2024-12-08

assassin appreciation, gambling sucks, 3d printed gun puffery, money shy, politics smells like horseshit, DVDs will return like records, debanking ventures, Syria rebellion gains, UK cow feed fracas

etc

• Top internet sleuths say they won't help find the UnitedHealthcare CEO killer

  “I have yet to see a single video that’s pounding the drum of ‘we have to find him,’ and that is unique,” said Michael McWhorter, better known as TizzyEnt on TikTok, where he posts true crime and viral news content for his 6.7 million followers. “And in other situations of some kind of blatant violence, I would absolutely be seeing that.”

• The UnitedHealthcare Gunman Understands the Surveillance State - The Atlantic

  The masked killer who targeted UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson on the streets of New York City on Wednesday is, after more than 48 hours, still on the run. This is remarkable because he is the focus of a very public manhunt. We know so much already: Videos of the murder have spread widely on social media; police have described physical evidence, including bullet casings and a dropped phone and water bottle that might have been the assassin’s, and released pictures of a “person of interest” from his stay at a Manhattan hostel. We just don’t know who he is. After an outdoor attack in one of the busiest and most intensively surveilled places in the world—where cameras operated by the New York City Police Department and countless property owners are ubiquitous, supplemented by the personal devices that residents and visitors carry—the attacker has vanished, at least for the time being. The gunman has succeeded in avoiding identification in part by understanding how technology is used and what its limits are. This killing raises the possibility that our surveillance network—an intricate web meant to enhance public safety and private security—has become so obvious and intrusive that criminal perpetrators can figure out how to dodge it.

• How an Assassin Escaped One of the Most Surveilled Cities in the World.

• UHC CEO Shooter lookalike competition takes place at Washington Square Park

Horseshit

• Boomers grieve not becoming grandparents–Millennials have little sympathy

• DraftKings sued after father-of-two gambles away $1M of his family's money

• America’s gambling boom should be celebrated, not feared

  Many people see gambling as a vice that ensnares the poor. For them, taking a punt is an indicator of economic immiseration, and the loosening of prohibitions is a mistake that must be corrected as soon as possible. In fact, much about today’s gambling boom should be celebrated as an expansion of people’s freedom to lead their lives as they choose. In part America’s boom reflects the fact that it is catching up with the rest of the world. For decades Uncle Sam confined gambling to casinos, which themselves were restricted to Las Vegas, tribal reservations or riverboats. America’s attitudes to sex, drugs, alcohol and gambling are shaped by its puritanical past. In many states, liquor cannot be sold before church wraps up on Sunday. Hollywood long followed a morality code, which barred depictions of illegal drugs or “licentious” nudity and warned film-makers not to make criminals appear sympathetic. But court rulings in recent years have paved the way for states to legalise and regulate gambling. Many of them, thirsty for new revenue streams, have flocked to gambling as a money-spinner. In 2018 sports-betting was legal only in Nevada. Now it is permitted, with some restrictions, in 38 states. By contrast, sports-betting has long been legal in Australia, Canada and much of Europe and South America. It has been legal in Britain since the 1960s.

• Can hunters' donations help deliver high-quality meat to Colorado food pantries?

• The growing threat of firearms that can be made at home

  a blueprint, easily available online, for a model called the FGC-9, which revolutionised the world of 3D-printed weapons when it was published in March 2020. FGC stands for “fuck gun control” and 9 refers to the 9mm bullets it uses. The slogan reflects the ideological leaning of many involved in the development of 3D-printed guns. In an anonymised interview given after the manual was published, the creator of the FGC-9, who posted under the name JStark1809, said, “We fucked gun control for good … Gun control is dead, and we killed it.” JStark1809 has since been revealed to be Jacob Duygu, a German man of Kurdish origin. In the FGC-9 manifesto, he called on people “to defend yourself and not be a victim to unjust firearm legislation any longer”. Elsewhere, he had posted about being an “incel”. In 2021, he was arrested by the German police. Two days later, he was found dead in a car parked outside his parents’ home in Hanover. He was 28. The German magazine Der Spiegel reported that an autopsy had been unable to determine the cause of death, but foul play and suicide had been ruled out. His mysterious death is the subject of many online conspiracy theories in the 3D-printed gun world.

• Pompeii Graffiti Shows Just How Raunchy Ancient Romans Were

• AI startups snatching up San Francisco real estate as Gen Z craves office life

• Gen-Z's Capitalist Whisperer

  Kyla Scanlon knows it’s easier for most people to talk about their bowel movements than to talk about money. Unlike bathroom habits, which don’t necessarily reflect one’s success or failure in life, money is personal. Money is intimately tied to our sense of self-worth; the ups and downs in our bank account often reflect our most important life choices, and expose our bad habits and vulnerabilities.

• Wealthy Americans Are Now Paying for Their Own Personal Fire Hydrants

• How 'no' became a dirty word in parenting

• Gilbert Atomic Energy chemistry set... Not really that much fun. The most dangerous children's toy just hit the auction block

• The disappearance of literary men should worry everyone

• A $105 Million Inheritance Windfall Is Coming for Heirs in the US - Bloomberg

  About $105 trillion is projected to be passed down from older generations over the next quarter century, according to research firm Cerulli Associates, an amount roughly equal to global gross domestic product in 2023. Rising stock markets and home prices, as well as inflation, have fattened the estates that members of the baby boom generation, born between 1946 and 1964, are expected to leave their heirs. The latest inheritance projection by Cerulli is 45% higher than the 25-year forecast the firm made only three years ago. US gifts and inheritances are expected to total $2.5 trillion next year alone.

celebrity gossip

• Albert Einstein's love letters are headed to auction

Rank Propaganda / Thought Policing / World Disordering

• Joined Facebook to fight terror, now she is convinced we need to fight Facebook

  In college and early in her career, Byrne had dedicated herself to the field of counterterrorism and its attempt to catalog, explain, and ultimately deter non-state political violence. She was most concerned with violent right-wing extremism: neo-Nazis infiltrating Western armies, Klansmen plotting on Facebook pages, and Trumpist militiamen marching on the Capitol.

• The deep and unavoidable roots of political bias

• It's not digital illiteracy: Why older adults are drawn to dubious news

Bluesky

• Clay Shirky: Bluesky Is Different from X. For Now

Musk

• Starlink's first constellation of direct-to-phone satellites is now in orbit

Electric / Self Driving cars

• A man who invented the self-driving car (in 1986)

• Electric Plus Hybrid Vehicles Reach Record US Auto Market Share in Q3

• The electric shock behind Europe's stuttering EV future

• Universal 'Plug and Charge' protocol for EV charging to arrive in 2025

Religion / Tribal / Culture War and Re-Segregation

• America's best-known practitioner of youth gender medicine is being sued

• The awkward diversity era of Hollywood movies is over

Edumacationalizing / Acedemia Nuts

• Cambridge University urged to apologise over jailing of thousands of women

• The internet made a stink over her 'politics of smell' PhD thesis (Archive)

  But last week, the 26-year-old shared a happy photo and a breezy caption on X, unaware that her post — and the niche focus of her PhD thesis — would become a lightning rod in the sprawling culture war against elite institutions and the nebulous concept of “woke.” With her thesis still under embargo, Louks said it’s too early to know exactly what this sudden strike of social media interest will yield.

• The science behind winning a Nobel Prize? Being a man from a wealthy family

Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising

• We all took the DVD boom era for granted

  The DVD boom of the late 90s and early 2000s, on the other hand, really was a remarkable time for movies. So much so that, if you’re a reader of a certain age, you probably didn’t appreciate how good that era was until it ended. The arrival of movies on Digital Versatile Discs around the year 1996 meant that films suddenly looked better than they once did on analogue VHS tapes, and the media itself was lighter and cheaper to produce and distribute.

• Sundar Pichai says Google Search will 'change profoundly' in 2025

• Google pushes back against federal supervision of its payment arm

• Apple's Three-Year Modem Road Map: Company Plans to Beat Qualcomm by 2027

• AMD confirms Ryzen 7 9800X3D stock will improve soon

• Valve's master plan for Steam Machines is finally coming into focus

TechSuck / Geek Bait

• (2021) Fitting Cubic Bézier Curves

• Arctic uses a fan to cool another fan — S12038-4K 120mm fan adds an extra fan in its center to cool its central shaft | Tom's Hardware

  Its advertised power consumption at max load, 3.96W, is 12% lower than the next closest server-grade competitor. It generates an insane 11.45 mmH₂O of static pressure, around 3X-6X greater than Arctic's stable of standard case fans. This high static pressure and airflow level is near the best in class for server hardware. As the name implies, the S12038 can be had in flavors of 4,000 or 8,000 maximum RPM.

AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World

• LA thinks AI could help decide which homeless people get housing – and don't

• The GPT Era Is Already Ending – Something Has Shifted at OpenAI

• OpenAI seeks to unlock investment by ditching 'AGI' clause with Microsoft

Space / Boomy Zoomers / UFO

• (Nov 2024) DoD Examining Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena

• After decades of denial, The Pentagon admits it's baffled by UFOs

• NASA delays first crewed flight to the moon in over 50 years

Crypto con games

• Russian Socialite and Influencer. Cops Say She's a Crypto Laundering Kingpin

Economicon / Business / Finance

• What Arm's CEO makes of the Intel debacle

• Intel ruled tech. Now it's in deep trouble

• Amazon's New Robotic Warehouse Will Rely on Human Workers

Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making

• (PDF) How the Federal Government Weaponized the Bank Secrecy Act to Spy on Americans

  • Feds Use Bank Loophole To Surveil Americans’ Financial Data Without Warrants, House Judiciary Says.

• A16Z: Debanking – What you need to know

  We already have fair banking rules that try to ensure that people aren’t discriminated against — on the basis of age, gender, marital status, national origin, race, religion, and more. But no such rules limit banks (or their regulators) from denying or revoking someone’s right to banking services at whim. Debanking can therefore be used as a tool or weapon systematically wielded by specific political actors/ agencies against private individuals or industries without due process. Imagine if the government decided who could or couldn’t get electricity merely because of their politics, or some arbitrary reason… without having to explain, investigate, notify, or offer recourse. That’s what’s happening with debanking.

Left Angst

• The Silicon Valley Billionaires Steering Trump's Transition

• Elon Musk is not America's new king. But he might be its new Thomas Cromwell

• EPA Advisor Admits ‘Insurance Policy’ Against Trump Funnels Billions to Climate Groups.

• Why Running the Government Like a Business Would Be a Disaster

• Bezos says he is 'optimistic' about Trump's plan to roll back regulations

• Gen Z's financial angst underlies shift to the right

Law Breaking / Police / Internal Security

• Mentally ill Calif. school shooter shot at kids as 'countermeasure' for US involvement in 'genocide of Palestinians': note

• Police illegally sell restricted weapons, supplying crime

External Security / Militaria / Diplomania

• NATO draws up plans for its own fleet of naval surveillance drones

• What One Russian Satellite Tells Us About the Future of Nuclear Warfare

• Protecting Undersea Internet Cables Is a Tech Nightmare

• Many Americans' cellphone data being hacked by China, official says

• Beyond TikTok – The National Security Risks of Chinese Agricultural Drones

World

• Truong My LAN: Vietnamese tycoon in race to repay $9B to avoid execution

• South Korea's Yoon Apologizes for Martial Law, Leaves All Decisions to Party

• Syrian opposition forces led by HTS are now on the outskirts of Homs City

  • Syrian rebels begin to encircle Damascus

• Athens's New Answer to a Water Supply Crunch: An Ancient Aqueduct

• What to Know About Gadhimai Festival–and Its Controversial Mass Animal Sacrifice

• Belgium found guilty of crimes against humanity in colonial Congo

• A year into Javier Milei's presidency, Argentina's poverty hits a new high

• Norway's sovereign wealth fund rises to a record €1,700B

• Deepfakes weaponised to target Pakistan's women leaders

Russia Bad / Ukraine War

• 'Rail Force One': The Trains That Take World Leaders to Ukraine

• Badass Russian techie outsmarts FSB, flees Putinland

• If Putin loses his Tartus base, he may need a ceasefire in Ukraine

China

• Will China's manufacturing juggernaut run out of road?

Health / Medicine

• The Allure of 'Microdosing' Ozempic

• The most mysterious psychedelic is already inside your brain

• Co-sleeping causes 3 more infant deaths in New York, officials say in warning

• US Food and Drug Administration moves to ban red food dye

Pox / COVID / BioTerror AgitProp

• Bird flu has been detected in a pig in the US. Why does that matter?

• Wuhan lab samples hold no close relatives to virus behind Covid

Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda

• A Uranium-Mining Boom Is Sweeping Through Texas

• Greenland is getting greener – helped by a mining company tree enthusiasts

• Why misinformation about a cow feed additive prompted people to throw milk away

  Some UK social media users have been pouring milk down their sinks and toilets in protest at the trial of a new feed additive that claims to significantly reduce the emission of methane gas in dairy cows. Arla Foods, a Danish-Swedish company which owns the UK’s biggest dairy cooperative, announced last week that 30 of its farms across the country would test the additive, named Bovaer. The company behind Bovaer - which is added in small quantities to cow feed - says it could reduce cow methane emissions by between 30-45%. It has been approved for use by UK regulators, and several major supermarkets will stock milk produced by cattle eating feed with the additive. Some online users have raised concerns around the use of Bovaer, citing issues around the safety of certain compounds used in it. However, experts have told the BBC that the additive “does not pose any food safety issues”. Other consumers have been threatening to boycott products from leading supermarkets in anger over the trial, while multiple farmers have taken to social media to inform consumers that they don’t use Bovaer. Meanwhile, baseless claims of it being part of a “depopulation” plot have swirled online alongside misinformation about its links to US-billionaire Bill Gates.

  • Calls to Boycott Dairy Products From Cows Given Anti-Methane Supplement Grow in UK

• UK tap water safety at risk after testing labs shut down

• How leaded gas has created a mental health crisis for Gen X