2024-11-18

536AD wasn't so bad, Oxford temps, UFO bits, USPS comrades, Harris still sucking, broligarchy tantrums, Canadian Froot Loops and coyotes, Biden does diplomacy, Jewish microbes on the Moon

etc

• Apparently, Oz doesn't get Dr. Bronner's: In Search of the Perfect Soap

• Volunteers, not FEMA are core to disaster response. How do we best support them?

Horseshit

• Are A.I. Clones the Future of Dating? I Tried Them for Myself.

• Rare gladiator-shaped knife handle gives insight into Roman celebrity culture

• A Physicist Came Up with Math That Shows 'Paradox-Free' Time Travel Is Plausible

• How a viral, duct-taped banana came to be worth $1 million

• Scientists discover what caused the Roman Empire to collapse 1,500 years ago | Daily Mail Online

  They identified a timeline for when Roman ships, which lined the shores by the hundreds at their peak, began to disappear and dwindled down to just dozens by the second half of the 7th century. Roman goods from the same time period were also analyzed from tens of thousands of sites between numerous regions, including Israel, Tunisia, Jordan, Cyprus, Turkey, Egypt, and Greece, which suggested the group was still in the midst of trading. Researchers said that rather than a decline, there was an increase in prosperity and demography in the second half of the 6th century CE. The information 'led us to conclude that the eastern Roman Empire started to decline ... after a [disruption in trade] and military failures,' authors Lev Cosijns from the University of Oxford and Haggai Olshanetsky from the University of Warsaw told DailyMail.com. Previous research had suggested that a plague decimated the Roman Empire in 543 AD or a climate shift that peaked in the mid-6th century. But the new study found the civilization was at the height of its power, economic output and population. 'So, it seems that 536 CE was not the worst year to be alive,' said Cosijns. 'At least, not for most people who lived during that time.

• The longest-range, single-aisle plane is poised to shake up transatlantic travel

• There's room for more than one bullshit tech bubble at a time: Why AI could eat quantum computing's lunch

• Beyond gene-edited babies: the possible paths for tinkering with human evolution

• Half of Gen Z suffers from ‘eco-anxiety,’ new poll finds.

• Lucid dreaming app triples users' awareness in dreams, study finds

• Abandonment Hertz: Customers Met By Empty Rental Desk Simply Abscond With Cars. Hertz employees left their posts hours early, which led to customers grabbing whatever keys were available.

• To Save More Water, American Homes Need Smaller Pipes

Musk

• Putin's oligarchs linked to funding Musk's takeover of Twitter

• Grok labels Musk as one of the most significant spreaders of misinformation on X

• A study found that X's algorithm now loves two things: Republicans and Elon Musk

• 'I bought this before Elon went crazy'

• World Largest Battery Manufacturer Says Musk 'Doesn't Know How to Make a Battery

Electric / Self Driving cars

• The Withering Dream of a Cheap American Electric Car

Edumacationalizing / Acedemia Nuts

• Oxford relying on 'Deliveroo-style' contracts

  Oxford University has been accused of relying on academics on “Deliveroo-style” and precarious fixed-term contracts to give the majority of its tutorials, after new research revealed just a third of lessons are taught by full-time professors.

• Two Nobel Prize winners want to cancel their own CRISPR patents in Europe

Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising

• 'Scared the Life Out of Me': FCC Complaints After Texas 'Blue Alert' Blast

• Palworld Developer Reveals the Pokémon Patents Nintendo Claims It's Violating

• Key Advertisers Pause Spending over Twitch Anti-Semitism Allegations

• Apple discontinuing Vision Pro due to lackluster sales

TechSuck / Geek Bait

• IPv6 networks do apparently get probed

• One-parting some Commodore 64 utilities for fun and profit

• What comes after Open Source? Bruce Perens has some ideas

AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World

• Gemini AI tells the user to die

• AI could cause 'social ruptures' between people who disagree on its sentience

• Wall Street Bankers Spot a Fat Payday in $1T AI Hysteria

Space / Boomy Zoomers / UFO

• (PDF) FY 2024 Consolidated Annual Report on Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena

• UFO shot down by US fighter jet found on Lake Huron's shoreline

  The UFO was shot down by a U.S. F-16 fighter jet on February 12, 2023. This is the third UFO incident to have taken place in North America in February 2023. The object is said to have been an octagon shape with strings hanging off. The fighter jet shot at the UFO twice, striking it with one missile before it fell into Canadian waters. Through a Freedom of Information request from CTVNews.ca, the 'wreckage' was found on 'the shoreline of Lake Huron' and the discovery was never made public.

Crypto con games

• Bitfinex Hacker Sentenced to 5 Years as DOJ Ends $10B Crypto Theft Case

• Major Bitcoin hacker Lichtenstein gets five years in prison for crypto

Economicon / Business / Finance

• A $7T and Growing Cash Pile Defies Wall Street Skeptics

Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making

• Regulatory Similarity

  Using the full text of the Federal Register, the official publication of the US government, we develop a similarity score that compares the regulatory exposure of pairs of companies. A higher score means that the two firms comply with similar regulations by the same regulatory agencies. Existing similarity measures such as industry boundaries, geographic proximity, and product markets account for only one-quarter of the variation in regulatory similarity. Nevertheless, firms with high regulatory similarity comove along key dimensions such as overhead costs, profitability, and investment.

• Postal chief brags of 100% union ‘comrades’ as bankruptcy nears - Washington Examiner

  The postmaster general is facing scrutiny for bragging about how he has nearly fully unionized the agency while running up an unsustainable budget deficit. Louis DeJoy recently said he was aiming for a “unionized operation … 100% unionized,” according to a report picked up by Postal Times and Americans for Tax Reform. In the initial report from reporter Matthew Foldi, he also questioned why he wasn’t getting more credit for the union hires. Speaking last month to the Mailers Technical Advisory Committee, DeJoy said, “I was actually with our supervisors union yesterday, and I said, ‘Comrades, how come you’re not celebrating me?’”

• Anti-MAGA PA Officials Go Rogue, Keep Counting Illegal Ballots In Defiance Of State Supreme Court | ZeroHedge

  Bucks County Board of Commissioners Chair Robert J. Harvie Jr. (D) and Vice Chair Dianne Ellis-Marseglia (D) are plowing ahead with their count of the illegal ballots that are missing signatures in one of two places, which officials have referred to as "block two" and "block four." The third commissioner, Republican Gene DiGirolamo was the lone dissenting voice.

Trump

• Trump Taps Fracking Executive and “TV-ready Evangelist for Fossil Fuels” for Energy Secretary.

  • Oil boss Chris Wright named as Donald Trump's energy secretary

• Trump Team Said to Want to Ease US Rules for Self-Driving Cars

Democrats / Biden Inc

• Kamala Harris raised $1B+ in defeat but still pushing donors for more

  Democrats are sending persistent appeals to Harris supporters without expressly asking them to cover any potential debts, enticing would-be donors instead with other matters: the Republican president-elect’s picks for his upcoming administration and a handful of pending congressional contests where ballots are still being tallied. “The Harris campaign certainly spent more than they raised and is now busy trying to fundraise,” said Adrian Hemond, a Democratic strategist from Michigan. He said he was been asked by the campaign after its loss to Trump to help with fundraising. The party is flooding Harris’ lucrative email donor list with near-daily appeals aimed at small-dollar donors — those whose contributions are measured in the hundreds of dollars or less. But Hemond said the postelection effort also includes individual calls to larger donors.

Left Angst

• Some Democrats Are Admitting They Lied Before The Election

  Now, Scarborough is lecturing his dwindling audience about how far out of touch the progressive left has gotten and how that’s why they lost. He’s not wrong; it’s just odd that he never said anything like this before November 5th. But after that, he discovered inflation and the cost of butter. He is not an honest man. He is trying to reclaim his credibility and maintain his job if Comcast sells his network.

  The second category is exemplified by Ezra Klein of the New York Times. In a post-election podcast, Klein admitted he knew all along that the issues upon which Republicans were campaigning and conservative media was reporting while the left denounced them both as liars were actually true – crime is up in blue cities, inflation is real and harming people, etc. “The sense of disorder rising, right?” Klein said. “Not just crime, but homeless encampments, trash on the street, people jumping turnstiles in subways, crazy people on the streets. You talk to people, and they’re mad about it. They feel it’s different than it used to be.”

• How Musk's DOGE Can Actually Do Some Good - Bloomberg

  The newly announced Department of Governmental Efficiency, to be known by the acronym DOGE (get it?) and headed by billionaire Elon Musk and entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy, is evidence that President-elect Donald Trump’s administration will at least attempt to deregulate the US economy. All memes aside, this could turn out to be a worthwhile enterprise, deserving of bipartisan support — so long as people temper their expectations. The first thing to realize is that it is not possible to eliminate every law, regulation, committee or agency that deserves to be. The system was set up such that getting rid of anything is a tough legal slog. It is not easy to fire large numbers of bureaucrats, and in any case their pay is a small part of the federal budget. When it comes to reducing red tape, there are bound to be more losses than victories.

• How to survive the broligarchy: 20 lessons for the post-truth world

  When someone tells you who they are, believe them. Last week Donald Trump appointed a director of intelligence who spouts Russian propaganda, a Christian nationalist crusader as secretary of defence, and a secretary of health who is a vaccine sceptic. If Trump was seeking to destroy American democracy, the American state and American values, this is how he’d do it.

  Journalists are first, but everyone else is next. Trump has announced multibillion-dollar lawsuits against “the enemy camp”: newspapers and publishers. His proposed FBI director is on record as wanting to prosecute certain journalists. Journalists, publishers, writers, academics are always in the first wave. Doctors, teachers, accountants will be next. Authoritarianism is as predictable as a Swiss train. It’s already later than you think.

• RFK Jr.'s Vow to Take On Big Food Could Face Resistance - The New York Times

  in vowing to upend the nation’s food system, Mr. Kennedy is taking a direct shot at Big Food, one of the country’s most powerful industries whose traditional allies are Republicans. Even something as simple as removing artificial dyes is likely to result in a knockdown battle for the multibillion-dollar food sector, which is wary of higher manufacturing costs or a dip in sales of products favored by loyal consumers.

  Mr. Kennedy has singled out Froot Loops as an example of a product with too many artificial ingredients, questioning why the Canadian version has fewer than the U.S. version. But he was wrong. The ingredient list is roughly the same, although Canada’s has natural colorings made from blueberries and carrots while the U.S. product contains red dye 40, yellow 5 and blue 1 as well as Butylated hydroxytoluene, or BHT, a lab-made chemical that is used “for freshness,” according to the ingredient label.

  • "He was wrong", but 100% correct ... "froot loops" ain't food even without the miracles of modern chemistry we Americans get. (Said as on occasional avid consumer of that hamster chow)

• Trump said can't run in 28 unless 'something' is figured out: Could it happen?

  President-elect Donald Trump, during a meeting with House Republicans on Wednesday, made an apparent joke in which he remarked that the GOP might want to “do something” that would somehow allow him to serve a third term in 2028. “I suspect I won’t be running again, unless you do something,” Trump said, according to audio shared with The Hill. “Unless you say, ‘He’s so good, we have to just figure it out.’” Trump’s remarks garnered some laughs from the GOP lawmakers, a couple of whom dismissed them as a joke. But Trump has made similar comments in the past, having previously floated the ideas of “extending” his term or somehow disregarding term limits.

• Is the 4B Movement's Vision for Life Without Men the Next Political Protest? - POLITICO

  It’s too soon to say if the 4B movement is here to stay in the United States. But even if it isn’t, the surge in interest says something about the social forces unleashed by the 2024 presidential election. An uptick in misogyny has already been evident — just look at the “your body, my choice” comments by men online — similar to what’s been seen in Korea, suggesting that this kind of feminist reaction could take hold. And even if women don’t explicitly take on the 4B label en masse, the movement’s message of bodily autonomy, and the anger that drove the conversation in the first place, could have a major impact not just on American politics, but on American life overall — just as it has in Korea.

Law Breaking / Police / Internal Security

• Teen serial swatter-for-hire busted, pleads guilty, could face 20 years

• Missouri Cops Accused of Pulling over Women and Searching Their Phones for Nudes

External Security / Militaria / Diplomania

• Perilous trips across Canada-US border becoming more common

  On the last night of their lives, Jagdish Patel, his wife and their two young children tried to slip into the U.S. across a near-empty stretch of the Canadian border. Wind chills reached minus 36 Fahrenheit (minus 38 Celsius) that night in January 2022 as the family from India set out on foot to meet a waiting van. They walked amid vast farm fields and bulky snowdrifts, navigating in the black of an almost-moonless night.

• Biden Allows Ukraine to Strike Russia With Long-Range U.S. Missiles - The New York Times

  President Biden has authorized the first use of U.S.-supplied long-range missiles by Ukraine for strikes inside Russia, U.S. officials said. The weapons are likely to be initially employed against Russian and North Korean troops in defense of Ukrainian forces in the Kursk region of western Russia, the officials said. Mr. Biden’s decision is a major change in U.S. policy. The choice has divided his advisers, and his shift comes two months before President-elect Donald J. Trump takes office, having vowed to limit further support for Ukraine.

  • Biden Approves Ukraine's Use of Long-Range Missiles Inside Russia

• Biden and Xi take a first step to limit AI and nuclear decisions

World

• Post Office inquiry: hopes for good news dwindle

• India's successful test of hypersonic missile puts it among elite group

• Is Germany's business model broken?

Israel

• A Crashed Israeli Lunar Lander Spilled Tardigrades on the Moon

Russia Bad / Ukraine War

• Russia's soldiers bringing wartime violence back home

• Austria says Russia to cut off gas from Saturday.

• North Korea May End Up Sending Putin 100,000 Troops for His War

Health / Medicine

• Cannabis Use Linked to Epigenetic Changes, Cancer Risk

• A $12k Surgery to Change Eye Color Is Surging in Popularity

Pox / COVID / BioTerror AgitProp

• Avian Flu Diary: California DPH Reports First Known U.S. Case of Emerging Mpox Strain

• Severe Covid-19 may shrink cancer tumors, early data suggest

Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda

• Restart of Three Mile Island tests US appetite for nuclear revival

• Why Farmers Use Harmful Insecticides They May Not Need

• NASA Satellites Reveal Abrupt Drop in Global Freshwater Levels

• Outdoor tourism produces copious waste, accelerates effects of climate change

• Humans have caused 1.5 °C of long-term global warming according to new estimates

• 'The sixth great extinction is happening', conservation expert warns

• Philippines endures its fourth typhoon in ten days