2024-08-29


Horseshit

  • A key Boeing mechanic was on vacation before the 737 Max doors blowout

  • Lexus and Toyota are the most reliable used-car brands, Tesla third from bottom

  • These Are the Last Supercars to Offer a Manual Transmission

  • we are all at the mercy of the bottom quintile

    Maybe the most important thing you learn by attending public school is that we are all at the mercy of the bottom quintile. The rules you follow in life will be based on the behavior of the bottom quintile, the taxes you pay are to support the bottom quintile, the greatest risks to your life and property will come from the bottom quintile,

  • The Midwest cities in search of new migrants

    Immigration continues to divide politicians in Washington and causes severe social strains in big cities and the southwestern states that are bearing the brunt of a post-pandemic influx of migrants. But in cities such as St Louis in Missouri, it is seen as part of the solution to labour shortages and years of depopulation. “This may be the first year [in decades] that we’ll have net zero decline in population,” says Arrey Obenson, president of the International Institute, a non-profit that has been reaching out to recent arrivals in larger cities to draw them to the Midwest. The programme is on track to bring about 2,000 immigrants by the end of the year, to a city that saw an outflow of about 4,400 residents last year. All of the migrants are authorised to work in the US.

  • This Company Wants to Sell You Sunlight at Night from Space

  • Book review: "Ender's Game" - by Noah Smith - Noahpinion

    Ender’s Game, by Orson Scott Card, appears at or near the top of many lists of the greatest science fiction books ever written. Whenever I see its name pop up on those lists, I feel my skin crawl a little bit. Whenever I meet someone who gushes about how much they love Ender’s Game, I immediately become a little wary. This is not because Ender’s Game is a bad book. Quite the opposite — it is an excellent book, a singular achievement. I believe it deserves its position on the lists. And in fact, Ender’s Game was one of the formative books of my own childhood. But at the same time, I wouldn’t say that I liked it. It’s one of those things that changed me by disturbing me — like Grave of the Fireflies, or Crumb. It made me reflect on things about myself that I didn’t like, and things about the world that terrified me.

  • 4-year-old accidentally shatters Bronze Age jar at museum

  • Long known: Parenting Is Hazardous to Your Health, the Surgeon General Warns

  • That feeling when your “cool-ass girl” can’t dig your online monkey torture vids | Ars Technica

    They say that the Internet offers a gathering place for every interest, no matter how niche, and that extends even to the darkest corners of the human psyche. That was certainly true here. The government was investigating a scheme in which US citizens were gathering in a "private online group and one-on-one chats on encrypted messaging applications" to share their fantasies about making "monkey crush" videos. The name actually makes these videos sound more innocuous than they are. While crushing a monkey to death would be terrible enough, the "clients" in this private online group wanted to watch monkeys tortured for hours. They complained when the monkeys died too quickly.

    In a truly heinous example of global, Internet-based outsourcing, the "client ideas" were funneled to an unnamed minor in Indonesia, who, for a few hundred US dollars sent via Western Union, would procure the monkeys, film their torture, and send the videos back to the Americans.

  • What the Hell Is Going On With SFWA? - by Jason Sanford

    it appears SFWA is suffering from serious managerial problems, with staff and volunteers not empowered to actually deal with issues. There is also a serious lack of communication between volunteers, staff and the board, with members of the board frequently not looped into what's going on. In addition, SFWA has NDAs that are overly broad and restrict communications with members and the public. Finally, all of this has combined with some toxic workplace encounters to result in burnout among staff, board members and volunteers.

  • America Can Break Its Highway Addiction

  • Humans can communicate with dogs using soundboards, study suggests


Rank Propaganda / Thought Policing / World Disordering

Telegram

TechSuck / Geek Bait

  • The slow evaporation of the free/open source surplus – Baldur Bjarnason

    Even though coders come from varying backgrounds, once they have a career many, if not most, become relatively high income middle class with significant spare time. A non-trivial number of coders in California also have moderate wealth from being secondary or tertiary beneficiaries of industry liquidity events which lets them work on FOSS as much as they want. (This is what keeps a surprising number of FOSS projects afloat.)

    Very few FOSS projects are lucky enough to have grown a sustainable and supportive community. Most of the time, it seems to be a never-ending parade of angry demands with very little reward. When the software labour market was growing steadily, burned out maintainers often got replaced by fresh-eyed graduates or coders who relied on the project at work.

    Best case scenario, seems to me, is that Free and Open Source Software enters a period of decline. After all, that’s generally what happens to complex systems with less investment. Worst case scenario is a vicious cycle leading to a collapse: Declining surplus and burnout leads to maintainers increasingly stepping back from their projects. Many of these projects either bitrot serious bugs or get taken over by malicious actors who are highly motivated because they can’t relay on pervasive memory bugs anymore for exploits. OSS increasingly gets a reputation (deserved or not) for being unsafe and unreliable. That decline in users leads to even more maintainers stepping back.

  • What is the longest known sequence of numbers that repeats in Pi?

  • Guido van Rossum's Post Removed for Violating Python Community Guidelines | Hacker News

Harris / Democrats

  • Why Kamala Harris's approach to capital gains is generating so much controversy

  • These are not opinions, these are facts

    Kamala Harris is the privileged child of racist immigrant college professors, she has all but no connection to the American working class experience in her formative years, she rose to prominence by having sex with a much older, powerful Democrat politician, as a government lawyer she engaged in corrupt practices that discriminated against black men in prison, as a Senator she was the most extreme Leftist in the Senate, she got chosen as VP because of her skin color and genitalia, as VP she has had no notable accomplishments other than to ignore the advanced dementia of her boss, she used extortion to grab the Presidential nomination for herself, and her campaign currently consists of hiding from the press while having no verifiable campaign platform.

Trump / Right / Jan6

  • Among America’s “Low-Information Voters” | The New Yorker

    In April, NBC News released the results of a poll that looked at how a thousand respondents consumed political news, and how they planned to vote. At the time, Biden was the overwhelming favorite among people who read newspapers, watched network news, and followed online news sites. Trump, meanwhile, led among those who frequently got their information from social media, cable news, and YouTube. The poll also showed that Trump most dominated among a subset of people described as “low-information voters.” Definitions of this group vary among experts, some of whom begin by pointing to the ubiquity of ignorance. “If you know what the F.T.C. did last week, you’re a freak,” David Schleicher, a professor at Yale Law School, told me. There were gaps in basic political knowledge even among law professors he knew. “It’s just a matter of degree,” he said. Nonetheless, he continued, low-information voters tend to have “fewer observations about politics with which to make vote choices.”

  • Trump campaign staff had altercation with official at Arlington Cemetery : NPR

    A source with knowledge of the incident said the cemetery official tried to prevent Trump staffers from filming and photographing in a section where recent U.S. casualties are buried. The source said Arlington officials had made clear that only cemetery staff members would be authorized to take photographs or film in the area, known as Section 60.

    In a statement to NPR, Steven Cheung, the Trump campaign's spokesman, strongly rejected the notion of a physical altercation, adding: "We are prepared to release footage if such defamatory claims are made. "The fact is that a private photographer was permitted on the premises and for whatever reason an unnamed individual, clearly suffering from a mental health episode, decided to physically block members of President Trump's team during a very solemn ceremony," Cheung said in the statement. The Trump campaign declined to make that footage immediately available.

  • Ankle bracelet and internet ban for ‘J6 Praying Grandma’ - Washington Examiner

  • Vance tries to tether Harris to Biden during Michigan rally - POLITICO

    Speaking at a rally in Big Rapids, Michigan, former President Donald Trump’s running mate tried to tie Harris to the Biden administration’s policies — saying at one point that “Kamala Harris has been calling the shots” — while also warning of China’s emergence as an economic superpower that’s taking jobs away from the U.S.

  • States Keep Denying RFK Jr.'s Request to Be Removed From the Ballot - Business Insider

    "Minor party candidates cannot withdraw, so his name will remain on the ballot in the November election," Cheri Hardmon, a spokesperson for Michigan's secretary of state, said in a statement to The Detroit News. "The Natural Law Party held their convention to select electors for Robert Kennedy Jr. They cannot meet at this point to select new electors since it's past the primary," she added.

  • 'My identity is stolen': Photos of influencers used to push pro-Trump propaganda

  • Michael Sparks, the first Jan. 6 defendant to breach U.S. Capitol, sentenced to 53 months in prison.

Law Breaking / Police / Internal Security

  • Man Is First to Be Charged in New York With Wearing a Mask in Public - The New York Times

    A man on Long Island has been arrested and charged with possessing a knife and wearing a face mask in public, a milestone moment in the debate over whether to criminalize masks in New York State.

    The man arrested on Sunday, Wesslin Omar Ramirez Castillo, 18, the first to face charges under a mask ban passed this month in Nassau County, N.Y., was not engaged in protest. He was walking down Spindle Road, a residential street of tidy lawns and single-family homes in Hicksville, wearing dark clothes and a ski mask in August, the county police said in a statement.

    When police officers arrived, they frisked Mr. Castillo and discovered a 14-inch knife in the waistband of his pants, the department said in a statement on Tuesday. He was charged on Monday with several crimes, including criminal possession of a weapon and a violation of the mask law. “Our police officers were able to use the mask ban legislation as well as other factors to stop and interrogate an individual who was carrying a weapon with the intent to engage in a robbery,” Mr. Blakeman said in a statement. “Passing this law gave police another tool to stop this dangerous criminal.”

World