2024-05-14

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• Suddenly There Aren't Enough Babies. The Whole World Is Alarmed (Archive)

  The world is at a startling demographic milestone. Sometime soon, the global fertility rate will drop below the point needed to keep population constant. It may have already happened. Fertility is falling almost everywhere, for women across all levels of income, education and labor-force participation. The falling birthrates come with huge implications for the way people live, how economies grow and the standings of the world’s superpowers.

  • HN comments

• Solar storm produces dazzling light show, some power grid issues.

  • The Solar Storm Fried GPS Systems Used by Some Farmers, Stalling Planting

Horseshit

• The Great Flattening

  Today that exhortation might run in the opposite direction: in our angst about the removal of specialness and our eagerness to criticize the bad, we ought not lose sight of the potential good. Start with this site that you are reading: yes, the Internet commoditized content that was previously granted value by virtue of being bundled with a light manufacturing business (i.e. printing presses and delivery trucks), but it also created the opportunity for entirely new kinds of content predicated on reaching niche audiences that are only sustainable when the entire world is your market.

• 2.4M person study: Internet use boosts, not hurts, well being

  • Internet access linked to higher wellbeing, study finds

• Why Do So Many Parents Think Kids Need Their Own Bedroom?

• The rage epidemic: is our modern world fuelling aggression?

• Sexism, cheating, and nightclubs: inside the dark heart of modern chess

• How Good, Kind, Caring People Became The Bad Guys

  You have to achieve a fine balance between sugar coating and blunt honesty. Above all, you have to anticipate that all of your hard work won't achieve the results you want in the short term. It takes a long time. A lot of people won't listen at first. You often have to trick people into doing the right thing. It's exhausting. t takes a lot out of you to be respectful to idiots all day long, especially when many of them go out of their way to do you harm.

  It's all hard, because every single minute matters now. We don't have decades to change public thought. The plagues are getting worse and more frequent. The climate collapse is accelerating. The weather is getting more extreme. People are dying from heatstroke in the thousands now. They're getting swept away in crash floods. They're getting blown out of their apartments by typhoon-strength winds in the middle of the night. Every disease we ever dealt with is now converging on our weakened immune systems. Our politicians spent the last year whining about TikTok while letting yet another zoonotic disease run rampant. The last threads of democracy are unraveling right in front of us.

  • HN comments

Electric / Self Driving cars

• Amazon's robotaxi co is under investigation after two crashes with motorcyclists

  • Amazon's self-driving taxi Zoox under investigation by US after rear-end crashes

• EV Motor Used by Lamborghini, McLaren, & Ferrari – Mass-Produced by Mercedes

• Biden set to levy 100% tariffs on Chinese EVs this week

• Cruise resumes supervised autonomous driving with safety drivers

celebrity gossip

• Melinda Gates Resigns from Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation

  • Melinda Gates leaving Gates Foundation after more than 20 years

  • Melinda French Gates to Resign from Gates Foundation

  • Melinda French Gates to Resign from Gates Foundation

  • Melinda French Gates Is Resigning from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation

Obit

• Mary Wells Lawrence, High-Profile Advertising Pioneer, Dies at 95

• Jim Simons, Code Breaker Who Mastered Investing, Dies at 86

Rank Propaganda / Thought Policing / World Disordering

• House Committee Report Exposes Global Social Media Censorship Regime

  According to new documents put forward by the United States House Judiciary Committee and its Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government, the government of Brazil has been issuing censorship orders to X and other US-based social media platforms. The report in question is titled “The Attack on Free Speech Abroad and the Biden Administration’s Silence: The Case Of Brazil.” The second part of this report highlighted that as recently as in April, X, in addition to Rumble, were served a total of ten orders to implement censorship policies on accounts. In Rumble’s case, it was served 9 censorship orders. Both companies rejected these orders.

• The Global Hate-Speech Conundrum

• A prime example of Wikipedia being one of the fronts in this Info War

  As a reminder, Robert Malley, who was Obama’s top Middle East advisor and responsible for negotiating his nuclear deal with Iran. Who was also Biden’s top negotiator with Iran. Who stole classified documents which were then given away. Had Yasser Arafat as his unofficial godfather. This important detail was conveniently scrubbed from Robert Malley’s Wiki page, but not from his father’s.

Musk

• Australian court lifts order blocking X on church stabbing video

• Musk's SpaceX Is Quick to Build in Texas, Slow to Pay Its Bills

• Tesla Rehires Some Supercharger Workers Weeks After Musk's Cuts

  • Elon Musk Rehiring Supercharger Team

  • Tesla Rehires Some Supercharger Workers Weeks After Musk's Cuts

• Tesla's Storing Unsold Inventory in an Abandoned Mall Parking Lot

• You Can't Use an Amazon Adapter to Charge Your Car at a Tesla Supercharger

Trump / War against the Right / Jan6

• Inside the unusually aggressive Arizona grand jury that indicted Trump’s allies - POLITICO

  The Arizona grand jury that recently indicted 18 people for their roles in former President Donald Trump’s scheme to subvert the 2020 election cast a far wider net than state prosecutors had publicly foreshadowed. The panel of 16 Arizonans displayed unusual independence from the prosecutors supervising the investigation, according to a rare inside look at the secret proceedings based on interviews with eight people familiar with the probe and documents signed by a top prosecutor.

  The grand jury took aggressive steps to haul in witnesses and even brought charges against some who had been told by prosecutors they were not under investigation. It ultimately produced a 58-page indictment last month that charged national and state Republicans — including one of Trump’s current top advisers and several former members of his inner circle — with felonies for their alleged roles in the effort to overturn Joe Biden’s victory in the state. Trump himself was listed as an unindicted co-conspirator. Documents reviewed by POLITICO reveal that at least two of the 18 people charged — former Trump lawyers Jenna Ellis and Christina Bobb — were assured by prosecutors that they were not targets of the probe, only to learn that the grand jury indicted them anyway. In fact, a letter that a prosecutor sent to Ellis just days before the indictment appeared to significantly understate her legal jeopardy.

  • 'Unusually Aggressive' Anti-Trump Grand Jury In Arizona Went Rogue With Indictments | ZeroHedge

• Trump leads his supporters in vulgar chants at Jersey Shore rally.

Pox / COVID / BioTerror AgitProp

• Bird flu in cattle: is cow's milk safe to drink?

• Federal government announces new initiatives to monitor, prevent bird flu.

Religion / Tribal / Culture War and Re-Segregation

• Hundreds of anti-Israel protesters in NYC shut down Manhattan Bridge.

• Woke No More

• DEI Hits the VA: Biden's Veterans Affairs Department Offers Race-Based Training Programs That Exclude White Vets

  Agency officials have discussed their "equity" offerings on the VA's Ending Veteran Homelessness podcast. Communications official Shawn Liu said the department began "a lot of our racial equity work" in the spring of 2021, around when Biden issued his executive order on diversity. He said the race-based offerings prompted internal pushback, which he dismissed, arguing that "treating everybody the same might not be enough."

• Broad Public Support for Legal Abortion Persists 2 Years After Dobbs

Edumacationalizing / Acedemia Nuts

• The Long, Steep Fall of an Online Education Giant

• The Harsh Crackdown on College Protests Is a Dangerous Mistake

Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising

• Encrypted mail service Proton hands suspect's personal info to cops again

• Facebook's referral traffic for publishers down 50% in 12 months

• Stack Overflow Users Are Revolting Against OpenAI Deal

• Telegram has launched a pretty intense campaign to malign Signal as insecure

  • HN comments

• Microsoft is launching a mobile game store, taking on Apple and Google

• Nearly all Nintendo 64 games can now be recompiled into native PC ports

  • How long before Nintendo is putting people in jail for this one?

• Marvel Rivals apologises after banning negative reviews

• Warner Bros. gives Adult Swim games back to their creators rather than kill them

• On Instagram, a Jewelry Ad Draws Solicitations for Sex with a 5-Year-Old

• Microsoft to face antitrust case over Teams

TechSuck / Geek Bait

• Leaked details of Intel's upcoming Arrow Lake desktop CPUs indicate that the company is abandoning hyper-threading.

• This is the state of healthcare IT: Biggest CPU for the Bad System

  • Why they need bigger systems

  The whole thing is about 10k APIs that all share the same cluster of 10 databases on the backend, which was never designed to scale like this. This company did 500 million revenue 2010 and now 15 billion this year, all running on this fking sql back end. They have a team of 500 devs writing for these apps, the complexity is unbelievable. No one knows how to untangle it and scale out to micro services.

• The Cult of the Haskell Programmer

AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World

• "Look at us! we're relevant!" Intel reduces latencies of chat LLM app using quantisation

• AI GPU Bottleneck Has Eased, but Now Power Will Constrain AI Growth

• In DC, a new wave of AI lobbyists gains the upper hand

• OpenAI to announce ChatGPT product improvements; "feels like magic," says Altman

• ChatGPT consumes 25 times more energy than Google

• OpenAI launches new AI model and desktop version of ChatGPT

Space / Boomy Zoomers / UFO

• Starlink satellites disrupted by major solar storm

• Why Everyone Is Heading Back to the Moon

• China’s Chang’e-6 is carrying a surprise rover to the moon.

• SpaceX Unveils Spacesuit for Private Astronaut Spacewalk

Crypto con games

• The $2.3B Tornado Cash Case Is a Pivotal Moment for Crypto Privacy

Economicon / Business / Finance

• Once-hot tech office in SF's SoMa sells for a fourth of its 2019 price

• Squarespace to Go Private in $6.9B All-Cash Transaction with Permira

  • Permira to take website-design firm Squarespace private in $6.9B deal

  • Squarespace to Go Private in $6.9B All-Cash Transaction with Permira

• The case for forever high interest rates

• Labor's Declining Share Is Worrisome and Mysterious

• GameStop shares soar 110% and are halted as trader 'Roaring Kitty' resurfaces

  • GameStop rockets, as 'Roaring Kitty' returns; shares halted

  • GameStop's 'Roaring Kitty' Returns, Sends Shares Skyrocketing As 'Million Apes Go Insomniac'

  • Roaring Kitty is back and so are meme stocks. GameStop and AMC surge like 2021

  • GameStop Is Back?

  • GameStop surges after meme stock investor 'Roaring Kitty' resurfaces online

• Boeing locks out private firefighters after contract talks break down

• Venture Capitalists Are Using Podcasts to Lure in Founders

• Freetrade, Britain's answer to Robinhood, says its CEO is stepping down

• Indeed lays off 1000 employees

Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making

• Populism Is the Voice of the Voiceless

• Opinion | Biden Is Doing It All Wrong - The New York Times

  I’ve spent decades looking at the behavior of swing voters and how candidates appeal to them, including for Bill Clinton’s re-election campaign in 1996. If Mr. Biden wants to serve another four years, he has to stop being dragged to the left and chart a different course closer to the center that appeals to those voters who favor bipartisan compromises to our core issues, fiscal discipline and a strong America.

  People usually assume that turning out so-called base voters in an election matters most, since swing voters are fewer in number. And it’s true that in today’s polarized environment, Mr. Biden and Mr. Trump each has about 40 percent of the country in their bases already and nothing will change those people’s minds. But in that remaining 20 percent of the electorate, swing voters have disproportionate power because of their potential to switch. It’s simple math: Take an electorate of 10 voters in an election tied 5 to 5. If one voter swings, the margin becomes 6 to 4. Two voters then need to be turned out just to tie it up and a third one is needed to win.

• Psaki's new book falsely recounts Biden's watch check in ceremony for fallen soldiers

  Former White House press secretary Jen Psaki claims in her new book that President Biden never looked at his watch during the ceremony for soldiers killed during the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021 — contradicting news photos and firsthand accounts of Gold Star families.

  Why it matters: In TV ads and social media posts, Donald Trump and his allies repeatedly have used images of Biden checking his watch during the ceremony to try to undermine the president's brand as an empathetic leader. Psaki's book is the latest instance of current and former Biden administration officials downplaying or misrepresenting controversial episodes from the Afghanistan withdrawal ahead of the 2024 election.

• Major airlines sue Biden administration over fee disclosure rule

• Bipartisan Bill To Repeal Section 230 Defended In Facts-Optional Op-Ed | Techdirt

  If you are holding companies liable for third-party speech, you run into all of the problems we describe above: fewer companies willing to host any speech, and the few that do either moderating so heavily as to make them useless, or looking the other way entirely to avoid the requisite knowledge.

• (Feb 2024) Navigating the Kill Switch Law

  The Kill Switch law, officially known as Section 24220 of the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, is a groundbreaking piece of legislation aimed at enhancing driver safety and reducing car theft. It does this by mandating the incorporation of ‘impaired driving prevention technology’ into new passenger vehicles, effectively introducing a remote car battery switch into our cars to kill switch protect us and our vehicles. For the general public, this legislation brings about a new era of safety and control over our modern automobiles. But it’s not just us, the drivers, who are affected. The automotive industry is also facing significant changes, with manufacturers required to meet new standards and adapt to vehicle designs that include these kill switches and their associated technologies.

  • "a new era of safety and control over our modern automobiles" ... but its not you in control.

• Snopes reverses ‘fact check’ after Ashley Biden reveals in letter to judge her stolen diary is authentic | The Post Millennial | thepostmillennial.com

  Snopes has reversed their previous "fact-check" which claimed that a diary purported to have been written by the president's daughter Ashley Biden was a unproven to be authentic, indicating it was a fake. In a letter provided by Ashley Biden to a court during sentencing of those convicted for having stolen the diary, Biden herself confirmed the diary's authenticity.

  • Ashley Biden Wrote Letter to Judge Confirming That Diary Reporting That Biden Showered With Her Until a ‘Not Appropriate’ Age Is Real

• TWRA loses appeal to continue wildlife protection under Open Fields Doctrine

  in an appeal of a previous court ruling on the lawsuit filed on behalf of Terry Rainwaters and Hunter Hollingsworth, the court has said, "what the TWRA is arguing is reasonable, stands in opposition to the restraint upon unreasonable searches and seizures that emerged from the American colonial era in opposition to arbitrary British search practices." When told of the ruling against TWRA, retired Marion County game warden Mike Bailey had some choice words for the appeals court judges we can't share here.

Law Breaking / Police / Internal Security

• Italy's mafia forgoes extortion, turns to white-collar crime

External Security / Militaria / Diplomania

• How GPS warfare is playing havoc with civilian life

• Welcome to the Laser Wars

• Tom Cotton Accuses Biden Of Imposing A ‘De Facto Arms Embargo’ Against Israel

World

• Can Europe's economy ever hope to rival the US again? (Archive)

• French digital industry braces for crackdown on kids' screentime

Iran / Houthi

• Iranian film director Mohammad Rasoulof flees after jail sentence

Israel

• Israel's appetite for high-tech weapons highlights a Biden policy gap

• UN halves estimates of women and children killed in Gaza - The Jerusalem Post

  The United Nations seemingly halved the estimated number of women and children killed in Gaza, according to UN data published on May 6 and 8. The UN published the number of fatalities reported by the Hamas-run Gaza Ministry of Health or the Government Media Office in Gaza and Israeli authorities. The UN provided a disclaimer below the data: "The UN has so far not been able to produce independent, comprehensive, and verified casualty figures."

Russia Bad / Ukraine War

• Russia is surging across the frontlines, and Ukraine seems unable to stop it

China

• Is China Winning? Rethinking Perceptions of Success in Central Planning

• US official says Chinese seizure of TSMC in Taiwan would be 'devastating'

• China's quantum tech 'core strength' targeted by latest US trade blacklist

• My life as a Chinese spy: Secret police agent tells all

Health / Medicine

• Sleep does not help brain wash out toxins, study suggests

  • Scientists find sleep may not clear brain toxins

  • Brain clearance is reduced during sleep and anesthesia in mice

• The rise in maternal mortality rates in the US is due to a change in measurement

• First person to receive genetically modified pig kidney transplant dies

• Outdoor time is good for kids' eyesight

• Colorectal cancer incidence in teens up 300% since 1999

• As the FDA evaluates ecstasy treatment for PTSD, questions mount about evidence

Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda

• Germany underreported coal mine emissions by factor of 184

• Carbon dioxide pipelines and underground injection can cut greenhouse gas

• A man who took on the coal industry to save a forest – and won

• Big, Smoggy Bangkok Gets a Badly Needed Breath of Fresh Air

• Conservation Is About More Than Saving Species from Extinction

• That mouth-watering aroma of fresh food cooking? It may be degrading air quality

• A global plastic treaty will only work if it caps production, modeling shows

• Venezuela loses its last glacier as it shrinks down to an ice field