2024-09-11
Cool
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Carpentopod: A walking table project
Since this post has gone public, many people have asked me if they could get one as well. I’m currently not making these on demand. However, I’ve decided to release the Carpentopod linkage itself as public domain.
Worthy
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I doubt I can ever recover the respect I once had for the wealthy, the educated, the credentialed, and the successful. In the Covid period, they deployed their privileges as a weapons against modern ideals and against all the people they (secretly) regarded as their lessers.
etc
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9/11 Memes Have Taken Over the Internet
To be on social media in 2024 is to be swimming in jokes and memes about 9/11. Things that might once have been whispered among friends are now shared by meme accounts with hundreds of thousands of followers. On TikTok, videos contrasting the year 2024 with 2001 (often ending with someone reacting to the planes hitting towers) frequently went viral. While on X, a famous photo of President George W. Bush being informed by his chief of staff that the U.S. was under attack is now frequently used to mock everything from Ozempic to JD Vance to the Drake/Kendrick Lamar beef. Want to be overly dramatic about a minor event in your life? Why not use a video or GIF of Caitlyn Jenner standing in a sea of American Flags, solemnly saying, “9/11”? Or you could keep things simple and just say, “This was my 9/11.”
Horseshit
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What to do if you catch your staff on a quiet vacation, according to an HR exec
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He's Known as 'Ivan the Troll.' His 3D-Printed Guns Have Gone Viral
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Cars collect troves of data about traffic and road hazards.Should they share it?
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Overweight Ford F-750 Plunges Through Historic Wooden Bridge in Maine
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An Underwater Data Center in San Francisco Bay? Regulators Say Not So Fast
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Why did a major S.F. tech conference just host a panel about making more babies?
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Insurance sales? oh... He Was Lured by a Promising Job, but Was Forced to Scam People
Musk
Electric / Self Driving cars
Religion / Tribal / Culture War and Re-Segregation
Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising
AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World
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What steam power and generative AI have in common
As it turns out, AI has a lot in common with steam power, which improved productivity in a range of jobs and clearly foreshadowed the major changes that were to come. Still, steam-powered machines that could automate farm work were available for more than 100 years before it actually happened. Complementary innovation was required, and I suspect that will be true as well with generative AI.
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Google's AI Will Help Decide Whether Unemployed Workers Get Benefits
Space / Boomy Zoomers / UFO
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The Starship and Super Heavy vehicles for Flight 5 have been ready to launch since the first week of August. The flight test will include our most ambitious objective yet: attempt to return the Super Heavy booster to the launch site and catch it in mid-air. We recently received a launch license date estimate of late November from the FAA, the government agency responsible for licensing Starship flight tests. This is a more than two-month delay to the previously communicated date of mid-September. This delay was not based on a new safety concern, but instead driven by superfluous environmental analysis. The four open environmental issues are illustrative of the difficulties launch companies face in the current regulatory environment for launch and reentry licensing.
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NASA Postpones Upcoming Mars Mission, Citing Delays With Bezos’s Big Rocket.
Crypto con games
Economicon / Business / Finance
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Is the American job market being deliberately manipulated in favor of migrants?
I was alarmed by claims that a non-governmental organization (NGO) called Switchboard appears to have insinuated itself into so many job application processes and procedures that it almost controls the market. Unfortunately, it doesn't appear to be using that dominance to help Americans - rather the opposite, if reports are correct.
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Bank of America raises minimum hourly pay to $24, as tellers flee the industry
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PwC tells employees it will use location data to police 'back-to-office' rule
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Grocery price inflation: Is corporate greed to blame? : NPR
There's no dispute that food sellers and manufacturers have passed costs on to consumers; they typically do, to varying degrees. And their costs increased substantially from the start of the coronavirus pandemic. Through it all, an exodus of workers from lower-paying jobs led companies to push up wages that had been stuck for decades. Researchers at two Federal Reserve Banks — those based in Kansas City and New York — say this is a key driver of higher grocery prices. Pay for workers in food manufacturing and retail rose a bit faster than pay for workers in many other occupations. A report from the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City noted that processed food, which requires more labor, accounted for the vast majority of price hikes.
The Biden administration has been eager to blame corporate greed. But even a report that the White House put out this year acknowledged that store markups don't fully explain food inflation.
people have been spending big on groceries, even as they shop less at other stores. And that's on top of an unprecedented surge in spending in recent years — first as people received pandemic relief checks and then as wages grew in many jobs.
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New York Times tech workers union votes to authorize a strike
Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making
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DOJ issues warning as GOP states try to clean noncitizens from voter rolls.
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Nearly 40 states back surgeon general's social media warning labels
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Nonprofits Sue IRS Alleging Political Speech Rules Not Applied Equally | The Epoch Times
Two Texas churches and a couple of nonprofit organizations with tax-exempt status are challenging the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) in federal court over alleged violations of their freedom of speech, free exercise of religion, and equal treatment under the law. The group alleges that “left-leaning” publications that are owned by tax-exempt nonprofits, as well as numerous churches, routinely support Democratic political candidates in violation of the Internal Revenue Code with no repercussions, while conservative churches and nonprofits are threatened and penalized.
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Official Donald Trump-Kamala Harris Debate Drinking Game Rules
Harris / Democrats
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ress coverage, some of it openly adulatory, has mostly memory-holed the deficiencies of Harris as vice president. With the exception of a 27-minute Q&A with CNN, Harris has largely ignored journalists and their questions. Even if reporters were determined to grill her on her record, they haven’t had the chance and might not get the chance anytime soon. Harris’s personal favorability rating has shot up in the absence of discussion about what she did and did not do as vice president.
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Kamala Harris Can’t Keep Running Like This | The New Republic
Three days before the Times poll came out, amid growing consternation about her deliberate lack of a clear and detailed agenda, Kamala Harris’s campaign announced a new policy—sort of. Harris, her campaign said, was no longer in favor of banning plastic straws. Five years ago, as a senator from California, she came out in favor of phasing out plastic straws and replacing them with paper ones—albeit with better ones than the flimsy kind that degrade after you’ve drunk a third of your McDonald’s Diet Coke. Now Harris is fine with the status quo. This is a comical example of a very real trend after Harris became the presumptive nominee in late July: She quickly jettisoned progressive positions she took during the 2020 presidential race—such as gun buybacks, a fracking ban, and Medicare for All—without saying much about where she currently stands. Last month’s DNC was a celebration of the party’s normalcy and the middle class, but there was little of substance beneath it. Her big policy ideas in August were to punish price gouging in grocery stores, kill taxes on tips, and spur the construction of new homes.
The Harris campaign is only now, belatedly, realizing that this is a problem. On Sunday, they finally added an “Issues” section to her website. It includes a slew of policies that the campaign has previously outlined, as well as sections on reproductive and civil rights. Unfortunately for Harris, its release was undermined by a simple but telling error: The page’s source code revealed that parts of the platform were copied directly from Biden’s campaign page.
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Why Is AI So Bad at Generating Images of Kamala Harris? | WIRED
Despite being a prominent figure, Harris hasn’t been as widely photographed as Trump. WIRED’s search of photo supplier Getty Images bears this out; it returned 63,295 images of Harris compared to 561,778 of Trump. Given her relatively recent entry into the presidential race, Harris is “a new celebrity,” as far as AI image makers are concerned, according to Cuenca Abela. “It always takes a few months to catch up,” he says. That Harris is a Black woman, of Jamaican and Indian descent, also may be a factor. Irene Solaiman, head of global policy at AI company Hugging Face, says that “poorer facial recognition for darker skin tones and femme features” may affect the sorting of images of Harris for automated labeling.
There may be yet another reason why AI portrayals of Harris are not especially good. “The images are not being created to be photorealistic but rather are being created to push a narrative,” says Hany Farid, an expert on deepfake detection and cofounder of GetReal Labs, a startup offering software to catch fake media. In other words, those sharing AI-generated images of Harris may often be more interested in producing meme-worthy scenarios than refining the realism of her likeness. The “communist dictator” image shared by Musk and the video in which Harris holds her Trumpy baby both serve to ridicule and denigrate the Democratic candidate rather than spread disinformation.
Trump / Right / Jan6
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Desperate Republicans Using AI to Generate Fake Photos of Donald Trump Saving Kittens
Though the influential Republican committee — one of the House of Representative's most esteemed assignments — didn't explicitly denote or watermark the image as AI-generated, it certainly doesn't look real; the former president's features are oddly smooth, as are those of the cartoonishly calm-looking cat and duck. But the image wasn't created to make Trump, who famously doesn't care for pets, look cuddly. It was created to reinforce the false story that Haitian immigrants flooding to the US are killing and eating their neighbors' pets — an inflammatory partisan rumor based on largely debunked "reports" and murky social media hearsay that, according to actual law enforcement officials, have no merit.
And in a bigger sense, it's something we're seeing more and more: American political candidates and operatives, usually on the right, using AI to dream up fantastical things that affirm their worldview — even if they never actually happened.
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You Have to Be an Absolute Lunatic to Believe That the Trump Assassination Attempt Was an "Op"
I find the rise of BlueMAGA very disturbing, and I’m surprised more people don’t. Or perhaps I’m not surprised; within progressive circles there can be a strong social prohibition against speaking frankly about this tendency, for fear of giving support to the enemy. Just mentioning this cadre of deranged obsessives, who frequently express violent sentiment towards Donald Trump, his family, and Republicans in general, reliably gets me shouts of “FALSE EQUIVALENCE! BOTH SIDES-ISM!” and similar. I suspect that this mostly stems from progressives deliberately looking away from the pro-Dem online cesspool that’s developed in the past decade, or barring that, from thinking that team blue needs an abusive and psychotic online cult of its own. One way or another, they’re out there, in great numbers, and they exhibit all of the ugly elements of online extremism that we’ve grown accustomed to. Yes, yes, I’m sure regular MAGA is worse. That doesn’t erase the problem, and you should want better than that. I am particularly concerned with how ubiquitous conspiracy theories about the assassination attempt on Donald Trump have become.
The most widespread BlueMAGA behavior, currently, is an absolutely rabid dedication to the idea that any polling that does not show a decisive lead for Harris is the product of Russian disinformation or the evil of Nate Silver or the machinations of The New York Times, which is alleged to be a dedicated anti-Kamala publication despite publishing five pieces a day with headlines like “How a Kamala Harris Victory Could Create a Time Loop That Would Prevent the Assassination of Medgar Evers.” There are so many people right now who dismiss any poll that doesn’t show Kamala dominance, it’s remarkably - especially because Democrats have spent several election cycles mocking Republicans for their belief in “skewed polls”! It seems like the desire for Harris to win is so enormous that people just can’t allow themselves to admit that this election is currently a total tossup. New York magazine can’t stop running essays about how Kamala is guaranteed to win because of THE POWER OF LOVE or whatever. But winning requires thinking, thinking clearly.
Law Breaking / Police / Internal Security
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2 charged with soliciting attacks on minorities, infrastructure on Telegram
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TBI agents raid Millersville Police Department, home of 'conspiracy cop'
Tennessee Bureau of Investigation agents raided the Millersville Police Department on Wednesday, executing a search warrant as the criminal investigation into the troubled agency enters a dramatic new phase. A team of agents was also seen executing a separate search warrant at the White House residence of the department's conspiracy-minded assistant police chief, Shawn Taylor.
About nine miles away in rural Robertson County, NewsChannel 5 Investigates observed eight TBI agents outside Shawn Taylor's home, which prominently features an American flag and a Trump flag on a flagpole just outside. While it is not known what TBI agents are seeking, Taylor has appeared in videos in which he displays an impressive collection of electronic equipment that he has utilized to pursue his sometimes bizarre conspiracy theories.
Online, the reaction from Shawn Taylor's camp was predictable — as the conspiracy theorist at the center of that botched child-predator sting posted a video in which he blamed NewsChannel 5 for the TBI raid. Craig "Sawman" Sawyer, founder of Veterans for Child Rescue, claimed the search is designed to cover up for child sex trafficking in Tennessee.
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Body-cam footage of Colt Gray being questioned after he threatened to shoot up school in 2023
The father of accused Georgia school shooter Colt Gray believed that his 14-year-old son was too gentle, and bought him the AR-15-style rifle in an attempt to “toughen him up,” a relative claims. Colin Gray gave his troubled son the assault rifle for Christmas — the weapon that Colt ended up using in last Wednesday’s bloodbath at Apalachee High School that left two teens and two teachers dead, authorities have said.
The relative added: “Colin always thought that Colt was too gentle and tender. That’s why I believe he gave him the rifle.”
“He’s evil,” Charles Polhamus, the 14-year-old alleged gunman’s maternal grandfather, told The Post over the weekend. “Spending 11 years with that son of a bitch screaming and hollering every day — it can affect anybody.
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Extremists keep trying to sabotage the electrical grid. What if they succeed?
World
Israel
Russia Bad / Ukraine War
China
Health / Medicine
Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda
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Human activities now fuel two-thirds of global methane emissions
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A dropped bag of Cheetos had 'world changing' impact on life in a cave
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Antarctic sea ice on cusp of record winter low for second year running
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High toxin levels are illegal in public water but not for private wells
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Pacific islands submit court proposal for recognition of ecocide as a crime
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After "eat the bugs", how can we go lower? Can fungi turn food waste into the next culinary sensation?
- That said, a healthy compost pile contributes immensely to a happy garden.
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Brewing Hurricane Francine Heads Toward Louisiana Ending Atlantic Hurricane Lull