2024-09-02
Horseshit
Rank Propaganda / Thought Policing / World Disordering
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Elon Musk and his bros-in-arms are winning the global battle for the truth
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The Durov case is not about free speech (Archive)
The hashtag #FreePavel, launched by Elon Musk, spread quickly after Pavel Durov’s recent arrest in Paris. Many of those who reposted it portray the Telegram founder’s detention as an assault on free speech. In any direct sense, it is not. Durov faces preliminary charges in a French probe of Telegram’s alleged failures to address criminality on its platform, including drug peddling and child pornography. A court may ultimately have to decide whether the app broke French law, and whether its Russian-born CEO can be held responsible.
US conservatives and Silicon Valley entrepreneurs have found themselves in strange concert with Russian bloggers in alleging that Durov’s detention shows European tech regulation — certainly more hands-on than the US variety — is on the road to censorship. Senior Russian officials, among Telegram’s most avid users, claim Paris is trying to force Durov to hand over the app’s encryption keys. Top marks to Moscow for gall: Durov has said he fled Russia in 2014 and sold his VKontakte network to Kremlin-friendly buyers after refusing demands to share Ukrainian user data. Russia tried to ban Telegram in 2018.
Musk
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Judge who owns Tesla stock greenlights X lawsuit against critics
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Brazil judge's order to secretly block multiple Twitter accounts within 2 hours
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How Brazil's Experiment Fighting Fake News Led to a Ban on X
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Brazilian Users Will Be Fined $9000 a Day If They Use VPN to Access X
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Bill Ackman Says X Ban Will Make Brazil an 'Uninvestable Market'
Electric / Self Driving cars
Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising
TechSuck / Geek Bait
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a brief history of barbed wire fence telephone networks – loriemerson
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The Pentium as a Navajo weaving
In December 1972, National Geographic highlighted the Shiprock plant as "weaving for the Space Age", stating that the Fairchild plant was the tribe's most successful economic project with Shiprock booming due to the 4.5-million-dollar annual payroll. The article states: "Though the plant runs happily today, it was at first a battleground of warring cultures." A new manager, Paul Driscoll, realized that strict "white man's rules" were counterproductive. For instance, many employees couldn't phone in if they would be absent, as they didn't have telephones. Another issue was the language barrier since many workers spoke only Navajo, not English. So when technical words didn't exist in Navajo, substitutes were found: "aluminum" became "shiny metal". Driscoll also realized that Fairchild needed to adapt to traditional nine-day religious ceremonies. Soon the monthly turnover rate dropped from 12% to under 1%, better than Fairchild's other plants.
AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World
Space / Boomy Zoomers / UFO
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Boeing will try to fly its troubled Starliner capsule back to Earth next week
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Starliner crew reports hearing "sonar like noises"
"This is emanating from the speaker in Starliner"
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Thinking about a UFO as some kind of extraterrestrial spaceship is naive
Economicon / Business / Finance
Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making
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America Must Free Itself from the Tyranny of the Penny (Archive)
As far as anyone knows, the American cent is the most produced coin in the history of civilization, its portrait of Lincoln the most reproduced piece of art on Earth. Although pennies are almost never used for their ostensible purpose (to make purchases), right now one out of every two circulating coins minted in the United States has a face value of 1 cent. A majority of the ones that have not yet disappeared are, according to a 2022 report, “sitting in consumers’ coin jars in their homes.” It’s crucial that they remain there. Five years ago, Mint officials conceded that if even a modest portion of these dormant pennies were suddenly to return to circulation, the resulting flow-back would be “logistically unmanageable.”
Harris / Democrats
Law Breaking / Police / Internal Security
World
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Anarchy in Sudan has spawned the world’s worst famine in 40 years (Archive)
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How Vietnamese Australians came to dominate the nail salon industry
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'Not our tradition'-calls in Sweden to ban fathers walking brides down the aisle
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Myanmar's poorest are turning to social media to sell their kidneys
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East-German state Thuringia elects right-wing extremist party to lead government
the story of the evening seemed clear: in Thuringia the Alternative for Germany (AfD)—a hard-right party whose branches in both that state and Saxony, which also voted on September 1st, have been formally designated as extremist—appears to have topped the polls in a state election for the first time since its founding just over a decade ago. In Saxony it is projected to sit only fractionally behind the centre-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU). The AfD’s lead candidate in Thuringia, Björn Höcke, whose provocative flirtations with Nazi rhetoric have landed him with criminal convictions, is not about to take charge of the state. No other party will work with the AfD, in the east or anywhere else (although if it secures one-third of the seats in Thuringia, as looks likely, the party would have a blocking minority in parliament, enabling it to block the appointment of judges among other matters). But the large chunk of seats the AfD now occupies looks likely to force the other parties into ideologically garbled coalitions to keep it from power.