2024-11-17

communications failures, EU sucks for small biz, the doors don't open, VPN sin, student debt, Netflix live dribble, DOGE doubt, election denial, Kentucky needs cows, squirrelpox apocalypse

etc

• The 6 New Rules of Communicating - by Ted Gioia

  Here’s the reality—rhetorical skills and speechmaking got degraded during the last decade. This top-down approach works best when it is rigorous, logical, and organized. But in an age of insults, taunts, and denunciations, speechifying starts to feels like browbeating—a never-ending harangue. Too much of public discourse, in recent years, has boiled down to powerful people (sometimes of limited intellect) screaming into a microphone from a bully pulpit. That’s not what oratory should be, but it’s what it has become. These things feed on themselves. If you grasp the dominant Girardian mimicry in society today, you shouldn’t be surprised to see that screaming from one elite eventually causes others to scream back. And the conflicts thus escalate—getting angrier and more shrill with each passing year. Don’t tell me that you haven’t noticed.

• The Arecibo Message, Earth's First Interstellar Transmission, Turns 50

  • Few would think this a good idea, today. Says a lot on how our society has evolved.

Horseshit

• Extra virgin olive oil is the flavour of mechanisation

• Should you freeze your brain? These scientists think it's worth a shot

• Year Zero: Lessons learned making and building devices for retro computers

  what exactly is EPR? In theory, it’s an environmental policy that makes producers responsible for the entire lifecycle of their products, from creation to disposal. Noble idea, right? In practice, it’s like being handed a Rubik’s Cube with no solution. Here’s the deal: if you sell electronic devices in Europe, you have to register and pay fees in every single country you sell to—yes, all 27 of them. Fees are based on the weight of your products, and you have to report your sales data regularly, sometimes in different languages and on different schedules. Oh, and if you miss a payment or a report? Prepare for fines hefty enough to make your accountant weep. To put it in perspective, eBay estimates that complying with the EPR directive can cost small businesses up to €140,000 and 39 working days each year. That’s a lot of vintage computer parts. So, I had to make the tough call to stop selling the SidecarTridge in several European countries. To my friends in Austria, Bulgaria, Cyprus, France, Greece, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Spain, and Sweden—I genuinely wish it were different. But until I find a money tree or the regulations change, my hands are tied.

  Oddly enough, this is a regulation for any company selling electronic devices in Europe. But do you think that the Chinese company called Store1234213 selling Everdrive clones in Aliexpress pay it? Some will do it, most of them won’t. And they will continue selling their stuff without any problem while the European companies will be fined.

• Visions of Nuclear-Powered Cars Captivated Cold War America, Tech Never Worked

• Why Libraries Need Librarians

• Casio has released a ring in the form of its iconic watch

• Raising children still takes a village – But the village is changing

celebrity gossip

• What I Ate Growing Up with the Grateful Dead

• Tim Cook on Why Apple's Bets Will Pay Off

Musk

• Elon Musk targets Microsoft in expanded OpenAI lawsuit

• SpaceX Eyes Starship Launches During Trump Presidency

• Twitter is the worst global social network–except for all the others

• X's algorithm was changed in mid-July 2024 to boost right-leaning accounts

Electric / Self Driving cars

• Four Dead in Fire as Tesla Doors Fail to Open After Crash

  Not all Model Y vehicles are equipped with a manual release for the rear doors.

  • Fiery Tesla Crash Traps and Kills Four After Electric Doors Couldn't Open

  • (Mar 20 2024) Angela Chao was intoxicated during fatal car accident, police say | AP News

  A friend, Amber Keinan, told detectives that Chao called her at 11:42 p.m. and said the car was in the water and she was trapped inside. The conversation lasted 8 minutes as the car slowly sank. “Chao told Keinan the water was rising and she was going to die and said ‘I love you,’” the report says. “Chao then said her good byes to Keinan.”

• Electric car sales grow in UK despite decline in overall vehicle market

Religion / Tribal / Culture War and Re-Segregation

• Insurance design to protect women from health and income effects of extreme heat

• Study confirms Egyptians drank hallucinogenic cocktails in ancient rituals

• E/acc as a religion:A Technologist's Right to Choose

• Pakistani religious body declares using VPN is against Islamic law

  “Using VPNs to access blocked or illegal content is against Islamic and social norms, therefore, their use is not acceptable under Islamic law. It falls under ‘abetting in sin,’ ” said the statement, quoting the council’s chairman, Raghib Naeemi. The statement declared that any technology, including the internet, used to access “immoral or illegal activities is prohibited according to Islamic principles.”

Edumacationalizing / Acedemia Nuts

• Any way you cut it

• Skin in the game: Fixing higher education's student debt problem

  Imagine a drug company selling a pill that promises to make you smarter and more capable. It costs $200,000, requires four years of regular doses, and is usually bought with borrowed money. The catch? If it doesn’t work – if you end up no smarter or more capable – you still have to pay back every penny. And the company keeps selling it. What I’ve just described is not a drug company but how today’s colleges & universities operate.

• Treating bullying as everyone's problem reduces incidence in primary schools

Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising

• WhatsApp now lets you save message drafts

• The Great Migration to Bluesky Gives Me Hope for the Future of the Internet

• Tyson vs. Paul: Netflix suffers significant issues on fight night

  • Netflix buffering issues: Boxing fans complain about Jake Paul vs. Mike Tyson

  • HN comments

  • Netflix streaming issues leaving Mike Tyson-Jake Paul viewers livid

  • Netflix's Tyson-Paul Boxing Bout Gets 65M Viewers at Peak

• Some of Substack's Biggest Newsletters Rely on AI Writing Tools

• The Bluesky Bubble: This is a relapse, not a fix

  • Another million users joined Bluesky today – could Bluesky spike spark end of X?

• Programmer Convicted for Helping Run One of Biggest Illegal Streaming Services

  According to court documents and evidence presented at trial, Yoany Vaillant, 43, worked as a computer programmer for Jetflicks, an online, subscription-based service headquartered in Las Vegas that permitted users to stream and, at times, download copyrighted television episodes without the permission of relevant copyright owners. At one point, Jetflicks claimed to have 183,285 different television episodes, far more than Netflix, Hulu, Vudu, Amazon Prime, Disney+, or any other licensed streaming service.

• FTC Says Spam Calls Down 50% in Recent Years

• Blizzard-made Warcraft 1&2 remasters look like Zynga games made by blind duck

  Personally? I think the remasters look like dogwater. I’d say they reminded me of a Newgrounds flash game but I’m positive I’ve played several that were much nicer. It looks a dentist waiting room pop-up book of itself run through several washing machine cycles then brightened up with an MS paint tool meant to emulate crayons made of the sun. It looks like it's going to try and offer me a discount on an energy bundle so I can run my farms for another hour, but I only if I send an invite to my aunt. If I’m blinded by nostalgia, then I choose to remain blind forever. Actually, I’ll have ten percent more blindness please. The colours are still too much.

• Judge Blocks The Onion Bid for Alex Jones’s InfoWars to Review Bankruptcy Auction

  • Alex Jones Is Trying to Halt the Sale of Infowars. Musk's X Just Got Involved

AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World

• AI Chatbot Joins Mushroom Hunters Group, Encourages Cooking Dangerous Mushroom

• OpenAI's tumultuous early years revealed in emails from Musk, Altman, and others

• NASA and Microsoft intro Earth Copilot to tame satellite data overload

Space / Boomy Zoomers / UFO

• Latest Pentagon report reveals new UFO sightings

  • Military's UFO-Hunting Aerial Surveillance System Detailed in Report

• Bombshell video shows UFO swarm 'unaffected' by missile attack

• A lot of people are mistaking Elon Musk's Starlink satellites for UAPs

• Blue Origin stacks huge New Glenn rocket ahead of 1st launch.

• The ISS Is Leaking Air–and NASA and Russia Can't Agree Why

  • NASA and Roscosmos disagree on cause and severity of ISS air leak

Crypto con games

• 18 states want the SEC to stop enforcing crypto regulation

  • Have we got regulation, or have we got some people are allowed to run securities scams while others are jailed for identical actions?

Economicon / Business / Finance

• Even Economists Need to Eat

• San Francisco tech company Forward, once worth $1B, abruptly shuts down

• TikTok Parent ByteDance's Valuation Rises to About $300B

Trump

• Sanders finds common cause with Trump to lower and cap credit card interest rate

• Musk asks 'high-IQ revolutionaries' to work for no pay on new Trump project

Democrats / Biden Inc

• Harris' campaign blew $2.6M on private jets in final weeks of campaign

Left Angst

• Trump is now the cause of DEI and censors: Liberalism Is the Rebellion Now

  You can feel the decline of liberalism here in the United States. Very few leaders on either side of the aisle talk about freedom anymore.1 Progressives tend to couch their appeals in terms of justice, conservatives in terms of greatness. Americans still pay lip service to freedom of speech, but no one seems to really want it — Elon Musk has increased X’s censorship on behalf of foreign governments and suppressed content he doesn’t like, while Democratic leaders like Tim Walz and John Kerry have called for legal crackdowns on “hate speech” and “misinformation”. Abortion was legal everywhere in America three years ago — now it’s illegal in thirteen states. DEI statements — essentially, professions of ideological conformity — are now mandatory at many universities. Even free enterprise is slowly becoming a casualty of the culture wars, with progressive antitrust crusaders shifting their focus from economic harms to corporate political power, and Republicans threatening retaliation against businesses that promote progressive values. (Of course, don’t even get me started on the Palestine movement and its fantasies of violent conquest and ethnic cleansing.) And this is all before Trump Round 2. Francis Fukuyama, one of liberalism’s most ardent defenders, has a good rundown of how things could get much worse under a second Trump term. Obviously we’ll have to wait and see, but Trump’s disdain for democratic norms, his fixation on political vengeance and punishment, and his recruitment of new, more competent allies don’t exactly bode well.

• Trump’s Reckless Choices for National Leadership - The New York Times

  Donald Trump has demonstrated his lack of fitness for the presidency in countless ways, but one of the clearest is in the company he keeps, surrounding himself with fringe figures, conspiracy theorists and sycophants who put fealty to him above all else. This week, a series of cabinet nominations by Mr. Trump showed the potential dangers posed by his reliance on his inner circle in the starkest way possible. For three of the nation’s highest-ranking and most vital positions, Mr. Trump said he would appoint loyalists with no discernible qualifications for their jobs, people manifestly inappropriate for crucial positions of leadership in law enforcement and national security. The most irresponsible was his choice for attorney general. To fill the post of the nation’s chief law enforcement officer, the president-elect said he would nominate Representative Matt Gaetz of Florida. Yes, that Matt Gaetz. The one who called for the abolishment of the F.B.I. and the entire Justice Department if they didn’t stop investigating Mr. Trump.

  • words "Confirm" and "Senate" not found; this is a festival of despair, not actual reporting on likely members of the next government.

• UMass Amherst urges international students to return to campus before Jan. 20

  the school says international students and professors should "strongly consider returning to the United States prior to the presidential inauguration day of January 20, 2025 if they are planning on traveling internationally during the winter holiday break," which runs through the end of January.

  [B]ased on previous experience with travel bans that were enacted in the first Trump Administration in 2016, the Office of Global Affairs is making this advisory out of an abundance of caution to hopefully prevent any possible travel disruption to members of our international community. We are not able to speculate on what a travel ban will look like if enacted, nor can we speculate on what particular countries or regions of the world may or may not be affected.

• Duty to Warn Letter - to VP Harris - Re: Election 2024

  This is my second Duty to Warn Letter regarding hacking of the 2024 Presidential Election. The first letter on November 7 was directed to Commonwealth of Pennsylvania Officials. Both warnings are made per DNI Clapper’s 2015 directive to all agencies and contractors associated with intelligence and financial agency technologies to warn of suspicions of hacking. You should reverse your concession, call for both a full investigation of criminal activity and demand hand recounts in all seven swing states. In my professional view there are multiple and extremely clear indications the Presidential vote was willfully compromised.

• What Can the Department of Government Efficiency Do? - The New York Times

  While Trump has not detailed how the entity will operate, he said in a statement that it would “slash excess regulations, cut wasteful expenditures and restructure federal agencies” and “provide advice and guidance from outside of government.” Conventionally, what outsiders can do in the government has been pretty limited. But with Trump and Musk both known for pushing boundaries, it’s not clear what “DOGE” will look like.

  • Could DOGE cut $2T? The legal and practical reality of government reform

• Salon retracts 2005 Robert F. Kennedy Jr. piece on alleged autism-vaccine link

Law Breaking / Police / Internal Security

• 'Dastardly deeds': Family of Malcolm X sues US agencies over assassination

• Houston Man Arrested For Allegedly Plotting Terrorist Attack On US Soil.

  Anas Said, a 28-year-old man living in the Houston area, has been arrested for attempting to give material support to ISIS and plotting a terrorist attack from his home, FBI officials announced during a press conference. Said allegedly admitted to researching how to execute a terrorist attack on local military recruiting centers, offering his residence as a sanctuary to ISIS operatives, attempting to create terrorist propaganda and boasting about how he was willing to commit a Sept. 11-style attack if he had the capability.

• Bullet strikes Southwest Airlines plane in Dallas prior to departure

  • Dallas: Gunfire at airport as passenger plane hit by bullet

External Security / Militaria / Diplomania

• American fighter pilots explain how they fought an overwhelming Iranian drone swarm in total darkness | CNN Politics

  It was April 13, and Iran had fired over 300 drones, ballistic and cruise missiles, a far larger strike than the US military had anticipated. Instructed to use every weapon at their disposal to help defeat the attack, Coffey and his crew mate, weapons systems officer Capt. Lacie “Sonic” Hester, came up with a plan. Speaking to CNN in their first interviews since that night, Hester and Coffey described flying as close as they could to an Iranian drone, well below the minimum safe altitude for the F-15 Strike Eagle, and using a gun — an extremely dangerous maneuver in total darkness, against a barely visible target. They missed.

• Along with everyone else: T-Mobile hacked in Chinese breach of telecom networks, WSJ reports

  • T-Mobile was hacked by China

• Russia cuts off enriched uranium exports to the United States

• Pentagon fails 7th audit in a row but says progress made

World

• Palantir spoke with MoJ about calculating prisoners' 'reoffending risks'

• Japan's GDP grows for second successive quarter

• CEO of Saudi Arabia's 100-Mile Skyscraper Out,Allegations of Mass Employee Death

Russia Bad / Ukraine War

• Television outages in spring caused by Russian sabotage of six satellites

• Russian spy ship confirmed to be operating near cables off Dublin

• Ukraine's drone suppliers ramping up production of drones that can't be jammed

• Killer Robots Are About to Fill Ukrainian Skies

China

• 'Robot revolution' forces China's human workforce to adapt

Health / Medicine

• We now think the myopia epidemic can be slowed – or even reversed

• Study finds high-speed internet link to increased obesity

Pox / COVID / BioTerror AgitProp

• Covid-19's Surprising Effect on Cancer

Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda

• Starting from the usual basis of "lack of crippling taxes is an unacceptable subsidy" and going completely irrational from there: Climate Finance Hypocrisy

• Climate activists sentenced for powder attack on U.S. constitution

• Question bringing COP29 to a halt: Who's rich enough to pay for climate change?

• Turning waste into fuel: Bourbon industry offers new path for renewable energy | University of Kentucky Research

  Stillage, which remains after grains are distilled into bourbon, has traditionally been used as feed for livestock. However, Kentucky’s cattle population has reached its lowest point since 1962, while bourbon production is expected to double in the next five years. This imbalance has prompted distilleries to seek alternative ways to manage increasing stillage. This is where anaerobic digestion, a process that transforms organic material into renewable natural gas by using microorganisms without oxygen, plays a role. “Stillage has been piling up, and there just aren’t enough cattle to consume it all,” Crofcheck said. “So, distilleries are beginning to explore new ways to use this material, and renewable energy is one of the most promising solutions.”

• Sustainability considerations are not influencing meat consumption in the US

• Red squirrels 'to vanish from England' unless vaccine against squirrelpox funded