2024-12-04

everything used to be better, Enron returns, ERCOT reiterates, CIA journalism, Musk can't get paid, anarchic science, tallow politics, rare earths bans, South Korean martial law, House report on COVID

etc

• We’re all suffering from qualitynesia now

  My ears didn’t deceive me. CDs have a bit-rate of 1,411 kilobits per second, which is a measure of how much data is used to represent sound. Spotify Premium ranges from 24 kbps to 320 kbps, while free Spotify listeners are limited to 160 kbps at best. I realise this is hardly news to music aficionados. Neil Young, who grudgingly returned his music to Spotify this year after a spat involving Joe Rogan, complained, “There is so much tone missing that you can hardly feel the sensitivity.” If hundreds of millions of normal music listeners (like me) have decided to trade audio quality for convenience and variety, then fair enough. But what disconcerted me is that I didn’t know that’s what I’d done. I had simply forgotten how much better music used to sound. There should be a word for this phenomenon. Qualitynesia, perhaps? If wearing “rose-tinted glasses” is the act of thinking something was better in the past when it objectively wasn’t, this is its opposite: forgetting something was better in the past when it objectively was.

• What’s the Deal with Base Plates? — Practical Engineering

Horseshit

• Advent of Code player threatened with $150k lawsuit for sharing problems/inputs

• Workers rather 'super-commute' over 4 hours and keep pandemic suburban life

• Gamma Radiation Detected at Popular Bay Area Sculpture Park

• New findings from Sam Altman's basic income study

• The Golden At-Bat rule could give MLB a new shine. But is it worth it?

• Tip pressure might work in the moment, but customers are less likely to return

• Enron Announces Its Return from the Dead with Crypto Patents

  • Two decades after Enron's bankruptcy, the company is back as a crypto firm?

  • Enron has been resurrected in what appears to be an elaborate joke

• S.F. tech founder says 84-hour workweek approach is 'because I'm San Franciscan'

• Would You Pay $1k for a Family Photo?

• The myth of junk food-eating gamers is about social hunger

• The 'donut effect': Major US cities may never look like they did before pandemic

• ERCOT Still Doesn't Understand Winter Demand

  while power plant freezing issues were less during Winter Storm Heather in January 2024 than Winter Storm Elliott in December 2022, gas supply availability during Heather was little better than Elliott. There are still major problems with gas supply availability during winter storms.

• Sober curiosity: Why Gen Zers are reducing their alcohol consumption

• Scott Galloway Explains Why Age Gating Social Media Is Both Necessary and Doable

• Florida hurricane survivors could be suffering from PTSD

celebrity gossip

• Stephen King to shut down his 3 radio stations in Maine

Obit

• Art Cashin, New York Stock Exchange fixture for decades, dies at age 83

• California teacher dies from suspected rabid bat bite

Rank Propaganda / Thought Policing / World Disordering

• Social media algorithms can change your views in a single day

• Ressentiment in the Manosphere: Resistance in the Incel Hatred Pipeline

• Dutch and French police take down Matrix encrypted chat app

  • Europol joint investigation team takes down the matrix

  • An unrelated cybercriminal network named MATRIX was taken down

  The service might have been built using the Matrix protocol, but we’re unaware of it if so. The takedown site has a Matrix-the-movie branding, which is a probable source of confusion. The app showcased doesn’t look like any of the Matrix clients we’re aware of.

• Meta says it's mistakenly moderating too much

• The hidden links between a giant of investigative journalism and the US government | Mediapart

  The OCCRP, the largest organised network of investigative media in the world, hid the extent of its links with the US government, this investigation can reveal. Washington supplies half of its budget, has a right to veto its senior staff, and funds investigations focussing on Russia and Venezuela. With an annual budget of 20 million euros, and a staff of 200 spread over every continent, the NGO has both initiated and contributed to the largest international projects of investigative journalism of recent years, often based on massive data leaks. These include The Panama Papers, Pandora Papers, Suisse Secrets, Narco Files, Pegasus Project, Cyprus Confidential, and the Laundromat series which revealed the money laundering schemes of ruling elites in Azerbaijan and Russia.

Bluesky

• A Personally Significant Bluesky Moment

• Exploring BlueSky’s Domain Handles

Musk

• Tesla loses bid to restore Elon Musk’s $56bn pay package

  • Elon Musk's multibillion-dollar Tesla pay package blocked by a judge again

  • Judge reaffirms ruling that invalidated Tesla pay package for Elon Musk

  • Tesla CEO Elon Musk loses bid to get $56B pay package reinstated

  • Delaware judge rejects Musk's $56B Tesla pay – again

  • Elon Musk's $56B Tesla pay package rejected again by US judge

  • Elon Musk loses bid to reinstate Tesla pay plan, now worth $101B

  • Elon Still Can’t Get His Money - Bloomberg

  In early 2018, when Musk was only worth a few tens of billions of dollars, the board of directors and shareholders of Tesla Inc., his biggest company, voted to give him an enormous package of stock options if he hit some aggressive operational and valuation targets. If Musk succeeded in hitting every milestone in the options package, the options would be worth about $56 billion, Tesla would be worth about $650 billion (up from $59 billion), and Musk’s existing stake in Tesla — the shares that he owned before he got the options grant — would be worth about $140 billion. All of these numbers seemed, at the time, unfathomable: The deal was that if Musk made Tesla one of the largest companies in the world, it would make him the richest person in the world. And then he did it. Tesla today is worth more than $1.1 trillion, he’s the richest person in the world, and he got all the stock options, which as of yesterday were worth about $101 billion. And then this year a judge in Delaware, where Tesla was incorporated, took them away from him, finding that Tesla’s board of directors, in 2018, was too dominated by Musk to negotiate his pay, and that the shareholders who approved the deal were not fully informed.

• SpaceX Weighs Tender Offer Raising Valuation to $350B

Electric / Self Driving cars

• Jaguar's rebranding continues with the Type 00 concept electric car

• Norway breaks another EV record, nearly completing its EV transition

Religion / Tribal / Culture War and Re-Segregation

• Gargoyles, stained glass and the spire: How Notre-Dame was restored

• Holy miscalculation: Entire Christian calendar based on 6th-century monk mistake

• America's Hidden Racial Divide: A Mysterious Gap in Psychosis Rates

• Majority of Canadians oppose equity hiring – more than in the US, new poll finds

• A tech charity imploded over a statement on Gaza

Edumacationalizing / Acedemia Nuts

• Giga Is ITU and UNICEF's School Connectivity Project

• Opinion | How an experiment in equitable education in Newton has failed

  Previously, most classes at Newton’s high schools were given a label: honors, advanced college prep, or college prep, with honors offering the most challenging content. This system of “tracked classes” had its problems. Students who began their freshman year in a particular level could find it challenging to change levels, possibly making it harder for them to eventually take more advanced courses such as AP Calculus. To make matters worse, Black, Latino, and low-income students were disproportionately represented in lower-level classes. The multilevel model sought to rectify this problem by mixing the levels together into a single classroom taught by a single teacher. The district’s administrators claimed this would allow easier transitions among levels for students, increase exposure to more advanced content for lower-level students, and provide beneficial interactions among students who might otherwise never meet. This was a model that had seen some success at Newton South in the English and history departments and in specialized, opt-in programs that were well-funded and well-supported.

  In one of my multilevel classes, I received feedback that the lower-level students didn’t want to ask questions because they didn’t want to “look dumb,” and the higher-level students didn’t want to ask questions because they didn’t want their classmates to “feel dumb.” The result was a classroom that was far less dynamic than what I was typically able to cultivate.

• Teens can't get off their phones. Here's what some schools are doing about it

• The Anarchist and the Hockey Stick - by Adam Mastroianni

  in the whole Galileo debacle, the Catholic Church was the side “trusting the science.” The Inquisition didn’t just condemn Galileo for contradicting the Bible. They also said he was wrong on the facts. That part of their judgment “was made without reference to the faith, or to Church doctrine, but was based exclusively on the scientific situation of the time. It was shared by many outstanding scientists — and it was correct when based on the facts, the theories and the standards of the time.” As in: the Inquisition was right.

  I don’t buy Feyerabend’s claim that the scientific method doesn’t exist. I think it doesn’t exist yet. That is, we’ve somehow succeeded in the practice of science without understanding it in principle. Although we haven’t solved the Mystery of the Hockey Stick, there are too many bodies to deny the mystery exists (the bodies in this mystery are alive—that’s the whole point).

• UCLA's fall class bucks trend of diversity decline at colleges after ban

Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising

• Chuck E. Cheese’s Animatronics Band Bows Out - IEEE Spectrum

• Company claims 1k% price hike drove it from VMware to open source rival

• Data brokers may be banned from selling your social security number

  • CFPB proposes rule blocking data brokers from selling sensitive personal data

• Blizzard's pulling of Warcraft I and II tests GOG's new Preservation Program

• Microsoft sends a warning to anyone using Windows 11 on incompatible hardware

• Casual movie goers are a thing of the past

• Playstation at 30: the console that made video games cool

• DuckDuckGo Donates $25,000 to the Perl and Raku Foundation

• The Verge now has a subscription

• Walmart Acquires Vizio

• US officials urge Americans to use encrypted apps amid unprecedented cyberattack

TechSuck / Geek Bait

• Intel Launches Arc B-Series Graphics Cards

• Valve's Steam Link on Raspberry Pi - Raspberry Pi

  • The Raspberry Pi 5 now works as a smaller, faster kind of Steam Link

• Hackers pivot from data breaches to total destruction

AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World

• The Booming 'AI Pimping' Industry

• Certain names make ChatGPT grind to a halt, and we know why

  • The name 'David Mayer' crashes ChatGPT. Digital privacy requests may be at fault

• Manga publisher is using Anthropic AI to translate Japanese comics into English

• Landlords Are Using AI to Raise Rents – and Cities Are Starting to Push Back

Space / Boomy Zoomers / UFO

• 70-centimetre asteroid expected to burn up over Northern Siberia at 4.15pm GMT

Economicon / Business / Finance

• Why America’s economy is soaring ahead of its rivals

  the US is growing so much faster than any other advanced economy. Its GDP has expanded by 11.4 per cent since the end of 2019 and in its latest forecast, the IMF predicted US growth at 2.8 per cent this year. While last month’s US election was fought against a backdrop of the cost of living crisis, the country’s economic performance in recent years has been the envy of the developed world. The US may have been less affected by the war in Ukraine than Europe, owing to its abundant domestic energy supplies, and rebounded more quickly than some G7 nations from Covid. But its growth record is rooted in faster productivity growth — a more enduring driver of economic performance.

• Employee lawsuit accuses Apple of spying on its workers

  • Employee sues Apple over 'spying' claims tied to mandatory devices

  • Apple Illegally Surveilled and Censored Workers, Employee Lawsuit Says

  • Apple accused of snooping on workers' iPhones in new lawsuit

• Jeff Bezos Is Betting on AI Chip Startup Tenstorrent to Take on Nvidia

  • Tenstorrent closes $693M+ of Series D funding led by Samsung

• 2025 will be a bad year for remote work

• Americans Risk Losing Life Savings When Retirement Homes Go Bust

• The Next Four Years Will Be All About Natural Gas

• Gelsinger Out at Intel, What Happened, Ten Years Too Late

• Why your employer might love for you to quit

• Wells Fargo to Sell San Francisco Headquarters

• Vodka maker Stoli files for bankruptcy in US after ransomware attack

Trump

• Why do we need a Department of Government Efficiency?

  There are many ways DOGE could go suboptimally. We don’t want “defund the police” all over again. The government performs many useful and necessary functions. Turning them all off would be Bad. Indeed, its indispensability creates the unmet need for efficiency, and its lack of efficiency causes real pain every day to millions of Americans whose taxes should pay for better. The ongoing success of DOGE will require relentless sales to the US public: This is what we are doing and why. This post represents my exploration of this idea. It will also be necessary to tread a fine line between half the electorate, who sees DOGE as the embodiment of a mandate for a righteous purge, and the other half of the electorate, who fears DOGE is being used as a figurehead for purely ideological revenge. Fortunately, influential voices on every side of American politics have already voiced enthusiasm for the concept. It turns out frustration with government inefficiency is shockingly bipartisan.

• Chad Chronister, Donald Trump’s pick to run the DEA, withdraws name from consideration.

• US Steel Takeover by Japanese Company Will Be Blocked, Says Trump | The Epoch Times

  President-elect Donald Trump said on Dec. 3 that he would prevent the acquisition of U.S. Steel Corp. by Japan’s Nippon Steel Corporation. “I am totally against the once great and powerful U.S. Steel being bought by a foreign company,” the president-elect said in a post on the social media platform Truth Social. “Through a series of Tax Incentives and Tariffs, we will make U.S. Steel Strong and Great Again, and it will happen FAST! As President, I will block this deal from happening. Buyer Beware!!!” The $14.9 billion deal to buy U.S. Steel was unveiled in December last year. If the transaction goes through, it would make U.S. Steel a wholly owned subsidiary of Nippon Steel.

Democrats / Biden Inc

• Hunter Biden Got Pardoned, And Special Counsel Weiss Is PISSED - Above the Law

  “As a matter of past-practice in this district, courts do not dismiss indictments when pardons are granted,” Weiss wrote, citing such luminaries as Steve Bannon, Michael Flynn, Joe Arpaio, and Ollie North. “Instead, it has been the practice of this court that once an Executive Grant of Clemency has been filed on the docket, the docket is marked closed, the disposition entry is updated to reflect the executive grant of clemency, and no further action is taken by the Court.” And although Weiss purported not to have seen the pardon itself (which Lowell inexplicably failed to docket), he took particular umbrage at the suggestion that the prosecution was politically motivated, huffing that “The court similarly found [Biden’s] vindictive prosecution claims unmoored from any evidence or even a coherent theory as to vindictiveness.”

Left Angst

• Trump's mass deportation plan can use AI to extend immigration crackdown

• Tech Firms Won't Tell Us If They Will Help Trump Deport Immigrants

• What a second Trump administration means for Taiwan's future

• Trump didn't win by a historic landslide. It's time to nip that lie in the bud

  None of this is true. Yes, Trump won the popular vote and the electoral college. Yes, Republicans won the Senate and the House. But, contrary to both Republican talking points and breathless headlines and hot takes from leading media outlets (“resounding”, “rout”, “runaway win”), there was really nothing at all historic or huge about the margin of victory. Repeat after me: there was no “landslide”. There was no “blowout”. There was no “sweeping” mandate given to Trump by the electorate. The numbers don’t lie.

• US plan to protect consumers from data brokers faces dim future under Trump

• America Stopped Cooking With Tallow for a Reason - The Atlantic

  Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s latest spin on MAGA, “Make frying oil tallow again,” is surprisingly straightforward for a man who has spent decades downplaying his most controversial opinions. Last month, Kennedy argued in an Instagram post that Americans were healthier when restaurants such as McDonald’s cooked fries in beef tallow—that is, cow fat—instead of seed oils, a catchall term for common vegetable-derived oils including corn, canola, and sunflower. Americans, he wrote, are “being unknowingly poisoned” by seed oils; in his view, we’d all be better off cooking with solid fats such as tallow, butter, and lard. In a video that Kennedy posted on Thanksgiving, he deep-fries a whole turkey in beef tallow and says, “This is how we cook the MAHA way.” Cardiologists shuddered at the thought. Conventional medical guidance has long recommended the reverse: less solid fat, more plant oils. But in recent years, a fringe theory has gained prominence for arguing that seed oils are toxic, put into food by a nefarious elite—including Big Pharma, the FDA, and food manufacturers—to keep Americans unhealthy and dependent. Most nutrition scientists squarely dismiss this idea as a conspiracy theory.

  • Find a single person who prefers the current McDonald's fries to the old tallow kind. I'll wait.

• Meta's Mark Zuckerberg seeks 'active role' in Donald Trump's tech policies

External Security / Militaria / Diplomania

• Biden administration bars China from buying HBM chips critical for AI

• US chips are 'no longer safe' to buy, Chinese industry bodies say

• China bans exports to US key high-tech materials

  • China bans exports to US of gallium, germanium in response to chip sanctions

  • China Hits Back at U.S. Chip Controls with Limits on Key Raw Materials

  • China Bans Rare Mineral Exports to the U.S.

  • China bans the sale of materials for chip and battery production to the US

• U.S. officials say they still have not expelled Chinese telco hackers

  • Chinese hack of global telecom providers is 'ongoing,' officials warn

World

• Universities enrolling foreign students with poor English, BBC finds

• Vietnamese tycoon loses death row appeal over biggest bank fraud

  • Vietnamese tycoon must raise $9B or face death penalty

• Police investigate damage to internet cable between Finland and Sweden

  • Why bother investigating? We already knows it was a Chinese ship? And Russians, apparently. ... surely the professional journalists wouldn't have reported these things without the evidence was all in?

• Betel: Addictive nut is driving record rates of cancer

• India takes out giant nationwide subscription to 13,000 journals

• NATO to boost efforts to counter Russian, Chinese sabotage acts

• Japan's Nomura bank boss takes 30% pay cut after worker tries to kill customer

• Apple to offer Indonesia $1B in investment, minister says

• Korea arrests CEO for adding DDoS feature to satellite receivers

South Korea

• Full text of South Korea's martial law decree | Reuters

  In order to protect liberal democracy from the threat of overthrowing the regime of the Republic of Korea by anti-state forces active within the Republic of Korea and to protect the safety of the people, the following is hereby declared throughout the Republic of Korea as of 23:00 on December 3, 2024:

  • 1. All political activities, including the activities of the National Assembly, local councils, and political parties, political associations, rallies and demonstrations, are prohibited.
  • 1. All acts that deny or attempt to overthrow the liberal democratic system are prohibited, and fake news, public opinion manipulation, and false propaganda are prohibited.
  • 1. All media and publications are subject to the control of the Martial Law Command.
  • 1. Strikes, work stoppages and rallies that incite social chaos are prohibited.
  • 1. All medical personnel, including trainee doctors, who are on strike or have left the medical field must return to their jobs within 48 hours and work faithfully. Those who violate will be punished in accordance with the Martial Law.
  • 1. Innocent ordinary citizens, excluding anti-state forces and other subversive forces, will be subject to measures to minimize inconvenience in their daily lives.

• South Korean president declares emergency martial law

• HN comments

• South Korea declares martial law

• Activities related to National Assembly, political parties banned: martial law commander | Yonhap News Agency

• South Korea Declares Emergency Martial Law | ZeroHedge

  South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol declared emergency martial law, accusing the opposition party of engaging in anti-state activities.

• Soldiers surround parliament after South Korea declares martial law: President blames ‘Pro-North Korean forces’ for dramatic move.

• Protests outside South Korea's parliament after President Yoon Suk Yeol declares martial law - live updates - BBC News

  National Assembly Speaker Woo Won-sik submitted a resolution requesting the lifting of martial law around 01:00 local time. The resolution was passed with 190 of 300 members of the ruling and opposition parties in attendance, with all present in favour.

  Photos of tanks lining the streets are circulating online, sparking confusion and concern.

• SouthKorea has placed ALL media outlts under government cntrl due to martial law

• South Korea President Yoon Declares Martial Law: Live Updates - The New York Times

Israel

• Trump: ‘There Will be All Hell to Pay’ if Hamas Doesn’t Release Hostages by January 20.

• Internal Google documents reveal concerns about its cloud contract with Israel

Russia Bad / Ukraine War

• Russians suspected of data cable sabotage between Finland and Sweden

• Russia gives life sentence to Hydra dark web kingpin after seizing ton of drugs

China

• China Became the Largest Car Exporter

• China to give least developed countries zero-tariff treatment

• China leads US in 57 out of 64 Critical Technologies

Health / Medicine

• Social drinkers on obesity drugs lose the taste for alcohol

• New funding could make whole-eye transplants a reality

Pox / COVID / BioTerror AgitProp

• (PDF) After Action Review of the Covid-19 Pandemic: Lessons Learned and a Path Forward

  • 1) The U.S. National Institutes of Health funded gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
  • 2) The Chinese government, agencies within the U.S. Government, and some members of the international scientific community sought to cover-up facts concerning the origins of the pandemic.
  • 3) Operation Warp Speed was a tremendous success and a model to build upon in the future. The vaccines, which are now probably better characterized as therapeutics, undoubtedly saved millions of lives by diminishing likelihood of severe disease and death.
  • 4) Rampant fraud, waste, and abuse plagued the COVID-19 pandemic response.
  • 5) Pandemic-era school closures will have enduring impact on generations of America’s children and these closures were enabled by groups meant to serve those children.
  • 6) The Constitution cannot be suspended in times of crisis and restrictions on freedoms sow distrust in public health.
  • 7) The prescription cannot be worse than the disease, such as strict and overly broad lockdowns that led to predictable anguish and avoidable consequences.

  • House committee reveals where Covid originated from long investigation

• Twice-Yearly HIV Shot Shows 100% Effectiveness in Women

Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda

• California can't use all its solar power. That's a problem

• Oil giants blocked a treaty to curb plastic pollution; countries will try again

• Black plastics may contain toxic compounds that can leach into food, experts say

• Can desalination quench agriculture's thirst?

• The first ice-free day in the Arctic Ocean could occur before 2030

• The lost worlds emerging from glaciers

• Australia struggling with oversupply of solar power

• New York issues first drought warning in 22 years as dry conditions persist

• Green spaces provide substantial but unequal urban cooling globally

• Soil microbiomes show consistent and predictable responses to extreme events