2024-05-02

etc

• Meteorologists awed by rare type of tornado (anti-cyclonic)

Horseshit

• Billionaires should pay minimum 2% wealth tax, say G20 ministers

• Something's Rotten in the State of Washington

  Twenty-two years ago a group of Boeing Aerospace Engineers wrote a detailed letter describing how corporate management was leading the major plane manufacturer to its eventual demise, through out-sourcing, cost-cutting, layoffs, and mismanagement, with prescient warnings of how this would impact safety, reliability, and ultimately exact a toll of innocent lives.

  What has happened in the intervening years is exactly that - a long and sordid list of violations, blunders, mismanagements, cost-overruns, preventable disasters, and more recently, what appears to be violent and murderous cover-up of whistleblowers.

• 1000s of homes may be left without heat if remote control firm ceases trading

• Society is hungry for a hero: I Watched a Guy Eat a Barrel of Cheeseballs

  Next he brandished the jar of cheeseballs. (Eagle-eyed observers may notice it is not the same jar depicted in the poster — a lavender-tinted 36.5 oz Utz canister — but rather a clear Munch King barrel, weighing in at 13 oz. As “Munch King,” seems more aligned with his personal brand, I am willing to overlook the discrepancy.)

  “Wow, I was not expecting a thousand people to be here,” he said, sheepishly surveying the growing crowd. “So, uh, if you can’t see I’m sorry about that. I’m going to eat as many of these cheeseballs as possible before the NYPD chases me off!”

• Game-changing new condoms can be rolled on pre-erection — up to two hours before sex.

Electric / Self Driving cars

• US opens probe into 130k Ford vehicles over hands-free tech

Obit

• Paul Auster, the Patron Saint of Literary Brooklyn, Dies at 77

  • Paul Auster, American author of The New York Trilogy, dies aged 77

Rank Propaganda / Thought Policing / World Disordering

• Stasi in the West

Musk

• Tesla is already pulling back Supercharger plans after firing team

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

• Tesla staff say firm's entire Supercharger team fired

• Elon Musk Took $17M in Federal Charging Grants Before Firing Supercharger Team

• Tesla uses new Texas law to avoid Austin's environmental regulations

• How Tesla is changing product life cycle in the car industry

• LinkedIn's traffic is up 18%, while X down 10%

• Why China is defeating Tesla

Trump / War against the Right / Jan6

• Trump's most revealing quotes yet on what he'll do if he wins in 2024

• Trump New York trial: Jailing former president could spark ‘mass protests,’ experts say.

• Book Review: The Origins Of Woke - by Scott Alexander

  The claimed thesis is “the cultural package of wokeness is downstream of civil rights law”. It goes pretty hard on this. For example, there’s the title, The Origins Of Woke. Or the Amazon blurb: “The roots of the culture lie not in the culture itself, but laws and regulations enacted decades ago”. The other thesis, the one it actually argues for, is “US civil rights law is bad”. On its own, this is a fine thesis. A book called Civil Rights Law Is Bad would - okay, I admit that despite being a professional Internet writer I have no idea how the culture works anymore, or whether being outrageous is good or bad for sales these days. We’ll never know, because Richard chose to wrap his argument in a few pages on how maybe this is the origin of woke or something. Still, the book is on why civil rights law is bad.

  Vaclav Havel talks about the indignity of life under communism. You weren’t allowed to just do your job and pay your taxes and follow the laws of the communist state. You had to be actively complicit. You had to act enthusiastic about the communism, force it upon others, inform on your colleagues and punish deviation - at least if anybody was going to check later. This kind of communism didn’t just hurt your pocketbook. It damaged your soul. It molded you into a worse and uglier type of person who would eventually abandon their better impulses in order to justify their actions to themselves.

  This is how Hanania thinks of civil rights law. Business owners can’t just give blacks ten extra points on the screening test and call it a day. They have to favor blacks while insisting to everyone that they don’t do this and it’s perfectly fair and they love civil rights law. They have to twist their employment criteria into some kind of illegible monstrosity so nobody can notice all the favoritism they’re doing, then tell everybody that they believe the monstrosity is “fairer”. They have to hire a bunch of diversity coordinators - not because they’re required to hire diversity coordinators, it’s not a requirement - but because they love equality so so much (and if they don’t do this, they’ll get sued for seemingly unrelated reasons). Everyone faces a constant threat of lawsuits which can only be warded against by seeming maximally woke and maximally enthusiastic and maximally happy about all the idiotic fake laws you are being forced to comply with.

  my impression of Hanania’s place in the ecosystem is that he’s not writing this for you or me. He’s writing this for a group of conservative heavyweights who will set policy if Trump wins in November. He’s reminding them that civil rights law exists, that it’s against conservative principles, and that it’s pretty easy for a president to repeal large parts of it. All the rest of the book is just a booster stage to help it reach those people.

Pox / COVID / BioTerror AgitProp

• AstraZeneca Admits That its Covid Vaccine Can Cause Blood Clotting Side Effect.

  • AstraZeneca admits its Covid vaccine cause rare side effect in court documents

• Virologist who was first to share Covid genome sleeps on street after lab shuts

• High levels of immunity complicate efforts to test Covid vaccines and treatments

• Bird Flu in Raw Cow Milk Has Killed Farm Cats in a Concerning First.

Religion / Tribal / Culture War and Re-Segregation

• The NBA Bubble: how Black players performed better without fans

• Two Experts Advocate Monthly Stipends to Curb Black-on-Black Crime

• United Methodist Church lifts bans on LGBTQ clergy and same-sex weddings

Edumacationalizing / Acedemia Nuts

• NYPD storms into Columbia University to clear out anti-Israel mob

  • NYC doctor, anti-Israel protester among 282 arrested at Columbia, City College of NY

  One student, who only identified herself as Melissa, said Wednesday she and others were peacefully protesting when the raid occurred. “Last night we experienced extreme police brutality. Despite peaceful, peaceful, protest, the police ambushed us,” she said, adding that her pinkie was injured after being handcuffed.

• Pro-Palestine campus group behind Columbia University protests received over $3million a year in funding from 'charities' linked to Hamas

  Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), a campus group with more than 250 chapters across the country, is one of the main organizers of a protest that brought the Manhattan university to a standstill. The new report by the think tank Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy (ISGAP), reveals the group got millions from several charities with alleged links to Hamas.

• Opinion | 2024 Was the Year That Broke College Admissions - The New York Times

• Harvard applications drop 5% after year of turmoil on the Ivy League campus

• UCLA protester says ‘Zionist thugs’ released rats into anti-Israel encampment.

• It’s Not Just Gaza: Student Protesters See Links to a Global Struggle - The New York Times

  In many students’ eyes, the war in Gaza is linked to other issues, such as policing, mistreatment of Indigenous people, racism and the impact of climate change.

• Biden forgives more than $6B in loans for 317,000 Art Institutes students

  President Biden announced on Wednesday that the White House would forgive more than $6.1 billion on student loan debt for 317,000 borrowers who attended The Art Institutes, a private art school system in the U.S. that shuttered last year. The relief will apply to students who were enrolled in the school system between January 1, 2004 and October 16, 2017, during which the U.S. Department of Education found that The Art Institutes made "pervasive and substantial misrepresentations to prospective students about postgraduation employment rates, salaries, and career services during that time," according to a statement from the DOE.

Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising

• JPEG XL and Google's War Against It

• Most Americans see TikTok as a Chinese influence tool, Reuters/Ipsos poll finds

• Please Don’t Share Our Links on Mastodon

  We tried it on our Mastodon profile, and every time we shared a link, we were able to successfully make our website unresponsive or slow to load. Presently, we use Cloudflare as our CDN or WAF, as it is a widely adopted solution.

  • Wonder what they're paying cloudflare for, if not a solution to "too much traffic".

• LaserDisc - The first mass market optical media

  The final LaserDisc released in the USA was Bringing Out the Dead in 2000. The quality of both DVD players and discs improved quickly, the prices quickly dropped, and by 2001, DVD players were outselling VCRs in the USA. Despite the big disc format’s demise in the States, it continued in Japan for some time until Pioneer announced its final batch of three thousand players on the 14th of January in 2009

  just as early CDs and DVDs are starting to have some issues, LaserDiscs are also starting to die. On lower quality media, the aluminum layer slowly oxidizes making the disc unreadable. In other cases, the glue used to bind them is giving way as they weren’t well stored.

• Two giants in the satellite telecom industry join forces to counter Starlink

• Net neutrality restored as FCC votes to regulate internet providers

• AWS S3 storage bucket with unlucky name nearly cost developer $1,300

  Ask Maciej Pocwierz, who just happened to pick an S3 name that "one of the popular open-source tools" used for its default backup configuration. After setting up the bucket for a client project, he checked his billing page and found nearly 100 million unauthorized attempts to create new files on his bucket (PUT requests) within one day. The bill was over $1,300 and counting.

  • see also: 867-5309/Jenny - Wikipedia

• Chinese-owned Riot installs rootkit on every League of Legends players' computer

• CenturyLink left users with no service for two months, then billed them $239

• Cheating Site Ashley Madison Is Overflowing with Sextortionists

• Apple working to fix alarming iPhone issue

• Take-Two Interactive Shuts Down Kerbal Space Program Studio Intercept Games

TechSuck / Geek Bait

• HN Jobs:

  • Ask HN: Who is hiring? (May 2024)

  • Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (May 2024)

  • Ask HN: Freelancer? Seeking freelancer? (May 2024)

• Here's your chance to own a decommissioned US Government supercomputer

• After years of telling motherboard makers to set PL1 = PL2, Intel now says not to do that, and also that it never said to do that.

• Every SSD is SLC if you try hard enough.

• Hacker free-for-all fights for control of home and office routers everywhere | Ars Technica

AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World

• Eight newspapers sue OpenAI, Microsoft for copyright infringement

  • Eight newspaper publishers sue Microsoft and OpenAI over copyright infringement

• Artificial intelligence has psychological impacts -our brains might not be ready

• Microsoft's billion-dollar OpenAI investment was trigged by Google fears

Space / Boomy Zoomers / UFO

• Europe's ambitious satellite Internet project appears to be running into trouble

Crypto con games

• Crypto washout sends Bitcoin below $58,000 ahead of Fed decision

• Bitcoin drops all the way below $57,000 and into a bear market

• Tether stablecoin makes 4.5B in profit in Q1

Economicon / Business / Finance

• Amazon profit more than triples

• The Dow plunges 570 points as hopes for an interest rate cut fade.

• Are Amazon's Increased Margins Good or Bad News for the Rest of Us?

• Google lays off hundreds of ‘core’ employees

• McDonald's and other big brands warn that low-income consumers starting to crack

Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making

• FTC passes a law - Don Surber

  The Federal Trade Commission passed a law that makes it illegal for a person to agree with his employer not to compete against them when he leaves. Usually compensation is involved. These are called noncompete agreements — a contract between two private parties. Why this is any of the government’s business is beyond my powers of comprehension. The constitutionality of this ban also escapes me. Congress should make law — not a group of befuddled bureaucrats and a panel of politically appointed pinheads.

• White House considers welcoming some Palestinians from war-torn Gaza as refugees.

• Automatic emergency braking at speeds up to 90mph required under new rule

• Google urges US to update immigration rules to attract more AI talent

• House passes GOP antisemitism bill amid college unrest

• AM radio law opposed by tech and auto industries is close to passing

Law Breaking / Police / Internal Security

• Federal prosecutors are examining financial transactions at Cash App and Square

  • Feds Scrutinizing Block's Square And Cash App, Eyeing If Transactions Funded Terror And Skirted Sanctions | ZeroHedge

  Questions about the company started swirling back in March 2023 when short seller Hindenburg Research released a report called "Block: How Inflated User Metrics and “Frictionless” Fraud Facilitation Enabled Insiders To Cash Out Over $1 Billion". In it, they concluded that "the 'magic' behind Block’s business has not been disruptive innovation, but rather the company’s willingness to facilitate fraud against consumers and the government, avoid regulation, dress up predatory loans and fees as revolutionary technology, and mislead investors with inflated metrics."

• What the data says about crime in the U.S.

  All those caveats aside, looking at the FBI and BJS statistics side-by-side does give researchers a good picture of U.S. violent and property crime rates and how they have changed over time. Both the FBI and BJS data show dramatic declines in U.S. violent and property crime rates since the early 1990s, when crime spiked across much of the nation. Using the FBI data, the violent crime rate fell 49% between 1993 and 2022, with large decreases in the rates of robbery (-74%), aggravated assault (-39%) and murder/nonnegligent manslaughter (-34%). It’s not possible to calculate the change in the rape rate during this period because the FBI revised its definition of the offense in 2013.

  Using the BJS statistics, the declines in the violent and property crime rates are even steeper than those captured in the FBI data. Per BJS, the U.S. violent and property crime rates each fell 71% between 1993 and 2022. While crime rates have fallen sharply over the long term, the decline hasn’t always been steady. There have been notable increases in certain kinds of crime in some years, including recently. In 2020, for example, the U.S. murder rate saw its largest single-year increase on record – and by 2022, it remained considerably higher than before the coronavirus pandemic. Preliminary data for 2023, however, suggests that the murder rate fell substantially last year.

  Americans tend to believe crime is up, even when official data shows it is down.

  • The U.S. crime rate is still dropping, FBI data shows

World

• The European Union's remarkable growth performance relative to the United States

• Thankfully, There Are No Russia-EU Fertilizer Pipelines For West To Blow Up  | ZeroHedge

  "Fertilizer is the new gas," CEO Svein Tore Holsether told the Financial Times in an interview, adding, "It is a paradox that the aim is to reduce Europe's dependency on Russia, and then now we are sleepwalking into handing over critical food and fertilizing power to Russia."

Russia Bad / Ukraine War

• Russian GPS jamming threatens air disaster, warn Baltic ministers

China

• Why China is so bad at disinformation

• China May Be Preparing to Deploy Economic ‘Nuclear Option.’

• China's Electric Cars Keep Improving, a Worry for Rivals Elsewhere

• Americans Are Open to Cheap Chinese Cars. That's Scary for the Auto Industry

• China's Population Could Shrink to Half by 2100

• China unveils video of its moon base plans, which includes NASA space shuttle

• War prep is why Xi Jinping is afraid to unleash China's consumers

Health / Medicine

• J&J will pay $6.5B to resolve nearly all talc ovarian cancer lawsuits in US

• First documented cases of HIV transmitted through cosmetic needles

• Exercise Helps Your Brain as Much as Your Body

• Medical Skepticism Is On the Rise. Here’s How Doctors Are Responding.

Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda

• America’s Wind Power Production Drops for the First Time in 25 Years

• Most clean power purchasing strategies do little to cut emissions

• Silicon Valley is enamored with a company that pumps poop underground

• Tire toxicity faces fresh scrutiny after salmon die-offs

  Regulators have only begun to address the toxic tire problem, though there has been some action on 6PPD. The chemical was identified by a team of researchers, led by scientists at Washington State University and the University of Washington, who were trying to determine why coho salmon returning to Seattle-area creeks to spawn were dying in large numbers. Working for the Washington Stormwater Center, the scientists tested some 2,000 substances to determine which one was causing the die-offs, and in 2020 they announced they'd found the culprit: 6PPD.

• Calling Out Climate Lies for a Living

  After a dozen years unmasking lies and five years before that overseeing UCS’s media relations operation, I am leaving the organization. But before I walk out the door, I wanted to provide a retrospective of some of my columns on the biggest sponsors of climate disinformation in the country: ExxonMobil CEO Darren Woods, his predecessor, Rex Tillerson, and Charles Koch, CEO of the coal, oil and gas conglomerate Koch Industries.

• CO2 Pipelines Are Big Oil's New Mode of Destruction

• Sustainability Activists Take Aim at Disposable Hotel Slippers