2024-09-04
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Power, gas shut off to Los Angeles County residents as landslide continues
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10 Reasons Why Technological Progress Is Now Reversing
Not long ago, scientists wanted to understand reality. That was true whether their names were Newton and Einstein, or Hewlett and Packard—who established Silicon Valley by building test and measurement equipment. How quaint, test and measurement devices!—which humbly respect the essence of the real world. Could you imagine our leading tech CEOs today wasting their time on measuring the world? Instead they want to create their own universe (or multiverse or cyberspace, to use the fashionable jargon)—and force the rest of us to live in it. So, in the last decade, the largest tech investments have gone into creating fantasy and unreality. Trillions are spent on virtual reality and artificial intelligence. Tech has lost its reverence for the real, and now hungers to displace it with its own Frankenstein creations.
many of us (me included) learned a lot from Foucault and other postmodernists, as they showed how knowledge gets turned into an authoritarian tool. I thought that was valuable, because seeing these abuses should make it easier to stop them. But it didn’t work out that way. Something ugly happened instead. Instead of criticizing and debunking these abuses, a whole generation of smart people started imitating them. It was an easy game to learn: You pretend to be truthful, but use this to build your own empire. And if there is no truth, why not use the concept of truthfulness as just one more tool for your personal advantage? Academics were probably the first to figure this out—playing deceptive power games with data. But these techniques inevitably infiltrated into the broader culture over the course of a generation. A contempt for truth went mainstream—despite constant lip service to honesty—and everything got justified (secretly) in terms of power.
Horseshit
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A simple theory of which thinkers support the elites, or not
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Companies Are Simply Ignoring Many New State 'Right to Repair' Laws
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Airline forced to rebalance planes because first class seats are too heavy
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Satellite Pollution Is Now a Serious Problem for Astronomers
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I was asked to leave an event for female founders because I had my baby with me
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The truth about why we stopped having babies | The Independent
“Men are mean and everything is too expensive.”
There are two broad trends at work here, according to Prof Sarah Harper CBE, a professor of gerontology at the University of Oxford. The first is an extension of something that started in Europe 250 years ago: “When you improve women’s education and healthcare, it reduces the number of children she’ll have. That’s a very good thing – more women being healthy, educated and having access to family planning.” The other trend has happened more dramatically over the last 30 years, and is particularly notable in Asia and Latin America. This second fall in fertility, where we’re seeing birth rates below 1.5 children, “seems to be driven by different dynamics”, says Prof Harper. “Responses from young women are the same in Southeast Asia as in Europe: yes, women are saying there are economic issues, insecure jobs or challenges with affordable housing. But they’re also saying, ‘I’m educated and I understand that if I have a child that will change my lifestyle. I want to consider when I have a child’.” They might decide to stay child-free, to delay having their first child, or to only have one.
Rank Propaganda / Thought Policing / World Disordering
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China-linked 'Spamouflage' network mimics Americans to sway US political debate
New research into Chinese disinformation networks targeting American voters shows Harlan’s claims were as fictitious as his profile picture, which analysts think was created using artificial intelligence. As voters prepare to cast their ballots this fall, China has been making its own plans, cultivating networks of fake social media users designed to mimic Americans. Whoever or wherever he really is, Harlan is a small part of a larger effort by U.S. adversaries to use social media to influence and upend America’s political debate. he account was traced back to Spamouflage, a Chinese disinformation group, by analysts at Graphika, a New York-based firm that tracks online networks. Known to online researchers for several years, Spamouflage earned its moniker through its habit of spreading large amounts of seemingly unrelated content alongside disinformation.
Musk
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Starlink tells Brazil regulator it will not comply with X suspension
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Elon Musk supports replacing democracy with government of high-status males
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“Had we done as Ukraine asked, it would have been a felony violation of US law.”
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World Bank Halts Ads on X After They Appear Under Racist Content
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Elon Musk's Ridiculous Slapp Suit Gets Green Light from Partisan Judge
Electric / Self Driving cars
Edumacationalizing / Acedemia Nuts
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Opinion | College Students Need to Grow Up. Schools Need to Let Them. - The New York Times
Universities don’t openly describe students as children, but that is how they treat them. This was highlighted in the spring, when so many pro-Palestinian student protesters — most of them legal adults — faced minimal consequences for even flagrant violations of their universities’ policies. (Some were arrested — but those charges were often dropped.) American universities’ relative generosity to their students may seem appealing, especially in contrast to the plight of our imaginary waiter, but it has a dark side, in the form of increased control of student life.
If universities today won’t hold students responsible for their bad behavior, they also won’t leave them alone when they do nothing wrong. Administrators send out position statements after major national and international political events to convey the approved response, micromanage campus parties and social events, dictate scripts for sexual interactions, extract allegiance to boutique theories of power and herd undergraduates into mandatory dormitories where their daily lives can be more comprehensively monitored and shaped. This is increasingly true across institutions — public and private, small and large — but the more elite the school, the more acute the problem.
Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising
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Elasticsearch will be open source again as CTO declares changed landscape
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US gambling sector's 'relentless' social posts breached own rules, study claims
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Star Wars Outlaws Stealth Bugs Make It A Crappy Masterpiece
To be excited about a beautifully crafted wall is to set yourself up for an aneurysm when you start to notice the tiny, inflecting details on characters’ faces, or the scrupulous idle animations of a bored guard. Then as I tried to conceive that this same level of care was taking place across thousands of locations in multiple cities over a handful of planets, my genuine thought was: “It’s ridiculous that we mark these games on the same criteria as others.” How can someone look at this, this majesty, and say, “Hmmm, seven out of ten?” And then a guard sees me through a solid hillside and ruins fifteen minutes of painstaking stealth, and I wonder how it can be on sale at all. In 2024, we have reached the most deeply peculiar place, where AAA games are feats that humanity would once have recognized as literal wonders, and yet play with the same irritating issues and tedious repetition as we saw in the 90s. This contrast, this dissonance, is absolutely fascinating.
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Concord, $200M budget game, pulled from distribution after 1 week
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NaNoWriMo is in disarray after organizers defend AI writing tools
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NFL season expected to spur record $35B in legal sports wagers
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TV viewers get screwed again as Disney channels are blacked out on DirecTV
TechSuck / Geek Bait
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Rust for Linux maintainer steps down in frustration • The Register
I truly believe the future of kernels is with memory-safe languages," Filho's note continued. "I am no visionary but if Linux doesn't internalize this, I'm afraid some other kernel will do to it what it did to Unix." And he concluded his message with a reference to a YouTube video from the Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory-Management, and BPF Summit in May. Pointing to a portion of the video as an example of the kind of interaction that led him to step down, Filho wrote, "[T]o reiterate, no one is trying [to] force anyone else to learn Rust nor prevent refactorings of C code." That remark is a response to a comment on the video that, according to Filho, came from Linux kernel maintainer Ted Ts'o: "Here's the thing, you're not going to force all of us to learn Rust."
The video depicts resistance to Filho's request to get information to statically encode file system interface semantics in Rust bindings, as a way to reduce errors. Ts'o's objection is that C code will continue to evolve, and those changes may break the Rust bindings – and he doesn't want the responsibility of fixing them if that happens.
AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World
Space / Boomy Zoomers / UFO
Economicon / Business / Finance
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Amazon is trying to trick me into signing up for Prime services
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Economist Eugene Fama: ‘Efficient markets is a hypothesis. It’s not reality’
Fama is arguably the world’s most famous and influential finance professor, thanks to his revolutionary efficient market hypothesis — that stock market prices at any time incorporate all available information, thanks to the cumulative and unending efforts of millions of investors constantly trying to outfox it. The paradox is that as a result of their efforts, the stock market is in practice almost impossible to beat. EMH is the closest finance has to a “theory of everything”, and won Fama the Nobel Prize for Economics in 2013. But it remains as controversial today as it did when Fama first proposed it half a century ago.
The mania for all things artificial intelligence is the latest challenge to Fama’s theories, transforming the world’s stock market into an inverted pyramid resting precariously on a narrow clutch of companies worth trillions of dollars. These can add and shed hundreds of billions of dollars' worth of stock market value on virtually no news. As a result, even some Fama acolytes are losing their faith. “I think [markets] are probably less efficient than I thought 25 years ago,” Clifford Asness, a hedge fund manager and a former research assistant to Fama, admitted to the FT in an interview last year. “And they’ve probably gotten less efficient over my career.” Fama himself shrugs off the apparent apostasy of his former student. “He’s trying to take advantage of different risks, and maybe he interprets that as inefficiency,” the finance professor says. “But remember, he’s now on the other side of the fence. He’s selling products, right?”
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VW cancels long standing agreement that ruled out layoffs till 2029
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Women Lead Record Number of Central Banks, but More Progress Is Needed
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Concern over housing costs hits record high across rich nations
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Stratechery has, from the beginning, operated with a great degree of reverence for tech history; perhaps that’s why I’ve always been a part of the camp cheering for Intel to succeed. The unfortunate fact of the matter is that the need for cheerleading has been clear for as long as I have written this blog: in May 2013 I wrote that Intel needed to build out a foundry business, as the economics of their IDM business, given their mobile miss, faced long-term challenges. Unfortunately not only did Intel not listen, but their business got a lot worse: in the late 2010’s Intel got stuck trying to move to 10nm, thanks in part to their reluctance to embrace the vastly more expensive EUV lithography process, handing the performance crown to TSMC. Meanwhile Intel’s chip design team, increasingly fat and lazy thanks to the fact they could leverage Intel’s once-industry-leading processes, had started to fall behind AMD; today AMD has both better designs and, thanks to the fact they fab their chips at TSMC, better processes.
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Intel share price drop could see it delisted from bluechip index
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Rush hour isn't what it used to be. 10-4 is the new 9-5, commuting data shows
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Mastercard Replacing Card Numbers with Tokens in Next Six Years
Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making
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In my view, the original sin of tax policy was the decision to focus on income, not consumption. Once we started down that road, we created a system where closing one loophole would inevitably create a couple more. Yes, if income really is the thing that should be taxed, then it makes logical sense to tax unrealized gains. But income is not the right base for our tax system; consumption is what matters.
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Taxing unrealized capital gains is a terrible idea
I have great respect for Jason, whom I consider to be one of the very smartest policy economists, but I genuinely do not see how he can believe tax planning will become easier and less costly under this proposal. Furthermore, one has to consider the tax complications of the act Congress actually will pass, after lots of political horse-trading, rather than the ideal Jason Furman plan. We all know how previous tax plans have fared when they go through the legislative process.
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How NAFTA Broke American Politics - The New York Times
The passage of NAFTA remains one of the most consequential events in recent American political and economic history. Between 1997 and 2020, more than 90,000 factories closed, partly as a result of NAFTA and similar agreements. The coming presidential election, like the previous two, is likely to be determined by three of the “blue wall” states — Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania — which have all been ravaged by deindustrialization. In 2016, Donald Trump won those states, and the presidency, in part by railing against NAFTA (“the worst trade deal ever,” he called it). Exit polls showed that Trump won nearly two-thirds of voters who believe that free trade takes away American jobs. Ohio, meanwhile, which twice voted for Barack Obama, has increasingly become a Republican stronghold. Trump’s right-wing populism — an economic-nationalist blend of opposition to free trade, support for programs like Social Security, at least rhetorically, and anti-immigrant sentiment (“virtually 100 percent of the net job creation in the last year has gone to migrants,” he falsely asserted) — helped pave the way for a new generation of self-proclaimed “pro-worker” Republicans, including Trump’s vice-presidential pick, Senator JD Vance of Ohio. Both Vance and Trump denounced NAFTA in their speeches at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee in July. “When I was in the fourth grade,” Vance said, “a career politician by the name of Joe Biden supported NAFTA, a bad trade deal that sent countless good jobs to Mexico.”
Biden Inc
Trump / Right / Jan6
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Kamala Harris, Donald Trump, and Arlington cemetery - Washington Examiner
There is no doubt the families had a right to observe the anniversary at Arlington and to invite Trump to be there with them. There is also no doubt that the Army, which administers Arlington National Cemetery, tried to stop the event.
- Later reports are saying Kamala was invited to this event too and chose not to attend.
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Fund-Raiser for Jan. 6 Rioters at Trump's Golf Club Is Postponed
Law Breaking / Police / Internal Security
External Security / Militaria / Diplomania
World
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Over 1k Vancouver Airbnb hosts defy new BC short-term rental rules
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Olaf Scholz, the German Chancellor and lawmaker for the center-left Social Democratic Party (SPD), asserts that conservatives cannot be allowed to hold power in Germany regardless of voter decisions. He stated this week: “Our country cannot and must not get used to this...The AfD is damaging Germany. It is weakening the economy, dividing society and ruining our country’s reputation...” The Chancellor failed to explain how the AfD could be "weakening the economy" when the economy has been under socialist control for decades. Mr. Scholz urged other parties to block the AfD from governing by maintaining a so-called "firewall" against it.
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Japan Population Drop Pushes Bus Company to Set Up Hedge Fund
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Venezuelan judge issues arrest warrant for opposition's presidential candidate
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Venezuela's newest news agency says AI anchors protect reporters amid crackdown
Israel
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Record Anti-Netanyahu Protests, Labor Strikes, Bring Israel To A Standstill | ZeroHedge
The IDF had stated it believes they had been shot not long before its troops reached the tunnels under Rafah. Subsequently health authorities announced they were likely killed 48 to 72 hours before their autopsy, and that they were all executed at close range by multiple bullets. All of these emerging details have only further served to outrage the victims' families as well as demonstrators, who are calling for a new government. Huge protests have taken over parts of Jerusalem as well, and in front of government buildings.
China
Health / Medicine
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Measles cases are up and childhood vaccinations are down
- They re-defined "vaccine", tho: Can't I say my child's KoolAid is a 'vaccination protocol' now? As long as I truly believe it might be effective?
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Antidepressant-linked overdose deaths in US have climbed for two decades