2024-05-03
Worthy
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ounger users may not appreciate this, but there were front-page-of-the-newspaper (... newspapers used to have paper pages, one of them was considered most important, it was a different time…) stories that scared large parts of the population that if you typed your credit card number into any keyboard it would be stolen by hackers. There was a purported raft of fake e-commerce sites where bad guys would spend millions of dollars to create convincing facsimiles of real e-commerce sites, just to steal your credit card details. This was probably never actually a major threat by percentage of all stolen cards, not when these articles were written or afterwards, but this would not be the first or last time that the media convinced itself of an untruth and then was unable to find an industry insider to leak them a SQL query dispelling their fantasies. (The largest source of purloined credit card information is scaled breaches of card issuers or companies that were legitimately presented hundreds of thousands or millions of cards in commerce. Organized crime does not outscale capitalism; the threat is when it gets to piggyback illegitimately on capitalism.)
And so that was the initial value proposition of Paypal: convey money from your own payment instruments to others on the Internet (by volume, mostly eBay auction sellers) without needing to show those potential devious hackers your actual credit card number. That way, your exposure was upper-bounded at the single transaction in progress, and hopefully Paypal or your bank could intervene if something went wrong.
etc
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After a Long Stretch of Darkness, the Bay Bridge Lights Are Returning
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What Makes a Society More Resilient? Frequent Hardship. - The New York Times
Comparing 30,000 years of human history, researchers found that surviving famine, war or climate change helps groups recover more quickly from future shocks.
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This is the way 1968 ends... - by Benjamin Kerstein
There is a terrible logic to radical movements. They begin as expressions of a sort of idealism or at least what their followers perceive to be idealism. But they run headlong into a world that is not ideal. A world that, in its fundamental indifference, is not interested in idealism. A world that is, in its way, immovable. This cannot but frustrate and enrage the radical, who is not capable of accepting a world in which everything changes and nothing changes; in which all is flux but everything ultimately returns to itself. As a result, radicalism ultimately arrives at a point at which it can no longer stand the frustration of its messianic ambitions. Out of bitter vengeance, it decides to destroy the world and, along with the world, itself.
Horseshit
Boeing
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Whistleblower who accused Boeing supplier of ignoring defects dies
Joshua Dean, a former Spirit AeroSystems employee who alleged he was fired in retaliation for flagging lax standards at the company’s Wichita, Kansas, manufacturing plant, died on Tuesday after a sudden illness, his aunts and sister said in posts on social media.
Dean’s mother wrote in a Facebook post last month that her son was “fighting for his life” after contracting pneumonia and suffering a stroke following an MRSA infection. The Seattle Times, which first reported his death, said Dean was 45 years old and had “been in good health and was noted for having a healthy lifestyle”.
Parsons said Dean became ill and went to the hospital because he was having trouble breathing just over two weeks ago. He was intubated and developed pneumonia and then a serious bacterial infection, MRSA. His condition deteriorated rapidly, and he was airlifted from Wichita to a hospital in Oklahoma City, Parsons said. There he was put on an ECMO machine, which circulates and oxygenates a patient’s blood outside the body, taking over heart and lung function when a patient’s organs don’t work on their own. His mother posted a message Friday on Facebook relating all those details and saying that Dean was “fighting for his life.”
Dean was represented by a law firm in South Carolina that also represented Boeing whistleblower John “Mitch” Barnett. Barnett was found dead in an apparent suicide in March. He was in the midst of giving depositions alleging Boeing retaliated against him for complaints about quality lapses when he was found dead from a gunshot wound in Charleston, S.C., where Boeing has its 787 manufacturing facility. The Charleston County Coroner’s Office reported Barnett’s death appeared to be “from a self-inflicted gunshot wound.” Almost two months later, the police investigation into his death is still ongoing.
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Second Boeing whistleblower dies after raising concerns about 737 MAX
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if you really believe Boeing has adopted Putin-style assassination, unfollow me and go away
Electric / Self Driving cars
Rank Propaganda / Thought Policing / World Disordering
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On 14 March, Meta announced it would abandon CrowdTangle, the tool used by tens of thousands of journalists, watchdogs, and election observers to monitor the integrity of elections around the world. Meta will shut down CrowdTangle on 14 August, without an effective replacement, ahead of elections in the United States, Brazil, and Australia and in the wake of elections in India, South Africa, and Mexico — endangering both pre- and post election monitoring.
Meta’s decision will effectively prohibit the outside world, including election integrity experts, from seeing what’s happening on Facebook and Instagram — during the biggest election year on record. This means almost all outside efforts to identify and prevent political disinformation, incitements to violence, and online harassment of women and minorities will be silenced. It’s a direct threat to our ability to safeguard the integrity of elections.
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Republicans release internal communications between tech executives - The Verge
That the communications happened in the first place is not illegal, though if they rise to the level of coercion — the issue that is in front of the Supreme Court now in Murthy v. Missouri — it would be. Internal communications at Meta (then Facebook), Google, and Amazon from 2021, cited in the report, show serious pressure from the Biden administration pushing the platforms to do more to combat covid and vaccine misinformation. But the documents also show executives who at times seemed unwilling to cave to pressure, at other points convinced by certain arguments, and sometimes angered and off-put by the administration’s approach.
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Jordan uses a tech hearing to go after Biden as 2024 'censor' - POLITICO
House Judiciary Chair Jim Jordan opened a fresh line of attack on the Biden administration Wednesday — using a hearing on social media in 2021 to raise questions about whether the White House was scheming to impact the upcoming election. “What’s the Biden administration have up their sleeves in the last six months before the election?” Jordan (R-Ohio) asked. “What are they going to try to censor now?”
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Biden Censorship Official Can't Answer Basic Questions About the First Amendment
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Producing fake information is getting easier
When it comes to disinformation, “social media took the cost of distribution to zero, and generative AI takes the cost of generation to zero,” says Renée DiResta of the Stanford Internet Observatory. Large language models such as GPT-4 make it easy to produce misleading news articles or social-media posts in huge quantities.
Musk
Trump / War against the Right / Jan6
Pox / COVID / BioTerror AgitProp
Religion / Tribal / Culture War and Re-Segregation
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All About the Spring Festival of Sex Work in Ancient Rome - Atlas Obscura
Floralia was a festival that occurred in late April till early May to celebrate the end of winter and honor a fertility goddess—who may or may not have been a “prostitute.” Whatever can be said of the deity, the celebration itself most definitely included sex workers. Along with circus stunts, bunny hunts, mimes, jesters, dancing, and nudity, the ancient civilization celebrated the season with much licentiousness.
Edumacationalizing / Acedemia Nuts
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More Than 1,600 Pro-Hamas Activists at 33 Schools Arrested Since Gaza Encampments Began
No, protestors were arrested for deliberately breaking the rules: flouting curfews, setting up tents where no tents were allowed, intimidating other students and impeding their free access and education on campus, and defying orders from law enforcement. In some instances, protestors broke into campus buildings and then barricaded them against campus authorities, declaring that the buildings had been “liberated.” Thus, when protestors were arrested for trespassing, disorderly conduct, and resisting arrest, they had no one to blame but themselves. If anything, universities have been reluctant to arrest demonstrators, often waiting days before calling in police, repeatedly pleading with the lawless mob before authorizing arrests, and only arresting a fraction of those involved in the illegal encampments. Thus, the 40 incidents in which campus demonstrators have been arrested represent only the small fraction of anti-Semitic activity on college campuses that has been met by a law enforcement response.
Fourth, outside agitators have become involved to an alarming extent. Police made arrests at 22 universities from Saturday to Tuesday; and, in 11 out of 12 instances where the numbers are known, they arrested more outsiders than students. In multiple instances, these outside agitators even participated in illegally occupying campus buildings. It is unacceptable that a handful of activists, with no connection to a university, can seize its property and hold it hostage to absurd demands.
Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising
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Bards and Sages Publishing closure due to "AI-generated trash"
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Faster Connectivity !== Faster Websites - Jim Nielsen’s Blog
t’s kind of incredible how the world is being flooded with bandwidth (I mean, you can get internet beamed to you anywhere on earth from a string of satellites.) The question is quickly shifting from how slow is your connection to how slow is your device?
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Ofcom investigates OnlyFans over children's access to adult content
TechSuck / Geek Bait
AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World
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US urges China, Russia to declare only humans, not AI, control nuclear weapons
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Email Microsoft didn't want seen reveals rushed decision to invest in OpenAI
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Sam Altman Invests in Energy Startup Focused on AI Data Centers
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Not a Genius move: Resurrecting war hero Alan Turing as your 'chief AI officer'
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The Woman Who Showed President Biden ChatGPT – and Helped Set the Course for AI
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Microsoft bans U.S. police departments from using enterprise AI tool
Space / Boomy Zoomers / UFO
Economicon / Business / Finance
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Google lays off 'Core' employees, moves some positions to India and Mexico
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Red Lobster Isn't Nearing Bankruptcy Because of Endless Shrimp
the story about what's gone wrong with Red Lobster is much more complicated than a bunch of stoners pigging out on shrimp (and, later, lobster) en masse. The brand has been plagued by various problems — waning customer interest, constant leadership turnover, and, as has become a common tale, private equity's meddling in the business. "If anything, the Endless Shrimp deals are probably as much a symbol of just either desperation or poor management or both," Jonathan Maze, the editor in chief of Restaurant Business Magazine, said.
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The case for addressing private equity prejudice (Archive)
Public markets are not going away. Stock and bond prices will remain the primary way for investors to assess the health of individual companies or of national economies. But investors waiting for private markets to implode in to irrelevance are starting to sound like those who believe passive index-tracking investment is a fad. Big asset managers are shifting towards figuring out how to do this right, not whether to do it at all.
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Fast food operators rushing to use AI in the wake of minimum wage hikes
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Long-predicted consumer pullback hits Starbucks, KFC and McDonald's
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Amazon Has Suspended US Green-Card Applications for Foreign Workers
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Pair of six-year-old LNG carriers primed for scrapping having never traded
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Amazon's Dash Carts are unusably bad
Using the Dash Cart is a truly wretched experience. After about 5 minutes with it, I missed Just Walk Out so badly that I put everything back on the shelf, logged out of the cart, and just walked out of the store, never to return again.
I put the strawberries back, logged out of the cart, took my bags back to the car, and drove over to the local incarnation of Kroger, where I was able to complete my shopping without having to deal with any testy machines. Now that Just Walk Out is gone, there is no reason whatsoever for me to choose Amazon over any of their competitors for groceries, and many reasons not to, like that shelf full of green potatoes.
In short, the experience of using the Dash Cart is very similar to using one of those early self-checkout machines (UNEXPECTED ITEM IN BAGGING AREA) except that you push the machine around with you in the store and it harasses you the entire time that you’re shopping. It should be embarrassing to Amazon that these things can’t reliably scan a bag of grapes with a sensor package larger than many “self-driving” vehicles. The only good thing about these carts is that they’re so poorly designed that they surely won’t last. If rain, cars, and the rough-and-tumble life of a grocery cart in a parking lot don’t do them all in by the end of summer, a Chicago winter will surely finish the rest of them off.
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Amazon sales soar with boost from artificial intelligence and advertising
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Amazon CEO Andy Jassy broke federal labor law with anti-union remarks
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Former Burning Man headquarters building sells at 90% discount
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Apple announces largest-ever $110B share buyback as iPhone sales drop 10%
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Peloton cutting about 400 jobs worldwide; CEO McCarthy stepping down
Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making
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All New U.S. Cars Must Carry Automatic Brakes by 2029 (Archive)
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Biden calls US ally Japan 'xenophobic' along with India, Russia and China
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For most people, politics is about fitting in
How do people formulate their political beliefs? By which I mean: how do they decide what politically-salient facts they believe to be true and which causes they identify with? This seems like an incredibly important question if you’re trying to understand and project the course of public opinion (and even more important if you’re seeking to shape public opinion). And yet, I rarely see these sort of epistemological questions discussed among people who cover politics for a living. When I do, I think their theories are often naive, overstating the degree to which people consider political events literally on the merits — as opposed to evaluating them through a variety of psychological, social and strategic lenses.
Among public intellectuals — you know, the sorts of people who write Substack newsletters — ideas are debated more seriously. And elite opinion can influence mass opinion, certainly. But I think political elites considerably overstate the extent to which they can persuade the public by marshaling the right arguments or presenting them with the “right” facts. For instance, the whole field of “misinformation studies” is lacking in empirical support or a solid theory of psychology. Presenting information in a way that seems partisan will often persuade people that you’re not on their side and backfire — even if you’re correct on the merits.
Law Breaking / Police / Internal Security
External Security / Militaria / Diplomania
World
Russia Bad / Ukraine War
China
Health / Medicine
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Alarming superbug from deadly eyedrop outbreak has spread to dogs
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Johnson and Johnson announces $6.5B settlement over ovarian cancer allegations
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FDA Finally Moves to Scrutinize Specialized Health Screenings
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At least 25,000 people in the US are starting weight-loss drug Wegovy each week
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Does the American Diabetes Association work for patients or companies?
Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda
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What cosmic rays tell us about Earth's changing surface and climate
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Environmentally, you’ve got to hand it to Sauron
Sauron also contributed to forest reserves such as Mirkwood Old Growth Forest Biodiversity Reserve. While neurotoxins causing amnesia were present in some waterways, these were likely produced by harmful algal blooms resulting from Elvish untreated sewage. Mirkwood was home to a rich ecosystem supporting a vibrant population of endemic colonial spiders, Ungoliantus shelobii, which remain understudied. A small remnant spider population was also present in Cirith Ungol, supported by a locally administered feeding program. Unfortunately, that population was subject to poaching by an invading hobbit force during the War of the Ring.
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New US climate rules for pollution cuts 'probably terminal'for coal-fired plants
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Greenland is losing so much ice that its gravity is getting weaker: researcher
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Storing energy with compressed air is about to have its moment of truth
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Megadrought forces end to sugarcane farming in parched Texas borderland