2024-12-15

gang-nail plates, healthcare industry hysteria, Pelosi broke her hip, Bluesky begs for bans, pardons are confessions, Elon the knife, NJ drones ours?, Korean President impeached, CA can ban gas cars

etc

• The invention that accidentally made McMansions

  This is a really interesting video about something called the gang-nail plate, a construction innovation that enabled larger roofs to be built on houses, removed the need for internal load-bearing walls, and made the process of construction cheaper & more efficient.

• Don’t Get Burned: 2.6 Million Stanley Mugs Are Being Recalled Worldwide After 38 Reported Injuries

• Downtown San Francisco experiences first tornado warning in recorded history

Luigi

• Lawyers weigh suspect's options to fight charge he murdered Brian Thompson

• Americans are furious over health care. Is this an Occupy Wall Street moment?

• The ENTIRE healthcare system is broken, not just health insurance companies

• The online 'gray tribe' philosophy of UnitedHealthcare killer Luigi Mangion

• FBI Passed Tip About Mangione to New York Police After CEO Killing

• The dark fandom behind healthcare CEO murder suspect

• Luigi Mangione and the Making of a Modern Antihero

• Lawyers weigh suspect's options to fight charge he murdered Brian Thompson

• Why are so many Americans acting like a pack of ghouls?

  I have to admit I was pretty astonished to see so many Americans publicly supporting a murder. But perhaps I shouldn’t have been. When Hamas massacred a bunch of random Israeli civilians on October 7, 2023, leftist organizations in the U.S. adopted the symbol of a parachute — which some of the Hamas soldiers used to carry out the attack. Many exulted in the violence. Compared to that sustained outpouring of ghoulishness, the cheering of Thompson’s murder is small potatoes.

  And the ghoulishness is by no means confined to the political left. When Nancy Pelosi’s husband was left with a fractured skull from an attack in 2022, Donald Trump mocked him and his son Donald Trump Jr. joked about it, much to the delight of many rightists. Meanwhile, Republicans have come to tolerate an absurd level of personal immorality from their leaders. Matt Gaetz, who has been investigated for child sex trafficking and accused of having sex with multiple minors, withdrew his bid for Attorney General, but not before Elon Musk threatened to primary any legislator who didn’t vote for Gaetz’s confirmation. And while a few leftists try to cheer Hamas, a much larger number of rightists enjoy ridiculing Ukraine for defending itself against Russian conquest and brutalization.

• Woman denied a claim faces 15 years 100000 bond for Delay Deny Depose threat

Horseshit

• I was a long-haired teenage boy in the 1960s. Why did everyone hate us so much?

• US city tells residents to stop sticking googly eyes on its statues

• Superflares are rare but extreme events that could disrupt life on Earth

celebrity gossip

• Reports: Pelosi's Injuries in Luxembourg Are Quite Serious

  • Nancy Pelosi Hospitalized in Luxembourg After Sustaining Injury From Fall - The New York Times

  Former Speaker Nancy Pelosi was hospitalized on Friday after being injured while traveling abroad on a bipartisan congressional delegation to Luxembourg, a spokesman said on Friday. Ms. Pelosi, 84, “sustained an injury during an official engagement,” the spokesman, Ian Krager, said in a brief statement that provided no details on the nature of the injury or how it occurred. He said she was admitted to a hospital for evaluation. Ms. Pelosi tripped going down marble stairs at the Grand Ducal Palace and took a hard fall, according to a person familiar with the incident who was not authorized to comment and spoke on condition of anonymity. People close to Ms. Pelosi in California and Washington, D.C., speaking on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak for her, said the former speaker fractured her hip when she fell. They said doctors were confident the damage could be repaired with a routine operation, but it was not yet clear whether that would be done in Luxembourg or in the United States.

• U2's Larry Mullen Jr: my dyscalculia makes 'counting like climbing Everest'

Obit

• OpenAI whistleblower found dead in San Francisco apartment

  • OpenAI whistleblower found dead in San Francisco apartment

Bluesky

• Bluesky has found out what happens if you take millions of the most demented users from a much larger platform and make them your own problem: They become your own problem.

  many Bluesky users don't want to just moderate and ignore Singal, they want him gone. It's become a dealbreaker. By keeping him, Bluesky risks harming the community, depleting its goodwill, and losing users, while also sending a signal to others that bad actors and harassers are welcome there.

Musk

• Elon Musk Hits $400B: The Billionaire Who's Cash Poor but Aiming for Mars

• Resignation at the Royal Society | Skeptical Inquirer

  On November 25, the neuropsychologist Dorothy V M Bishop published a blog post announcing she had resigned from the Royal Society in protest against the continued membership of Elon Musk, who was made a Foreign Fellow in 2018. The story has since been picked up by The Guardianand is rapidly spreading through the scientific press

• Teens say YouTube is their go-to social app–and X is fading into irrelevance

Electric / Self Driving cars

• Sony-Honda's 275-mile electric sedan set to launch in US

• It's Not This Tesla Cybertruck's Fault That It's Stuck in a Little Snow

Edumacationalizing / Acedemia Nuts

• My School Experimented with 'Education Equity.' It Failed

Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising

• YouTube quietly made some of its web embeds worse, including ours

• Tinder Warns of Declining Revenue While It Rethinks Core App

• Sony is reportedly working on a PS5 portable

• Are Social Media Platforms the Next Dying Malls?

• Does YouTube have a future if its creators have to make money elsewhere?

• Social media users probably won't read beyond this headline, researchers say

TechSuck / Geek Bait

• Intel ME Cleaner

  • Older Intel chips can have the "Management Engine" firmware removed or crippled

• Systemd begrudgingly drops a safety net while a challenger appears

• Contrary to some, traceroute is real – I should know, I helped make it work

AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World

• OpenAI, GoogleDeepMind, and Meta Get Bad Grades on AI Safety

• Canada proposed $15B incentive to boost AI green data centre investment

• AI's emissions are about to skyrocket even further

• Meta asks the US government to block OpenAI's switch to a for-profit

  • Meta Urges California Attorney General to Stop OpenAI from Becoming For-Profit

• Ilya Sutskever believes superintelligent AI will be 'unpredictable'

• Study: LLMs are prone to social identity biases similar to the way humans are

• Large Concept Models: Language Modeling in a Sentence Representation Space

• Michael Dell Spent 40 Years Preparing for an AI Boom No One Expected

Crypto con games

• Don't use crypto to cheat on taxes: Bitcoin bro gets 2 years

Economicon / Business / Finance

• Palantir, MicroStrategy and Axon are now in the Nasdaq 100

• SF tech startup Scale AI, worth $13.8B, accused of widespread wage theft

• Western self-sufficiency in computer chips is just not going to happen

• The U.S. Chinese immigrants running Temu shipping centers from their homes

• Meet the People Who Refused to Go Back to the Office and Lost Their Jobs

Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making

• TikTok loses emergency bid to pause law that could lead to US ban

  • U.S. Court Denies TikTok's Request to Freeze Sale-or-Ban Law

• Citizenship Is Becoming More of a Privilege Than a Right

• Minnesota and New Jersey Sue Glock over Lethal Add-On for Guns

Trump

• OpenAI's Altman will donate $1M to Trump's inaugural fund

• Trump hosts Apple CEO at Mar-a-Lago as big tech leaders continue outreach

• Justice Department: Jan. 6 defendants who accept pardons will make ‘a confession of guilt’ - POLITICO

  “[A] pardon at some unspecified date in the future ... would not unring the bell of conviction,” federal prosecutors argued in a Jan. 6 case before U.S. District Judge Carl Nichols. “In fact, quite the opposite. The defendant would first have to accept the pardon, which necessitates a confession of guilt.”

• Now we know how many secret sources the FBI had on Jan. 6, but what did they do?

• Report reveals that FBI spied on its likely new director, Kash Patel

  • REPORT: FBI Spied on Their Incoming Boss, Kash Patel – RedState

• George Stephanopoulos and ABC apologize to Trump, are forced to pay $15 million to settle defamation suit.

Left Angst

• Bringing Elon to a knife fight - by Jennifer Pahlka

  I am guessing that those most worried that DOGE will succeed have never tried their hand at reforming government. It’s hard. But easier, you say, with no respect for the law, and the DOGE team will be unencumbered by such details. But that’s not true. The lawsuits will come. A lot of the government tech community is skipping the hand wringing; they've basically just grabbed a bag of popcorn and are watching in real time as Elon and Vivek learn all the things they’ve known, lived, and absolutely hated for their entire time in public service. They don’t see DOGE as their savior, but they are feeling vindicated after years of shouting into the void. I am struck by how different the tone of the DOGE conversation is between political leaders on the left and the people who’ve been fighting in the implementation trenches. One group is terrified they’ll succeed. The other is starting to ask a surprising question (or at least I am): What if even billionaires can’t disrupt the system we have built?

  It’s not that Dems haven’t tried the billionaire move. Obama’s Secretary of Defense Ash Carter started the Defense Innovation Board and appointed Eric Schmidt to lead it, for example. Carter’s hope was to transform the military into a modern, effective (and dare I say efficient) institution, and saw Schmidt as extra firepower for change, so to speak. Many grumped about the unaccountable power Schmidt would have, but I served on that board for four years and that concern was laughable.

• Trump wants to end daylight savings time

• The Week CEOs Bent the Knee to Trump

• Trump set to scrap car-crash regulation Musk hates

• In Display of Fealty, Tech Industry Curries Favor with Trump

External Security / Militaria / Diplomania

• Makes sense: NJ Drones might be American

  • 86 years after 'War of the Worlds' broadcast, visitors in sky have NJ panicking

• We need to talk about Salt Typhoon

• U.S. Air Force Confirms Drone Sightings over Ramstein Air Base in Germany

World

• Britain's bright and ambitious are running out of reasons to stay

• British trader found guilty of £1B fraud

• The British Sleep Society Position Statement on Daylight Saving Time in the UK

• Japan's audacious bid to become a semiconductor superpower

• South Korea's parliament votes to impeach president over martial law debacle

  • South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol Impeached over Martial Law

• Brazil's ex-defense minister arrested for meddling in coup probe

Iran / Houthi

• Iranian malware linked to recent attacks on US, Israeli infrastructure

Health / Medicine

• Japanese researchers test pioneering drug to regrow teeth

• Most people who opt for medically assisted dying around the world have cancer

• N.C. couple free of nearly $100k medical debt after 15 years

• Americans spend more years being unhealthy than people in any other country

Pox / COVID / BioTerror AgitProp

• Bird flu jumps from birds to human in Louisiana; patient hospitalized

• Sold-out farm shops, smuggling, safety warnings: US battle over raw milk grows

Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda

• EPA will grant California the right to ban sales of new gas cars by 2035

• Biodiversity loss due to agricultural trade three times higher than thought

• Marine emissions of methanethiol increase aerosol cooling in the Southern Ocean

• After 2 years, Coca-Cola's promise to scale up reusable packaging is dead