2025-01-20

stories of self, Zoomer slack, TikTok flip flop, Musk couldn't fix Intel, Bambu unlocked, Trump coins, Vivek ousted, Canadian envy, German rumors, rule by lawyers, celebrated diagnoses, solar sheep

etc

• Pointless Pace Killers - Rob Henderson's Newsletter

  Carrie Kerpen has written, “The reason we struggle with insecurity is because we are comparing our behind-the-scenes with everyone’s highlight reel.”

CA Fires

• Smoke from fire at California lithium battery raises concerns about air quality

• Fighting LA's Fires from the Sky

• After the Fires

• They Built Their Fireproof Dream Home. Even If It Lasted, Would They?

• Wildfires are erasing California's climate gains, research shows

• L.A. Homeowners Installed Private Fire Hydrants

Horseshit

• Nobody helped me. Then I was sent to jail for holding up a shop with a toy gun

• "The Traitors", a reality TV show, offers a useful economics lesson

• The pointy-shoed corruption of medieval London

• What do people regret the most when they retire

• Detroit lots were closed for allegedly seeking $1K for Lions parking

• Young people are hanging out less – it may be harming their mental health

• Fearing AI Will Take Their Jobs, Workers Plan a Long Battle Against Tech

• Cut the Zoomers some slack

  For Zoomers, dating and marriage seem bleak. They often come from broken homes, with few positive examples of healthy relationships. Churches — once crucial for moral guidance, meeting potential spouses, and helping couples through marital struggles — have been abandoned. Instead, young people turn to dating apps they find degrading, with low chances of success. Young women, burdened by college debt taken on to secure a job, hesitate to start families because they cannot rely on a husband’s income alone. Zoomers are not inherently entitled or lazy. They were born into a culture that gutted many key social institutions to boost abstract measures like GDP. Earlier generations forgot that economic growth should improve people’s lives, not just inflate earnings reports. Destroying faith, family, and community for profit invites cynicism among young people who see fewer pathways to success. This does not excuse Zoomers from personal responsibility, but conservatives should encourage them rather than mock them.

Rank Propaganda / Thought Policing / World Disordering

• Wikipedia's Supreme Court on the Verge of Topic Banning 8 Editors

  • Wikipedia Arbitration Committee Banning 8 Editors from Israel-Palestine Area

• The right to participate and to exclude: The role of government in social media

• Climate misinformation is rife on social media – and poised to get worse

TikTok

• TikTok modifies closing message to mention Donald Trump

• MarvelSnap Game Also Goes Dark and Is Pulled from AppStores Because of TikTokBan

  • Marvel Snap down, caught in the TikTok ban

  • Marvel Snap is banned, just like TikTok

• Apple says it's following the law by removing TikTok from the App Store

  • About availability of TikTok and ByteDance Ltd. apps in the United States

• TikTok Starts Going Dark in the U.S.

• TikTok goes offline in the US hours before ban due to come in

• Perplexity AI makes a bid to merge with TikTok U.S.

• These are the countries where TikTok is already banned

• TikTok has officially shut down in the United States

• TikTok goes dark in the US

  • HN comments

• TikTok Is Down in the US

• Could TikTok ever be banned in the UK too?

• India Banned TikTok in 2020

• Everyone is asking the wrong questions about TikTok

• Trump says he will issue an executive order Monday to get TikTok back up

  • Trump Says He Will Sign Executive Order to Stall TikTok Ban

  • Trump Says He Will Issue an Order to Reopen TikTok in the U.S.

  • Trump reveals his plan to revive TikTok

  • Donald Trump wants to buy TikTok

• TikTok Shutdown: Why building on proprietary platforms is a risky game

• TikTok Shut Down: Data Shows 85% Drop in US Access (and Surge to Alternatives)

• TikTok restores service, thanks Trump

  • TikTok to Restore Service After Trump Vows to Extend Deadline

  • TikTok says it is restoring service for U.S. users

  • TikTok is back after executive order stalling ban

  • TikTok Being Restored

• TikTok's CEO used to work for Mark Zuckerberg as a Facebook intern

• I'm a 17-Year-Old TikTok Junkie. I Need This Ban

• TikTok users posting cat videos do not threaten UK national security, minister

Facebook

• Mark Zuckerberg blamed Sheryl Sandberg for Meta 'inclusivity' push: report

  • HN comments

• Facebook paid GOP firm to malign TikTok

  • Mark Zuckerberg paid lobbyists $7.6M to aid in TikTok ban

• Zuckerberg appeared to know Llama trained on Libgen

Bluesky

• If Big Tech social platforms are junk food, then what is Bluesky?

• Russian disinformation campaigns discover Bluesky

Musk

• Elon Musk has become the biggest hypocrite on free speech

• Elon Musk's gaming scandal deepens as he attempts to silence streamer Asmongold

• the "grain of salt" here is a 50lb block: Elon Musk Reportedly Emerges As a Potential Intel Buyer, Involving Qualcomm & Global Foundries In This Blockbuster Deal

• One-third of Tesla owners in the Netherlands considering selling their vehicles

Electric / Self Driving cars

• EV startup Canoo files for bankruptcy and ceases operations

• BYD slashes prices across its EV line up, now starting at under $30k

Religion / Tribal / Culture War and Re-Segregation

• Lessons from the Past to Overcome Capitalism

Edumacationalizing / Acedemia Nuts

• IQ is largely a pseudoscientific swindle

Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising

• Some Hulu users have to answer questions about the ads shown to them to continue

• Newly-appointed Apple CFO denies 75% App Store profit claim in UK trial

• The web is a creative industry and is facing the same decline as film or TV

• Instagram's shifting to rectangles, messing up your perfect, square grid

• Lenovo has removed its iconic TrackPoint nub from new ThinkPad laptops

• Bambu Connect's Authentication X.509 Certificate and Private Key Extracted

  The Bambu Connect app is a fairly low-effort Electron-based affair, with some attempt at obfuscation and encryption, but not enough to keep prying eyes out. The de-obfuscated main.js file can be found here, with the certificate and private key clearly visible. These are used to encrypt HTTP traffic with the printer, and is the sole thing standing in the way of tools like OrcaSlicer talking with authentication-enabled Bambu Lab printers.

• More than half of U.S. counties have no or limited access to local news

• 'I Won't Touch Instagram'

TechSuck / Geek Bait

• A System For The Sixties-and-a-Half: The Toshiba Visicom COM-100

• Old Vintage Computing Research: The "35-cent" Commodore 64 softmodem

• Quantum computers may or may not work, but they arguments against them are unsound.

• A tour the some of the sillier levels of imaging hell: Viewing images

AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World

• AI systems aren't just copying our biases – they're making them worse

• The Pentagon says AI is speeding up its 'kill chain'

Space / Boomy Zoomers / UFO

• Largest telescope threatened by light pollution from energy project

Crypto con games

• Coinbase added the official Trump token in Solana

• Insider trading allegations surface as TRUMP memecoin floods Solana DEXs

• Trump launches cryptocurrency with price rocketing

• What the release of Trump's memecoin signals for crypto regulations

• Trump launches crypto meme coin, ballooning net worth ahead of inauguration

• Coinbase, Binance Plan to List Donald Trump's Official Trump Token

• Melania Trump joins her husband in the meme coin billions business

• Trump's Cryptocurrency Surges to Become One of the Most Valuable

• Trump-backed memecoin value tops $13B

Economicon / Business / Finance

• Why America is in an alcohol recession

• The new gold rush: why the precious metal has lost none of its allure

• Bill Gates paints a grim picture for the future of work

• Allstate car insurer sued for tracking drivers without permission

• Dumpster divers make hauls after holidays when stores toss merchandise

Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making

• Will the new presidency affect WFH for federal workers?

• Teen Sets Fire to Congressman's Office Allegedly over TikTok Ban

• Automakers Want Feds to Pump the Brakes on New Emergency Braking Rules

Trump

• Inaugural Weekend: Joyous Celebration or Dark Violence?

• Trump's pick for energy secretary acknowledges fossil fuels cause climate change

• Vivek Ramaswamy expected to depart DOGE

  Vivek Ramaswamy, President-elect Donald Trump's choice to co-lead the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) with entrepreneur Elon Musk, is expected to soon step away from the task force, CBS News has learned. Ramaswamy intends to announce a campaign for Ohio governor as soon as the end of January, multiple sources confirmed to CBS News. Ramaswamy, 39, had no comment.

  People close to Musk have privately undercut Ramaswamy for weeks, frustrated with his lack of participation in the heavy lifting, according to sources familiar with the internal dynamics. There has been friction between the incoming rank and file DOGE staff and Ramaswamy, the sources said, and Ramaswamy has been subtly encouraged to exit. "Vivek has worn out his welcome," one person close to Trump said.

Democrats / Biden Inc

• Biden burns it all down on his way out the door

• asked why he paused LNG exports to Europe, Biden was completely unaware he had done so.

• They were sentenced to death. But they don't want President Biden's commutation

• Nancy Pelosi’s daughter goes scorched earth on Jill ‘Lady McBiden’ in the bitter feud between Nancy Pelosi and Joe Biden

• Biden planning book with his narrative on presidency, election exit

Left Angst

• Opinion | How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms - The New York Times

  • Top AI Investor Says His Companies Are Filled With "America-Hating Communists" Destroying Them From the Inside

  They’re professional activists in their own minds, first and foremost," Andreessen fumed. "And it just turns out the way to exercise professional activism right now, most effectively, is to go and destroy a company from the inside." Does any of this particularly hold up to scrutiny? Not really; in reality, Americans' ideological beliefs have remained relatively stable over the past three decades, and the tech industry has remained staggeringly profitable. There's also a tension that's hard to reconcile: if Andreessen and his deputies are so brilliant at founding and managing startups, why are they constantly hiring saboteurs instead of qualified candidates? But what does emerge is an unintentionally revealing self-portrait of one of the most influential men in the AI industry. Andreessen feels besieged, paranoid that a deep state of his own employees is tearing down his companies from within. One reasonable interpretation: whether he's right or wrong about that hypothesis, it's spurring him to throw money at startups aiming to automate the work of the regular employees he feels so betrayed by.

• Steve Bannon says inauguration marks official surrender of tech titans to Trump

• Canada, Trump and the new world order

  When most Americans think about Canada, which is rarely, they think of snow, lakes, good hunting and how pleasant it is to have a neighbour who doesn’t make trouble. When Canadians think about Americans, which is all the time, the psychology of the weaker party makes for a mixture of envy coupled with fear and loathing.

• The mad dash to protect environmental data from Donald Trump - The Verge

• Lina Khan's legacy could prove to be fragile as Trump pick takes helm of FTC

• Opinion | Trump Barely Won the Election. Why Doesn’t It Feel That Way? - The New York Times

  Donald Trump won the popular vote by 1.5 points. Trump and Democrats alike treated this result as an overwhelming repudiation of the left and a broad mandate for the MAGA movement. But by any historical measure, it was a squeaker. In 2020, Joe Biden won the popular vote by 4.5 points; in 2016, Hillary Clinton won it by 2.1 points; in 2012, Barack Obama won it by 3.9 points; in 2008, Obama won it by 7.2 points; and in 2004, George W. Bush won it by 2.4 points. You have to go back to the 2000 election to find a margin smaller than Trump’s. Down-ballot, Republicans’ 2024 performance was, if anything, less impressive. In the House, the Republicans’ five-seat lead is the smallest since the Great Depression; in the Senate, Republicans lost half of 2024’s competitive Senate races, including in four states Trump won; among the 11 governor’s races, not a single one led to a change in partisan control. If you handed an alien these election results, they would not read like a tectonic shift. And yet, they’ve felt like one. Trump’s cultural victory has lapped his political victory. The election was close, but the vibes have been a rout. This is partially because he’s surrounded by some of America’s most influential futurists. Silicon Valley and crypto culture’s embrace of Trump has changed his cultural meaning more than Democrats have recognized. In 2016, Trump felt like an emissary of the past; in 2025, he’s being greeted as a harbinger of the future.

• German ambassador warns of Trump plan to redefine constitutional order

  Germany's ambassador to the United States has warned that the incoming Trump administration will rob U.S. law enforcement and the media of their independence and hand big tech companies "co-governing power", according to a confidential document seen by Reuters. The briefing document, dated Jan. 14 and signed by Ambassador Andreas Michaelis, describes Donald Trump's agenda for his second White House term as one of "maximum disruption" that will bring about "a redefinition of the constitutional order - maximum concentration of power with the president at the expense of Congress and the federal states."

  • Leaked memo reveals alarming German warnings over Trump

• The Pathetic Billionaires' Club

  Much of the political and business world is prostrating itself at the feet of the least-qualified man, morally and intellectually, ever to occupy the White House. It’s understandable if not excusable why many of those declaring fealty are doing so. If you look at what has happened to Liz Cheney or Adam Kinzinger you realize that Republican politicians who stand up to Trump destroy their political careers and put themselves at real personal risk. Many businesspeople — including media owners — fear that they will suffer monetarily if they cross the new regime.

• The 'Tech-Industrial' Oligarchy Is Already Here

• GOP lawmakers waste little time trying to write Elon Musk's priorities into law

• Curtis Yarvin Says Democracy Is Done. Powerful Conservatives Are Listening

Law Breaking / Police / Internal Security

• DOJ confirms arrested US Army soldier is linked to AT&T and Verizon hacks | TechCrunch

• Government Monitoring Those with "Negative" Views of Health Insurance Companies

External Security / Militaria / Diplomania

• U.S. Forces and NASA Could Inadvertently Be Spying for China

• Cutting off oil is Canada's nuclear option

  • Canada threatens 'single largest trade blow' to U.S. if Trump follows through on

World

• Is this the end of Berlin's famous club scene?

• Japan's elderly are lonely and struggling. Some women choose to go to jail

• South Korea's impeached president is arrested over a martial law declaration

• Rule by lawyers is behind Chagos giveaway

  The stated rationale, articulated last autumn by the attorney-general, Lord Hermer, is that giving away Chagos will “demonstrate our deep commitment to international law”, by “clearly and without question honouring our obligations”. He also cited other examples of this commitment, such as the decision to respect the International Criminal Court, presumably meaning its arrest warrant for Binyamin Netanyahu.

  It amounts to a mission to elevate the authority of all legal institutions, and especially international courts, above all else, to subject every conceivable question of public policy to the mindset and practices of lawyers, to boil all questions of values or interests down to legal procedure or court rulings, and then to claim that this approach is nothing controversial or irregular but is in fact the only legitimate application of the principle of “rule of law”. In fact, this is not “rule of law”, but a partial and radical reinterpretation of rule of law favoured by progressive, careerist lawyers. It is, as its critics have named it, about the “rule by lawyers”.

• Accidents, not Russian sabotage, behind undersea cable damage, officials say

• Chinese buyers interested in German Volkswagen factories, source

Israel

• Who are the three Israeli hostages released by Hamas?

China

• China building new mobile piers that could help possible Taiwan invasion

• Chinese actor's abduction to Myanmar sign of growing diversity of scams

• China's grandiose plot to take on Rolls-Royce

Health / Medicine

• Top three insurers reaped $7.3B through their drug middlemen's markups, FTC says

• The Terrifying Realization That an Unresponsive Patient Is Still in There

• The King of Ozempic Is Scared as Hell

• Volunteers with Down's syndrome could help find Alzheimer's drugs

• Psychedelic drug DMT to be trialled on UK volunteers to tackle alcohol misuse

• US: Walgreens filled millions of illegitimate prescriptions, including opioids

• Perhaps You Would Be a Little Touchy Too

  Being diagnosed with a mental illness is now frequently represented as some sort of liberatory practice, something to celebrate, but for many of us it’s a deeply traumatic event. And the way that you deal with that trauma - if and when, in fact, you are finally ready to deal with it - is by learning what you can learn. You learn the diagnosis, you learn the disorder. You learn your disorder.

• The problem with pulse oximeters.

• FDA sets limits for lead in many baby foods as CA disclosure law takes effect

Pox / COVID / BioTerror AgitProp

• Cat and Dog Food Manufacturers Required to Consider H5N1 in Food Safety Plans

• Moderna Gets $590M in Federal Funding for Bird Flu Vaccine

• HHS Formally Debars EcoHealth Alliance, Dr. Peter Daszak After COVID Select Reveals Pandemic-Era Wrongdoing

  HHS states “that a period of debarment for Dr. Daszak is necessary to protect the Federal Government’s business interests.” This letter also confirms that EcoHealth terminated Dr. Daszak’s employment effective January 6, 2025. EcoHealth and Dr. Daszak facilitated gain-of-function research in Wuhan, China without proper oversight and willingly violated multiple requirements of its multimillion-dollar National Institutes of Health (NIH) grant.

• US Suspends EcoHealth Alliance, Peter Daszak After COVID-19 Evidence Uncovered By House Committee | ZeroHedge

Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda

• Researchers seek to expand 'citizen scientist' testing of UK river quality

• Physicists Pinpoint the Quantum Origin of the Greenhouse Effect

• The Risks of Climate Change to the United States in the 21st Century

• Solar farms are booming and putting hungry sheep to work

  • Not much market for wool or mutton, nowadays.

• Polar mesospheric ozone loss changes solar signal in the Northern Hemisphere

• Carbon Dioxide Levels Rose by a Record Amount Last Year