2024-06-29
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Horseshit
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Cold shipping might be the next industry that batteries disrupt
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Another monolith appeared near Las Vegas. Who's behind these mysterious objects?
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A Black Woman Invented Home Security. Why Did It Go So Wrong?
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The Mythic Rebellion: Why The Far Right Keeps Winning
Our politics is no longer a battle between left and right. It is a battle between myths, and our institutions are the battleground. On one side, those who believe that the institutions of liberal democracy can meet the chaos of the times. On the other, people who see those same institutions as the cause of our fragmentation. The far right is gaining traction because it speaks to a wide-spread frustration with the technocratic bureaucracies of the EU and the US. It casts them as toxic machines enforcing a placeless, multicultural pluralism that serves global capital at the expense of working people. Increasingly, those same institutions don’t have a response good enough to convince voters.
The imaginal dream of a new future is not going to come from the technocratic political class. It absolutely won’t come from the fear-mongering and manipulation of the far right. It will come from a culture that knows how to honour the past while celebrating change. From economic and immigration policies that nurture identity in its many forms while recognising that there is a limit to how much diversity a culture can take. Above all, it will arrive by dreaming of a third path, one that takes us beyond the sterile emptiness of our existing politics into a future defined by love, acceptance and aliveness.
Electric / Self Driving cars
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The Hyundai Inster is a cool, small EV – so of course it's not coming to the US
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Bitsening raises $25M for its high-resolution radar in autonomous driving
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Tesla Autopilot leads driver onto active train tracks, mistaking it for road
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EVs still have major quality problems, and it's mostly about the software
Rank Propaganda / Thought Policing / World Disordering
Trump / War against the Right / Jan6
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Supreme Court curbs charges against Jan. 6 rioters
The Supreme Court on Friday made it more difficult to prosecute some Jan. 6 rioters, and may have weakened the Justice Department's case against former President Trump in the process. The big picture: The court narrowed one specific charge that the Justice Department has relied on in more than 300 Jan. 6 cases, including Trump's.
That charge — obstructing an official proceeding — has previously been used almost exclusively for white-collar crimes like evidence tampering. But the Justice Department had argued that the Jan. 6 riot was an attempt to obstruct an official proceeding: the certification of the 2020 election. To prove an obstruction charge, the court said Friday, prosecutors would need to show that a defendant interfered with documents, records or other material parts of an official proceeding.
In a big decision today, the Supreme Court, in a split that saw KBJ siding with the Roberts majority and ACB writing the dissent joined by Sotomayor and Kagan, rejected the use of The Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 against a J6 defendant, ruling the statute only applied to interference with records or evidence, not interference with an official proceeding. This has implications not only for other J6 defendants, but also the DC court charges against Trump.
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DNC Sent Millions To Law Firms Behind ‘Unprecedented Lawfare’ Campaign Against Trump
Pox / COVID / BioTerror AgitProp
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CDC A(H5N1) Bird Flu Response Update June 28, 2024
To date, there have been three human cases associated with an ongoing multistate outbreak of A(H5N1) in U.S. dairy cows. Based on the information available at this time, CDC's current H5N1 bird flu human health risk assessment for the U.S. general public remains low. All three sporadic cases had direct contact with sick cows.
Religion / Tribal / Culture War and Re-Segregation
Edumacationalizing / Acedemia Nuts
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So Now the Feds Will Monitor Research Integrity?
We can now begin to make sense of the dust-up between the bureaucracy-based Scientific Integrity Task Force and the university-based Council on Governmental Relations. Neither is concerned so much with protecting the integrity of science; they merely differ on who shall be the enforcers—universities or federal bureaucracies—over the working scientists who bring in the crucial cash. Neither have any interest in dealing with the most significant scientific-integrity issues facing us today, ranging from overt politicization to corruption verging on criminality at the highest levels. At this point, it’s apt to recall Henry Kissinger’s famous quote about the 1980s Iran-Iraq war—that it’s a “pity both sides can’t lose.” Yet, while I’m no friend of the shenanigans of university administrations and the games they play, I’m far more concerned about the Biden administration’s move to complete the federalization of university science begun in 1950, which may finally squash the very people who are the most effective custodians of scientific integrity: scientists themselves.
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Professor Charged for Operating Multimillion-Dollar Grant Fraud Scheme
According to court documents, Hoau-Yan Wang, 67, was a tenured medical professor at a public university’s medical school, as well as a paid advisor and consultant to a publicly traded Texas biopharmaceutical company. From approximately May 2015 through approximately April 2023, Wang allegedly engaged in a scheme to fabricate and falsify scientific data in grant applications made to the NIH on behalf of himself and the biopharmaceutical company. As alleged, the fraudulent grant applications to the NIH sought funding for scientific research of a potential treatment and diagnostic test for Alzheimer’s disease and resulted in the award of approximately $16 million in grants from approximately 2017 to 2021, part of which funded Wang’s laboratory work and salary.
Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising
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Copyright takedowns are a cautionary tale that few are heeding
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Meta Moves to More Directly Connect to ActivityPub, but Is It Open?
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Fujifilm once struggled to sell cameras. Now, it can't keep up with demand
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The Real Story of the Crisis at The Washington Post - The Atlantic
For years, it was sacrilege at the Post to speak ill of Bezos, the billionaire founder of Amazon who rescued the paper in 2013. Rescue really is the appropriate word: As the Post’s revenues crumbled amid the broader collapse of the print-newspaper business, the Graham family—stewards of the Post for 80 years—couldn’t find a path forward. Though embedded deeply in the city’s culture, they welcomed Bezos’s $250 million bailout. Baron, the executive editor at the time, wrote in his 2023 memoir, Collision of Power, that “we all wondered whether Bezos grasped just how bad things were.”
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Microsoft's AI boss Suleyman has a curious understanding of web copyright law
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T-Mobile users enraged as "Un-carrier" breaks promise to never raise prices
TechSuck / Geek Bait
AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World
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Unesco sounds alarm over artificial intelligence-fuelled Holocaust denial
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Bill Gates says not to worry about AI's energy draw, technology will adapt
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Zuckerberg disses closed-source AI competitors as trying to 'create God'
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LLMs now write lots of science. Good
Trying to restrict the use of LLMs is not the way to deal with these problems. In the future they are rapidly going to become more prevalent and more powerful. They are already embedded in word processors and other software, and will soon be as common as spell-checkers. Researchers tell surveys that they see the benefits of generative ai not just for writing papers but for coding and doing administrative tasks. And crucially, their use cannot easily be detected. Although journals can impose all the burdensome disclosure requirements they like, it would not help, because they cannot tell when their rules have been broken. Journals such as Science should abandon detailed disclosures for the use of llms as a writing tool, beyond a simple acknowledgment.
Space / Boomy Zoomers / UFO
Economicon / Business / Finance
Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making
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SEC v. Jarkesy: A Win for the Separation of Powers and the Right to Civil Jury Trial.
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What a big new Supreme Court decision could mean for homeless Americans
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California's Gov. Newsom wants to restrict smartphone usage in schools – AP News
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20 Biggest Lies Biden Told During His Debate With Trump
watched the Biden-Trump debate alone in a Lisbon hotel room, and it made me weep. I cannot remember a more heartbreaking moment in American presidential campaign politics in my lifetime, precisely because of what it revealed: Joe Biden, a good man and a good president, has no business running for re-election. And Donald Trump, a malicious man and a petty president, has learned nothing and forgotten nothing. He is the same fire hose of lies he always was, obsessed with his grievances — nowhere close to what it will take for America to lead in the 21st century. The Biden family and political team must gather quickly and have the hardest of conversations with the president, a conversation of love and clarity and resolve. To give America the greatest shot possible of deterring the Trump threat in November, the president has to come forward and declare that he will not be running for re-election and is releasing all of his delegates for the Democratic National Convention.
If Vice President Kamala Harris wants to compete, she should. But voters deserve an open process in search of a Democratic presidential nominee who can unite not only the party but also the country, by offering something neither man on that Atlanta stage did on Thursday night: a compelling description of where the world is right now and a compelling vision for what America can and must do to keep leading it — morally, economically and diplomatically.
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I love "voters deserve an open process in search of a Democratic presidential nominee"... Yeah man, thats called "primaries", Democrats gave that up 'cuz pesky people might have voted for the wrong name.
The Biden Victory Fund and the Democratic National Committee’s financial bigwigs had all assembled in the Ritz Carlton as part of a two-day political briefing that featured emotional pep talks and face-time with VIPs. “Joe’s ready to go,” Dr. Biden told the group. "He’s prepared." Fact check: false.
Before midnight, Joe Biden would slog through 90 minutes of a debate against Trump that even Biden’s closest allies privately admitted was a disaster. Biden appeared every bit the 81-year-old grandfather that he is, stammering with a thin voice through unintelligible arguments and often staring blankly, mouth agape, as Trump lobbed one verbal attack after another. Biden froze up repeatedly and fumbled even some set-piece lines he had prepared in advance for the moment. When fielding a question about the national debt, his answer was incomprehensible as he seemed to suggest super-rich Americans should pay more taxes. "We'd be able to help make sure that all those things we need to do—childcare, elder care, making sure that we continue to strengthen our healthcare system, making sure that we're able to make every single solitary person eligible for what I've been able to do with the—with, with, with the COVID. Excuse me, with dealing with everything we have to do with—look, if—we finally beat Medicare."
I’m not really in a mood to critique Trump’s debate performance, which was stronger than I’d expected but also included lots of wild, rambling tangents that only seemed coherent in comparison to Biden. Trump never won a post-debate poll in any of his three debates against Hillary Clinton or his two against Biden in 2020. But he absolutely crushed Biden, 67-33, in CNN’s poll of debate-watchers. How bad do you have to screw up to lose a debate by 34 points to Donald Trump in a country as divided as this one? And yes, these polls historically do have some predictive power in anticipating movement in the horse race, especially with a result as lopsided as this one.
Picking a new nominee via superdelegates at the convention would be like attending a shitshow at a plumbers’ convention. And Harris remains quite unpopular too, although her disapproval ratings are now notably better than Biden’s. Either of these candidates are probably below 50 percent to win against Trump. But what matters is that they’re probably better bets than Biden. Give me Harris at this point, who at least is more of a blank slate. I’m not a Gavin Newsom guy, but give me Newsom, who at least has had designs on the job and governs a state with the 5th largest economy in the world. Harris and Newsom are very much not my preferred options — but I prefer them to Biden. But don’t give me any more bullshit about how age is just a number or just a media fixation — or how changing candidates just isn’t how it’s done. We’re playing the highest-stakes game of poker you can imagine, and you do whatever in your power to improve your odds — even if it’s only from 25 percent to 35 percent.
As I wrote at the time, the one saving grace to holding the debate this early was that it gave Democrats the option to pull the emergency lever and urge Biden to quit before the convention if it went really badly. Well, emergency levers exist for a reason. It went worse than I ever imagined — and I was expecting it to go poorly. It’s time for Biden to consider what’s best for his party, what’s best for the country and what’s best for his legacy — and that isn’t seeking the presidency until he’s 86.
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Joe Biden given one week to stand down
Joe Biden has been told he has a week to win over Democrats or they will move to oust him after a disastrous performance in the first presidential debate. One congressman told Matthew Yglesias, a US political blogger: “I think the president has one week to prove he is not dead.” David Plouffe, who managed Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign, told CNN: “It’s kind of a Defcon 1 moment…they are three years apart, but they seemed about 30 years apart tonight.” David Axelrod, another Obama adviser, said: “There are going to be discussions about whether he should continue.”
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Federal funding for major science agencies is at a 25-year low
Law Breaking / Police / Internal Security
External Security / Militaria / Diplomania
World
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French far-right leader Jordan Bardella vows ‘cultural battle’ and demands EU rebate
Jordan Bardella, the far-right candidate to be France’s prime minister, has pledged to fight a “cultural battle” against Islamism and secure an EU budget rebate even as he promised “a lot of pragmatism” on the economy if his party wins snap elections. The RN intends to move ahead with a proposed law that states as its aim “to combat Islamist ideologies”. It includes measures to make it easier to close mosques and deport imams deemed to be radicalised, and a ban on clothing that “constitute in themselves an unequivocal and ostentatious affirmation” of Islamist ideology. Bardella said this would include various types of veils and the so-called burkini, or head-to-toe swimwear. “The veil is not desirable in French society,” he said. “The battle is in part legislative, but is also a cultural battle that needs to be pursued.”
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The Dark Side of Neom: Expropriation, expulsion and prosecution of inhabitants
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Stigma against benefits has made devastating poverty acceptable in Britain
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Campaign to decriminalise suicide in four Caribbean nations gains momentum
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What record air conditioner sales reveal about India heatwave
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Due to court orders, OpenDNS shutdown itself in France and Portugal