2025-02-25

pining for the Olde Net, dilute maple syrup, let EV's burn, cheaped out GPUs, asteroid apocalypse called off, fractional representation, RICO the NGOs, Bongino the FBI, Germans voted wrong again,

etc

• I Suddenly Lost My Enthusiasm for Interneting - Durmonski.com

  the online promise used to be simple: meet strangers, stumble upon fascinating, handcrafted content made to inform – not squeeze you into a marketing funnel – engage in forums with people who actually responded like human beings, and get lost in beautifully written blog posts that didn’t feel like they were regurgitated from some clickbait sorcery content factory in a dark alley of the web.

  Now the Internet is a frenzied hellscape of video content optimized to harvest engagement metrics, where every interaction is a performance. Everything is short-form, because apparently, reading anything longer than a tweet is now considered an extreme sport. Everyone online is either a self-declared millionaire guru hawking their 10-step success course, or a professional oversharer cataloging their psychological baggage in real time for validation points. Discussions are decreasing. Fewer and fewer real people are commenting online. Apparently, everyone is too busy doomscrolling through their daily selection of 500 short-form videos.

  My theory is that the early internet pioneers – the geeks, the hobbyists, the people who built weird little corners of the web – grew up, got jobs, had kids, and simply walked away. What’s left is a new wave of hyper-ambitious hustlers, clout chasers, and digital snake oil salesmen who think “authenticity” is something you sell in an online course.

  • Real people have been banned from most forums for voicing deviant views. Places where such views could be welcomed got nuked for being "echo chambers". There still exist the lonely weirdo sites, blogspots and such.

• A Parade of Planets Is Marching Through the Night Sky

• The weather and climate influences on the January 2025 fires around Los Angeles

Horseshit

• Floating nuclear power plants to be mass produced for US coastline

• Silicon Valley has lost it's way says Palantir CEO

• Can Canadians get the world drinking tree sap?

  What is far less well known is that you can drink the sap itself, which is called maple water. Clear in colour, it contains just 2% natural sugars, so it is only slightly sweet. A small but growing number of producers in Canada are now selling this maple water in bottles or cartons, after first giving it a filter and pasteurisation to kill off any microbes. "People feel like they're drinking the wild Canadian forest," says Yannick Leclerc of Maple3, a producer of maple water drinks, based in Quebec City. Advocates point to the fact it is a natural drink, and makers hope that it can steal some sales from the existing similar product – coconut water. The latter is made from water that naturally forms inside coconuts.

• To have deeper conversations, try being more of an asshole

• Useless High-Voltage Power Lines Risk Sparking California Fires

  Lawyers suing Edison allege that a Jan. 7 power surge on a nearby, active line created a magnetic field that briefly re-energized the dormant cable, setting off the sparks that ignited the blaze. Edison said in a state filing that it is investigating that theory. State investigators have yet to announce a cause for the fire.

• Unitree G1 robot puts on an exceptionally smooth dance performance

• Birth rates are crashing around the world. Should we be worried?

  • Months ago: "Natalism is right wing propaganda; they want forced breeding!"

• Link between social media and depression stronger in teen girls than boys

• As U.S. marriage rate hovers at 50%, education gap in marital status widens

• Micro-retirement: has Gen Z found a brilliant fix for burnout?

• US friendship is in freefall – shredding bonds and cutting lives short

• The 'masculinity crisis' is a crisis of self-esteem

celebrity gossip

• Larry Ellison's Half-Billion-Dollar Quest to Change Farming Has Been a Bust

• Steve Jobs Would Have Celebrated His 70th Birthday Today

• Strategic Genius of Taylor Swift

• Appeals Court Denies Elizabeth Holmes's Plea to Overturn Conviction

Obit

• Ski patroller caught in Mammoth Mountain avalanche dies of her injuries

Rank Propaganda / Thought Policing / World Disordering

• As Facebook Abandons Fact-Checking, It's Also Offering Bonuses for Viral Content

  • As Meta gets rid of fact-checkers, misinformation is going viral

• Inside The Telegram Groups Doxing Women for Their Facebook Posts

Bluesky

• Bruce Springsteen with 1.2M followers ditches X(Twitter) for Bluesky

Electric / Self Driving cars

• Porsche, Volvo and Rivian Are Injecting Unique Styles into Self-Driving Cars

• Carmakers turn to new hybrid and petrol models to bolster profits

• Option for electric vehicle fires: Let them burn

Edumacationalizing / Acedemia Nuts

• Wiley journal retracts 26 papers for 'compromised peer review'

• Universities that have the most retracted scientific articles

Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising

• How Deutsche Telekom Makes Cloudflare Re-Route Traffic Around the Globe

• Asus Announces Fragrance Mouse

• The False Promise of Digital Public Squares Was Always a Scam

• Technicolor-Owned VFX Firm MPC May Shutter Due to 'Severe' Challenges

• Microsoft's Euro-mandated File Explorer surgery shows 'less is more' still works

• ARPA Is Quietly Funding $50-$65 Community-Owned Fiber to Neglected Neighborhoods

• Xcode constantly phones home

  In effect, Xcode is a developer analytics collection mechanism

• Intel Announces Xeon 6500P and Xeon 6700P Processors

• Jeep Owners Fed Up with In-Car Pop-Up Ads

TechSuck / Geek Bait

• Torvalds: You can avoid Rust as a C maintainer, but you can't interfere with it

• Defragging my old Dell's UEFI NVRAM

• The Importance Of Current Balancing With Multi-Wire Power Inputs | Hackaday

  As recently shown by NVidia with their newly released RTX 50-series graphics cards, failure to provide current balancing between said different conductors will quickly turn it into a practical physics demonstration of this rule. Initially pinned down as an issue with the new-ish 12VHPWR connector that was supposed to replace the 6-pin and 8-pin PCIe power connectors, it turns out that a lack of current balancing is plaguing NVidia GPUs, with predictably melty results when combined with low safety margins. So what exactly changed that caused what seems to be a new problem, and why do you want multi-wire, multi-phase current balancing in your life when pumping hundreds of watts through copper wiring inside your PC?

  Because with the RTX 4090 and 5090 FE GPUs – as well as some GPUs by third-party manufacturers – these 12V lines are treated as a singular line, it is essential that the resistance on these lines is matched quite closely. If this is not the case, then physics does what it’s supposed to and the wires with the lowest resistance carry the most current. Because the 12V-2×6 connector on the GPU side sees only happy sense pins, it assumes that everything is fine and will pull 575 watts, or more, through a single 16 AWG wire if need be.

AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World

• Grok 3 appears to have briefly censored unflattering mentions of Trump and Musk

• Microsoft Cancels Leases for AI Data Centers, Analyst Says

• Microsoft Outsources OpenAI's Ambitions to SoftBank

• Did xAI lie about Grok 3's benchmarks?

  • Has anyone not?

Space / Boomy Zoomers / UFO

• Earth safe from 'city-killer' asteroid 2024 YR4 'That's impact probability zero'

  • Asteroid 2024 YR4 is going to miss Earth, but the story doesn't end there

• EU Officially Begins Work on $11B Starlink Rival IRIS2, Eta 2030

• What can we send to Mars on the first Starships? – Casey Handmer's blog

  As of today, it is 601 days until October 17, 2026, when the mass-optimal launch window to Mars opens next.

  What if we used Starship to transport a dozen or so Starlink satellites to Mars, each with a software update to use their powerful phased array antenna as an orbital radar? Because they form a constellation, they could even do multistatic synthetic aperture statistics. We need to build a relay constellation in Mars orbit sooner or later. As a complementary component, we could drop a wideband radio into the orbital Starship to put out far more than 10 W at much lower frequencies, seeing deeper into the crust. We have extremely powerful, versatile, programmable digital radio front-ends these days – and we should be using them to find stuff underground, including more scrolls!

  We know there’s a high likelihood mostly pure water ice exists within 10-20 m of the surface across large swaths of the various prospective landing sites. Why not drop off a few dozen long steel (or tungsten) spears, guide them in while tracking them on radar, and then survey their impact craters with HiRISE as soon as the dust has cleared? These rods will impact the surface at about 8 km/s, penetrating many times their length, and exposing the subsurface to our existing orbital instruments for the first time. The main attraction of this approach is that it requires essentially zero additional effort on top of the existing program, whereas the others require either a crash instrument development program, or building and flying multiple intricate surface operations robots and landing them with an extremely untested EDL system. Rods from the gods merely requires dropping a few tonnes of steel in roughly the same area and then surveying the damage. It’s also the only method that can deliver enough energy to actually directly access the deep subsurface at scale.

• Why Starship Matters

Economicon / Business / Finance

• Apple announces $500B US investment plan

  • Apple will spend more than $500B in the U.S. over the next four years

  • Apple Says It Will Add 20k Jobs, Spend $500B, Produce AI Servers in US

  • Apple Manufacturing Academy announced for downtown Detroit later this year

  • Apple to Build A.I. Servers in Houston and Spend $500B in U.S.

• Prosus to acquire Just Eat Takeaway in €4B deal

  • Tech investor Prosus to buy Just Eat Takeaway.com for $4.3B

• The U.S. Economy Depends More Than Ever on Rich People

• Is Being Single Bad for the Economy?

• WiseTech shares plunge after majority of board quits

• Costco insider explains why they stock expensive luxury items

• IBM Consulting workers told mgt wants to 'more closely align pay, performance'

  • Will this lead to the same level of opprobrium as Facebook's "low performers" layoffs?

• Coffee Prices at a 50 year high

• How an obscure advisory board lets utilities steal $50B/year from ratepayers

• JPMorgan Wants to Lend Companies Money

Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making

• The Death of Competition in American Elections - The New York Times

  a close review of the 2024 election shows just how undemocratic the country’s legislative bodies already are. After decades of gerrymandering and political polarization, a vast majority of members of Congress and state legislatures did not face competitive general elections last year. Instead, they were effectively elected through low-turnout or otherwise meaningless primary contests. Vanishingly few voters cast a ballot in those races, according to a New York Times analysis of more than 9,000 congressional and state legislative primary elections held last year. On average, just 57,000 people voted for politicians in U.S. House primaries who went on to win the general election — a small fraction of the more than 700,000 Americans each of those winners now represents.

• RICO the NGOs - Listener’s Substack

  As disclosures emerged over the last month about the web of payments flowing through byzantine corporate structures housed in and around Washington D.C.’s NGO Industrial Complex, my first reaction was, “that looks like money laundering”. After reflecting on it and digging deeper, I’ve come to believe it isn’t “like” money laundering – it “is” money laundering. Zooming out, as you will see below, I believe there exist all of the elements necessary to bring Racketeering (RICO) charges against a large number of individuals and organizations. There is either no crime here or an enormous crime. Do we look it in the eye and name it, or sweep it under the rug and pretend it never happened? If you think this isn’t important, or that white collar crime doesn’t apply to certain groups of people or certain types of activities that otherwise meet all the definitions of ‘illegal” it might be worth stopping to ponder how you got to that position and what the implications of this belief system are. I think the implications of that belief system are exactly what we are seeing now. Any group of people who believe themselves to be above the law will very quickly begin breaking the law, with the best intentions of course.

  That’s the beauty of RICO. It was designed to catch tricky crooks who were loosely affiliated. That’s D.C. in a nutshell for most people, but the example we dive into below is very specific and may be a winner.

  we don’t need vigilante justice to address the incredible corruption being unearthed right now in Washington D.C. There are legal tools available to both the government and individual citizens if we have the courage and dedication to use them. Enron was famously prosecuted using RICO and was bankrupted as a result. We should bankrupt the NGO Industrial Complex.

• NYC's Congestion Pricing Hits Revenue Target, Continues to Prove Doubters Wrong

Trump

• Trump announces commentator Dan Bongino as FBI deputy director: ‘Congratulations!’

  • Trump Selects Dan Bongino as Deputy FBI Director - WSJ

  • "Utter Despair": Liberals Panic Over 'Politicized' FBI After Bongino Appointment | ZeroHedge

  • Dan Bongino Appointed Deputy FBI Director

Left Angst

• Some agencies urge staff not to comply with Elon Musk’s performance email

  • NASA employees advised to delay responses to Musk's "what did you do" email

  • Musk's demand to government workers opens fissures in Trump administration

  • Trump administration tells agencies they can ignore Musk order on email reply

• DOGE will use AI to assess the responses from federal workers

• White House email compromises undercover officers' names

• Federal prisons prep to move trans inmates as early as next week

• Kristi Noem Revokes Protected Status for 500,000 Haitians, Opens Them Up for Deportation

• Opinion | What Trump Can Learn From the Last G.O.P. Disaster - The New York Times

  These have been the vibes around Donald Trump’s return to power, and they were also the vibes of George W. Bush’s presidency in the period immediately following Sept. 11, 2001. I was a young conservative beginning a Washington career at the time, and it felt as though the terrorist attacks had changed the political landscape permanently: discrediting the progressive left, reviving a spirit of patriotism and heroism and national greatness, perhaps inspiring a large-scale return to religion, definitely shifting the entire American establishment toward the right. But not, as it turned out, for long. By the time the Bush presidency limped to its conclusion, the right appeared generationally discredited, and the stage was set for Barack Obama’s triumph and the Great Awokening beyond. In hubris and in folly, conservatism had wasted its moment and let a generational opportunity slip away.

• US Agency Reportedly Plans to Shut Down 8,000 EV Chargers, Offload EVs.

• Opinion | What Trump is teaching liberal universities and colleges about power - The Washington Post

  The Trump administration is not just trying to get the government under control or save taxpayers money. It is mounting a frontal assault on every center of left-wing institutional power it can reach: academia, the civil service, nonprofits. The object is to break these institutions so badly that the next Democratic administration will not be able to put them back the way they were. I probably don’t have to tell our readers why this is bad. They understand that the slash-and-burn approach to the bureaucracy will leave it understaffed, demoralized and mired in chaos, endangering services that voters depend on. They know that many nonprofits do valuable work, often for society’s most vulnerable. They’re aware that a research project is not like a car, which can be safely turned off and started again when you’re ready to use it, so making ham-fisted cuts to science funding risks setting society back by years.

  Since you know that, let me make a less obvious and probably less welcome point: The left, not the right, picked this fight. Too many institutions set themselves up as the “Resistance” to Trump and tried to make a lot of mainstream political opinions anathematic, while expecting to be protected from backlash by principles such as academic freedom that they were no longer honoring. This was politically naive and criminally stupid for institutions that rely so heavily on U.S. taxpayer support.

  This danger has been evident for years, yet when I asked academics if this was really wise, most were curiously oblivious to the risks. Though they complained about stingy state legislatures and meddling Republican politicians, many bizarrely took them as evidence that there was little cost to politicizing academia — essentially, “They’re already attacking us, so there’s no point in trying to placate them.” They did not seem to grasp how much worse it could get. Fundamentally, they took their prestige and public support for granted and seemed unable to imagine a world where the word “education” no longer conjured reverent deference among most of the population. Like children throwing rocks from an overpass, they felt protected by their elevated position, assuming their targets could do little but yell back. They weren’t expecting one of the drivers to get out of the car and grab a baseball bat from the trunk. None of which justifies what Republicans are doing now. It is crude, destructive and — like a baseball bat — unconscionably disproportionate. But complaining about Republicans, while emotionally satisfying, isn’t very useful. The institutional left can’t control what Republicans do. It can only control its own behavior. And that behavior, however well-intentioned, was reckless in the extreme.

• Are federal workers lazy? Let's look at the data

• Musk's 'DOGE' claim about USAid funds for India sets off political firestorm

• TVs at HUD hacked during meeting to show AI generated video of Trump and Musk

  • AI Video of Trump Sucking Musk's Toes Blasted on Government Office TVs

  • TVs at HUD Played an AI-Generated Video of Donald Trump Kissing Elon Musk's Feet

  • AI vid: Trump kissing 'King' Elon Musk's feet plays on loop in federal building

• What does the US Department of Education do?

  This is part of the “Why we have and need a US Department of Education” series which seeks to examine the role of the U.S. Department of Education at a time when the president of the United States has called for the Department’s demise. It considers what the Department does to shape education policy and practice in the United States. It also addresses misconceptions about the Department’s role and the president’s authority to dismantle it.

• The Truth About Social Security and Dead People - Bloomberg

  There’s a reason millions of people are not listed as deceased in the main database when they should be, but it's not the fraud that Elon Musk and Trump say it is.

  But what about all those undead centenarians — of whom there are now 20.8 million, according to numbers released by Musk — in Social Security’s Numident file? Why are they still not marked as dead after multiple attempts by inspectors general to make that happen? The reasons given by SSA officials have been that adding death information to all the records would cost too much ($5.5 million to $9.7 million, it estimated in 2015), require regulatory changes to carry out, result in the possible release of personal information about still-living people to the agency’s publicly available Death Master File and “be of little benefit to the agency” because few if any payments are going to dead people born before 1920.

• The Trump administration is blundering AI policy

• Opinion | America Has a Rogue President - The New York Times

  President Trump’s decision to fire senior military leaders without cause is foolish and a disgrace. It politicizes our professional military in a dangerous and debilitating way. What frightens me even more is the removal of three judge advocates general, the most senior uniformed legal authorities in the Defense Department. Their removal is one more element of this administration’s attack on the rule of law, and an especially disturbing part. It pains me to see these fine people being treated so unfairly and, for the first time in my career, to see dedicated, apolitical military professionals being removed without cause.

  • How much did it hurt him to watch Flynn being set up by the FBI? How much noise sis he make about "we don't want your OVID vaccine" separations?

• If COBOL is so problematic, why does the US government still use it?

• Musk's deep ties to – and admiration for – China could complicate Beijing policy

• Pentagon, FBI and other key federal agencies refuse to comply with Musk

• Farmers Sue over Deletion of Climate Data from Government Websites

• Judge blocks Musk agency access to Americans' personal data

• Trump Targets $128B California High-Speed Rail Project

• An Obituary for the FBI

  The 117-year-old Federal Bureau of Investigation, long heralded as the nation’s premier national law enforcement agency — an avowedly nonpartisan, independent investigator that for decades has pursued gangsters, mafioso, Nazis, terrorists, spies, cybercriminals, and corrupt politicians without fear, favor or political malice — died over the weekend. While the institution’s independence had been on life support since January 30th, when the bureau’s top career agents were purged in an unprecedented move and the Justice Department announced it wanted the identities of thousands of agents and personnel who contributed to the investigation of the attempted insurrection on January 6th, the final cause of death was the avarice and cowardliness of 51 Republican senators who voted to confirm Kash Patel as its ninth director — 51 senators too afraid to stand up to Donald Trump, too intellectually rotted by years of MAGA talking points that transformed the bureau into a Deep State bete noire, and too incurious and vengeful to understand the cost of their actions to the country.

• Trump administration threatens tariffs for any nation that dares to tax Big Tech

• FDA asks fired scientists to return, including some reviewing Musk's Neuralink

External Security / Militaria / Diplomania

• US asked to kick UK out of Five Eyes

World

• Myanmar's exiled media face existential crisis after Trump severs aid

• UK delays plans to regulate AI as ministers seek to align with Trump admin

• Conservative opposition wins German election and the far right is 2nd with strongest postwar result.

  Chancellor Olaf Scholz conceded defeat for his center-left Social Democrats after what he called “a bitter election result.” Projections for ARD and ZDF public television showed his party finishing in third place with its worst postwar result in a national parliamentary election. Merz said he hopes to put a coalition government together by Easter. But that’s likely to be challenging.

  The (AfD) party’s candidate for chancellor, Alice Weidel, said it is “open for coalition negotiations” with Merz’s party, and that “otherwise, no change of policy is possible in Germany.” Merz has repeatedly ruled out working with AfD, as have other mainstream parties — and did so again in a televised post-election exchange with Weidel and other leaders. Merz dismissed the idea that voters wanted a coalition with AfD. “We have fundamentally different views, for example on foreign policy, on security policy, in many other areas, regarding Europe, the euro, NATO,” he said. “You want the opposite of what we want, so there will be no cooperation,” Merz added. Scholz decried AfD’s success. He said that “that must never be something that we will accept. I will not accept it and never will.”

  • The German Elections: Take the "W" - CDR Salamander

• New German leader signals seismic shift in transatlantic relations

Russia Bad / Ukraine War

• Russia's War on Ukraine: Three Years, Three Hundred and Two False Claims

• The Adventures of a Ukrainian Intelligence Officer

• The Reality of Ukraine - by Timothy Snyder

China

• DeepSeek coding can transfer users' data directly to the Chinese government

• Chinese rivals to Starlink accelerate race to dominate satellite internet

Health / Medicine

• Is Ketamine Neurotoxic?

• Weight-loss drugs aren't just slimming waists. They're shifting the economy

• Weight-loss jabs linked to dozens of deaths

• Coffee Leads U.S. Caffeine Intake as Tea Declines

• Cursing appears to improve exercise performance

• Novel inhalable gene therapy trialled for people with cystic fibrosis

• How to Not Pay Your Medical Bills

Pox / COVID / BioTerror AgitProp

• Bat-infecting merbecovirus HKU5-CoV lineage 2 can use human ACE2 as a cell entry

• What climate change means for bird flu – and the soaring price of eggs

Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda

• Greenpeace Is Going to Trial in $300M Suit That Poses Bankruptcy Risk

• Glaciers Worldwide Are Melting Faster Causing Sea Levels to Rise More

• The only animal Australians are afraid of? A bird

• Cephalopod Sentience and Cognition

• A Mission to Heal Gila Monsters

• Developers Lobby to Keep Building, Water Shortages Be Damned

• A material used to clean household aquariums can break down forever chemicals

• Indoor Marijuana Ops Are Consuming a Staggering Amount of Energy

• BP expected to scrap renewables target in shift back to fossil fuels

• Texas Lawmakers Scramble to Stop Solar Energy but It Just Keeps Coming

• More than half of countries are ignoring biodiversity pledges

• H2 electrolysis cost understated 60 to 300 percent

• The Upper Atmosphere Is Cooling, Prompting New Climate Concerns