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2025-02-20

work wanks, Nikola bankrupt, DEI dis-integration, math dances, Pokemon Gone, copyright suck, HPumane, KFC minus KY, student loans not forgiven, UKians for the FBI, war on Gaia

etc

Horseshit

  • Company offers staff half-hour masturbation breaks

  • ‘Cancelations are Canceled’: Science Fiction Competition Tries To Cancel Author, Sees Backlash

    Self-Published Science Fiction Competition (SPSFC) announced on Wednesday that it was removing author Devon Eriksen’s book from consideration for an award. The SPSFC said that it made the decision because Eriksen violated the competition’s code of conduct — which had been published to X the day before this announcement. Eriksen is the author of “Theft of Fire: Orbital Space #1,” a popular self-published book that has received glowing reviews, including one from the creator of Doom. He didn’t even enter the book into the competition; his wife did, thinking she might surprise him if he won. After seeing that he had been booted from the competition, he published a fictional account of learning that he had been entered into a competition without his knowledge and had somehow violated that competition’s code of conduct, which he never agreed to. That code of conduct stated that contestants could not harass judges or other authors, which Devon didn’t do — and couldn’t do — since he didn’t even know he was entered. But one of the judges posted on Bluesky, in a message provided to The Daily Wire, that even though Eriksen “didn’t directly contact judges or other authors,” his posts were “driving away judges, authors and prospective contestants/members in huge numbers.”

  • Women who made America's microchips and the children who paid for it

celebrity gossip

Bluesky

Musk

Electric / Self Driving cars

Religion / Tribal / Culture War and Re-Segregation

  • Tegmark's Mathematical Universe Defeats Most Proofs Of God's Existence

  • Trevor Noah Suggests ‘Integration’ of Black and White People Was a Mistake - modernity

    However, he then pointed out that Finland was a stable, prosperous and high trust society largely because it is overwhelmingly homogenous. “I think part of the reason Finland is able to do it is because, have you been to Finland? I’ve been to Finland. You know who’s in Finland? Finnish people. That’s it,” said Noah. Noah then explained how it is far easier for people of similar ethnicities and cultures to communicate with each other without there being any confusion “Already there’s an implicit trust because we already know what certain actions, words and vibes mean,” he said. Noah then asked Princeton Professor Ruha Benjamin if she thought “integration was the right solution” to the questions raised by the civil rights movement. Benjamin responded that she didn’t think integration was the right solution and that “segregation and “integration weren’t the only options” because black people were forcefully integrated into a “supremacist culture.”

  • Mark Zuckerberg's charity guts DEI after assuring staff it would continue

Edumacationalizing / Acedemia Nuts

  • Children are starting school unable to sit up or hold a pencil

  • Aussie math teachers must add Indigenous dance, storytelling to lessons

    Maths teachers will be expected to incorporate Indigenous dance and storytelling into school lessons under the revised national school curriculum. The Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority began developing the current version of the national curriculum in 2022. An analysis of the new curriculum by the federal opposition has found that, of the 2,451 lesson suggestions, three-quarters relate to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander history and culture.

  • America stopped caring how poor kids do in school

    The Post reports that “the District also made nominal gains, or stayed about the same, in reading for fourth- and eighth-graders.” And what’s crazy is that in the context of the latest National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) report, flat performance in reading is genuinely impressive. On average, nationwide, students got worse — especially the weakest students — not just compared to before the pandemic, but compared to two years ago.

    Congress stopped trying to set federal requirements that schools get better, because the political energy around improving schools was evaporating. The left retreated into coalition solidarity with teachers unions, and the right refocused on vouchers and privatization. And it turns out that giving up and not trying doesn’t work very well.

Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising

TechSuck / Geek Bait

  • The reality of long-term software maintenance - Ashley's blog

    To many on the outside, seeing someone submitting 10,000 lines of code for a new feature in an open-source project is a generous, helpful person who deserves respect and co-operation from the developers. However experienced developers responsible for the codebase will be well aware that person may suddenly disappear off the face of the earth - and then once you consider the long term, they've essentially dumped responsibility for perhaps 4-10x as much work as they've done themselves on to the project's other developers. If they quite reasonably decide they'd rather not deal with that, then this becomes a very thorny diplomatic problem: how do you politely turn down someone who appears to have been so generous? In the case of that Linux kernel dispute, this seems to have been part of the point the kernel developers were trying to make. (However they used what I'd call extremely undiplomatic language which looks to have added to the acrimony.)

AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World

Space / Boomy Zoomers / UFO

Crypto con games

Economicon / Business / Finance

Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making

Trump

Democrats

  • US appeals court blocks student debt relief plan

    A U.S. appeals court ruled on Tuesday that Democratic former President Joe Biden's administration lacked authority to pursue a student debt relief program designed to lower monthly payments for millions of borrowers and speed up loan forgiveness for some. The three-judge panel held that the Education Department exceeded its authority by trying to use a Higher Education Act provision that allows for income-based loan repayment plans to adopt debt forgiveness on the scale provided by Biden's Saving on a Valuable Education (SAVE) Plan.

Left Angst

  • A SpaceX team is being brought in to overhaul FAA's air traffic control system

  • How the Woke Right Replaced the Woke Left - The Atlantic

    Donald Trump promised that his election would free Americans from ever having to worry about saying the wrong thing again. He even signed an executive order titled “Restoring Freedom of Speech and Ending Federal Censorship.” But a few weeks into his administration, we hardly find ourselves enjoying a culture of free speech and tolerance for opposing views. Almost immediately, the president did the opposite of what he’d promised and put together his own linguistic proscriptions. Most of the banned words related to gender and diversity, and this time the rules had the force of the government behind them. “Fear that other words could run afoul of the new edicts led anxious agency officials to come up with lists of potentially problematic words on their own,” wrote Shawn McCreesh in The New York Times. These included: “Equity. Gender. Transgender. Nonbinary. Pregnant people. Assigned male at birth. Antiracist. Trauma. Hate speech. Intersectional. Multicultural. Oppression. Such words were scrubbed from federal websites.” Plus ça change. The government itself determining the limits of acceptable speech is undeniably far more chilling and pernicious—and potentially unconstitutional—than private actors attempting to do so. But what is most striking about this dismal back-and-forth is how well it demonstrates that the illiberal impulse to dictate what can and cannot be said is always fundamentally the same, whether it appears on the right or the left.

  • Trump's Pivot Toward Putin's Russia Upends Generations of U.S. Policy

    As far as Mr. Trump is concerned, Russia is not responsible for the war that has devastated its neighbor. Instead, he suggests that Ukraine is to blame for Russia’s invasion of it. To listen to Mr. Trump talk with reporters on Tuesday about the conflict was to hear a version of reality that would be unrecognizable on the ground in Ukraine and certainly would never have been heard from any other American president of either party. In Mr. Trump’s telling, Ukrainian leaders were at fault for the war for not agreeing to surrender territory and therefore, he suggested, they do not deserve a seat at the table for the peace talks that he has just initiated with Mr. Putin. “You should have never started it,” Mr. Trump said, referring to Ukrainian leaders who, in fact, did not start it. “You could have made a deal.”

  • Can Trumpism be defeated? Absolutely. Here’s how | Bernie Sanders | The Guardian

    Trumpism will not be defeated by politicians inside the DC beltway. It will only be defeated by millions of Americans, in every state in this country, coming together in a strong, grassroots movement which says no to oligarchy, no to authoritarianism, no to kleptocracy, no to massive cuts in programs that working people desperately need, no to huge tax brakes for the richest people in our country.

  • USDA accidentally fired officials working on bird flu and is trying to rehire

  • Trump's national-capitalism likes to flaunt its strength, but it is fragile

  • Elon Musk is wrong

    Now, I never thought I'd be standing up and defending the FBI, which is not a natural organisation of which I'm a fan. But we do need law enforcement agents. We do need to protect people, and we need to protect those who have served the state. And Musk is doing none of those things. And all of this is frankly truly frightening. Because the consequence is that there isn't a state that we can rely on. And in a state that we can't rely on, we are all on our own.

    • From a UK blogger, whose state may prosecute him soon for hosting comments on that blog.

  • Doge Claimed It Saved $8B in One Contract. It Was $8M

  • Virtue Signaling Now Means You Have To Sell That Tesla – Issues & Insights

    Remember when all the best people, the elites and elitists among us, the correct thinkers, the self-appointed guardians of all things good, were buying electric vehicles, particularly Teslas? What a terrific way for them to demonstrate their green street cred. But that’s passé. The latest in look-at-me virtue signaling is selling that Tesla to make an important political statement.

  • The irony of Elon Musk's attack on public broadcasters

    These barely-veiled threats to foreign-facing broadcasters mirror similar announcements on the defunding of American broadcasters, including National Public Radio (NPR) and the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS). DOGE subcommittee chair Majorie Taylor Greene has called on executives from the two organisations to give evidence to DOGE, which has accused them of “systemically biased news coverage”. This may seem like small beer compared to the geopolitical earthquake represented by the US administration’s proclamations on the Ukraine war and the Gaza conflict, or its sabre-rattling on Greenland or Canada. But these moves are part of the same epochal shift in American foreign policy. There is much to criticise about America’s record in the post-war period. But even the worst abuses were driven, at least rhetorically, by an opposition to authoritarianism. It is no exaggeration to say that Trump and Musk are now increasingly aligned with the authoritarian heir to Stalin in the shape of Vladimir Putin, and the heirs of Hitler in the AfD (Alternative for Germany). The irony of Musk categorising Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and Voice of America as the “radical left” will not be lost on those of the European left who traditionally saw these outlets as the ideological wing of the American government or even the CIA. Indeed, they are often credited with playing a key role in providing the propaganda underpinnings that led to the dismantling of the Iron Curtain and the subsequent collapse of the Soviet Union.

  • Seeing Through the Spartan Mirage - by George Dillard

  • RFK wants to replace psychological care with unpaid labor on "wellness farms"

  • JD Vance’s Debacle in Germany Exposes MAGA’s Sinister Global Endgame | The New Republic

    I never could have imagined, none of us could, that the government of the United States of America would openly ally itself with a fascist political party. In the heart of Europe. In Germany, for God’s sake. And while we’re imagining things, imagine this: Although the conservative Christian Democrats are ahead in the polling, with 29 percent, AfD is in second at 21 percent. Imagine that AfD somehow wins. The U.S. government will be openly cheering a fascist victory. Combine this with what we already know about Ukraine. The Trump administration is going to give Putin whatever he wants. What exactly this is, we don’t yet know. But when Saudi Arabia is hosting talks that include the U.S. and Russia only, and not Ukraine or the other nations of Europe, you don’t have to be Sherlock Holmes to smell the fix that’s in.

  • National Science Foundation fires roughly 10% of its workforce

  • Did DOGE Take Credit for Spending Cuts Related to President Carter's Death?

    a brief glimpse of the data raises questions about its accuracy. One row describes a lease terminated for an “agency” called “Allowance to Former Presidents.” Additional information shows that the property is 7,682 square feet, costs $128,233 per year, and is in Atlanta, Georgia. The GSA maintains a database of property leased by the federal government. Cross-referencing the information on DOGE’s website with GSA’s database reveals that the federal government was leasing this property from “The Carter Center, Inc.” The Carter Center is a nonprofit organization founded by former President Carter, who died on Dec. 29, 2024.

    DOGE is likely not responsible for the termination of GSA’s lease of the Carter Center. The benefits to Carter under the Former Presidents Act expired upon his death. We can debate whether the Former Presidents Act is good policy and whether the federal government should provide these sorts of benefits to former presidents. Yet DOGE did not produce these “savings” listed on its website.

  • Musk appears to target NASA's Artemis moon project

  • Migrants, Deported to Panama Under Trump Plan, Detained in Remote Jungle Camp

  • Trump Team Plans Mass Firings at Key Agency for AI and Chips

  • Trump's firing spree rises to SCOTUS as watchdog attorney challenges termination

Law Breaking / Police / Internal Security

External Security / Militaria / Diplomania

World

Israel

China

Health / Medicine

Pox / COVID / BioTerror AgitProp

Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda

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