2025-01-07

its not about the tic-tac, hail Gromit, remote control modems, Hulu merged, Dell rebrands, electrical equipment in demand, steel sues, tariff fluff, Trump certified, Jan6 narratives, Trudeau resigns

Worthy

• Fascists and Rakes

  It gets worse, because once I've decided that you're a fascist, I think the reason we're arguing is that you're a fascist. If you would only stop being a fascist, we could get along fine. You can go on thinking tic-tacs are sentient, you just need to stop being a fascist. But you're not a fascist. The real reason we're arguing is that you think tic-tacs are sentient. You're acting exactly as you should do if tic-tacs were sentient, but they're not. I need to stop treating you like a fascist, and start trying to convince you that tic-tacs are not sentient. And, symmetrically, you've decided I'm a rake, which isn't true, and you've decided that that's why we're arguing, which isn't true; we're arguing because I think tic-tacs aren't sentient. You need to stop treating me like a rake, and start trying to convince me that tic-tacs are sentient.

  • what of the people who ask why we're told that everyone agrees the tic tacs talk, that there cannot be any debate (was there ever any?) ... worse than fascists; heathens!

etc

• Boeing 787 Dreamliner aborts takeoff from Australia airport: 'technical reasons'

• Hacker of the year nominee: Gromit the Dog

  Gromit the dog is what Elon Musk, Sam Altman, Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates and all those screwball US billionaires would like to be, but never will. Despite that time Preston the robot dog attempted to frame him for mistreatment of sheep, Gromit has never been involved in any sex scandals, Bond-villain paedophile island romps, or running Dickensian child-slave factories, unlike his human counterparts in the technology industry. Gromit is simply a decent engineer.

Horseshit

• America Needs to Rethink What It Means to Be Old

• Connecticut DMV Allows Tow Companies to Sell People's Cars

• How to break free from your "toxic productivity" cycle

• Acoustic sensors find frequent gunfire on school walking routes

• Testosterone linked to stronger political opinions in men

• It's not just Tesla. Vehicles amass troves of possibly sensitive data.

• Stop Asking Your Teen How Their Day Was

• A rising trend of 'murderous verbs' in movies over 50 years

• Americans Need to Party More

• All clocks are 30 seconds late | Victor Poughon

• Gigantic SUVs are a public health threat. Why don't we treat them like one?

• Can American Drivers Learn to Love Roundabouts?

• The Taxidermist A-Listers Call When They Need a Ram's Head for the Wall

celebrity gossip

• Jimmy Carter Remembered Fondly by Bill Gates, Environmentalists

Rank Propaganda / Thought Policing / World Disordering

• Why do people share (mis)information? Power motives in social media

Musk

• British Elite Seem Angrier at Elon Musk than About Migrant Rape Gangs

• Elon Musk Demands Release of Jailed Far-Right Activist

• France president says Musk intervening directly in elections

• X's declining user base: Musk's platform projected to lose users

• Ask HN: Has Musk "lost the plot"? | Hacker News

  Everyone with standards has considered Musk to be low-class trash since 2018 when he called Vernon Unsworth a "pedo guy" and "child rapist".

Electric / Self Driving cars

• Uber and Lyft Are Gearing Up for the Robotaxi Revolution

• Stolen e-bike batteries could be made worthless if Bosch was less greedy

• Man nearly misses flight as Waymo stuck doing loops in parking lot

  • LA tech entrepreneur nearly misses flight after getting trapped in robotaxi

• Deere Goes Driverless Beyond Midwest Farms to Ease Labor Crunch

Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising

• DVD shop owner vows to be 'last man standing'

• Civilization 7 senior historian prays it'll be a 'gateway drug' into textbooks

• 4chan became the home of the elite reader

• This will probably not be the year of IPv6 on the desktop: DigiCert removing support for IPv6 on their services

• LG's new projector looks like a stand fan

• MediaTek rings in the new year with a parade of chipset vulns

  it's a stack overflow issue in affected chipsets' modems, one that leads to RCE if an affected device connects to an attacker-controlled base station. A successful attack doesn't require the attacker to acquire any additional privileges, nor does it depend on user interaction.

• HDMI 2.2 cranks the bandwidth to 96Gbps and aims to eliminate audio sync issues

  • HDMI Forum Announces Version 2.2 of the HDMI Specification

• The wild fall and last-minute revival of Bench, the accounting startup

• Disney to Merge Hulu and Live TV with Fubo, Taking on YouTube TV

• Meta Smart Glasses First Big Cultural Moment Is a Terror Attack

• UFC's Dana White joins Meta's board weeks before Trump takes office

  • CEO of UFC, Dana White, Joins Meta Board

  • Dana White, John Elkann and Charlie Songhurst to Join Meta Board of Directors

  • UFC's Dana White is joining Meta's board of directors

• Dell will no longer make XPS computers

  • Dell kills XPS and Optiplex brands, adopts Apple-inspired tiered naming scheme

  • Dell Kills the XPS Brand

TechSuck / Geek Bait

• Dive into Time-Series Anomaly Detection: A Decade Review

• The strange cases of consumer-grade routers on puny power supplies | APNIC Blog

• Aedan Cullen Cracks the Raspberry Pi RP2350's Security Subsystem Wide Open

AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World

• Attenborough "Profoundly Disturbed" by AI Clone of His Voice

• OpenAI is losing money on its pricey ChatGPT Pro plan, CEO Sam Altman says

• Sam Altman has choice words for the OpenAI board members who fired him

• 'Virtual employees' could join workforce as soon as this year, OpenAI boss says

Space / Boomy Zoomers / UFO

• SpaceX to test vehicle upgrades and payload deployment on next Starship flight

• Outgoing NASA administrator urges incoming leaders to stick with Artemis plan

Economicon / Business / Finance

• US Mint sheets of uncut currency

  • HN comments

• A new electricity supercycle is under way

  Over the past year Schneider’s market capitalisation has risen by over a third, to around $140bn. It is not the only maker of electrical gear that is booming (see chart 1). The market value of Hitachi, a Japanese conglomerate, has tripled since the start of 2022, thanks in part to the rapid expansion of its power-equipment division. After a difficult 2023, weighed down by troubles in its wind-turbine division, shares in Siemens Energy rose by 300% last year, outperforming even those of Nvidia, owing to fast-growing sales in the German firm’s grid-technology business. “Electricity is a key driver for us,” explains Christian Bruch, its chief executive. Scott Strazik, boss of GE Vernova, a power-equipment business that was spun out from the conglomerate last year, sees a “supercycle” in the making. Demand for everything from transformers and switchgears to high-voltage transmission cables is being turbocharged. The International Energy Agency (IEA), an official forecaster, estimates that global investment in grid infrastructure reached nearly $400bn in 2024, up from a little over $300bn in 2020 and reversing a decline that began in 2017 on the back of slowing demand in China

• Working Well: Returning to the office can disrupt life

• Foxconn beats estimates with record fourth-quarter revenue on AI demand

• Great Resignation 2.0 is coming – and I salute the European millennials who quit

• Intel won't kill off its graphics card business

• Intel's Problems Are Even Worse Than You've Heard

• Booz Allen Hamilton to Pay $15.875M to Settle False Claims Act Allegations

• Health Care Is UPS $20B Lifeline to Offset Shipping Slowdown

• Collapse of U.S. Steel acquisition leaves questions for Gary plant

• Bridgewater Cuts 7% of Staff in Effort to Remain 'Nimble'

• The Challenge for Made-in-America Bikes? Made-in-China Parts

Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making

• Uber, Lyft spent millions pushing for NYC congestion pricing —and stand to make killing.

• U.S. Steel, Nippon sue Biden administration over decision to block merger

• TikTok should lose its big Supreme Court case

• Conspiracies Too Awful to Imagine? - Victor Davis Hanson

• The fur flies as House, Senate wrangle over ban on mink farming

Trump

• Dollar Reverses Losses After Trump Blasts WaPo's "Fake News" Tariff Report | ZeroHedge

  On Truth Social, President-elect Donald Trump blasted the Washington Post for "quoting so-called anonymous sources, which don't exist, incorrectly states that my tariff policy will be pared back." "That is wrong. The Washington Post knows it's wrong. It's just another example of Fake News," the former president said.

• With Kamala Harris Presiding, Congress Certifies Donald Trump As Winner Of 2024 Election

  • US Congress Formally Certifies Trump's Election Victory | ZeroHedge

  This year’s counting of the electoral votes was declared a “national special security event,” unlocking federal, state and local resources.

Democrats / Biden Inc

• Schumer dodges when asked who’s leading the Democratic Party.

• Biden to ban offshore oil, gas drilling in areas ahead of Trump term

  • Remember how American LNG shipments were going to power Europe once the Russian gas pipelines shut down? Notice how all the infrastructure development that would have required did not actually happen?

• Angry Biden Rages, Curses Out Reporters…

Left Angst

• Donald Trump's Tech Picks Orbit Elon Musk

• Why Is the Right Obsessed With Epic Poetry?

• Much "Jan6" verbiage, most of it to the effect that we knew the story before it happened, and any inconvenient facts contrary to the official reality are misinformation, populist nonsense, and Trumpist hate.

• January 6 and the Triumph of the Justification Machine - The Atlantic

  The revision of January 6 among many Republicans is alarming. It is also a powerful example of how the internet has warped our political reality. In recent years, this phenomenon has been attributed to the crisis of “misinformation.” But that term doesn’t begin to describe what’s really happening.

  One of us, Mike, has been studying the effects of our broken information environment as a research scientist and information literacy expert, while the other, Charlie, is a journalist who has extensively written and reported on the social web. Lately, our independent work has coalesced around a particular shared idea: that misinformation is powerful, not because it changes minds, but because it allows people to maintain their beliefs in light of growing evidence to the contrary. The internet may function not so much as a brainwashing engine but as a justification machine. A rationale is always just a scroll or a click away, and the incentives of the modern attention economy—people are rewarded with engagement and greater influence the more their audience responds to what they’re saying—means that there will always be a rush to provide one. This dynamic plays into a natural tendency that humans have to be evidence foragers, to seek information that supports one’s beliefs or undermines the arguments against them. Finding such information (or large groups of people who eagerly propagate it) has not always been so easy. Evidence foraging might historically have meant digging into a subject, testing arguments, or relying on genuine expertise. That was the foundation on which most of our politics, culture, and arguing was built. The current internet—a mature ecosystem with widespread access and ease of self-publishing—undoes that.

  • "Only our lies should be heard"

• Jan. 6 and the path not taken

  After Jan. 6, much of civil society, the media, and Trump’s own party rejected the unprecedented effort by a mob to interfere with the certification of the election. Trump was judged responsible for encouraging this mob, both on the day itself and for months before, with a series of lies about American democracy. Many in the Trump administration resigned, including Cabinet officials. Corporations said they would no longer fund Republicans who voted to overturn the election. Trump was kicked off social media. He seemed to be heading to a status of a political pariah. I will never understand how Jan. 6 was not the end of Trump. So, what happened?

  The further we have moved from the Jan. 6, the easier it has been to rewrite history, to tell people to ignore what they saw with their own eyes. All the same, the transformation occurred with shocking speed. The “lost cause” narrative of the post-civil war South took a generation to take hold. A similar turnaround in venerating traitors occurred in just a couple of years, a testimony to how quickly they were embraced by right-wing politicians and media. Emblematic of this process is that Kevin McCarthy, who refused to co-operate with the Jan. 6 House investigation, handed over thousands of hours of video to aid Tucker Carlson’s efforts to rehabilitate the attackers.

  • "innocence and absence are no defense!" and Trump is just so icky. How dare they make evidence public? it might confuse the Narrative!

Law Breaking / Police / Internal Security

• Former Apple employees charged in $150k charitable donations scheme

External Security / Militaria / Diplomania

• After China's Salt Typhoon, the reconstruction starts now

• New York Resident Pleads Guilty to Operating Secret Police Station of the Chinese Government in Lower Manhattan

  Chen Jinping and co-defendant “Harry” Lu Jianwang conspired to act as illegal agents of the PRC government and also obstructed justice by destroying evidence of their communications with an MPS official. While acting under the direction and control of the MPS official, the defendants worked together to establish the first known overseas police station in the United States on behalf of the Fuzhou branch of the MPS. The police station — which closed in the fall of 2022 — occupied an entire floor in an office building in Manhattan’s Chinatown. Lu and Chen helped open and operate the clandestine police station. None of the participants in the scheme informed the U.S. government that they were helping the PRC government surreptitiously open and operate an undeclared MPS police station on U.S. soil.

World

• Canada PM Trudeau is likely to announce resignation, source says

  • Canadian PM Trudeau set to resign as party leader as polls plummet

  • Justin Trudeau announces resignation as Canadian prime minister

  • Embattled Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau resigns

  • Canada's Trudeau resigns as Liberal Party leader, spelling end to time in power

  • Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to resign after nine years in power

  • Justin Trudeau Resigns

  • Justin Trudeau says he will resign as Canadian PM after new party leader chosen

• Central American Troops Arrive in Haiti to Reinforce Mission to Restore Order | The Epoch Times

  About 150 military police officers from Central America have arrived in Haiti to reinforce the embattled government’s fight against violent gangs that have upended daily life for millions in the Caribbean country. The deployment of around 75 security officers, mostly from Guatemala, was greeted Saturday at Toussaint Louverture International Airport in Port-au-Prince by the Kenyan commander of the U.N.-backed mission that for months has been struggling to restore order.

• Esports are booming in Africa – but can its infrastructure keep pace?

• Danish king changes coat of arms amid row with Trump over Greenland

• Austrian far-right party tasked with forming coalition

• India Plans About $3B Aid, Tariff Cuts for Electronics

• Kim Jong-un bans hotdogs for North Koreans, cooking them an act of treason

• South Korea's Presidential Security Service vows to harbor fugitive president

• The Biggest Peacetime Crime–and Cover-Up–In British History

  • UK's Starmer Dismisses Rape Gang Outrage As "Far-Right Bandwagon" | ZeroHedge

  • Starmer’s shameful deflections on grooming gangs

Iran / Houthi

• Impressive video shows Navy fire missiles from Red Sea at Iran-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen.

Russia Bad / Ukraine War

• Why is Ukraine losing ground? Mobilization crisis and command failures exposed

• The end of an era: Russia loses its gas grip on Europe.

China

• Chinese venture capitalists force failed founders on to debtor blacklist

• Apple's China troubles mount as foreign phone sales sink for 4th month

• China's Bluetooth alternative is on the move as Beijing pushes universal remotes

• Taiwan says cyberattacks on government doubled in 2024, mostly from China

• BYD, "Slave-gate" and the soul search about China's cutthroat industrial model

• Chinese Vessel Cuts Taiwan Internet Cable in Apparent Sabotage

Health / Medicine

• Stick tests your hormones using your phone and saliva

• Human judgment must remain central to health insurance claims: California law

• The Italian health data system is broken

• FDA Updates Recommendations to Help Improve Pulse Oximeters Across Skin Tones

• Fluoride once again scrutinized for possible effect on children's brains

  • Controversial fluoride analysis published after years of failed reviews

Pox / COVID / BioTerror AgitProp

• America's first bird flu death reported in Louisiana

• HMPV virus cases rising in rest of world after outbreak in China

Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda

• 19th Century Scientists Predicted Global Warming

• "30 years" != "new" anything; New Evidence Reveals 30 Year Global Drop in Hurricane Frequency and Power.

• Shrinking trees and tuskless elephants: the ways species are adapting to humans

• A new way to determine whether a species will successfully invade an ecosystem

• Foods with the Most Plastic Chemicals: Study Reveals Surprising Results

• But there's no doubt about impending DOOM: Climate Models Can't Explain What's Happening to Earth