2024-04-20
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Discovery in Maya pyramid reveals dramatic dynasty collapse, archaeologists say
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Planning and infrastructure failed during Maui wildfires
The summary alone is both harrowing and eerily clinical to read. It’s hard to shake firsthand accounts that came out in August of people diving into the ocean to escape flames and scenes of Lahaina, the former capital of the Hawaiian Kingdom, in ashes. But the 200-page report identifies some telling instances of issues that stymied response efforts. Pipes failed, and water pressure dropped so low that parts of Lahaina had no water flowing from their fire hydrants. Smoke and flames cut off evacuation routes and “overwhelmed the efforts of police and firefighters to evacuate the area.” Without cell service, police officers and firefighters talked to each other on closed channels, including car radios — leaving the public in the dark about what was going on. Some residents created impromptu evacuation routes by “opening locked gates and clearing access to dirt roads.”
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Red state coal towns still power the West Coast. We can't just let them die
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Insurance Companies Are Flying Drones and Taking Photos of Your Home
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'Irresponsible' to ignore consciousness across animal world scientists argue
Horseshit
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Why are American roads so dangerous?
The good news is the number of people killed in traffic collisions fell by almost 4 per cent in 2023. The bad news is the mortality rate on US roads is still 25 per cent up on a decade earlier, and three times the rate of the average developed country. Most of the explanations commonly put forward for why US roads remain so deadly focus on broad structural factors such as vehicle size or time spent on the road, but a review of the evidence suggests this may be mistaken. Last year’s improvement is a case in point. Two reasons often cited as key causes of poor US performance both worsened: the total number of miles driven by Americans increased, and US cars continued to grow larger. Yet fatal collisions still declined.
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San Francisco sues Oakland over proposed airport name change
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On giant piles of cash, and their origins - by Dave Karpf
As it stands today, the primary direction-setter for new advances in science and technology is “what do folks like Marc Andreessen and Peter Thiel and Gary Tan and Sam Altman find exciting?” The problem isn’t just that these guys are ideological fellow-travelers, hell bent on a shared political project that socializes all risk while privatizing all gain. (though, I mean… that would kinda be enough of a problem on its own.) It’s also that their eye for science, technology, and even consumer products just kinda sucks. Building toward their vision of the future means we’re going to end up with a lot of silly investments in pretend-cities and eugenics vaporware. It means we’ll have abundant funding for hail-mary attempts at developing cold fusion and geo-engineering, and practically nothing for helping cities remain habitable under extreme weather conditions.
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Exposure to poor people reduces support for redistribution among the rich
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How my NPR colleague failed at “viewpoint diversity”
my colleague’s article was filled with errors and omissions. And having given my opinion in public, it’s fair that I should show my work in this space, where I often discuss NPR and journalism more broadly. Nothing I say here is personal; it’s about the journalism. I’ve already told Uri much of what I am telling you, and I have taken his responses seriously. He told me he loves NPR and wants to make it better.
If Uri wanted to start a discussion about journalism at NPR, he succeeded, though maybe not in the way he intended. His colleagues have had a rich dialogue about his mistakes. The errors do make NPR look bad, because it’s embarrassing that an NPR journalist would make so many. NPR correspondent Eyder Peralta wrote on Facebook, “There are a few bits of truth in this… but it mostly suffers from the same thing it accuses NPR of doing. It is myopic and uses a selective reading to serve the author’s world views.” The errors are so numerous that his defenders—and he has some!—have taken to admitting them, then adding words to the effect of: I hope this doesn’t obscure his “larger point”!
I discussed one example on stage in San Antonio. The article made headlines for Uri’s claim that he “looked at voter registration for our newsroom” in Washington, D.C., and found his “editorial” colleagues were unanimously registered Democrats—87 Democrats, 0 Republicans. I am a prominent member of the newsroom in Washington. If Uri told the truth, then I could only be a registered Democrat. I held up a screenshot of my voter registration showing I am registered with “no party.” Some in the crowd gasped. Uri had misled them.
Electric / Self Driving cars
Rank Propaganda / Thought Policing / World Disordering
Musk
Trump / War against the Right / Jan6
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Truth Social is a mind-bending win for Donald Trump (Archive)
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Officials said the man was in critical condition after setting himself on fire across the street from the courthouse in Manhattan.
My name is Max Azzarello, and I am an investigative researcher who has set himself on fire outside of the Trump trial in Manhattan. This extreme act of protest is to draw attention to an urgent and important discovery: We are victims of a totalitarian con, and our own government (along with many of their allies) is about to hit us with an apocalyptic fascist world coup.
These claims sound like fantastical conspiracy theory, but they are not. They are proof of conspiracy. If you investigate this mountain of research, you will prove them too. If you learn a great deal about Ponzi schemes, you will discover that our life is a lie. If you follow this story and the links below, you will discover the rotten truth of ‘post-truth America’. You will learn the scariest and stupidest story in world history. And you will realize that we are all in a desperate state of emergency that requires your action.
One of the key findings of this research is that Harvard University is one of the largest organized crime fronts in history, which is how they churn out billionaires – it’s a major hub of this sprawling criminal network. As it turns out, dozens of the writers of The Simpsons went to Harvard. So I asked myself the question: If The Simpsons served the interests of organized crime, how would it do so? ... we realize the criminal truth of The Simpsons: Our elites are telling us that our eroding collective circumstances are our own fault, and we can’t do anything about it, while they steal the American Dream from us. It is, for lack of a more elegant word, brainwashing.
we string these major discoveries together: Cryptocurrency is an economic doomsday device; our government is a secret kleptocracy; The Simpsons exists to brainwash us. From there, the only research we need is critical thinking and we’re able to piece together the true story of our circumstances.
Religion / Tribal / Culture War and Re-Segregation
Edumacationalizing / Acedemia Nuts
Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising
TechSuck / Geek Bait
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Raw flux streams and obscure formats: Further work around imaging 5.25-inch floppy disks
This started our quest of finding a different floppy controller, and after a suggestion from the Senior Technical Specialist at CUL, both CUL and CAC invested in a GreaseWeazle. This controller sits between a computer and a floppy drive, and like similar products such as the FluxEngine and Kryoflux, can read and save raw flux streams. GreaseWeazle and FluxEngine, whose software can be used on the GreaseWeazle hardware, also include recognised floppy disk profiles to convert raw flux streams into binary data. This is needed to make it possible to access the actual files on the floppy disk.
Acquiring a working 5.25-inch floppy disk drive was more challenging than expected. CUL had several drives in their collection, kindly donated to the Digital Preservation lab at an earlier point. However, it was quickly discovered that these drives were made for double-density disks, meaning that they were unable to read and image the more modern high-density disks. This was a problem, as the high-density disk drives can read double-density disks but not the other way around. As most of the disks in the CAC collections are high-density, a different drive needed to be sourced. Leontien then emailed to University technology listserv to ask if anyone had a high-density floppy disk drive they would be happy to donate or lend to the University Library. In total, six drives were donated.
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There are a wide range of Z80 based MCU's. None of them are DIP models, unfortunately, but none of the model numbers for those MCU's are on the list of end-of-life components. It basically looks like the DIP models, specifically, are going EoL.
AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World
Space / Boomy Zoomers / UFO
Crypto con games
Economicon / Business / Finance
Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making
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TikTok divest-or-ban legislation could suddenly be fast-tracked in the Senate
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Outraged Papua New Guinea academics have slammed President Joe Biden for his 'unacceptable' suggestion that his uncle was eaten by cannibals in the country after his plane was shot down during World War II. Biden implied on two occasions Wednesday that his maternal uncle 2nd Lieutenant Ambrose J. Finnegan had met a grisly end at the hands of cannibals after his plane was shot down by the enemy over New Guinea in 1944. But the White House and official defense records confirmed that Finnegan died when the military plane he was in experienced engine failure and crashed into the Pacific Ocean, not over land.
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Congressional Testimony on Sect 230 Was So Wrong It Should Be Struck from Record
Because Stanger’s submission was so far off the mark that whoever invited her should be embarrassed. I’ve seen some people testify before Congress without knowing what they’re talking about, but I cannot recall seeing testimony this completely, bafflingly wrong before. Her submitted testimony is wrong in all the ways that the Wired article was wrong and more. There are just blatant factual errors throughout it.
Also, um, decentralized social media can only really exist because of Section 230. “Without Section 230,” you wouldn’t have Bluesky or Mastodon, because they would face ruinous litigation for hosting content that people would sue over. So, no, you would not have either more decentralized social media (which I think is what you meant) or DAOs (which are wholly unrelated). You’d have a lot less, because hosting third-party speech would come with way more liability risk.
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IMF sounds alarm on ballooning US national debt: ‘Something will have to give.’
The United States is floating on a giant pumped-up air mattress of excess federal spending and no one has had the guts to say so. Not Fed Chair Jay Powell, who wants to keep his job and pretends to be mystified that the economy continues to grow; not Janet Yellen, who exchanged her supposed economic expertise for political boomerism the minute she became Joe Biden’s Treasury secretary. Certainly not the financial media, which is all in for Biden’s reelection.
Finally, the IMF is saying out loud what has been obvious for more than a year: “The exceptional recent performance of the U.S. is certainly impressive … but it reflects strong demand factors as well, including a fiscal stance that is out of line with long-term fiscal sustainability.” That’s a polite way of saying the Biden White House and its Democrat collaborators are spending like drunken sailors and it has to stop. It will not, of course, because in the months leading up to the November election President Biden will be tossing out taxpayer dollars like confetti, hoping to attract voters unhappy with the direction of the country.
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US considers scrapping its cutting-edge proposal to slash power plant pollution
Law Breaking / Police / Internal Security
External Security / Militaria / Diplomania
World
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Germany arrests two for alleged military sabotage plot on behalf of Russia
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Poles 40% richer than they would be without EU membership, finds report
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Infected blood scandal: Children were used as 'guinea pigs' in clinical trials
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Drug shortages, now normal in UK, made worse by Brexit, report warns
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Luxury car sales plunge as buyers put off by Korea's neon green licence plates
Israel
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Explosions in Isfahan amid fears of Israeli retaliation to Iran.
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Tehran is saying it has no plans for further retaliation following the oddly toothless, performative response from Israel. Officially, Iran and its state media are even referring to the attack incident as having been done by "infiltrators" while not readily naming Israel, also declaring that the aggression 'failed'. So far, it is looking like none of Iran's nuclear facilities were actually hit.
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Reuters photographer wins World Press Photo Contest with poignant shot from Gaza
China
Health / Medicine
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Paying Off People’s Medical Debt Has Little Impact on Their Lives, Study Finds - The New York Times
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KitKat owner Nestlé fights off push to cut back on unhealthy products
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Hospital prices for the same emergency care vary up to 16X, study finds
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Ketamine bladder: Special clinics as youth addiction 'explodes'
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Two Hunters from the Same Lodge Afflicted with Sporadic CJD: Is CWD to Blame?
Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda
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Ocean spray emits more PFAS than industrial polluters, study finds
Ocean waves crashing on the world’s shores emit more PFAS into the air than the world’s industrial polluters, new research has found, raising concerns about environmental contamination and human exposure along coastlines. The study measured levels of PFAS released from the bubbles that burst when waves crash, spraying aerosols into the air. It found sea spray levels were hundreds of thousands times higher than levels in the water.
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Internet data centers are fueling drive to old power source: Coal
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Insects and Other Animals Have Consciousness, Experts Declare
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The EPA is again allowing summer sales of higher ethanol gasoline blend