2024-11-14

it wasn't about the sheep, google's evils, open 286 motherboard, tri-format floppies, JPL and AMD layoffs, inflation is up and voters care, Trump names Musk DOGE, USS Edsall found, German politics

etc

• A neuroscientist taught rats to drive; suggesting anticipating fun enriches life

Horseshit

• Nuclear fusion startup claims milestone with unconventional reactor

• Einstein's Theory of General Relativity Faces Challenge

• The US Has a Cloned Sheep Contraband Problem | WIRED

  There’s another strange element to Schubarth’s story: Potentially dozens of MMK’s descendants may now be at large in the US. These sheep that contain genetics from MMK are defined as contraband in the handful of plea agreements that were signed by men who were alleged to have bought sheep from Schubarth or transported ewes to his ranch in Montana to be impregnated. What isn’t clear is how many sheep are at large, and what exactly has happened to them.

• For parents, L. Greenfield's doc about teens and social media is a horror movie

• Extreme Wealth Is Bad for Everyone – Especially the Wealthy

• This is Life in America's Water-Inequality Capital. It Might Be About to Change

• Port of Oakland ordered to stop using 'San Francisco' in its airport name

• Infinite Machine raises $9M A16Z-led round to convince Americans to buy scooters

• Singles Want to Find Love in Real Life Again, If Only They Could Remember How

celebrity gossip

• Dollywood's Mountain Myth-Making - by Tabitha Arnold

Musk

• Guardian will no longer post on Elon Musk's X from its official accounts

  • Why the Guardian is no longer posting on X

  • The Guardian is leaving X

• Instapundit returns to X

• A computational analysis of potential algorithmic bias on X during the election

• Tesla is recalling 2,431 Cybertrucks, and this time there's no software fix

• French news titles sue X over allegedly running their content without payment

Electric / Self Driving cars

• VW and Rivian's Big Bet to Rescue Each Other

  • VW launches $5.8B tie-up with Tesla rival Rivian

• Waymo compiles dataset of pedestrian and cyclist injuries

Religion / Tribal / Culture War and Re-Segregation

• Why Boeing Killed DEI

Edumacationalizing / Acedemia Nuts

• Yale is set to offer a course on Beyoncé and her legacy

• At the University of Rochester: Wanted Posters of Jewish Faculty Members Glued to Walls.

Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising

• AMD's CPU sales are miles better than Intel

• Why did Windows 95 setup use three operating systems? - The Old New Thing

• Man jailed for loading illegal streaming services on to Amazon Fire Sticks

• Don't be evil

  There are two ways to think about this. The first is that Google was run by exceptionally good people. They were sitting at the controls of a staggeringly well-configured machine, and they had many evil dials in front of them that would make them even more money. For Google’s leadership team to avoid the temptation to turn those dials, they must’ve been remarkably benevolent, or at least anti-malevolent. Many companies sell their souls for far less than Google could’ve made by selling a few small pieces of theirs. The second way to think about it is that Google was an exceptionally good product. The people who ran Google weren’t especially moral, and their ambitions to not be evil weren’t especially unique. A lot of people have idealistic visions to do things “the right way” when they start companies; they want to make useful products, to build genuine communities, to create good jobs for employees, to go high. Sure, the lofty promises to make the world a better pitch are cringe, but they’re usually bad sales pitches, not outright lies. Still, a lot of companies end up going low, because building a company is hard. When a company is struggling—when the machine isn’t working, and its survival is hanging in the balance—the dial that does evil looks a lot more appealing. Evil, or at least compromises, starts to feel necessary, and how wrong is it to do what’s necessary? Google avoided that dial because it was making enough money to not need it.

• Micron launches 60TB PCIe gen5 SSD with 12GB/s read speeds

• Etsy Accuses Game Boy Publisher of Piracy for Selling Its Own Games

• The hackers who breached AT&T's data at analytics company Snowflake have been arrested.

• Apple Arcade unwraps new games for the holiday season

• 'A phenomenon' how World of Warcraft smashed out of geekdom and conquered gaming

• Google is testing the 'impact' of removing EU news from search results

• Bluesky crosses the 15M user mark

• How Half-Life 2 was made: A story of cabals and Electronics Boutique

• Meta must face FTC trial that could separate Instagram and WhatsApp

• Meta to introduce ads on Threads in early 2025, the Information reports

TechSuck / Geek Bait

• 80286 ATX mainboard based on the IBM 5170 AT PC (HN comments)

• Remember The Tri-Format Floppy Disk?

  The tri-format disk was a special thing. It was capable of storing data in Amiga, PC, and Atari ST formats. This was of benefit for cover disks—a magazine could put out content for users across all three brands, rather than having to ship multiple disks to suit different machines.

AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World

• Meta's chatbot is straight up telling mushroom hunters to cook up poison

• Perplexity brings ads to its platform

• OpenAI co-founder Greg Brockman returns to ChatGPT maker

• What if AI doesn't just keep getting better forever?

• The AI hype bubble is, if not bursting, then certainly deflating.

• "Firefly" and "collaborative filtering" from 1995: The Website That Predicted AI

• Apple's hitting its AI stride right as competition is slowing

• Douglas Adams' "Electric Monk": Last CA nuclear plant turns to generative AI for filing and finding fine print

Space / Boomy Zoomers / UFO

• Chinese rover finds signs of ancient ocean on Mars

• US Congress to hold second hearing on UFOs in attempt to 'pull back curtain'

  • US Congress will hold another UFO hearing today

  • Experts testify at UFO hearing in Congress

Crypto con games

• Dogecoin Surges 20% as Trump Names Musk to DOGE

  • Trump's Doge Is Good for Dogecoin

• Bitcoin's Revival Can't Wipe Away the Shadow of FTX

Economicon / Business / Finance

• For the second time this year, NASA's JPL center cuts its workforce

  • NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab laying off 5% of its workforce

  • JPL to lay off roughly 5% of its workforce

  • NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory lays off another 5 percent of workforce

• AMD Confirms Laying Off 4% of Its Employees

  • AMD to lay off 4% of workforce, or about 1k employees

• Spirit Airlines is filing for bankruptcy

• Buy now, pay later giant Klarna files for U.S. IPO

• GrubHub sold to food startup Wonder for $650M

  • Just Eat Is Selling Grubhub to Marc Lore's Wonder for $650M

• Inflation Picks Up to 2.6%, but Door Stays Open to Fed Rate Cut

  • Falling inflation hits 'snag' as housing costs accelerate

  • US inflation rises to 2.6%

  Wednesday’s figure from the Bureau of Labor Statistics was in line with economists’ expectations of a 2.6 per cent pace and above September’s 2.4 per cent. Once volatile food and energy prices were stripped out, “core” CPI held steady at 3.3 per cent on an annual basis. However, monthly core prices rose 0.3 per cent for a third month in a row, indicating that underlying inflation has yet to be fully tamed.

• Too Good to Lose: America's Stake in Intel

Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making

• New York City Council Votes to End Broker Fees Squeezing Renters

• Backlash as San Francisco votes to transform stretch of highway into park

• CFPB Details Carveouts for Financial Institutions in State Data Privacy Laws

• FTC Stops H&R Block's Unfair Downgrading and Deceptive Promises of 'Free' Filing

• U.S. Sets Targets to Triple Nuclear Energy Capacity by 2050 (HN comments)

• Thune to succeed McConnell as next Senate GOP leader

• The Election Wasn't a Realignment or a "Mandate"

  When all votes are fully counted, it looks like Trump will have won the popular vote by 1.5 points and have 1-4 point margins in the 7 swing states. That's not the kind of large margin of victory typically associated with realignment elections in which large blocs of voters shift from one party to another (e.g. 1932 or 1980). It's actually a narrower victory than Bush won in 2004 or Obama in 2012. Few would argue either of those wins was a realignment or a mandate. Biden in 2020 won the popular vote by a bigger margin (about 4.5 points) and had nearly the same electoral vote margin (306 for Biden in 2020; 312 for Trump this year). For those keeping score, I wrote at the time that Biden didn't have a mandate either. Trump's popular vote margin may actually be a little smaller than Hillary Clinton's was in 2016 (yes, obviously, she lost the electoral college).

• Yes, inflation made the median voter poorer

  • In no part of the income distribution did wages grow faster while Biden was President than they did 2012-2020.
  • But, the change in median wages is not what matters; it is the median change in wages that does. And this metric was even weaker under Biden: lower than any period in the last 30 years other than the Great Recession.
  • People do not feel wages, they feel total income. And median growth in total income — post taxes and transfers — was not just historically low: it collapsed and was deeply negative from 2021 onwards.
    • Much of this decline is due to timing of pandemic stimulus and even less the “fault of Biden” than other things.

  To see why the median change in wages is the relevant object for thinking about the election, imagine a world where you had 3 different people: person A with an income of $4, person B with an income of $5, and person C with an income of $10. If four years later person A is now only making $1, person B is making $6, and person C is also making $6, the median income has increased! But if there were an election, the median worker — who is also the median voter — did not have a good last four years, financially speaking. Hence why the median change in income is the object of interest.

• Lost In The Future

  Seemingly every single person on Earth with a blog has tried to drill down into what happened on November 5 — to find the people to blame, to somehow explain what could've been done differently, by whom, and why so many actions led to a result that will overwhelmingly harm women, minorities, immigrants, LGBTQ people, and lower-income workers. It's a terrifying time.

  Case in point: Regular people have spent years watching the price of goods increase "due to inflation," despite the fact that the increase in pricing was mostly driven by — get this — corporations raising prices. Yet some parts of the legacy media spent an alarming amount of time chiding their readers for thinking otherwise, even going against their own reporting as a means of providing "balanced" coverage, insisting again and again that the economy is good, contorting to prove that prices aren't higher even as companies boasted about literally raising their prices. In fact, the media spent years debating with itself whether price gouging was happening, despite years of proof that it was. People don’t trust authority, and they especially don’t trust the media — especially the legacy media. It probably didn’t help that they implored readers and viewers to ignore what they saw at the supermarket or when at the pump, and the growing hits to their wallets from the daily necessities of life, gaslighting them that everything was fine.

• FBI seizes Polymarket CEO's phone, electronics

  The FBI seized Polymarket CEO Shayne Coplan’s phone and electronics early Wednesday morning — just a week after the election-betting platform successfully predicted President-elect Donald Trump’s win, The Post has learned. The 26-year-old entrepreneur was woken up at 6:00 a.m. in his Soho home by law US enforcement officers who demanded his phone and electronics, a source close to the matter told The Post. It’s “grand political theater at its worst,” the source told The Post. “They could have asked his lawyer for any of these things. Instead, they staged a so-called raid so they can leak it to the media and use it for obvious political reasons.”

  • FBI Raids Home of Polymarket CEO Shayne Coplan (HN comments)

Trump

• Elon Musk, Vivek Ramaswamy to lead Trump's Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE),

  Trump announced Tuesday that Musk and Ramaswamy would lead his “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE), an initiative meant to “slash excess regulations, cut wasteful expenditures” and restructure federal agencies.

  • Elon Musk to lead new efficiency department named after his favourite crypto

  • Trump names Elon Musk to role leading government efficiency drive

  • Trump selects Elon Musk to lead government efficiency department

  • Trump says Elon Musk to lead 'DOGE' office to cut 'wasteful' government spending

  • Donald Trump announces Elon Musk will co-lead Dept of Government Efficiency

  • Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy to Lead Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE)

  • Trump Asks Elon Musk/Vivek Ramaswamy to Lead Department of Government Efficiency

  • Trump Taps Elon Musk to Lead of Government Efficiency

  • Elon Musk Says He'll Gameify Fighting Government Waste Through Doge

• Elon Musk's PAC spent an estimated $200M to help elect Trump

  • How much did Democrats spend on Harris? We've heard about Harris' Billion+, what did their PACs throw down?

• Trump Taps Pete Hegseth for Secretary of Defense | National Review

  President-elect Donald Trump has selected Fox News host Pete Hegseth to serve as the next secretary of defense. Hegseth’s appointment, which is sure to attract the ire of Democrats given his long-standing association with Fox, will require confirmation by the Republican-controlled Senate.

• Heritage Picks Up the Pieces With Trump After Project 2025 | RealClearWire

  At one point in the home stretch of this campaign, Google searches for “Project 2025” exceeded those for “Taylor Swift.” The 900-page collection of white papers went viral, and Trump’s campaign was spooked. Denunciations from Republicans followed, including from Howard Lutnick, who declared anyone associated with the Heritage endeavor “radioactive.” “There is no door, and there is no key, for Project 2025 into the Trump-Vance transition,” Lutnick told RCP ahead of the October vice-presidential debate. The CEO of Cantor Fitzgerald would know: Trump named him and Linda McMahon as co-chairs of his transition. She handles the policy. He oversees personnel. “So, if someone tried to send me a resume,” Lutnick said of staff associated with the endeavor, “they’d get an ‘I’m sorry’ back. Radioactive means ‘no thank you.’”

  But that was during the campaign. Now that the transition has started, the Trump team must screen tens of thousands of applicants to decide who will staff the rank-and-file of the coming administration. A LinkedIn-style database of true believers, like the one Heritage built, could be a handy thing. Trump previously feigned ignorance of Project 2025. “I’m not going to read it,” he said during the debate of the policy book put together by his favorite think tank. The Heritage proposals, many of them written by conservative alums of his administration, had become a political liability. Said Trump campaign co-chair Chris LaCivita over the summer, Project 2025 had become a “pain in the ass.” A viral moment from the head of Heritage didn’t help.

• Trump expected to try to halt TikTok ban, allies say

• Trump expected to move Space Command headquarters out of Colorado in his ‘first week.’

• Trump Meets With Biden, Republican Lawmakers in D.C.

• Trump appoints Tulsi Gabbard as director of national intelligence: ‘Fearless spirit.’

• Trump nominates Matt Gaetz as attorney general.

Democrats / Biden Inc

• Kamala Harris Campaign Gave $500k to Al Sharpton’s Nonprofit Weeks Before Glowing Interview With Anti-Semitic MSNBC Host

• Did Kamala Harris Pay Celebrities to Endorse Her? Oprah Winfrey Speaks Out - Newsweek

Left Angst

• Americans are Googling how to 'move to Europe'. We should welcome them

• Silicon Valley is on edge as Trump's immigration policy sparks fears

• After Trump's Victory, the 4B Movement Is Spreading Across TikTok

• Liberal Women Are Stocking Up on Abortion Pills After Trump’s Election Victory.

• Journalism's fight for survival in a postliterate democracy

  To fix a problem, you first have to understand it, and the problems here just happen to be significant — requiring not just policy intervention, subsidy, and breaking up a few trillion-dollar tech companies, but also a social will toward truth. There have been times before when Americans have confronted forces of alienation, fragmentation and plutocratic control — but the work starts with us and the will to change, and nowhere else. Here is where I turn to the young and idealistic Walter Lippmann of the Progressive Era:

  Yet we have to face the fact in America that what thwarts the growth of our civilization is not the uncanny, malicious contrivance of the plutocracy, but the faltering method, the distracted soul, and the murky vision of what we call grandiloquently the will of the people. If we flounder it is not because the old order is strong, but because the new one is weak. Democracy is more than the absence of czars, more than freedom, more than equal opportunity. It is a way of life, a use of freedom, an embrace of opportunity.

  • Lippmann was no fan of democratic society: Walter Lippmann - Wikipedia

  To Lippmann, democratic ideals had deteriorated: voters were largely ignorant about issues and policies and lacked the competence to participate in public life and cared little for participating in the political process.

• Musk's AI Nightmares Could Blunt Trump's Tech Ambitions

• Michael Fanone on the election: ‘We are violent. We are hate-filled.’ - The Washington Post

  The former D.C. police officer, beaten by Trump supporters as he defended the U.S. Capitol, will no longer defend America.

  He saw this coming, and on Tuesday night some in America were starting to arrive at the place he’d already been living for the past 46 months. “I didn’t vote for that motherf---er,” he said, “and I fought tooth and nail to prevent this day from f---ing coming.” He’d learned about more than 300 “deep state” enemies that Trump’s self-described “secretary of retribution” had compiled in a target list, as Raw Story first reported; Fanone says he saw his name on it. If Trump wants him imprisoned, he’d rather be killed in a shootout. “I’ll die right here on my f---ing house,” he said. “I’m not going to be in some ‘Apprentice’ f---ing military tribunal.” Fanone insists that he’s not some “prepper weirdo,” that he’s just someone who understands how law enforcement can be weaponized against people — “and I fully expect that to happen.”

• 'We may have less to offer': US negotiators confront diminished COP29 standing

Law Breaking / Police / Internal Security

• Pentagon leaker Teixeira: 15 years in prison for sharing military secrets online

  • Classified-Documents Leaker Jack Teixeira Is Sentenced to 15 Years in Prison

External Security / Militaria / Diplomania

• Report: FAA considers ban on flights to Haiti after Spirit and JetBlue planes take gunfire .

• Man Charged in Leak of Classified Documents About Israeli Military Plans - The New York Times

  A C.I.A. official has been charged with disclosing classified documents that appeared to show Israel’s plans to retaliate against Iran for a missile attack earlier this year, according to court documents and people familiar with the matter. The official, Asif W. Rahman, was indicted last week in federal court in Virginia with two counts of willful retention and transmission of national defense information. He was arrested by the F.B.I. on Tuesday in Cambodia and brought to federal court in Guam to face charges.

• Mystery of US warship's final resting place solved by accident

  The USS Edsall was attacked shortly after Pearl Harbor in 1942 and sank with a huge loss of life. The wreck, discovered by accident at the bottom of the Indian Ocean, is the final resting place of more than 200 servicemen. The 314ft destroyer was found by the Australian navy last year but the development was only announced this week.

World

• Australia's top university to halt international student admissions next year

• Australian real estate agent hallucinates two schools in rental listing

• GDP Revisions Show Canada's Economy Growing at Faster Pace

• How the German government collapsed and what will happen now

  The German traffic light coalition – named for the red Social Democrats (SPD), the yellow market-liberal Free Democrats (FDP) and the green Greens – is history. It collapsed three days ago, late in the evening on 6 November, when Chancellor Olaf Scholz (SPD) fired his Finance Minister Christian Lindner, who is also the head of the FDP. The Free Democrats left the government, leaving the SPD and the Greens to limp along until new elections. Nobody knows quite when these will happen.

  Scholz said that the FDP had “Too often shouted down the necessary compromises with publicly staged disputes and loud ideological demands.” He said that Lindner specifically had “broken his trust” by “too often blocking laws for the wrong reasons” and “engaging in small-minded party political tactics.” Lindner responded that Scholz himself had staged the crisis, pleading that the budgetary concessions Scholz demanded of him would have violated his oath of office.

• Calgary's plan to reintroduce fluoride into drinking water pushed back to 2025

• Ban on women marrying after 25: the proposal to boost birth rate in Japan

• Telegraph journalist faces 'Kafkaesque' investigation over alleged hate crime

• Argentina's monthly inflation drops to 2.7%, the lowest level in 3 years

• South Korea faces kimchi shortage as cabbage prices soar

• Norway apologises to Sami, Forest Finns and Kvens for forced assimilation policy

• Japan Stops a Reactor from Starting as America Goes All in on Nuclear Power

• Women jailed over sadistic monkey torture videos

Russia Bad / Ukraine War

• Zelensky's nuclear option: Ukraine 'months away' from bomb

China

• Local and foreign chip manufacturers flee China, expand in Vietnam

• Porn: The West's greatest weapon in a war with China?

Health / Medicine

• Chronic itch is miserable. Scientists are just scratching the surface

• CDC: U.S. epidemic of STDs may finally be slowing.

Pox / COVID / BioTerror AgitProp

• Teen infected in Canada's first bird flu case is in critical condition

  • Teenager in critical condition with Canada's first human case of bird flu

• Keep improving it, I'm sure you can get a version that kills everything. A human isolate of bovine H5N1 is transmissible and lethal in animal models

• 7% of Dairy Workers Showed Serologic Evidence of Avian Influenza A(H5N1)

• Researchers Discover Covid-19's Secret to Evading Early Immune Response

Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda

• Exxon Says Trump Should Keep U.S. in Paris Climate Pact

• "Reinvent the tree" jokes: Carbon dioxide capture from open air using covalent organic frameworks

• Global Carbon Emissions Rise, Pushing World Toward Dreaded Warming Threshold

• MIT engineers make converting CO2 into useful products more practical

• 'Fossil Fuels Are Still Winning': Global Emissions Head for a Record