2024-06-02

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• When Companies Ask for Your Social Security Number, Try Saying No

• Beware Moral Fashion

  moral fashion actually seems to be more of a (not necessarily zero mean) random walk in a not so limited space. Centuries ago, when the world had 100Ks of small poor cultures amid frequent famines, pandemics, and wars, cultural selection was strong, assuring that morals were adaptive. But then we cut variety, weakened selection, and elevated the status of moral fashion changing “activists”. After which morals have rapidly wandered away from their initial adaptive places, without obvious limits, and plausibly mostly due to fashion processes that don’t on average promote adaptiveness.

  In contrast, clothing fashion changes may be wasteful, but clothes are constrained to wander in a space limited by our limited willingness to sacrifice comfort, convenience, or cost for clothing fashion. More threatening would be cultural changes that made us much more willing to make such sacrifices, and moral fashion is exactly the sort of thing which might do that.

Horseshit

• 5G Power: Creating a green grid that slashes costs, emissions and energy use

• Witches and wizards: A delightful new book will tell you something new about medieval magic.

  Perhaps you hold the currently popular notion that medieval witch hunts targeted wise old women who made herbal remedies for their ungrateful peasant neighbors? Incorrect, according to Stanmore and most historians of the period. In the first place, witch hunts were rare during the Middle Ages. They proliferated in the early modern period, and while Stanmore does not explore theories about what caused this in Cunning Folk, historians increasingly view Europe’s witch hunts as a symptom of social upheaval and competing faiths following the Reformation. Witch hunts occurred within all Christian denominations and served as a kind of advertisement for a particular church’s ability to secure both salvation and protection from evil for its members. They were dramatic demonstrations of purity in a highly competitive ideological marketplace.

• The big lie about sleep

• Why Asia Stopped Having Kids

  Asians have stopped breeding. Really, almost everyone has stopped, but one group has taken things to a new level. The entire first world other than Israel is just at or below replacement. But “low fertility” in European derived societies means around 1.2 to 1.7 children per woman. Among East Asians, the range is more like 0.7-1.2.

  my unified theory of East Asians is that they are hyper-conformists, and relatedly struggle in situations where behavior is not scripted. This makes them good at, say, technological development, catch-up economic growth, and keeping the streets clean, but bad at things like entrepreneurship — at least relative to human capital — and forming families in a world without arranged marriages or strong norms bringing young people together.

• The State of the American Middle Class

• Survival of the richest: Inside the short-lived fallout shelter bubble

Electric / Self Driving cars

• EV startup Fisker's collapse: how the company crumbled

Rank Propaganda / Thought Policing / World Disordering

• Journalism gets substantial rise in philanthropic spending over the past 5 years

  There has been a “substantial” increase in philanthropic spending for journalism over the past five years, particularly outlets that serve poor and minority communities, a report issued on Thursday said — but journalists need to tighten ethical rules that govern the new spending, it recommended. The struggling news industry is increasingly relying on donations and subscriptions, although it hasn’t come close to making up for the collapse in advertising that has led to the dramatic drop in outlets that cover local news. More than half of funders surveyed by NORC at the University of Chicago said they have increased their journalism grants. Most nonprofit and for-profit news organizations report more funding.

• The World War Two army that didn't exist

• Toxic Clickbait: Evil AI Sock Puppets or Unhinged Edgelord Flexing on Social Media?

  Category Six operations are the most severe as they trigger calls for violence and policy response. "An IO reaches Category Six if it triggers a policy response or some other form of concrete action, or if it includes a call for violence. This is a (thankfully) rare category. Most Category Six influence operations are associated with hack-and leak operations which use genuine documents to achieve their aim; they can also be associated with conspiracy theories or other operations that incite people to violence. "

  Such attacks go well beyond the simple abuse of generative AI and well into the network effects of hundreds or even thousands of well-funded organizations that were previously laborious troll farms burning the midnight oil. Now, those same human armies are multiplying their efforts by virtue of having empowered each team member with bothered capabilities to create and cross-post emotionally charged messaging to get unsuspecting, vulnerable audiences to react in seemingly irrational ways.

Musk

• SpaceX Aims to Launch Cellular Starlink Service This Fall

• Elon Musk's Latest Dust-Up: What Does 'Science' Even Mean?

Trump / War against the Right / Jan6

• How Trump's Guilty Verdict Is Tanking His Value

• The Prosecution’s Story About Trump Featured Several Logically Impossible Claims: Whatever Trump did after the 2016 presidential election, it seems safe to say that it did not retroactively promote his victory.

Pox / COVID / BioTerror AgitProp

• The Covid-19 Vaccines Shouldn't Have Been Free

• Fauci says no evidence for pandemic guidance on masking or social distancing

Religion / Tribal / Culture War and Re-Segregation

• Statistics of the Negro Leagues officially enter the Major League record

Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising

• Pixar Layoffs, AI in Animation Studios, and Course Correction Needed at Disney?

• Stealing everything you've ever typed on your Windows Recall PC is now possible

  • Microsoft's new Windows Recall AI spyware has been hacked to run on unsupported hardware.

• New Streaming Service Lets Viewers Create Their Own Shows Using AI

• VPNs vs "Russia and Belarus are banned" Helldivers 2 has caused over 20k Steam accounts to be banned

  • HN comments

• Alexa will soon lose a popular shopping list feature

• The biggest findings in the Google Search leak.

• Cheating communities have realized that they are unable to spoof TPM hardware ID

• All Spotify Car Things Are About to Become E-Waste

TechSuck / Geek Bait

• 12 to 32 TB of RAM: Amazon EC2 high memory U7i Instances for large in-memory databases

• FCC Seeks Comment on Impact of Geomagnetic Storm on Communications

AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World

• The AI drama is heating up. Higher the stakes, more infighting spills in public

• AI is shockingly good at making fake nudes and causing havoc in schools

• Google Rolls Back A.I. Search Feature After Flubs and Flaws

Space / Boomy Zoomers / UFO

• Scrubbed at T-4min. Boeing's Starliner capsule poised for second try at first astronaut flight

  • Boeing will launch its 1st Starliner astronaut mission today after delays. Here’s how to watch it live online.

  • Boeing and NASA call off Starliner crew launch minutes before liftoff

  • Boeing's Starliner Launch with NASA Astronauts Postponed Again

  • Starliner Launch Attempt Scrubbed.

• Japan billionaire Maezawa cancels Dear Moon space tourism project

  • Why a Japanese billionaire just canceled his lunar flight on Starship

• Updated Formula on Alien Intelligence Suggests We Are Alone in the Galaxy

• Chinese Spaceplane Releases Mysterious Object in Orbit Months After Launch

• FCC chair calls for stricter ‘space junk’ rules.

• China makes historic landing on far side of the moon

Crypto con games

• Sam Bankman-Fried Moved to Oklahoma City Despite Judge's Request

Economicon / Business / Finance

• Why There's a Copper Shortage

• Making housing more affordable means your home's value will have to come down

• Software stocks got pummeled after a cluster of troubling earnings reports

• Homebuyers Are Starting to Revolt over Steep Prices Across US

• Dr Pepper Ties Pepsi as America's No. 2 Soda

• Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella resigning from Starbucks board effective immediately

• Savings app CEO says 85,000 accounts locked in fintech meltdown

External Security / Militaria / Diplomania

• Retired Navy Admiral Is Arrested on Bribery Charges - The New York Times

  Federal prosecutors said that Robert P. Burke, 62, of Coconut Creek, Fla., who was once the Navy’s second-highest-ranking officer, steered a government contract to a company in exchange for a job at the firm with a yearly base salary of $500,000 and a grant of 100,000 stock options. The two co-chief executives of the company, Yongchul Kim, 50, who is known as Charlie, and Meghan Messenger, 47, both of New York, were also arrested and charged with taking part in the scheme, the Justice Department said.

Iran / Houthi

• Houthi rebel footage appears to show a downed US Reaper drone worth $30M

Israel

• Israel ends a three-week offensive in north Gaza town

Russia Bad / Ukraine War

• Deepfake of U.S. Official Appears After Shift on Ukraine Attacks in Russia

• The Kharkiv Offensive Is a Russian Strategic Failure for Now

Health / Medicine

• Can ketones enhance cognitive function and protect brain networks?

• Many mental-health conditions have bodily triggers

• First pig-to-human liver transplant recipient 'doing well'

• Genetic cause of intellectual disability affecting thousands identified

• People like amphetamines? ADHD and autism: what causes it, and why are diagnoses soaring?

• Ozempic and Wegovy Might Be Supercharging Your Taste Buds

• Africa needs malaria vaccines as soon as possible

• FDA staff questions safety of ecstasy for PTSD

• Deaths linked to ATV use in U.S. climb by a third in one year.

Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda

• Giant Tonga Volcanic Eruption Could Disrupt Weather for Years to Come

  Water vapour in the stratosphere has two main effects. One, it helps in the chemical reactions which destroy the ozone layer, and two, it is a very potent greenhouse gas. There is no precedent in our observations of volcanic eruptions to know what all that water would do to our climate, and for how long. This is because the only way to measure water vapour in the entire stratosphere is via satellites. These only exist since 1979, and there hasn't been an eruption similar to Hunga Tonga in that time.

  The large ozone hole from August to December 2023 was at least in part due to Hunga Tonga. Our simulations predicted that ozone hole almost two years in advance. In terms of global mean temperatures, which are a measure of how much climate change we are experiencing, the impact of Hunga Tonga is very small, only about 0.015 degrees Celsius. (This was independently confirmed by another study.) This means that the incredibly high temperatures we have measured for about a year now cannot be attributed to the Hunga Tonga eruption.

• California sides with big utilities, trimming incentives for community solar

• Water batteries: Pressurized water stores energy deep underground

• Phoenix Is Facing a Hurricane Katrina of Heat

• Heat kills at least 15 in India as temperatures near 50C

• Market value of carbon offsets drops 61%

• The Largest Ice Shelf in Antarctica Is Behaving Oddly

• Ancient terracotta air coolers are helping fight record extreme heating in India

• Gene-Edited Salad Greens Are Coming to US Stores This Fall

• Panama prepares to evacuate first island in face of rising sea levels