2025-01-19

TikTok reprieve, Socratic life, lootbox ban, environmental impact of AI, less skiing, moar beef tallow, Trump tokens, Biden's infirmities, Houthi piracy, Syrian arms, alcohol nutrition facts

LA Fires

• The wildfires have created an new housing crisis in Los Angeles

• Inside L.A.’s desperate battle for water as the Palisades fire exploded

• No shrubs and lots of concrete: This is what a fire-resistant house looks like

• As LA smolders, the AQI can't capture the full picture of wildfire smoke

• 'It was built for this': how design helped spare some homes from LA wildfires

• More than 1,100 inmates help Cal Fire battle for less than $30 a day

• There are no grown-ups in California

• Vintage cars survive Los Angeles area fires

Horseshit

• Big Ideas to Make New York City More Affordable

• Joint Statement from the United States and Canada on Haudenosaunee Participation in the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics | The White House

  The United States and Canada call on the International Olympic Committee (IOC) to allow the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, a confederacy of Indigenous Nations in North America, to compete in lacrosse at the 2028 Los Angeles Olympic Games as their own team under their own flag.

• Tech founder pledges to give away half of wealth to make American dream possible

• Giant Batteries Are Transforming Electrical Grids

• Archaeologists Find First Female-Led Society in Europe

• Is Atlas Shrugged the New Vibe?

• Are We Living in a Dystopia?

• Nobel laureates and preeminent scientists call for 'moonshot' food effort

• David Lynch exposed the rot at the heart of American culture

• Why I'm long-term bullish on the Middle East

• Balance of Power Shifts Back Toward Bosses

Rank Propaganda / Thought Policing / World Disordering

• Why Europe fears free speech - UnHerd

  We all know the old joke: when a European referendum delivers the “wrong” outcome, the country votes again until they get it “right”. The EU thought this would be the case after Brexit. But so far, no one’s laughing. If anything, things have got worse. Take Romania, which recently cancelled its presidential election when Călin Georgescu, leader of a nationalist Right coalition, won the first round. Thierry Breton, former French European Commissioner, revealed the EU’s mindset during a damning recent TV interview. “We did it in Romania and we will obviously do it in Germany if necessary,” he said. In other words, if you can’t beat the far-Right, ban them.

• Does fact-checking work? What the science says

TikTok

• 90-Day Delay: Trump Blinks on TikTok Ban

  • TikTok probably will get a 90-day reprieve on ban, Trump says

• Supreme Court Upholds TikTok Ban; Clearss App to Shut Down in U.S. by Sunday

• TikTok loses Supreme Court fight, prepares to shut down Sunday

• Statement from White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre Regarding TikTok

• How TikTok Evaded a Ban Again and Again, Until Now

• TikTok to ‘Go Dark’ on Sunday for Its 170 Million American Users

• TikTok says it will go dark on Sunday unless given 'definitive' assurances

• Is the TikTok ban a chance to rethink the whole internet?

• Oracle May Hold TikTok's Future in Its Hands

• What If No One Misses TikTok?

• Which countries have banned TikTok and why?

• Perplexity AI submits bid to merge with TikTok

Facebook

• FB fact checks were never going to save us. They just made liberals feel better

• Meta Pivots on Content Moderation

• From cow vigilantes to military propaganda: Facebook cuts risk violence in Asia

• Zuckerberg says companies need more 'masculine energy.' What does that mean?

Bluesky

• atproto and the ownership of identity

• We need to protect the protocol that runs Bluesky

Musk

• European Union orders X to hand over algorithm documents

• X is rolling out labels for parody accounts

• SpaceX requests exemption from $15 broadband law

• Garry Kasparov: Elon Musk is a danger to democracy

Electric / Self Driving cars

• Rivian stock rises as Volkswagen plans to expand $5.8 billion EV partnership

• EV, hybrid sales reached a record 20% of U.S. vehicle sales in 2024

• EV startup Canoo files for bankruptcy and ceases operations

Religion / Tribal / Culture War and Re-Segregation

• Construction and validation of a scale for assessing critical social justice

• What Would Socrates Do?

  2400 years of inquiry of all sorts into central value questions seems to have only resulted in modest progress. And few who have inquired into such questions, whether successfully and not, have chosen to use Socratic-style inquiry much, though most have been well aware of that option. So how could a typical person expect their personal Socratic inquiry to cut their personal value inconsistencies enough to justify substantial efforts here?

Edumacationalizing / Acedemia Nuts

• MIT Shuts Down Internal Grant Database Used to Research School's Israel Ties

• Victims of PowerSchool's data breach helped each other investigate hack

• Despite tensions, US-China AI research collaborations are alive and well

Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising

• Google begins requiring JavaScript for Google Search

• RedNote may wall off "TikTok refugees" from Chinese users

  • Chinese rival app Xiaohongshu is overwhelmed by 'TikTok refugees' in US

  • US TikTokers moving to RedNote encounter Chinese-style censorship first time

  • RedNote Scrambles to Hire English-Speaking Content Moderators

• New Bambu Lab Firmware Update Adds Mandatory Authorization Control System

• The PC is Dead: It’s Time to Make Computing Personal Again

• FTC bans Genshin Impact dev from selling lootboxes to under-16s, fines them $20M

• This Hedge Fund Created an Excel on Steroids

• There's a VR Game All the Kids Are Playing, and They're Convinced It's Haunted

• Games Workshop and the big ambition of a miniatures business

AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World

• How much economic growth from AI should we expect, how soon?

• Hallucination is a problem we'll have to live with for a long time

• Using ChatGPT is not bad for the environment

  • HN comments

• Microsoft eggheads say AI can never be made secure

• Taking legal action to protect the public from abusive AI-generated content

Space / Boomy Zoomers / UFO

• SpaceX Starship explosion forced FAA to divert flights to avoid debris

• FAA grounds SpaceX's Starship, reports property damage on Turks and Caicos

• Fire destroys Starship on its seventh test flight, raining debris from space

Economicon / Business / Finance

• Deal News and Rumors Are Pushing Intel Stock Higher to Start the Year

• Cash advance apps: Financial relief, or "loan shark in your pocket"?

• Vail Resorts Has an Epic Problem - WSJ

  For the first time, the company recently disclosed, it sold fewer season lift tickets, known as Epic Passes, than it did the year before. The Epic Pass, which costs around $1,000 this season, offers unlimited access to 42 Vail properties around the world, from Stowe, Vt., to Whistler in Canada, to Andermatt in the Swiss Alps. The whole business model rests on the pass, and any diminished interest in it could spell trouble, compounding other issues the company has been grappling with. Chief among them: Growth in skiers has been muted for nearly 20 years.

• Capital One two-day outage leaves customers in free-fall

• Steak 'n Shake says it will use 100% beef tallow

  • Steak 'n Shake says it will use 100% beef tallow

• Fake Job Listings Are Proliferating

• Tech unemployment in the US drops to lowest level in more than two years

• Scout Warns VW Dealers Fighting Direct Sales That It's Not Playing Around

• Amazon puts its drone deliveries on hold following two crash incidents

Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making

• A Tale of Two State Insurance Markets - WSJ

  Florida fixed its market with reforms. California didn’t. See the results.

• New York Proposes Doing Background Checks on Anyone Buying a 3D Printer

Trump

• Bill Gates 'Impressed' with Trump's Interest in Global Health After Dinner

• Trump Team Has Wealth-Fund Ambitions for Small Lending Agency

• Trump to Begin Large-Scale Deportations Tuesday

• Trump brings hope for shoring up the steel industry.

• America braces for an avalanche of Trump executive orders on day one - The Spectator World

  Donald Trump will be sworn back into office on Monday, from inside the Capitol Rotunda, as Ronald Reagan was in 1985. Cold weather is the official reason for moving the ceremony from outside to in, and it seems true — the seventy-eight-year-old president-elect may wish to avoid the fate of his predecessor William Henry Harrison — although there’s plenty of speculation that security is the real factor. The Donald, in benevolent king mode, also didn’t want the poor horses to freeze to death on his big day. It’s funny what goes on in that very famous orange head.

  Trump will then make an appearance at the Capitol One Arena, for the fans, before going on to the White House so that he can, as he promised, jokingly yet seriously last year, be a dictator for one day. He will do this by signing as many as 100 executive orders. It would be very Donald to have added a few more directives just so he can reach the nice round century. Expect the growing legion of Trump loyalists to begin a chorus in the media: he’s done more in one day than most presidents do in their first 100. We’re so back, et cetera, ad infinitum.

• Trump Begins Selling New Crypto Token, Raising Ethical Concerns

  • The Official Trump Meme Token

  • Trump Unveils "Official" MemeCoin Late Friday; 12 Hours Later It Is Up 16,000% To $30 Billion | ZeroHedge

  • Trump Launches Meme Coin

Democrats / Biden Inc

• Biden declares Equal Rights Amendment US law, even though it is not

• Biden signs 11th-hour cybersecurity executive order

• How Biden’s Inner Circle Protected a Faltering President

  The president’s acknowledgment has put a new spotlight on his family and inner circle, all of whom dismissed concerns from voters and Mr. Biden’s own party that he was too old for the job. And yet they recognized his physical frailty to a greater degree than they have publicly acknowledged. Then they cooperated, according to interviews with more than two dozen aides, allies, lawmakers and donors, to manage his decline. They rearranged meetings to make sure Mr. Biden was in a better mood — a strategy one person close to him described as how aides should handle any president. At times, they delayed sharing information with him, including negative polling data, as they debated the best way to frame it. They surrounded him with aides when he walked from the White House to the waiting presidential helicopter on the South Lawn so that news cameras could not capture his awkward bearing.

  • NYT ‘Journalists’ Write Tell-All ‘Exposing’ the Biden White House Cover-Up They Fully Participated In

• The Biden Admin Forced Gas and Coal Plants To Embrace Carbon Capture—Then Privately Told Climate Activists To Fight It

Left Angst

• Under new law, cops bust famous cartoonist for AI-generated CSAM

• OpenAI's Altman responds to Dem letter demanding he explain Trump donation

• The Interview: Curtis Yarvin Says Democracy Is Done

• The bros' new clothes: How Big Tech lurched to the right

• Male speaker with violent past dropped by anti-Trump women's march

• The world is an objectively worse place because of tech-bro oligarchs

• Memo to Trump: Develop specific AI guidelines for nuclear command and control

Law Breaking / Police / Internal Security

• Feds worry AT&T breach could out informants

• A Georgia Prosecutor Has Long Regretted Sending a Man Away for Life. Can He Fix It? - The New York Times

  Mr. Burke, a former district attorney, hadn’t seen the man, Jessie Askew Jr., since the sentencing in 1998. He had insisted at the time that Mr. Askew, then 24 years old, deserved to die in prison. On this spring morning in 2023, Mr. Burke planned to tell the court it was the biggest mistake of his career.

External Security / Militaria / Diplomania

• President-Elect Donald Trump faces an unprecedented cyberthreat

World

• Digital driving licenses being introduced in the UK

• Why 5G in the UK is so bad

• A Wider War Has Started in Europe

• Thai prime minister says she was nearly tricked by scam caller posing as another world leader

  Prime Minister Paetongtarn Shinawatra said she realized it was a scam when the other person tried to pressure her into transferring money to a foreign bank account.

• Hundreds of Miners Were Trapped for Months–Until a Two-Man Rescue Mission

• Is Switzerland getting badder at English?

• Drone Boats Being Rushed to Help Prevent Baltic Seafloor Cable Sabotage

• Norway is sounding the alarm after discovering that Russia is also spoofing GPS

• Georestriction of the UK - Community - Haiku Community

  While Haiku, Inc. is a US not-for-profit company, with services hosted outside the UK, we risk a lawsuit in the UK if we continue to offer community services to users of this country. Communities all over the internet are facing a similar problem.

• UK: BBC switch-off to force 600k households on to smart meters

• IBM Wins £895M Contract to Transform UK Emergency Services Network

• 43% of UK Banks Unprepared for Dora Compliance: New EU Regulations

• Voters across Asia contend with AI-generated fake videos and images

• Swedish man dies in South Korea after being denied treatment at 21 hospitals

• Inside South Africa's 'ruthless' gang-controlled gold mines

Iran / Houthi

• Inside the Houthi’s moneymaking machine | The Economist

  Before the ceasefire Maersk said it expected the Red Sea to stay closed “well into 2025”, a view reflected in analysts’ profit forecasts for shipping majors. Though attacks have slowed recently, a rebel official says this proves the blockade is working. “The number of sanctioned vessels transiting the Red Sea”, he says, “has declined significantly.” It is also lucrative. A panel of experts told the UN Security Council in November that a few “shipping agencies co-ordinate with a company affiliated with a top-ranking Houthi leader” to buy safe passage. “There’s clearly some deal-cutting,” says Tim Lenderking, America’s special envoy for Yemen. The UN experts reckon the fees are worth $180m a month, or $2.1bn a year. In effect, that doubles the Houthis’ income, though others in the industry, including Mr Askins, question these numbers.

Israel

• Israel 'Confiscates' Thousands Of Abandoned Weapons, Including Tanks, From Syria | ZeroHedge

Russia Bad / Ukraine War

• Russian hackers target WhatsApp accounts of ministers worldwide

China

• Chinese Innovations Spawn Wave of Toll Phishing via SMS

• China probes US chip subsidies over 'harm' to Chinese mature node chipmakers

Health / Medicine

• Proposed rules would require nutrition info on alcohol labels

  • Why has alcohol been exempt from these requirements for so long? I recall "foaming agents" being discussed int he 1980s...

• Experts hail 'milestone' in study of the deadly Huntington's disease

Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda

• “In 2023, global temperatures spiked unexpectedly, partly due to the 2020 regulation cutting sulfur emissions from international shipping, which reduced cloud cover and increased solar heat absorption.”

• Peering into a Bleak, 'Uninsurable Future'

• The Greenland Shark, the Longest-Living Vertebrate on Earth

• Federal Reserve withdraws from global regulatory climate change group