2024-07-21
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Cutting to the Chase ... - by Jester Naybor
From our very first school day, we are led to embrace that confession … when we are told to “be nice” and “trust Teacher”. Our society reveres education, accomplishment, compassion, and advancement, to the point that we put those who best personify those attributes on pedestals of respect, authority and trust. We misplace our trust in the thoughts of others, to the point that we outsource our decision-making authority to them. Reagan’s famous line of “trust but verify” is thought of as a Cold War anachronism, when prudence dictates it be part of every decision we make - instead, we allow the Pedestaled to make our decisions and allocate our resources FOR us as we just go to work or school each day, thinking that “playing by the rules” is all we need to do because the notables we trust will make sure we attain a better future. And the Pedestaled are more than happy to oblige us, in taking over that authority. In fact, many among them build their entire lives around attaining the elite status that leads to being trusted with such authority; it is their greatest investment.
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Sun is starting next solar cycle–despite being halfway through its current one
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300-Year-Old House Transported Piecemeal Japan to California, Then Reconstructed
Horseshit
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Hello Kitty is not a cat, creators declare — despite her whiskers, ears and name.
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Ukrainian scouting culture thrives in the woods of western New York state
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After CrowdStrike, Programmers Deserve Consequences.
ts an open secret that the entire software development field is a bit of a clusterfuck. Attempts to impose standards and restrictions largely fail. It is diminishingly rare to finish a project on budget, on time, and without defects. The education software developers receive is often woefully inadequate. The space is flooded with grifters, conpersons, imbeciles, and fanatics. We idolize and pray to emulate success stories like Facebook (a grand machine which reminds me of birthdays and drives teenagers to suicide.) Its just bad, man.
Software "Engineers" are never held personally accountable for the effects their actions have on the world. That poor bastard or bastard(s) at CrowdStrike weren't paid anesthesiologist rates and yet their mistake is going to kill a lot of people. I doubt they would have signed off on anything they'd done in the last decade as being "defect-free" and yet that is the standard we rightfully hold other fields to.
- If your job is to make sure the hospital's IT systems stay up so that doctors can access them during operations, why would you install unknown 3rd party root software on those systems? The proposed solution is akin to holding the workers at the ammunition plant liable for the murder committed with the bullet. Or perhaps even the folks who mined the lead.
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Are people too flawed, ignorant, and tribal for open societies?
what is rational for individuals is often disastrous at the level of collectives. Even if voters do not benefit from becoming politically informed, democracies depend on an informed electorate to make good decisions. The result is… what we observe in the real world: widespread political ignorance and frequently uninformed—often bad, sometimes disastrous—democratic decision-making. Of course, this is a problem for all democracies, including illiberal ones, but it is unclear how encouraging a free, open marketplace of ideas helps. If it is rational to be ignorant in democratic politics, opting out of participating in public debate and deliberation is equally rational. And it would seem positively irrational to express bold, daring positions out of step with the opinions of one’s friends, families, and colleagues.
The ideals of open societies sound good. I think they are good. Nevertheless, such societies confront considerable epistemic challenges that must be acknowledged. Given the existence of complexity, invisibility, ignorance, and politically motivated cognition, it seems unlikely that citizens—the ultimate locus of decision-making within such societies—will form responsible, rational, accurate beliefs about reality. And without such beliefs—without informed public opinion—it is difficult to see how open societies can make good collective decisions.
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What is 'mogul style'? Why billionaire bland has had its day
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Gen Zers are so disillusioned with the economy, many say okay to commit fraud
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Is It Silicon Valley’s Job to Make Guaranteed Income a Reality? - The New York Times
celebrity gossip
Musk
Trump / War against the Right / Jan6
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Parts of our cities are Islamist, says Nigel Farage as he backs JD Vance
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Biden is now claiming that Trump is going to put people into concentration camps.
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Trump vows to axe Biden’s electric car mandate on ‘day one.’
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Shocking Number Of Democrats Think Trump Shooting Was Fake: Poll
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Some Black startup founders feel betrayed by Ben Horowitz's support for Trump
Shooting
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How the Secret Service Failed | City Journal
It’s easy to understand why the public seeks more compelling narratives to explain this shocking event. The facts known so far are hard to accept: a suspicious man was spotted roaming the rally grounds and was reported to authorities, but the event went forward anyway. According to ABC News, a USSS sniper team spied the shooter on a nearby, unprotected rooftop a full 20 minutes before he opened fire. Nonetheless, as the Federalist’s Sean Davis writes, “They kept the rooftop open, watched the shooter, kept Trump on the stage, and didn’t do a damn thing until after he had been shot. And we’re supposed to believe it was an innocent oopsie?”
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Secret Service says it's appalled by DEI rhetoric against female agents after Trump rally shooting
The Secret Service, in a statement to NBC News, said that the criticism from pundits and influencers was baseless. The agency also stood by its commitment to diversity in recruiting as helping, not hurting, the effectiveness of its protective teams.
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Audio Analysis Is 100% Clear: Trump & Crowd Were Shot At By Two Separate People – Peak Prosperity
As a reminder, audio forensic experts have already concluded that the audio signatures from three weapons could be resolved from whichever audio recording(s) they analyzed. Today I build on that by bringing you the audio evidence, as well as analysis that conclusively proves that two (and possibly three) weapons were fired at Trump and the assembled crowd. This should not be information you get from me. This should already be part of the national dialog and we should be getting routine updates from the FBI about how they are going about locating the second (and possibly third) shooters.
Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising
Crowdstrike
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Crowdstrike Insiders Sold Stock Before the Microsoft Windows Outage | Barron's
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Russia Thanks Western Sanctions for Helping It Avoid The Crowdstrike IT Outage.
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Crowdstrike Failure Highlights the Fragility of Globally Connected Technology.
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What Happened to Digital Resilience? (Archive)
In the worst-case scenarios that the Biden administration has quietly simulated over the past year or so, Russian hackers working on behalf of Vladimir V. Putin bring down hospital systems across the United States. In others, China’s military hackers trigger chaos, shutting down water systems and electric grids to distract Americans from an invasion of Taiwan. As it turned out, none of those grim situations caused Friday’s national digital meltdown. It was, by all appearances, purely human error — a few bad keystrokes that demonstrated the fragility of a vast set of interconnected networks in which one mistake can cause a cascade of unintended consequences. Since no one really understands what is connected to what, it is no surprise that such episodes keep happening, each incident just a few degrees different from the last.
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Siblings miss crucial life-extending treatment because of CrowdStrike (Archive)
Malachi and Maleea Castilotte were scheduled for a brain infusion Friday, a procedure they receive every two weeks. Their mother, Sabrina, received the first sign at 1 a.m. that something was wrong—a posting from Seattle Children’s Hospital that the network was down. “I really didn’t think anything of it, I just thought, ‘Oh, it will be a chaotic day,” Sabrina recalled. As the morning progressed so did the extend of the outage. Her children’s appointments were cancelled, the first they would miss in five years.
TechSuck / Geek Bait
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minuteman missile communications
One of the things I'm not completely confident of is the size of the collision domain within HICS, or how much of the cable network was a common bus. From reading between the lines of some different reports and considering the overall design, I'm fairly confident that the entire digital HICS network was a single shared bus within each flight, and I think it is likely that it was a shared bus within each squadron. This bus would be tens of miles long with multiple branches, a challenging electrical situation that perhaps explains why the Air Force has repeatedly found it to be infeasible to make HICS faster.
The HICS network was capable of 1.3Kbps, and because of the "flood" design of the network, that was essentially 1.3Kbps of total capacity across a single collision domain. In other words, only 1.3Kbps of total traffic could be handled, with far less available from point to point when the network is under heavy use. Further, enhancements to the Minuteman system added cryptographic authentication of messages over HICS and, later, encryption of the messages themselves. The added overhead of the cryptographic system further reduced network capacity. Retargeting a squadron of Minuteman missiles via the CDB took over 20 hours. Retargeting a single missile could take 30 minutes.
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Sonny Piers was removed from the GNOME Foundation board
The GNOME Foundation Board voted to remove Sonny Piers as a member of the Board of Directors for cause, at a Special Meeting on May 17th, 2024, following the procedure outlined in the GNOME Bylaws, and remove him from all committees. Effective May 25th, 2024, his seat is now vacant, A Code of Conduct complaint was also made against Sonny Piers. The Foundation is engaged in a mediation process with him, which is still ongoing and so we are unable to share more information at this time.
Despite the suspicious post from this 2-day-old account (at the time of writing), this post was confirmed to me as an official announcement after I flagged for moderation and received a response from the moderators.
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Global computer outage snarls Arizona’s early voting, raises alarm about November
A global Microsoft-based computer outage early Friday crippled the electronic systems Arizona’s two largest counties use for early in-person voting, causing election officials to quickly divert to backup plans to keep early voting open for the state’s primary election. The breakdown affected the devices that Maricopa and Pima counties use at voting locations to check voters in, verify voter eligibility and print ballots. It did not affect the machines the counties use to count ballots, which are not used during early voting because voters place their completed ballots into envelopes to be counted later.
Some early voting stations in the Grand Canyon state, where early voting has been open since July 3, were knocked out of use Friday, according to the Maricopa County Elections Department. “Due to the global tech outage, Maricopa County is also experiencing an outage at some voting locations,” the department wrote on on X.
AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World
Space / Boomy Zoomers / UFO
Economicon / Business / Finance
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Prosecutors go on crusade, and the poor people lose
How exactly BofA simultaneously hurt the FHA by ‘lying’ about the credit quality of its mortgages and hurt poor people by giving them mortgages they didn’t deserve is a bit of a mystery, but this is the stuff of gods, and not mere mortals, so I wouldn’t understand. Anyways, that’s a digression. Let’s come back to the Atlanta Fed’s research. . . . and then no one wants to do business with the FHA anymore
We study the effect of Department of Justice lawsuits in the 2010s against large lenders for alleged fraud in the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) mortgage insurance program. The suits led to more than $5 billion in settlements and caused targeted banks and their peers to precipitously exit the FHA market. Difference-in-differences and triple differences tests exploiting geographic variation in exposure to exiting banks show a 20 percent reduction in FHA lending in heavily exposed areas. This reduction was not associated with improved underwriting standards or lower default rates. Large banks’ FHA exit has significantly reduced low-income households’ overall access to mortgage credit.
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Top Fed officials say they are 'closer' to cutting interest rates
Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making
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Fed judge tosses GOP challenge to Nevada’s mail-ballot counting rules: They ‘lack standing’.
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Dems Plot 'Loophole' Of Rebellion If Biden Won't Step Down | ZeroHedge
During a Friday morning Zoom call with 50 delegates, DNC delegate Elaine Kamarck said the apparent "loophole" allowing for such rebellion if convention-goers say they can no longer vote for their pledged candidate in "good conscience" despite picking them in primaries and caucuses. According to the DNC's rules, "Delegates elected to the national convention pledged to a presidential candidate shall in all good conscience reflect the sentiments of those who elected them." Kamarack said that the rules previously mandated that delegates have to vote for whoever they're pledged to, however that changed after the 1980 convention in which Ted Kennedy and then-President Jimmy Carter were battling for the iron throne. Unlike the Republican party, Democrats can revolt at any time. Given that Biden won nearly all the pledged delegates in the primary, those delegates can say that Biden no longer "reflect[s] the sentiments of those who elected them," and can dump him at will. "See, we’ve never had a situation quite like this where the primaries were over. Very clear-cut winner. And yet something was discovered unclosed, whatever you want to call it, after the end of the primaries that caused people to severely doubt whether or not their nominee should proceed," she said.
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Who is Kamala Harris? The VP's star is rising among Democrats
President Joe Biden's poor performance on the debate stage has spurred mounting criticism about his chances of beating Republican Donald Trump. As anxiety has turned to tension within the Democratic Party, her name is at the top of the list of possible replacement candidates. She has not wavered in her loyalty to Mr Biden in recent weeks - but even Republicans have begun to incoporate her name into the Trump campaign's messaging. After making history as the first woman as well as the first black and Asian American vice-president, supporters argue her current title as second-in-command could mark a more seamless transition if Biden passes the baton. Other Democrats are calling for an open convention to pick a replacement.
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David Letterman will headline Biden fundraiser with Hawaii governor on July 29 | AP News
David Letterman will headline a fundraiser with President Joe Biden in 10 days with Hawaii Gov. Josh Green, a sign that his campaign is forging ahead despite continued calls for the president to bow out of the 2024 race. The fundraiser on July 29 will be at the home of a family friend on Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts, Green told The Associated Press Friday. It will feature the longtime late-night host, plus Biden and first lady Jill Biden. The campaign has at least 10 other fundraising events over the last 10 days of July.
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Kamala Harris to Speak With Major Democratic Donors - The New York Times
Vice President Kamala Harris tried to buck up the Democratic Party’s biggest donors on Friday, telling about 300 of them that there was little to worry about in President Biden’s campaign. Some listeners said they did find Ms. Harris’s delivery to be strong, even if it offered little reassurance, and did not place the blame on her. And some of the donors who were disappointed with the call had preexisting concerns about Mr. Biden’s candidacy, which is why they had requested the briefing.
After the call, one group that had promoted it in advance apologized to its members for having done so. The email, which was viewed by The New York Times, added, “The call was not productive, and we wanted to apologize to each of you who joined for sharing that invitation.”
after Ms. Harris stopped speaking, according to three listeners, one participant who was unmuted could be overheard calling the entire call “ludicrous.”
External Security / Militaria / Diplomania
World
Israel
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Houthi drone attack rocks Tel Aviv near US embassy branch office, injuring 7.
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Israel Sees Major Progress in Destroying Gaza's Tunnel Network
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Israel strikes Yemen in response to Houthi drone attack on Tel Aviv
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We Volunteered at a Gaza Hospital. What We Saw Was Unspeakable
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ICJ Ruling Confirms What Palestinians Have Been Saying for 57 Years
China
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Super cheap robotaxi rides spark widespread anxiety in China
he rapid adoption of the driverless taxis has rattled China’s gig economy workforce, which has suffered from stagnant wages because of deflationary forces stalking the economy following years of tight coronavirus restrictions and a real estate crisis. “With the Chinese economy struggling a bit, Chinese people are likely much more fearful of losing their jobs, and this serves as a reminder of one of the ways that could happen,” Tu Le, managing director of Sino Auto Insights, told CNN in an email interview. He added that any significant job losses could be a few years away. On Monday, the National Bureau of Statistics reported that the country’s gross domestic product expanded by just 4.7% in the April to June months, a much slower pace of growth than the 5.1% expected.
Health / Medicine
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100-year-olds say working beyond retirement age is what keeps them going
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Patients coming off anti-depressant pills describe permanent genital numbness
‘These drugs have wiped out my sex drive,’ the former student told Mail+. ‘I have total genital numbness, zero libido and have no response to sexual stimuli.’ The condition is known as post-SSRI sexual dysfunction (PSSD) - SSRIs are a type of antidepressants known as selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, but the side-effect can also be the result of taking other drugs that act on the brain chemical serotonin.
We’ve been contacted by people in 37 different countries, both sexes and ages ranging from pre-puberty to people in their 80s,’ he says. ‘It’s an awful situation and we have no cure.’ The main symptoms of PSSD include genital numbness, inability to orgasm or pleasureless orgasms, erectile dysfunction, vaginal dryness and reduced sex drive. Those affected also report emotional ‘blunting’ – meaning they can’t feel either positive or negative emotions.
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Increase in people hospitalised with psychosis after prescribed cannabis