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2024-12-31

microwave your TV, dissent is neo-medieval, all or nothing apocalypses, sovereign slavery, Carter more popular than ever, credit defaults up, H1B slave geeks, Biden apologists, Treasury hax

etc

Horseshit

  • India's food shortage filled American libraries

  • LG's microwave has a 27-inch display

    LG has responded to Samsung in the battle to slap displays on every home appliance you own, culminating in the LG Signature microwave which puts a superfluous 27-inch LCD touchscreen and speakers into an appliance you probably don’t even need. LG says the microwave’s display provides “an immersive entertainment experience” that’ll surely prevent the onset of buyer’s remorse at having overpaid for a potential advertising machine centrally located in your kitchen. And when paired with LG’s oven, it “conveniently shows the cooking progress of dishes in the range, eliminating the need to bend down and check the oven manually.”

  • Air cab manufacturer Volocopter has filed for insolvency

  • Jolt Cola aims to make a comeback – this time with even more caffeine

  • We know where your car is

  • neomedievalism and transnational nobility - alice maz

    Disinfo is perhaps the most insidious, meant to deliberately provoke the immune response that we all need now to survive online, thereby muddying waters, hardening opinion against both sides of an argument, and cultivating cynicism against the author's enemies. AI will make all of this unimaginably worse, a printing press for printing presses, and it is likely that people will retreat further into closed communities to escape the deluge of garbage that will swamp the public internet.

    The nation-state is a creature of the unitary public, broadcast media, and consensus reality. The chaos of the internet makes it fundamentally impossible to organize on that same scale, and this situation is likely to persist for decades. Western politics and ideology were grounded for centuries in a shared understanding of popular will, state sovereignty, and the public good. That shared basis is gone now. We have ceased to debate, in the broader sphere, how to accomplish the ends we all take for granted as true. We have regressed, necessarily, to arguing about what those ends even ought to be.

  • It Takes Two to Think

  • Life Cannot Be Delegated - by L. M. Sacasas

    The bargain we are being asked to ratify takes the form of a magnificent bribe. Under the democratic-authoritarian social contract, each member of the community may claim every material advantage, every intellectual and emotional stimulus he may desire, in quantities hardly available hitherto even for a restricted minority: food, housing, swift transportation, instantaneous communication, medical care, entertainment, education. But on one condition: that one must not merely ask for nothing that the system does not provide, but likewise agree to take everything offered, duly processed and fabricated, homogenized and equalized, in the precise quantities that the system, rather than the person, requires. Once one opts for the system no further choice remains. In a word, if one surrenders one’s life at source, authoritarian technics will give back as much of it as can be mechanically graded, quantitatively multiplied, collectively manipulated and magnified.

    There’s a lot to think about in those few lines. For my money, that paragraph, written sixty years ago, tells us more about the current state of affairs than a thousand takes we might stumble across as we browse our timelines today.

  • Escape the Silicon Valley Filter Bubble

    When codegen was the focus of all of tech twitter, companies like HeyGen and ElevenLabs were being started as some of the breakout apps of the GenAI revolution. When Sequoia and Goldman published their pieces on AI’s $600B question, you could’ve bought Nvidia for a near 40% gain.

  • Arizona's Tiny Taipei: How a Taiwanese Chip Factory Seeded a Community

  • Human Civilization at critical junction:authoritarian collapse or superabundance

    "Industrial civilisation is facing 'inevitable' decline as it is replaced by what could turn out to be a far more advanced ‘postmaterialist’ civilisation based on distributed superabundant clean energy. The main challenge is that industrial civilisation is facing such rapid decline that this could derail the emergence of a new and superior 'life-cycle' for the human species", commented Dr Nafeez Ahmed, author of the paper, member of The Club of Rome, member of the Earth4All Transformational Economics Commission and Distinguished Fellow at the Schumacher Institute for Sustainable Systems.

  • From The Sovereign Individual to Idiocracy - by Luis Cuende

    Emma is an average earner. She works in an administrative 9-to-5 job. Adam has kids and considers himself as a pragmatic centrist voter. Emma doesn't have kids and considers herself a leftist voter aligned with social justice.

    Emma never met Adam. But in her mind, Adam is enslaving her. He’s making her poorer and making her do work that he doesn’t enjoy to barely make a living. Adam never met Emma. But in his mind, Emma is enslaving him. A horde of Emmas are voting for bureaucrats that force him to pay most of what he produces to them, yet they produce little themselves.

    I will not go into who’s right or wrong. Capitalism has reduced poverty by 90% and grown GDP per capita by 3,000%. I hope the numbers speak for themselves. The fight above isn’t a fair fight. Adam has an order of magnitude more mobility than Emma. At some point, triggered by yet another tax hike, not feeling welcome anymore or rising crime, Adam decides to move his family. Adam and his family relocate to Dubai. He hates leaving his extended family and friends behind, and he isn’t even sure whether he’ll call Dubai home for the decades to come. But he cannot subdue the future of his family to populism.

    • War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, and Isolationist Populism arises from rich multi-nationalists.

  • California Flat Earther admits partial defeat after trip to Antarctica

  • Gen Zers may not have a house or kids, but they're spoiling their pets more

  • Chaos Packaging

    • The packaging and retailing industry has gone berserk.

  • American homeowners are wasting more space than ever before

  • "bone anchors" poor little fellers. VR Goggles for Mice

celebrity gossip

Bluesky

Musk

Electric / Self Driving cars

Religion / Tribal / Culture War and Re-Segregation

  • What the Left Refused to Understand About Women’s Sports - The Atlantic

    The story of transgender women competing in female sports is frequently told as one of inclusion—creating opportunities for people to compete as their authentic selves. But for athletes such as Liilii, these rules were a matter of exclusion. Every spot taken by someone with a male athletic advantage is an opportunity closed to a female rival. Other players in the conference, it turned out, had concerns similar to Liilii’s. In particular, some worried whether a ball spiked over the net by a stronger and more powerful player could injure them. Those concerns would ultimately lead Nevada and other teams to forfeit games to San Jose State, in the largest-scale protest yet by female athletes against the presence of a trans competitor.

    Many progressives have viewed trans rights as an uncomplicated sequel to the successful campaigns for voting rights for Black Americans and marriage equality for same-sex couples. But the volleyball players were pointing to an issue that affected two traditionally marginalized groups: gender-nonconforming people and women athletes. And the left, which had become attached to a simple, hierarchical ranking of oppression, could find no way to arbitrate between the two groups—or even acknowledge that any conflict existed.

  • Costco Board Pushes Back Against Anti-DEI Activists

Edumacationalizing / Acedemia Nuts

Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising

AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World

Space / Boomy Zoomers / UFO

  • NASA's Parker Solar Probe has survived the closest-ever Sun flyby

  • T Cor Bor: Astronomers await dazzling celestial show

    Now a whole new generation of stargazers are scanning the skies again because scientists believe T Cor Bor ignites about every 80 years or so.

    On a crystal clear night, in the Dark Skies Reserve of Bannau Brycheiniog, also known as the Brecon Beacons, astronomers are setting up their telescopes. "T Cor Bor is dim at the minute - it's magnitude 10, well below what you can see with the naked eye," explains Dr Jenifer Millard from Fifth Star Labs. To find the area of sky where it should appear, she advises to first locate the plough and follow its handle to Arcturus. To the west of this star is the curved constellation of Corona Borealis, made up of seven stars, and where T Cor Bor will at some point light up. "It is only going to be visible to the naked eye for a couple of days," she says.

Crypto con games

Economicon / Business / Finance

Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making

Trump

  • Elon Musk changes his tune on H1-B visas as he tries to cool raging MAGA civil war over skilled immigration.

  • H-1B Mega Thread.

    To start with, this program is MASSIVELY popular with employers. The program has a statutory limit of 85,000 visas per year, but employers routinely receive approval for more than 800k applications per year (868k, or 10x the limit, in 2024). Contrary to what I expected, the average salary for an H-1B is relatively low—slightly under $120k this year.

    Let’s review applications by employer (again, with teal representing IT roles and gray being everything else). There are some HUGE numbers here. 15 companies alone received approval for 20k+ applications each.

    A casual perusal of the data shows that this isn’t a program for the top 0.1% of talent, as it’s been described. This is simply a way to recruit hundreds of thousands of relatively lower-wage IT and financial services professionals. America needs to be a destination for the world’s most elite talent. But the H-1B program isn’t the way to do that.

  • Trump told SCOTUS he plans to make a deal to save TikTok

Democrats / Biden Inc

  • Biden's "Obvious Mental Decline" Most Underreported Story In 2024: Veteran CBS Journalist | ZeroHedge

  • Opinion | Joe Biden, the Presidency and the Messiness of Being Human - The New York Times

    The accusations were like a firestorm: There was no time for a new primary. There was not enough time to campaign. When the election was lost, much of the rage turned to contempt. And now, as details come to light about advisers in the White House reportedly knowing for years that Mr. Biden was faltering with age, harsh judgments have been handed down — we as a country have been lied to in an orchestrated plot. Even Jill Biden has come under fire for reportedly trying to shield her husband. I understand people’s anger when they feel they have been misled or even lied to. In hindsight it can seem obvious that Mr. Biden should have known that governing into his mid-80s in a second term would prove unacceptable in a re-election campaign or problematic for the country should he have won a second term. But might I suggest that there is another way to understand this, too? A more humane way? Blame is very simplistic. One person or group of people is the villain, another person or group is the victim. The lines are clear. But oftentimes blame is an easy place to hide from a more complicated and nuanced situation in which there aren’t such clear lines. That situation, as some people around the president have described, is that Mr. Biden has bad days and good days. The same is true for most of us, no matter how old or young we are. But more to the point, someone who is elderly and has had serious health issues in the past — Mr. Biden had brain surgeries for two aneurysms in 1988 — is going to find that the bad days become more frequent. And the people around that individual, who care about that person, are probably not going to readily accept that.

Left Angst

Law Breaking / Police / Internal Security

External Security / Militaria / Diplomania

World

Iran / Houthi

  • Tehran Bazaar Merchants Strike Over Rising Prices and Currency Surge in Iran - NCRI

    The strike and protest began in the Shoemakers’ Bazaar and quickly spread to the Rasteh Bazaar, Small Charsu, the Fabric Sellers’ Bazaar, Bagh Sepahsalar, Seyyed Vali Passage, Hammam Chal Passage, and the Coppersmiths’ Bazaar. Shortly afterward, the fabric sellers in Abbasabad Passage, Sepah Bazaar, and Mellat Passage also joined the strike. Protesters chanted: “Courageous merchants, support, support!” “Don’t be afraid, don’t be afraid, shut it down, shut it down!” and “You can’t do business with an 80,000 toman dollar!” In a statement, the merchants cited several reasons for their strike, including the shortage of raw materials due to soaring currency rates, severe economic stagnation caused by exorbitant prices, lack of liquidity in the market, and heavy taxes.

Israel

Russia Bad / Ukraine War

China

Health / Medicine

Pox / COVID / BioTerror AgitProp

Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda

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