2025-01-28

bubble pop panic, LED lights suck, awaiting answers on lawfare and COVID, Columbian diplomacy, when is a pardon ignorable?, more cables cut, China's exemplary handling of Jack Ma, Kansas tuberculosis

etc

• Bird feathers found in both engines of crashed Jeju Air jet

  • Bird remains found in both engines of Jeju Air flight 2216

Deep Sink

• Ain't it wild how many people are well versed in the causes of and cures for a totally unforeseen, breaking news market moving event.

• DeepSeek Panic at the App Store

  DeepSeek released a f***ing app of its website. Market said I have an idea, let’s panic. Nvidia was down 11%, Nasdaq is down 2.5%, S&P is down 1.7%, on the news.

  Shakeel: The fact this is happening today, and didn’t happen when r1 actually released last Wednesday, is a neat demonstration of how the market is in fact not efficient at all.

  That is exactly the market’s level of situational awareness. No more, no less.

• U.S. stock markets tumble as investors worry about DeepSeek

  Shares of Nvidia, the chip company whose A.I. technology has made it into one of the most valuable companies in the world, dropped more than 13 percent by late morning on Monday. Rival chip companies, including Arm and Broadcom, also plunged, dragging down the major indices. The tech-heavy Nasdaq fell almost 600 points, or nearly 3 percent, by late morning.

• Pat Gelsinger on DeepSeek

  Computing obeys the gas law. Making it dramatically cheaper will expand the market for it. The markets are getting it wrong, this will make AI much more broadly deployed.

• A few thoughts on DeepSeek – and why you can't trust what you read

  There has been no independent or international audits conducted on the $6 million development cost - which means that believing the Chinese claim of old chips and a shoestring budget is a choice. For Nvidia in particular, this could echo Cisco’s crisis during the dot-com bubble crash. During that last tech bubble, Cisco dominated networking equipment but suffered after the burst, with the market flooded by second-hand equipment.

  • It wasn't "second hand equipment" that killed Cisco, they made sure it was hard to run that without paying them. It was Linux 2.2's inclusion of much better routing capabilities, meaning that there was no longer any reason to buy proprietary hardware for the job. Cisco's competition got smacked even harder than they did.

• How China's new AI model DeepSeek is threatening U.S. dominance

  • China's DeepSeek AI Dethrones ChatGPT on App Store

• DeepSeek limits registrations to Chinese numbers, citing 'large-scale attacks'

  • DeepSeek hit with large-scale cyberattack, says it's limiting registrations

  • DeepSeek Hit by Large Scale 'Malicious Attacks,' Restricts Registration

  • DeepSeek limits registrations due to cyber attack

  • DeepSeek hit by cyberattack, limits new registrations

• Tech drags global shares lower on China's AI push

• Nvidia, ASML Plunge as DeepSeek Triggers Tech Stock Selloff

• DeepSeek 'punctures' tech spending plans, and what analysts are saying

• Stock Futures Tumble on China AI Advances, with Nvidia Down 10%

• The AI Bubble Crash is here

• China's DeepSeek sets off AI market rout

• China Embarrasses U.S. Big Tech

• What Is China's DeepSeek and Why Is It Freaking Out the AI World

• DeepSeek Buzz Puts Tech Stocks on Track for $1.2T Drop

• The Rise of DeepSeek: What the Headlines Miss

• Tech stocks tank as US AI dominance no longer a sure bet

• China's DeepSeek AI sends tech stocks reeling

• Global tech shares fall as China AI chatbot DeepSeek spooks investors

• Chinese AI threat triggers $1T market panic

• Stocks Sink as Investors Worry About China's A.I. Advances

• What the sellside is saying about DeepSeek

• Nvidia's $465B plunge triggered by DeepSeek, largest in market history

• Chinese AI chatbot DeepSeek sparks market turmoil

• DeepSeek Mania Shakes AI Industry to Its Core

• A Chinese AI advancement called DeepSeek is sending US stocks plunging

• Nvidia Dismisses China AI Threat, Says DeepSeek Still Needs Its Chips

• Nvidia stocks drops 16% because of DeepSeek R1 breakthrough

• Nvidia sheds almost $600B in market cap, biggest one-day loss in US history

• Nvidia Calls DeepSeek 'Excellent' AI Advance, Dismisses Concerns

• DeepSeek: Hype and Reality

• DeepSeek has about 50k Nvidia H100s that they can't talk about

• DeepSeek Won't Sink U.S. AI Titans

• 'Nvidia Drops 17 Percent as China's AI Model DeepSeek Sparks Tech Sell-Off'

Horseshit

• The small California town with ties to one of Earth's weirdest secrets

• Your Light Bulb Is Lying to You - The Atlantic

  Walk into a well-stocked hardware store, and you will find two main types of bulbs to choose from: “soft white” and “daylight.” (Let’s ignore the existence of Wi-Fi-enabled smart bulbs, which are a solution in search of a problem.) Soft white sounds like it will be the whiter of the two, when in fact it is the more golden option. Daylight sounds like it should be warm and natural; it is instead cold and ugly. The confusing nomenclature has led an untold number of people astray, condemning them to harsh lighting that makes everything in a home, including its residents, less attractive.

• Emergency Braking Will Save Lives. Automakers Want to Charge Extra for It

• Connection between violent TV and increase in aggression

• Empowering Users, Not Overlords: Overcoming Digital Helplessness

• Google says it will change Gulf of Mexico to 'Gulf of America' in Maps

celebrity gossip

• Paul Reubens Comes Out as Gay in Posthumous Documentary: The documentary, Pee-wee as Himself, premiered this week at Sundance.

• Christopher Walken Has Never Owned a Cellphone

TikTok

• Perplexity AI proposes to merge with TikTok, with US Government getting half

• Mr Beast is officially bidding for TikTok.

• Trump is searching for potential TikTok buyers – who are the likely contenders?

Musk

• Bill Gates Rips into Elon Musk for His Right-Wing Pivot

  • 'This Is Insane S**T': Bill Gates Puts Elon Musk on Blast in Blunt Interview

• How the roots of the 'PayPal mafia' extend to apartheid South Africa

• Elon Musk's friend confirms the Nazi salute

• Europe's Elon Musk Problem

• Tesla shareholders have a long list of questions about failed promises

Electric / Self Driving cars

• One in four 2020 Tesla Model 3 failed the Danish periodic inspection in 2024

• EV maker Canoo, once worth $2.4B, files for bankruptcy

• China-made BYD Shark pickup is drawing attention in the global truck market

Religion / Tribal / Culture War and Re-Segregation

• Pentecostalism's prosperity gospel replaced Catholic liberation theology

• The FDA pulls key DEI initiative for cancer studies from its website

Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising

• Netflix won the streaming wars, and we're all about to pay for it

• Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090 costs as much as a whole gaming PC–but it sure is fast

• Denis Villeneuve eyes a new hard sci-fi epic adaptation, 'Rendezvous with Rama'

• Sony Will Stop Producing Blank Blu-ray Discs After 18 Years

• Ubisoft Closes Leamington Studio and lays off 185

• Facebook flags Linux topics as 'cybersecurity threats' – posts and users blocked

AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World

• US leadership in AI requires open-source diplomacy

• Stargate artificial intelligence project to exclusively serve OpenAI

• AI Hardware Is in Its 'Put Up or Shut Up' Era

Space / Boomy Zoomers / UFO

• With successful New Glenn flight, Blue Origin may be turning the corner

• Astronomers red-faced after mistaking Musk's Tesla Roadster for asteroid

Economicon / Business / Finance

• Two hundred UK companies sign up for permanent four-day working week

• "Best Economy Ever" up until the beginning of November or so. Imagine that. Working Americans Turn to Food Banks as Fed Inflation Battle Drags On

Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making

• Prosecute The Architects Of Trump Lawfare For Election Interference.

  Turning lawfare on its creators is not about revenge. It will serve as a deterrent to prevent future abuse and will restore public confidence that justice is even-handed. Individuals who have carried out lawfare have not only destroyed faith in our legal system but also may have violated the law. A federal statute, 18 U.S.C. 241, prohibits conspiring to “injure, oppress, threaten, or intimidate” a person exercising constitutional rights or privileges. Clearly President Donald J. Trump had constitutional rights and privileges to run for office and govern, not to be imprisoned for contrived crimes, and not to be deprived of property based on abuse of federal and state justice systems. According to the Biden administration’s own theory, preventing a candidate from running and assuming office also deprives supporters of their rights to vote.

• The Great American Debate Begins Again

  the past four years have seen a sustained effort to overturn the principles of the open society. The just-departed administration, of which Biden was the decrepit figurehead, tried to impose, by threat or mandate, a version of reality that brooked no discussion. Supported by its allies in the media, the academy, and the bureaucracy, the administration became, in its own eyes, the guardian of truth. Yet on every important question that confronted the country, it was almost invariably wrong—and I say “almost” as a kindness. From the pandemic to the economy, from energy to war and peace, the faceless clique that ran the government on Biden’s behalf made an unholy mess of things.

• "Gigantic Rat's Nest": Taibbi Hints FBI Communications With COVID Scientists Will Be Exposed | ZeroHedge

  There’s a reason why Fauci’s pardon is backdated to 2014, because that’s the time period they are going to have to start looking, which is, when did we start defying the ban on gain of function research. We clearly did. That’s pretty established at this point. Why were we doing it? What connection did that have to the Wuhan thing? What kind of advanced notice did we get? What kind of lies were told about it? Who were responsible for those lies? What information did we get about the inefficacy of the vaccine and how did that connect to statement by the CDC and the White House? This also connects to the censorship issue in a major way because there was a massive effort to control the public conversation about this that went through the health agencies. We know they’re looking at that. And that’s another executive order, by the way, the free speech order. It directs the Department of Justice to come up with a comprehensive review of all the censorship stuff, so we’re going to find out about that. I just think COVID is a gigantic rat’s nest of stuff. Every direction they look there’s going to find something revelatory.

• NYC Congestion Pricing Results Are Mixed but Some Commutes Improve - The New York Times

• CDC ordered to stop working with WHO immediately

  • CDC ordered to stop working with WHO immediately

Trump

• Trade War Ends In Less Than 10 Hours After Colombia Agrees To All Of Trump's Terms | ZeroHedge

  ust after 10pm ET, and just under 10 hours after Trump lobbed the first shot in the first trade war of his second admin, the White House announced that Colombia had agreed to all of Trump's terms, "including the unrestricted acceptance of all illegal aliens from Colombia returned from the United States, including on U.S. military aircraft, without limitation or delay." Based on this agreement, the White House notes, the hastily drafted tariffs and sanctions "will be held in reserve, and not signed, unless Colombia fails to honor this agreement." The visa sanctions issued by the State Department, and enhanced inspections from Customs and Border Protection, will remain in effect until the first planeload of Colombian deportees is successfully returned.

• J6er Speaks Out on Pardoned Prisoners Still in Jail – PJ Media

  The infamous D.C. jail known as the Gulag was reportedly the only jail in America that refused to release some dozen of its prisoners right after Trump’s inauguration and J6 pardons, and it has since been reported that some of them have been moved to other jails as authorities allege state charges or other spurious reasons to postpone releasing them. One J6er, Anthony Vo, is even being held in Canada, and it is unclear why he hasn’t been released since the Trump administration ordered all J6ers released.

• JD Vance says Big Tech has "too much power"

• RFK Jr. says he's open to seizing drug patents

Democrats / Biden Inc

• LA fires have extinguished Gavin Newsom’s presidential dream.

• Biden Admin Quietly Spent $15 Mil To Distribute ‘Contraceptives and Condoms’ in Afghanistan—and Said Doing So Would Take ‘Some Coordination’ With Taliban

Left Angst

• WHO starts cutting costs as US withdrawal date set for January 2026

• The Media Ran With Total Fake News Story About ICE Raids at Chicago Public Schools.

• After uproar, Air Force says recruits will again be taught about Tuskegee Airmen

• Trump now controls the NSA and FBI – What this means for your privacy

  • Anything the people at these agencies would do for Trump, they've done far more willingly for Biden.

• Canadian tech's not-so-quiet shift to the right

• Oh please let this happen: Initiative Requires Vote: California Should Become Independent Country

• Trump's No. 2 Pick for the EPA Represented Companies Accused of Pollution Harm

• The Impact of 25% Tariffs on Canadian GDP

Law Breaking / Police / Internal Security

• ICE raid at Newark, NJ fish market was not part of mass deportation plan

• First images of ICE mass deportation efforts show arrests of MS-13 gang members, murder suspects.

External Security / Militaria / Diplomania

• ICC braces for Swift Trump sanctions over Israeli arrest warrants

• US restricts Switzerland's access to AI chips

World

• Germany's Economic Model Is Broken, and No One Has a Plan B

• Sweden Seizes Ship Suspected of Baltic Sea 'Sabotage'

  • Sweden seizes ship after suspected Baltic Sea cable sabotage

  • Sweden opens sabotage probe into Baltic undersea cable damage

  • Yet another undersea cable has been severed in the Baltic Sea.

  • Latvia: Undersea cable likely damaged by external influence

• The British Museum says is part closed after fired employee shut down IT systems

• Saudi gigaproject: NEOM reveals major progress on The Line and other key regions

• Former Taliban hostage Ryan Corbett recovering

• Auschwitz liberators not invited by Poland to the 80th anniversary of liberation

• 'Hell on Earth': Who Were the Victims Killed by the Nazis in Auschwitz?

China

• What China Got Right About Big Tech

  Unlike Trump, Xi understood that a new class of business titans could hijack his country’s political system.

  Five years ago, Jack Ma was not just one of the world’s richest billionaires, but also—perhaps only after President Xi Jinping—the most famous Chinese person in the world. Then, in 2020, on the eve of what was expected to be one of the biggest initial public offerings (IPOs) in history, Ma’s world was turned upside down as his empire became the target of hostile regulatory actions from the Chinese Communist Party. Authorities canceled the IPO of Ma’s Ant Group (an Alibaba affiliate), levied anti-monopoly actions against his businesses and those of other tech giants, and summoned Ma for hostile lectures and questioning. Soon, the man who once seemed to be everywhere was scarcely seen at all. To avoid further trouble, without fanfare, he reportedly slipped away to live in a kind of exile in Japan.

  Yet the humbling of Ma—and an entire class of other newly minted, mega-rich tech entrepreneurs in China—also speaks profoundly to political developments in the United States surrounding President Donald Trump’s reconquest of power after four years out of office. In bringing this new class of business titans to heel, China’s leaders made a carefully considered strategic decision about the direction of their country’s political economy. In effect, they were saying that Beijing would never grant a dominant role to the extraordinarily lucrative and freewheeling private technology sector. Put slightly differently, that sector would have no sacred cows and would never be allowed to cast a shadow on the party and state.

• China's Tibet Dam Project Has Its Neighbors Worried

• Xi Jinping Muzzles Chinese Economist Who Dared to Doubt GDP Numbers

Health / Medicine

• Cannabis Compound Discovered Inside Different Plant

  The team found CBD in the fruits and flowers of a plant known as Trema micrantha blume, a shrub which grows across much of the South American country and is often considered a weed, molecular biologist Rodrigo Moura Neto of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro told AFP in 2023. Neto, who had not yet published his results, said he now plans to scale up his study to identify the best methods to extract CBD from "Trema" and analyze its effectiveness in patients with conditions currently treated with medical cannabis. His team recently won a 500,000-real (US$104,000) grant from the Brazilian government to fund the research, which he estimates will take at least five years to complete.

• The division between 'mental' and 'physical' illness fails us all

• As dengue cases rise, researchers point to simple solution: Trash cleanup

• Check the outhouses of the more strict "plain people" groups: Do we actually know what a healthy gut microbiome looks like?

• Immunotherapy Extended President Jimmy Carter's Life

Pox / COVID / BioTerror AgitProp

• Tuberculosis disease outbreak in Kansas is ‘unprecedented’ | The Independent

  Kansas Department of Health and Environment announced 67 active outbreak cases and 79 latent infections in Kansas City, Kansas, as of Friday since 2024. The majority of cases were declared to have broken out in Wyandotte County and Johnson County, just west and southwest of the metro area. KDHE Deputy Secretary Ashley Goss told the Senate Public Health and Welfare Committee Tuesday: “Currently, Kansas has the largest outbreak that they’ve ever had in history.” But despite this, officials stated that the outbreak had a very low risk to the general public and surrounding counties.

  People cannot catch the disease through kissing, shaking hands, sharing food, drink, or toothbrushes, or through sharing bedding or the same toilet in a household.

• 'A Dangerous Virus': Bird Flu Enters a New Phase

• Newly Emergent Highly Pathogenic H5N9 Subtype Avian Influenza a Virus

  • First outbreak of rare bird flu strain reported at California poultry farm

  • US reports first outbreak of H5N9 bird flu in poultry

Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda

• USGS releases first-ever map of potential for geologic hydrogen in U.S.

• Microplastics block blood flow in the brain, mouse study reveals

• Who to Blame for Early Modern Climate Change?

• Make Sunsets: Geoengineering

  • Our plans are better: Planetery Redesign

• Notorious US chemical plant polluting water with toxic PFAS, lawsuit claims

• Sinking truths: University confirms Miami's coastal subsidence challenges

• Florida's citrus outlook remains bleak. But new science offers hope

• Dangerous temperatures could kill 50% more Europeans by 2100, study finds

• Backlash in Kenya over livestock vaccines and belching cows

• Mystery at Aquarium: Swell Shark Egg Hatches Without a Male Present