2024-12-01
cuz critters can't count, finder's keepers, sad food sells, property is theft, beaver banality, Cathars are back, GenZ dont read, crypto supports free speech, Biden boned Ukraine, AI for bear glances
etc
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(PDF) No evidence for inequity aversion in non-human animals: a meta-analysis of accept/reject paradigms
Disadvantageous inequity aversion (IA), a negative response to receiving less than others, is a key building block of the human sense of fairness. While some theorize that IA is shared by species across the animal kingdom, others argue that it is an exclusively human evolutionary adaptation to the selective pressures of cooperation among non-kin. Essential to this debate is the empirical question of whether non-human animals are averse towards unequal resource distributions. Over the past two decades, researchers have reported that individuals from a wide range of taxa exhibit IA; tasks where participants can reject or accept a given distribution of rewards delivered the bulk of this evidence. Yet these results have been questioned on both conceptual and empirical grounds. In the largest empirical investigation of non-human IA to date, we synthesize the primary data from 23 studies using accept/reject tasks, covering 60 430 observations of 18 species. We find no evidence for IA in non-human animals in these tasks.
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Vehicle up in flames in Port of Miami
Residents said they heard a loud explosion followed by the thick smoke and flames. MDFR units arrived to find a vehicle on fire inside a shipping container. Firefighters immediately went to work and subdued the blaze.
Horseshit
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'Bro you look utterly reborn': Is bald Reddit the nicest place on the internet?
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'Switches' are turning handguns into machine guns on Ontario streets
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Gen Z's definition of financial success includes joining the top 1%
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Rich People Love Dinosaur Bones and Scientists Are Feeling Left Out
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What does this button do? – My new car has a mysterious and undocumented switch (HN comments)
I'm getting it removed because now I'm basically driving around with a foreign GPS tracker. Some lease company somewhere is getting data on wherever I go. Kind of spooky if you think of it, especially as I assume I am one of the few actually looking into what this is. Most people would have probably driven around for years with a foreign GPS tracker.
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San Francisco pit of 4,000 bones may trace to Civil War doctor
It was a gruesome find. Limb bones with saw marks. Skulls cut in half. Long ribs, pelvic bones and sections of vertebrae. Over 4,000 human bones and bone fragments in all, tumbled together in a pit where someone had buried and seemingly forgotten them in 19th-century San Francisco. Workers doing lead remediation work at Fort Mason discovered the bones in 2010, a week before Halloween. They had lain just a few feet below ground at the former site of a Civil War-era Army hospital. Incision marks in some of them caused a park service archeologist to initially think they were the results of amputations. The pit also contained pill bottles and other medical artifacts, but no records remained to explain the bones’ presence.
a pioneering Civil War doctor named Edwin Bentley used the unclaimed cadavers of poor people in San Francisco – which he had access to as a pathologist who performed autopsies for the city – in the 1870s to teach anatomy and surgical methods at one of the first medical schools in the West. Then, the hypothesis goes, someone discarded the cut-up body parts rather than having them properly buried. The flesh decayed, leaving the bones.
- what would "properly buried" have looked like, then? Big landfill pit behind the building, perhaps? We have incinerators for such things now.
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Anthropomorphic Sad Expressions Reduce Waste of “Single” Imperfect Food
A field study conducted at a large food retailer in Germany revealed that sales of “single” bananas significantly increased when they were anthropomorphized with sad emotions compared to when they were anthropomorphized with happy emotions or not anthropomorphized. Across three preregistered online experiments, this research corroborates the effectiveness of sad emotional expressions in boosting purchase intentions, establishes compassion as the underlying process, generalizes this effect to other produce (i.e., tomatoes), and shows that a price discount eliminates this effect.
- abuse compassion in your customers to sell inferior product for normal prices. Will probably work on nearly anything... for a while. Having "compassion" as a social good wasn't really that important anyhow and after all, it doesn't show up on our financial statements.
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You are not on Indigenous land
Humanity didn’t always exist; therefore for every piece of land, there was a first human to lay eyes on it, and a first human to say “This land is mine.” But by what right did this first human claim exclusive ownership of this land? Why does being the first person to see a natural object make you the rightful owner of that object? And why does being the first human to set foot on a piece of land give your blood descendants the right to dispose of that land as they see fit in perpetuity, and to exclude any and all others from that land? What about all the peoples of the world who were never lucky enough to be the first to lay eyes on any plot of dirt? Are they simply to be dispossessed forever? I have never seen a satisfactory answer to these questions. Nor have I seen a satisfactory explanation of why ownership of land should be allocated collectively, in terms of racial or ethnic groups. In general, the first people who arrived on a piece of land did so in dribs and drabs, in small family units and tiny micro-tribes that met and married and fought and mixed and formed into larger identities and ethnicities and tribes over long periods of time. In most cases, the ethnic groups who now claim pieces of land as their own did not even exist when the first humans discovered or settled that land.
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Buc-ee's Is The Sickness At The Heart Of America
The gas guzzling junk food store is the epitome of American hubristic excess
This country is a seriously bizarre place to live, and Buc-ee’s is a microcosm of our American existence at present. This combination gas station-grocery store-way of life is a mirror we have erected to show us ourselves. It’s the highway equivalent of junk food. It almost certainly shouldn’t exist, and we are worse as a culture for having had it, but goddamn does it flip the right switches in our collective brain. It is truly junk that shouldn’t be great, but the rot at the core of America is what makes us who we are. Buc-ee’s, the Bass Pro Shops pyramid, and ordering shit we’ll throw away in a month from Temu, these are the new Gods of America, and they deserve their shrines.
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'I couldn't stop watching': stories of how porn obsession takes over lives
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Smooth Mars bar wins Aylesbury man £2 compensation – and internet fame
Rank Propaganda / Thought Policing / World Disordering
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Understanding Digital Marketing Ecosystem Spreading Pro-PRC Influence Operations
This blog post details GLASSBRIDGE—an umbrella group of four different companies that operate networks of inauthentic news sites and newswire services tracked by the Google Threat Intelligence Group (consisting of Google’s Threat Analysis Group (TAG) and Mandiant). Collectively these firms bulk-create and operate hundreds of domains that pose as independent news websites from dozens of countries, but are in fact publishing thematically similar, inauthentic content that emphasizes narratives aligned to the political interests of the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Since 2022, Google has blocked more than a thousand GLASSBRIDGE-operated websites from eligibility to appear in Google News features and Google Discover because these sites violated our policies that prohibit deceptive behavior and require editorial transparency.
Bluesky
Electric / Self Driving cars
Religion / Tribal / Culture War and Re-Segregation
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Wokism is the New Face of An Old Heresy, And It Can Be Defeated Again
There is academic controversy about whether Catharism was a real and organized movement or whether the medieval Church imagined or exaggerated it. The lack of any central organisation among Cathars, regional differences in beliefs and practices, as well as the lack of sources from the Cathars themselves, has prompted some scholars to question whether the Church exaggerated its threat, and others to wonder whether it even existed.
- Plenty of people currently deny that "woke" exists, even as they insist everyone follow along with its tenets.
Edumacationalizing / Acedemia Nuts
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The Books Briefing: How Gen Z Came to See Books as a Waste of Time - The Atlantic
An alarming phenomenon has sprung up over the past few years: Many students are arriving at college unprepared to read entire books. That’s a broad statement to make, but I spoke with 33 professors at some of the country’s top universities, and over and over, they told me the same story. As I noted in my recent article on the topic, a Columbia professor said his students are overwhelmed at the thought of reading multiple books a semester; a professor at the University of Virginia told me that his students shut down when they’re confronted with ideas they don’t understand. Criticizing young people’s literacy is a pastime that stretches back centuries, but in the past decade, something seems to have noticeably shifted.
Why is this happening? The allure of smartphones and social media came up, and it appears that many middle and high schools are teaching fewer full books. (One student arrived at Columbia having read only poems, excerpts, and news articles in school.) But one possible cause that I nodded to in my article is a change in values, not ability. The problem does not appear to be that “kids these days” are incurious or uninterested in reading. Instead, young people might be responding to a cultural message: Books just aren’t that important.
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Scientists kill 192M lab mice each year. Is there a better way?
- ask a mouse if it wants to live. they don't agonize over their short lives, they enjoy their moments however few.
Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising
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Breaking down the DOJ's plan to end Google's search monopoly
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Googling Is for Old People. That's a Problem for Google (HN comments)
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Meta plans to build a $10B subsea cable spanning the world, sources say
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Instagram actively helping spread of self-harm among teenagers, study finds
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Telegram finances propped up by crypto gains as founder fights charges
Telegram has told investors that the detainment of chief executive Pavel Durov by French police has had no “material impact” on the messaging app’s operations, as financial disclosures showed that the surging value of its crypto holdings is increasingly underpinning its business. According to unaudited financial statements seen by the Financial Times, which have not been previously reported, Telegram reported huge gains in the value of its digital assets in the first half of 2024, which rose to $1.3bn compared with nearly $400mn at the end of last year. The filings suggest that this rise, together with proceeds it booked from selling Toncoins — a cryptocurrency with which it has close ties — and a further Toncoin-related deal have all helped create a financial buffer for the Dubai-based company after it was shaken by Durov’s legal troubles.
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Music copyright claims affecting figure skating, gymnastics, artistic sports
TechSuck / Geek Bait
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The complexities of enabling OpenCL support – The Cat Fox Life
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The upside-down capacitor in mid-'90s Macs, proven and documented by hobbyists
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AMD Disables Zen 4's Loop Buffer - by Chester Lam
From side discussions with AMD employees at Hot Chips 2024, the loop buffer was primarily a power optimization. I never heard AMD discuss the loop buffer elsewhere. That's likely because the loop buffer isn't an important feature from a performance perspective. The op cache can already deliver more bandwidth than the core's downstream rename/allocate stage can consume.
AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World
Space / Boomy Zoomers / UFO
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“Toxic smell” at Progress hatch was hypergolic fuel
the “toxic smell” detected by Russian astronauts immediately after opening the hatch to unload the newly docked Progress at ISS was actually a small but very dangerous amount of hypergolic fuel left over from the previous Progress freighter. If true, this incident indicates a shocking level of incompetence, sloppiness, or even malice at Russian mission control. How can mission controllers forget to do a “routine purging” of hypergolic fuel, especially when it is known that this very dangerous fuel — which can dissolve skin if you allow yourself to get in contact with it — can “easily spill” into the docking port where people will travel?
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It Is Time To Build The Monster Scope – Casey Handmer's blog
With the recent SpaceX Starship orbital flight tests, it is time to commit to building the largest physically possible space telescope. Such a telescope would peer deeper into the universe than any before it, answering fundamental questions: Are we alone? What do Earth-like exoplanets around other stars look like? How did we get here? What weird stuff awaits discovery? Where is the limit on human ambition to know what is in our universe?
Crypto con games
Economicon / Business / Finance
Democrats / Biden Inc
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How Biden Made a Mess of Ukraine - The Atlantic
Joe Biden filled his administration with geniuses: Rhodes scholars; Ivy League graduates; people with extensive global experience; a national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, whom the president has described as a “once-in-a-generation intellect.” The president himself has been immersed in foreign policy for half a century. Yet despite all of those impressive résumés, the Biden administration has badly mishandled the war in Ukraine, not only hampering a beleaguered ally’s ability to fend off a Russian invasion but also throwing away a remarkable chance to improve America’s global standing and democratic powers’ position in the world. In defending themselves far more effectively than expected, the Ukrainians showed a capacity to deal Russian President Vladimir Putin a major military defeat, but again and again, Biden and his experts have constrained Ukraine’s ability to fight until it was too late. Just recently, only after his party lost the presidential election, Biden finally gave Ukraine the tightly limited ability to use American weapons on military targets in a small part of Russia. The president’s decision comes after 33 months of war, during which Russia has launched long-range attacks anywhere in Ukraine it wanted, in many cases using Iranian-made weaponry.Biden has promised the Ukrainians that he will stand by them “for as long as it takes”—but he has nevertheless made sure that the war has gone on much longer than it had to.
Left Angst
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Jack Smith and Merrick Garland Don’t Look to Be Done With Trump Yet.
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Musk could use the 'Department of Government Efficiency' for self-enrichment
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Alexander Vindman has accused Elon Musk of divulging state secrets to Vladimir Putin, and that the real reason he supports Trump is because Putin ordered him to do so
Law Breaking / Police / Internal Security
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Venezuelan Gangs Operating in TN: From ‘It’s Not Happening’ to ‘It’s Actually a Good Thing.’
Chattanooga mayor Tim Kelly flippantly dismissed the TBI’s warning, stating to a local TV station that Tren de Aragua’s criminal activity is “not a concern for us right now in Chattanooga.” To be fair, Tim Kelly is a trust fund eco-leftist who believes his purpose as mayor is to save the world from global warming. There is no reason to doubt his sincerity when Mayor Kelly states that South American gang activity in Chattanooga does not concern him. Just one week later, a Tren de Aragua gang member was arrested in Chattanooga. three women were also arrested, but rather than being Tren de Aragua members, these women are apparently being held in captivity and forced into prostitution.
TBI Director Rausch stated of these women, “they are victims as well,” and live in “great fear” of their captors as many women are kidnapped off the streets in Venezuela and then forced into prostitution in the U.S.
In other words, these women are sex slaves that have been smuggled into the U.S. by a criminal Venezuelan gang. Slavery is alive and well in Chattanooga, and the city’s Democrat mayor says this is “not a concern” of his.
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Florida Man Who Spied on Verizon for China Gets 4 Years in Prison
External Security / Militaria / Diplomania
World
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A Dyslogy for Ireland's "Hate Speech" Bill
McEntee has committed to still pushing for hate crime legislation in spite of dropping the hate speech bill itself. But it’s also too soon to be doing victory laps, as McEntee has promised to come back for another bite at the apple if she’s reelected. If you live in Ireland, you will likely have heard plenty of claims about what this bill entails: that previous legislation of this type proved ineffective at its stated aims, and so more robust legislation is required; or that the existing incitement to hatred legislation was drafted in a pre-digital, pre-social media era, and that this bill represents a simple but necessary “modernization” of existing legislation.
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Ransom Gang Claims Attack on NHS Alder Hey Children's Hospital
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Mumbai court issues contempt notice to Sundar Pichai over YouTube non-compliance
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Rebels Control Most of Syria’s Largest City, War Monitor Says - The New York Times
Antigovernment rebels captured most of Syria’s largest city, Aleppo, by early Saturday, facing little resistance from government forces on the ground there, according to the fighters and to a war monitoring group. Syrian government warplanes responded with airstrikes on Aleppo neighborhoods for the first time since 2016, according to the war monitoring group, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights. That year, rebels were routed from Aleppo in a fierce battle for the city that dragged on for months, a big blow to the opposition movement trying to oust the autocratic president, Bashar al-Assad. The Russian Defense Ministry said on Friday that Russia had carried out airstrikes against the rebel offensive in support of the Syrian military, but it did not say where.
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French cognac Hennessy's workers protest China bottling plan amid tariff threat
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UK changes to inheritance tax for farmers could help in the long run
Russia Bad / Ukraine War
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The map that shows Russia’s ‘secret war’ with the West has now begun
Taken together, the conclusion becomes unavoidable: that over the last 12 months, as the West has continued to support Ukraine’s war efforts, Russia has dramatically escalated its acts of sabotage across Europe and beyond, sowing a greater sense of instability on the continent than at any time since the Cold War.
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New US drones tested on Ukraine front line hailed as 'game changer'
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Ukraine 'redirecting' Iranian-designed kamikaze drones back to Russia
China
Health / Medicine
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Cause of rare devastating, autoimmune disease in Puerto Ricans–and possible cure
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The number of male registered nurses in US has nearly tripled since early 2000s
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distilled water. and salt. Any soda bottling plant in the USA could produce truckloads of this within a week.
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see also: The intravenous use of coconut water
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The danger of hordes of addicts mainlining coconuts on the streets may be worth considering, however.
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Narcan vending machines help communities save fentanyl users’ lives.
Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda
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"Why does this even need to be connected to the internet?" Sol-Ark manufacturer reportedly disables all Deye inverters in the US (HN comments)
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Csiro opens $6.8M printing facility to make flexible solar panels
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Orcas start wearing dead salmon hats again after ditching the trend for 37 years
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Atmospheric methane removal: A promising but challenging climate solution
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Japan taps into AI bear surveillance to warn of dangers
In an effort to reduce the danger bears pose to humans, several municipalities across Japan have begun using an artificial intelligence-assisted surveillance system to pinpoint bear locations when they wander onto farmland roads and into urban areas.
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There's a reason oil well sales are collapsing in California: Cleanup costs
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Taxing Farm Animals' Farts and Burps? Denmark Gives It a Try
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In shallow waters, cruise ships can churn up as much sediment as a hurricane