2024-12-25

well aged mammoth veal, Santa tracking, its all becuz of young men, fake chocolate, "cheap" ex-rentals, Usenet counter suits, AI generated junk, touching the Sun, German infertility, fig wasps

etc

• Scientists unveil 50k-year-old baby mammoth remains

• Fiber friction is the key to cozy knits

• FAA probes holiday drone show accident that injured a boy in Florida

  • 7-year-old boy undergoes heart surgery after getting hit by falling drone

• Lifted in hours: American Airlines Grounds All Flights After "Technical Issue"

  • American Airlines Grounds US Flights Amid Technical Glitch

  • American Airlines resumes flights after nationwide 'technical issue'

• Official Norad Tracks Santa

  • Santa Tracker: The slip-up that started a 70-year-old festive tradition

  This surprise call started the nearly 70-year tradition of the Santa Tracker, which allows children around the world to track the whereabouts of Father Christmas via a livestream and a phone line answered by volunteers. It is now run by CONAD's successor, the North American Aerospace Defence Command (NORAD). Nearly 1,000 volunteers cycled through the NORAD Tracks Santa Operations Center on Peterson Space Force Base, Colorado, between 4 a.m. and 10 p.m. Dec. 24, 2022. Volunteers providing updated information on Santa's location and gifts delivered worked in two-hour shifts answering phone calls from children and adults located around the globe.

  But how did a child seemingly get the phone number of a colonel in the US air force? The American department store Sears had printed an advert in a local newspaper telling children they could call Santa, Terri explains. "They had printed one digit wrong in the phone number. And it was dad's top secret number."

• Unique northern Minnesota border airport closing after 70 years

Horseshit

• Nearly four decades on and, like Jesus, ransomware won't die

• How did human butts evolve to look that way?

• Are Young Men Really Becoming More Sexist? (Archive)

  It’s conventional wisdom that young people will be more progressive than their forebears. But although young people can often be counted upon to be more comfortable with risk and radicalism, that doesn’t mean they will always express that through left-leaning politics. Young men may have helped hand President-Elect Donald Trump his victory, fueling the narrative about a growing gender gap among young voters. But this is not just an American trend. In South Korea, young men have been radicalized against feminism, opening up a large gender gap; in Poland, gender emerged “as a significant factor … with young men showing a strong preference” for the far-right political alliance; and in Belgium, the anti-immigrant and separatist Vlaams Belang party received significantly more support from young men than young women. Could the Gen Z political gender gap be an international phenomenon?

• In the shadows of Arizona's data center boom, thousands live without power

• Lilium ceases operations before delivering a single electric air taxi

  • Insolvent flying taxi startup Lilium has found a buyer

• The chocolate of the future will have less cocoa or none at all

  Cocoa prices have reached record highs, recently surpassing $10,000 (CHF9,150) per tonne for the first time. Poor weather and disease in Ivory Coast and Ghana have led to a deficit in cocoa beans for the third year in a row. The two West African countries account for about 60% of global cocoa production. To add more pressure, the European Union has introduced a “zero deforestation” supply chain regulation which will come into force in January 2025. Seven agricultural commodities, including cocoa and cocoa products such as chocolate, cannot be sold in the EU unless it can be proven that they have not caused deforestation since 2020.

  It is this challenging environment that is fuelling the search for new ingredients that can replace or minimise the use of cocoa in chocolate but are cultivated in Europe. UK based company NukokoExternal link is one such start-up that is making the most of this trend. It managed to raise $1.5 million in seed funding this year to scale up its cocoa-free chocolate made from fava beans.

• How Tortillas Lost Their Magic

• Nobody goes to New York City anymore. It's too crowded

• $2,100 mechanical keyboard has 800 holes, NYC skyscraper looks

• A Debt Jubilee of Biblical Proportions Is Coming — Are You Ready?

  I believe the federal debt jubilee will come in the form of a massive wave of inflation. The coming debt jubilees could wipe out trillions in liabilities while unleashing previously unimaginable inflation. That could trigger the largest wealth transfer in history. Remember, debt doesn’t exist within a vacuum. It’s a liability for the borrower and an asset for the lender. Those storing wealth in government currencies, bonds, and other paper assets will be the biggest losers. Debtors and owners of scarce, unencumbered, hard assets will be the big winners.

• Some call it Twixmas. Others call it Feral Week. The period between Christmas and New Year’s Eve is the perfect time to do nothing — and experts say we need it.

celebrity gossip

• Francis Ford Coppola: 'I Have Nothing Left to Lose'

• Prosecutors Drop Appeal in Alec Baldwin 'Rust' Shooting Case; Ending Legal Battle

Obit

• Gordon Mah Ung, PCWorld Editor and Renowned Hardware Journalist, Dies at 58

Musk

• Sonic booms from most powerful rocket ever built have some scientists worried

Electric / Self Driving cars

• Hertz Is Asking Customers If They Want to Keep Their Tesla Rentals

  Hertz bought a bunch of Tesla Model 3s for its rental fleet and quickly realized that Tesla depreciation would be extra bad at scale. In an aggressive effort to sell off its remaining Tesla inventory, the rental company is sending extra cheap buyout options to rental customers. If you like your rental, Hertz will sell it to you for an extra cheap good deal. One Hertz customer took to Reddit to show off a screenshot of the deal he got directly from Hertz, a 2023 Tesla Model 3 with 30,000 miles on the odometer for $17,913.

• Electric Cars Could Last Much Longer Than You Think

Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising

• When the world logs off: Christmas, New Year's, and the Internet holiday rhythm

• Under Pressure, Telegram Pulls Off an Elusive Milestone: A Profit

• 'Destroyed' Usenet Provider Sues Anti-Piracy Group for Millions in Damages

  Once-thriving Usenet provider NSE was targeted by Dutch anti-piracy group BREIN many years ago. Under legal pressure, the provider felt forced to shut down its successful business. Though NSE ultimately triumphed in court, that victory came years later. NSE is now demanding millions of euros to compensate for the alleged damage to its business. BREIN, however, sees things differently.

• Open source maintainers are drowning in junk bug reports written by AI

  Seth Larson, security developer-in-residence at the Python Software Foundation, raised the issue in a blog post last week, urging those reporting bugs not to use AI systems for bug hunting. "Recently I've noticed an uptick in extremely low-quality, spammy, and LLM-hallucinated security reports to open source projects," he wrote, pointing to similar findings from the Curl project in January. "These reports appear at first glance to be potentially legitimate and thus require time to refute."

• Netflix sues Broadcom's VMware over US virtual machine patents

• Apple's bad blood with Nvidia continues, after decades of fighting

• Apple seeks to defend Google's billion-dollar payments in search case

• 'We are not a retro company': Sega prepares to go back to the future

• 2024 was the year gamers started pushing back on the erosion of game ownership

TechSuck / Geek Bait

• Tim Peters returns to the Python community

  From what Peters says on that page, the only contact he had during the entire process leading up to his ban was a single message from the SC, which Morehouse also mentioned in her post; ""we did discuss this directly with the person first as an initial corrective measure where the feedback was not received and no willingness to listen or improve was indicated (in fact, doubling down on issues we were trying to address occurred)"". As might be guessed, Peters has a significantly different take on what was said, though he does admit to being dismissive of that message, in part because the specific example given ""didn't pass a 'reasonable person' test to me"". He will not release the email exchange without SC permission, but he claims that the message was fairly vague other than the one example:

  Without specificity, the best I could make of it was "we're not objecting to what you're saying, we're objecting to who you are - become someone different, in ways you must already know we have in mind". It left both sides unmoved, but they didn't reply to my reply, so there was no "discussion". It was a one-time exchange of monologues.

• The quest to save the largest CRT TV from destruction

• with grace and skill: Ask HN: Programmers who don't use autocomplete/LSP, how do you do it?

AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World

• Salesforce: We're Going to Hire 2k Sales Execs Now to Sell AI

• Elon Musk's xAI company has secured $6 billion in investment.

• AI bigwigs want to go all-in on nuclear. They are also behind nuclear companies

• The AI backlash couldn't have come at a better time

Space / Boomy Zoomers / UFO

• NASA solar probe to make its closest ever pass of sun on Christmas Eve

  • Parker Solar Probe attempts closest ever fly-by of Sun

  • NASA's Parker Solar Probe aims to fly closer to the sun like never before

• Space Station keeps dodging debris from China's 2007 satellite weapon test

Crypto con games

• US and Japan Blame North Korea for $308M Crypto Heist

• World's first Bitcoin nation scales back crypto dream

Economicon / Business / Finance

• Intel shareholders file case asking ex CEO, CFO to return 3 years of salary

• Google CEO reveals major job cuts as part of "efficiency" move

• Honda and Nissan Aim to Merge as Global Competition Bears Down

  • Two seismic changes pushing Honda and Nissan into merger talks

• New research suggests that Walmart makes the communities it operates in poorer

• Carlos Ghosn Predicts a Reckoning for Car Industry 'Weaklings'

• Dairy farmers struggle to cover expenses as American appetites change

• Starbucks strike to expand to over 300 US stores on Christmas Eve, union says

Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making

• (April 2024) The Corporate Transparency Act Means Jail Time for Small Business Owners

Democrats / Biden Inc

• Democrats Block Tom Cotton Resolution To Condemn Biden’s Commutation for ‘Kids for Cash’ Judge

• New research shows the massive hole Dems are in - POLITICO

  When asked to compare the Democratic Party to an animal, one participant compared the party to an ostrich because “they’ve got their heads in the sand and are absolutely committed to their own ideas, even when they’re failing.” Another likened them to koalas, who “are complacent and lazy about getting policy wins that we really need.” Democrats, another said, are “not a friend of the working class anymore.”

Left Angst

• Silicon Valley's Influence on the White House

• K Street’s airing of grievances - POLITICO

• The ironies of Trump’s tantrums about the dollar

  US president-elect Donald Trump wants a weaker dollar in order to boost exports, protect American jobs from foreign competition and reduce the trade deficit. He also wants a strong dollar and will not brook any challenges to its dominance in global finance. If that is not enough of an inconsistency, the new administration’s policies could well be at cross-purposes with both of those intentions. Its actions will probably boost the dollar’s value in the short run while its status as a reserve currency may well become shakier.

Law Breaking / Police / Internal Security

• Gay couple gets 100 years in prison for rape of adopted sons

  The couple raised them under the guise of a happy home in an affluent Atlanta suburb. But their supposedly picture-perfect life — Zachary worked in banking and William was a government employee — held a dark secret.The couple was arrested in 2022 after an alleged member of the ring was caught downloading child porn, and he told the investigators how the Zulocks were making porn with young boys living in their house. Both Zulocks plead guilty to charges of aggravated child molestation, aggravated sodomy, sexual exploitation of children.

External Security / Militaria / Diplomania

• Congress is looking to ban new sales of popular Chinese-made drones

World

• Tokyo released point cloud data of the entire city for free

• Russian cargo ship sinks in Mediterranean after explosion in engine room

• Paris to Berlin by train is now faster by five hours

• The forests that powered premodern Britain into the modern age

• Brazil shuts BYD factory site over 'slavery' conditions

• Germany's Social Democrats Failed Miserably

• Australia is banning social media for teens. Should Canada do the same?

• Germany joins EU’s ‘ultra-low’ fertility club

  Official statistics show Germany’s birth rate fell to 1.35 children per woman in 2023, below the UN’s “ultra-low” threshold of 1.4 — characterising a scenario where falling birth rates become tough to reverse. Estonia and Austria also passed under the 1.4 threshold, joining the nine EU countries — including Spain, Greece and Italy — that in 2022 had fertility rates below 1.4 children per woman. The fall in birth rates partially reflects the “postponement of parenthood until the 30s”, which involves a “higher likelihood that you will not have as many children as you would like because of the biological clock”, said Willem Adema, senior economist at the OECD. Without immigration, low fertility rates mean a shrinking working-age population, adding pressures on public finances and limiting economic growth.

Russia Bad / Ukraine War

• Saudi Arabia Becomes Top Buyer Of Russian Fuel Oil  | OilPrice.com

China

• Questions Emerge About Data Used by China to Defend Against Doping Allegations

Pox / COVID / BioTerror AgitProp

• Post COVID data in the UK: Those who got the jab substantially increased their chances of death.

• The Elusive Payoff of Gain of Function

• Flu surges in Louisiana as health department barred from promoting flu shots

• Key warning signs about bird flu are all going in the wrong direction

Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda

• Is it true there are dead wasps in figs?

  The female wasp crawls inside through a hole so narrow that she loses her wings in the process and becomes trapped. If the fig is a male, she lays her eggs inside. These hatch into larvae that burrow out, turn into wasps and fly off, carrying fig pollen with them. If the wasp climbs into a female fig, she pollinates it, but cannot lay her eggs and just dies alone. Luckily for us, the female fig produces an enzyme that digests this wasp completely. The crunchy bits are seeds, not wasp parts.

• The next volcanic eruption is coming

• Coconut palms dominate over half of Pacific atoll forests

• Recycling human and animal excreta could help meet nutrient supply for crops