2025-01-12
LA still burning, black boxes failed, Matt's madness, fiber repeaters, floppy IPC, forgive Fannie, last gasp lawfare, rules for peasants, "Musk shouldn't ask" is a poor answer, less Great Salt Lake
LA fires
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LA fires live: new evacuation order as thickening smoke prompts health emergency
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High resolution imagery of LA fire damage from earlier today
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The L.A. Fires Were Likely Not Caused by Climate Change
Not to needlessly dump on the parade of climate catastrophism but there is no evidence that these chaparral fires are worsened by climate change in any significant way. Forest fires maybe yes, but not chaparral fires. This vegetation type has always coexisted with intense fires exactly like these.
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In LA fire horror, California elites face the consequences of blue misrule
Comedian Billy Crystal lost his home — all but its tennis court — in Pacific Palisades. The homes of actors Anthony Hopkins, Miles Teller and John Goodman were wiped out there, too. Heiress Paris Hilton said she saw her luxe Malibu vacation house “burn to the ground on live TV.” It’s unpleasant to talk about the politics that led to the loss of entire neighborhoods, but it’s necessary to examine the terrible policies that led to this preventable disaster.
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Obvious Blue Model Failure: "It’s unclear when the reservoir first went offline"
The Los Angeles Times reports this morning — confirming a conspiracy theory that people have been spreading online as social media disinformation, of course — that the major local reservoir at the heart of Pacific Palisades was dry when the fire started, due to a torn liner (floating cover). The newspaper quotes a city DWP official as saying that the reservoir has been out of service for repairs for “a while.” They’re not sure about an actual date. The story is illustrated with a photograph of the empty reservoir that was taken in 2022, so.
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Why are trees still standing next to burned-out buildings in Los Angeles?
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(2022) L.A. County Fire Department donating surplus supplies to Ukraine’s first responders | KTLA
Boots, hoses, nozzles, body armor and medication were among the items packed and shipped out during an event earlier this week. The care package was loaded at an L.A. County fire station in Inglewood on Thursday afternoon. Fire Chief Daryl Osby and county supervisor Janice Hahn were in attendance and helped pack up the items. “As Ukrainian firefighters continue to work under extreme peril to remove victims with limited resources, we felt the need to step up and help in some way,” said Osby in a news release.
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Inconvenient truths about the fires burning in Los Angeles from two fire experts
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As wildfires rage, private firefighters join the fight for the fortunate few
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Amid a search for the cause of the crisis, energy firm Southern California Edison admitted its grid short-circuited just after 10pm on Tuesday when a tower went down - the same time the Hurst Fire erupted. Although Edison said it was not yet clear if the fallen power line happened before or after the fire started, it comes after Bob Marshall, the chief executive of Whisker Labs, a company that monitors electrical activity, told Fox News that the firm saw spikes in faults in the hours before the Eaton, Palisades and Hurst Fires. Marshall said data shows the power was not immediately shut off after the faults surged, and may have been caused by 'tree limbs touching wires or wires blowing in the wind and touching.' 'That creates a spark in a fault, and we detect all of those things,' Marshall said.
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A 'warrior' brain surgeon saved his Malibu street from wildfires and looters
Horseshit
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Black boxes on crashed South Korean jet cut out before impact, inquiry finds
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The relationship recession is going global
The central demographic story of modern times is not just declining rates of childbearing but rising rates of singledom: a much more fundamental shift in the nature of modern societies. Relationships are not just becoming less common, but increasingly fragile. In egalitarian Finland, it is now more common for couples who move in together to split up than to have a child, a sharp reversal of the historical norm.
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Charles Petzold: Very Wrong Math
- comment:
If you wrapped a rope around the earth, how much more rope would you need to add so that it would be 1 meter above the ground at all points? The answer is only 2π meters!
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We moved to the old Sun campus, I noticed the towel dispensers had a delay timer
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Is the World Becoming Uninsurable?
- the concept of "insurance' was pioneered in nascent industries with insane risk and loss per todays standards. I also not the rise in popularity of gambling; there seems to be a convergence of interests there.
Obit
Rank Propaganda / Thought Policing / World Disordering
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Killing With Applause: Emergent Permission Structures for Murder in the Digital Age
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State Department Defies Congress, Revives Infamous Censorship Office in Absurd Prank
Just after the New Year, on January 2nd, Gabe reported in the Washington Examiner that as many as 51 GEC employees and tens of millions of dollars were moving in an effort to “realign” the office to a “hub” under a new name. The former GEC would be called the Counter Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference office, or R/FIMI, and report to the Undersecretary for Public Diplomacy. The $29.4 million routed to the new “hub” would be “roughly the amount of base funds the GEC currently uses to fund counter-FIMI initiatives through grants and contracts,” a non-public letter dated December 6th and sent to Congress read.
Musk
Electric / Self Driving cars
Religion / Tribal / Culture War and Re-Segregation
Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising
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CFPB seeks to regulate virtual currencies in Roblox and other games
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Aligning Automattic’s Sponsored Contributions to WordPress – Automattic
To recalibrate and ensure our efforts are as impactful as possible, Automattic will reduce its sponsored contributions to the WordPress project. This is not a step we take lightly. It is a moment to regroup, rethink, and strategically plan how Automatticians can continue contributing in ways that secure the future of WordPress for generations to come. Automatticians who contributed to core will instead focus on for-profit projects within Automattic, such as WordPress.com, Pressable, WPVIP, Jetpack, and WooCommerce. Members of the “community” have said that working on these sorts of things should count as a contribution to WordPress.
TechSuck / Geek Bait
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ILA Evo: Meta's journey to reimagine fiber optic in-line amplifier sites
As fiber was rolled out along roads, railways, and pipelines, real estate to house optical signal repeaters was developed in parallel. What later became known ILA sites were spaced 18 to 25 miles (30 to 40 km) apart. With rapid improvements in both optical fiber purity and composition, plus advancements in optronics, spacing soon doubled into the 50 to 60 mile (80 to 100 km) range where it has largely remained until today.
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Some things should stay dead: Restoring a 22-Year-Old Game’s Audio Hack With V86
The DS4QB2 sound engine takes a "hold my beer" approach to inter-process communication. So if Squealer TNT wants to play a sound, this is the sequence:
- The game writes parameters to a file, DS4QB2.DAT
- The game writes a value to port 0 and waits for it to be cleared
- DS4QB2 continuously polls port 0 and detects the audio request
- DS4QB2 reads the parameters from DS4QB2.DAT and plays a sound
- DS4QB2 clears port 0 and the game resumes
It was a cursed solution.
AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World
Space / Boomy Zoomers / UFO
Economicon / Business / Finance
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Sequoia Backs Startup Giving Offshore Accounts to People in Unstable Economies
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The Fannie and Freddie Trade Is Back - Bloomberg
in 2008 Fannie and Freddie went bust. Part of the problem was that there was a historic housing downturn, a lot of people defaulted on their (conforming) mortgages, and Fannie and Freddie had big losses on their guarantees. Another part of the problem is that, over the years leading up to 2008, Fannie and Freddie built up sort of an investment portfolio that was horrific in very 2008 ways. Fannie and Freddie bought only high-quality conforming mortgages in their basic business of guaranteeing mortgages, but they invested their money — the insurance reserve they’d need to pay out those guarantees — in a surprisingly large amount of subprime mortgages. And it turns out that everyone was right: The government did not let Fannie and Freddie fail. Instead, the government took them over: The FHFA, Fannie and Freddie’s regulator, was appointed “conservator” of the enterprises, basically kicking out their public-company directors and taking over their management. And the US Treasury gave them a huge line of credit to make sure that they could pay back all of their guarantees.
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'So immoral': gig economy workers forced to pay fee to receive their wages
Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making
Trump
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Rudy Giuliani found in contempt of court — again — for defaming Georgia election workers.
Washington, DC, federal Judge Beryl Howell sided with lawyers for Shaye Moss and Ruby Freeman, finding that Giuliani violated the judge’s “unambiguous” prior ruling barring the former New York City Mayor from continuing to defame the two women, according to reporting by The Hill. On Monday, a Manhattan federal judge similarly held Giuliani in contempt of court, on the grounds that he was trying to “run out the clock” to avoid paying Freeman and Moss a $148 million defamation verdict they won in 2023.
Howell was alarmed by the argument suggesting Giuliani would never cease making the claims against the women. “He’s never going to stop because he thinks he’s right?” Howell said. “That’s chilling.” Ted Goodman, Giuliani’s political advisor, claimed Giuliani wasn’t able to sufficiently defend himself in the original defamation suit. “This contempt ruling is designed to prevent Mayor Giuliani from exercising his constitutional rights,” Goodman said.
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The verdict, however, is likely to last far longer than the Trump verdict. It is a judgment against not just Merchan but the New York legal system, which allowed itself to be weaponized against political opponents. > That includes businesses that view this case and the equally absurd civil case brought by New York Attorney General Letitia James as creating a dangerous and even lawless environment. Many are saying “There but for the grace of God go I” in a system that allows for selective prosecution.
Democrats / Biden Inc
Left Angst
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Why I Shouldn’t Have Been Shamed for My Pandemic Sex Parties By Dr. Jay Varma
A far-right honeytrap targeted COVID expert Dr. Jay Varma. We will all pay the price for fallacious campaigns to destroy trust, he says.
Why my sudden fame? Because I had been caught in the crosshairs of a far-right “activist journalism” sting. After a respected career in public health, I was branded a deviant and hypocrite. There were hundreds of stories. The New York Times headline read “Former N.Y.C. Covid Czar Partied While Preaching Social Distancing.”
While I worked on this vital effort, I did not share anything with my colleagues or the public about my private life. Outwardly, that life is conventional. My wife and I have been married for 26 years and have three grown children. But–like an increasing number of New Yorkers–we had also practiced ethical non-monogamy for more than a decade. In August 2020, we gathered with eight other close friends—all members of our “pod”—for an intimate party. We all had negative PCR tests 48 hours before gathering. We verified that we had no COVID symptoms at the time we gathered and tracked each other’s symptoms for the following week. No one in the group contracted COVID. In early November, we participated in a nearly identical gathering, with the same outcome.
Law Breaking / Police / Internal Security
External Security / Militaria / Diplomania
World
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A woman who built an 'aidbot' for displaced people in Lebanon
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Indonesia keeps iPhone 16 ban despite Apple offer to build AirTag factory
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Something is rotten in the state of Starmer
Elon Musk, and a host of other critics, have been going after Keir Starmer for his and Jess Phillips’ decision to refuse a national inquiry into the grooming gangs in Oldham. Keir Starmer is furiously angry about the grooming scandal. Unfortunately, what he is mostly angry about seems to be those attacking his record, rather than the rape gangs.
Before we get to what was wrong with his response, and there was a great deal, we should first understand where he and his supporters are coming from. Musk is ill-informed, unconcerned with the truth and making reckless assertions, and he is doing so from a massive social media platform, on the eve of his becoming an official in the US government. Musk and his allies have attacked Starmer and Jess Phillips, both of whom believe they have taken a substantive role in fighting against sexual abuse.
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Germany battles to secure 'Russian shadow fleet' oil tanker adrift
China
Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda
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This Tiny Fish’s Mistaken Identity Halted a Dam’s Construction - The New York Times
Scientists say the snail darter, whose endangered species status delayed the building of a dam in Tennessee in the 1970s, is a genetic match of a different fish.
Dr. Near contends that early researchers “squinted their eyes a bit” when describing the fish, because it represented a way to fight the Tennessee Valley Authority’s plan to build the Tellico Dam on the Little Tennessee River, about 20 miles southwest of Knoxville. “I feel it was the first and probably the most famous example of what I would call the ‘conservation species concept,’ where people are going to decide a species should be distinct because it will have a downstream conservation implication,” Dr. Near said.
- How much public money, over how many years, was wasted by this example of deliberate malpractice of science?
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Reducing irrigation of livestock feed is essential to saving Great Salt Lake
The Great Salt Lake of Utah (US) is of great economic, cultural, and spiritual importance, yet rapid depletion of the lake in recent decades gravely threatens these values. The lake's shrinkage is attributable to anthropogenic consumption of 62% of river water that would have otherwise reached and replenished the lake.
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Bigmouth buffalo: Mysterious fish that live for a century and don't age