2024-04-16
Worthy
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(2014) The Cowpox of Doubt | Slate Star Codex
I worry that we are vaccinating people against reading the research for themselves instead of trusting smarmy bloggers who talk about how stupid the other side is. That we are vaccinating people against thinking there might be important truths on both sides of an issue. That we are vaccinating people against understanding how “scientific evidence” is a really complicated concept, and that many things that are in peer-reviewed journals will later turn out to be wrong. That we are vaccinating people against the idea that many theories they find absurd or repugnant at first will later turn out to be true, because nature doesn’t respect our feelings. That we are vaccinating people against doubt.
etc
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FBI Opens Criminal Investigation into Baltimore Bridge Collapse
The FBI is conducting a criminal investigation into the deadly collapse of Baltimore’s Francis Scott Key Bridge that is focused on the circumstances leading up to it and whether all federal laws were followed, according to a person familiar with the matter. The person was not authorized to discuss details of the investigation publicly and spoke on the condition of anonymity to The Associated Press. The FBI was present aboard the cargo ship Dali conducting court authorized law enforcement activity, the agency said in a statement Monday. The investigation was first reported by The Washington Post. And on Monday, Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott announced a partnership with two law firms to “launch legal action to hold the wrongdoers responsible” and mitigate harm to city residents.
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David Chang and Momofuku will no longer enforce 'chili crunch' trademark
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The Birth of Israel - by M. E. Rothwell - Cosmographia
Simultaneous to the Canaanite decline, we see two new groups emerge. The first appear on the flat fertile plains of the southern coast, where they seem to have peacefully settled into cities like Ashkelon, Ekron, and Gath. These were immigrants, a population of the Sea Peoples from the Aegean, whom we now know as the Philistines.
The other group appear among the highlands on both sides of the Jordan River. They lived in rudimentary longhouses, forming settlements of no more than a hundred people. Their material culture was basic, their pottery undecorated, and their economy based on grain, livestock, and olive cultivation. It was these people whom Merneptah named in his granite stele. It was these people whom he called Israel.
Horseshit
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Gen Z is full of financial angst despite inheriting a golden job market
Gen Zers — folks born between the late 1990s and early 2010s — are entering adulthood during one of strongest job markets in US history. Compared with Millennials, especially, who entered the workforce in the Dark Ages known as the Great Recession, the Gen Z experience is a dream. "This is the best economy we’ve seen for younger workers that anybody can remember,” Brendan Duke, senior director for economic policy at the Center for American Progress, tells me. Their wages have gone up faster than inflation overall, and more quickly than any other age cohort, he added.
It’s important to remember, Duke tells me, that younger workers are always starting out at a disadvantage when they enter the workforce. You start at an entry level wage, gain experience, and, typically, you see your wages go up. Of course, the long view is little comfort when you’re 23 and slurping bodega ramen with your six roommates.
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While one segment of Silicon Valley lamented the perpetual absence of flying cars, another, it turns out, was quietly building them—or, at least, something flying-car adjacent. Just three months after the Founders Fund manifesto appeared, a Canadian inventor named Marcus Leng invited his neighbors and a couple of friends to his rural property, north of Lake Ontario. Leng was in his early fifties, with a bowl cut of coarse graying hair. He instructed his guests to park their (conventional) cars in a row and cower behind them. He strapped on a helmet and boarded a device that he’d built in his basement. It had a narrow single-seat chassis and two fixed wings, one in front and one in back, each with four small propellers. It was at once sleek and ungainly, as if a baby orca had been hitched to two snowplows. Observers described it, for lack of a better comparison, as looking like a U.F.O. Leng called it the BlackFly.
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McDonald’s new marketing: Billboards that smell like its French fries
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Lawyer divorces wrong couple through dropdown selection error
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These two stories were published on the same day a few weeks ago | Not the Bee
Electric / Self Driving cars
Rank Propaganda / Thought Policing / World Disordering
Musk
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Tesla to lay off more than 10% of its staff
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Tesla shares dip after reports firm will lay off more than 10% of workforce
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Tesla is reportedly laying off 'more than 10 percent' of its workforce
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Tesla to cut 14k jobs–10% of workforce–as Musk aims to make it 'lean and hungry'
The job cuts come as the slowdown in sales of EVs makes waves through the global car industry, with companies across the supply chain slashing jobs and cutting costs.
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Tesla Cybertruck Production Halted Due to Unintended Acceleration
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Tesla Signed Deal with India's Tata Electronics to Source Chips
Trump / War against the Right / Jan6
Pox / COVID / BioTerror AgitProp
Religion / Tribal / Culture War and Re-Segregation
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Britain Confronts the Shaky Evidence for Youth Gender Medicine - The Atlantic
In a world without partisan politics, the Cass report on youth gender medicine would prompt serious reflection from American trans-rights activists, their supporters in the media, and the doctors and institutions offering hormonal and surgical treatments to minors. At the request of the English National Health Service, the senior pediatrician Hilary Cass has completed the most thorough consideration yet of this field, and her report calmly and carefully demolishes many common activist tropes. Puberty blockers do have side effects, Cass found. The evidence base for widely used treatments is “shaky.” Their safety and effectiveness are not settled science.
Edumacationalizing / Acedemia Nuts
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Citizenship Privilege Harms Science
Imagine you want to attend a research conference in the United States this autumn. If you are from most nations in the global north, there’s probably still plenty of time to make arrangements. But, according to our analysis, citizens from 132 of the 134 countries in the global south need a visa to visit the United States, whereas this is true for people from only 20 of the 61 countries in the global north. (See Supplementary information for how we designated global south countries.) And obtaining those visas is not straightforward: as of 4 April, the next available appointment at the US consulate in New Delhi, India, is not until October. It’s February 2025 at the consulate in Cotonou, Benin, and March 2026 in Bogotá, Colombia.
It’s not just trips to the United States that are problematic. Scholars from the global south face obstacles when travelling to many hotspots for scientific research, which include Canada, Japan and most European countries. By contrast, citizens from more than 80% of countries in the global north need no visa to go to Germany or Japan.
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Journal editors are resigning en masse: what do these group exits achieve?
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Research for Sale: How Chinese Money Flows to American Universities
Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising
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Orwell Watch: NPR and the Death of Fairness
this wasn’t about “bias.” It was about ethics, or a lack of them. But this has been going on for so long, most people have forgotten what ethics look like. Audiences have been trained to think that a station or person that doesn’t make overtly political coverage decisions is just hiding its real biases, which must be either right-wing, corrupt, or both. So someone like Berliner, when he talks about feeling “obliged” to cover even Donald Trump fairly, is actually just concealing a form of unfairness, or inspiring another tribe of unfair actors. Fair equals unfair. It’s impressive propaganda, actually.
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Sony's PS5 Pro is real and developers are getting ready for it
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Telecom fights price caps as U.S. spends billions on internet access
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Roku makes 2FA mandatory for all after nearly 600K accounts pwned
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The Life and Death of Hollywood, by Daniel Bessner (Archive
The film and TV industry is now controlled by only four major companies, and it is shot through with incentives to devalue the actual production of film and television. What is to be done? The most direct solution would be government intervention. If it wanted to, a presidential administration could enforce existing antitrust law, break up the conglomerates, and begin to pull entertainment companies loose from asset-management firms. It could regulate the use of financial tools, as deWaard has suggested; it could rein in private equity. The government could also increase competition directly by funding more public film and television. It could establish a universal basic income for artists and writers.
None of this is likely to happen. The entertainment and finance industries spend enormous sums lobbying both parties to maintain deregulation and prioritize the private sector.
- The remnant rump of old media is dying, it needs government support and "UBI for artists and writers"... Meanwhile new media is full of new names making money and pleasing audiences who are wondering why Old media got so stuffy and boring. that's not worth figuring into the story because it might derail the narrative: that the concentration of power among the old media elite is bad and must be solved with further central control.
AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World
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Sam Altman is not on YC's board. So why claim to be its chair?
In securities filings reviewed by Bay Area Inno, Altman has claimed to be Y Combinator's chairman for at least the past three years. He was never the accelerator's chairman, though, and couldn't have been: A formal board didn't exist until after he left in 2019.
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Microsoft Pitched OpenAI's DALL-E as Battlefield Tool for U.S. Military
Space / Boomy Zoomers / UFO
Economicon / Business / Finance
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Labor group demands California’s $20 minimum wage for fast food workers extend to all sectors.
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America’s Bonds Are Getting Harder to Sell.
A series of weak auctions for U.S. Treasurys are stoking investors’ concerns that markets will struggle to absorb an incoming rush of government debt. A selloff sparked by a hotter-than-expected inflation report intensified this past week after lackluster demand for a $39 billion sale of 10-year Treasurys. Investors also showed tepid interest in auctions for three-year and 30-year Treasurys.
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Los Angeles Warehouse Vacancies Climb to Highest in a Decade
Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making
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Here are the massive tax increases coming your way in a second Biden term.
Biden’s written plan calls for a small business tax hike, a corporate tax hike, a capital gains and dividends tax hike, income tax hikes, energy tax hikes and even a second Death Tax on top of the first one. Biden would increase the corporate income tax from today’s 21% to 28%. That’s a higher tax rate than communist China and France and the U.K., each at 25%. Now add the average state corporate income tax at 4% and the average combined Biden rate would be 32%. That would be the second-highest corporate income tax in the developed world. Just below Colombia.
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Tennessee passes 'chemtrail' bill banning airborne chemicals
Law Breaking / Police / Internal Security
External Security / Militaria / Diplomania
Israel
Russia Bad / Ukraine War
Health / Medicine
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Chinese Company Under Congressional Scrutiny Makes Key U.S. Drugs (Archive)
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The Adderall Shortage: DEA versus FDA in a Regulatory War
Indeed, there is a large factory in the United States capable of producing 600 million doses of Adderall annually that has been shut down by the DEA for over a year because of trivial paperwork violations.
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The burnt toast is good for you: Carbon beads help restore healthy gut microbiome and reduce liver disease progression, researchers find.