2024-05-16
Worthy
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(1986) In medicine what's the difference between an -ectomy, an -ostomy, and an -otomy?
My wife believes they mean “hack it off,” “bite it off,” and “pinch it till it drops off.”
Very funny, J.W., and actually not all that far off the mark.
etc
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Sun shoots out biggest solar flare in 2 decades, Earth should be out of the way
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What Is Causing This? “Demographic Winter Is Coming” As Fertility Rates Plummet All Over The Globe
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(PDF) Preliminary NTSB Report on Dali Collision with the Francis Scott Key Bridge
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Crew trapped on Baltimore ship, seven weeks after bridge collapse
Horseshit
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The China-linked EV battery mega factory dividing a US township
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Battle over billionaire's private Bay Area beach access goes to trial again
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$460, 5,471-piece Lego Barad-dûr set comes for LOTR fans' wallets in June
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Technology is probably changing us for the worse–or so we always think
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The Empire of Brittle and Shiny
It comes down to the chinese concept of Chabuduo (Hu Shih, 1920) which means “close enough” or “good enough”. “Good enough” for market traction, “good enough” to generate sales, but “good enough” is not good. Most experienced consumers are weary of trying new things, they prefer something old that work to something new that only may work better.
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'California Stop' Is Costing Californians Millions in Tickets
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Did dinosaur blood run hot or cold? Both, according to a new study
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San Francisco is the nation's most dramatic "Leadership Hub"
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My rendezvous with the raw milk black market: quick, easy and unchecked by FDA
The interstate trade in raw milk is illegal, because of the risk of serious illness from drinking unpasteurized milk. But in Washington and many other places across the country, raw milk is being transported across state lines and openly sold to enthusiastic customers — and the Food and Drug Administration is doing nothing to stop it. That lapse in enforcement has taken on new significance as the H5N1 bird flu virus has spread to at least 46 dairy cow herds in nine states. Government testing has found genetic traces of the virus in 1 in 5 samples of store-bought milk, suggesting the possible presence of live virus in the raw product.
The market for out-of-state pet milk exists largely because the FDA has allowed it to, one former agency official acknowledged to STAT. The agency has issued only six warnings to interstate shippers of raw milk in the last two decades, according to its website, though the practice was banned in 1987.
Electric / Self Driving cars
celebrity gossip
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Apple co-founder Wozinak: Here's the best strategy my own parents used while raising me
“My parents let me follow my heart,” he told graduating students at the University of Colorado Boulder last week. “When you really want something, love something and it’s your passion, you should have your parents supporting you going in your direction. Not telling you, ‘No. You should study this. You should go to this school.’”
Rank Propaganda / Thought Policing / World Disordering
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YouTube agrees to remove videos of banned Hong Kong protest song
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Russian Disinformation Videos Smear Biden Ahead of U.S. Election - The New York Times
Many of the videos are trying to appeal to right-wing voters with fake messages about President Biden, experts say.
Last month, a video began circulating on social media purporting to tell the story of an internet troll farm in Kyiv targeting the American election. Speaking in English with a Slavic accent, “Olesya” offers a first-person account of how she and her colleagues initially worked in support of President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine. Then, she says, after a visit by mysterious Americans who were “probably C.I.A.,” the group began sending messages to American audiences in support of President Biden. “We were told our new target was the United States of America, especially the upcoming elections,” the woman in the video says. “Long story short, we were asked to do everything to prevent Donald Trump from winning the elections.” The video is fake, part of an effort to cloud the political debate ahead of the U.S. elections. U.S. officials say the video is consistent with Russian disinformation operations as internet warriors aligned with Russia appear to be honing their strategy. Some of the old tactics of 2016 or 2020 could be used again, with new refinements.
Microsoft said the video featuring “Olesya” probably came from a group it calls Storm-1516, a collection of disinformation experts who now focus on creating videos they hope might go viral in America. The group likely includes veterans of the Internet Research Agency, a Kremlin-aligned troll farm that sought to influence the 2016 election. The agency was run by Yevgeny Prigozhin, the founder of the Wagner mercenary group who led a rebellion against the Kremlin and then was killed in a plane crash that American and allied officials believe was orchestrated by Russian intelligence agencies.
Musk
Trump / War against the Right / Jan6
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Cohen Made Huge Admission in NYC Trump Case and Now the Tumblers Begin to Fall in Place – PJ Media
You will recall that Cohen received less time from federal prosecutors for cheating on his income taxes and lying to a bank and then, despite not having anything to do with his fraud case, agreeing to plead guilty to two counts of campaign election violations. As Andy McCarthy noted recently, Cohen pleaded guilty to the campaign violations without those violations ever being litigated. McCarthy noted that these charges were never tested in court.
In his testimony, the prosecution was allowed to note that Cohen went to prison for his crimes, including campaign finance violations that weren't violations of the law. This obviously will telegraph to the jury that these 34 charges in New York must be illegal campaign expenditures. That's the story the prosecution has been allowed to tell the jury even though they've charged only the bookkeeping charges.
Tuesday, we found out that, without a doubt, there was a conspiracy that was planned to “Get Trump” by any means necessary — even on flimsy legal payments to stop stories from making it into the news cycle. This is what constitutional lawyer Mike Davis believes happened — a criminal conspiracy by all levels of prosecutors.
Pox / COVID / BioTerror AgitProp
Edumacationalizing / Acedemia Nuts
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How to get 7th graders to smoke - by Adam Mastroianni
Except it did hurt. Students who did the Emotion program ended up smoking more cigarettes and more weed and drinking more alcohol than students who received no program at all. Which is to say: researchers came into schools in Los Angeles and ran a drug prevention program that caused a bunch of seventh-graders to do more drugs.
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Lifetime earnings simply can't keep up with the cost of degrees
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Education Dept. announces highest student loan interest rate over a decade
Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising
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Google adds Web search filter for showing old-school text links as AI rolls out
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The "Metaverse / Mew VR" sales pitch has cooled some, they can remember previous rounds: Virtual Boy: the rise and quick fall of Nintendo's enigmatic red console
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Tonight I end a 21-year blogging career
That was possible not just because I could reach readers through Google, but because I could turn my thoughts and knowledge into an ad-supported commodity that attracted others who wanted to know what I knew. That has been taken from me now. Google has claimed my work as theirs. They make it freely available without attribution. I can no longer turn my knowledge into an income — but Google has. And I had no say in it.
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I Went Undercover as a Secret OnlyFans Chatter. It Wasn't Pretty
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"Free" VMWare: The Worst Website In The Entire World
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As Google AI search rolls out to more people, websites brace for carnage
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Period trackers 'coercing' women into sharing risky information
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Google opens up its smart home to everyone and will make Google TVs home hubs
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iPhone owners say the latest iOS update is resurfacing deleted nudes
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Cable TV providers ruined cable–now they're coming for streaming
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AT&T cuts a deal to launch satellite-to-smartphone service soon
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Utah Locals Are Getting Cheap 10 Gbps Fiber Thanks to Local Governments
TechSuck / Geek Bait
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TCP is an underspecified two-node consensus algorithm
TCP is an agreement between 2 nodes to run a simple consensus algorithm. The data that is agreed on is (roughly) how much of what I have sent have you seen and how much have I seen of what you've sent. Since there are only 2 nodes, the algorithm is much simpler than what you would see in Raft or Paxos, but like a lot of consensus algorithms, it's based on nodes agreeing on what the current highest number is. Besides the streams being sent, there's another important bit of information: the state of the connection itself. Annoyingly, some of this information is not transmitted over the network.
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Linux maintainers were infected for 2 years by SSH-dwelling backdoor with huge reach | Ars Technica
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(Jan 2024) How bad is LLVM really?
AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World
Space / Boomy Zoomers / UFO
Crypto con games
Economicon / Business / Finance
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Raspberry Pi Announces Plans for London Listing in Win for City
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Red Lobster closing at least 99 locations as its future comes into question
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Wall Street Casino Is Open for Business as Meme Stocks Take Over
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Jerome Powell urges patience on rate cuts after key inflation index higher than expected.
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Mortgage companies could intensify the next recession, US officials warn
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The different uses of CPI and PCE, variation in their weights, choice of methodologies and changes in data collection strategies highlights just how arbitrary the markets, media, and Fed’s focus on decimal point misses in forecasts really is. Everyone would be better off if rates or even new inflation targets (as some are calling for) are determined by economic fundamentals rather than arbitrary data quirks. There is no perfect measure. But since the last review of how the US measures inflation was in the 1990s, perhaps it is time for another one.
- The numbers obstinately refuse to do what we want, and it's interfering with our plan to spend our way out of inflation. Let's find better behaved numbers.
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Could the US economy be doing too well?
The boom is visible on the ground. On a recent trip to Georgia in the south of the US, I saw fields and forests being turned into factories with extraordinary speed. In 20 years of reporting around the world, what I have seen in the US over the past year can only compare to what I saw in China in the mid-2000s. US President Joe Biden's economic policies are changing the country’s landscape.
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Walmart's Reign as America's Biggest Retailer Is Under Threat
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Nvidia drops $374M to become its own landlord in Santa Clara
Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making
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JPMorgan CEO urges the U.S. to deal with its deficit sooner rather than later
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Senators Propose $32B in Annual A.I. Spending but Defer Regulation
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California's $12B Medicaid experiment stretches the definition of health
worker shortages, negotiations with health insurance companies, and complex billing and technology systems have hamstrung the community groups' ability to deliver the new services: Now into the third year of the ambitious five-year experiment, only a small fraction of eligible patients have received benefits.
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The Biden Campaign Officially Turns Down the Presidential Debates Commission.
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“How do we have a large body of people that are in our city, our country, that are excellent swimmers and at the same time we need lifeguards — and the only obstacle is that we won’t give them the right to work to become a lifeguard,” the mayor said.
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Friends are not a representative sample of public opinion
I think there’s honor in being willing to defend an unpopular position. And I don’t think public intellectuals ought to behave like political strategists. But if they’re going to make claims about public opinion, they ought to at least be able to locate their views somewhere on the Cartesian plane of the broader American electorate. And you do that by looking at polls, election results, and other data, and maybe by doing some first-hand reporting in communities that are unlike the one you inhabit — and not by relying on the opinions of your friends.
Gessen makes an appeal to authority — claiming that all of the “better informed” people agree with their stance on Gaza. But it’s not as though the Middle East is some issue where an expert consensus can be divined through painstaking application of the scientific method. (Setting aside for a moment that the scientific consensus is also socially constructed,) People have been arguing about this particular parcel of land for centuries. Has it never occurred to Gessen that the reason their friends agree with them on Gaza is precisely because Gessen seeks out friends who hold similar political views (or they seek out Gessen)? Or if not that, because political views are strongly correlated with a person’s position in the lattice of occupational, demographic and socioeconomic categories? And that those views become further entrenched as those social ties deepen? Birds of a feather flock together.
The phrase “epistemic closure” was in vogue a decade or so ago to describe this sort of phenomenon, usually associated with the right and the world of Fox News and Rush Limbaugh. It persists among many Trump voters, who dismiss the mainstream media out of hand. But epistemic closure has now also become commonplace on the left and even in the White House — albeit usually with more elaborate rationalizations like the selective appeals to authority that Gessen makes.
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House Passes Legislation to Improve Air Travel, Sending Bill to Biden's Desk
Law Breaking / Police / Internal Security
External Security / Militaria / Diplomania
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US moves to stop buying uranium from Russia and start producing it at home
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In Red Sea, US Navy paying the price of shipbuilding failures | Responsible Statecraft
The Houthi rebels launching missiles and drones from shore and hijacking commercial shipping in the confined waters of the Red Sea meets the textbook definition of an asymmetric threat in a littoral region. Yet the “little crappy ships,” as they have come to be known, are nowhere to be seen inside the Red Sea. Rather, the Navy has to keep a carrier strike group composed of Ticonderoga-class guided missile cruisers and Arleigh Burke-class destroyers on station longer than anticipated in an attempt to keep an important maritime choke point open.
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The Illusion of Conventional War: Europe Is Learning the Wrong Lessons
World
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BC uses new law to demand house owners explain where they got the money
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Prostitutes are to be granted “rights” to refuse sexual acts, stop sexual acts, perform sexual acts in the manner they prefer, and refuse to sit behind Amsterdam-style windows (public facing windows where prostitutes are on display). However, should a prostitute use these “rights” 10 times within six months, their pimp can then call on a government mediator to intervene. All pimps must have a registered office and apply to the Belgian government for approval to offer contracts to prostitutes. The contracts will be disguised as hotel-restaurant-café (HoReCa) contracts so that prostitutes can remain anonymous.
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Slovakian Prime Minister Robert Fico shot and gravely injured
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MP uses parliamentary privilege to ask why Lucy Letby story blocked in UK
China
Health / Medicine
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Blautia maintains colonic mucus function under low-fiber consumption
Mechanistically, B. coccoides stimulated mucus growth through the production of the short-chain fatty acids propionate and acetate via activation of the short-chain fatty acid receptor Ffar2, which could serve as a new target to restore mucus growth during mucus-associated lifestyle diseases.
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Lots of drug companies talk about putting patients first – but this one did
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Brain biopsies on 'vulnerable' patients at Mt Sinai set off alarm bells at FDA
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Cannabis neuroprotective properties could treat Alzheimer's and Parkinson's
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Babies born by C-section need two doses of measles vaccine to produce antibodies.
Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda
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Cows would be a cause, tho; not a solution: Herd of 170 bison could help store CO2 equivalent of almost 2M cars
The latest research, which has not been peer-reviewed, used a new model developed by scientists at the Yale School of the Environment and funded by the Global Rewilding Alliance. It calculates the additional amount of atmospheric CO2 that wildlife species help to capture and store in soils through their interactions within ecosystems. The European bison herd grazing in an area of nearly 50 sq km of grasslands within the wider Țarcu mountains, was found to potentially capture an additional 2m tonnes of carbon a year. That is nearly 9.8 times more than without the bison – although the report authors noted the 9.8 figure could be up to 55% higher or lower, given the uncertainty around the median estimate. This corresponds to the yearly CO2 emissions of 1.88m average US petrol cars.
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Fastest rate of natural carbon dioxide rise over the last 50k years
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As climate change amplifies urban flooding, communities can be 'sponge cities'
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Microsoft emissions have risen 30% since 2020 due to data center expansion
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Bay Area city orders scientists to stop controversial experiment
Prior to this month, researchers were using specialized machines to spray salt water into the air above a decommissioned naval ship docked in Alameda. Their ultimate goal? To test if those machines could be used to brighten low-lying clouds above the water in an attempt to cool down the planet.