2025-02-09
AK plane crash, identity fatigue, destroying hacking, disquieted science, Rust outreach, DOGE enabled by Obama, USIAD media funding, NIH caps, unwelcome immigrants, MAGA extinction, Baltic disconnect
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10 aboard Alaska plane that crashed died, says US Coast Guard
A small commuter plane carrying 10 people across Alaska’s Norton Sound that crashed in western Alaska has been found, the US Coast Guard posted on social media on Friday afternoon. All 10 people who were on the plane died. The plane was found about 34 miles (54km) south-east of Nome, the Coast Guard said. Mike Salerno, a spokesperson for the Coast Guard, said rescuers were searching the aircraft’s last known location by helicopter when they spotted the wreckage.
Horseshit
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Everyone thinks they're experts:How advice overload is fueling parents self doubt
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Supersizing vehicles offers minimal safety benefits – but substantial dangers
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(Jan 2025) what the fuck are we doing anymore - by kate wagner
I talk to enough people in the business to come to the alarming conclusion that trans and queer writers, socialists, and writers of color, are being quietly excluded from the world of letters due to “political” or “identity” fatigue which is a way of saying “it’s easier to capitulate to right wing pressure on matters of race and gender (in particular) and pretend that doing so is somehow savvy and left-ish populist than to continue going against the status quo, a concept which is itself now a bit cringe.” Alternatively, said fatigue is a market one in which such stories and perspectives no longer sell as well and therefore are no longer important. If you complain about this loss — an overcorrection to a problem that has, with a few notable exceptions, only ever been presented in an inherently reactionary format — you get accused by guys with podcasts of doing “2010s thought.” This is but one symptom of a broader disease: social media, if not the world of letters itself, is being increasingly poisoned by antisocial tendencies, nihilism, petty bitterness and an irony that averts our gazes rather than stares defiantly Bertolt Brecht-style in the face of the wretched world we live in. This is a polemical essay, not a piece of reported journalism. I know that if you’re reading this, we share similar audiences and probably walks of life and you have seen the things I’m seeing for yourself.
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Inside The Wealthy California Enclave So Secretive People Barely Know It Exists
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We are destroying software - antirez
We are destroying software trying to produce code as fast as possible, not as well designed as possible. We are destroying software, and what will be left will no longer give us the joy of hacking.
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Night owl behavior could hurt mental health, sleep study finds
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Learning opponents don't hate you can reduce toxic polarization
Musk
Religion / Tribal / Culture War and Re-Segregation
Edumacationalizing / Acedemia Nuts
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The End of Science's Peacetime
Science and politics have a long history of conflict. But before 2020, science had — in my lifetime, at least — operated mostly in peacetime, as measured by public support and abundant resources. But with this long peace has come naïveté and an unwillingness to fix flaws that have plagued American science for many decades, attitudes which have left it vulnerable to nefarious political agendas. While some might say that now is not the time for self-reflection, I argue that we must recognize that current events serve as a social stress test for science, revealing its many underlying fragilities. Today, harm reduction is the only route to mitigate the damage to vulnerable scientists and the stifling of scientific progress. And I believe that out of the ashes will come something new, but it cannot look like the science of today and yesterday.
DEI efforts appear to be a main justification for many of the new administration’s actions. This does not come as a surprise. Diversity initiatives have been a political target for several years, as have certain academic subjects that teach about inequality around race and gender. The goal is to make racism and sexism go away — not by fighting them but by erasing evidence of them, and marginalizing efforts to ameliorate their impact. By scapegoating DEI, the architects are executing plain old divide-and-conquer. People may appreciate efforts to diversify science — but not more than they like their jobs. So, if removing Martin Luther King Jr. Day programming is what it takes to keep the lights on, then so be it. Better that the bad things happen to “them,” the thinking goes, than to “us.”
Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising
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Donkey Kong’s famed kill screen has been cleared for the first time
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Football Manager 25 canceled in a refreshing show of concern for quality
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Graphics card makers are already jacking up RTX 50-series prices
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GeForce RTX 5090 fails to topple RTX 4090 in GPU compute benchmark
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endless.downward.spiral – is this the beginning of the end of What3Words?
Long-time readers know that I am not a fan of What Three Words. I think it is a closed, proprietary, and user-unfriendly attempt to enclose the commons. I consider that it has some dangerous failure modes. Even going by the publicly available plans the cost of a W3W lookup is about ⅓rd of a penny. I imagine that Mercedes pay considerably less than that. And yet, an investor who had 4,030,000 Series C1 Preferred Shares, have decided that their customers aren't interested enough in W3W to justify the cost of integrating it into their vehicles. That's the commercial risk and the behavioural change risk both at once. It appears to me that they can't retain their current corporate customers and don't seem to be able to attract or keep individual consumers. W3W only succeeds with sufficient network effects. After 12 years of operation, it is yet to reach anything approaching critical mass. Its attempt to insinuate itself within the emergency services (who use it for free) doesn't seem to have transformed into mass adoption. Its premium customers appear to be dropping it. Search and Rescue teams warn against using it.
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Amazon, Google asked to explain why they were serving ads on sites hosting CSAM
TechSuck / Geek Bait
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Asahi Linux lead developer Hector Martin resigns from Linux kernel | Hacker News
- Why don't these folks build their own kernel with Rust, then? Why is it necessary to force changes on an existing project? Doesn't that compromise the purity of the goal, all by itself?
AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World
Space / Boomy Zoomers / UFO
Economicon / Business / Finance
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Consumers Are Flocking to Rent Chickens in Effort to Combat Rising Egg Prices
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the biggest reason behind today's solid increase in the number of employed workers is the same one we have been pounding the table on since 2023. It's all foreign workers, and - as we explained recently - it is mostly all illegal aliens.
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Power Moves: How Electric Utility Monopolists Broke Their Bargain with America
Believe it or not, utilities did used to be innovative. From the 1890s until 1970, with a brief lull in the 1920s, America had a functional arrangement with electricity utilities. It’s a sort of deal. Investor-owned utilities are allowed to monopolize a certain region with a guaranteed customer base. But in return, they have to offer good service, invest in equipment to make their operations better, and charge reasonable prices set by state-level utility commissions. (Note that one traditional American approach of fostering competition is absent here; antitrust law can play a role here or there, but the gist of the utility model is that wires or connections to the home create ‘natural monopolies’ that must be addressed through overt regulatory control.) Until the 1980s, regulators, while not perfect, tended to uphold this deal. America was a land of cheap electricity. But it stopped working in the 1970s, immediately after an energy crisis and deregulation kicked off by Jimmy Carter.
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The US cannot extract much more oil if the price keeps falling
Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making
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65k More Government Workers Accept Trump Admin Buyout Offer, Official Says | ZeroHedge
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How USAID and Its $50 Billion Budget Became a Target for Reform | The Epoch Times
“One of the most common complaints you will get ... from State Department officials and ambassadors and the like, is: ‘USAID is not only not cooperative, they undermine the work that we’re doing in that country,’” sometimes advancing programs that the host government finds objectionable, Rubio said.
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A DOGE Origin Story: How Barack Obama Laid The Groundwork For Elon Musk
DOGE took over the U.S. Digital Service, a 300-person technology office President Barack Obama set up inside the Executive Office of the President in 2014 to fix his beleaguered HealthCare.gov. Bureaucrats had bungled the site, so USDS sought out Silicon Valley innovators, and was authorized to circumvent federal hiring procedures to get them. Hiring young people from the tech world and putting them together to work for Obama, unmoored from the stuffy rules of a typical government building, led to an environment of overt left-wing advocacy. Obama designed it that way, making the USDS administrator, its top employee, a political appointee. When Donald Trump took over in 2017, he didn’t attempt to turn the tables. Instead, he turned the other cheek. He reclassified USDS’s top job as a career position, not a political one, signaling that he trusted the employees to simply carry out the unglamorous job of fixing government IT.
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In addition to propping up far-left corporate media outlets like Politico and the BBC with taxpayer funds, the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) has funneled half a billion dollars to a secretive non-governmental organization operating a global news propaganda matrix. WikiLeaks published the bombshell report in the overnight hours that shows the massive taxpayer-funded state propaganda network - operating as a shady NGO - called "Internews Network":
USAID has pushed nearly half a billion dollars ($472.6m) through a secretive US government financed NGO, "Internews Network" (IN), which has "worked with" 4,291 media outlets, producing in one year 4,799 hours of broadcasts reaching up to 778 million people and "training" over 9000 journalists (2023 figures). IN has also supported social media censorship initiatives.
Trump
Left Angst
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US Govt not a startup: DOGE moving fast, breaking what can't afford to be broken
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Judge temporarily blocks Musk's 'DOGE' team from accessing treasury records
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Is DOGE a cybersecurity threat? A security expert explains the dangers
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DOGE wreaked havoc on the government in just one week | The Verge
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East Hampton Village Police Chief Jeffrey Erickson reiterated that local police would not assist federal actions: 'If it is an ICE detainer or an administrative warrant, we do not have the authority, we will not hold them.'
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If one is going to make generalizations about classes, blacks in South Africa suffer far more from that poor governance. This Executive Order, taken in context, is a deliberate attempt to invert the actual reality of the situation, and make a subset of the whites the supposed real victims. You don’t even have to get into apartheid history to see the outrageousness of this framing.
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Extinction Burst Explains MAGA Voters’ Racist Anger
The Trump spike in racism, sexism, and hate — it’s the emotional foundation for the entire Make America Great Again movement, that nostalgia for when life in America was simpler and paler. But as soon as we began addressing it — boom! extinction burst. This term is why I love science so much. You can take an idea from one field, like psychology for example, and apply it to another field, like political science, and the principles still apply.
Now, extinction burst at the national level is much slower, but in this case we actually know very clearly what triggered it: it was Obama’s election in 2008. Sarah Palin, the Tea Party Movement, the birther movement, and ultimately MAGA. It is a 10-year tsunami of rage in the face of inevitable extinction.
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Trump Attack on Bureaucracy Raises Concerns over 'Gold Standard' Economic Data
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Watchdog Groups Anticipate an All-Out War on Science by the Trump Administration
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Even among the angst the push on this one is notable. Someone really wants it seen. : Teen on Musk's DOGE Team Graduated from 'The Com'
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Kash Patel was paid by Russian filmmaker with Kremlin ties, documents show
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Does DOGE really have what it takes to usefully tackle Uncle Sam's tech spend?
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US Treasury division classifies DOGE staff as extreme danger
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US Treasury Threat Intelligence Analysis Designates DOGE Staff as Insider Threat
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Federal judge blocks DOGE from accessing sensitive Treasury Department material
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Why is Trump coverage so feeble? - by Dan Froomkin
I have been struggling for a week now to put my finger on why and how the mainstream media’s coverage of Donald Trump’s second term has been so disastrously feeble and insufficient. What is it missing? And I finally came to this conclusion: You simply cannot cover Trump’s second term accurately and responsibly if you are not willing to situate his acts as part of a terrifying descent into authoritarianism, racism, and cruelty. And the mainstream political media – for a variety of reasons -- is not willing to do anything of the kind.
- Trump and Musk are already Mega-Mecha-Hitler and the source of all bad things according to the media. How could they possibly twist they knickers tighter?
Law Breaking / Police / Internal Security
Russia Bad / Ukraine War
Health / Medicine
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Opinion | Finding a Way Back From Fentanyl - The New York Times
As a good liberal, I used to oppose arresting people for using drugs. They need health care, not handcuffs, I thought. But then to my surprise and dismay, I found myself praying that my old pal Drew Goff would be arrested.