2024-04-11

etc

• US aiming to 'crack the code' on deploying geothermal energy at scale

• emulating the capabilities of some of the basest components of life. that snot easy. New hydrogel can stretch to 15 times its original size

Horseshit

• Animal-free egg protein startup Onego Bio is closer to cracking the egg market

• Killing with kindness – "Be kind" culture has abandoned adolescent girls

• German art museum fires worker for hanging his own painting in gallery

  • German gallery fires employee for hanging own art in exhibition

  • A Reverse Art Heist? Museum Finds Employee's Painting on Its Wall

• These Women Came to Antarctica for Science. Then the Predators Emerged | WIRED

  Jane Willenbring was the first to blow the whistle on sexual harassment and assault in Antarctica. Years later, women are still coming forward with tales of horror as a government investigation unfolds.

• Write down your thoughts and shred them to relieve anger, researchers say

• The rich are getting second passports, citing risk of instability.

• So, Amazon's 'AI-powered' cashier-free shops use a lot of humans

• Decaf is the hottest thing in coffee

• Paleo diet? We're desperate for half-truths about human origins

Boeing

• Boeing whistleblower says 787 could 'break apart' due to safety flaws

• Boeing somehow managed to get itself into even bigger trouble

• Another Boeing whistleblower raises fresh concerns about the 787

Electric / Self Driving cars

• GM's Cruise robotaxis are back in Phoenix – but people are driving them

• The $10k BYD Seagull EV is scaring the U.S. auto industry

• Is this plug taken? EV charging etiquette comes to "Modern Manners" book

• MA family among Tesla owners waited hours to charge after solar eclipse

celebrity gossip

• US 'considering' dropping Julian Assange prosecution, Joe Biden says

  • Biden says he is 'considering' Australian call to drop Julian Assange charges

  • Biden 'considering' request to drop Assange charges

  • Biden Says U.S. Is Considering Dropping Its Case Against Assange

  • Biden 'considering' Australian request to drop case against Assange

• Alex Jones To Sue CIA After Undercover Report Claims Agency "Went After Him Hardcore" | ZeroHedge

Musk

• Elon Musk has expanded on his plans to settle Mars, as SpaceX's Starship approaches reality.

• Elon Musk plans to rejuvenate the original platform as Tesla's dominance wanes

• Elon Musk denies knowing who's suing him to dodge defamation suit

• Elon Musk says his posts did more to 'financially impair' X than help it

• Musk's Undisclosed Starlink Costs Undercut Profitability Claims

• Twitter's pivot to x.com is a gift to phishers

• Tesla Cybertruck teardown shows battery pack is 'half empty' and we are confused

• The Toxic Culture at Tesla

Trump / War against the Right / Jan6

• Trump Media's Accounting Firm has regulatory issues, 100% audits deficiency rate

• Rebecca Lavrenz convicted on all Jan. 6 protest charges | Crime & Justice | gazette.com

  After a lengthy deliberation that’s been rare for Capitol breach cases, Falcon resident Rebecca Lavrenz, known on social media as the “J6 Praying Grandma,” was convicted on all four federal misdemeanor charges for her participation in the Jan. 6, 2021, protest of the 2020 presidential election results in Washington, D.C. The 71-year-old great grandmother and owner of a bed-and-breakfast business where she lives about 14 miles northeast of Colorado Springs could be sentenced to up to a year in prison and ordered to pay fines of more than $200,000, which excludes legal fees.

• Jacob’s Dream: MAGA meets the Age of Aquarius

  Jacob Angeli-Chansley, the man the media has dubbed the QAnon Shaman, had been released from federal custody six weeks before when we met for lunch at a place called Picazzo’s

  It took some doing to get him to sit for an interview, as Jacob is wary of what he calls Operation Mockingbird, an alleged CIA-sponsored effort begun in the Fifties to use mass media to influence public opinion. Jacob believes that people like me are the tools of the Mockingbird operation, of the deep state, international bankers, pharmaceutical cartels, and corporate monarchies that control the world. People like me believe in medicines that are addictive drugs, in food that is poison, in environmentalism that is ecocide, in education that is ignorance, in money that is debt, in objective science that is not objective. “People are brainwashed by the elites and their propaganda networks,” he said. “Mass hypnosis, bro.”

• How a Case Against Fox News Tore Apart a Media-Fighting Law Firm - The New York Times

  Hours earlier, the lawyers and their client, Dominion Voting Systems, had negotiated an extraordinary $787 million settlement with Fox News. The deal was struck moments before opening arguments in a hotly anticipated defamation trial, in which Fox was accused of airing inflammatory lies that Dominion had thwarted Donald J. Trump in the 2020 presidential election. Now the company’s two main law firms could enjoy the spoils.

  Susman Godfrey would pocket a thick slice of the settlement that Fox had just wired over. Clare Locke, a smaller firm that specializes in the niche field of defamation law, wouldn’t get a cut of the settlement. But Dominion had already paid it millions of dollars in fees, and the victory offered the firm the potential for something even greater.

  Run by the husband-and-wife team of Tom Clare and Libby Locke, the firm had helped popularize efforts by wealthy and powerful clients to attack news organizations and delegitimize or kill unfavorable articles. Ms. Locke in particular had taken to publicly arguing that much of the news media was unethical, though she also voiced support for free speech. The triumph against Fox gave the firm’s founders an opportunity to widen their appeal. They could argue that Clare Locke was not an enemy of the free press or the First Amendment, but a champion of truth and a guardian of democracy.

  Friction among lawyers at Clare Locke had been building for years, and much of it centered on Ms. Locke. Her colleagues chafed at her management style. Some feared that her public embrace of conservative causes, including on Fox News, was alienating clients. Then came Dominion.

Edumacationalizing / Acedemia Nuts

• Texas is replacing human exam graders with AI

  • Texas will use computers to grade written answers on this year's STAAR tests

Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising

• Consumers will see FCC-mandated 'nutrition labels' for broadband plans

• Facebook takes on TikTok with a new, vertical-first video player

• Big Tech's grip on social media is a growing problem

• Funding shortfall forces FCC to slash monthly broadband benefits in May

  • Internet price hikes for low-income Americans could begin in May

• US broadband internet: Now with mandatory 'nutrition' labels

• NPR defends its journalism after senior editor says it lost the public trust

  • After Being Completely Exposed By Its Own Editor, NPR Responds in the Worst Possible Fashion

• Kobo announces color e-readers

• The MPA has big plans to crack down on movie piracy again

  • Hollywood Believes the Time Is Ripe to Bring Back SOPA

  • Movie industry demands US law requiring ISPs to block piracy websites

• The Rise and Fall of The Village Voice - by Ted Gioia

TechSuck / Geek Bait

• Canonical partners with Qualcom for Snapdragon X

• Google unveils custom Arm-based chips, following rivals Amazon and Microsoft

• Essays: In Memoriam: Ross Anderson, 1956-2024 - Schneier on Security

• VMS Software prunes OpenVMS hobbyist program

  Bad news for those who want to play with OpenVMS in non-production use. Older versions are disappearing, and the terms are getting much more restrictive. The corporation behind the continued development of OpenVMS, VMS Software, Inc. – or VSI to its friends, if it has any left after this – has announced the latest Updates to the Community Program. The news does not look good: you can't get the Alpha and Itanium versions any more, only a limited x86-64 edition.

• Malicious Visual Studio projects on GitHub push Keyzetsu malware

• 5.25-inch floppy disks expected to help run San Francisco trains until 2030

AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World

• Three major LLM releases in 24 hours

  • HN comments

• AI boom is boosting demand even for HDDs, raising prices by up to 20% since Q3

• OpenAI and Meta ready new AI models capable of ‘reasoning’

Economicon / Business / Finance

• ByteDance Profit Jumps 60%, Taking It Past Archrival Tencent

• Bank of Canada holds key interest rate at 5%

• Amazon owes $525M in cloud-storage patent fight, US jury says

• Boom times for US green energy as federal cash flows in

• Peloton's Bumpy Ride

• Checkr, the background-screening platform valued at $5B, cuts 32% of workforce

• Inflation unexpectedly rises to 3.5% — plunging Dow Jones down 450 points and all but ruling out a summer cut to interest rates

• Credit-Card Delinquency Rates Were Worst on Record in Fed Study

Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making

• Anti-Israel agitators shut down Senate cafeteria; around 50 arrested | Fox News

• The Election Denial Groups Planning to Disrupt November(Archive)

  multiple far-right activist groups with ties to former president Donald Trump and the Republican National Committee are mobilizing their supporters in earnest, drawing on one baseline belief: Elections in the US are rigged, and citizens need to do something about it. All the evidence states otherwise. But in recent weeks, these groups have held training sessions about how to organize on a hyperlocal level to monitor polling places and drop boxes, challenge voter registrations en masse, and intimidate and harass voters and election officials. And some are preparing to roll out new technology to fast-track all of these efforts: One of the groups claims they’re launching a new platform for checking voter rolls that contains billions of “data elements” on every single US citizen. These groups could have a major impact on the 2024 election. In addition to disenfranchising voters and putting additional pressure on already overstretched election offices, they could convince more and more people that US elections are fraudulent.

• How Taxpayers Will Heavily Subsidize Democrat Boots on the Ground This Election | RealClearInvestigations

  A dizzying array of overwhelmingly “democracy-focused” entities with ties to the Democratic Party operating as charities and funded with hundreds of millions of dollars from major liberal “dark money” vehicles are engaged in a sprawling campaign to register the voters, deliver them the ballots, and figuratively and sometimes literally harvest the votes necessary to defeat Donald Trump.

  These efforts, now buttressed by the federal government, amplify and extend what Time magazine described as a “well-funded cabal of powerful people ranging across industries and ideologies,” who had worked behind the scenes in 2020 “to influence perceptions, change rules and laws, steer media coverage and control the flow of information” to defeat Trump and other Republicans. The “shadow campaigners,” Time declared, “were not rigging the election; they were fortifying it.”

• Chips Act DEI Insanity - by George Patterson Sibble

  See, in order to gain access to the subsidies, everything from the construction workers, to suppliers, to engineers, and finally fab workers need to meet stringent government DEI requirements. For instance, 40% of construction workers need to be female. Except only 10% of all construction workers are women currently. Additionally, chip makers must provide fully paid for childcare and healthcare for everyone involved including construction workers. Obviously, this skyrockets the price of everything from the moment they break ground. Of course, the quotas for minority workers are there too.

• Biden Admin Gives $6.6 Billion to Project Run By Ex-Solyndra CEO

  aiwanese chipmaker TSMC’s Arizona subsidiary, whose president is former Solyndra head Brian Harrison, will receive $6.6 billion to build a factory in Phoenix, Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo announced Monday. Harrison was CEO of Solyndra when it declared bankruptcy in 2011 after receiving over $500 million in loans from the Obama administration.

• Biden Is Spending $1 Trillion to Fight Climate Change. Voters Don’t Care. - WSJ

  The strategy is risky because climate has never been a priority with voters. And it is unclear whether climate policies could reverse the deep skepticism many young people feel toward Biden. Recent Wall Street Journal polls have found that Biden’s support among young people is shrinking compared with 2020 amid concerns about the president’s age and his support for Israel’s war against Hamas.

• There's One Big Problem with the New Federal Data Privacy Bill

• Group of Republicans blocks FISA bill with spy powers deadline looming

• Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee tells schoolkids that moon is a ‘planet’ and ‘made up mostly of gases.’

• Blue City Only Issues Seven New Housing Permits In Two Months Despite Housing Crisis

• US agrees to delay Sen. Bob Menendez's corruption trial over wife's health

Law Breaking / Police / Internal Security

• Chinese Organized Crime Now Targeting Gift Cards in U.S.

• Several people shot near end of Ramadan event in Philadelphia: report

External Security / Militaria / Diplomania

• 101st Airborne soldiers are first to receive new Next Gen Squad Weapon

• Americans are still not worried enough about the risk of world war

• US Air Force Secretary so confident in AI-controlled F-16s, he'll fly in one

• Biden Upgrading Defense Ties with Japan, Aimed at Countering China

World

• BBC to split India operations following raids

• German industry unlikely to recover from energy crisis, warns RWE boss

• Saudis Scale Back Ambition for $1.5T Desert Project Neom

  • Saudi Arabia 'forced to scale back' plans for desert megacity

• France Bracing for Cyberattacks During Summer Olympics

• Chechnya is banning music that's too fast or slow.

• Will Stonehenge lose its Unesco World Heritage status?

Russia Bad / Ukraine War

• American Drones Failed to Turn the Tide in Ukraine

• US Slams Strikes on Russia Oil Refineries as Risk to Oil Markets

• Russia's Shahed-136 Factory Attacked by Light Plane Converted into a Drone

China

• Yellen Junks 200 Years of Economics to Block China Clean Tech

• Chinese Cement Maker Halted After 99% Crash in 15 Minutes

  • Chinese Cement Maker loses 99% of value in 15 minutes

• China flooding Britain with fake stamps in act of 'economic warfare'

  Sources close to Royal Mail said that forgeries from the Communist state were behind a rise in complaints that letters sent with stamps bought from legitimate stores were being flagged as fraudulent. Security experts and MPs described the mass forgery as an “act of economic warfare” and akin to “printing counterfeit money”.

Health / Medicine

• Rural Americans Are Dying at Increasingly Higher Rates Than City Dwellers

  • HN comments

• Recommendations for the Use of Dietary Fiber to Improve Blood Pressure Control

Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda

• U.S. imposes first-ever national drinking water limits on PFAS

  • the US finalizes rules for 'forever chemicals' in drinking water

  • EPA puts limits on 'forever chemicals' in drinking water

• The surprising public health benefit of unemployment | Tim Harford

  as the researchers put it, “these estimates imply that The Great Recession provided one in twenty-five 55-year-olds with an extra year of life.” But Finkelstein and her co-authors find scant evidence for any of this. Instead, they point to air pollution. The air becomes cleaner in areas where the economy slumps. The researchers estimate that this cleaner air accounts for more than one-third of the mortality reduction. This may come as a surprise, because we are not accustomed to regarding air pollution as a problem for rich countries — the trope is that industrialising cities in Asia are smog-ridden, but that for America and Europe the only pollutant that need worry us is the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide.

• A Billion-Dollar Chemical Firm's Battle to Hide Pollution Secrets

• Early warning system to track Asian hornets unveiled by UK researchers

• Wall Street turns to 'solar grazing' sheep in its push to go green

• Activists protest in trees, file lawsuit to block old growth logging on BLM land

• Ocean Heat Has Shattered Records for More Than a Year. What's Happening?

• More than half a million global stroke deaths may be tied to climate change

  Researchers found over three decades that non-optimal temperatures, those above or below temperatures associated with the lowest death rates, were increasingly linked to death and disability due to stroke. The study does not prove that climate change causes stroke. It only shows an association. The study also did not examine other risk factors such as high blood pressure and high cholesterol levels.

  • Burden of Stroke Attributable to Nonoptimal Temperature in 204 Countries and Territories | Neurology

• Human rights violated by Swiss inaction on climate, ECHR rules in landmark case | Climate crisis | The Guardian