2024-06-23
Horseshit
Electric / Self Driving cars
Rank Propaganda / Thought Policing / World Disordering
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Extreme weather threatens elections in 2024, national security experts warn : NPR
This year, at least 68 countries will hold elections, with billions of voters heading to the polls. Voting will be subject to many of the usual electoral risks, including disinformation campaigns, foreign interference, and rigging by incumbents. In some states, both incumbents and challengers could even use violence to keep certain people at home. But there will be another factor, one not yet widely considered, that could skew results: the physical forces unleashed by climate change. They present a unique and novel challenge. Although all electoral threats are serious, the ones brought by climate change have the potential to disenfranchise voters even in the absence of malevolent intent. The disenfranchisement of even a few voters can make a profound difference in election outcomes, as in the case of the 537 votes in Florida that determined the U.S. presidential election in 2000. As extreme weather events become more frequent, the risk to voters will grow.
Trump / War against the Right / Jan6
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Why billionaires support Trump
First, business people struggle to understand fanaticism. In commercial life, all actors are negotiable, even if their price is high. You might pass decades in the private sector without encountering someone who has total commitment to an abstract doctrine (socialism), to an individual (Trump) or to a cause (Russian amour propre). This blind spot for zeal is why corporations were such sitting ducks for “woke”. And why oligarchs a generation ago thought Vladimir Putin was their pliable instrument.
This mental glitch applies to business as a whole. But there is another that affects the most successful exponents in particular. The self-made super-rich tend to grossly overrate contrarianism. Dissent is core to financial success. Why buy an asset unless you think the market has underpriced it? Why set up a business unless you think the world is wrong not to have offered that product or service already? Opening the humblest corner bistro is, in essence, a statement that everyone who hasn’t opened one there has missed a trick. Imagine how much stronger that contrarian impulse must be in a hedge fund seeking above-market returns.
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Attack of the Crypto-Nazis! - Tablet Magazine
Are working-class men of all races, along with rural Americans in general, the greatest threats to the American republic today? According to Harold Meyerson, writing in the progressive journal he co-founded, The American Prospect, “[y]ounger working-class men of all races” who support Trump instead of Biden are emotionally disturbed individuals obsessed with their “precarious manhood” who “lash out: blaming their problems on outsiders and anti-macho ideology, on feminized work rules, on capitalists and communists so long as they were Jewish, on novelty, on empiricism.”
If the thought of millions of young Hispanic, Black and white men whose manhood is precarious and who hate “empiricism” isn’t scary enough, we should be even more terrified by the 16% of Americans who dwell in the rural wastelands that lie between big Democratic cities. This is the claim of professor Tom Schaller and professor Paul Waldman, whose election-season campaign tract White Rural Rage is the flavor of the month on NPR and MSNBC. On Morning Joe, Schaller duly declared that white rural Americans are “the most racist, xenophobic, anti-immigrant, anti-gay geo-demographic group in the country. ”This one-sixth of the American population,” according to White Rural Rage, is a “threat to the world’s oldest constitutional democracy.”
Pox / COVID / BioTerror AgitProp
Religion / Tribal / Culture War and Re-Segregation
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Animal homosexual behaviour under-reported by scientists, survey shows
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Milwaukee's oldest gay bar donates photos to Wisconsin LGBTQ History Project
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Mecca sees over 1,000 deaths during the Hajj as temperatures topped 50°C
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Naomi Klein: Thin-skinned Baillie Gifford has put arts festivals in jeopardy
Klein was one of the 800+ signatories of the recent contentious letter spearheaded by Fossil Free Books which called on Baillie Gifford, a prominent sponsor of arts festivals including Hay and the Edinburgh Fringe, to pull its investments from the fossil fuel industry as well as from companies “that profit from Israeli apartheid, occupation and genocide”.
The resulting pressure saw Hay Festival sever its ties to Baillie Gifford, and the investment manager has since cancelled all its remaining sponsorships of literary festivals. Other than Hay, it is unclear whether the decision was taken by the festivals or Baillie Gifford itself. The company will continue to sponsor the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. Critics have called the campaign self-defeating and hypocritical, given writers’ own involvement in the companies targeted by Fossil Free Books, most notably Amazon.
Edumacationalizing / Acedemia Nuts
Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising
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How Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta Failed Children on Safety - The New York Times
The email exchanges are just one slice of evidence cited among more than a dozen lawsuits filed since last year by the attorneys general of 45 states and the District of Columbia. The states accuse Meta of unfairly ensnaring teenagers and children on Instagram and Facebook while deceiving the public about the hazards. Using a coordinated legal approach reminiscent of the government’s pursuit of Big Tobacco in the 1990s, the attorneys general seek to compel Meta to bolster protections for minors.
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'Meridian': Why Netflix Is Helping Competitors with Content and Code
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Creative workers deserve better than a choice as to who rips them off
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Amazon mulls $5-$10 monthly price tag for unprofitable Alexa service, AI revamp
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Illegal streamers sent to prison and others arrested in major piracy crackdown | The Independent
TechSuck / Geek Bait
AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World
Space / Boomy Zoomers / UFO
Economicon / Business / Finance
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A Small Town with a Big Factory Goes South in Search of Workers
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Delivery Drivers Got Higher Wages. Now They're Getting Fewer Orders
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Regulators hit Citi, JPMorgan, Goldman, Bank of America over living will plans
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Inside FICO and the Credit Bureau Cartel
In January of 2024, the Community Home Lenders of America discussed this dynamic with FICO, calling it a utility, which it is. The “combination of FICO’s extremely high market share, and the fact that Washington agencies require lenders to use this company’s product, means that FICO has unilateral, solid-gold market power, the type rarely seen in any US industry short of highly regulated utilities, whereby rates are set by public-utility boards or commissions.” But the companies themselves know it and say it. In November 2011, then-CEO of Fair Isaac, Mark Greene, explained that the “network effect” of “FICO Scores . . . being sort of the standard language” and “having everybody . . . standardize on a FICO Score, that’s magic.” FICO sells 10 billion scores every year, four times the number of McDonald’s burgers and twice the number of Starbucks coffees sold annually. According to the company itself, nine out of ten lending decisions rely on FICO.
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Walmart switching to electronic price tags that can change every 10 seconds
Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making
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Proposed USDA rule to require RFID tagging of inter-state cattle and bison
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House leaders vow to block online privacy bill over intraparty pushback
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One-third of Americans think political violence is justifiable
In 2022, nearly one-third of participants (32.8 percent) considered violence to be usually or always justified to advance at least one political objective. Some groups were much more likely than others to endorse political violence: Republicans and MAGA-supporting Republicans in particular; those who endorse QAnon, the white supremacy movement, Christian nationalists and other extreme right-wing organizations and movements; and firearm owners — but only by a small margin, unless they owned assault-type rifles, had bought firearms during the COVID pandemic or regularly carried loaded firearms in public. With 2023’s results, the list grew to include racists, sexists, xenophobes, homophobes, transphobes Islamophobes and antisemites.
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Grieving Parents Want Congress to Protect Children Online
- What's better than "do it for the chilluns?" Do it for the dead chilluns.
Law Breaking / Police / Internal Security
External Security / Militaria / Diplomania
World
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EU interior ministers want to exempt themselves from chat control bulk scanning
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A Roman beach destroyed by Mount Vesuvius is open to the public
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Weeks before the 2024 Olympics Eiffel Tower ticket prices increase by 20%
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US Olympic and other teams will bring their own AC units to Paris
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What to Know About Japan’s CBD Crackdown | TIME
While regulating THC limits for hemp and CBD products is common practice around the world—it’s capped at 0.3% in some U.S. states, for example—Japan’s proposed new cap of 0.001% for oils (and even lower for beverages and products in other forms) has been slammed by advocates and experts as unrealistic and likely a death knell for Japan’s CBD industry, effectively banning the substance altogether, as some regional neighbors like China have recently moved to do.
Russia Bad / Ukraine War
Health / Medicine
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Sarepta. Why? | Science | AAAS
The agency has just granted that use expansion, and it turns out that it was all due to Peter Marks, who completely overruled three review teams and two of his highest-level staffers (all of whom said that Sarepta had not proven its case). Honestly, I'm starting to wonder why any of us go to all this trouble. It appears that all you need is a friend high up in the agency and your clinical failures just aren't an issue any more. Review committees aren't convinced? Statisticians don't buy your arguments? Who cares! Peter Marks is here to deliver hot, steaming takeout containers full of Hope.
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Cystic fibrosis 'miracle' drugs priced higher for poorer EU countries
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Bedroom light at night increases inflammation and disrupts circadian rhythm
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IV infusion enables editing of the cystic fibrosis gene in lung stem cells
Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda
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Harvard Study: Planetary Health Index Diet – lower mortality and 30% lower CO2
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California Water Temperatures Drop to Dangerous Levels - Newsweek
Summer temperatures in Northern and Central California could have more people flocking to the beach to cool off in the ocean, but data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration shows that some of the coastal waters are too cold for safe swimming. A recent temperature reading off the coast of Crescent City revealed that water temperatures were 47.3 degrees Fahrenheit, more than 3 degrees below normal for this time of year and 4 degrees below winter water temperatures in January. Meteorologists and weather experts are blaming the temperature plunge on an "intense marine cold spell."
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Extreme heat is a global killer and worse for our health than previously thought
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'Multiple disasters all in one day': New Mexico's brutal week of fire and flood
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The gardener who took a Canadian city to court for the right to not mow his lawn