2024-10-11
hostile corporations, sleeper bots, EV are heavy, Archive annoyed, Red box leftovers, FBI tokens, Kamala's dream economy, GOP hates health, legal lethal domestic DoD, CIA terrorist, Hersh pans out
etc
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Solar storm could supercharge auroras across US, impact power grids
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Honda recalling 2M vehicles over steering issue
The recall by the Japanese automaker includes various 2022 through 2025 model vehicles including some Civic and Civic Type R, CR-V, HR-V and Acura Integra and Integra Type S vehicles.
Hurricanes
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A Weekend of Work in the Aftermath of Helene in East Tennessee
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Helene was supercharged by ultra-warm water made up to 500 times more
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With Hurricane Milton looming, Florida's NPR stations went text-only online
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NWS has to take the upper estimate so folks take precautions, but this is a joke.
The average observed by stations was 67 mph, and the average of the NHC official value was 114 mph. That's a 47 mph difference. The best positioned station was just offshore of Venice Beach, which measured 78 mph at landfall, which was 42 mph lower than the NHC estimate (120 mph). The same thing happened with Helene: our UAH storm intercept team measured only 60 mph at landfall, whereas the NHC value was 140 mph."
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After Hurricane Milton, a growing risk: Flooded electric cars going up in flames
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Milton knocks out power to millions and spawns 150 tornadoes
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Barrel found in French Broad River in Asheville, NC. USA/9342/AF-96 Versa-Pac VP-55 Fissile Material.
Horseshit
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Being generous, thoughtful, and kind is a sign of high intelligence
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Months Before Ethiopian 737 Crash, Boeing Turned Aside Carrier's Questions
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How Gandalf Gets His Name In The Rings Of Power Is Surprisingly Faithful To Tolkien
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Students seize opportunity to solve real-world problems through think tank
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Stretchy dairy cheese now possible without cows, company says
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The Trouble Marketing New Software Products to Conservatives
Conservatives don’t like subscriptions, they don’t like uploading data to the cloud, and they don’t like making accounts. They also just don't like clicking on ads. I have watched an unpolitical friend of mine set up a new Windows computer while clicking “allow” to all of the privacy questions because she just wanted to make Microsoft happy. A conservative consumer would never do that. There is an inherent distrust in the system, seemingly stemming from the idea that tech products are built by lefty engineers who have been indoctrinated by universities and their peers. I spoke with plumbers and welders with no technical training who run linux at home purely out of distrust for Microsoft.
if you think you may end up with a conservative audience, you need to design your product in such a way that the company itself is considered hostile. The product should either be so necessary that they can’t live without it, or it should be set up in a way that even if the company wants to cut someone off as a customer they can’t. Unfortunately this is more difficult and time consuming, so the second option is to find a way to start with left-wing customers.
- Some reasonable observations. This person's product is a "Spy on my kids' internet for me" service.
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The anti-status watch: why men in finance love cheap, cheesy watches
celebrity gossip
Rank Propaganda / Thought Policing / World Disordering
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'Sleeper agent' bots on X fuel US election misinformation, study says
The findings by the Washington-based American Sunlight Project (ASP) demonstrate how bot-like activity plagues X, previously called Twitter, despite pledges by billionaire owner Elon Musk to crack down on the digital manipulation. ASP analyzed nearly 1,200 accounts, a long-standing network that generated more than 100 million posts as of July, including pro-Kremlin propaganda, content favoring Republican nominee Donald Trump, and misinformation about Harris's campaign. The accounts, some of which have escaped detection and moderation on the site for as long as 15 years, retweeted such content within seconds of its posting, indicating bot activity, the group said in a report shared with AFP ahead of its public release. "We were not surprised to find another pro-Russian bot network, but we were shocked to learn that some of the accounts in the sleeper agent network have been active for more than a decade," Nina Jankowicz, the group's co-founder and chief executive, told AFP.
Jankowicz, the former Department of Homeland Security disinformation chief, called on X to take down the network, which has seen an uptick in "abusive and false content" targeting Harris.
Musk
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Twitter will pay its Premium users to engage with each other
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The bill finally comes due for Elon Musk - The Verge
For almost as long as he’s been CEO of Tesla, Elon Musk has been bullshitting us about self-driving cars. In 2016, he said Tesla self-driving cars were “two years away.” A year later, it was “six months, definitely,” and customers would be able to actually sleep in their Tesla in “two years.” In 2018, it was still a “year away” and would be “200 percent safer” than human driving. In 2019, he said there would be “feature complete full self-driving this year.” There hasn’t been a year go by without Musk promising the imminent arrival of a fully driverless Tesla. This week, it’s finally here. Or at least that’s what Musk says.
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Opinion | Elon Musk Rides to Biden’s Hurricane Rescue
The de-funding by Democrats is now looking even more political. Two weeks ago FCC Chair Jessica Rosenworcel granted Dish Network chairman Charlie Ergen a three-year extension to meet FCC deadlines to build out his fledgling 5G network and avoid stiff penalties for squatting on valuable spectrum. Starlink was well on its way to meeting its commitments to the FCC, but Mr. Ergen wasn’t close to meeting his. Ah, but Mr. Ergen is a Biden-Harris campaign donor while Mr. Musk is a critic. Note also that Dish lobbied the FCC in 2022 to scrap the Starlink award, saying it “cannot credibly claim that it will be able to fulfill its obligations.” Perhaps Mr. Ergen hopes to win federal funding to cover the rural areas that the FCC had tapped Starlink to connect.
Electric / Self Driving cars
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Jaguar Land Rover to Revive Freelander as a Made-in-China EV
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Bankrupt Fisker says it can't migrate its EVs to a new owner's server
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Electric vehicle safety via crash test
“Electric vehicles present somewhat of a physics challenge,” Winfree began. “We had a suspicion, when vehicles that were electrified first started to come onto the market, that they may have issues with respect to how they interacted with roadside infrastructure that is deployed around the country.”
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'Nearly unusable': Calif. police majorly push back on Tesla cop cars
Edumacationalizing / Acedemia Nuts
Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising
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Archive.org, a repository storing the history of the Internet, has a data breach
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Leaving WordPress (.org or WPF, still unsure which one)
If I have to pay an attorney just to find out if I'm allowed to donate my time to improving the WP community/ecosystem, things have gotten out of hand. Open source communities shouldn't be collateral damage when two private equity backed companies are fueding with each other.
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Mozilla fixes Firefox zero-day actively exploited in attacks
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Hackers targeted Android users by exploiting zero-day bug in Qualcomm chips
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The woman who revolutionized the fantasy genre is finally getting her due
In publishing, the people who work behind the scenes rarely get their due. But on Oct. 1, 2024, at least, one industry pioneer got the limelight. On that day, PBS aired “Judy-Lynn del Rey: The Galaxy Gal,” the first episode of its new documentary series “Renegades,” which highlights little-known historical figures with disabilities. A woman with dwarfism, Judy-Lynn del Rey was best known for founding Del Rey Books, a science fiction and fantasy imprint that turned fantasy in particular into a major publishing category.
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Bankruptcy Took Down the Redbox Machine. If Only Someone Could Take Them Away
Redbox’s parent filed for bankruptcy in the summer, saying it lacked the cash to buy the rights to many new releases, and the kiosk operator subsequently went out of business. It left 24,000 movie vending machines still in the field. Some of the nation’s biggest retailers were stuck holding the logistical bag. Pharmacy chains CVS and Walgreens, discounters Walmart and Dollar General, and grocers Albertsons and Kroger are among those getting bankruptcy-court approval to dispose of abandoned Redbox kiosks, which on average hold more than 600 films. They’re not just taking up store space. Retailers say the machines interfere with remodeling plans and expose them to potential safety hazards and liabilities. Some kiosks are hardwired into stores’ electrical systems. Outdoor machines are bolted into the concrete foundations and contain a coolant that is supposed to be disposed of in an environmentally safe manner.
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The true cost of game piracy: 20 percent of revenue, according to a new study
TechSuck / Geek Bait
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Transforming colors with matrices | lisyarus blog
ransforming colors using matrices, interpreting colors as 3D RGB or 4D RGBA vectors. In this article I'll try to explain how it works and which operations on colors can be represented this way.
AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World
Space / Boomy Zoomers / UFO
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X-37B begins novel space maneuver
will execute aerobraking maneuvers for the first time, enabling an orbit change & the safe disposal of its service module components in accordance with recognized standards for space debris mitigation.
Crypto con games
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Satoshi Nakamoto Is Not an Individual
Personally, the idea of Satoshi Nakamoto being an individual seems neither feasible nor grounded in reality to me. Rather, I believe it is most likely that Satoshi Nakamoto is a pseudonym for a significantly large group that worked together to develop Bitcoin.
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Everything HBO’s Bitcoin doc got wrong about Peter Todd and Satoshi
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FBI Created a Crypto Token to Bait Pump-and-Dump Scammers
The FBI created its own cryptocurrency company and crypto token in order to bait fraudsters who would make fake trades in order to boost the price before cashing out, according to a press release from the U.S. Department of Justice. The FBI operation, dubbed Operation Token Mirrors, was unprecedented in the crypto space and 18 individuals and entities have been charged over their alleged fraud and manipulation in indictments announced on Wednesday.
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The Downfall of FTX’s Ryan Salame and Crypto Advocate Michelle Bond - The New York Times
Two years ago, the FTX executive Ryan Salame and the crypto advocate Michelle Bond were an industry power couple. Mr. Salame gave tens of millions of dollars to conservative politicians, who celebrated him as a “budding Republican megadonor,” while Ms. Bond ran for Congress, drawing support from Donald Trump Jr. But this tale of crypto boy meets crypto girl has turned into a legal nightmare. Mr. Salame, 31, once a top lieutenant to Mr. Bankman-Fried, is set to report to federal prison in Maryland on Friday to start a sentence of seven and a half years, after he pleaded guilty to campaign finance fraud. In August, Ms. Bond, 45, who lives with Mr. Salame and their infant son in Potomac, Md., was also charged with campaign finance violations linked to FTX. The two were married last month in a small ceremony in Nevada. But their $4 million house in Potomac, purchased in 2022 at the height of FTX’s success, is set to be sold, with all the proceeds surrendered. Mr. Salame has gone from meeting with politicians to skirmishing on X with anonymous trolls. After FTX failed in late 2022, Ms. Bond resigned as the head of a prominent crypto trade group and became a target of federal prosecutors in the Southern District of New York, the same office that pursued her husband.
Economicon / Business / Finance
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Blue Energy secures $45M funding for modular nuclear power plant
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A utopian strand of economic thought is making a surprising comeback
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Make things suck, and eventually people stop buying them. McDonald's largest fry maker lays off hundreds as Americans turn away from fries
Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making
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Kenny Johnson, the Rockdale County Soil and Water Conservation District supervisor, testified on Tuesday alongside business owners and leaders frustrated by the fire last month at the BioLab plant in Conyers, 25 miles (40 kilometers) east of Atlanta. In the hours after the fire, hazardous plumes spread into neighboring counties. According to the Georgia House Democratic Caucus, the 62-year-old Johnson “complained of shortness of breath and subsequently collapsed in the hallway" after the meeting, local news outlets reported. State Rep. Viola Davis, who is a nurse, administered CPR until medical officials arrived and rushed him to Grady Memorial Hospital. He died later that day.
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The Tech Coup: How the Unchecked Power of Companies Is Destabilizing Governance
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Wisconsin Supreme Court grapples with governor's 400-year veto
Harris / Democrats
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Gretchen Whitmer is doing soft lesbian porn for the Harris campaign
I think I just watched a transgression-fetish demonstration. One that was cleverly designed not to be censorable. I want to be wrong about this, because it suggests that the apparatus of the Democratic party has become deeply perverted in a way that justifies every breathless scream from every lowbrow social-conservative hick ever.
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Middle-class Americans are more optimistic about their financial future than they were a year ago. And with inflation approaching the Federal Reserve’s 2 percent target, Chair Jerome Powell has begun lowering interest rates, providing relief to debt-burdened businesses, credit card holders and potential homebuyers. But polls still show that Americans trust GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump on the economy more than they do Harris, a sentiment that plagued Biden throughout his presidency. “While Harris is performing better than Biden was against Trump on handling the economy … being given some benefit of the doubt as a newer candidate, voters still feel that day-to-day costs are expensive and thus there is a limit to how much improvement this news will bring for her,” said Carly Cooperman, a Democratic pollster who is CEO of Schoen Cooperman Research.
“Poor inflation numbers would have caused a good deal of harm to her at this point, as this is likely to be the most important issue to undecided voters in critical swing states,” she said.
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this is the 3rd such endorsement in the last 3 elections by the most recent owners of the hallowed Atlantic name and IP. An endorsement that was a rarity for over 150 years has been rendered, in less than a decade, a commodity
Trump / Right / Jan6
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Catherine Herridge — who was laid off earlier this year as she investigated the Hunter Biden laptop scandal — said the network released the full, unedited transcript of her interview with Trump when he was president in 2020. The Republican presidential candidate has demanded CBS News publish the full interview with Harris after accusations that the Tiffany Network edited her “word salad” answers during the sit-down with Bill Whitaker.
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Resistance to public health, relegated to the fringes of the American right and left before Covid vaccine mandates became a cultural flashpoint and a symbol of government overreach, now has a firm foothold in Republican politics — and a chance to wield real power in Washington.
“Immunization is not an individual decision; it’s a community decision,” said Dr. Alan R. Hinman, who ran immunization programs for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in the 1980s. The medical freedom movement’s emphasis on individual choice, he said, is “a very selfish approach.” The idea of a political movement that rejects expertise and prioritizes personal choice in an epidemic is deeply troubling to public health experts, who worry that public health powers will be curtailed if Mr. Trump wins in November. Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s blueprint for a second Trump administration, would bar the C.D.C. from making vaccine recommendations, which are based on the advice of experts.
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DOJ Blames FBI Informant for Deleting Jan. 6 Evidence | Headline USA
Law Breaking / Police / Internal Security
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A DoD directive has expanded domestic military authority to include LETHAL force
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Afghan refugee Nasir Tawhedi charged with plotting US Election Day massacre worked for CIA: report
An Afghan national accused of plotting an ISIS-inspired Election Day terror attack in the US worked for the CIA in Afghanistan, according to a new report. Nasir Ahmad Tawhedi, 27, who was nabbed in Oklahoma on Monday over the alleged terror plot, was employed as a security guard for the agency but was not a CIA informant, NBC News reported, citing multiple sources. It wasn’t immediately clear when or how long Tawhedi worked security before he came to the US in 2021 — just weeks after the Taliban regained control of Afghanistan and the last US troops departed from the war-torn nation.
External Security / Militaria / Diplomania
World
Israel
Russia Bad / Ukraine War
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North Koreans deployed alongside Russian troops in Ukraine, sources say
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Erik Andersson's informative Nord Stream update
Lloyds & Arch intend to prove in court that the government of Ukraine ordered the destruction. The insurers doubled down on their previous claim that the destruction was an act of war (and thus they are not liable). They all but say it was ordered by the Ukrainian government, and will rely on “expert evidence” of this.
I (Andersson) have repeatedly said that I dismissed Seymour Hersh claim of 8 bombs after my expedition, and have assumed there were exactly four bombs. This has now been proven false, and I think that we again have to account for the possibility that there were perhaps 8 bombs, and that Sy Hersh is perhaps right in his claim that “the Americans sped back to the crime scene to remove the unexploded bombs.”
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Africans recruited to work in Russia say they were duped into building drones
Health / Medicine
Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda
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Wildlife numbers plummet 73 percent over past half-century, report finds
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Global renewables growth set to outpace current government goals for 2030
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Best-case scenario for climate change is now 1.6°C of warming
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'Cocaine of the seas' – how a luxury food is wreaking ecological mayhem
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Foreign aid for fossil fuel projects quadrupled in a single year
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Don't overshoot: why carbon dioxide removal will achieve too little, too late
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It's Not Easy Being Green: On the Energy Efficiency of Programming Languages