2024-05-09
Horseshit
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Europeans have more time, Americans more money. Which is better? (Arhive)
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Americans have more ambition than Europeans, says CEO of Norway's $1.6T fund
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Boeing says workers skipped required tests on 787 but recorded work as completed
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Helium discovery is the breakthrough science, medicine, and industry needed
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Governments have borrowing constraints. Pretending otherwise is dangerous
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Hyundai considering pay-to-use in-car features, such as heated seats
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Disability and Normal, or "Normal" - Freddie deBoer
This piece by S.I. Rosenbaum in The Atlantic, which uses the recently-deceased conjoined twins George and Lori Schappell to consider the ideas of disability and difference, is a… rich text. For one thing, it’s a good example of The Atlantic’s weird positioning as both America’s premiere neoconservative journal and a repository of unreconstructed social justice narratives that seem to operate totally independent of rapidly-if-quietly evolving progressive attitudes towards that sort of thing. (It seems like it’s always both 2003 and 2018 at The Atlantic.) More to the point, I think it’s a good example of the ever-deepening incoherence of modern disability norms, and particularly how disability activists want to have it every way they choose when it comes to difference.
What’s incredible about this attitude is that we are now 60 long years into a national experiment with deinstitutionalization that almost everyone acknowledges has been a disaster but which has never really been reversed. I’ve already written here about John F. Kennedy’s Community Mental Health Act of 1963, and I don’t want to go over it in detail again. The short version is that, inspired by admirable concern for the mentally ill, the Kennedy administration spearheaded a bill intended to tear down our state institution system and replace it with a system of community mental health centers; this proved disastrous because while the state institutions were indeed dismantled to a dramatic degree, the community mental health centers were never built. (Please try to remember this the next time the government institutes an unfunded mandate.) And the results are plain to see: sick people wasting away in institutions was tragic, while sick people wasting away on subway cars and in alleyways and under bridges is both tragic and dangerous for the sick and the well alike. Institutional responses to disability issues will always be imperfect and certainly can be much better. But the constant scapegoating of those institutional responses by activists has done precisely nothing to actually help the living conditions of the severely disabled.
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You Can Sleep with the Cars: The Ferrari Museum Is Now Listed on Airbnb
celebrity gossip
Rank Propaganda / Thought Policing / World Disordering
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Russia and China Are Winning the Propaganda War - The Atlantic
Autocrats in China, Russia, and elsewhere are now making common cause with MAGA Republicans to discredit liberalism and freedom around the world.
The Election Integrity Partnership was not organized or directed by the U.S. government. It occasionally reached out to platforms, but had no power to compel them to act, DiResta told me. Nevertheless, the project became the focus of a complicated MAGA-world conspiracy theory about alleged government suppression of free speech, and it led to legal and personal attacks on many of those involved. The project has been smeared and mischaracterized by some of the journalists attached to Musk’s “Twitter Files” investigation, and by Representative Jim Jordan’s Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government. A series of lawsuits alleging that the U.S. government sought to suppress conservative speech, including one launched by Missouri and Louisiana that has now reached the Supreme Court, has effectively tried to silence organizations that investigate both domestic and foreign disinformation campaigns, overt and covert. To state baldly what is happening: The Republican Party’s right wing is actively harassing legitimate, good-faith efforts to track the production and dissemination of autocratic disinformation here in the United States.
The same tactics have been used against the Global Engagement Center. In 2021, the GEC gave a grant to another organization, the Global Disinformation Index, which helped develop a technical tool to track online campaigns in East Asia and Europe. For a completely unrelated, separately funded project, the Global Disinformation Index also conducted a study, aimed at advertisers, that identified websites at risk for publishing false stories. Two conservative organizations, finding their names on that latter list, sued the GEC, although it had nothing to do with creating the list. Musk posted, again without any evidence, “The worst offender in US government censorship & media manipulation is an obscure agency called GEC,” and that organization also became caught up in the endless whirlwind of conspiracy and congressional investigations.
One could call this a secret authoritarian “plot” to preserve the ability to spread antidemocratic conspiracy theories, except that it’s not a secret. It’s all visible, right on the surface. Russia, China, and sometimes other state actors—Venezuela, Iran, Hungary—work with Americans to discredit democracy, to undermine the credibility of democratic leaders, to mock the rule of law. They do so with the goal of electing Trump, whose second presidency would damage the image of democracy around the world, as well as the stability of democracy in America, even further.
Musk
Trump / War against the Right / Jan6
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Why Is the Judge in Trump’s New York Trial Muzzling a Key Defense Witness?
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How Trump's allies amplify his Truth Social messages to the wider world (Archive)
Perhaps the most significant move to limit Trump’s audience came after the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol: bans on Twitter, Facebook and YouTube, blocking him from some of the most influential social media platforms of the era. And yet, three years later, a Washington Post analysis shows how those efforts have failed. Now the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, Trump is as potent a political force as ever, with an army of amplifiers ensuring that his messages — true or untrue — reach a broad swath of the American public. He is set to face President Biden in November, with Trump running roughly even in national polls.
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Attorney says he gave Trump trial judge unsolicited advice during civil fraud case – NBC Boston
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Trump ‘considers plan to send hit squads to Mexico to kill cartel leaders’ | The Independent
Presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump is privately considering a plan to deploy American assassination squads to Mexico to take out drug cartel leaders if he is re-elected in November, according to a report. Three sources familiar with the former president’s proposal told Rolling Stone that he has insisted that the American military has “tougher killers than they do” and is mulling a similar plot to that carried out when US forces killed ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi back in 2019. The deployment would be covert, the outlet reported, and would not rely on the Mexican government’s consent.
Pox / COVID / BioTerror AgitProp
Religion / Tribal / Culture War and Re-Segregation
Edumacationalizing / Acedemia Nuts
Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising
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StackOverflow mods frustrated as users delete answers since OpenAI partnership
These partnerships are sometimes public relations niceties more than they are substantive collaborations, but it does sound as though Stack Overflow is going to license its data for Open AI to train future models on. It’s hard not to see this as anything other than an attempt by Stack Overflow’s newish corporate overlords to cash in on their intellectual property before it becomes entirely worthless.
What remains of the Stack Overflow community is disgusted by the idea that their contributions will be absorbed into anonymous AI models, perhaps devaluing their hard-won reputation points and community credibility. Some people are trying to delete their own questions out of spite, only to discover that they don’t actually own their own content. And I don’t know why anyone would willingly submit more unpaid answers (or questions!) to Stack Exchange forums under these conditions. After all, huge pools of people in Africa and South America are being paid to write code examples for model-training companies right this minute. Why should I do it for free?
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U.S. libraries are battling high prices for better e-book access
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FCC explicitly prohibits fast lanes, closing possible net neutrality loophole
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Prime Video subs will soon see ads for Amazon products when they hit pause
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RIP 'Red vs. Blue.' Machinima Is Gone–But Its Legacy Is Everywhere
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Disney+, Hulu and Max Will Be Available Together This Summer
TechSuck / Geek Bait
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Just a bunch of scanners (JBOS?)
There’s a bit of a meme about printers being the worst computer accessory to setup, configure and maintain. I don’t believe this is true. Scanners a far far far worse - this is why you don’t see scanners today - we lost. The FS4000US was released to market sometime around 2001 and 2002 from my research. It received 32bit drivers up to Vista. My first task was to test the scanner on USB to ensure it worked prior to iSCSI fun. Luckily VueScan still exists and provides a driver replacement for the FS4000US. It was able to detect the scanner. Great win!
Anyway, my HD68 to HD50 cable worked just. Lol just joking. Once again the simple things end up being the hardest. I bought an external cable, but the SCSI controller card has the HD68 connector on the inside of the card. It physically wouldn’t fit. So I took to the cable with a Stanley knife and cutters. Eventually it fit.
tried some 64bit drivers. This installed ok, no boot loop however I got a This device cannot find enough free resources that it can use. error. I never worked out what was happening here. Fine. I rebooted into Linux. It could see the controller and the scanner - huge win. But no one ever wrote Linux Xane drivers for this scanner. Fine I thought - I would run a Windows VM, pass through the PCIe device and run a supported Windows Server 2008R2 setup. Turns out in version 7 for VirtualBox they removed PCI passthrough. I’ll try virt-manager.
AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World
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Microsoft announces $3.3B investment in Wisconsin Datacenter
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Asterisk/Zvi on California's AI Bill - by Scott Alexander
The reason it sounded like a bad bill before was that people were misrepresenting what it said. ... the bill isn’t about regulating deepfakes or misinformation or generative art. It’s just about nukes and hacking the power grid.
Space / Boomy Zoomers / UFO
China's Chang'e 6 mission to moon's far side enters lunar orbit (video)
Crypto con games
Economicon / Business / Finance
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81% of young people say 4-day workweek would boost productivity, survey reports
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The Fed just dashed hopes for lower mortgage rates. What homebuyers need to know.
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The Gap Between the Price You See and What You Pay Is Getting Worse (Archive)
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Reddit shares soar 14% after company reports revenue pop debut earnings report
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Americans Are Racking Up 'Phantom Debt' That Wall Street Can't Track
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Cocoa Rally Is Spilling into Coffee as Traders Run Out of Cash
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Texas Spot Power Prices Jump Almost 100-Fold on Tight Supply
Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making
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TikTok sues U.S. government, saying potential ban violates First Amendment
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Democrats are widely believed to be particularly motivated by trying to assist Rep. Katie Stuart (D-Edwardsville), who is running for reelection in an increasingly Republican district. However, we are told that at least 20 Republicans may be knocked out of ballot spots. This is all brought to you by the crowd who tells us that democracy is at risk in November’s election, headed, in Illinois by President Biden’s proxy (as he is routinely called, even by his allies), Pritzker.
At least one Democrat couldn’t ignore the hypocrisy. “At this time in our history, when we are watching Republican legislatures across the country really attack access to the ballot and attack voting rights and fundamentally attack democracy, I just think it’s fundamentally wrong for Democrats to participate in something that makes it harder for people to run, to run for office, makes it harder for folks to engage,” Rep. Kelly Cassidy (D-Chicago) said.
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Joe Kahn, after two years in charge of the New York Times newsroom, has learned nothing. He had an extraordinary opportunity, upon taking over from Dean Baquet, to right the ship: to recognize that the Times was not warning sufficiently of the threat to democracy presented by a second Trump presidency. But to Kahn, democracy is a partisan issue and he’s not taking sides.
critics like me aren’t asking the Times to abandon its independence. We’re asking the Times to recognize that it isn’t living up to its own standards of truth-telling and independence when it obfuscates the stakes of the 2024 election, covers up for Trump’s derangement, and goes out of its way to make Biden look weak.
in a sweeping indictment of Trump-era journalism, Kahn pointed a finger at a generation of reporters who appeared to arrive in newsrooms unequipped to deal with unpleasant facts. Sounding offended on behalf of the paper’s reporting reputation, which took a beating with years of misses on stories like Russiagate and factual fiascoes like the “Caliphate” podcast, Kahn reminded Times reporters that the job is about facing and reporting difficult truths, not striving to remake reality into a campus-like safe space, in pursuit of any political “mission”.
Law Breaking / Police / Internal Security
External Security / Militaria / Diplomania
World
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The Birth Of A New Cartel: Meet The Mexican Institute Of Immigration
The night of last Friday May 3rd two men were shot dead in two different vehicles right outside the Ciudad Juárez’ International Airport. One of the victims died inside a small sedan, while the second one was on the driver’s side of a large SUV. Both of them had been waiting for several minutes in front of the airport. Authorities recovered over a dozen .233 [sic] bullet caskets, an uncommon caliber for sicarios in Ciudad Juárez, and mostly used by the Mexican National Guard.
Although the two main cartels in Juárez are still fighting each other to get full control of the juicy business of human smuggling, the INM is making bigger bucks by selling immigration permits to foreigners to be able to freely travel through Mexico, an advantage Mexican officials have over criminal organizations. Each permit, according to sources who have acquired one, is being sold for up to 50,000 Mexican pesos, roughly $2,000. Without one of these, migrants are stuck at the Mexican southern border for months and end up having to pay sometimes more as a bribe to the same INM officials to let them out of Mexican southern border towns like Tapachula.
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Milei is already proving the Left-wing economic establishment wrong
With inflation falling, interest rates coming down, and the peso on fire in one market, Milei is already proving the global Left-wing economic establishment – addicted to bigger government and endless deficits – wrong. Indeed, it may provide a template for other countries to escape from zero growth.
Health / Medicine
Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda
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Top climate scientists expect global heating to blast past 1.5C target
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The oceans have broken temperature records every day over the past year
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Cassava: The perilous past and promising future of a toxic but nourishing crop
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Chemicals in car interiors may cause cancer — and they’re required by US law.
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Why Highway 1 is the climate challenge that California can't fix
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World experienced hottest April on record, climate monitor says
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UN expert attacks 'exploitative' world economy in fight to save planet
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Largest vacuum to suck climate pollution out of the air just opened
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Environmental Changes Are Fueling Human, Animal and Plant Diseases, Study Finds
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Top climate scientists expect global heating to blast past 1.5C target
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New rock art discoveries in Eastern Sudan reaffirm catastrophic climate change
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Wind has clear economies of scale, expressed in the size of the turbine. This allows the dilution of engineering costs in the hub to be spread over more blade, as well as greater and more consistent winds higher above the ground. This trend has mostly topped out with the standard 1 MW wind turbine on land, now a common sight through much of the American West.
For offshore wind, however, there are fewer size constraints on part transportation and turbines can get truly monstrous. Take, for example, the latest behemoth: 16 MW out of China. Each blade weighs 54 T and is 123 m long. In principle, one of these can produce as much energy as ~100 acres of solar PV.
A 1200 m long turbine, modeled below, would generate in excess of 100 MW per turbine. A fleet of 10,000 could supply the entire oil and gas energy needs of South Korea, Japan, or the UK. The idea could be proven at much smaller scale, or potentially scaled up to the limits of the abyssal depths.