2024-08-17

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• A 29-Year-Old Just Gave the Best Explanation Why Millennials Aren't Having Kids

  Charlie began, "I'm gonna drop some opinions on the whole 'millennials aren't having kids' thing as a working-class millennial." They continued, "It absolutely baffles me that the government is pretending like they don't know why we're not having kids because, frankly, it is glaringly obvious. The economy is a fucking tire fire right now. The cost of groceries, the cost and availability of baby formula, the cost of diapers, the cost of childcare, the cost of giving birth in the United States."

Horseshit

• Wooden Building of the Future Has a Problem: Mold

• Japanese Kei cars banned by yet another U.S. state

• Disney's not alone in saying your clicks means you can't sue

• Walmart grounds drone delivery in three states to focus on Dallas

celebrity gossip

• 5 charged in Matthew Perry’s ketamine death as new details emerge.

• Coke Fortune Heir Tallies $1B in Workplace Harassment Verdicts Against Him

• How ex-liberal power couple Ben and Felicia Horowitz made a political U-turn

Musk

• Low Earth Orbit Satellites Cause Environmental Harm Regulators Didnt Prepare For

• AT&T and Verizon ask FCC to block Starlink's direct-to-cell plans

  • AT&T, Verizon Tell FCC to Reject SpaceX Plan for Cellular Starlink

• Don't go head-to-head with Musk on space internet, satellite CEO tells Europe

Electric / Self Driving cars

• Just 45 petrol cars sold in Norway in July as EVs hit 92 per cent of sales

• Battery maker to build 1,000-job factory in North Carolina

• Waymo says it's issued a fix for overnight honking from driverless cars

Edumacationalizing / Acedemia Nuts

• Standardized tests ‘rooted in white supremacy,’ teachers union president says.

  “The way in which, you know, we think about learning and think about achievement is really and truly based on testing, which at best is junk science rooted in white supremacy,” Stacy Davis Gates said last week in a radio interview. She also said teachers’ low pay is due to sexism: “This society has never wanted to pay women [their] worth, and as you know, our union is 80% female.” Gates made the comments when asked by the black radio station WVON 1690 to respond to criticism about asking for pay raises despite low student achievement. The union wants a 9% annual raise and money for solar panels, abortions, and transgender drugs and surgeries as part of its contract negotiation.

• Texas school bans all-black clothing, cites mental health concerns

Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising

• The Pixel 9 phones have a new modem, and that's a big deal

• Cartoon Network's Website Was Deleted. That Should Scare You All

• Apple accused of using privacy to excuse ignoring child abuse material on iCloud

• You can now use the Meta Quest as a screen for HDMI devices

• TikTok fights for survival in latest filing as ban approaches

• Cyber insurers are winners from the biggest ever IT outage

• Fortnite Publisher Debuts Mobile Storefront After Years in Court

• Apple's Hold on the App Store Is Loosening, at Least in Europe

• Microsoft halts its aggressive Windows 11 ads in Windows 10

• No Joke: The Onion Thinks Print Is the Future of Media

• AT&T Gets a Wrist Slap for Advertising a Satellite Calling That Doesn't Exist

AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World

• Eric Schmidt Says Google Is Falling Behind on AI – and Remote Work Is Why

• Microsoft and OpenAI calling for personhood credentials in new paper

• AI-powered 'undressing' websites are getting sued

  The offending websites allow users to upload images of real, fully clothed people, which are then digitally “undressed” with AI tools that simulate nudity. One of these websites, which wasn’t identified within the complaint, reportedly advertises: “Imagine wasting time taking her out on dates, when you can just use [the redacted website] to get her nudes.”

  • SF sues most-visited websites that create nonconsensual deepfake pornography

Space / Boomy Zoomers / UFO

• Do SETI Optimists Have a Fine-Tuning Problem?

• A Memoir Offers an Insider’s Perspective Into the Pentagon’s U.F.O. Hunt - The New York Times

  Luis Elizondo made headlines in 2017 when he resigned as a senior intelligence official running a shadowy Pentagon program investigating U.F.O.s and publicly denounced the excessive secrecy, lack of resources and internal opposition that he said were thwarting the effort. Elizondo’s disclosures at the time created a sensation. They were buttressed by explosive videos and testimony from Navy pilots who had encountered unexplained aerial phenomena, and led to congressional inquiries, legislation and a 2023 House hearing in which a former U.S. intelligence official testified that the federal government has retrieved crashed objects of nonhuman origin. Now Elizondo, 52, has gone further in a new memoir. In the book he asserted that a decades-long U.F.O. crash retrieval program has been operating as a supersecret umbrella group made up of government officials working with defense and aerospace contractors. Over the years, he wrote, technology and biological remains of nonhuman origin have been retrieved from these crashes. “Humanity is, in fact, not the only intelligent life in the universe, and not the alpha species,” Elizondo wrote. The book, “Imminent: Inside the Pentagon’s Hunt for U.F.O.s,” is being published by HarperCollins on Aug. 20 after a yearlong security review by the Pentagon.

Crypto con games

• Crypto Hacks Double to $1.6B as Prices Jump, Report Shows

Economicon / Business / Finance

• Cisco cuts jobs, 7% of workforce, as it shifts focus to AI, cybersecurity

• Carry Trade That Blew Up Markets Is Attracting Hedge Funds Again

• What to know as new real estate commission rules go into effect

• SoftBank scraps AI chips tie-up plan with Intel

• Warren Buffett ditches his near-$1B Snowflake investment

• Is this the end for the magnetic stripe?

• Markets Are Way Out of Line with Reality, According to These Measures

• Florida Man Spends His GameStop Riches to Build $132M JetBlue Stake

• Realtors Resist Changes in Commissions

• Subway calls 'emergency' meeting with franchisees as sales plummet

• U.S. Awards $1.6B to Texas Instruments to Build Semiconductor Plants

• 8.5% of U.S. homes have an estimated value of $1M or more, a record high

Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making

• Thousands are housed as L.A. County makes progress on Skid Row

• US lawmakers urge probe of WiFi router maker TP-Link

• DNC staffer files complaint seeking to bar Green Party from presidential ballot  - WisPolitics

• Congress asks Zuckerberg to explain why drug dealers are advertising on Facebook

• FTC bans fake online reviews

• Right on Red: The Culture War Comes for Traffic Lights (Archive)

  a pair of obscure provisions that passed the GOP-run House Appropriations Committee shows that another divide is driving politics in 2024: Republican motorists vs. Democratic pedestrians. That’s one takeaway from the latest scrum over the D.C. appropriations bill, an annual forum for legislative grandstanding that has long been a place for pols to pursue the culture-war causes of the day.

  One of the proposals would forbid Washington’s local government from banning right turns at red lights. Another would do away with the automated traffic-enforcement cameras that ticket D.C. drivers for speeding, blowing stop signs and other violations. The provisions are not just a case of earnest traffic-engineering wonkery sneaking into Congressional oversight. They represent a culture-war cause just as real as D.C.’s needle-exchange efforts or mask mandates, two other targets of current GOP riders. At the core of it is the politically revealing question of cars versus other ways of getting around.

• Miami’s Francis Suarez blurs line between public duty, pursuit of wealth

  As it turns out, Suarez is often not in the city he was elected to lead. The mayor spent at least 85 days outside Miami in 2022, including about half those days abroad, primarily in the Middle East, according to a Miami Herald analysis of city records. He spent almost a week in Qatar, two weeks in Saudi Arabia and a few days in the United Arab Emirates. He’s on track to be out of town just as much in 2023. Suarez won’t give any specifics about what he’s been doing in the Middle East, who he’s been meeting or who’s been footing the bills. The only thing he’ll say is that he travels a lot for his work as a private attorney for an international law firm, the most lucrative of 14 side jobs that have transformed him from a debt-ridden city commissioner into a multi-millionaire mayor.

Harris / TBA 2024 / Democrats Demonstrate "Our Democracy"

• Kamala Harris to release her first major economic plan as a presidential candidate - CBS News

  Harris will call for the construction of 3 million new housing units in her first four years in office. This is part of her economic policy that she is expected to roll out in Raleigh, North Carolina, campaign officials confirm to CBS News. The Biden administration has previously called for the construction of 2 million new homes.

  Harris is expected to announce that she will make tackling inflation a "Day One" priority, as well as outline a plan to lower costs for middle class families, take on corporate-price gouging and an overall focus on lowering costs for Americans, according to details shared by Harris-Walz campaign officials. Friday's economic policy remarks come after Harris pledged to eliminate taxes on tips and raise the minimum wage during her rally in Las Vegas on Saturday, her only two economic policy proposals so far.

  "When I am president, I will continue that work to bring down prices," Harris said at a campaign rally in Glendale, Arizona, on Friday. "I will take on big corporations that engage in illegal price gouging. I will take on corporate landlords that unfairly raise rents on working families. I will take on Big Pharma and cap the cost of prescription drugs for all Americans.

  • Opinion | Kamala Harris’s price gouging proposal is a terrible idea - The Washington Post

  The most likely template for Harris’s proposal is a recent bill from Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.). (Harris co-sponsored similar legislation with Warren in 2020, when Harris was a senator.) Warren’s bill would ban any “grossly excessive price” during any “atypical disruption” of a market. Alas, no definition was provided for these terms, either; rather, the bill would empower the Federal Trade Commission to enforce bans using any metric it deems appropriate. It’s hard to exaggerate how bad this policy is. It is, in all but name, a sweeping set of government-enforced price controls across every industry, not only food. Supply and demand would no longer determine prices or profit levels. Far-off Washington bureaucrats would. The FTC would be able to tell, say, a Kroger in Ohio the acceptable price it can charge for milk. At best, this would lead to shortages, black markets and hoarding, among other distortions seen previous times countries tried to limit price growth by fiat. (There’s a reason narrower “price gouging” laws that exist in some U.S. states are rarely invoked.) At worst, it might accidentally raise prices.

  If your opponent claims you’re a “communist,” maybe don’t start with an economic agenda that can (accurately) be labeled as federal price controls.

• Tim Walz’s 2006 campaign falsely described details about his arrest for DWI in 1995 | CNN Politics

  According to court and police records connected to the incident, Walz admitted in court that he had been drinking when he was pulled over for driving 96 mph in a 55 mph zone in Nebraska. Walz was then transported by a state trooper to a local hospital for a blood test, showing he had a blood alcohol level of .128, well above the state’s legal limit of 0.1 at the time. But in 2006, his campaign repeatedly told the press that he had not been drinking that night, claiming that his failed field sobriety test was due to a misunderstanding related to hearing loss from his time in the National Guard. The campaign also claimed that Walz was allowed to drive himself to jail that night. None of that was true. A CNN KFile review of statements made by the Walz campaign at the time reveals numerous discrepancies between how the campaign described the events and the facts of what actually took place that night.

Biden Inc

• The untold story of how Nancy Pelosi forced Biden to quit with a brutal phone call and humiliating ultimatum that ruined 50 years of friendship... and has left Jill and Joe furious | Daily Mail Online

Law Breaking / Police / Internal Security

• FBI Fielding Drones That Fire Off Deafening Bangs

External Security / Militaria / Diplomania

• Deliberate nuclear use in war over Taiwan: Scenarios and considerations for USA

Russia Bad / Ukraine War

• Ukrainian soldiers are reviewing Russian restaurants on Google

• Google says it is deactivating Russia-based Adsense accounts

China

• US official: Chinese seizure of TSMC in Taiwan would be 'absolutely devastating'

Health / Medicine

• More People Are Overdosing on Ozempic Alternatives

• FDA Announces Milestone in Sodium Reduction Efforts, Issues Draft Guidance with Lower Target Levels for Certain Foods | FDA

  Prior to 2021, consumer intake was approximately 3,400 milligrams per day on average, far higher than the limit recommended by the Dietary Guidelines for Americans of 2,300 milligrams per day for those 14 years and older. If finalized, the new set of voluntary targets would support reducing average individual sodium intake to about 2,750 milligrams per day. This reduction is approximately 20% lower than consumer intake levels prior to 2021.

Pox / COVID / BioTerror AgitProp

• Mpox: Sweden confirms first case of 'more grave' variant outside Africa

• CDC warns of surge in parvovirus cases.

  Parvovirus B19, a seasonal respiratory virus that subsided during the pandemic, is making a comeback, U.S. health officials warned Tuesday. In a health alert issued by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the agency said it has received reports of higher test positivity rates in recent months: The proportion of people with antibodies indicating recent infection, which fell below 3% from 2022-2024, spiked to 10% in June. Parvovirus, also known as "slapped cheek disease" for the facial rash it can cause in children, is considered common: Nearly half of Americans have detectable levels of parvovirus B19 antibodies by age 20, while more than 70% have these antibodies by the age of 40. People in occupations with close contact with children, such as schools and day care centers, tend to be at higher risk of infection, the CDC noted.

Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda

• Japan's searing summer heat is warping railway tracks more often

• Half of Their Land Burned: The California Counties Constantly on Fire

• The banana apocalypse is near, biologists find key to their survival

• Faced with Heavier Rains, Cities Scramble to Control Polluted Runoff

• Roach sprays don’t work: If you want to stop a cockroach infestation, most consumer products offer ‘absolutely no benefit.’

  the new study highlights that the EPA allows anti-roach insecticides to be green-lit after testing on susceptible, lab-strain cockroaches, which specifically haven’t evolved pyrethroid resistance.

• Another dolphin attack in Fukui; boy, 10, gets 20 to 30 stitches