2024-05-01

etc

• Emotion can also cause chickens to get red in the face

• There's no need to shower every day – here's why

• Massive U.S. Nuclear Plant Is Finally Complete. It Might Be the Last of Its Kind

Horseshit

• California reverses its population-loss streak

• Desire for loud car predicted by being a man: higher psychopathy and sadism

• Priest fired after spending $40k on Candy Crush

• Andrew Tate ruthlessly mocked for claiming having sex with women is gay.

  Self-proclaimed misogynist influencer Andrew Tate has been ruthlessly mocked online after claiming it’s “gay” for men to have sex with women for pleasure. The 37-year-old, who is currently detained in Romania awaiting criminal trial on rape and human trafficking charges, insisted in a post on X that sex is solely “for making children” and that any man who has sex for pleasure is gay.

• Missing Delta Emergency Slide Found by Lawyer Suing Boeing

Electric / Self Driving cars

• You Could Buy the Entire Fisker Company for Less Than the Founder’s Home Costs.

• All Cars Sold in the US Will Soon Have to Be Able to Automatically Avoid a Crash

celebrity gossip

• Richard Stallman's Talk in Spain Canceled (At Short Notice)

Rank Propaganda / Thought Policing / World Disordering

• Meta faces EU probe over Russian disinformation

Musk

• "Everyone is in complete shock": Tesla cuts Supercharger employees

• Musk lays off Tesla senior executives in fresh job cuts, The Information reports

• Tesla to lay off everyone working on Superchargers, new vehicles

• Elon Musk fires Tesla's entire supercharger team

• Elon Musk issues brutal email to Tesla staff as he goes ‘absolutely hardcore’ and fires two senior executives, his entire Supercharger team, and moves to lay off hundreds more employees.

• Musk disbands Tesla EV charging team, leaving customers in the dark

• Tesla's Biggest Problem: Cars

• Elon Musk's Political Outbursts Have Turned Off Tesla's Core Buyers

• Tesla wants to monetize its cars to process AI workloads

Pox / COVID / BioTerror AgitProp

• The FTC has ordered Razer - a computer and mouse manufacturer - to refund all customers of the Razer Zephyr and pay a $100,000 fine.

  • Razer made to pay $1.2M over 'N95' face mask that wasn't

  • FTC fines Razer for every cent made selling bogus "N95 grade" RGB masks

• WHO overturned dogma on how airborne diseases spread. Will the CDC act on it?

Edumacationalizing / Acedemia Nuts

• Columbia Suspends Media Access to Campus ‘As a Safety Measure.’

• Survey: Many Gen Zers Say School Lacks a 'Sense of Purpose,' Isn't 'Motivating'

• Majority of arrests at UT Austin’s Gaza Camp were not UT students | The Post Millennial | thepostmillennial.com

  UT Spokesperson Mike Rosen told the Austin American-Statesman that based on preliminary numbers, 46 of 77 people arrested Monday were not students, though it is unclear whether this number included faculty or staff members.

• Riot Cops invade US University to enforce affirmative action for zionists

Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising

• Americans Might Lose Internet Access Today

• Reddit is full of bots: thread reposted comment by comment, 10 months later | Hacker News

• Why I'm Resigning From The Intercept - Ken Klippenstein

  I resigned from The Intercept today in order to pursue a new kind of journalism here on Substack, one more hard-hitting than what’s possible in the corporate world. The Intercept has been taken over by suits who have abandoned its founding mission of fearless and adversarial journalism, and I can’t continue in an environment where fear of funders is more important than journalism itself. On a brighter note, though, I’m leaving DC to move back to Wisconsin, excited to embrace independence both in my journalism and from the Washington bubble. The reason so much of the news media sucks is they aren’t writing for you. They’re writing for their sources in Washington, for the industries they cover, for rich people, and for fancy awards committees. Just take a look at the ads they run: for investment banks, defense contractors, oil companies. Unless you’re in the market for any of these products, they aren’t writing for you. I want to write for you.

• Why do the Japanese love CDs?

• Roku OS home screen is getting video ads for the first time.

• Screenshots suggest TikTok is circumventing Apple App Store commissions

• It'd be nice if advertising disclosed the price paid for the ad: With ‘Challengers’ and ‘Saltburn,’ Hollywood Movies Embrace Sex Again - The New York Times

  There is erotic churro eating. “Sex is back!” shouted an apparently elated man at the conclusion of a prerelease “Challengers” screening in West Hollywood, Calif., this month. “It absolutely feels like the pendulum has swung back toward filmmakers exploring adult relationships and sexuality in their projects,” said Amy Pascal, the former chairwoman of Sony Pictures and producing force behind “Challengers.”

• Twitter co-founder Biz Stone joins board of Mastodon's new US nonprofit

• Apple banned Delta for years. It's now America's Number 1 iPhone app.

TechSuck / Geek Bait

• Hitting every branch on the way down

• Turn Your Qualcomm Phone Or Modem Into Cellular Sniffer

• Bruce Perens Proposes Draft Post-Open Zero Cost License

• Shared post - Is the GNOME Foundation Going to Go Bankrupt in 1 Year?

• Nifty Printing Music with CSS Grid

AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World

• Mercury News and other papers sue Microsoft, OpenAI

  • Major newspapers join legal backlash against OpenAI, Microsoft

  • Eight US newspapers sue OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement

  • New York Daily News, Chicago Tribune, and Others Sue OpenAI and Microsoft

• A New AI Has Supposedly Achieved Sentience

• Google sued by US artists over AI image generator

• Why Doesn't AI Want to Show Me Jesus Washing the Feet of His Disciples?

  I was playing with an AI image generator, trying to get an image of Jesus washing someone’s feet. I had always thought that he had washed the feet of lepers specifically or poor people generally, but I can only find biblical evidence of him washing the disciples. In any event, the passage from John has long been seen as particularly evocative, and correspondingly has been a very common image in the history of Christian art, as a simple Google search will show. And yet I can’t for the life of me get an AI to generate such an image. It’s odd.

  If I were to anthropomorphize, which I shouldn’t, I might guess that they’re thinking “Jesus is a leader, so he’d be getting his feet washed by his followers, not the other way around.” Alternatively, I allllllmost wonder if this is a product of the kind of guardrails they’ve had to put on these tools so that they’re not offensive; maybe, somehow, their parameters suggest that it would be offensive to portray Jesus in a subservient position. Which is funny because, you know, the whole thing about Jesus was his disinterest in worldly concerns about status.

Crypto con games

• Bitcoin falls to $61000 as Hong Kong crypto ETFs fail to impress investors

• CZ of Binance sentenced to 4 months in prison

  • Binance founder Changpeng Zhao sentenced to four months in prison

  • Binance Founder Sentenced to Four Months in Prison

  • Binance founder Changpeng Zhao sentenced to four months in prison

• DoJ Charges 'Bitcoin Jesus' With Tax Fraud | ZeroHedge

Economicon / Business / Finance

• Europeans can't afford the US anymore

• Boeing is borrowing $10 billion as it burns cash fixing its issues.

• SES to acquire Intelsat for $3.1B – SpaceNews

• The surprising reason few Americans are getting chips jobs now

• Walmart Targets Gen-Z With Cheap Private Label Food As Youngsters Struggle In Era Of Failed Bidenomics | ZeroHedge

• Bill comes due for money-losing tech companies that borrowed billions

• PG&E Nears Deal with KKR for Stake in Power Business Spinoff

• US Labor Costs Accelerate to 1.2%, Biggest Advance in a Year

• US consumer confidence hits lowest level since July 2022

• Starbucks shares sink 8% as same-store sales fall, quarterly results miss

Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making

• After decades of inaction, states are finally stepping up on housing

• US drug control agency will move to reclassify marijuana

  The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration will move to reclassify marijuana as a less dangerous drug, The Associated Press has learned, a historic shift to generations of American drug policy that could have wide ripple effects across the country.

  • HN comments

  • US drug control agency will move to reclassify marijuana in a historic shift

• New HUD energy rules raise the cost of a new home by $31K. Payback time 90 years

• Fox News Reports on the Soros Network Paying Protesters at Palestinian Tent Cities; Rep. Comer Vows Congress Will “Follow the Money” and Expose the Dark Money Networks

Law Breaking / Police / Internal Security

• UnitedHealth CEO: 'Decision to pay ransom was mine'

• Victims of harassment by federal judges often find judiciary is above the law

• How the crime of counterfeiting is making a comeback

External Security / Militaria / Diplomania

• Soaring US munitions demand strains support for Israel, Ukraine, Taiwan

World

• EU opens formal proceedings against Meta under the DSA

• Indian spies booted out of Australia for trying to steal sensitive information

• Japanese government spent $35B to prop up yen, BoJ figures suggest

• Dear Europe, please wake up

• Deep Beneath London, Onetime Bomb Shelters Will Become a Tourist Attraction

• Who is jamming airliners' GPS in the Baltic?

• Javier Milei's tax and state reform bills approved by Argentina's lower house

Israel

• US military pier for Gaza costs $320 million, Pentagon says.

China

• China's small towns thrive as more opt out of demanding megacity life

• Tensions grow as China ramps up global mining for green tech

• China has a controversial plan for brain computer interfaces

Health / Medicine

• Only half of atrial fibrillation patients survive another 10 years

• National panel lowers mammogram screening age to 40

• Imagine living in a 4-foot body that doesn't develop chronic diseases

• Some psychedelic drug users are stuck with unwelcome highs

• FTC challenges 'junk' patents held by 10 drugmakers, incl Novo Nordisk's Ozempic

  • FTC challenges junk patent listings for blockbuster prescription medications

• Response to Hanson's Response On Health Care

  I acknowledge he’s the expert on his own opinion, so I guess I must be misrepresenting him, and I apologize. But I can’t figure out how these claims fit together coherently with what he’s said in the past. So I’ll lay out my thoughts on why that is, and he can decide if this is worth another post where he clarifies his position.

  • Second Response to Alexander on Medicine - by Robin Hanson

  I also agree with Scott that he isn’t the only person to misunderstand me. So let me try again. Every study on the marginal effect of medicine has some way it operationalizes “marginal medicine” for the purpose of that study. In geographic variation studies, it is the medicine done in places that spend more on medicine, but not in places that spend less. For studies that compare large to small hospitals, it is the treatments done in large but not small hospitals. For experiments that vary the price of medicine or insurance, it is the medicine chosen by subjects who faced lower prices, but not chosen by those who faced higher prices. I remember at some point also suggesting using treatments with a lower Cochrane Review rating. My key point was and is that each of these operationalized definitions of “marginal medicine” offers a concrete way to avoid marginal medicine.

• Walmart will close all of its health care clinics

Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda

• Activists thrilled after parts of agriculture law deemed unconstitutional

• America's Wind Power Production Drops for the first time in 25 Years

• (PDF) Big Oil's Evolving Efforts to Avoid Accountability for Climate Change

• Greenpeace Crusade Against Golden Rice Will Blind and Kill Children

• At plastic treaty talks, sharp disagreements on whether to limit production