2024-07-01
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The elemental foe - by Noah Smith - Noahpinion
To ask why some societies in the world are still poor is the wrong question. Poverty is the default condition, not just of humanity but of the entire Universe. If humanity simply doesn’t build anything — farms, granaries, houses, water treatment systems, electric power stations — we will exist at the level of wild animals. This is simply physics.
China’s rise to wealth, engineered by Deng Xiaoping and his successors, and carried out by untold millions of Chinese entrepreneurs and workers, was among the greatest blows humanity ever struck against the foe — rivaled only by the Industrial Revolution itself. Nearly a fifth of the entire species was elevated to something approximating a materially comfortable existence. Even acknowledging all the drawbacks, it’s difficult to imagine a better world in 2024 where that didn’t happen. And now, incredibly, humanity might be repeating that feat just a couple of decades later. India, now the world’s largest country, is growing rapidly — not as rapidly as China did, but fast enough to have already brought most of its citizens out of the most extreme poverty.
If you want to understand the principles that underlie my political leanings, this is the key. Humanity is at war — a war so old, so terrible, and so all-consuming that even World War 3 would be a minor skirmish in comparison. Whether or not we remember it, we are always on death ground. But our intelligence has given us an opportunity not afforded to other animals — the chance to conceive of our species as a single team, fighting not individually but as an army united against the implacable, elemental foe of poverty and desolation.
Horseshit
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Shoplifters love Lego. The colorful plastic bricks are a gold mine for criminals
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They’re cashing in millions through the Oregon Lottery’s shadow economy
None of these individuals actually won big prizes that frequently. Experts say that would be mathematically impossible. Instead, they and others are drawing attention from the Oregon Lottery by working as so-called discounters or ticket aggregators: individuals who buy winning lottery tickets from players at a significant discount, then cash them in for face value, taking the difference as profit, after taxes. Some lottery players are willing to sell their winning tickets at a discount to avoid the debts they owe the state, which would be taken from the prize money if they cashed in directly with the Oregon Lottery. Reasons for selling vary, but not all are on the up and up.
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NYC straphangers uneasy at zip ties seemingly holding tracks together: 'Should I be worried?'
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New York State Office for the Aging: Animatronic Pet Initiative
Electric / Self Driving cars
celebrity gossip
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Judge Denies Alec Baldwin Motion To Dismiss Manslaughter Charge In 'Rust' Shooting | ZeroHedge
Sheriff’s investigators initially sent the revolver to the FBI for routine testing, but when an FBI analyst heard Mr. Baldwin say in an ABC TV interview that he never pulled the trigger, the agency told local authorities they could conduct an accidental discharge test, though it might damage the gun. The FBI was told by a team of investigators to go ahead, and tested the revolver by striking it from several angles with a rawhide mallet. One of those strikes fractured the gun’s firing and safety mechanisms. Armorer Hannah Gutierrez-Reed was convicted in March of involuntary manslaughter for her role in the shooting and was sentenced to 18 months in prison.
Religion / Tribal / Culture War and Re-Segregation
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If you are spiritual but not religious, how do you want to die?
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The Vatican is going solar, Pope to transition City to 100% green energy
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Rainbow Family gathering ordered to leave Northern California forest
The Rainbow Family of Living Light gathering was set to be held the first week of July in California’s Plumas National Forest. On June 25, however, the U.S. Forest Service officials issued an order asking people to leave the area, with those who refuse to go facing fines of up to $5,000 or a six-month jail sentence. “The Forest is concerned about the 500-plus individuals already dispersed camping in a concentrated area. We are always willing to work with any organization or group interested in recreating on the national forest. There are existing and projected impacts on natural and cultural resources and other authorized uses. Our priority is maintaining public health and safety and the appropriate stewardship of public lands and natural resources,” Plumas National Forest Supervisor Chris Carlton said in a statement on Wednesday.
Edumacationalizing / Acedemia Nuts
Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising
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Capcom and GOG to release the original Resident Evil trilogy
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Show HN: I've built a child monitoring app with mitmproxy and WireGuard | Hacker News
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Newswire: A Large-Scale Structured Database of a Century of Historical News
The resulting dataset contains 2.7 million unique public domain U.S. newswire articles, written between 1878 and 1977. Locations in these articles are georeferenced, topics are tagged using customized neural topic classification, named entities are recognized, and individuals are disambiguated to Wikipedia using a novel entity disambiguation model. To construct the Newswire dataset, we first recognize newspaper layouts and transcribe around 138 millions structured article texts from raw image scans. We then use a customized neural bi-encoder model to de-duplicate reproduced articles, in the presence of considerable abridgement and noise, quantifying how widely each article was reproduced. A text classifier is used to ensure that we only include newswire articles, which historically are in the public domain. The structured data that accompany the texts provide rich information about the who (disambiguated individuals), what (topics), and where (georeferencing) of the news that millions of Americans read over the course of a century. We also include Library of Congress metadata information about the newspapers that ran the articles on their front pages.
TechSuck / Geek Bait
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Black magic PCB traces: Inside a 1 dollar radar motion sensor | thin threads
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(2021) The Byte Order Fiasco
AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World
Space / Boomy Zoomers / UFO
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The race to prevent satellite Armageddon
An American aerospace giant wanted components that could protect a military system’s electronics from the radiation generated by a nuclear detonation. Micross signed the contract, and set about doing the work, but was left in the dark about why such a system would be needed. The puzzle pieces fell into place earlier this year, says Mike Glass, a product manager at Micross, when American officials began to talk about Russian plans to place a nuclear weapon in space.
That talk was motivated by a Russian satellite called Cosmos-2553, which is thought to be secretly testing the necessary electronics some 2,000km above Earth’s surface. A nuclear detonation there would probably be too high to wreak any meaningful direct damage on the surface of Earth. But it could cause what Lieutenant-Colonel James McCue, an outgoing official with America’s Defence Threat Reduction Agency, calls a “satellite Armageddon”. Many of the nearby spacecraft tightly packed in lower orbits would be immediately fried; a greater number farther afield would slowly succumb to the radioactive aftermath. The blast would affect all countries’ satellites indiscriminately.
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Mars gets hit by hundreds of basketball-size space rocks every year
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Family whose roof was damaged by space debris files claims against NASA
Crypto con games
Economicon / Business / Finance
Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making
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A Genuine Constitutional Crisis - by Eric Cowperthwaite
clearly, people who are not the President are making decisions that are Constitutionally only the President’s decisions to make. Jill Biden and Barack Obama and a circle of conspirators in the White House are acting as if they are the President. This is a genuine Constitutional Crisis. How will it be resolved?
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The two Bidens: The night America saw the other one
Internally, many aides have seen flashes of an absent-minded Biden, but typically brush them off as ordinary brain farts because they usually see him engaged, eight current and former Biden officials told Axios.
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Robert Hur Emerges as the Clear Winner in the Presidential Debate
The presidential debate last night was chilling to watch as President Joe Biden clearly struggled to retain his focus and, at points, seemed hopelessly confused. The winner was clear: Special Counsel Robert Hur. For months, Democrats in Congress and the media have attacked Hur for his report that the president came across as an “elderly man with a poor memory.” Hur concluded that prosecuting Biden would be difficult because a jury would view him as a sympathetic figure of a man with declining mental capabilities. That was evident last night and the question is whether a man who was too diminished to be a criminal defendant can still be a president for four more years.
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The Great Democratic Conundrum - The Atlantic
Carville was far from the only Democrat reconsidering a scenario that had seemingly passed into political fantasy: whether Biden could be persuaded, or pushed, not to run again. Another prominent Democratic strategist, who is considered one of Biden’s staunchest defenders in the party and did not want to be named for this report, told me his view last night that “there’s a very high likelihood that he’s not going to be the candidate.” Even so, the strategist added, “I don’t know how that happens.”
If Biden insists on staying in the race, the odds remain high that Democrats will in fact nominate him at their convention in August; dislodging an incumbent president is a huge task. But more Democrats in the next few days are likely to crack open the party-nomination rules. And those rules actually provide a straightforward road map to replace Biden at the convention if he voluntarily withdraws—and even, if he doesn’t, a pathway to challenge him.
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Heritage Foundation preparing for legal battles if Biden pulled from nomination | Fox News
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WSJ: European Officials Have Noticed Deterioration of the President’s Faculties For Months – HotAir
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A Supreme Court Justice Is Why You Can't Buy a Car Right Now
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California approves final high-speed rail link connecting San Francisco to LA
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The Supreme Court, Chevron, and the Political Class’s Worst Nightmare: Accountability.
Rather than “brazenly seizing power from the other two branches,” the Supreme Court has returned power to Congress, where the Constitution put it to begin with. The brazen seizing, in fact, was undertaken by the unelected administrative state, what even FDR’s Commission on Administrative Government called a “headless fourth branch of government.” And that was in 1937; there’s been a lot more seizing since then.
Of course, the political class likes the administrative state for the precise reason it is constitutionally dubious – because it is not accountable to the voters. Instead, it is run by people like them, screening their often-subjective policy preferences behind confusing nomenclature, complex procedure, and (often dubious) claims of expertise. Like anything else that is a threat to the political class’s power or prestige, a return to something closer to constitutional government generates fear, hostility and – as we can see – over-the-top language. The good news is, nobody listens to the political class much anymore.
Law Breaking / Police / Internal Security
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Street takeover with more than 50 cars in downtown LA leaves some in flames.
LAPD said several vehicles were impounded after authorities responded to the area near East 18th Street and Main Street, where participants intentionally set two of the cars on fire. Firefighters received a call about an auto fire around 3 a.m., sending two fire engines as LAPD officers were also sent to the scene to investigate, according to the LA Fire Department. No one was arrested, police said.
"We actually have reduced the number of street takeovers in LA, but particularly in Downtown Los Angeles," he said. "But, nonetheless, it has not completely come to a halt."
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US to Criminally Charge Boeing, Seek Guilty Plea, Sources Say
External Security / Militaria / Diplomania
World
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Man arrested with explosives near Paris was part of Russian sabotage campaign
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Far-right wins first round of France’s snap election, survey shows
After unusually high turnout, the Rassemblement National (RN) party won 34.5 per cent of the vote, while the leftwing Nouveau Front Populaire alliance came in second with 28.5 per cent, according to projections by the pollster Ifop at 8pm local time. Macron’s Ensemble alliance secured 22.5 per cent of the vote.
Pollster projections, which are normally reliable and are based on preliminary results, suggested that the party would take about 34 percent of the vote, far ahead of President Emmanuel Macron’s centrist Renaissance party and its allies, which took about 22 percent to end in third place. A coalition of left-wing parties, called the New Popular Front and ranging from the moderate socialists to the far-left France Unbowed, won about 29 percent of the vote boosted by strong support among young people, according to the projections. Turnout was high at about 67 percent, compared to 47.5 percent in the first round of the last parliamentary election in 2022, reflecting the importance accorded by voters to the snap election. To many it seemed that no less than the future of France was on the line with a far-right party long considered unelectable to high office because of its extreme views surging.
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Canada 'sleepwalking' into cashless society, consumer advocates warn
Russia Bad / Ukraine War
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Russian spy satellite reportedly continues suspicious maneuvers
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‘Flood’ of cheap Russian fertiliser risks Europe’s food security, industry says
A flood of cheap Russian fertiliser risks driving European producers out of business or out of the continent, posing a risk to long-term food security, the crop nutrient industry has warned. The flow of Russian natural gas into the EU slowed significantly after the country’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, and European countries have shifted to other sources of supply. But Russia has continued to use its gas to produce, and export to Europe, cheap nitrogen-based fertiliser. For some types of fertiliser, such as urea, imports have even increased since Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022. The cheap fertiliser has helped European farmers, but the region’s own fertiliser producers have been struggling to compete.
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Magnitsky case: How Switzerland failed to investigate Russian millions
China
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Chinese reusable rocket Tianlong-3 accidentally launched during static test fire
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Why Do India and China Keep Fighting Over This Desolate Terrain? - The New York Times
that’s not how nation-states view territory, no matter how desolate it is. That is why India and China have their armies deployed on these heights along an unmarked and, in many places, contested boundary between the two countries. In the absence of any fencing or barbed wire to demarcate territory, soldiers from each nation contend with considerable ambiguity when conducting patrols along what’s known as the Line of Actual Control. Vinod Bhatia, who served as director general of military operations for the Indian Army and is now retired, describes it as a line of perceptions. This lack of clarity means that there are several places along the border that are effectively a no-man’s land, where both Indian and Chinese troops carry out patrols. Soldiers from each side routinely leave empty cigarette packets and beer cans behind as marks of territorial claim. At the same time, soldiers on each side are legally bound to exercise restraint during patrols, according to a 1996 agreement between the two countries that prohibits the use of firearms and munitions at the border.
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"Digital parents" give millions in China a vision of family love they never had
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Chinese academics urged to 'construct narratives' to defend maritime claims
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China calls on scientists of all nations to study lunar samples
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A trade war with China over EVs could slow low-carbon transition
Health / Medicine
Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda
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Hope, then heartbreak, as first 'spinning' sawfish dies in Tampa Bay
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Up to 99% of Life on Earth Died in a Catastrophic Event Two Billion Years Ago
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PFAS absorbed through skin at levels higher than previously thought
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Why Hurricane Beryl’s rapid intensification is so unusual. What to know - The Washington Post
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Nature interrupted: Impact of the US-Mexico border wall on wildlife
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Beneath offshore wind turbines, researchers grow seafood and seaweed | AP News
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Hoping for a Miracle to Save the Ogallala Aquifer? Prepare for the New Dust Bowl