2025-02-19

lies we tell our kids, trans and primogeniture, centenarian social security, "because we have the money" USPS de-DeJoy-ed, parent politics, carrier collision details, peace without Ukraine

Horseshit

• Train hoppers ride the rails across America – and you can tag along

• Pathfinder 1: The Airship That Could Usher in a New Age

• Ketamine-Fueled 'Psychedelic Slumber Parties' Get Tech Execs Back on Track

• Glow in the Dark Bunnies Coming to a Pet Store Near You... Finally.

• Opinion | There’s One Lie I Will Never Tell My Children - The New York Times

  When I was 11, I underwent a complex procedure to correct a discrepancy in the length of my legs. Surgeons spent 13 hours drilling through my bones and attaching an external metal frame from my hip to my toe. It took them the next two years to stretch my leg three inches. The pain was so severe that morphine, other opioids, Valium and muscle relaxants were all standard protocol. Yet, before the surgery, when I asked if it would hurt, the only thing I remember being told was “Don’t worry, we have ways to manage any unpleasantness.” The difference between what I was told and what I experienced shattered my faith in doctors and left me questioning whether I could trust adults at all. Now, as a parent — and through my years working in health care — I’ve made the conscious decision never to lie to people about pain. Even with something as small as a routine vaccination, even before they see the needle coming toward them. Yes, I say, it may hurt. Many parents opt instead to reassure their children. Since they can’t stop the needle from hurting, they believe the next best thing is to offer comfort. But when the pain does inevitably come, it’s accompanied by a heaping side of betrayal. Lies that mislead children about their experiences are not white lies. Though they may appear innocuous, they erode the fabric of the fundamental and necessary trust between parent and child. They create an emotional wound not easily healed. The pain of discovering you have been deceived by a trusted adult can cut deeper and last longer than the pain of an unavoidable medical intervention.

• S.F. is tearing down the Valencia bike lane. But a new battle has already begun

• The surprising theory that explains modern American life: Why don't you move?

Rank Propaganda / Thought Policing / World Disordering

• 60 Minutes on Germanys prosecution of online hate

  • CBS joined German police to conduct a raid on a citizen for posting a meme online .

Musk

• Tesla was hit by a wave of protests, sales are crashing, insiders are waking up

• Attempted Arson and Vandalism at Tesla Store in Colorado Being Investigated

• X now blocks Signal contact links, flags them as malicious

• X Prevents Research on Potential Election Interference

• Tesla's law firm drafts Delaware bill that could salvage Musk pay package

Electric / Self Driving cars

• Scout Range Extender Will Be a Non-Turbo Four-Cylinder, Offer 500-Mile Range

Religion / Tribal / Culture War and Re-Segregation

• (2021) The secret court case 50 years ago that has robbed transgender people of their rights ever since – The i Paper

  A narrative has developed about the position of transgender people today that has become so widely accepted as to be assumed as fact: that it is only in the past few decades that trans people have begun to enjoy any rights; that trans women have always been more prominent than trans men; and most of all, that in recent years, trans people have been seeking to gain more rights than they’ve ever had before. A new book, The Hidden Case of Ewan Forbes by Zoe Playdon, upends all of this. The Emeritus Professor of Medical Humanities at the University of London has unearthed a legal case that 50 years ago changed everything for trans people, but which has been kept secret at the highest levels ever since. The purpose, it seems, of this blackout was to uphold the patriarchal structure underpinning the monarchy, aristocracy, and hereditary peerages – the right of inheritance by the firstborn son. Or, to use the formal term, male primogeniture. The effect was to remove the human rights of transgender people that had previously existed – and in silence.

Edumacationalizing / Acedemia Nuts

• Can a College Town Survive the Closure of Its College?

• Among top researchers 10% publish at unrealistic levels, analysis finds

Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising

• Ray-Ban Meta Glasses Have Sold 2M Units, Production to Be Increased to 10M

• Huawei launches $3,660 trifold phone

• Fighting the AI Scraperbot Scourge

• SanDisk puts petabyte SSDs on the roadmap

• NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5090 Linux GPU Compute Performance Benchmarks Review - Phoronix

  When taking the geo mean across 60+ benchmarks of CUDA / OptiX / OpenCL / Vulkan Compute, the GeForce RTX 5090 was delivering 1.42x the performance of the GeForce RTX 4090. A very nice generational improvement considering many of the Windows reviews yesterday were talking up around ~1.3x the performance when not dealing with DLSS4 or similar tech. The GeForce RTX 5090 was delivering great GPU compute performance whether you are into CUDA, OpenCL, or Vulkan. It was fascinating to look at the generational performance comparing the GeForce RTX 5090 Blackwell to the former Turing and Ampere generations too for those holding out years before investing big money into a new GPU. With these GPU compute benchmarks the GeForce RTX 5090 delivered 2.6x the performance of the GeForce RTX 3090 and 3.7x the performance of the GeForce TITAN RTX.

• (2021) The Sony FX-300 Jackal: A Holy Grail technological marvel of the late 70s | The SWLing Post

• Reviewing the Cryptography Used by Signal - Dhole Moments

  I didn’t feel that “I looked at Signal and didn’t find any vulnerabilities in it” is exactly a convincing argument, so instead, I wanted to lead you down the journey I took to review Signal; to show you the code snippets I reviewed, and what (if anything) significant I thought about them. The journey is more important than the destination. I hope this helps more people get comfortable with the basics of reviewing cryptographic software.

• BlackBerry's iconic keyboard patent has expired

• Dune: Messiah: Villeneuve's crowning achievement or when the spice runs dry?

• US publisher uses linguistic gymnastics to avoid saying outage due to ransomware

• Valve releases Team Fortress 2 game code

TechSuck / Geek Bait

• Wraparound Hex Grids – BorisTheBrave.Com

• Time to make C the COBOL of this century

  • We could do this by inventing something better; or by bending society to forbid using the best tool we have yet evolved, making do with less capability... Guess which approach we're gonna try.

• Gnome 48 beta is another nail in X11's coffin

  • X11 has outlived people who proclaimed it dead.

AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World

• Elon Musk's xAI releases its latest flagship model, Grok 3

• The New York Times adopts AI tools in the newsroom

• Meta staff torrented nearly 82TB of pirated books for AI training

• The Generative AI Con

• OpenAI Weighs Special Voting Rights to Guard Against Hostile Takeovers

• Spymaster Controls a $1.5T Fortune. He Wants to Use It to Dominate AI

• AI Data Center with Up to 3 Gigawatts of Power Is Envisioned for South Korea

• If Musk wants AI for the world, why not open-source all the Grok models?

• HP to Acquire Parts of Humane for $116M

Space / Boomy Zoomers / UFO

• Turning the Moon into a fuel depot will take a lot of power

• Nokia is putting the first cellular network on the moon

• Asteroid 2024 YR4: More than 100M people live in risk corridor

• There's a tiny chance the asteroid headed for Earth could hit the moon

• NASA says 'City killer' asteroid now has 3.1% chance of hitting Earth

Economicon / Business / Finance

• PG&E reports profit of more than $2B for 2024

• Southwest to lay off 15% of its corporate staff, including senior leadership

• Chase will soon block Zelle payments to sellers on social media

• At the 'Wall Street of Eggs,' Demand Is Surging

• Startups Are Waiting Years to Go Public, If at All

• US consumers rush to buy as Trump tariffs fuel stockpiling

• UnitedHealth laying off 30-35k employees by May 1

Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making

• Social Security: Nearly 1.5 Million Americans Listed as Over 150 Years Old, 1,041 Over 220 Years Old.

• No, 150-Year-Olds Aren't Collecting Social Security Benefits | WIRED

  Elon Musk has repeatedly claimed that his so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) project had uncovered massive government fraud when it alleged that 150-year-olds were claiming Social Security benefits. But Musk has provided no evidence to back up his claims, and experts quickly pointed out that this is very likely just a quirk of the decades-old coding language that underpins the government payment systems. While no evidence was produced to back up this claim, it was picked up by the right-wing commentators online, primarily on Musk’s own X platform, as well as being reported credibly by pro-Trump media outlets. Computer programmers quickly claimed that the 150 figure was not evidence of fraud, but rather the result of a weird quirk of the Social Security Administration’s benefits system, which was largely written in COBOL, a 60-year-old programming language that undergirds SSA’s databases as well as systems from many other US government agencies. COBOL is rarely used today, and as such, Musk’s cadre of young engineers may well be unfamiliar with it.

  • "No evidence" that fits the Narrative.

• DOGE Finds $4.7 Trillion In Virtually Untraceable Treasury Payments | ZeroHedge

  "In the Federal Government, the TAS field was optional for ~$4.7 Trillion in payments and was often left blank, making traceability almost impossible," DOGE announced via its X account. Thanks to DOGE, those "optional" days are over. “As of Saturday, this is now a required field, increasing insight into where money is actually going," DOGE added.

• US Postal Service Announces Tenure Plan of Postmaster General Louis DeJoy

  The United States Postal Service is today announcing that Louis DeJoy, America’s 75th Postmaster General, has notified the Postal Service Board of Governors that it is time for them to begin the process of identifying his successor.

Trump

• The Genius of the DOGE Exposures › American Greatness

  The creators of Monty Python could not have made this stuff up, although they came close in their “It’s every man’s right to have babies if he wants them!” sketch. It still makes me laugh. But that’s why Donald Trump and Elon Musk are highlighting these absurd expenditures. They are so ridiculous that they almost defy belief, and they serve to supercharge American anger and righteous indignation.

• Critics Prove Vance’s Point on the Threat of the Anti-Free Speech Movement.

• Pete Hegseth Says Biden’s IRS Targeted Him With ‘Sham’ Audit on Their Way Out the Door › American Greatness

• Trump signs executive orders limiting power of agencies, expanding IVF access

• Trump Signs Order Giving White House Control over Independent Agencies

Democrats

• Dems Having Major Buyer’s Remorse After David Hogg Starts Texting Them Outrageous Messages.

Left Angst

• 10% of staff at US CDC told they would lose their jobs

• Top Social Security Official Leaves After Musk Team Seeks Data Access

  • Acting head of Social Security Administration resigns after dispute with Elon Musk’s DOGE: report.

• Mexico threatens to sue Google over name change of Gulf of Mexico on US maps

• Daring Fireball: Golfo del Gringo Loco

  It’s worth noting, however, that Alaskans themselves are the people who spearheaded the Obama order that first renamed Mt. McKinley to Denali, and Republican Senator Lisa Murkowski has already introduced new legislation to re-re-rename it back.

• Team from Elon Musk's SpaceX to review air traffic control system

• FDA staff reviewing Musk's Neuralink were included in DOGE employee firings

  • Doge Reportedly Cuts FDA Employees Investigating Neuralink

• Silicon Valley is Embracing Christianity (With the Help of Peter Thiel) - The New York Times

  Silicon Valley executives are accustomed to chasing the elusive — fortune, breakthroughs, power — but God has not tended to rank high on the list. The Bay Area is one of the least churchgoing parts of America, where people have been more apt to meet their spiritual longing with meditation, ayahuasca, intermittent fasting or cold plunges. An episode of the HBO show “Silicon Valley” once satirized this with a gay entrepreneur aghast at being “outed” as Christian. In a place built on stretching human limitations, where people exert dominion over everything from fertility to outer space, even turning mortality into a business opportunity, the divine has seemed, to some, obsolete.

• Trump and Tates

• The war on DEI is a smoke screen | The Verge

  These comments reveal far more sinister motivations for the war on DEI. Rufo has repeatedly stated his opposition to policies that promote “equal outcomes,” which he has said should be replaced with a system that promotes “equal opportunity.” That anodyne language obscures the fact that many prominent critics of DEI — Rufo included — have hinted at or outright stated that equal outcomes are impossible under a meritocratic system. This worldview stems from their belief that people are not created equal.

• Musk signals DOGE could look into gold at Fort Knox

  • America's gold reserves could add $750B to the U.S. Treasury

  • Elon Musk's Doge Targets US Gold Reserves

• Wayback Machine keeps dot gov Sites

• Trump Cuts Target Next Generation of Scientists and Public Health Leaders - The New York Times

• Who's in Charge of Doge? Not Elon Musk, White House Says

• NOAA scientists ordered to get clearance before talking to Canadian counterparts

• As Trump 'Exports' Deportees, Hundreds Are Trapped in Panama Hotel

• AP's silly gulf war - Don Surber

• Tariffs result in 10% laptop price hike in U.S. says Acer CEO

  • Acer to raise prices by 10pc in response to Trump's tariffs

  • Tariffs result in 10% laptop price hike in U.S. says Acer CEO

• Elon Musk's Business Empire Scores Benefits Under Trump Shake-Up

• Funding science is a badass thing to do

  • Why not fund churches with tax money, too?

• Gates warns of deaths if Trump and Musk don't reinstate foreign aid funding

• Science.org: Trump Tracker

• The Coming Democratic Baby Bust - The Atlantic

  A few years ago, Gordon Dahl, an economist at UC San Diego, set out to measure how Trump’s 2016 victory might have affected conception rates in the years following. And he and his colleagues found a clear effect: Starting after Trump’s election, through the end of 2018, 38,000 fewer babies than would otherwise be expected were conceived in Democratic counties. By contrast, 7,000 more than expected were conceived in Republican counties in that same period. (The study, published in 2022, was conducted before data on the rest of Trump’s term were available.) Over the past three decades, Republicans have generally given birth to more kids than Democrats have. But during those first years of the first Trump administration, the partisan birth gap widened by 17 percent. “You see a clear and undeniable shift in who’s having babies,” Dahl told me. Dahl and his co-authors found evidence for a significant shift in birth rates only in elections that a Republican won; for the 2008 election, they found no evidence that Barack Obama’s victory affected fertility rates.

• The Uncertain Resiliency of Public Trust in Science

  multiple surveys and studies have reported the Covid-19 pandemic correlated with a decline in trust in the years following the initial outbreak. This decrease, though, seems to be waning as new research shows a clearer picture of trust across time. One 2024 study suggests Trump’s attacks on science during his first term did not have the significant impact many experts feared — and may have even boosted confidence among certain segments of the population. Overall confidence in scientific institutions has slightly rebounded since the pandemic, some research suggests, with that trust remaining strong across countries. Despite the uptick, there appears to be a still widening divide particularly between political factions, with Democrats showing higher levels of trust and Republicans showing lower levels, a polarization that became more pronounced during the Covid-19 pandemic.

• COVID Pushed a Generation of Young People to the Right - The Atlantic

  “Far-right parties are surging across Europe—and young voters are buying in,” the journalist Hanne Cokelaere wrote for Politico last year. In France, Germany, Finland, and beyond, young voters are swinging their support toward anti-establishment far-right parties “in numbers equal to and even exceeding older voters.” In Germany, a 2024 survey of 2,000 people showed that young people have adopted a relatively new “gloomy outlook” on the future. No surprise, then, that the far-right Alternative für Deutschland has become the most popular party among Germans under 30. Like most interesting phenomena, this one even has a German name: Rechtsruck, or rightward shift. What’s driving this global Rechtsruck? It’s hard to say for sure. Maybe the entire world is casting a protest vote after several years of inflation. Last year was the largest wipeout for political incumbents in the developed world since the end of the Second World War. One level deeper, it wasn’t inflation on its own, but rather the combination of weak real economic growth and record immigration that tilled the soil for far-right upstarts, who can criticize progressive governments on both sides of the Atlantic for their failure to look out for their own citizens first. There is another potential driver of the global right turn: the pandemic.

• Whoopi Goes Full ‘Basket Of Deplorables,’ Says She Can’t Even Talk To Trump Supporters

  “I think this is beyond Democrats and Republicans,” Goldberg said. “It’s hard to talk to people who support people who think you don’t matter in the country … When you support THAT person … when we find the stuff that we agree on, that’s what we do. When we find the stuff that is disagreeable to the majority, now, I didn’t find anything of interest for me in Project 2025. I didn’t feel like this is geared to us as a nation, I felt it was geared to very specific folks and that bothered the poo out of me.”

• Has Elon Musk Become Too Big to Tame?

• Who Runs Elon Musk’s DOGE? Not Musk, the White House Says. - The New York Times

  on Monday evening, a White House official stated plainly that “Mr. Musk is not the U.S. DOGE Service Administrator.” The official, Joshua Fisher, made the statement in a declaration to a judge, U.S. District Judge Tanya S. Chutkan, who is hearing a case filed by Democratic attorneys general against Mr. Musk and the DOGE effort. Mr. Fisher added that Mr. Musk was “an employee in the White House Office” and “not an employee of the U.S. DOGE Service.” Mr. Trump often talks about Mr. Musk as the functional leader of the DOGE effort, featuring him in a news conference last week where Mr. Musk answered questions about it. A lot of secrecy has surrounded DOGE despite Mr. Musk’s attempts to position it as “maximally transparent.” The White House’s unwillingness to state who its administrator is only adds to that sense of opacity. DOGE’s predecessor organization, the U.S. Digital Service, had administrators whose roles were public, most recently Mina Hsiang.

  • White House says Musk is not DOGE employee, has no authority to make decisions

• The Purge of the Deep State and the Road to Dictatorship

  The Trump administration’s war with the deep state is not a purgative. It is not about freeing us from the tyranny of intelligence agencies, militarized police, the largest prison system in the world, predatory corporations or the end of mass surveillance. It will not restore the rule of law to hold the powerful and the wealthy accountable. It will not slash the bloated and unaccountable spending — some $1 trillion dollars — by the Pentagon. All revolutionary movements, on the left or the right, dismantle the old bureaucratic structures. The fascists in Germany and the Bolsheviks in the Soviet Union, once they seized power, aggressively purged the civil service. They see in these structures, correctly, an enemy that would stymie their absolute grip on power. It is a coup d'état by inches. Now we get our own.

• Trump has laid of 10% of NASA employees

  • The Planetary Society Strongly Opposes Mass Layoffs of Employees at NASA

• GSA engineering lead resigns over DOGE ally's request for access

• Elon Musk is failing to cut American spending

• Musk Decries Hitler's Censorship, Right Before Threatening to Jail Critics

• USDA fired officials working on bird flu, now trying to rehire them

Law Breaking / Police / Internal Security

• Police arrest apparent leader of cultlike 'Zizian' group linked to killings

  • Alleged head of cultlike 'Zizian' anarchist computer scientists arrested

External Security / Militaria / Diplomania

• India's Tata Consultancy Was Gaming the US Visa System

• USS Harry S. Truman (CVN 75) Got Bumped Ugly

  If, as initially reported, after TRUMAN gets patched up in Souda Bay and can complete her deployment, well, that is a great thing for the other CVN’s in our fleet. They won’t have to cover her unexpected absence. The 11 carriers we have now are inadequate for what our nation is asking of them. What if the TRUMAN got t-boned by the Besiktas-M and got holed? What would we do?

• The F-35 Will Now Exceed $2T as the Military Plans to Fly It Less

World

• Brazil asks UN to ditch proposed levy on global shipping

• Meta Is Ready to Bring Trump into Play in Fight Against EU Rules

• What German tech founders want from the election

• Germany's Habeck slams 'tech oligarch' Musk, calls for a European X

• Bolivians smuggle Starlink to escape China-backed internet

• Vietnam paves way for Musk's Starlink seen as "olive branch"

• Death of South Korean actor at 24 sparks discussion about internet culture

• Why Barcelona Bought the Building That Symbolizes Its Housing Crisis

• Javier Milei faces impeachment calls after Argentina cryptocurrency collapse

• German defense boss: If parents have dinner, kids have to sit at another table

• Brazil mayor was shot in 'fake attack' for election boost but lost in landslide

Russia Bad / Ukraine War

• Appeasement at Munich - by Timothy Snyder

  As American and Russian negotiators converge today in Munich for a major security conference, carrying in their briefcases various plans about Ukraine without Ukraine, the temptation is to recall another meeting in that city. Appeasement of the aggressor seems to be the plan now, as it was with Germany in 1938. But the resemblances between that moment and this go deeper, and it worth pausing to consider them. The symmetry between Germany-Czechoslovakia in 1938 and Russia-Ukraine in 2022 is uncanny, and pausing for a moment on the resemblances might help us to take a broader view of today. We are prisoners, now more than ever, of the rumors and disinformation and emotions of the moment.

  the first American move under Musk-Trump has been to endorse appeasement. Knowingly or not, and I do not presume to say which, that choice pushes us one step towards 1939.

• US and Russia agree to try to end war without Ukraine at the table

• Ukraine isn't invited to its own peace talks. History is full of such examples

China

• Five One-Chinas: The contest to define Taiwan

• Xi Voices Support for Jack Ma, China Private Sector Chiefs

  • Xi Jinping seizes DeepSeek moment to restore China tech chiefs to spotlight

• BYD Lands 12.5GWh Deal with Saudi Electricity Company

• Has China's Oil Demand Peaked?

• Marriages in China Crash, Portending Deeper Demographic Woes

• China Rescues Stranded Lunar Satellites

• Chinese lithium company halts tech exports as trade tensions build

• China Looks to Use Tesla FSD Rollout as Leverage in Trade Negotiations

Health / Medicine

• Using CRISPR to remove extra chromosomes in Down syndrome

• Why community pharmacies are closing – and what to do if yours shutters

Pox / COVID / BioTerror AgitProp

• Flu is out of control in the United States: Could a long-term immunosuppressive effect of repeated mRNA Covid shots be part of the reason? Don’t expect the media to ask.

  even the dumbest reporters would rather not remind people of their 2020 panic. They know they’ll be tarred and feathered if they call for school closures or lockdowns. All we can do is ride out the season, so best to say as little as possible.

Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda

• Record January heat: La Niña may be losing its ability to check global warming

• Scientists Discover Key Genes to Fight Against Crop Parasites

• Scented Wax Melts as a Significant Source of Atmospheric Nanoparticles

• Big Tech's water use is 100 times bigger than expected

• Japan backs nuclear power in climate plan criticized as insufficient

• Alice Hamilton Waged a One-Woman Campaign to Get the Lead Out of Everything

• 'Triangle of death': will Italy tackle mafia's toxic waste dumping?