2024-10-15

RMS dissed, Metaverse busted, celebrating SpaceX, political schooling, WordPress and apocalypse, Harris bribes Black men, what laptop?, carjacking crisis, Novichok is back, COVID boosters affect IQ

etc

• Report of 'armed militia' prompts relocation of NC hurricane recovery officials

  • FEMA contractors ordered to 'stand down' after security threats, messages show

• As Hurricanes Disrupt Phone Service, Amateur Radio Comes in Clear

• In search of the simplest all-in-one blade sharpener

Horseshit

• Parents can learn a lot from the Dungeons & Dragons role-playing game

• I went to art school at 66 – and now I've sold paintings

• Millennials and Gen X Are Figuring Out What to Do with Boomers' Stuff

• Casio made a furry robot designed to cuddle and calm you down

• People think they already know everything they need to make decisions

• Worldwide Efforts to Reverse the Baby Shortage Are Falling Flat

celebrity gossip

• The Stallman report

  Stallman has also incited numerous controversies for advancing a political agenda which normalizes sexual misconduct and advocates for reforming our social and legal understanding of sexual conduct in a manner which benefits the perpetrators of abuse.

  • I think this is continued "stop respecting RMS im way cooler", from someone who has tried before and should know better.

• remember "The Metaverse?" Anon dev makes good on $10K bet with Carmack

• Murder trial begins for tech consultant accused in death of Cash App founder

Obit

• Ward Christensen, BBS inventor and architect of our online age, dies at age 78

Musk

• 'I, Robot' Director Mocks Elon Musk for Tesla Ripping Off Film for Optimus

• Are Tesla's robot prototypes AI marvels or remote-controlled toys?

  • if it was a Bezos show the headlines would herald the advance in tether-less telepresence.

  • Tesla Optimus Bots Were Remotely Operated at Cybercab Event

  • Tesla Optimus bots were controlled by humans during the 'We, Robot' event

• Elon Musk says he will take legal action after California officials cited his politics when rejecting SpaceX launches

• I read all the community notes on Elon Musk's X account. Here's what I learned

• Liberals are Losing their Minds over Elon Musk – JONATHAN TURLEY

  Silicon Valley investor Roger McNamee called for Musk’s arrest and said that, as a condition of getting government contracts, officials should “require him to moderate his speech in the interest of national security.” Former Clinton Secretary of Labor Robert Reich wants Musk arrested for simply refusing to censor other people. Former MSNBC host Keith Olbermann called for Musk to be deported and all federal contracts cancelled with this company. As with many in the “Save Democracy” movement, Olbermann was unconcerned with the denial of free speech or constitutional protections. “If we can’t do that by conventional means, President Biden, you have presidential immunity. Get Elon Musk the F out of our country and do it now.”

  Of course, none of these figures are even slightly bothered about other business leaders with political opinions, so long as, like McNamee, they are supporting Harris or at least denouncing Trump. Musk has failed to yield to a movement infamous for cancel campaigns and coercion. The usual alliance of media, academia, government and corporate forces hit Musk, his companies and even advertisers on X. Other corporate officials collapsed like a house of cards to demands for censorship — see, for example, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg. Musk, in contrast, responded by courageously releasing the Twitter Files and exposing the largest censorship system in our history. That is why I describe Musk as arguably the single most important figure in this generation in defense of free speech. The intense hatred for Musk is due to the fact that he was the immovable object in the path of their formerly unstoppable force.

• Elon Musk’s SpaceX has achieved something extraordinary

  Mr Musk’s ambitions for Mars are part of an ambition to safeguard civilisation which also entails, in his eyes, the re-election of Donald Trump (on which he is working hard), and, apparently, the use of X, a social network he owns, as a personal platform and a tool for the spread of misinformation. This is something about which many have strong concerns, and rightly. But with the Super Heavy cooling down in its elevated cradle, the getting to Mars bit, at least, looks more real than it has ever done before.

• Internet troll Joshua Goldberg's response to Elon Musk posting his old bait

• Musk on Starship

  if rocket technology can be improved by 1000X, then the cost of becoming sustainably multiplanetary would drop to ~$1T, which could be spread out over 40 or more years, so <$25B/year. At that cost, it becomes possible to make life multiplanetary, ensuring the long-term survival of life as we know it, without materially affecting people’s standard of living on Earth. Starship is designed to achieve a >1000X improvement over existing systems and, especially after yesterday’s booster catch and precise ocean landing of the ship, I am now convinced that it can work.

Electric / Self Driving cars

• Were America's Electric Car Subsidies Worth the Money?

• European Carmakers Descend on Paris to Showcase Low-Cost EVs

• VW, BMW and Mercedes Are Getting Left in the Dust by China's EVs

Religion / Tribal / Culture War and Re-Segregation

• (Sep 2024) I'm a feminist and I think it's harder to be a man than a woman

Edumacationalizing / Acedemia Nuts

• Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel 2024

  • Nobel Prize in economics for work on differences in prosperity between nations

  • Nobel economics prize goes to researchers of prosperity

• On Campus Safety, the Left Is Hopelessly Confused

  Democrats and their allies hold strange and incongruous views about criminals and crime, regularly robbing the Peter of campus safety to pay social-justice Paul. Looked at in toto, recent developments call into serious question progressives’ commitment to crime-free universities. If that commitment isn’t real, it is difficult to see this spring’s Liberty fine as anything other than selective (and political) prosecution.

Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising

• Swinger parties to legal dramas: Dream job turned nightmare at Blizzard

• The hostile takeover of the Advanced Custom Fields plugin hurts developers trust

  • Why World War WordPress Will End with a Zombie Fork

  • Matt Mullenweg's Crusade Undermines Open Source

• Apple might release a $2k Vision headset next year

• The Internet Archive is back as a read-only service after cyberattacks

• Re-sales of the Baldur's Gate 3 Collector's Edition reach $3k

• MS Flight SIM 2024 sucks up to 180 Mb/s of bandwidth in flight

TechSuck / Geek Bait

• Intel's latest flagship 128-core Xeon CPU costs US$17,800 or US$139 per core

• Show HN: X11 tool to share a screen area in any video meeting | Hacker News

• Avoiding a Geopolitical open-source Apocalypse

  you can’t begrudge the desire to become a primary mover and shaker in open source land. The West has dominated open source for a long time, and it’s only natural that Chinese companies feel more comfortable using software written primarily by Chinese developers. But herein lies the problem: Given the current geopolitical climate, will Western companies be willing to adopt that same software? It’s hard to see a major U.S. financial institution migrating from RHEL to, say, Open Euler or OpenKylin. We already see a reasonable push to sideline hardware companies such as Huawei in the West. It feels like a matter of time before pressure increases to use open source software that Western developers primarily develop. Simultaneously, Chinese institutions will likely favor homegrown open source projects over those originating from and dominated by the West.

• The state of GNU/Linux and a case against shared object libraries | Hacker News

AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World

• Silicon Valley is debating if AI weapons should be allowed to decide to kill

• AI's thirst for power keeps coal fires burning bright

• Runway Says It's Giving Filmmakers Up to $1M If They Use AI to Make Their Movies

• Adobe starts roll-out of AI video tools, challenging OpenAI and Meta

• Google to buy power from small modular nuclear reactor company Kairos

Space / Boomy Zoomers / UFO

• The Mission to Jupiter's Europa Launches Today

• SpaceX's Starship test completes with a remarkable "chopstick" booster catch.

• Brightness of the Qianfan Satellites

Economicon / Business / Finance

• It's a tough time to be in tech–AI and layoffs made it a competitive job market

• OPEC Slashes Oil Demand Growth Forecast Again

• Costco Members Are Buying Platinum. Should You?

• The American economy has left other rich countries in the dust

  In the history of modern economics America’s three-decade outperformance is remarkable. Can it continue?

• Middle-class homeowners are increasingly squeezed by housing costs

Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making

• Fixing Social Security means raising taxes – and not just on the superrich

Harris / Democrats

• Kamala Harris proposes 1M forgivable loans to Black entrepreneurs

  • Vice President Kamala Harris unveils an “Opportunity Agenda” plan for Black men, which includes a proposal of forgivable loans of up to $20,000 to Black entrepreneurs.
  • She also pledges to support federal marijuana legalization, a big step beyond the Biden administration’s current stance.
  • Harris’ crypto plans “will make sure owners of and investors in digital assets benefit from a regulatory framework so that Black men and others who participate in this market are protected,” her campaign says.

  • Kamala Harris backs crypto regulatory framework in pitch to Black men

Biden Inc

• It’s the 4th anniversary of the biggest lie the Biden-Harris administration ever told. It’s only gotten worse

Trump / Right / Jan6

• Third Trump assassination attempt thwarted when armed man arrested outside Coachella rally, sheriff says.

  • Trump Coachella rallygoer Vem Miller breaks silence to deny assassination attempt and reveal why he had guns in his car | Daily Mail Online

  Vem Miller, 49, is a registered Republican who tried to present fake VIP credentials at a Trump rally on Saturday and then found himself arrested on illegal firearms charges. A friend and business partner of Miller told DailyMail.com he is a full-blown Trump supporter and slammed police for 'not understanding he's one of us'. Speaking out for the first time since his arrest, Miller said that while he keeps firearms in his car to protect against death threats, he has never fired one before and says he's 'beyond a novice' about them. 'I've literally never even shot a gun in my life,' Miller said. 'I don't know anything about guns.'

  Miller also says that there are no falsified IDs on his person, that there was confusion because he's Armenian and some use his full birth name and others don't to avoid potential anti-Armenian sentiment around the world. His 2021 court documents list his name as ‘Vem Vim Yenovkian’, also known as ‘Vem Miller Yenovkian’. Miller filed in Clark County, Nevada to change his name to Vem Miller in 2022. The court appears to have granted the request. He further denied accusations made by Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco that he was a part of an anti-government 'sovereign citizens' movement.

• JD Vance Backs Up Trump’s False Claims About Venezuelan Gangs And Gets Schooled For It

  • "Do you hear yourself? Only a handful of apartment complexes were taken over by Venezuelan gangs and Donald Trump is the problem and not Kamala Harris' open border?"

• Conservatives & Bikes

  Advocates for more bicycle infrastructure seem overwhelmingly to self-identify as “liberal”, “Democrat” “progressives”.

• The Trump Voters Who Don’t Believe Trump - The New York Times

  One of the more peculiar aspects of Donald J. Trump’s political appeal is this: A lot of people are happy to vote for him because they simply do not believe he will do many of the things he says he will. The former president has talked about weaponizing the Justice Department and jailing political opponents. He has said he would purge the government of non-loyalists and that he would have trouble hiring anyone who admits that the 2020 election wasn’t stolen. He proposed “one really violent day” in which police officers could get “extraordinarily rough” with impunity. He has promised mass deportations and predicted it would be “a bloody story.” And while many of his supporters thrill at such talk, there are plenty of others who figure it’s all just part of some big act. There is, of course, evidence to the contrary. During Mr. Trump’s term in office, some of his autocratic rhetoric did become reality. He really did set in motion a Muslim ban; he really did order up investigations of his foes; he really did foment a mob when the election didn’t go his way. But in other instances he was stymied, and a lot of his strongman jaw-jaw remained just that.

• Musk's X blocked links to JD Vance dossier after hearing from Trump campaign

• Hillary Clinton is behind the Tea Party and thus Trump: An interesting take shows '91 print mistake leading to current political climate

Law Breaking / Police / Internal Security

• He was sentenced to death. Shaken baby syndrome is at the heart of his appeals

• Wait ... isn't crime supposed to be way down? The Carjacking Crisis (Archive)

  Dalton, a 15-year police veteran, is one of a dozen detectives on the new Prince George’s County Carjacking Interdiction Unit. In the District of Columbia and the surrounding area, which includes Prince George’s County pressed up against most of the city’s eastern border, this crime has become an offense committed not just by seasoned criminals but by adolescents looking to rob people, go for a joyride, and beef up their street-tough bona fides. Since early 2023, a third of the unit’s detectives have been shot at or have fired their own gun while pursuing carjackers.

  In Washington, the number of carjackings more than doubled from 2019 to 2020, from 152 to 360, and then kept climbing—to 484 in 2022, and 958 in 2023. This startling increase stemmed from a complex and still somewhat mysterious set of factors, but prominent among them, at least according to cops in the Carjacking Interdiction Unit, were protracted school closings, which fueled truancy and juvenile crime; police reforms that restricted the ability to fight crime effectively; and a new hesitancy among some officers about risking their career or their life in a political atmosphere (“Defund the police!”) that they felt villainized them more than the criminals.

  If the SUV turned left, staying in Maryland, the detectives could chase it. But if it slipped across the D.C. line, the officers would have a harder time getting permission to chase it. This, too, was an outgrowth of the changing politics of policing over the past decade: Communities all over the country had placed new restraints on police departments’ ability to aggressively pursue criminals. There were good reasons for these reforms—tragic examples of police overreach and outright abuse, especially in predominantly Black neighborhoods, were common. But police say this sudden overhaul had serious unintended consequences: more murders, more carjackings, and more violent crimes of other sorts, most of them in the very communities that the police reforms had ostensibly been aimed at protecting.

  Some people say that society can’t arrest its way out of a crime problem. “Yes, we can,” Mrotek said. “It’s actually very simple.”

World

• The bruising debate over UK zonal energy pricing

• Now Keir Starmer strips portraits of Gladstone, Elizabeth I and Walter Raleigh from No10 | Daily Mail Online

• Amid a Water Crisis, England Asks: Who Should Be in Charge?

• Muslims in India face discrimination after restaurants display workers' names

• France: New Parliament displays unity by refusing handshakes

• TSMC Plans More Chip Plants in Europe, Taiwan Official Says

• LPG Tankers Explode, One Linked to Iranian Gas Smuggling.

Israel

• How Israel’s Army Uses Palestinians as Human Shields in Gaza - The New York Times

Russia Bad / Ukraine War

• Vial with nerve agent that killed woman contained enough to kill thousands

  The lead counsel for a public inquiry into the 2018 death of a British woman poisoned by a Soviet-developed nerve agent said Monday that there was enough poison in the vial she unwittingly opened to kill thousands of people. Dawn Sturgess and her partner collapsed after they came into contact with a discarded perfume bottle containing the nerve agent Novichok in the southwest England town of Amesbury. She had sprayed the contents of the bottle on her wrist and died days later. Her partner survived. "The evidence will suggest that this bottle — which we shall hear contained enough poison to kill thousands of people — must earlier have been left somewhere in a public place creating the obvious risk that someone would find it and take it home," lead counsel Andrew O’Connor said. Their exposure came four months after a former Russian intelligence officer, Sergei Skripal, and his daughter were sickened by Novichok in an attack in the nearby city of Salisbury.

China

• "Joint Sword-2024B" exercise carried out in the Taiwan Strait

• China launches third high orbit internet satellite.

• Scale of Chinese Spying Overwhelms Western Governments

Health / Medicine

• People are fleeing 23andMe. It's trickier than they realize

• Over 86% of surveyed health care providers are short on IV fluids

• What went wrong with autism research? Let's start with lab mice

• Human sense of smell is faster than previously thought, study suggests

• Routine dental X-rays are not backed by evidence–experts want it to stop

Pox / COVID / BioTerror AgitProp

• Covid-19 may increase the risk of heart attacks, strokes and deaths for 3 years

• How skipping your COVID booster could reduce your IQ - Los Angeles Times

  Using data from more than 100,000 people who completed online tests in England, the authors of a study published by the New England Journal of Medicine found that those recovering from COVID, including those with only mild symptoms, had measurable cognitive deficits. Even participants who had “mild COVID-19 with resolved symptoms” exhibited deficits “commensurate with a 3-point loss in IQ” compared with uninfected participants. The cognitive loss was more pronounced in those who experienced more severe infections. Participants who had long COVID — that is, with symptoms that lasted more than 12 weeks — had the equivalent of a 6-point IQ loss on average, and those who had been “admitted to the intensive care unit had the equivalent of a 9-point loss.”

Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda

• Trees and land absorbed almost no CO2 last year. Is natures carbon sink failing?

• Marine Carbon Dioxide Removal Is About to Go Big

• Africa fights rising hunger by looking to foods of the past

• Scientists successfully breed corals to improve their heat tolerance