2025-01-13

cargo cults, LA burns, stuffed animals, ancient sex toys, computers are matured, more compute will cure all, poor people shafted, DNC security, Trumpist-marxist counter-revolution, cancel elections

etc

• It's time to abandon the cargo cult metaphor

  pop-culture depiction of cargo cults is inaccurate and fictionalized, as I'll show. Second, the metaphor is overused and has contradictory meanings making it a lazy insult. Finally, cargo cults are portrayed as an amusing story of native misunderstanding but the background is much darker: cargo cults are a reaction to decades of oppression of Melanesian islanders and the destruction of their culture. For these reasons, the cargo cult metaphor is best avoided.

• Families in North Carolina still living in tents after Hurricane Helene… now a deadly winter storm is coming

LA fires

• Asking rents skyrocket as LA fires destroy homes

  • LA Renters Hit with Price Gouging During Wildfire Chaos

• Fighting Fires–and the Rumor Mill–As L.A. Burns

• Company behind incorrect evacuation alerts in LA says it added new safeguards

• As if CA fires have never happened before... California overhauled its insurance system. Then Los Angeles caught fire

• The southern California fire event was accurately forecast on Jan 4

• Palisades Reservoir Was Closed to Repair Its Cover

• California Fires: Multiple people accused of arson as firestorm rages in LA

• Why Los Angeles was unprepared for this fire

• The California wildfires could be leaving deeper inequality in their wake

  The sight of celebrity mansions and movie landmarks reduced to ashes can make it seem like the wildfires roaring through the Los Angeles area affected a constellation of movie stars. But a drive through the charred neighborhoods around Altadena shows that the fires also burned through a remarkable haven for generations of Black families avoiding discriminatory housing practices elsewhere. They have been communities of racial and economic diversity, where many people own their own homes.

• Destruction of Palisades fires in satellite images

• Private firefighters protected a Hollywood talent manager’s home. Why are some people so mad?

  Leber is one of a growing number of Californians who, faced with the growing threat of wildfires in populated areas, have turned to private firefighting teams as an added layer of protection. Supporters of private firefighting teams argue they can augment the work of government-run efforts, stepping in to fill the cracks caused by depleted city and state budgets and an ever-worsening climate crisis. But not everyone is a fan of private firefighters, particularly those that contract directly with homeowners outside of insurance, like the company Leber hired. Critics contend that when wealthy individuals hire their own firefighters, they compete with public teams for precious resources such as water, and could potentially interfere with those teams’ efforts by, for example, blocking or crowding narrow access points.

  • Billionaire tycoon is blasted after hiring a private fire crew to protect his luxury outdoor mall as devastating wildfires continue to rip through LA

• Gov. Gavin Newsom slams Trump's disinformation about California wildfires

  • California Fire Facts

• There Is a Safety Valve for Private Home Insurance in California

Horseshit

• Millennials and Gen Z are falling hard for stuffed animals

  Melissa Symonds of Circana, a consumer-insights firm, says that soft toys are the second-largest category in the British toy market; sales have increased by around 58% since 2021. The global market was worth almost $12bn in 2023 and is expected to grow at an annual rate of 8% until 2030. So lucrative are these playthings that Warren Buffett bought the parent company of Squishmallows, an American purveyor of rotund stuffed animals, in 2022, calling it a money-making “gem”. It is not young kids driving the demand but “kidults” (those aged 12 and above). Kidults now account for over a quarter of sales and, in 2023, surpassed preschoolers for the first time as the biggest age cohort for toys overall.

• James Turrell’s quest to build the most ambitious artwork of our time

• The mistake of yearning for the 'friendly' online world of 20 years ago

• NJ bus aide was on her phone as 6-year-old girl was choked by harness

• The history of sex toys and what they tell us about ancient women

  Sexual history has to be found in different ways outside mainstream history books, but sex toys have existed and been enjoyed by all genders throughout human history. Many were made of materials that perished over the centuries. The Ancient Greeks used a stuffed leather phallus known as olisboi, and which can be seen depicted on pottery examples. In the middle ages, dildos were widely used enough that a side industry of strap-on harnesses flourished. Because many of these harnesses were custom made by leather crafters, the proof of this existence for these bedroom accessories has been found in receipts for purchases. These scraps of paper contain a glimpse into a culture where sex toys were normal, and that women were using harnesses to turn their sex toys into a strap on dildos to penetrate other women with.

• Kids Turn to a Mental-Health Chatbot to Share Their Anxieties

• People's moral values change with the season

Facebook

• Open letter to Mark Zuckerberg – Congratulations on your remarks

Musk

• More than 60 German universities and research institutions leave X

• Steve Bannon condemns Elon Musk as 'racist' and 'evil'

• UK universities join retreat from Elon Musk's X, citing misinformation

Religion / Tribal / Culture War and Re-Segregation

• Apple board opposes proposal to abolish DEI programs

Edumacationalizing / Acedemia Nuts

• Tuition cost has fallen significantly at many colleges

Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising

• Mullenweg Shuts Down WordPress Sustainability Team, Igniting Backlash

  • Mad King Mat Mullenweg is now terminating the WordPress accounts of people who suggest that a WordPress fork might be forthcoming.

• Netflix Expanded to 190 Countries in 7 Years

• What the US Pornhub 'ban' is really about

  • Pornhub has blocked access from a third of the US. The Supreme Court could change that | CNN Politics

TechSuck / Geek Bait

• Das Blinkenlights!

• I will never need to buy a new computer again - 82MHz

  Now this system is 6 years old, and I’m starting to feel that same itch again. I haven’t upgraded my computer in a while, so maybe it’s time for something new? Ryzen 9000 maybe? With or without X3D? But here’s the thing: I don’t need it. I don’t have a single usecase for which I would need this much processing power. In fact, I could still use that i5 from 2011 and it would do everything I want it to do perfectly fine. I didn’t need to upgrade, I just wanted to. And I don’t need to upgrade now either. That Ryzen 3600 system is still plenty fast, and it will be for the rest of the decade at least. I’m writing this post right now on an 11 year old laptop. I write all my posts on this laptop. It’s fine. It works. No need to replace it. And no need to replace the desktop system, which is at least twice as fast as that laptop, either.

  • HN comments

  • I have been using a 2011 computer for the last couple months after "main" hardware failures. it suffices.

• From ASCII to ASIC: Porting donut.c to a tiny slice of silicon

AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World

• AI founders will learn The Bitter Lesson | Lukas Petersson

  throughout AI’s history, researchers have repeatedly tried to improve systems by building in human domain knowledge. The “bitter” part of the title comes from what happens next: systems that simply use more computing power end up outperforming these carefully crafted solutions. We’ve seen this pattern in speech recognition, computer chess, and computer vision. If Sutton wrote his essay today, he’d likely add generative AI to that list. And he warns us: this pattern isn’t finished playing out.

  • HN comments

• 'Mainlined into UK's veins': Labour announces public rollout of AI

Space / Boomy Zoomers / UFO

• Space junk metal ring baffles residents and sparks concern in Kenya village

• Watch Blue Origin launch its 1st New Glenn rocket early Sunday in a free livestream.

• Hacker hijacks and repairs Beesat-1 satellites from the ground

Economicon / Business / Finance

• Amazon's 5-Day RTO Appears to Be More Flexible in Europe Than the US

• Technological Disruption in the Labor Market | NBER

  employment in low- and middle-paid occupations has declined, while highly paid employment has grown. Second, employment growth has stalled in low-paid service jobs. Third, the share of employment in STEM jobs has increased by more than 50 percent since 2010, fueled by growth in software and computer-related occupations. Fourth, retail sales employment has declined by 25 percent in the last decade, likely because of technological improvements in online retail.

• Game publisher Tencent threatens to sue US for Chinese military designation

• JPMorgan Chase Disables Employee Comments After Return-to-Office Backlash

Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making

• US Supreme Court curbed public scrutiny as it boosted security before Roe ruling

  • Having already had a leak, people publishing their home addreses and so on...

Democrats / Biden Inc

• Secret Phone Surveillance Tech Was Likely Deployed at 2024 DNC | WIRED

  Initial tests conducted during the DNC revealed no conclusive evidence of cell-site simulator activity. However, months later, EFF technologists reanalyzed the raw data using improved detection methods. According to Cooper Quintin, a senior technologist at the EFF, the Rayhunter tool stores all interactions between devices and cell towers, allowing for deeper analysis as detection techniques evolve. A breakthrough came when EFF technologists applied a new heuristic to examine situations where cell towers requested IMSI (international mobile subscriber identity) numbers from devices. According to the EFF’s analysis, on August 18—the day before the convention officially began—a device carried by WIRED reporters en route a hotel housing Democratic delegates from states in the US Midwest abruptly switched to a new tower. That tower asked for the device’s IMSI and then immediately disconnected—a sequence consistent with the operation of a cell-site simulator.

• Police detain 2 people at Vice President Harris’ Brentwood home during curfew hours

Left Angst

• China's DeepSeek Shows Why Trump's Trade War Will Be Hard to Win

• Four Big Questions for the Counter-Revolution

  root questions about the nature and future direction of what I will call, for lack of any better term, the Counter-Revolution – the informal and disorganized, but growing, and already global, network of people thinking about, writing about, and now increasingly building institutions with a mission of actively pushing back against the revolutionary tide of the (again for lack of a better term) “Woke” New Faith-Ideology. What is fascinating about this Counter-Revolution is the surprising political breadth – indeed one might say diversity – of the people that have been brought together under its tent of opposition. Liberals, conservatives, and libertarians; rationalist humanists and the New Atheists; social conservatives, religious traditionalists, and neo-reactionaries; even some classical Marxists and left-labor-socialists; and many others that defy easy categorization – all have been at least temporarily united in shared recognition of an existential threat to their collective survival.

  Just because there are antagonistic divisions between two sides on these questions doesn’t necessarily mean there is only a binary way to answer them, however. So the final question is whether, on all of the above questions, a new equilibrium, a new balance, can be found in answer. Can a new balance be found between the fantastic benefits produced by Liberalism and its pathologies?

• From Obama to Justin Trudeau, how the liberal world order crumbled

• Tech titans are falling over themselves to help Trump

• I Have No Idea What Peter Thiel Is Trying to Say

  To hear Thiel tell it, the incoming Trump presidency is the dawn of a new age. Thiel uses ancient, I’m sorry “ancien,” spellings of many words. Words like “apokálypsis” which he says will lead to the grand unveiling of multiple truths. Who killed Jeffrey Epstein? What’s the real story behind the JFK assassination? Was COVID-19 a U.S. bioweapon? Did Brazil ban X at the behest of the Biden administration? According to Thiel, Trump has an opportunity to unveil all these truths and more. It’s an essay that rails against a word coined by Thiel’s “friend and colleague” Eric Weinstein, what they call the “Distributed Idea Suppression Complex (DISC) — the media organisations, bureaucracies, universities and government-funded NGOs that traditionally delimited public conversation.” In short, elites.

  There’s a lot of problems here. The biggest being that Thiel is, by any measure, an elite. He is a member of the Distributed Idea Suppression Complex he seems to oppose. He is the kind of person who goes on Piers Morgan to speak out against assassinated CEOs and writes op-eds in the Financial Times.

Law Breaking / Police / Internal Security

• Fired Disney employee will plead guilty to hacking menus to hide peanut content

External Security / Militaria / Diplomania

• Most US spy agencies doubt Havana Syndrome caused by foreign foe

World

• Public health: Businesses seek to cut sick pay in Germany

• EU Globalist Explicitly Threatens To Cancel German Election Result If Right Wing AfD Wins | ZeroHedge

  The publication Romania Journal highlighted Breton's words as follows: "If, on the other hand, the Tesla and X boss breaks the law, especially in Germany, by supporting the 'extremist' AfD party, the former European Commissioner believes that it will be necessary for the authorities to act as in Romania, where the presidential elections were canceled, writes the website of the French television BFMTV, which recalls Călin Georgescu’s TikTok campaign.

• Britain's First Supervised Drug Use Room Is Set to Open in Glasgow

• Sweden neither at war nor at peace, says PM, as warships sent to Baltic Sea

• The damning statistics that reveal the true cost of Brexit, five years on

China

• China to Keep Tapping Coal to Meet Its Energy Security Needs

Health / Medicine

• How Corn Syrup Took over America

• Male and female brains differ at birth

• Alcohol habits aren't a black-and-white issue

• Study links sugar-filled drinks to millions of heart disease and diabetes cases

• Vitamin deficiency may be why you're so tired

Pox / COVID / BioTerror AgitProp

• What We Know About HMPV, the Common Virus Spreading in China

Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda

• The utterly plausible case that climate change makes London much colder

• Aridity, Acidity, and Salinity: How Greenhouse Gases Are Choking Our Soil

• The Panama Canal's Newest Voyagers: Fishy Intruders from Two Oceans

• Across southeastern US, weedy rice steals herbicide resistance from crop rice

• EU's 2024 new wind capacity less than half amount needed for climate goal

• Microplastics in the air may be leading to lung and colon cancers

• Why this longtime Aspen ski executive thinks corporate sustainability is a scam