2024-05-29
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The Tragic Story Of The Ill-Fated Supergun | Hackaday
In the annals of ambitious engineering projects, few have captured the imagination and courted controversy quite like Gerald Bull’s Supergun. Bull, a Canadian artillery expert, envisioned a gun that could shoot payloads directly into orbit. In time, his ambition led him down a path that ended in both tragedy and unfinished business. Depending on who you talk to, the Supergun was either a new and innovative space technology, or a weapon of war so dangerous, it couldn’t be allowed to exist. Ultimately, the powers that be intervened to ensure we would never find out either way.
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Diverging diamond interchanges make left turns faster and safer
Horseshit
Electric / Self Driving cars
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The Slowdown in US Electric Vehicle Sales Looks More Like a Blip
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Copper Mining and Vehicle Electrification
Just to meet business-as-usual trends, 115% more copper must be mined in the next 30 years than has been mined historically until now. To electrify the global vehicle fleet requires bringing into production 55% more new mines than would otherwise be needed. On the other hand, hybrid electric vehicle manufacture would require negligible extra copper mining. The figure summarizes projections of both demand and supply in a fashion that has not been done before and we discuss aspects of copper exploration that have not seen much discussion. Our main purpose, however, is to communicate the magnitude of the copper mining challenge to the broader public that is less familiar with upstream resource issues.
celebrity gossip
Rank Propaganda / Thought Policing / World Disordering
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Inside the scramble to ‘prebunk’ election misinformation before it takes hold - The Washington Post
Modeled after vaccines, these campaigns — dubbed “prebunking” — expose people to weakened doses of misinformation paired with explanations and are aimed at helping the public develop “mental antibodies” to recognize and fend off hoaxes in a heated election year.
Google has no plans to launch such a campaign in the United States, where former president Donald Trump and his allies are spreading falsehoods about widespread voter fraud in the 2020 election, laying the groundwork to cast doubt on the results of Trump’s rematch with President Biden in November. Instead, humbler campaigns are springing up in locations across the nation, including Arizona’s Maricopa County, where election officials are enlisting local celebrities such as the Phoenix Suns basketball team to promote voting and explain the procedures. Federal agencies are encouraging state and local officials to invest in prebunking initiatives, advising officials in an April memo to “build a team of trusted voices to amplify accurate information proactively.”
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(2020) 'The Social Dilemma' Director Says the Internet Is Undermining Democracy
Musk
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Tesla owners file federal suit against Elon Musk and family trust
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Musk's Neuralink registers brain implant study on US Government database
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New Cybertruck sends owner to hospital before he can even drive it
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Elon Musk dominates space launch. Rivals are calling foul (Archive)
Elon Musk aggressively elbowed his way into the space launch business over the past two decades, combining engineering genius and an entrepreneurial drive with a demand that the U.S. government stop favoring the big, slow-moving contractors that had long dominated the industry. in one striking way, the former outsider has come to resemble the entrenched contractors he once fought to topple: He is increasingly using his vast power and influence to try to keep emerging rivals at bay, his competitors say, even as his success is prompting qualms within the government about such heavy reliance on a mercurial billionaire. The new generation of space entrepreneurs trying to emulate Mr. Musk is sufficiently concerned about what they see as his anticompetitive tactics that some of them are now willing to take him on publicly.
Trump / War against the Right / Jan6
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Trump says he will give "very serious consideration" to pardoning Julian Assange
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Donald Trump Says He'll Stop All Electric Car Sales
ormer United States President Donald J. Trump, currently facing 34 felony counts in criminal court, is campaigning for re-election this fall by taking shots at the increasingly popular electric car industry. Trump has already called for oil and gas industry executives to donate significant campaign funds in exchange for a reversal of Biden administration climate policies. If elected this November, Trump would roll back tailpipe emissions targets and dramatically slash EV tax credits. These policies may prove unpopular even among Republican voters, as electric vehicle production has spurred job growth and investment in southern states.
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Everything You Need To Know As Trump Trial Heads To Verdict | ZeroHedge
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Trump Tells Donors He'll Deport "Any Student" Who Protests Against Gaza Genocide
Pox / COVID / BioTerror AgitProp
Religion / Tribal / Culture War and Re-Segregation
Edumacationalizing / Acedemia Nuts
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What do Students graduating from Elite Colleges this year want?
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Are Gaza Protests Happening Mostly at Elite Colleges? | Washington Monthly
Using data from Harvard’s Crowd Counting Consortium and news reports of encampments, we matched information on every institution of higher education that has had pro-Palestinian protest activity (starting when the war broke out in October until early May) to the colleges in our 2023 college rankings. Of the 1,421 public and private nonprofit colleges that we ranked, 318 have had protests and 123 have had encampments.
By matching that data to percentages of students at each campus who receive Pell Grants (which are awarded to students from moderate- and low-income families), we came to an unsurprising conclusion: Pro-Palestinian protests have been rare at colleges with high percentages of Pell students. Encampments at such colleges have been rarer still. A few outliers exist, such as Cal State Los Angeles, the City College of New York, and Rutgers University–Newark. But in the vast majority of cases, campuses that educate students mostly from working-class backgrounds have not had any protest activity. For example, at the 78 historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) on the Monthly’s list, 64 percent of the students, on average, receive Pell Grants. Yet according to our data, none of those institutions have had encampments and only nine have had protests, a significantly lower rate than non-HBCU schools.
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Harrassment of scientists is surging – institutions aren't sure how to help
Every day around the world, scientists are being abused and harassed online. They are being attacked on social media and by e-mail, telephone, letter and in person. And their reputations are being smeared with baseless accusations of misconduct. Sometimes, this escalates to real-world confrontations and attacks.
Such threats to scientists aren’t new; those researching climate change and gun control, for example, have endured abuse for decades. However, since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, there has been an unprecedented escalation in the intensity and frequency of attacks, and the range of targets, say researchers. Anthony Fauci, the former director of the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and one of the most high-profile infectious-diseases specialists during the pandemic, was subject not just to online trolling, but to two credible attempts on his life that prompted the arrests of two people. Virologist Marc Van Ranst at the Catholic University of Leuven in Belgium and his family were moved to a safe house after a far-right soldier hunted them.
t can be particularly difficult to deal with harassment that comes from, or is prompted by the comments of, another academic. “Some of the most impactful abuse and harassment comes from peers and colleagues,” Byford says. It’s also been a source of frustration for Hotez, seeing his equally respected peers spreading what he sees as disinformation.
Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising
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PayPal is planning an ad business using data on its shoppers
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T-Mobile buying US Cellular; says rural coverage will improve
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EU Explores Whether Telegram Falls Under Strict New Content Law
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Google won't comment on a potentially leak of its search algorithm documentation
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Nvidia denies pirate e-book sites are "shadow libraries" to shut down lawsuit
TechSuck / Geek Bait
AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World
Space / Boomy Zoomers / UFO
Crypto con games
Economicon / Business / Finance
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Activist Elliott takes $2.5B T.I. stake, urges company to improve free cash flow
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Wheat Jumps To Nine-Month High On Fears Of Dwindling Global Stockpiles | ZeroHedge
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Mortgages Stuck Around 7% Force Rapid Rethink of American Dream
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Stocks are up 12% this year, but nearly half of Americans think they're down
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Opinion | American voters are wrong about the economy. Whose fault is it? - The Washington Post
n reality, the U.S. economy has been growing consistently for nearly two years, even after accounting for inflation. By virtually every benchmark, in fact, we’re exceeding growth expectations. The U.S. economy has been outperforming other advanced economies. We’re also doing better than pre-pandemic forecasts had situated us by now, both in terms of gross domestic product and the number of jobs out there. This generally isn’t true elsewhere in the world.
economists define “inflation” as growth in prices, not the level of prices. So if prices skyrocketed last year, then flattened out this year, economists would describe inflation as currently low. A normal person, however, might still complain about “inflation” since the level of prices remains higher than it was not long ago.
Many commentators (particularly those on the left, who are furious about how these misperceptions reflect upon President Biden) blame the media for the public’s economic illiteracy or for leaving the public with the impression that economic conditions are terrible. I agree that we journalists generally give more play to bad economic numbers than good ones. We’ve also done a lousy job of helping the public understand what the right benchmarks are, such as whether they should expect prices to fall outright, what counts as a “good” GDP report, or how our outcomes compare to those in other countries. But here’s a secret: If the media has a bad-news bias, that’s because our audiences have a bad-news bias, too. People are more likely to click, watch, listen to and share content that induces outrage. This human predisposition toward negativity is not unique to economic news, nor news in general.
Social media and political echo chambers then amplify our biases for negative news, particularly when consumers see developments that also align with their other preferences. For example, there’s a reason Republicans rate the economy more poorly than Democrats do, even if both groups are pretty dour.
Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making
Law Breaking / Police / Internal Security
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Jay Ostrem, 64, was jailed on $1 million cash-only bond on three counts of first-degree murder, South Dakota Attorney General Marty Jackley said. A probable cause affidavit identified the victims as two brothers Paul Frankus, 26, and his 21-year-old brother Zach and Timothy Richmond, 35.
External Security / Militaria / Diplomania
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UPDATE: The Story of a Chechen Shot by a Special Ops Colonel Is Getting Weirder – PJ Media
The CEO of Utilities One, Serghei Busmachiu, is from Moldova. Other officials from the company appear to be Eastern European. Busmachiu moved to the U.S. in 2013 and worked as a busboy and spent time selling ice in Alaska. How does a busboy/ice salesman save enough money to open a utility company in just three years? Utilities One released a statement, as well as what they claim is the last picture taken by Daraev, which seems unlikely since reports suggested the man was using telephoto camera equipment. The only way the company would have access to pics Ramzan Daraev took would be if they were on a company phone.
- "selling ice in Alaska"
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The obscure federal intelligence bureau that got Vietnam, Iraq and Ukraine right
Every American knows what the CIA is. I would guess that maybe 1 in 1,000 have ever heard of INR — the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research, American diplomats’ in-house intelligence agency. But if you do know about INR, you probably know two things: (1) It has gotten big stuff right when the CIA and others screwed up. (2) When it got that big stuff right, no one listened to it. INR is the Cassandra of American intelligence, and it earned that reputation the hard way.
World
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Parliamentarians urge next UK govt to consider ban on smartphones for under-16s
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Why have so many UK festivals been cancelled or postponed?
According to the AIF, summer 2023 saw a large number of festival casualties. Rostron said that “one in six festivals that were around in 2019 were no longer around in 2023″ and they found 36 that had cancelled in advance. “The number one was reason was economic and financial pressures,” said Rostron of last summer’s cancellations. “It comes from a mixture of rising supply chain costs, and if they weren’t selling as many tickets – even by a small percentage – the difference on the increase in prices and difficulty in terms now in place meant they had to cancel. “A number of festivals happened where everything looked good on the surface. The customers came, had a good time, the bands played, but the festivals actually lost money. Some of them are in difficulty or might be in difficulty if there isn’t a good wind. That’s very worrying. These festivals are around and don’t appear to be on fire, but maybe they are.”
“Previously, about 90 per cent of the ticket price went on the event, and 10 per cent was there for the profit,” he said. “Those supply chain costs shot up by about 30 per cent because of Brexit, because of COVID, the energy crisis, businesses disappearing as a result. A few big ones like Glastonbury can afford to significantly increase their ticket prices, most of them can’t go up too much because of the cost of living crisis and being affordable.
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Sin Chanserivutha, spokesman and Undersecretary of State for the State Secretariat of Civil Aviation (SSCA), said yesterday that, “The media coverage of MH370 in Cambodia is fake”. “We do not know the purpose of this false news, but we just know that they have bad intentions against Cambodia,” he said. “This false media coverage and an image were published once about eight years ago, and it has just been revised again and republished recently, which has created confusion,” he said. The remarks come after a British-based newspaper, The Mirror reported that: “MH370 mystery ‘solved’ by Google Maps as plane remains ‘found’ in darkest part of Cambodian jungle”.
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A robot will try to remove melted nuclear fuel from Japan's destroyed reactor
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Argentinian president to meet Silicon Valley CEOs in bid to court tech titans
Israel
Russia Bad / Ukraine War
China
Health / Medicine
Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda
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Scientists solve mystery of why killer whales are attacking boats worldwide | Daily Mail Online
Marine biologists have now revealed that their seemingly aggressive behavior may actually just be the actions of boredom among the highly intelligent animals. In a report released on Friday, biologists, government officials and other marine representatives said the boat rudders are a prime toy for orcas in open waters.
Researchers believe the sudden fad of attacking boats started in around 2019 after a rapid increase in orca's main food source, bluefin tuna, thanks to conservation efforts and fishing bans. This meant the whales spent less time hunting, leaving them with ample leisure time.
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The Stench of Climate Change Denial - The New York Times
You see, when I was in high school, my family lived on the South Shore of Long Island, where few homes had sewer connections. Most had septic tanks, and there always seemed to be an overflowing tank somewhere upwind. Most of Nassau County eventually got sewered. But many American homes, especially in the Southeast, aren’t connected to sewer lines, and more and more septic tanks are overflowing, on a scale vastly greater than what I remember from my vaguely smelly hometown — which is both disgusting and a threat to public health. The cause? Climate change. Along the Gulf and South Atlantic coasts, The Washington Post reported last week, “sea levels have risen at least six inches since 2010.” This may not sound like much, but it leads to rising groundwater and elevated risks of overflowing tanks. The emerging sewage crisis is only one of many disasters we can expect as the planet continues to warm, and nowhere near the top of the list.
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Can disease-detecting dogs help save South Dakota's bighorn sheep?