2025-01-11

better stars than ours, generational divides, fear and solitude, remaking Meta, terrifying questions, sk1rpt rot, bubbles and jobs, Trump sentenced to nothing, China speaks Chinese, ban all things

etc

• Superhabitability around K-class Stars | Centauri Dreams

  We think of Earth as our standard for habitability, and thus the goal of finding an ‘Earth 2.0’ is to identify living worlds like ours orbiting similar Sun-like stars. But maybe Earth isn’t the best standard. Are there ways planets can be more habitable than our own, and if so where would we find them? The term for the kind of world we are looking for is ‘superhabitable,’ and the aim of this study is to extend the discussion of K-class stars as hosts by modeling the atmospheres we may find on planets there.

LA fires

• Why hydrants ran dry as firefighters battled LA's deadly fires

• Pacific Palisades reservoir was offline and empty when firestorm exploded

• Mayor's Absence Is Considered a Sign L.A. Underestimated Fire Risks

• Los Angeles fires expose inflated US home prices

• TikTok tells staff impacted by wildfires to use sick hours if they can't work

• (Oct 2024) Forest Service Halts Prescribed Burns in California

  • we can do controlled burns

  When the Forest Service identifies high-risk forests needing prescribed burns, it takes an average of 4.7 YEARS just to get through environmental reviews. For complex projects, it's 7.2 years - longer than many fire cycles.

• Los Angeles Fires Will Put California's New Insurance Rules to the Test

• Tough Love for California - by Arnold Kling - In My Tribe

  Private insurance companies have limited obligations to cover losses. Instead, they are reinsured by a state fund. But the state reinsurance fund has less than $1 billion, and the cost of damages from the fires is going to be on the order of $50 billion or more. The state is going to need a Federal bailout. If it were up to me, that bailout would come with conditions.

  In order to receive a bailout, I would require that California pass legislation ceding sovereignty to the Federal government to manage three areas: public employees; water; and forests. Public employees in California receive salaries that are far above their equivalents in other states. They are paid much more than the typical American taxpayer who is going to have to fund the bailout. The emergency legislation that we should require California to pass in order to obtain a bailout should include provisions that take away the power of public employee unions to strike. It should allow a Federal office to reset salaries and to terminate and replace any employees who are not doing the jobs that they are supposed to do.

• California Fires Expose a $1T Hole in US Home Insurance

• Canadian 'Super Scooper' plane grounded after hitting drone over LA fires

  • Collision with drone knocks Canadian firefighting plane out of L.A. battle

• Fires in California leave at least 10 dead, decimate Los Angeles area

• Polymarket users are hoping to profit from the devastation in California

• Learn smart lessons from the L.A. fires, not stupid lessons

• As a Climate Scientist, I Knew It Was Time to Leave Los Angeles

• "We're Not Screwing Around": LA Sheriff Declares Curfew Amid Arson & Looting Chaos | ZeroHedge

Horseshit

• Evacuation alert sent in error to phones of nearly 10M L.A.-area residents

• My Gen Z kids had a surprising reaction to 'Dead Poets Society'

  The first thing my 20-year-old said when the credits rolled was, "What? That's terrible! Nothing changed! He got fired and the school is still run by a bunch of stodgy old white men forcing everyone to conform!" My immediate response was, "Yeah, but he changed those boys' individual lives, didn't he? He helped broaden their minds and see the world differently." I realized that Gen X youth valued individuals going against the old, outdated system and doing their own thing, whereas Gen Z values the dismantling of the system itself. For Gen X, Mr. Keating and the boys taking a stand was inspiring, but the fact that it didn't actually change anything outside of their own individual experiences stuck like a needle in my Gen Z kids' craw.

• What Age Should Kids Legally Be Allowed to Play Outside?

• There are no pure cultures – we have always been global

• Bride's fury after Instagram stunt wedding turns out to be real

• Jonathan Haidt's Claims on Kids and Tech Crumble Under Scrutiny from Top Expert

• Art Deco style is popular again, a century after its heyday

• I plan to farm my land with no tractor this year

• "Wouldn't It Be Cool If " Science Is a Scourge and We Will Regret It

celebrity gossip

• What Dr. Ruth Left Behind - The New York Times

  Today, there are plenty of influencers, but it’s hard to think of anyone as wholly and widely beloved. “There’s no one who didn’t like her, there was no controversy,” Fasman said. “And not just that: She was talking about sex. That’s incredible.”

  • she could become demonized quickly if someone resurfaced some of her comments on trans and other alternative preferences.

• Legendary Hacker Receieves Presidential Pardon

Rank Propaganda / Thought Policing / World Disordering

• It is all in their mind: Information processing bias in lonely individuals

  Loneliness is a distressing emotional state that motivates individuals to renew and maintain social contact. It has been suggested that lonely individuals suffer from a cognitive bias towards social threatening stimuli. However, current models of loneliness remain vague on how this cognitive bias is expressed in lonely individuals. The current review provides an up-to-date overview of studies examining loneliness in relation to various aspects of cognitive functioning. These studies are interpreted in light of the Social Information Processing (SIP) model. A wide range of studies indicate that lonely individuals have a negative cognitive bias in all stages of SIP. More specifically, lonely individuals have an increased attention for social threatening stimuli, hold negative and hostile intent attributions, expect rejection, evaluate themselves and others negatively, endorse less promotion- and more prevention-oriented goals, and have a low self-efficacy. This negative cognitive bias seems specific to the social context. Avenues for future research and implications for clinical practice are discussed.

  • "it has been suggested" therefore our assumptions can now be accepted without ever having been tested against actual data.

• Blumenthal So Eager to Bring Back KOSA, He Admits Its Purpose Is Censorship

Facebook

• From the spew, one would think that there could not possibly have been a civil society before FB implemented "moderation"... How did the world ever work before FB even existed?

• Meta's new content policy will harm vulnerable users

• Will Yann LeCun Leave Meta over Policy Rollback?

• Zuckerberg has turbo-boosted enshittification, and we're all going to pay

• MacStories Won't Stand for Meta's Dehumanizing and Harmful Moderation Policies

• Defederation from Threads

  Hachyderm has defederated with Threads due to their changes in moderation policy as of the publication of this post.

• Global fact-checkers were disappointed, not surprised, Meta ended its program

• Zuckerberg tells Joe Rogan Biden administration tried to censor memes

• Biden officials 'screamed' and 'cursed' at Meta to take down vaccine posts

• Zuckerberg says administration pushed Meta 'super hard' to take down vax content

• Zuckerberg on Rogan: Facebook's censorship was "something out of 1984"

• (Video) Joe Rogan Experience #2255 – Mark Zuckerberg

• Inside Mark Zuckerberg’s Sprint to Remake Meta for the Trump Era - The New York Times

  Last month, Mr. Zuckerberg, the chief executive of Meta, tapped a handful of top policy and communications executives and others to discuss the company’s approach to online speech. He had decided to make sweeping changes after visiting President-elect Donald J. Trump at Mar-a-Lago over Thanksgiving. Now he needed his employees to turn those changes into policy. Over the next few weeks, Mr. Zuckerberg and his handpicked team discussed how to do that in Zoom meetings, conference calls and late-night group chats. Some subordinates stole away from family dinners and holiday gatherings to work, while Mr. Zuckerberg weighed in between trips to his homes in the San Francisco Bay Area and the island of Kauai. By New Year’s Day, Mr. Zuckerberg was ready to go public with the changes, according to four current and former Meta employees and advisers with knowledge of the events, who were not authorized to speak publicly about the confidential discussions. The entire process was highly unusual. Meta typically alters policies that govern its apps — which include Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Threads — by inviting employees, civic leaders and others to weigh in. Any shifts generally take months. But Mr. Zuckerberg turned this latest effort into a closely held six-week sprint, blindsiding even employees on his policy and integrity teams.

• Why is Mark Zuckerberg vice-signaling?

Musk

• Elon Musk and Far-Right German Leader Agree 'Hitler Was a Communist'

  • Musk interviews German far-right frontwoman

• German institutions depart X/Twitter, a day after Musk's Weidel talk

• Elon Has Appointed Himself King of the World

• Elon Musk’s Latest Terrifying Foray Into British Politics | The New Yorker

  The world’s richest man has become fixated on child sexual exploitation in deindustrialized English towns—much of which took place more than a decade ago.

• Vancouver strip club marquee cited as hate speech on X

Electric / Self Driving cars

• BYD's electric supercar jumps over potholes and spikes

• New Tesla Model Y Juniper refresh

  • Tesla's Model Y crossover gets a facelift – just in China for now

• Tesla is just another mid-size automaker amid competition thats eating its lunch

• Toyota rethinks its bet on hydrogen (HN comments)

• Only 5 percent of US car buyers want an EV, according to survey

Religion / Tribal / Culture War and Re-Segregation

• Meta's memo to employees rolling back DEI programs (HN comments)

  • Meta rolls back DEI programs in latest bow to Trump

  • Meta ends its DEI programs

• Amazon to halt some of its DEI programs: Internal memo

Edumacationalizing / Acedemia Nuts

• 60M K-12 Students Compromised in Data Breach

  • Database tables of student, teacher info stolen from PowerSchool in cyberattack

Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising

• Fedora Stakeholders Have Been Debating Whether to Retire GlusterFS

• Before Squid Game, there was Battle Royale

• Assessing 2024 US road quality with Connected Vehicle Data

• AMD says Intel's 'horrible product' is causing Ryzen 7 9800X3D shortages

• How the US TikTok Ban Would Work

• Free-software warriors celebrate landmark case that enforced GNU LGPL

  • German router maker is latest company to inadvertently clarify the LGPL license

• Venu Sports shuts down before it ever launches

  • Disney, Fox and Warner Won't Move Forward with Venu Sports

• CFPB Agency moves to protect in-game currencies in video games like Roblox

  • CFPB wants to hear about your video game loot

• Randomly hearing a chime recently? It might be coming from your AirPods Pro 2

• I Know About The Date In The Footer

TechSuck / Geek Bait

• Be aware of the Makefile effect

  • "engineering by Recipe" was considered bad before Rickover hit the Navy; now Doctrine and Dogma are often preferred over actual thought in many technical fields.

• Backdooring Your Backdoors - Another $20 Domain, More Governments

  Put simply - we have been hijacking backdoors (that were reliant on now abandoned infrastructure and/or expired domains) that themselves existed inside backdoors, and have since been watching the results flood in. This hijacking allowed us to track compromised hosts as they ‘reported in’, and theoretically gave us the power to commandeer and control these compromised hosts.

  it is somewhat encouraging to see that attackers make the same mistakes as defenders. It’s easy to slip into the mindset that attackers never slip up, but we saw evidence to the contrary - boxes with open web shells, expired domains, and the use of software that has been backdoored. Perhaps the playing field is more level than we thought (Editor: or the intelligence spread far wider than expected?).

  For the same reasons that both this research and the .MOBI research came to exist, we would be guilty of the exact same careless disposal of infrastructure if we were to let these domains expire as their previous owners did. We’re incredibly grateful for the support of The Shadowserver Foundation, who have agreed yet again to save us from our own adventures and to take ownership of the domains implicated in this research and sinkhole them.

AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World

• OpenAI Shuts Down Developer Who Made AI-Powered Gun Turret

• Elon Musk's xAI starts hiring in London after setting up shop

• Meta Trained Its AI on a Notorious Piracy Database

  • Court docs allege Meta trained AI model using LibGen

• It's remarkably easy to inject new medical misinformation into LLMs

• SEC Head Warns Against 'AI Washing,' the High-Tech Version of 'Greenwashing'

• Scale AI hit by its second employee wage lawsuit in less than a month | TechCrunch

• AI could create 78M more jobs than it eliminates by 2030

Space / Boomy Zoomers / UFO

• Why the space community should care about Arctic geopolitics

• A taller, heavier, smarter version of SpaceX's Starship is almost ready to fly

• Weather prompts Blue Origin to push back New Glenn rocket launch.

• A glowing ring of metal fell to Earth, and no one has any idea what it is - Ars Technica

Crypto con games

• US selling 69K seized bitcoins could mess with Trump plans for crypto reserve

  • DOJ cleared to sell $6.5B in Bitcoin seized from Silk Road

Economicon / Business / Finance

• On Bubble Watch

  Whenever I hear “there’s no price too high” or one of its variants – a more disciplined investor might say, “of course there’s a price that’s too high, but we’re not there yet” – I consider it a sure sign that a bubble is brewing.

• Quantum computing stock bubble pops after Nvidia CEO warning

• Goldman Sachs downgrades AMD as competitive pressures intensify

• Payroll employment rises by 256K in Dec; unemployment changes little at 4.1%

  • US economy smashes expectations with 256,000 jobs created in December

  The figure from the Bureau of Labor Statistics on Friday exceeded expectations of economists polled by Reuters of 160,000, and was above the downwardly revised figure of 212,000 positions added in November.

• Americans Are Tipping Less Than They Have in Years

Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making

• Supreme Court to hear fight over looming US ban on TikTok

  • TikTok SCOTUS Live Blog: The Court Hears Arguments over Potential Ban

  • Supreme Court Seems Poised to Uphold Law That Could Shut Down TikTok

  • Ahem... Parler. The TikTok Ban Would Be Social Media's First Extinction-Level Event

• US Unveils El Capitan, Fastest Supercomputer, for Classified Tasks

• Mapping Broadband Health in America | Federal Communications Commission

  The 2024 release expands the available broadband connectivity data to permit more robust visualizations; introduces new maternal health, opioids, chronic disease, and social determinants of health metrics which underlie many of the public health crises facing the nation

  • don't ask how heavily edited for agenda the data sets are

• H-1B Visa Lottery Is Shutting Out Top Talent. Replace It

Trump

• Trump Says World Is Free-Riding on U.S. Health Spending. He Has a Point

• Trump sentenced in hush money case

  Unconditional discharge means Trump will not be imprisoned, fined or face probation, but his conviction still stands, and he will enter office as a convicted felon.

  • Trump Is Sentenced in N.Y. Hush-Money Case and Will Avoid Jail

  • Trump avoids jail or punishment at hush money sentencing days before inauguration | Reuters

• Trump prepares 100 executive orders to enact once in office.

• Thiel: A time for truth and reconciliation

  Identity politics endlessly relitigates ancient history. The study of recent history, to which the Trump administration is now called, is more treacherous — and more important. The apokálypsis cannot resolve our fights over 1619, but it can resolve our fights over Covid-19; it will not adjudicate the sins of our first rulers, but the sins of those who govern us today. The internet will not allow us to forget those sins — but with the truth, it will not prevent us from forgiving.

Democrats / Biden Inc

• Biden Signs Law Making It Easier to Photograph and Film in National Parks

• Nvidia criticizes Biden's last minute chip export limits

Left Angst

• HBCU marching band scolded for accepting invitation to Trump’s inauguration.

• 17,000 doctors call RFK Jr. ‘actively dangerous’ to national healthcare.

• Epic CEO Tim Sweeney says tech leaders are 'pretending to be Republicans'

Law Breaking / Police / Internal Security

• Canadian Sentenced for Exporting Electronics Used by Russia in Missiles, Drones

• Jury nullification and Luigi Mangione's murder defense

External Security / Militaria / Diplomania

• US announces $25M reward for arrest of Venezuela's Maduro

• Ships must practice celestial navigation

• Chinese cyber-spy on officials probing real-estate deals near US Military bases

World

• Angela Merkel Wants Her Memoir to Save Her Legacy. It's Backfiring

• India's payment push is cutting out Visa and Mastercard

• The global implications of a Russian gas pivot to Asia

Israel

• The Gazan teenagers defying war for competitive maths

China

• Why China is losing interest in English

  any foreigner visiting Beijing will notice that rather few people are able to speak English well. The 80% target proved a fantasy: most drivers still speak nothing but Chinese. Even the public-facing staff at the city’s main international airport struggle to communicate with foreigners. Immigration officers often resort to computer-translation systems.

• How Taiwan is preparing for conflict with China

• Chinese Patents Reveal Aim to Cut Undersea Cables

Health / Medicine

• Fluoride analysis triggers renewed debate over what levels are safe for kids

• Research Finds Vaccines Are Not Behind the Rise in Autism. So What Is?

• Canadian Doctors Suggest Harvesting Organs From Euthanasia Patients Before They’re Dead.

• Childhood maltreatment alters sperm, future generations' brain development

• Hunters Disagree on the Threat of Chronic Wasting Disease in Deer

• "galaxy gas" NO2 The Next Drug Epidemic Is Blue Raspberry Flavored

• High THC, High Risk: The Cannabis-Psychosis Link.

Pox / COVID / BioTerror AgitProp

• How the US is preparing for a potential bird flu pandemic

• The Dangerous Precedent of CDFA’s Ban on Poultry and Dairy Cattle Exhibitions.

  The California Department of Food and Agriculture (CDFA) has imposed a sweeping ban on poultry and dairy cattle exhibitions, this time citing fears of H5N1 avian influenza. If this feels like déjà vu, that’s because we’ve seen this playbook before.

  • They closed some churches but not others for COVID; the precedents have been made and this is trivial in comparison.

Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda

• Mysterious fish that live for a century and don't decline with age

• Previously unknown jellyfish discovered in a pond in Hong Kong

• BlackRock quits climate group as Wall Street lowers environmental profile

• Global Climate Highlights 2024: The 2024 Annual Climate Summary

• Health experts rally for 'call to arms' to protect children from toxic chemicals

• World breaches 1.5C global warming target for first time in 2024

  • Hottest year on record sent planet past 1.5C of heating for first time in 2024

  • 2024 first year to pass 1.5C global warming limit

• Industrial Complex Proposal Threatens the Clearest Skies for Astronomy

• Oil extraction might have triggered small earthquakes in Surrey

• Scientists drill 2 miles down pull 1.2M-year-old ice core from Antarctic