisclosed issue

celebrity gossip

• Beyoncé 'Cowboy Carter' review: Album revives country genre

  Country music has been on life support. Enter Beyoncé, whose new album, “Cowboy Carter” (out Friday), is the revival that country music so desperately needed. The instantly timeless 27-track project is a soulful celebration of Southern values and the genre’s African American roots.

Rank Propaganda / Thought Policing / World Disordering

• Groups coordinate with hundreds of media outlets to push climate ‘crisis’ in news and entertainment | Just The News

• Twitter Files Brazil

  Brazil is engaged in a sweeping crackdown on free speech led by a Supreme Court justice named Alexandre de Moraes. De Moraes has thrown people in jail without trial for things they posted on social media. He has demanded the removal of users from social media platforms. And he has required the censorship of specific posts, without giving users any right of appeal or even the right to see the evidence presented against them.

Musk

• Tesla sales plunge far more than expected

• Elon Musk's reputation is falling – and it's taking Tesla with it

Trump / War against the Right / Jan6

• Trump Media's Founders Are Fighting

• Special counsel blasts judge’s jury instruction request in Trump documents case | CNN Politics

  The first scenario would instruct a jury to assess whether each of the records that Trump is accused of retaining fell into the categories of “personal” or “presidential” as laid out by the Presidential Records Act, a post-Watergate law that governs how White House records belonging to the government are to be handled at the end of a presidency. The second version Cannon asked for assumes that as president, Trump had complete authority to take records he wanted from the White House, which would make it nearly impossible for prosecutors to secure a conviction.

Religion / Tribal / Culture War and Re-Segregation

• A Christian revival is under way in Britain

• What Americans Lost When They Stopped Going to Church - The Atlantic

  The sudden decline of religion likely relates to changes in both politics and family life. In the 1970s and ’80s, the religious right became a formidable fundraising machine for the Republican Party. As the GOP consolidated its advantage among conservative Christians, religion seemed less appealing to liberal young people, especially if they or their parents already had a tenuous relationship with the Church. In the late 1980s, only one in 10 liberals said they didn’t belong to any religion; 30 years later, that figure was about four in 10. Meanwhile, the decline of marriage, especially among low-income Americans, accompanied their move away from the Church.

  America didn’t simply lose its religion without finding a communal replacement. Just as America’s churches were depopulated, Americans developed a new relationship with a technology that, in many ways, is the diabolical opposite of a religious ritual: the smartphone.

Edumacationalizing / Acedemia Nuts

• Colleges are lawyering up to avoid becoming the next Harvard

• Colleges are facing an enrollment nightmare

Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising

• Google Podcasts is gone — and YouTube Music can’t replace it - The Verge

• Spotify Is Changing How It Charges Customers, with New Plans and Prices

• Google's Protected Audience Protects Advertisers More Than It Protects You

• No joke: FTC boss goes on the Daily Show and is told Apple tried to block her

  • HN comments

• Hacker News analysis | Open Tech

  All of this indicate to me that HN is losing more contributors than it earns news ones, and that this trend started ~3 years ago.

  I found multiple weird patterns in the user’s karma. For example, some users, who shared stories with large number of upvotes, had zero karma. Even more interestingly, there was negative karma. I don’t even know how this came to be.

• Microsoft reveals how much you'll have to pay to keep using Windows 10 securely

• JPMorgan Chase is about to let advertisers target customers based on spending

  • JPMorgan to sell customer transaction data to advertisers

TechSuck / Geek Bait

• Broadcom execs say VMware price, subscription complaints are unwarranted

• AMD ROCm Going Open-Source: Will Include Software and Hardware Documentation

  • HN comments

• The Mystery of ‘Jia Tan,’ the XZ Backdoor Mastermind | WIRED

  Jia Tan exploited open source software’s crowdsourced approach to coding whereby anyone can suggest changes to a program on code repositories like GitHub, where the changes are reviewed by other coders before they’re integrated into the software. Peeling back Jia Tan’s documented history in the open source programming world reveals that they first appeared in November 2021 with the GitHub username JiaT75, then made contributions to other open source projects using the name Jia Tan, or sometimes Jia Cheong Tan, for more than a year before beginning to submit changes to XZ Utils. By January 2023, Jia Tan’s code was being integrated into XZ Utils.

• linux kernel: strcpy strncpy() strlcpy() and strscpy()

  There are buffers where we read to the first NUL character or up to 16 characters. I am not a huge fan of this behavior but it does exist. One piece of social advice that I can give is that you should not get into arguments with people who write code like this. These are not people motivated by reason.

• Autoconf makes me think we stopped evolving too soon

  • HN comments

AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World

• Stability AI reportedly ran out of cash to pay its cloud GPU bills

• Taco Bell and Pizza Hut Are Going 'AI-First,' Yum's New Tech Chief Says

Space / Boomy Zoomers / UFO

• Space is the new 'Wild West.' The EU is dying to step in and regulate

• White House wants Moon to have its own time zone, Coordinated Lunar Time (CLT)

Economicon / Business / Finance

• Amazon Is Cutting Hundreds of Jobs in Cloud Computing Division

  • Amazon Web Services lays off several hundred tech, sales staff

• Amazon ditches cashierless checkout system at its grocery stores

• Plunging Pickup Truck Sales Threaten Detroit's Profit Engine

• Office Vacancy Rate Nears 20% to Set Fresh Record, Moody's Says

Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making

• The White House misses its own deadline for justification of menthol ban

  The White House has missed its deadline to publish a rule banning menthol cigarettes, raising ire among public health advocates that the policy will be indefinitely delayed by election year politics. In an effort to force the administration to act, three anti-tobacco public health groups on Tuesday sued the Food and Drug Administration and its parent agency, the Department of Health and Human Services.

• Oregon governor signs bill recriminalizing drug possession into law

• How Biden Plans to Stop Trump From Stealing the Election (Archive)

  For years, Donald Trump has made it abundantly clear that if he doesn’t win the 2024 presidential election, he is willing to cheat and steal it. Since President Joe Biden’s inaugural address, according to sources with intimate knowledge of the situation, Biden and his inner circle have been drawing up meticulous plans and creating a large legal network focused on wargaming a close election finish, in which the former president and Republican Party launch a scorched-earth, Big Lie–fueled crusade.

  “President Biden has been worried, for a while now, that Donald Trump is going to try to steal the election, if it’s very close on Election Day,” says a source familiar with Biden’s thinking. “If that ends up being the case, we are… also expecting the Republican Party to go into overdrive to help him steal it. We are continuing to build out the infrastructure to ensure that doesn’t happen — again — if President Biden wins and Trump and MAGA Republicans try to confuse [everyone] and sow chaos.”

  According to two Biden campaign officials and two other sources with knowledge of the operation, draft pleadings and legal motions, for all kinds of possible Trump-related emergencies, are already written and at the ready. In critical swing states such as Georgia, Arizona, and Pennsylvania, Team Biden is regularly in contact with an array of outside counsels and local law firms that have been retained to actively monitor what is happening on the ground, including with regards to the activism of election-denying Trump allies.

  A spokesperson for the Democratic National Committee tells Rolling Stone that the national party is also setting aside “tens of millions of dollars in a robust voter protection program to safeguard the rights of voters to make their voices heard against relentless attacks from Donald Trump and the GOP.”

Law Breaking / Police / Internal Security

• Sysadmin pleads guilty to 33-year identity theft • The Register

  Given the large sums in the account, the real Woods was asked a series of security questions, which of course he failed to answer correctly because he didn't create them. That prompted the bank teller dealing with Woods to alert the LAPD, which arrested Woods after Keirans faxed a series of forged documents to local police, "proving" he was the real Woods. This is all despite the real Woods presenting a genuine social security card and California state ID card. To cap it off, Woods was arrested not under his own name, but under Keirans' instead.

  The worst part – Woods was held in county jail for 428 days in total, and after a California judge deemed him mentally unfit to stand trial and Woods pleaded "no contest" to the two felony charges against him, he was sent to a mental hospital for a total of 147 days and medicated with psychotropic drugs. From then on, the judge also ordered Woods to only use his "true name," Matthew Keirans, going forward. Throughout this ordeal, Keirans, earning a healthy salary through his work-from-Wisconsin-home sysadmin gig, was in regular contact with authorities requesting updates to Woods' criminal case.

  His luck turned on January 13, 2023 when, after discovering where Keirans worked, he informed the Iowa hospital about the situation, which then engaged a senior detective in the local police force. That detective managed to unravel Keirans' 33-year scheme over the course of several months, in part using DNA tests to definitively prove Keirans wasn't the son of an elderly man in Kentucky as he had previously claimed.

  • Man pleads guilty to stealing former coworker's identity for 30 years

External Security / Militaria / Diplomania

• Ex-White House CIO tells The Reg: TikTok ban may be diplomatic disaster

• Number of Chinese Devices in US Networks Growing Despite Bans

• US Cancels Latest Oil Reserve Refill Plan for Strategic Petroleum Reserve - Bloomberg

  The Energy Department said it was “keeping the taxpayer’s interest at the forefront” in its decision not to purchase as many as 3 million barrels of oil for a Strategic Petroleum Reserve site in Louisiana. The plan for the barrels to be delivered in August and September had been announced in mid-March.

  • Biden Halts Attempts To Refill SPR As Oil Price Soars | ZeroHedge

• Pentagon calls for tighter integration between military and commercial space

Taiwan

• Taiwan has been hit with its strongest earthquake in 25 years, with an estimated magnitude of 7.something.

• Taiwan quake to hit some chip output, cause Asia supply chain disruptions

• Taiwan Quake Puts Most Advanced Chips at Risk

• TSMC still assessing chipmaking facilities after 7.4-magnitude quake hits Taiwan

• Dozens trapped in tunnels after Taiwan's strongest quake in 25 years

• Taiwan earthquake briefly halts chip factories that power the global economy

Israel

• Strike That Killed WCK Workers Bears Hallmarks of Israeli Precision Strike

• Israel accused of targeting aid convoy 'car by car'

• Opinion | Oct. 7 Shattered Netanyahu’s Legacy. The War Saved Him — for Now. - The New York Times

China

• China's ageing population: A demographic crisis is unfolding for Xi

Health / Medicine

• This 28-year-old Dutch woman is scheduled to be euthanized in May because she is depressed and it’s sad how happy she seems about it

• Medicare Advantage plans to see 2025 base pay fall

Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda

• Tennessee lawmakers ban geoengineering, with allusions to 'chemtrails'

  The bill, which had already passed in the state Senate, covers a variety of technological interventions. They include theoretical ideas about cooling the climate by an approach known as solar radiation modification, as well as more limited practices that affect the weather, like cloud seeding, a technique used to increase rain and snowfall.

  • We may have to secede from the state to continue our Planetery Redesign work.

  • To Slow Global Warming, Scientists Test Solar Geoengineering - The New York Times

  It was the first outdoor test in the United States of technology designed to brighten clouds and bounce some of the sun’s rays back into space, a way of temporarily cooling a planet that is now dangerously overheating.

• Discovery could end global amphibian pandemic

• Forecasters say coal consumption will be much higher than the IEA expects

• States are banning Callery pear tree and urging homeowners to cut it down

• California Revealed as Worst US Emitter of Sulfuryl Fluoride