2024-05-07

Horseshit

• Do Individuals Matter in Institutional Economic History?

• Balsamic vinegar is likely fake

• Progressive Attitudes Towards Sex Are Pretty Damn Incoherent Right Now.

  It’s not just that the arguments for “no sex in movies” are unconvincing to me. It’s that I don’t even believe that the people making them are convinced by them. Instead I think that it’s pure visceral emotion being sold as actual argument - most of these people are simply scared of sex. They find it icky and frightening. The good news is that they are of course free to avoid sex in their own lives, to whatever degree they choose. The trouble is that they want to consume pop culture and, because sex is a big of life and narrative art must be free to depict all elements of human experience, they often find themselves confronted with the existence of sex in movies and TV. And it appears that, because they’ve been brought up in a social and political environment that has taught them that their momentary psychic comfort is the only thing that matters, they assume that all of the rest of us have to accept sexless and sanitized movies and television.

  Here’s the thing that’s really frying my noodle: this is all happening against a backdrop of an endlessly-mushrooming sex industry, driven by OnlyFans and the broader world of pro-am pornography, along with widespread support for sex workers and their rights within the broad world of progressive politics. I mean this both generally (progressive people tend to support sex work and the people making the case against sex scenes are progressives) and specifically (you can search in the feeds of specific people and find that they are both passionately opposed to sex scenes and passionately supportive of sex work.) In other words, there appears to be a lot of people out there who think that paying people to simulate sex on camera is wrong, but paying people to actually have sex is fine. This is, I would put it to you, not a position that can be made coherent.

  What’s important though is that these dueling positions stem from values, from principle, from argument. In the internet era, I’m afraid, those things are getting rarer and rarer. The way that political attitudes have tended to spread, whether right or left, has been mimetically, via social contagion - you log onto your app of choice and you see what everybody else thinks and you want to think that way too, for fear of being unpopular or uncool.

• Survey shows 46% of Americans believe sports memorabilia is financial investment

• How TikTok Is Wiring Gen Z's Money Brain

Electric / Self Driving cars

• China makes cheap electric vehicles. Why can't American shoppers buy them?

• Fisker is closing its Manhattan Beach headquarters, employees say

celebrity gossip

• With help from AI, Randy Travis got his voice back, and first song post-stroke

Obit

• Theoden: Bernard Hill: Titanic and Lord of the Rings Actor Dies

• Robert Dennard, father of DRAM, is deceased

Rank Propaganda / Thought Policing / World Disordering

• A leak-hosting site looks to thaw the chill of censorship

  For Emma Best, the co-founder of a leak-hosting site called Distributed Denial of Secrets, or DDoSecrets, seeing Reuters remove its story reinforced her desire to launch what would become the Greenhouse Project—a special section of the DDoSecrets site devoted to publishing and distributing news stories that have been censored. DDoSecrets—which in the past had a server seized in Germany and was once erroneously labeled a “criminal hacker group” by the US Department of Homeland Security—sees the Greenhouse Project as part of its broader mission to ensure the free transmission of data in the public interest by making itself a “publisher of last resort.” It chose the name because it hopes to create a “warming effect to reverse the chilling effects of censorship.”

Musk

• Tesla launches another round of layoffs

• Tesla cuts even more workers as unsold inventory stacks up

• Tesla Lays Off More Staff in Software, Service Team

• Musk's no.2 at Tesla goes back to China as the CEO isolates himself at the top

• Are Tesla Superchargers Open to Other EVs in California? It's Complicated

• I Read Everything Elon Musk Posted for a Week

Trump / War against the Right / Jan6

• Dems use the legal system to target the right — yet give the left a pass

  As law professor Jonathan Turley noted in these pages, the New York statute in question has never been used this way before: “Even The New York Times agreed that it could not find a single case in history where this statute was used against an individual or a company that did not commit a criminal offense, go bankrupt, or leave financial victims.” Nothing says “rule of law” like custom-made forms of liability designed for a single hated defendant.

Pox / COVID / BioTerror AgitProp

• New vaccine effective against coronaviruses that haven't even emerged yet

• Mask Mandate Costs

• Farm states push back on Biden's bird flu response

Religion / Tribal / Culture War and Re-Segregation

• Neuroscience Says Rituals Rewire Your Brain to Better Face Failure

• I got banned from Stack Exchange for not supporting Israel

Edumacationalizing / Acedemia Nuts

• Unscientific American: Science journalism surrenders to progressive ideology.

• George Washington Students Hold ‘People’s Tribunal,’ Call for Faculty’s Deaths.

• Why facial recognition technology makes these campus protests different

• Unscientific American

  Several prominent scientists took note of SciAm’s shift. “Scientific American is changing from a popular-science magazine into a social-justice-in-science magazine,” Jerry Coyne, a University of Chicago emeritus professor of ecology and evolution, wrote on his popular blog, “Why Evolution Is True.” He asked why the magazine had “changed its mission from publishing decent science pieces to flawed bits of ideology.”

  “The old Scientific American that I subscribed to in college was all about the science,” University of New Mexico evolutionary psychologist Geoffrey Miller told me. “It was factual reporting on new ideas and findings from physics to psychology, with a clear writing style, excellent illustrations, and no obvious political agenda.” Miller says that he noticed a gradual change about 15 years ago, and then a “woke political bias that got more flagrant and irrational” over recent years. The leading U.S. science journals, Nature and Science, and the U.K.-based New Scientist made a similar pivot, he says. By the time Trump was elected in 2016, he says, “the Scientific American editors seem to have decided that fighting conservatives was more important than reporting on science.”

• Columbia University Cancels Commencement Ceremony After Protests

Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising

• With its player community up in arms and its reputation on fire - with 200,000 negative reviews landing in just three days - Sony has decided maybe Helldivers players on Windows don't need a PlayStation Network account after all.

  • Sony overturns Helldivers 2 PSN requirement following backlash

• Has Windows 11 lost marketshare to Windows 10?

• The Collapse of the News Industry Is Taking Its Soul Down with It

• How to Reduce the Sexual Solicitation of Teens on Instagram

• Riot Games' anti-cheat software will require TPM, Secure Boot on Windows 11

• ProPublica Wins Pulitzer Prize for Supreme Court Coverage

TechSuck / Geek Bait

• The Cheyenne supercomputer has sold for $480,000, about 2% of what it cost when it was first installed.

• Linux 6.10 to Drop Support for Old Dec Alpha Hardware

  pre-EV56 DEC Alpha processor support will be retired.

  • The sub 400Mhz systems that lacked the fun byte swizzle instructions. early alpha's did not like to have to deal with less than 4 bytes at a time.

AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World

• Where the Wild Things Are: Second Order Risks of AI

• Is AI about to kill what's left of journalism?

Space / Boomy Zoomers / UFO

• Boeing’s Starliner Capsule Blasts Off on First Crewed Mission to ISS Today.

  • Boeing Starliner capsule's first crewed test flight postponed

• Wozniak's space firm, Privateer, buys Orbital Insight, raises $56.5M

• How NASA Is Hacking Voyager 1 Back to Life

• Missing Satellite Found After 25 Years of Being Lost in Space

Crypto con games

• Cryptos Dump After Robinhood Reveals SEC Wells Notice Related Related To Its Crypto Listings | ZeroHedge

  • Robinhood says SEC could pursue enforcement actions over its crypto operations

  • Robinhood's crypto arm receives SEC warning over alleged securities violations

  • Robinhood's stock dives after receipt of SEC 'Wells Notice' disclosed

  • SEC Prepares to Sue Robinhood over Crypto Unit

• Stablecoins will become the largest holder of US Government debt

• Tether Enters Surveillance Partnership with Chainalysis as Pressure Mounts

Economicon / Business / Finance

• Rental 'libraries of things' have become the new way to save money

• Middle-Class Lifestyle Out of Reach for Those Making Six Figures

• Can Turning Office Towers into Apartments Save Downtowns?

• Gasoline demand growth to slow this year on EV growth in China, US

• Cash-Flush Oil Industry Has Less Appetite for Debt

• Retailers jacked up prices and squeezed consumers. They might have just blinked | CNN Business

• Renters' hope of being able to buy a home falls to record low: NY Fed survey

• Why fast-food price increases have surpassed overall inflation

Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making

• Top House Intel Dem defends ‘very strong vetting process’ as Biden admin considers admitting Gazan refugees to US.

• Private Equity Trumped Social Equity in State Cannabis Deal

• Biden, Trump in close race with 6 months until presidential election

• FAA opens probe into Boeing 787: 'Employees may have falsified aircraft records'

Law Breaking / Police / Internal Security

• Motorist Killed After Crashing Into White House Gates.

  Shortly before 10:30pm on May 4th, a vehicle traveling at a high rate of speed collided with an outer perimeter gate on the White House complex. Security protocols were implemented as officers cleared the vehicle and attempted to render aid to the driver who was discovered deceased. There was no threat to the White House. The fatal crash portion of this will be turned over to the Washington Metropolitan Police Department Crash Investigation Unit and the Secret Service investigation continues.

• Stop Expecting Tech Companies to Provide 'Consequences' for Criminal Behavior

World

• Despite social media posts, scientists say no rise in quakes (in Japan)

• India EV Sales to Rise 66% in 2024 After Nearly Doubling in 2023

• French strike forces Ryanair to cancel more than 300 flights across Europe

• 'Everything's just on hold': the Netherlands' next-level housing crisis

Israel

• Civilians Ordered Out Of Rafah As IDF Ground Attack To Proceed

• Israel tells civilians to leave parts of Rafah, cease-fire talks disintegrating

• Israel's army tells Palestinians to evacuate parts of Rafah

• Hamas says it has agreed to ceasefire proposal.

Russia Bad / Ukraine War

• N. Korean missile that landed in Ukraine used 'fake' Japan part

• Germany and allies accuse Russia of sweeping cyberattacks

• Russia blamed for GPS interference affecting flights in Europe

• Russia to Hold Drills on Tactical Nuclear Weapons in New Tensions with West

China

• China Hacked Ministry of Defence, Sky News Learns

Health / Medicine

• How Bad Are Ultraprocessed Foods, Really? - The New York Times

  Dr. O’Connor questioned whether it’s helpful to group such “starkly different” foods — like Twinkies and breakfast cereals — into one category. Certain types of ultraprocessed foods, like sodas and processed meats, are more clearly harmful than others. UPFs like flavored yogurts and whole grain breads, on the other hand, have been associated with a reduced risk of developing Type 2 diabetes. Clinical trials are needed to test if UPFs directly cause health problems, Dr. O’Connor said. Only one such study, which was small and had some limitations, has been done, she said.

• NYU professors who defended vaping didn't disclose ties to Juul

• Millions were booted from Medicaid: The insurers gained Medicaid revenue anyway

• Study Suggests Genetics as a Cause, Not Just a Risk, for Some Alzheimers

Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda

• The Rise of the Carbon Farmer

• A rare burst of billions of cicadas will rewire our ecosystems for years to come

• Gateway to Hell': Turkmenistan urged to plug gas leaks driving climate change

• Storing Carbon Emissions in Demolished Concrete

• The performance of global forest governance: Three contrasting perspectives

• Australia's first solar garden is taking the renewables boom to the community

• Households Wince at the Rising Price of Going Green

• Toward an End to Microfiber Pollution

• Gas and propane stoves linked to 50k cases of childhood asthma, study finds

• Fewer Americans see climate change as serious problem: Survey