2024-12-11
Luigi, political candy, Cruise over, literal hardware "vulnerability", political debanking, coffee expensive, "defund dissenters", Haiti sucks, Swedish forfeiture, pills for health, raw milk reasons
etc
Luigi
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The police now believe that Mr. Mangione, 26, is the masked gunman who calmly took out a pistol equipped with a suppressor on a Midtown Manhattan street last week and assassinated Brian Thompson, the chief executive of UnitedHealthcare. He was arrested in Altoona, Pa., on Monday after an employee at a McDonald’s recognized him and called the police. Officers said they found him with fake identification, a weapon similar to the one seen in video of the killing and a manifesto decrying the health care industry. Later on Monday, Mr. Mangione was charged in Manhattan with murder, along with additional counts of forgery and illegal weapons possession. And in the hours after his apprehension, his baffling journey from star student to murder suspect began to come into focus. Mr. Mangione was in regular contact with friends and family until about six months ago when he suddenly and inexplicably stopped communicating with them. He had been suffering from a painful back injury, friends said, and then went dark, prompting anxious inquiries from relatives to his friends: Had anyone heard from him?
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Luigi Mangione charged with murdering healthcare CEO in New York
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CEO shooting suspect in angry outburst as he fights extradition to New York
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Family of alleged killer Luigi Mangione has extensive involvement in healthcare
Horseshit
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Do Adults Have the Skills They Need to Thrive in a Changing World?
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Experts vs. Prediction Markets on Assad's Fall in Syria
In his piece, Bremmer wrote about how HTS had been preparing for this moment for months. They took the opportunity with Russia's distraction in Ukraine, and Hezbollah's reduced capabilities due to their war with Israel. However, he also said that "But as weak as Assad is, the fighting is unlikely to topple his regime", and that "Assad defied the odds 13 years ago when Barack Obama’s administration said that he “must go,” and he is likely to do so again". At that point, few people would have disagreed with Bremmer. Assad's regime had fought an 11-year civil war backed by Hezbollah, Russia, and Iran. A few days before the fall of Assad, the Iranian Foreign Minister also visited Assad in Damascus, pledging support in countering the rebel offensive. Later we learned that behind closed doors, Tehran had informed Assad that it cannot send more forces to support the regime, but at the time few doubted that Iran and Russia would let one of their key allies in the Middle East leave without a fight.
What is interesting is that on the same day, on Polymarket, a prediction market where users put real money behind their forecasts, the market on whether 'Assad remain(s) President of Syria through 2024?' declined rapidly from 78% to a low of 39% on 6 December, signalling what was to come. This decline was the result of a number of emerging reports showing that Russia did not have "a plan to save Syrian President Bashar al Assad and that Russia is unlikely to create such a plan as long as pro-regime forces continue to abandon their positions". What made this an interesting market to follow was the volatility of the situation, the impact of outside state and non-state actors in the event, as well as the volume of the market, more than $7.5 million. On the events in Syria, Polymarket was a better news source to follow than most of the major news organisations.
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Scrabble star wins Spanish world title – despite not speaking Spanish
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Taller vehicles are more dangerous to pedestrians, even at low speeds
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Political opinions can influence our product choices, including chocolate
- Side effect of requiring performative political orthodoxy in every aspect of life. Candy doesn't need to celebrate anyone's tribal identity, it is sufficient unto itself.
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Crumbl's empire was never about cookies: tapping into hyper-consumption
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Startup will brick $800 emotional support robot for kids without refunds
celebrity gossip
Rank Propaganda / Thought Policing / World Disordering
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(Jan 2023) TikTok is a Time Bomb – The ultimate weapon of mass distraction
Other platforms, like Facebook and Twitter, use recommendation algorithms as features to enhance the core product. With TikTok, the recommendation algorithm is the core product. You don’t need to form a social network or list your interests for the platform to begin tailoring content to your desires, you just start watching, skipping any videos that don’t immediately draw your interest.
Bluesky
Musk
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Tesla lobbied UK to strengthen rules on carbon emissions from cars and lorries
- When they liked Musk, that was a good act... now "they are bullies" is bad.
Electric / Self Driving cars
Religion / Tribal / Culture War and Re-Segregation
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Annette Bening Says The Quiet Part Out Loud About Having a "Trans Child" - Victory Girls Blog
"To have a transgender child has made ME so much more interesting"
Edumacationalizing / Acedemia Nuts
Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising
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Movie stars, matchmakers, and aunties: How WhatsApp became an unstoppable force
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Apple hit with $1.2B lawsuit after killing controversial CSAM-detecting tool
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Cloud Computing Tax Threatens Chicago's Silicon Valley Ambitions
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Intel Arc B580 trades blows with the RTX 4060 and RX 7600 in early benchmarks
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Chinese hackers use Visual Studio Code tunnels for remote access
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Funko and BrandShield say it wasn't their fault itch.io was taken offline
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How Years of Reddit Posts Have Made the Company an AI Darling
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Musi Decries Apple's App Store Removal: A "Backroom Scheme" with Music Industry
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Daring Fireball: Regarding — and, Well, Against — Substack
Anil Dash, “Don’t Call It a Substack”:
We constrain our imaginations when we subordinate our creations to names owned by fascist tycoons. Imagine the author of a book telling people to “read my Amazon”. A great director trying to promote their film by saying “click on my Max”. That’s how much they’ve pickled your brain when you refer to your own work and your own voice within the context of their walled garden. There is no such thing as “my Substack”, there is only your writing, and a forever fight against the world of pure enshittification.
I am upset by the above, but only insofar as I’m jealous that I had never thought to make the analogy to an author telling people to “read my Amazon”. A publication on Substack is no more “a Substack” than a blog on WordPress is “a WordPress”. It’s really quite a nifty — but devious — trick that Substack has pulled to make this parlance a thing.
- the constraints on form and determination of others to make it an walled echo chamber do set substack publications apart from other outlets. A substack is more than a reddit post, but less than a blog actually owned by the author.
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Instagram will let creators test experimental reels on random people
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Why Google's legal troubles could hasten Firefox's slide into irrelevance
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Weakened US public broadcasters will fight for their lives in 2025
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WordPress parent company must stop blocking WP Engine, judge rules
TechSuck / Geek Bait
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AMD secure VM tech undone by DRAM meddling • The Register
they devised a way to bypass TEE-based memory access restrictions with a Raspberry Pi Pico, a DDR socket, and a 9V battery. The BadRAM attack – which does require physical access to hardware (for example, a rogue admin scenario) – works by abusing the SPD (Serial Presence Detect) chip on a memory module, which identifies the module to hardware. It manipulates the SPD into creating aliases for physical memory, which subsequently can be scoured for secrets in contravention of the TEE integrity goals. "In our attacks, we double the apparent size of the Dual Inline Memory Module (DIMM) installed in the system to trick the CPU's memory controller into using additional 'ghost' addressing bits," the authors explain. "These addressing bits will be unused within the virtually enlarged DIMM, creating an interesting aliasing effect where two different physical addresses now refer to the same DRAM location."
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People who can add hardware to your system are a known security risk. it does sound like an interesting possible means of enhanced debugging and reverse engineering visibility.
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AMD's trusted execution environment blown wide open by new BadRAM attack
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OpenWrt orders router firmware updates after supply chain attack scare
AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World
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Is anyone playing with the combination of generative AI and OpenCyc?
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LA Times Billionaire Owner Hilariously Thinks He Can Solve Media Bias with 'AI'
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Chatbots urged teen to self-harm, suggested murdering parents, lawsuit says
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Billboards Around San Francisco Urge You to 'Stop Hiring Humans'
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The Rich Can Afford Personal Care. The Rest Will Have to Make Do with AI
Space / Boomy Zoomers / UFO
Crypto con games
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US spot Bitcoin ETFs surpass Satoshi's estimated 1.1M BTC holdings
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How Crypto Insiders Turned ‘Debanking’ Into a Political Storm - The New York Times
For years, crypto start-ups like Eco have struggled to find and keep bank accounts in the United States, leading entrepreneurs to cry foul. In angry social media posts, they have accused the government of orchestrating a campaign to squelch the crypto industry, calling the crackdown unconstitutional and un-American. They have sued banking regulators and raised the issue with members of Congress. Those concerns have reached a boiling point. Last month, Marc Andreessen, an influential venture capitalist, appeared on Joe Rogan’s podcast, which reaches more than 10 million listeners, and accused Democrats of “terrorizing” crypto start-ups by pressing banks not to work with them. His complaints were amplified by Elon Musk, as well as crypto executives like Brian Armstrong, the Coinbase C.E.O., and Tyler Winklevoss, who said the government and the banking sector were engaged in “evil behavior.”
Economicon / Business / Finance
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Former Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger calls for prayer and fasting for employees
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Gelsinger fires back at recent stories about 18A's poor yields
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Wall Street Is Betting Billions on Rentals as Ownership Slips Out of Reach
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Most Americans Feel Good About Their Job Security but Not Their Pay
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Statement on FTC Victory Securing Halt to Kroger, Albertsons Grocery Merger
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US Commerce Dept coughs up $6.1B Christmas present for Micron
Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making
Trump
Democrats / Biden Inc
Left Angst
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Nobel laureates sign letter opposing RFK Jr. as US health secretary
More than 75 Nobel Prize winners have signed a letter urging senators not to confirm Robert F. Kennedy Jr., President-elect Donald J. Trump’s pick to lead the Department of Health and Human Services. The letter, obtained by The New York Times, marks the first time in recent memory that Nobel laureates have banded together against a Cabinet choice, according to Richard Roberts, winner of the 1993 Nobel in Physiology or Medicine, who helped draft the letter. The group tries to stay out of politics whenever possible, he said. But the confirmation of Mr. Kennedy, a staunch critic of mainstream medicine who has been hostile to the scientists and agencies he would oversee, is a threat that the Nobel laureates could not ignore, Dr. Roberts said. “These political attacks on science are very damaging,” he said. “You have to stand up and protect it.”
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Donald Trump Controls a Publicly Traded Company. Now He Will Pick Its Regulator
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Trump DOJ obtained phone, text logs of 43 staff, 2 members of Congress
Seeking to investigate leaks of classified information, the Trump Justice Department in 2017 and 2018 secretly obtained phone and text message logs of 43 congressional staffers and two members of Congress in a far broader probe than previously known, according to a new report by the department’s internal watchdog. The report by Inspector General Michael Horowitz found that the DOJ didn’t act with political motives, but failed to take sufficient account of constitutional separation of powers by seizing communications records of staffers and lawmakers — and making them subjects of a criminal investigation — only because they had lawful access to state secrets through their jobs.
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For Bhattacharya, Free Speech Means Freedom to Defund Dissenters
hattacharya, though, seems 100% convinced that (1) the Great Barrington Declaration was exactly right on, and (2) that the government censored him. As I detail in my piece, neither claim appears to be fully supported by the evidence, and his playing the censored victim act is silly. It’s made even worse, of course, because now he’s made it clear that in his role as head of NIH, he intends to push censorial policies to silence researchers who disagree with him. Specifically, he’s talking about denying important NIH research funding to schools he judges to be too woke.
External Security / Militaria / Diplomania
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Rheinmetall joins forces with US software specialist on combat drone development
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White House Says at Least 8 US Telecom Firms Nations Impacted by China
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FCC chair proposes cybersecurity rules in response to China's Salt Typhoon hack
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US Military grounds entire Osprey tiltrotor fleet over safety concerns
World
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Haiti Gangs Kill More Than 180 Mostly Elderly People Accused of Witchcraft
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Bangladesh's leap from poverty to textile powerhouse offers lessons for Africa
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Tokyo government to introduce four-day workweek to empower women
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Thames Water boss defends exec bonuses as sewage spills soar
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Brazil's Lula Undergoes Emergency Brain Surgery Following October Fall | ZeroHedge
Far-left Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva underwent emergency surgery last night to drain a brain bleed connected to a fall in October, the government wrote in a statement on Tuesday morning. Lula's office released a statement on X, indicating the president "visited the Hospital Sírio-Libanês in Brasília last night (December 9) for imaging tests after experiencing a headache." "The magnetic resonance imaging revealed intracranial hemorrhage, resulting from a domestic accident that occurred on October 19," the office said.
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If you’ve got it, don’t flaunt it in Sweden
The new law allows police to seize expensive goods even from people who are not under investigation for a crime, if they cannot prove they acquired them lawfully. Police could arrest a teenager sporting a gold watch, or someone driving a Porsche whom they know is on the dole, and confiscate their swag. The idea is to undermine gang leaders who recruit youngsters by dangling such wares.
- The USA calls it "civil forfeiture"
Russia Bad / Ukraine War
China
Health / Medicine
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Ozempic Killed Diet and Exercise - The Atlantic
Doctors might be slow to admit it, but Ozempic and other GLP-1s drugs are making diet and exercise obsolete.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has some thoughts about Ozempic. According to the nominee to run the Department of Health and Human Services, the government should not provide the drug for millions of Americans, but instead address obesity and diabetes by handing out organic food and gym memberships. Like many of RFK’s statements, these ideas have elicited some outrage. Their basic premise, though—that Americans should control their weight by eating better and getting exercise—could not be more mainstream. But this commonsense philosophy of losing weight, as espoused by RFK, the FDA, and really almost any doctor whom you might have asked at any time in recent memory, has lately fallen out of step with the scientific evidence.
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Short-term cognitive boost from exercise may last for 24 hours, suggests study
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Weight-loss drugs could be key reason why US obesity rates falling, experts say
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Scientists claim they've found the cause mystery colon cancers in young people
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Insurance companies aren't the main villain of the U.S. health system
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FDA may ban artificial red dye from beverages, candy and other foods
Pox / COVID / BioTerror AgitProp
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Australian Virus Lab Loses Track of Deadly Germs in 'Major' Breach
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Covid 'most likely' leaked from a Chinese lab – bombshell report
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WHO sheds some light on factors possibly at play in DRC outbreak
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Bird Flu Can’t Stop the Thirst for Raw Milk - The Atlantic
Across the country, the thirst for an illicit beverage is growing. Raw milk can’t be sold legally for human consumption in many states, but some 11 million Americans drink it anyway as wellness influencers, including Robert F. Kennedy Jr., extol its benefits. They do so despite a well-established risk of disease and death: E. coli, salmonella, and listeria have all been found in unpasteurized milk. This year, a new pathogen has been added to the list. Bird flu was first detected in American dairy cows in March, and in June, an FDA study found infectious viral particles in dozens of raw-milk samples. Previous bird-flu outbreaks have collectively killed more than half of people who get infected. This week, California health officials temporarily shut down production at Raw Farm, a raw-milk dairy, because they detected bird-flu virus in its products. Mark McAfee, who runs Raw Farm, told me that “our consumers are freaking out”—not because they fear being exposed to a potentially deadly virus, but because their supply is at stake. According to McAfee, concerns about further shutdowns have led raw-milk drinkers nationwide to “try to get what they can.” Stocking up on bird-flu juice may seem senseless to most Americans, and yet it’s a logical extension of the ideology that drives raw-milk enthusiasts. The fundamental appeal of raw milk is that its rawness—which includes all of the biologically active molecules passed down from udder to glass, be they strengthening or sickening—makes it both healthy and safe. To the people who drink it, the perceived health benefits of raw milk outweigh, or even negate, the risks.