2025-01-24

urban livestock, dark honesty, minimum venture pitch, GRRM wrote something, legal lesbian males, insurance examination, malicious psuedo-compliance, snortable anti-depressant, iceberg may sink penguins

etc

Where is London's most central sheep?

Alas I don't know what this sheep's name is, the City Farm isn't as keen as some in pinning biographical details to the railings, but there is no closer sheep to Trafalgar Square so she is London's most central sheep.
- HN comments
In order to measure distance between sheep, you really should start from the center of the sheep. So let’s make the math easier by assuming a spherical sheep in a vacuum…
Doctor Performs Vasectomy on Himself, Shares Video on Social Media
California first responders still use Thomas Guides

Horseshit

Young men now spend more of their free time alone than any other group
Is social media more like cigarettes or junk food?
Dark user interface, dark behavior? The effect of ‘dark mode’ on honesty - ScienceDirect

In a high-powered, pre-registered, and economically incentivized experiment, users of ‘dark’ and ‘light’ user interfaces were compared on honesty. Results showed no general effect of dark mode on honesty. However, dark mode promoted honesty in users that were awake for a longer period of time. As such, implementation of dark mode is safe and may even be encouraged.
Tech takes the Pareto principle too far

Contrast this with the tech industry, which submits for approval an ‘MVP’. A minimum viable product is the absolute least one can create that someone will pay for. It seems tech investors have gotten very used to evaluating MVPs, and rightly so — they need to be able to assess the potential of these prototypes so they can decide which are worth their investment. The problem is that MVPs don’t actually establish whether the team /could/ get to a finished product, and in practice many can’t.
- "tech" or "venture?" It's entirely possible to have a real business built on "tech", and its not uncommon to see "venture" scams running in non-technical fields.
'The Rizzler' and the creeping childishness of pop culture
"Bean There, Plowed That": Chicago announces winning names in snowplow contest
Frequent social media use tied to higher levels of irritability
Academic urban legends: spinach as a source of iron
Researchers say new attack could take down the European power grid
What Happened to Hanging Out on the Street?

celebrity gossip

Facebook

Musk

Electric / Self Driving cars

Tesla brand value shed $15 billion in 2024 with aging lineup, Musk at helm

Religion / Tribal / Culture War and Re-Segregation

Australian lesbian group cannot exclude males and bisexuals, tribunal rules

A Victorian lesbian group cannot exclude transgender and bisexual women from its public events as doing so would constitute unlawful discrimination, a tribunal has ruled. Exemptions carved into the SDA allow for discrimination in certain cases. The LAG argued that it should be treated similarly to the Peel hotel in Melbourne, wherean exemption under Victorian law enabled it to refuse heterosexual people on the basis that doing so would help gay men achieve equality. But in his finding, Fenwick said the applicants identified as “a discrete minority within a group in the community that is already identified by their sex and sexual orientation, characteristics that afford them the protection of the SDA”.
Why Brazil fell for Pentecostalism but not liberation theology
Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins defends DEI.
A rotten Apple: Tim Cook's betrayal of LGBTQ+ rights
The DEI Retreat Has Some Notable Holdouts
Amazon removed statements advocating for LGBTQ rights and racial equity

Edumacationalizing / Acedemia Nuts

Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising

TechSuck / Geek Bait

Using unhinged AVX-512 instructions to make the fastest phrase search algorithms.
3D printing giant things with a python jigsaw generator - Cal Bryant
Brick Layer Post-Processor, Promising Stronger 3D Prints, Now Available
A magical land where rounding equals truncation
Update to Join us to discuss transparency and governance at FOSDEM '25

Good news: it appears that Jack Dorsey’s FOSDEM talk has been cancelled!

AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World

Crypto con games

Economicon / Business / Finance

Divvy Homes, Once Valued at $2B, Is Sold for Half That Price
CNN Cuts 6% of Jobs in Strategy Pivot to Focus on Streaming
Numerous employees miss work at Colorado resort amid issues at employee housing | outtherecolorado.com

multiple employees of Breckenridge Resort failed to show up to work on January 22 as an act of protest related to poor living conditions.
Samsung Electronics Slashes Foundry Investment by over 50% for 2025
Why Is Homeowners Insurance Getting So Expensive?

Adjusting for the number of homes and home size explains about 15% of the increase, and construction cost explains another 33%; together, they explain about half the cost increase.1 However, only since around 2016 can increased construction costs explain a large chunk of the cost increase. I suspect a lot of what’s happening is that lots of homeowners insurance policies haven’t adjusted their coverage (and premiums) upward to account for the fact that construction costs rose precipitously over the last several years. My SWAG is that the actual fraction of homeowners insurance cost increase that number of homes, home size, and construction cost can explain is closer to 25% than 50%.

Between 1977 and 2022, US homeowners insurance profits were greater than 10% in only 5 years, and nationwide annual profits have never exceeded 15%. (This New York Times article highlights a scary-looking chart that implies that more and more states are unprofitable for homeowners insurance. But if you look at the larger timeline you can see that the number of unprofitable states is well within historical trends, and that, despite the recent increase, that number is actually close to historical lows.)
An economist takes on California's insurance crisis
SoftBank-Backed Startup Caught Faking $600M Revenue
Walmart Stands Firm on Why It Doesn't Accept Apple Pay in the U.S.
Some Walmart Managers Get a Raise, Lifting Their Max Pay Above $600k

Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making

Trump

Left Angst

Trump's war on electric cars has only just begun.
Mass deportations would deliver a catastrophic blow to the U.S. Economy
Trump Seeks to Paralyze Independent Privacy and Civil Liberties Watchdog - The New York Times

The Trump White House has told three Democratic-selected members of the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board to resign or be fired, which would stop the independent agency from functioning.
There's an alternative to the social broligarchy emerging
Trump admin's cancellation of scientific meetings prompts confusion, concern

Several meetings of National Institutes of Health study sections, which review applications for fellowships and grants, were canceled without being rescheduled, according to agency notices reviewed by STAT. A Feb. 20-21 meeting of the National Vaccine Advisory Committee, a panel that advises the leadership of the Department of Health and Human Services on vaccine policy, was also canceled. So was a meeting of the Presidential Advisory Council for Combating Antibiotic-Resistant Bacteria that was scheduled for Jan. 28 and 29. The scope of the cancellations was unclear. It was also unclear whether they were related to the Trump administration’s freeze on external communications until Feb. 1.
- NIH canceling meetings, travel, grants after Trump order

Law Breaking / Police / Internal Security

Court Says Feds Must Obtain Warrant to Search FISA Spy Databases

External Security / Militaria / Diplomania

World

Royal Navy submarine surfaces close to Russian spy ship off the UK coast
Keir Starmer appoints Jeff Bezos as his "first buddy"
Saudi Arabia plans $600B in new US investment, trade over four years
Belarus' secret program to undermine the EU
“Don’t let’s be beastly,” by the Editors

it was during Starmer’s tenure as prosecutor that the government neglected to charge Jimmy Savile, the notorious bbc media personality who had sexually abused hundreds of people. Speaking in the House of Commons in 2022, the former prime minister Boris Johnson charged that Starmer spent most of his time “prosecuting journalists and failing to prosecute Jimmy Savile.”
Tougher checks on knife sales fast-tracked after Southport attack.
Is Japan's Cultural Aversion to Public Noise Suppressing Its Birth Rate?
Korean democracy was nearly toppled by its president. It was saved by its people
ICC prosecutor seeks arrest of Taliban leaders for 'persecuting Afghan women'