2024-08-01
Horseshit
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Where Did The Jetsons Hide Their Drug Addicts?
Martin Luther King Jr.’s staff—when he had to show up late to some event—used to joke about their boss’ sometimes cheerful disregard for the lateness of the hour. King himself said once that he forgot which time zone he was in - "Eastern Standard Time, Central Standard Time, or Colored People's Time.” Elon Musk recently announced another delay in Tesla's ambitious robo-taxi program, where Tesla cars will autonomously take to the streets to earn income for their owners. The unveiling now slips from August to October. It's a familiar story for those who follow Musk's optimistic project announcements, which are often just a wee bit late. Clearly, brother Elon, our wealthiest African-American (he was born in South Africa), operates on his own version of Colored People’s Time.
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Nobody asked for this - by Tom Knighton
Rent-seeking is where a company tries to use the law to profit at the expense of its competitors, and I suspect that’s where Ford wants to go with this technology. What’s more, it wouldn’t be hard to sell it to lawmakers. When you also consider that most legislators can’t be bothered to consider the government’s proper role in commerce in the first place, we may well see our cars tattling on one another whether we want it or not.
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Seven changes destroying the Moon would have on planet Earth
- Already a later part of our geoengineering program: Why We Must Destroy The Moon
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Everyone's talking about the Global South. But what is it?
Many countries included in the Global South are in the northern hemisphere, such as India, China and all of those in the northern half of Africa. Australia and New Zealand, both in the southern hemisphere, are not in the Global South. Most cite the so-called Brandt Line as the border; a squiggle across the globe running from the north of Mexico, across the top of Africa and the Middle East, looping around India and China before dropping down to encompass most of East Asia while avoiding Japan, Australia and New Zealand. The line was proposed by former German Chancellor Willy Brandt in the 1980s as a visual depiction of the north-south divide based upon per-capita GDP.
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Trolls Used Her Face to Make Fake Porn. There Was Nothing She Could Do.
Rank Propaganda / Thought Policing / World Disordering
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Cloudflare once again comes under pressure for enabling abusive sites
Spamhaus—a nonprofit organization that provides intelligence and blocklists to stem the spread of spam, phishing, malware, and botnets—has become the latest to criticize Cloudflare. On Tuesday, the project said Cloudflare provides services for 10 percent of the domains listed in its domain block list and, to date, serves sites that are the subject of more than 1,200 unresolved complaints regarding abuse. The Spamhaus post noted how easy and common it is to find Cloudflare-protected websites that openly advertise services such as bulletproof hosting to cybercriminals.
Electric / Self Driving cars
Religion / Tribal / Culture War and Re-Segregation
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Gaia theory: The once-controversial idea that life shapes Earth's evolution
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A Handbook to Address Transphobia in Education
Recent developments in Saskatchewan and other regions highlight a disturbing trend: the systematic erosion of rights for transgender youth. The Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) has warned that the ‘anti-gender movement’ poses a significant threat of extreme violence. In the U.S., over 500 transphobic bills have been introduced, with many targeting the rights of transgender children in schools. These actions range from prohibiting parents from supporting their transgender children’s transitions to banning transgender athletes from participating in sports according to their gender identity.
Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising
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Charter failed to notify 911 call centers and FCC about VoIP phone outages
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The last version from 1992, lovingly wrapped for today: Complete WordStar 7.0 Archive
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Why the CrowdStrike bug hit banks hard
It would be an overstatement to say that the United States federal government commanded U.S. financial institutions to install CrowdStrike Falcon and thereby embed a landmine into the kernels of all their employees’ computers. Anyone saying that has no idea how banking regulation works. Life is much more subtle than that.
CrowdStrike is not, strictly speaking, the only vendor that you could have installed on every computer you owned to make your regulators happy with you. But, due to vagaries of how enterprise software sales teams work, they sewed up an awful lot of government-adjacent industries. This was in part because they aggressively pursued writing the sort of documents you need if the people who read your project plans have national security briefs.
And so, we ended up in a situation where we invited an advanced persistent threat into kernelspace.
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2024-07-31 just disconnect the internet
I wrote this out in a bit of a huff because I have seen "why were they connected to the internet at all?" like four times in response to the CrowdStrike incident. I know, I am committing the cardinal sin of taking things that people on the internet say seriously, but I feel obligated to point out: internet connectivity is pretty much completely orthogonal to what happened. CrowdStrike content updates are the kind of thing that, in a perfect world, you would promptly make available in your offline environment. In practice, an internal CrowdStrike update mirror would probably lag days, weeks, months, or years behind, because that's what usually ends up happening in "hard" offline environments, but that's a case of two wrongs making a right.
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Microsoft experiencing new wave of outages weeks after global IT failure
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Meta Has Run Hundreds of Ads for Cocaine, Opioids and Other Drugs
TechSuck / Geek Bait
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Some lessons have to be relearned often: Bit by falsy truths again | Zarar's blog
At the end of the day, validing config values types are accurate on application startup seems to be the common denominator in solving this problem.
AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World
Crypto con games
Economicon / Business / Finance
Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making
TBA 2024 / Democrats Demonstrate "Our Democracy"
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Google Search Confirms Kamala Harris Did Not Exist Prior To July 22, 2024 | Babylon Bee
Though conservative pundits were adamant that Harris had a track record of supporting far-left agendas and making controversial public statements, no evidence could be found to back up such allegations. "Nope, she just started existing last week," said a source within Google. "I know some people have these wild conspiracy theories that Kamala Harris is 59 years old, previously served as Attorney General of California and a U.S. Senator, and has been the Vice President for nearly four years, but that simply is not true. No evidence of her existence prior to July 22, 2024, exists. It doesn't. IT DOESN'T."
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Silicon Valley Venture Capitalists Pledge to Support Kamala Harris - The New York Times
The effort was buttressed by another group of tech entrepreneurs and workers called Tech For Kamala, which also wrote a letter this week expressing “enthusiastic and unwavering support for Vice President Harris.” The letter gathered more than 550 signatures in two days. The moves are perhaps the most public pushback to right-wing venture capitalists and executives whom some tech leaders see as dominating political conversation in the tech community. For years, Silicon Valley was largely considered a liberal bastion. But over the past few weeks, Elon Musk, who leads Tesla, SpaceX and X, and the investors Marc Andreessen, Ben Horowitz and David Sacks have endorsed former President Donald J. Trump, the Republican nominee.
Biden Inc
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Baier revealed he has heard potentially explosive 'rumors' that former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi was threatening to release polling that undermined Biden's case for staying in the race. And he said that President Obama was reportedly exerting his influence behind the scenes to push Biden off the political stage. In our interview, Baier also questioned who is truly in charge in the White House, as Biden seemingly hands over more influence and power to his Vice President.
Trump / Right / Jan6
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Trump Shooter Believed To Be Author of 'Extreme' Anti-Semitic Comments Online, FBI Says
In its ongoing investigation into Thomas Matthew Crooks’s attempted assassination of Republican nominee Donald Trump at a Pennsylvania rally in July, the FBI "very recently uncovered" a social media account "believed to be associated with the shooter in about the 2019-2020 timeframe," FBI deputy director Paul Abbate told a joint hearing of the Senate Homeland Security Committee and Judiciary Committee. Some of the over 700 comments from the social media account, Abbate told senators, "appear to reflect anti-Semitic and anti-immigration themes to espouse political violence and are described as extreme in nature."
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Following the hearing, Blackburn told reporters that the deputy director had mentioned one account that painted Crooks as an anti-immigrant and anti-Semitic individual. “That was an earlier social media account. We still don’t know the platform or the user name,” Blackburn noted.
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Meta explains why its AI claimed Trump's assassination attempt didn't happen
Meta has explained why its AI chatbot didn't want to respond to inquiries about the assassination attempt on Trump and then, in some cases, denied that the event took place. The company said it programmed Meta AI to not answer questions about an event right after it happens, because there's typically "an enormous amount of confusion, conflicting information, or outright conspiracy theories in the public domain." As for why Meta AI eventually started asserting that the attempt didn't happen "in a small number of cases," it was apparently due to hallucinations.
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Monday night in Washington, DC -- yes, Washington, DC -- where fake punk poseurs Green Day were performing a concert at the Washington Nationals baseball stadium. Right in the middle of the show, the band's lead singer, Billie Joe Armstrong, decided it would be a great time to go full Kathy Griffin on Trump. We want to be fair here (because we are not leftists). What Armstrong was holding was a rubber mask, not a simulated severed head. Moreover, it appears he did not bring the mask to the show, one of the fans did and he borrowed it from that fan. But let's be real here. Look at the way he is holding the mask by the scalp. There is no question that he was trying to re-create Griffin's Trump head moment.
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Donald Trump's Plan to Hoard Billions in Bitcoin Has Economists Stumped
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Republicans question Google for allegedly censoring assassination attempt search
Law Breaking / Police / Internal Security
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As police departments were defunded, the nationwide murder rate surged 30% in 2020, making it the largest single-year increase in over a century. The next year, we saw a 4.3% increase in murders nationwide. Prior to the reforms, under Trump, violent crimes were going down. When Biden took office, cities like Philadelphia and Indianapolis broke all-time records with 561 homicides and 271 homicides respectively. Portland, Oregon, meanwhile, hit its all-time homicide high in 2022.
World
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TikTok HQ staff hit by mass food poisoning incident
Dozens of staff at the Singapore office of TikTok's parent company, ByteDance, have been hospitalised in an apparent food poisoning outbreak. Health and food safety officials in the city state are investigating the incident, which left 60 people with symptoms of gastroenteritis on Tuesday. Fifty-seven of them were treated in hospital.Seventeen ambulances were sent to the building in Singapore's business district to treat those who had fallen ill, according to local media reports. "We take the health and safety of our employees very seriously and have taken immediate steps to support all affected employees, including working with emergency services to provide care," a ByteDance spokesperson told the BBC.
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Average Canadian household spends almost half its income on taxes
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The sinister, shocking rise of dog attacks on postal workers
Israel
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UN report says Palestinian detainees taken by Israel faced torture, mistreatment
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Live Updates: Top Hamas Leader Is Killed in Iran - The New York Times
Iran’s Revolutionary Guards announced in a statement that Ismail Haniyeh, a top Hamas leader, was killed in Tehran, where he was attending the inauguration ceremony of Iran’s new president. The statement said that he and an Iranian security guard were targeted at the place of their residence and further details will be announced.
Health / Medicine
Pox / COVID / BioTerror AgitProp
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Incidence of heart attacks and strokes was lower after Covid vaccination
- Anyone with vascular problems died immediately from the shot?
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Young adults at higher risk of hearing loss after Covid infection, data suggest
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Bird flu cases among farm workers may be going undetected, a study suggests
The CDC has warned that if people are infected by the seasonal flu and the bird flu simultaneously, the two types of viruses could swap genes in a way that allows the bird flu to spread between people as easily as seasonal varieties. No evidence suggests that’s happening now. And asymptomatic cases of the bird flu appear to be rare, according to a Michigan antibody study described by the CDC on July 19. Researchers analyzed blood samples from 35 workers from dairy farms that had outbreaks in Michigan, and none showed signs of missed infections. Unlike the study in Texas, these workers hadn’t fallen sick.
A dairy worker in Colorado told KFF Health News that he sought medical care about a month ago for eye irritation — a common symptom of the bird flu. The doctor conducted a usual checkup, complete with a urine analysis. But the farmworker hadn’t heard of the bird flu, and the clinician didn’t mention it or test for the virus. "They told me I had nothing,” he said in Spanish, speaking on the condition of anonymity because he feared retaliation from employers.
“We’ve heard that employers have been reticent to take them up on the offer,” said Christine Sauvé, policy and engagement manager at the Michigan Immigrant Rights Center. “If this starts to transmit more easily person to person, we’re in trouble,” she said, “because farmworker housing units are so crowded and have poor ventilation.”