2025-01-10
LA fires, previous moral panics, 1990's sucked, FB pearl clutching, benchy takedowns, Lunar spectrum, coco futures, Kamala tours, Biden stays, Afghan withdrawal values of burrocracy, aint about fish
etc
LA Fires
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(2017) Advice to Californians Building New Homes After the Fires
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(2019) California had a plan to store storm water, but Democrats blew it
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After Palisades fire hydrants lacked water, city officials blame demand - Los Angeles Times
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Fact Check: Did Los Angeles Cut Fire Department Funding by $17.6M? - Newsweek
While the LAFD's budget for the 2024-2025 fiscal year did decrease by about $17.6 million from the previous year, the amount is a small fraction of the department's total annual budget of almost $820 million.
- as others note, the "needs context" rating means "true but we can't say so"
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Could be the beginning of the end for fire insurance in California
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California's insurance is in crisis. The solution will cost homeowners a ton
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California Was Already in Home-Insurance Crisis Before Los Angeles Infernos
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Los Angeles Fire Damage Likely to Be Costliest Blaze in U.S. History
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Adam Carolla’s DEI Firefighter Story Goes Viral.
X owner Elon Musk shared a post featuring Carolla’s testimony on his platform and it quickly amassed more than 4.4 million views.
“I graduated North Hollywood High with a 1.7 GPA and could not find a job. I walked to a fire station. I was 19 and living in the garage of my family home and my mom was on welfare and food stamps. I said, ‘Can I get a job as a fireman?’ and they said, ‘No, because you’re not black, Hispanic or a woman and we’ll see you in about seven years.’”
He eventually got the invite to apply – roughly seven years later, he recalled during his testimony. He took the written exam and queried a fellow applicant while waiting at the government office.
“I had a young woman of color standing behind me in line, and I said to her, ‘Just out of curiosity, when did you sign up to become a fire man?’ … she said, ‘Wednesday.’ That is an example of my white privilege.”
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Drone collides with firefighting aircraft over Palisades fire
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Los Angeles Had a Housing Shortage. Wildfires Will Make It Worse
Horseshit
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A Brief History of Moral Panics Concerning Kids and Their Chosen Media
Wertham contended that rising crime and immorality among youth at the time stemmed directly from the influence of comics. Not just horror comics, but all comics depicting violence or crime or sexuality, or that fell in any way into his category of immorality, were his target. He even played into the anti-gay prejudices of the time by suggesting that Batman and Robin were gay lovers, and those comics were subtly encouraging that category of sinful alliance. In testimony before Congress, aimed at banning all such comics (which would have been the majority of all comics), he reportedly said: “I think Hitler was a beginner compared to the comic-book industry. They get the children much younger.”
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The sad beige aesthetic: why has the world suddenly turned taupe? (HN comments)
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Why kids need to take more risks: science reveal benefits of wild, free play
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Nvidia's Jensen Huang is 'dead wrong' about quantum computers, D-Wave CEO says
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The Anti-Social Century - The Atlantic
Americans are now spending more time alone than ever. It’s changing our personalities, our politics, and even our relationship to reality. Self-imposed solitude might just be the most important social fact of the 21st century in America.
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a big part of the ‘90s nostalgia is just the fact that people remember their childhoods fondly. And that’s a good thing. My husband’s grandmother still felt nostalgic for the ‘40s, which objectively sucked ass (sorry, YiaYia.) But many of us take for granted the technology that makes our lives easier, which we didn’t have thirty years ago. One of the most traumatizing moments from my childhood was in the late nineties, when the babysitter who normally brought my brother home from preschool didn’t return home. My mother thought he had died in a car accident, and with no way to contact the babysitter (she didn’t have a cell phone) she had to contact every potential cafe where they might have stopped for a snack. Midway through this frenzy of calls, my mother remembered that my brother had an after-school activity that day at the community center. But for about an hour, my mother and I thought my brother was dead. (Yes, my anxiety is genetic.) Today, this just wouldn’t have happened. My mom would have had a Google calendar with a reminder about the after-school activity. Even if she didn’t, she and the babysitter would have been able to exchange texts. And perhaps she’d even have an AirTag on my brother’s backpack, or location-sharing with the babysitter’s phone.
- Yikes. "Big Mother is Watching You, because She Loves You." I score this as a win for the 90s. Kids need room to make their own mistakes.
celebrity gossip
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'We're done': owner of Walter White's house in Breaking Bad puts it on market
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Luigi Mangione's account has been renamed on Stack Overflow
- From comments:
Evan drowns a good point in his own drama. I've moderated against him on a Stack Exchange site before and it's tedious how far he can push the limits. He knows the rules, the process, what's expected, and he knows how lowly moderators react when they the system alerts them to infractions. It's no surprise he's earned himself [another] suspension here.
Rank Propaganda / Thought Policing / World Disordering
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What happens when someone subpoenas Cloudflare for your info • The Register
Initially, the network infrastructure giant gave the blog owner, who pays Cloudflare to optimize their WordPress site, until the end of this week to file a legal challenge in the States against the subpoena, or have their personal details handed over to the ex-official. On Tuesday, the San Francisco-based corporation agreed to delay disclosure until January 29.
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Google Deindexes 200 Streaming Sites for Violating EU Sanctions on Russia
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The CEO of Mastodon is horrified by the prospect of Facebook allowing freedom of speech.
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Let's keep Facebook's move in perspective - by Tom Knighton
Right now, a lot of people are celebrating Meta’s decision. They’re thrilled to see it and are pointing to it as a sign that we’re entering a new era. I’m not remotely interested in giving them a pass. Sure, this is a positive development, but why did it take them eight years to make it happen? Why did they allow third-parties to dictate their content moderation strategies that resulted in numerous people catching so many bans on the platform that they started collecting them like they were Pokemon?
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Mark Zuckerberg's U-turn on fact-checking is craven–but correct (Archive)
For all the talk of freedom, Mr Zuckerberg’s video was another example of the capture of American business by the bullying incoming president. Mr Trump has called Facebook an “enemy of the people” and threatened to ensure that Mr Zuckerberg “spends the rest of his life in prison”. Mr Zuckerberg is not the only executive to submit: everyone from Apple’s Tim Cook to OpenAI’s Sam Altman is said to have donated to Mr Trump’s inauguration vanity fund. This week Amazon announced a $40m biopic of the incoming First Lady. The circumstances may be grotesque and the motives suspect. But the substance of Meta’s sweeping changes is, in fact, correct. Speech online urgently needs to become freer. Making it so will shore up America’s democracy against whatever tests it faces in the years to come.
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Threads and Instagram are for politics now, says Adam Mosseri
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Politics content to be pushed on all Instagram and Threads users
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Facebook lifts restrictions on calling women 'property', transgendered 'freaks'
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Meta is highlighting a splintering global approach to online speech
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Pro-Life Accounts Demand Meta Lift Suspensions After Free Speech Promises
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Leaked Meta Rules: Users Are Free to Post "Mexican Immigrants Are Trash"
Musk
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(Dec 2024) The Elon Swing Voter
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EU "energetically" probing disinformation, right-wing bias on X, report says
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Musk examines how to oust Starmer as prime minister before next UK election
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Italy's plan to buy Starlink data deals a serious blow to European space network
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Bernie Sanders asks Musk why he fired American workers and hired H1b workers.
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Elon Musk calls on California and Delaware to force auction of OpenAI stake
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X CEO signals ad boycott is over. External data paints a different picture
Electric / Self Driving cars
Edumacationalizing / Acedemia Nuts
Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising
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CES Proves It's Still Deeply Weird with These Bonkers Gadgets
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The Way We Listen to Music Changed Forever When Apple Launched iTunes in 2001
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Kape Technologies Now Owns Various VPN Companies, and VPN "Review" Websites
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VR Has Had a Phase Change and I Didn't Know It
But for $300, it’s amazing progress. For $400 you can have the headset and pretty much all the good games, which is both sorta neat, but also a reflection of my point about gaming selection. It has not “arrived”. But without me noticing it, it progressed from “hobbyiest” to viable niche. And that is absolutely enormous.
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TSMC Arizona allegedly now producing AMD's Ryzen 9000 and Apple's S9 processors
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Can the Nvidia RTX 5070 deliver 4090 performance for $549? No. Are you stupid or something?
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3DBenchy Starts Enforcing Its No Derivatives License
legally any derived version of this popular model being distributed on Thingiverse, Printables, etc. is illegal, as already noted seven years ago by an observant user on Reddit. According to the message received by a Printables user, all derived 3DBenchy models will be removed from the site while the license is now (belatedly) being enforced.
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My Amazon TV Now Unmutes Itself During Prime Video Commercial Breaks
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FCC Adopts Stricter Robocall Mitigation Database Filing Requirements
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Ex-MoviePass CEO Pleads Guilty; DOJ Calls Case Early Instance of "AI Washing"
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Candy Crush, Tinder, MyFitnessPal: Apps hijacked to spy on location
TechSuck / Geek Bait
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Toslink is really just S/PDIF (aka IEC 958) transmitted over light instead of coaxial cable. As such, it typically carries 48kHz of uncompressed PCM audio at 16bits in 2 channels:
48000 Hz * 16 bits * 2 channels = 1 536 000 bits/second1536 kbit/s sounds like a usable connection speed after all… Fun fact: That’s about the same throughput as a T1 line (1544 kbit/s).
AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World
Space / Boomy Zoomers / UFO
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Private sector stakes claim to Moon’s airwaves
Private companies are staking claims to radio spectrum on the Moon with the aim of exploiting an emerging lunar economy, Financial Times research has found. More than 50 applications have been filed with the International Telecommunication Union since 2010 to use spectrum, the invisible highway of electromagnetic waves that enable all wireless technology, on or from the Moon. Last year the number of commercial filings to the global co-ordinating body for lunar spectrum outstripped those from space agencies and governments for the first time, according to FT research. The filings cover satellite systems as well as missions to land on the lunar surface.
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7th flight test of Starship is preparing to launch as soon as Monday, January 13
Crypto con games
Economicon / Business / Finance
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You got conned. Home insurance costs still rising in Florida
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Microsoft confirms performance-based job cuts across departments
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China’s Biggest Shipping Line Added to US Military Blacklist.
Cosco Shipping Holdings Co. was named in a Federal Register filing on Tuesday, qualifying it as a Chinese military company as determined by the Pentagon, along with China State Shipbuilding Corp. and China Shipbuilding Trading Co. While the blacklist carries no specific penalties, it discourages US firms from dealing with those companies.
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Wall Street Analyst Pay Drops 30% as Banks Slash Equity Research
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These Are the Wildest, Weirdest Stock-Market Prices We've Ever Seen
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Caused a 10% spike today: Hershey Seeks CFTC Help to Take Huge Cocoa Position in New York - Bloomberg
The maker of Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups wants to take a position that will allow it to purchase more than 90,000 metric tons of cocoa on ICE Futures US, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the information is private. The request to the Commodity Futures Trading Commission equates to about 5,000 20-foot containers and is more than nine times the amount the exchange currently allows. Cocoa is in such scarce supply that Hershey, one of the US’s largest chocolate makers, is petitioning for the rare exemption, said the people. The amount the company wants to buy is so big that it also exceeds a federal position limit of 4,900 contracts, or 49,000 tons, set by the CFTC. The amount of cocoa Hershey wants to buy is equivalent to roughly all of the beans currently certified for delivery against futures contracts in New York. A larger position limit is likely to send the price of earlier-dated futures to a significant premium above the later-dated ones, disrupting the futures market.
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NY Governor Seeks to Limit Private-Equity Ownership of Homes in New York
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Private Equity Pull Back from Exotic and Controversial Liquidity Loans
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Honda could tap Nissan for short-term benefits in U.S. pickups, SUVs, capacity
Trump
Democrats / Biden Inc
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Biden weighs preemptive pardons for Cheney, Fauci, other Trump foes
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“Throughout her trip, the Vice President will discuss the accomplishments of the Biden-Harris Administration over the past four years in each region, the U.S. partnership with the respective nations, the contributions of U.S. military forces to regional and global security, and the enduring national security interests of the United States,” the White House said in a statement Tuesday.
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Biden cancels final foreign visit of presidency as fires rage in California | AP News
the sit-down with Zelenskyy would have offered the two leaders one last chance to discuss the path ahead for Kyiv before President-elect Donald Trump takes office amid growing uncertainty about future American support for Ukraine’s effort to repel Russia’s invasion. The White House had not formally announced the Biden-Zelenskyy meeting. But the two sides had agreed that the leaders would meet in Rome on Friday, according to a U.S. official who was not authorized to comment publicly on the White House plan.
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Biden said to weigh global limits on AI exports in 11th-hour trade war blitz
Left Angst
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Where did all the fascism talk go? - Washington Examiner
Monday, the journalist Glenn Greenwald asked on X, “Is there a single person in DC or media acting as if Literal Adolf Hitler is about to assume power in 2 weeks in order to end American democracy, install fascism, and create a white supremacist dictatorship? Is it possible those who said this for years never believed it?”
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How Hitler Dismantled a Democracy in 53 Days - The Atlantic
Joseph Goebbels, who was present that day as a National Socialist Reichstag delegate, would later marvel that the National Socialists had succeeded in dismantling a federated constitutional republic entirely through constitutional means. Seven years earlier, in 1926, after being elected to the Reichstag as one the first 12 National Socialist delegates, Goebbels had been similarly struck: He was surprised to discover that he and these 11 other men (including Hermann Göring and Hans Frank), seated in a single row on the periphery of a plenary hall in their brown uniforms with swastika armbands, had—even as self-declared enemies of the Weimar Republic—been accorded free first-class train travel and subsidized meals, along with the capacity to disrupt, obstruct, and paralyze democratic structures and processes at will. “The big joke on democracy,” he observed, “is that it gives its mortal enemies the means to its own destruction.”
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Vibe Shift: Comedians Now Admitting That They Were Pressured to Stay In Line.
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Bureaucracy Isn't Measured In Bureaucrats
Many Afghans had collaborated with the Americans, eg as translators, in exchange for a promise of US citizenship. As the Taliban advanced, they called in the promise, begging to be allowed to flee to America before they got punished as traitors. The article focused on a heroic effort by certain immigration bureaucrats, who worked around the clock with minimal sleep for the last few weeks before Kabul fell, trying to get the citizenship forms filled in and approved for as many translators as possible. It made an impression on me because nobody was opposed to the translators getting citizenship, and the bureaucrats were themselves the people in charge of approving citizenship applications, so what exactly was forcing them to go to such desperate lengths? If you ponder this question long enough, you become enlightened about the nature of the administrative state. If you don’t, you end up like Ramaswamy, who seems to think that halving the number of bureaucrats will halve the number of forms that need to be filled out. I think in his worldview, the FDA will think “Now that we have fewer bureaucrats, it would take forever to complete our current process, so let’s simplify the process.”
- many people cannot even contemplate "simplify the process" as a possibility. Those insisting improvement is impossible and should not be attempted are likely beneficiaries of the current problems of the systems.
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How the U.S. could in fact make Canada an American territory
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Beijing willing to deepen economic ties with Canada as Trump brings trade chaos
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H-1B: Visa row under Trump fuels anxiety for Indian dreamers
Law Breaking / Police / Internal Security
World
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Software Bugs Led to 'One of the Greatest Miscarriages of Justice'
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‘Shut up,’ they said; British MP’s vote against gangrape inquiry.
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Japan accelerating towards extinction, birthrate expert warns
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New permit needed as of today for Canadians flying across the pond
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A billion dollars later, the iPhone 16 is still banned in Indonesia
Russia Bad / Ukraine War
China
Health / Medicine
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New scientific names for HIV, Covid virus raise hackles | STAT
it largely escaped notice until December, when the U.S. National Library of Medicine said it would change names in its databases of genes and viruses to comply with the ICTV’s new monikers. Many new names sounded as if they’d been cooked up by a medieval monk. HIV-1 would henceforth be known as Lentivirus humimdef1. SARs-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid, would be known as Betacoronavirus pandemicum. Ebola was now Orthoebolavirus zairense.
Pox / COVID / BioTerror AgitProp
Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda
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Six big US banks quit net zero alliance before Trump inauguration.
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Yellowstone National Park's standing dead tree asset wildfire vulnerability
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in 1978, the Supreme Court ruled that “the Endangered Species Act prohibits impoundment of the Little Tennessee River by the Tellico Dam” to protect the endangered snail darters. That was then. The Times now quotes Thomas Near, the curator of ichthyology at the Yale Peabody Museum who leads a fish biology lab at the university, that “there is, technically, no snail darter.” Worse yet, it was actually just another member of the eastern population of Percina uranidea, or stargazing darters, which is not considered endangered. Near and his colleagues have published the results in Current Biology. In other words, years of litigation and millions of dollars were spent on what was a false claim, and the courts accepted the claims hook, line, and sinker.
- recall reading about the "darter" fish in 1988, this was not news then. Discussion of the subject was not welcome in High School Biology class. the concept "species" was an early victim of science bent for political gain.
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Volcanic Activity Beneath Yellowstone's Caldera Could Be on the Move
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Coal likely to go away even without EPA's power plant regulations
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Antarctic scientists drill 2 miles down to reach 1.2M-year-old ice