2025-02-16

Musk vs Altman, Kindle lockdown, kernel drama, "woke" exists, "while this is not historically true" it makes a nice story, Zizians on the run, "if Russia invades again", EU shackles, Russian quadrobics

etc

Horseshit

Conciousness May Be Retrocausal
Jannik Sinner: Italian banned for three months for doping - BBC Sport

World number one Jannik Sinner has accepted an immediate three-month ban from tennis after reaching a settlement with the World Anti-Doping Agency over his two positive drugs test last year.
"the Zooms don't show up" says Jamie Dimon
why not all of it? California homeowners to fund half of high-risk insurer's $1B 'bailout'
In Norway, Lake-Harvested Cocktail Ice Is Making a Quiet Comeback
People not too chicken to have (or rent) backyard chickens
- Priced out of store-bought eggs? Rent a chicken.
Think you're too smart to be caught by scammers? Think again
Isolated Indigenous man returns to tribe in the Amazon rainforest after contact

celebrity gossip

Late financier Evelyn de Rothschild accused of abuse during banking career

The claims against De Rothschild, two years after his death, come from several women who said they felt unable to raise their concerns while he was still alive, because of his position within the bank and the British establishment. They spoke to the Guardian on condition of anonymity. Among the allegations are that he seriously sexually assaulted and harassed several women in the mid and late 1990s when they worked for NM Rothschild.
Magnus Carlsen feuds with chess's governing body as he launches new tour
CNN’s Kaitlan Collins boosts Luigi Mangione’s legal defense fund—deletes post after backlash.

Rank Propaganda / Thought Policing / World Disordering

Musk

Electric / Self Driving cars

Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising

TechSuck / Geek Bait

Karol Herbst Steps Down as Nouveau Maintainer Due to Linux's Toxic Environment
- Nouveau kernel maintainer steps down
The moment I made up my mind about this was reading the following words written by a maintainer within the kernel community:

"we are the thin blue line"

This isn't okay. This isn't creating an inclusive environment. This isn't okay with the current political situation especially in the US. A maintainer speaking those words can't be kept. No matter how important or critical or relevant they are. They need to be removed until they learn. Learn what those words mean for a lot of marginalized people. Learn about what horrors it evokes in their minds.

AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World

Space / Boomy Zoomers / UFO

Crypto con games

Economicon / Business / Finance

Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making

HHS splurged more than $22B on grants for migrants — including cash for cars, home loans and startups.
Probationary employees at NASA Ames scheduled for layoff on Tues Feb. 18
New SF public health chief was part of McKinsey opioid-marketing operation
Eruption In "BleachBit," "Wipe Hard Drive," "Offshore Bank" Searches In DC Suggest Deep State Panic Mode | ZeroHedge
How Will the Trump Tariffs Affect Construction?

The largest single country by dollar value is, unsurprisingly, China, with $89 billion worth of construction-related imports in 2022. But it’s interesting to see what these imports consist of. It’s almost entirely building components and products related to interior fit-out, which combined are $74 billion (more than 80% of all Chinese construction-related imports). China is also the largest individual supplier of most of our power tools, 40% of the total. Raw materials, on the other hand, are a very small fraction of construction imports from China. China is the source of just 3.3% of our steel and metal imports, 3.8% of our wood imports, and 10% of our “other material” imports. With Canada, the second largest country for construction-related imports, this pattern is largely reversed. Materials (metal, wood, and other) combined make up more than 75% of Canada’s construction-related imports. More than 20% of our metal imports and 50% of our wood imports come from Canada. Mexico, our third largest trading partner, has the advantages of both close proximity to the US and low labor costs, and we see quite a mix of imports. There are bulky, low dollar density things which benefit from short shipping distances like metals, large appliances, furniture, and AC equipment. But there’s also a fair amount of (presumably labor intensive) manufactured goods like small appliances, electrical equipment, and power tools.

Trump

Left Angst

Doing This Again Makes Me Hate Myself and Hate You, But Yes, Something Happened to Liberalism in the 2010s, and Sometimes That Thing is Called "Woke"

Here is the contention I have made, am making, and I hope to never make again: though the exact dimensions and timeline will always be subject to debate, American liberalism clearly experienced dramatic changes in the 2010s, and these changes are specific and comprehensible. Liberals in 2010 weren’t the same as liberals in 2020. They just weren’t. They changed in comprehensible and expressible ways. And this absolutely dogged insistence that no such change occurred is one of the weirdest, most obviously dishonest political claims of my lifetime. It’s a record of a political and intellectual tendency defined by its powerlessness and directed by people who think that asking them to defend their ideals is a kind of crime.
NOAA imposes limits on scientists, sparking concerns over global forecasts
Musk's takeover of US health agencies raises pandemic threat, experts warn
Diversity: The U.S. Military's Not-So-Secret Weapon

One of the greatest strengths of the U.S. military has been its perceived ability to truly be a place where anyone, no matter their background, can rise to the level of their own merit. While this is not historically true given the exclusion of racial minorities, women, and gay, lesbian, and trans Americans across our history, in this case it is the public perception that is important.
Markets starting to view Trump as more 'pushover' on tariffs than protectionist
Trump officials fired nuclear staff not realizing they oversee US nuclear arms
Men claiming to be from DOGE show up at San Francisco City Hall, demand records
The technology team at financial regulator CFPB has been gutted | The Verge
Border czar Tom Homan slams AOC over webinar to help illegal immigrants avoid arrest: ‘I thought I educated her on this’.
Nina Jankowicz corrects the record on US AID funding of her

I have never—not at ASP, CIR, not at DHS, not in any work I’ve ever done—been involved in any “censorship” activity. In fact, I have actively argued that it is antidemocratic and ineffective.
Elon Musk's DOGE Is Running Highly Sensitive Government Data Through AI
NIH's 15% Indirect Spending Cuts Hurt Hard Tech Startups
Trump has thrown a wrench into a national EV charging program
Trump firings cause chaos at agency responsible for America's nuclear weapons
PBS Mourns a Month Of ‘Ivy League Right-Wing Nihilism.’
White House bans AP journalists from Oval Office amid continued Gulf dispute
Musk's DOGE Begins Firing Workers at Federal IT Department
US wants to un-fire nuclear safety workers can't figure out how to reach them
The US Fish and Wildlife Service has frozen millions, imperiling animals abroad

Law Breaking / Police / Internal Security

'Death cult' on the run: The Bay Area fringe group terrorizing America

A sprawling web of violence across America, which has left at least six dead, has been linked to a fringe group of radical Berkeley pseudo-intellectuals known as the Zizians. Investigators across the country are piecing together connections between the double homicide of a wealthy married couple in Pennsylvania, a deadly shootout in Vermont and two brutal knife attacks on a landlord in Vallejo. Four people who are allegedly Zizian cult members are in custody facing homicide charges, despite multiple escape attempts. Three members of the fringe group are missing and wanted, including the leader, Jack “Ziz” LaSota, who faked their death in the San Francisco Bay. Around a dozen individuals appear to have in-person links to Ziz, some of whom worked at NASA and Google before the arrests began. Many of them advocate for veganism and identify as transgender. Some met through the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, a Berkeley nonprofit buoyed by Peter Thiel and Sam Bankman-Fried and associated with the rationalist movement; MIRI warns about the dangers of AI and studies the “mathematical underpinnings of intelligent behavior.”
- A Vermont border agent's death linked to cultlike Zizian group

External Security / Militaria / Diplomania

World

Forget the US — Europe has successfully put tariffs on itself

The IMF estimates that Europe’s internal barriers are equivalent to a tariff of 45 per cent for manufacturing and 110 per cent for services. These effectively shrink the market in which European companies operate: trade across EU countries is less than half the level of trade across US states. And as activity shifts more towards services, their overall drag on growth becomes worse. At the same time, the EU has allowed regulation to track the most innovative part of services — digital — hindering the growth of European tech firms and preventing the economy from unlocking large productivity gains. The costs of complying with GDPR, for example, are estimated to have reduced profits for small European tech firms by up to 12 per cent. Taken together, Europe has been effectively raising tariffs within its borders and increasing regulation on a sector that makes up around 70 per cent of EU GDP.
Why don't Europeans buy more American cars?
Hundreds charged with online 'speech crimes' under 'Orwellian' crackdown

Russia Bad / Ukraine War

Suspected Russian spies caught spoofing Teams invites
What is device code phishing, and why are Russian spies so successful at it?
- Multiple Russian Threat Actors Targeting Microsoft Device Code Authentication
Europe will not be part of Ukraine-Russia peace talks, US envoy says
Fur Flies as Russia Takes on Young Fans of 'Quadrobics'

quadrobics -- a fitness and social media trend that involves imitating the movements of four-legged animals. Russian officials, Orthodox clergymen and pro-government intellectuals have harshly criticised the trend in recent weeks, portraying it as a dangerous import from a decadent West. In line with a hardening of Russia's ultra-conservative social agenda since the start of the offensive on Ukraine in February 2022, lawmakers have recently proposed to ban quadrobics. The proposal comes after similar interdictions against the LGBTQ movement and even against couples that don't want to have children -- moves touted by Moscow as necessary to defend Russia's "traditional values".
'Army of Europe' needed to challenge Russia, says Zelensky