2024-08-06
Horseshit
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OnlyFans Stars Are Using AI to "Sext" with Their Desperate Simps
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The Unraveling of a Charity’s Feel-Good Story About Saving African Orphans - WSJ
Jason Carney told U.S. families he was feeding malnourished babies and arranging adoptions. Two American moms started asking questions.
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America’s High Drunk-Driving Limit - The New York Times
what counts as drunk? Nations answer that question differently. Most say you can’t get behind the wheel when the concentration of alcohol in your blood (commonly known as B.A.C.) is 0.05 percent or more. Only a quarter of countries enforce a limit above that. The United States is one of them: Its limit is set at 0.08. Experts say that’s one reason for the 13,500 drunk driving deaths here every year, according to the most recent data.
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The Urban Family Exodus Is a Warning for Progressives - The Atlantic
Children—and the millions of private decisions to have or not have them—are in the news these days, for regrettable reasons. Ohio Senator J. D. Vance, the Republican vice-presidential candidate, has made a habit of excoriating progressives who don’t have a record of procreation. In November 2020, he implied that childless Democratic leaders are “sociopathic.” In an interview with the Fox News host Tucker Carlson in 2021, he lamented that the country was being run by “a bunch of childless cat ladies.” Later that year, in an address in Southern California, he said he wanted “to take aim at the left, specifically the childless left … because I think the rejection of the American family is perhaps the most pernicious and most evil thing that the left has done in this country.” Vance’s commentary is rude and revisionist. Childless adults aren’t psychotic, and many childless people are desperate to bear children. Suggesting that their unsuccessful reproductive efforts amount to sociopathy is cruel. More substantively, in 2022, it was progressive Democratic leaders—that witchy coven of child-loathing felinophiles—who pushed for an extension to the refundable child tax credit, while Republicans overwhelmingly rejected a deal that would have sent tens of billions of dollars to parents.
LimpLicks
Obit
Rank Propaganda / Thought Policing / World Disordering
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How the Regime Captured Wikipedia
This strange triangle of love, enmity, and power led many in the community to believe that Fram had been banned not for vague accusations of “abuse” but for calling out sub-par work of a top Wikimedia official’s love interest. Salacious as it all was, if this had been the end of the story, it would have been an unpleasant, but quirky, footnote in Wikipedia history. In reality, it was only the beginning of a fundamental change that would replace the decentralized ethos of the site’s founders, and impose the WMF agenda on Wikipedia to use it as a tool for progressive social change.
There was good reason for any donor, especially one as high profile as Google, to be incentivized by this new arrangement. As a donor-advised fund, Tides Foundation provides a layer of anonymity to WMF contributors who do not want to be identified. But it also gives known donors a buffer between their contributions and the grants that WMF would make on the other end of the pipeline. Google could donate funds that would eventually get funneled into grants for radical social justice programs with a hefty degree of plausible deniability and no small amount of opacity. Such an arrangement could afford Google, and dozens of donors like it, all the social justice impact with none of the PR-nightmare downsides.
Musk
Electric / Self Driving cars
Religion / Tribal / Culture War and Re-Segregation
Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising
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The meanest app: Duolingo subjects its users to "emotional blackmail"
It didn't take long for Duolingo's emails to shift in tone. One subject line read, "🥺It's been three days…" The next day, it asked, "Have you already gotten sick of learning Portuguese?" The day after that: "🤔It looks like you've learned how to say 'quitter' in Portuguese." Across the internet, nearly a decade's worth of posts, comments, and blogs lament Duolingo's brusque bedside manner, which one Redditor half-jokingly described as an attempt at emotional blackmail to spur reengagement. The nagging goes beyond email subject lines and push notifications; inactive users might look down at their phones to find that the Duolingo app icon suddenly depicts a sadder and older version of the owl's face — or one that's melting into a carnivalesque nightmare. Parents have even complained that the capricious owl is attacking their children's brains and making them cry. Though it's widely accepted that Duolingo can be a real jerk, some have gone so far as to suggest the company's manipulative messaging is flat-out unethical.
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Founder of Social Media Site 'Irl.com' Charged with Fraud over Faked Users
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How the Music Industry Learned to Love Piracy - The New York Times
this summer’s two-part Paramount+ documentary, “How Music Got Free,” which examines the greed and myopia of the music business in the late 1990s and early 2000s, when an assortment of otherwise feckless teenagers and tech enthusiasts finally figured out how to trade songs over the internet. Depending on your perspective, it is either a delightful yarn about the money-changers in the temple getting their due or a long, sad narrative about corporations and consumers banding together to deprive artists of a fair wage.
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CrowdStrike hits back at Delta Air Lines over 'threats of litigation'
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Bloomberg News disciplines staff after breaking Evan Gershkovich embargo | CNN Business
In a memo sent to the outlet’s staff on Monday and obtained by CNN, Bloomberg editor-in-chief John Micklethwait wrote that an initial story, published at 7:41 a.m. ET Thursday, reporting Gershkovich had been released as part of a historic US-Russia prisoner exchange was posted “prematurely.” Bloomberg’s reporting “could have endangered the negotiated swap that set them free,” Micklethwait wrote. “Even if our story mercifully ended up making no difference, it was a clear violation of the editorial standards which have made this newsroom so trusted around the world.”
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Google Violated Antitrust Laws in Online Search, Judge Rules - The New York Times
Google acted illegally to maintain a monopoly in online search, a federal judge ruled on Monday, a decision that strikes at the power of big tech companies and that may fundamentally alter the way they do business. Judge Amit P. Mehta of U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia said Google had abused a monopoly over the search business. The Justice Department and states had sued Google, accusing it of illegally cementing its dominance, in part, by paying other companies, like Apple and Samsung, billions of dollars a year to have Google automatically handle search queries on their smartphones and web browsers. “Google is a monopolist, and it has acted as one to maintain its monopoly,” Judge Mehta said in his ruling.
The ruling did not include remedies for Google’s behavior. Judge Mehta will now decide that, potentially forcing the company to change the way it runs or to sell off part of its business.
TechSuck / Geek Bait
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"On FOSSBros" by Adrian Cochrane
most importantly welcome newcomers to software freedom no matter their walks of life, or software freedom “purity”. None of us are entirely pure.
AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World
Space / Boomy Zoomers / UFO
Crypto con games
Economicon / Business / Finance
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Japan's Nikkei Posts Biggest Single-Day Fall Since 1987 After Weak U.S. Data
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Chicago Fed President Goolsbee says if economy deteriorates, Fed will 'fix it'
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Analysts believe today's market plunge is "disproportionate"
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Dow plunges more than 1,000 points as global stock rout deepens on recession fear
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Dow drops 800 points, Nasdaq craters 3% in global market rout
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hello I'm new to the stock market is it good when the intel ceo starts praying
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World markets shaken over fears of U.S. recession as sell-offs deepen
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US Two-Year Yield Below 10-Year for First Time Since July 2022
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The Good Trades Have Gone Bad - Bloomberg
Market crashes usually have the same mechanism. People like a thing, so they buy it, so it goes up. More people like it, so they buy more of it, so it goes up more. It goes up steadily enough that people think “ehh I should borrow some money to buy even more of this thing,” so they do. Eventually a lot of very leveraged investors own a lot of the thing. Then something goes wrong with the thing, its price goes down, the leveraged investors get margin calls, and they have to sell the thing to pay back their loans. Their losses are big enough that they have to sell other things, things that were fine, to pay back their loans on the thing that went wrong. The big leveraged investors who owned a lot of the thing that went wrong also all own the same other things, also with leverage, so there is a generalized crash in the prices of the things that big leveraged investors own.
I have said before that one of the best services a retail broker can provide is not answering the phones during a crash. The theory here is that self-directed retail investors are bad at timing the market: When the market crashes, they rush to sell, and they tend to sell at the bottom. A broker who simply doesn’t answer the phone does the important service of preventing her customers from selling. They can wait until tomorrow, by which point maybe the market will have recovered and they’ll get higher prices, or maybe they will have calmed down and decided not to sell. The broker who unplugs the phone during a crash saves her customers a lot of money.
Apparently a lot of retail brokerages had outages today, but some didn’t, and I hope that an ambitious finance professor will figure out a way to study this? Like if Charles Schwab customers perform better (worse) this month than Robinhood customers, that will tell you something about the value of shutting off the website for the morning of a crash. I don’t know what you do with that information? What if it worked really well and Schwab customers saved billions? Do you intentionally shut off the website next time? Do you advertise it? Do regulators mandate it? People sometimes ask me what regulatory changes I would make if I ran the US Securities and Exchange Commission, and “I would pull the plug on retail brokerages during big down days” is a possibly interesting platform, though you’d want to study it first.
There was a time when people thought that crypto might be a new asset class that was uncorrelated to other assets, but that seems like mostly a mistake. Crypto is a volatile infinite-duration asset; it goes up when risk appetite goes up or when interest rates go down, and down when risk appetite goes down or rates go up.
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US chip factory workers say a struggle to survive on wages as industry booms
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Biotech company Cepheid lays off 635 in Bay Area, slashes manufacturing staff
Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making
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Hawaii Gov. Josh Green says settlement for 2023 Maui wildfire could come next week | AP News
The parties involved in Lahaina wildfire lawsuits against the state of Hawaii, Maui County and utilities are close to a global settlement of claims that will be worth a little over $4 billion, Gov. Josh Green told The Associated Press on Wednesday. Green said he’s hoping to finalize the details in coming days, perhaps as soon as Aug. 6, which would be two days before the one-year anniversary of the fire that killed 102 people and wiped out historic Lahaina. “If that could happen, it would be great. I humbly invite all the parties to finalize the agreement,” Green said in an interview at his office. “It appears that we are almost there, and we only have a very tiny holdout remaining.”
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California lawmakers got ticket freebies as they cracked down on Ticketmaster
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'Zuckbucks' Group To Dump More Cash Into Election Offices
According to CTCL’s website, the “nonpartisan” grants will be available in U.S. territories and 19 states. The grants target 2024 battleground states Michigan, Nevada, and New Hampshire. Other eligible states are Alaska, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Hawaii, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Vermont, Washington, and Wyoming.
The new grants can be used for “key human, physical, and technological assets” the Department of Homeland Security considers “necessary to conduct elections,” according to CTCL’s website. The group linked to a document from the DHS’ CISA program, the federal government’s hub for Big Tech collusion and online censorship. The document lists designated election assets, which can “range from physical sites and hardware to digital operations.”
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Sensitive Illinois Voter Data Exposed by Contractor's Unsecured Databases | WIRED
Databases containing sensitive voter information from multiple counties in Illinois were openly accessible on the internet, revealing 4.6 million records that included driver's license numbers as well as full and partial Social Security Numbers and documents like death certificates. Longtime security researcher Jeremiah Fowler stumbled upon one of the databases that appeared to contain information from DeKalb County, Illinois and subsequently discovered another 12 exposed databases. None were password protected nor required any type of authentication to access.
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America Has Too Many Laws - The Atlantic
Even these numbers do not come close to capturing all of the federal government’s activity. Today, agencies don’t just promulgate rules and regulations. They also issue informal “guidance documents” that ostensibly clarify existing regulations but in practice often “carry the implicit threat of enforcement action if the regulated public does not comply.” In a recent 10-year span, federal agencies issued about 13,000 guidance documents. Some of these documents appear in the Federal Register; some don’t. Some are hard to find anywhere. Echoing Justice Brandeis’s efforts, a few years ago the Office of Management and Budget asked agencies to make their guidance available in searchable online databases. But some agencies resisted. Why? By some accounts, they simply had no idea where to find all of their own guidance. Ultimately, officials abandoned the idea.
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Supreme Courts Gone Rogue | Opinion - Newsweek
The U.S. Supreme Court's decision to shield the president with virtually unlimited powers and immunity is a stark example of judicial overreach. This ruling not only undermines the principle of checks and balances but also sets a perilous precedent for executive power. By granting the president such sweeping authority, the Court effectively erodes the foundational democratic principle that no one is above the law.
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Justice Thomas Failed to Reveal More Private Flights, Senator Says
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Whistleblowers claim Tulsi Gabbard being surveilled under ‘Quiet Skies’ program.
Harris / TBA 2024 / Democrats Demonstrate "Our Democracy"
Biden Inc
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Nancy Pelosi Makes Wild New Proposition: Put Biden on Mount Rushmore
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Biden's Treasury accused of trying to juice U.S. economy pre-election
The Treasury conducts regular bond market auctions to sell debt, fund the annual budget deficit, and roll over existing bonds that are maturing. For the past year, short-term debt — or Treasury bills — have been about 20% of all outstanding debt. That's at the high end of the old suggested range. Last week the range was updated to say that 20% should be the average, not the cap. Short-term debt is becoming a rising share of all outstanding debt, while the share of long-term debt, like 10-year or 30-year bonds, stays flat. In turn, critics say the lower supply is preventing long-term interest rates from going up. Those rates influence borrowing costs across the economy. Lower rates mean stronger economic activity — the opposite of what the Fed has been trying to achieve by setting overnight interest rates at a high level. Of course, if you believe the Fed has been behind the curve and has waited too long to cut rates, then the Treasury has been helping the economic cause rather than hurting it.
Trump / Right / Jan6
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Stephanopoulos Chastises Republican for Repeating Trump’s ‘Slur’ Against Harris
Rep. Byron Donalds called the scandal a “phony controversy” and refused to admit the former president was wrong in questioning her racial identity.
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Chris Christie blames Trump for boosting Josh Shapiro by endorsing his 'weakest' opponent
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RFK Jr. Privately Called Trump a ‘Sociopath’ Who’s ‘Barely Human’
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Donald Trump says Google 'has to be careful' or it will be 'shut down'
Law Breaking / Police / Internal Security
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he unidentified homeowner noticed a camouflaged camera hidden in the shrubbery outside of home in the upscale community of Scarsdale last Sunday, CBS News reports. Police said it was camouflaged with fake greenery and hooked up to a cellular hotspot to broadcast surveillance footage, as burglars use these hidden cameras across the nation to monitor opportunities to break into homes or steal vehicles. It is now believed the group who set up the cameras in Scarsdale are from South America, and local police are getting help from the FBI and Homeland Security in their investigation.
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A Republican State A.G. Fights to Keep Exonerated Prisoners Behind Bars
External Security / Militaria / Diplomania
World
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Bangladesh PM Hasina has resigned and left the country, media reports say
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Australians blame wind, solar for high power bills as media campaigns take hold
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Indonesia bans search engine DuckDuckGo on gambling, pornography concerns
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Maduro lost election, tallies collected by Venezuela's opposition show
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UK Riots: The Agenda Becomes Clear... | ZeroHedge
England is experiencing an eruption of anti-immigrant and far-right violence the likes of which has not been seen for years. Towns and cities have been overtaken by mobs of often masked men chanting anti-immigrant slogans, attacking hotels housing asylum seekers and mosques, clashing with police and causing widespread destruction.
Iran / Houthi
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Iran Rebuffs Calls for Restraint in Its Response to Killing of Hamas Leader - WSJ
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Houthi rebels hit container ship, say they shot down US drone
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Putin's Top Defense Officials Are In Tehran Amid Countdown To Zero Hour | ZeroHedge (Archive)
On Monday as the Middle East approaches zero hour of Iran's expected major retaliation attack on Israel, there is a Russian defense delegation in Tehran, and a US defense delegation in Tel Aviv. How is that for symmetry among enemies? Sergei Shoigu, Russia's ex-Defense Minister and current national Security Council secretary, is meeting with senior Iranian military and security officials, as well as newly sworn-in president Masoud Pezeshkian.
Also on Monday, the Israeli military confirmed that head of US Central Command, General Michael Kurilla, is in the country to assess the security situation against the backdrop of the potential attack from Iran. Kurilla met with Israeli army chief, Lieutenant-General Herzi Halevi, and "held a joint situational assessment on security and strategic issues, as well as joint preparations in the region, as part of the response to threats in the Middle East," according to a statement carried in Israeli press.
China
Health / Medicine
Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda
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Climate change deniers make up nearly a quarter of US Congress
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Thunderstorms Have Caused $45B in Damages in the U.S. in Six Months
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The hornet has landed: Scientists combat new honeybee killer in US
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Heat pumps are expensive. What if billionaires bought them for everyone?
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What happens to US food production if the groundwater runs out altogether?
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The lost history of what Americans knew about climate change in the 1960s
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Global Climate Change Impact on Crops Expected Within 10 Years, NASA Study Finds