2024-09-14

etc

• Amber nugget used as doorstop turns out to be worth over $1M

• A loose electrical cable is found on ship that caused Baltimore bridge collapse

• Alaska Airlines plane aborts takeoff in Nashville to avoid collision

Horseshit

• "Stockholm Syndrome" was invented by police to discredit a female hostage

• The wild, winding world of New York City's legal (& not-so-legal) cannabis market

• Has Online Dating Made a Difference to Marriage Matches?

• Unhappy workers may reduce global GDP by as much as 9%, Gallup estimates

• Americans Clicked Ads to Get Free Cash. Their Health Insurance Changed Instead

• Blood, sweat and testes: rich men have always wanted to live forever

• Buying Sunglasses in Brazil (or how to restore commitment in bargaining) – The hold-up problem

  Epilogue: Did Fulano’s boss accept the price Fulano suggested? That’s beside the point. Despite negotiating, I had never agreed to Fulano’s price. And when Fulano’s boss said ‘yes,’ I did the unexpected: I politely said, ‘I’ll think about it,’ and regretfully bid farewell to the three vendors I knew by name, as well as the other three. If I’m going to spend a significant amount of money, I want to be sure the sunglasses won’t pose a health hazard if my son wears them while playing football. So much love wasted. But despair not; it was all part of lifelong learning. I eventually visited another store in a different part of town, where I met the wonderful Leticia. During our haggling, I discovered that the sales strategy I had encountered was quite common, albeit with a twist. When it was Leticia’s turn to call the boss for an even steeper discount on a branded bundle, the price actually went up. And despite not being served coffee (it was too late in the day), I decided to accept the offer this time.

• Dentistry: Young patients want beautiful veneers. They are getting pain, debt and regret

• "Only" cost them $15k in legal fees: Got sued for $75k over an ADA website claim. Didn't give in. Didn't settle. Won

• The New York Apartment That Has Sheltered One Family for 86 Years

Rank Propaganda / Thought Policing / World Disordering

• AI Chatbots Can Talk Conspiracy Theorists Out of Believing

  • Chatbots can chip away at belief in conspiracy theories

  • AI chatbots might be better at swaying conspiracy theorists than humans

• The Hague becomes first city to pass law banning fossil fuel-related ads

Musk

• It took 50K gallons of water to put out Tesla Semi fire in California

• Elon Musk calls Australian government 'fascists'

  • Elon Musk dubs Australia's gov't 'fascists' over misinformation law

• It sure feels like Elon turned up the racism dial last month

• Brazil top court lifts Starlink, X bank account freeze after $3M transfer

• Elon Musk Is Getting Better at the Whole Oligarchy Thing

• Tesla Cybertruck sales surge 61% in July, outsells direct rivals

Electric / Self Driving cars

• Waymo and Uber partner to bring autonomous ride-hailing to Austin and Atlanta

Edumacationalizing / Acedemia Nuts

• Is Reading over for Gen Z Students?

• Ig Nobel Prize Winners

  • Plant mimics leaves of an artificial plastic host plant

• Serial academic fraudster steals medical, physics and computer science papers

• Affirmative Action Was Banned. What Happened Next Was Confusing

• CS Career fair cancelled at community college because no companies reached out

  • Community college tells CS majors to skip career fair

• Jonathan Turley: Sixth Circuit Hands Down Major Free Speech Win for Professor Against the University of Louisville.

Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising

• 20% of hard drives used for long-term music storage in the 90s have failed

• Google Almost Cut Ad Exchange Fees Ahead of Antitrust Crackdown

  • Ex-Google Exec Says Goal Was Crush Competition Trial Evidence Shows

  • Google altered a deal with publishers who couldn't say no

• Entire staff of game publisher Annapurna Interactive has reportedly resigned

  • HN comments

• United Air to Offer Free Wi-Fi in Deal with Musk's Starlink

• Parents 'don't use' parental controls on Facebook and Instagram

• Spotify begins piloting parent-managed accounts for kids on family plans

• Microsoft is updating Windows to avoid repeat of CrowdStrike catastrophe

• Apple seeks to drops its lawsuit against Israeli spyware pioneer NSO

• Flappy Bird Foundation purchased trademark after original dev missed refiling

TechSuck / Geek Bait

• Samba Secures a Big Investment from Germany's Sovereign Tech Fund

• Linux kernel contributor swatted and handcuffed live on stream| Hacker News

AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World

• Meta fed its AI on everything adults have publicly posted since 2007

• OpenAI's $150B valuation hinges on upending corporate structure, sources

Space / Boomy Zoomers / UFO

• Eminent officials say NASA facilities some of the "worst" they've ever seen

• Boeing Starliner astronauts speak out after capsule leaves without them

  • Starliner astronaut: We found things that we just could not get comfortable with

Crypto con games

• Sam Bankman-Fried Files Appeal to Overturn Fraud Conviction

Economicon / Business / Finance

• Verizon to eliminate nearly 5k employees in $2B cost-cutting move

• Boeing workers going on strike after 96% vote for walkout

  • Boeing workers, offered a 25% pay rise, have voted instead to go on strike.

  • Boeing workers strike as 25% pay rise rejected

• How SEC mobile phones can signal an imminent stock price drop

  Mobile phone location data has linked site visits by US securities watchdogs to the headquarters of companies with measurable drops in their share prices — even when no enforcement action is taken. When insiders sold shares right around a non-public visit by staff from the Securities and Exchange Commission, they avoided average losses of 4.9 per cent in the three months after the visit, according to a study led by researchers at four Midwestern universities. By matching commercially available data with share price moves, the study offers a window into the secretive world of securities enforcement beyond publicly announced cases. It also raises questions about the rules around insider trading.

• Intel Solidifies $3.5B Deal to Make Chips for Military

Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making

• New USGS map shows where landslides are most likely to occur in the U.S.

  • New Look at Landslide Potential Shows 44% of U.S. Is at Risk

• CEO of "health care terrorists" faces contempt charges after Senate no-show

• Meta Ad Library – Political Spend Transparency

  • Just at $2million for Kamala ads yesterday, over $7mil for the week.

  • Google has a similar thing: Political Advertising

• Florida officials investigate voters who signed abortion ballot initiative

Harris / Democrats

• So it turns out the totally unbiased ABC moderator Linsey Davis and Kamala Harris are sorority sisters!

• Kamala: Donald Trump called for the “termination” of the Constitution of the United States.

• About Those Buses We Keep Seeing at Kamala's Rallies, There's MORE and It's Even WORSE Than We Thought – Twitchy

  Now, to be fair we can neither confirm nor deny these claims but if this is at all true, this would mean Team Kamala is not only busing people in but paying the same people to attend her rallies over and over again.

Biden Inc

• Biden finalizes increases to China tariffs

Trump / Right / Jan6

• That “Trump-backed Crypto” Smells Like A PsyOp (Updated) – Mark E. Jeftovic is The Bombthrower

  Sometime on September 11th I started noticing that there were tweets showing up in my timeline referencing some “Trump Crypto”, called “World Liberty Financial”, but I didn’t recognize any of the handles and didn’t really spend any time on them, mentally dismissing them as pushing one of the countless crypto scams, memecoins or otherwise flakey endeavours that may enjoy a brief “pop” before ultimately flaming out. Is this just the mother of all shitcoin pumps? Or a more complex rat-fucking psyop to discredit Trump? I can’t believe I just typed that because it sounds like something straight out of the bowels of Qanon.

  After I posted this last night, I received an email from a credible source who wishes to remain unnamed (hey, if the MSM can do it…) that disgraced pharma CEO, and convicted felon, Martin Shkreli is behind it (“he is controlling Barron”).

  • Trump-Linked Crypto Venture Uses Web Privacy Service Linked to Russian Hackers - Newsweek

• Is There More to JD Vance's MAGA Alliance Than Meets the Eye?

  Now that Vance is accompanying Trump on the top of the Republican ticket, this paradox has opened Republicans up to fresh criticisms. How populist can Vance really be while cozying up to billionaires in Silicon Valley? What does a Yale-educated attorney and ex-venture capitalist understand about the lives of Trump’s blue-collar voters? Is a guy who owns not one but two million-dollar houses a credible mouthpiece for the GOP’s fledgling economic populism? But the deeper I’ve dug into the conservative world Vance comes from — often referred to as the “New Right” — the more I’ve come to see Vance’s split identity as a feature rather than a bug for his ideological supporters.

Law Breaking / Police / Internal Security

• Cop Who Lied to Justify Drug Raid Says He's Not Responsible for Resulting Deaths

• End of cash bail in Illinois has not resulted in more crime, has impacted courts

• Law firm investigation: Venezuelan gang demanded 50% of rent at Aurora complex

• America’s stores are winning the war on shoplifting | CNN Business

  A year ago, America’s stores declared a shoplifting epidemic. They closed stores in major cities, hired extra security, locked up key merchandise and declared big losses in their financial statements. This year, retailers are telling a very different story — or no story at all. It’s as if the shoplifting crisis suddenly vanished.

  • It was not politically correct to call out the freelance socialists: now everything is locked up in the stores.

External Security / Militaria / Diplomania

• US Navy Seal unit that killed Osama bin Laden trains for China invasion of Taiwan

• U.S. Moves to Block a Popular Tariff-Free Path for Chinese Goods - The New York Times

  The trade rule, called de minimis, allows packages to be shipped from foreign countries directly to consumers or businesses without paying tariffs, as long as the shipments do not exceed $800 per recipient per day. The new proposal would strip that exemption from a wide array of products and most likely have a significant effect on large importers of Chinese goods such as Shein and Temu. The de minimis provision stems from a century-old trade law and was originally intended for shipments that would be too trivial to require scrutiny from U.S. customs officials. But in recent years, online companies like Shein — and some sellers of Chinese goods on Amazon — have used the provision to gain market share in the United States, shipping cheap clothing and other items directly from Chinese factories to consumers’ doorsteps. In addition to bypassing tariffs, the companies can eliminate costs for warehousing in the United States.

  • US takes aim at Shein and Temu with new import rule proposal

  • Biden-Harris Administration Cracking Down on De Minimis Shipments

  • Biden targets Shein, Temu with new rules to curb alleged 'abuse' of loophole

  • China's online retailers Shein, Temu in focus as US aims to plug "loophole"

• The US Military Is Not Ready for the New Era of Warfare

• US freight train crashes into military vehicle

• Who’s Ready for World War Three? - by John Schindler

  It's time to move Western discussions about the Ukraine war back into earth orbit, before we stumble right into World War Three due to another needless strategic miscalculation. The root problem is that NATO has no theory of victory in the Ukraine war, to cite another core strategic concept. The best that anyone can deduce, Western foreign policy elites reckon that eventually Russia will just get tired of this attritional slugfest that isn’t producing strategic results for either side, and throw in the towel. Putin is 72 years old – how much longer can he hold on to power? Eventually he will die or become incapacitated, perhaps the new tsar will be overthrown.

World

• Metal detectorist who found and sold buried treasure to be jailed for 14 years

• Amsterdam residents feeling less safe in traffic; Still refuse bike helmets

• Poland's Intel plant gets EU green light for $1.9B in state support

Iran / Houthi

• Iranian Regime Impacts Persian Wikipedia by Manipulation, Censorship

Russia Bad / Ukraine War

• Russian Missile Strikes Civilian Grain Ship in Black Sea

• Russia's targeting of 'enemies within' evokes ghosts of the Soviet past

• New evidence of RT's key role in Russian intelligence operations globally

  • U.S. says Russian state media outlet runs intelligence operations

  • U.S. Accuses Russian TV Network of Conducting Covert Intelligence Acts

• 'Ukraine must defend itself': Washington leaders dismiss Putin's war talk

• Ukraine is essentially a giant CIA base, posing as a sovereign nation

  Putin does not want to conquer all of Europe, he just wants NATO off of his border, and justice for US development of weapons of mass destruction in Ukraine, namely, gene-specific biological weapons.

China

• China raises retirement age for first time since 1950s

  • For Years, Chinese Workers Could Retire at 50. Now, China Can't Afford It

• Dejected Social Media Users Call 'Garbage Time' over China's Ailing Economy

Health / Medicine

• High doses of ADHD drugs linked to a greater risk of psychosis

• Concussion risks are outweighed by benefits of amateur sport, study finds

• Recall: FDA Takes Steps to Ensure Safety of Cinnamon Products Sold in the US

• Boar's Head Shuts Down Virginia Plant Tied to Listeria Deaths

Pox / COVID / BioTerror AgitProp

• What We Know About Covid's Impact on Your Brain

• Missouri bird flu case believed to be a 'one-off'

Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda

• Sustainable eating habits that can help the environment without taking over life

• The ManhattAnt, the ant that's taken New York's streets by storm

• Climate change feedbacks lead to surge in natural methane emissions

• Shrinking the economy won't save the planet

• Scientists debunked one of conservation's most influential statistics

• Rapid intensification of Hurricane Francine is a sign of a hotter world

• Cooling Earth with reflective clouds in the stratosphere

• Academics say flying to meetings harms the climate – but they carry on

• Gas stoves may soon come with a tobacco-style health warning label in California