2025-02-27
planet parade, social phone addiction, Bezos bother, bright and bad, Bitcoin rout, frozen jobs, kinky spies, Biden's brain, progressive immigration restrictions, Romanian democracy, grooming the data
etc
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Steve Wozniak: 'Founding Apple would be much harder today than in the 1970s'
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MH370: Malaysia is resuming the search for missing 777 airliner, 11 years later
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All eight planets ‘captured in photo for first time’ – and they will be visible again this week
A photographer is thought to have become the first person to capture all seven planets and Earth in one picture. The rare image was made possible because a “great planetary parade” is taking place this week for the first time since 1982 – when cameras were not advanced enough to capture them all.
Horseshit
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Donut Lab and the electric motors everyone has been talking about
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Dystopias, authoritarianism, technological threats Is progress over?
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France sets new Guinness world record of cheese fondue of 2,117.5 kilograms
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Nebraska Man Struggles to Change Daughter's Name from 'Unakite Thirteen Hotel'
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UAB defends prison autopsy deal, lawyer: they can't 'illegally harvest an organ'
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Dumb Phones Are for Dumb Cunts
In the beginning, I thought this was an amazing idea and way to find more presence in my day-to-day life. So I purchased an old school flip-phone and immediately began using it. It was a black Nokia 2720 and all it could do was make calls and receive text messages. There was no social media, and no distractions. It was almost the perfect way to make a graceful exit from the grips of modern day technology. That was until I needed to live here, in the real world, and not just in this romanticised anti-technological reality that ignored the fact we have things like QR codes we need to scan at airports, and two-factor authentication apps we need on a day-to-day basis. I can understand the desire to live more intentionally and create a distraction-free environment for ourselves, but the truth of the matter is, the world is becoming more digital each and every day, and resisting this change only puts you at a disadvantage. I thought I could buy the answer to my problem, and not actually do the internal work it takes to shift my relationship to my devices.
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Gen Z battling with phone anxiety are taking telephobia courses
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Why I Am Not A Conflict Theorist - by Scott Alexander
Here there’s no plausible explanation except that one side or the other - the hundred million people who really want themselves and their kids to be vaccinated, or the hundred million people who really don’t - is making a terrible, tragic mistake. If you’re anti-vaxx, you believe the mistake is driven by pharma company propaganda. If you’re pro-vaxx, you believe the mistake is driven by grifter/conspiracy-nut propaganda. But in either case, the hundred million people who have fallen for the propaganda have honestly fallen for it.
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Secret workshop where Picassos and Rembrandts were forged found in Rome
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Top triathlete reveals positive drug test and blames "transfer of bodily fluid"
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'It wasn't nice': Australian couple sat next to corpse on long-haul flight
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Guide Dogs Are Expensive and Scarce. Could Robots Do Their Job?
celebrity gossip
Rank Propaganda / Thought Policing / World Disordering
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What China's influence over Marvel Rivals reveals about censorship
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Encryption ‘back doors’ are a bad idea
This is without doubt a thorny issue. No one wishes terrorists and child abusers to be able to evade detection. Some UK security officials have insisted privacy protections can coexist with “exceptional lawful access”, and argued that tech companies could find a clever workaround. Tech experts counter that no foolproof compromise yet exists. But almost all big tech companies rightly co-operate with legitimate law enforcement requests that do not involve “back doors” on a routine basis; Apple’s latest UK transparency report shows it complied with 93 per cent of emergency requests. If a solution is developed enabling this to happen safely with end-to-end encryption, co-operation should extend into this area too. For now, though, governments should treat this kind of protection as a common good. Efforts to police the criminal minority should not undermine the safety and privacy of the law-abiding majority.
- "China is in your phones" / Salt Typhoon stuff that has come out the last few months is because of backdoors into that network demanded by legislation.
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Bezos says WP opinion page will focus on 'personal liberties' and 'free markets'
What's more, WaPo opinion editor David Shipley - formerly of propaganda rag The New Republic as well as Bloomberg's editorial section, quit the paper rather than present a more balanced view. hether or not we can actually Trust Bezos and the CIA's favorite outlet to follow through - this is a five-alarm fire at the Post. The paper's chief economics reporter, Jeff Stein, framed it as a "massive encroachment by Bezos" which "makes clear dissenting views will not be published or tolerated here."
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Jeff Bezos sparks outrage with overhaul of Washington Post opinion page
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The Washington Post Wants You to Know It's Done Being the Washington Post | National Review
I am not terribly outraged about this (as so many others in the media currently affect to be); I am content to let the owner of a newspaper decide what runs in the pages he pays for. The Sulzbergers of the New York Times do this already, even if they choose not to publicly admit it; the Wall Street Journal is proud of its editorial worldview and uses it as a selling point. The Washington Post would be made more interesting by actually projecting a coherent worldview, one that allows for presentation of opposing views but actually advances an agenda its owner believes in.
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Musk
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Elon Musk and Spiky Intelligence
There’s been a debate raging on Twitter — Noah Smith can run you through the parameters — about the intelligence of the platform’s owner, Elon Musk. My contribution was to suggest that (i) Elon is obviously pretty bright, and (ii) this shouldn’t be conflated with moral judgment — highly intelligent people do lots of bad things.
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Grok blocked results saying Musk and Trump 'spread misinformation'
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Elon Musk's business empire is built on $38B in government funding
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Musk's Ex-Twitter Workers Win Severance over 'Fork in the Road' Email
Electric / Self Driving cars
Religion / Tribal / Culture War and Re-Segregation
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Italian priest close to pope was target of surveillance tool used by government
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Backyard Bird Has a Lot to Teach Us about Sex Variability
- birds and reptiles get weird. see also "hemipenis"
Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising
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Assassin's Creed Shadows: Ubisoft confirms game leaks genuine
Some players managed to get their hands on the game - due to be released on 20 March - ahead of its official release. Developer Ubisoft said gameplay videos shared online "did not represent the final quality of the game". In a statement posted online, the company said it was "still working on patches" and urged fans not to share spoilers.
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'Consider Phlebas' Series Set at Amazon from Charles Yu and Chloé Zhao
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Spy-satellite-grade images could soon become available to everyone
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AppLovin shares tumble as short sellers question AXON ad software
TechSuck / Geek Bait
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Christoph Hellwig Steps Down from One of His Kernel Roles Following Rust Drama
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Open-source is where dreams go to die
This story repeats with depressing regularity across the open-source landscape. Passionate developers create something valuable, share it freely with the world, and then watch as their gift becomes a burden that consumes their life. What begins as a labor of love transforms into unpaid technical support. Users file bug reports as if they’re paying customers, demanding immediate fixes and new features while contributing nothing themselves.
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Introduction to CUDA Programming for Python Developers | PySpur - AI Agent Builder
AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World
Space / Boomy Zoomers / UFO
Crypto con games
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How North Korea pulled off a $1.5B crypto heist–the biggest in history
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Sam Bankman-Fried tweets from prison, aligns himself with DOGE efficiency
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Bitcoin plunges as crypto fans didn't get everything they wanted from Trump
The price of bitcoin dropped as much as 3.6 per cent on Wednesday to $85,600, taking its losses over the past month to 15 per cent. Other tokens have suffered even bigger losses as crypto assets are swept up in a broader sell-off in risk assets, and the largest-ever cryptocurrency theft shakes confidence in the industry.
Economicon / Business / Finance
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Ex-Intel exec, blames the bureaucratic 'PowerPoint snakes'for its current issues
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Meta must face lawsuit claiming it prefers cheaper foreign workers
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The Job Market Is Frozen - The Atlantic
The unemployment rate was hovering near a 50-year low, which is historically a very good thing for people seeking work. How could finding a job be so hard? he answer is that two seemingly incompatible things are happening in the job market at the same time. Even as the unemployment rate has hovered around 4 percent for more than three years, the pace of hiring has slowed to levels last seen shortly after the Great Recession, when the unemployment rate was nearly twice as high. The percentage of workers voluntarily quitting their jobs to find new ones, a signal of worker power and confidence, has fallen by a third from its peak in 2021 and 2022 to nearly its lowest level in a decade. The labor market is seemingly locked in place: Employees are staying put, and employers aren’t searching for new ones. And the dynamic appears to be affecting white-collar professions the most. “
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Like a kid handing late homework, Supermicro files its financial figures
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Publix accused of deceptive pricing in lawsuit that brings receipts
Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making
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IRS admits anti-Trump taxman leaked data on 405K filers — six times more than previously known.
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Ethics watchdog flags senator helping wife rake in millions for nonprofit.
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"But the thing here Jesse is - you've got to take a step back, because this is barely scratching the surface. When you see what these people are saying, and thanks to Chris Rufo for putting this all online - they were brazen in using an NSA platform intended for professional use, to conduct this kind of really, really horrific behavior. And they were brazen in doing this because, when was the last time anyone was really held accountable? Certainly not over the last four years. Certainly not over the last 10 maybe 20 years, and we look at some of the biggest violations of the American peoples' trust in the intelligence community. So, today's action in holding these individuals accountable is just the beginning of what we're seeing across the Trump administration - which is carrying out the mandate the American people gave him."
Trump
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Trump floats 'gold card' to grant US residency to wealthy foreigners
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The whistleblower said two female FBI undercover employees infiltrated Mr. Trump’s 2016 campaign at high levels and were directed to act as “honeypots” while traveling with Mr. Trump and his campaign staff. The Times has learned that the bureau, now led by Director Kash Patel and Deputy Director Dan Bongino, is looking for those once-undercover employees under Mr. Comey’s direction. The FBI declined to comment. According to the whistleblower disclosure, which The Times reviewed, the investigation differed from Crossfire Hurricane, a later FBI counterintelligence operation that looked into never-proved allegations that the campaign was colluding with Russia.
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Donald Trump says he will impose 25% tariffs on imports from EU
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US Intelligence chief Tulsi Gabbard will fight 'egregious' Apple back-door order
Democrats
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Tapper & Thompson Blow the Lid Off That Story You Knew in 2020 – PJ Media
Set for release on May 20 by PenguinRandomHouse, the CNN anchor and the Axios correspondent are writing a tell-all (not really, but I'll return to that) titled, "Original Sin: President Biden's Decline, Its Cover-up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again." love this bit from the promotional page: "From two of America’s most respected journalists, an unflinching and explosive reckoning with one of the most fateful decisions in American political history: Joe Biden’s run for reelection despite evidence of his serious decline—amid desperate efforts to hide the extent of that deterioration."
what would make "Original Sin" worth your time and money? If it included the genuine tell-all story about how outlets like CNN and Axios willingly participated in the White House's attempted cover-up. If Tapper and Thompson tell that story — and tell it as a media-wide mea culpa
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Democrats Need Their Own DEI Purge - The Atlantic
At the University of Chicago’s Institute of Politics last week, former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg was nearly apoplectic about the diversity spectacles at the recent Democratic National Committee meeting—where outgoing chair Jaime Harrison delivered a soliloquy about the party’s rules for nonbinary inclusion, and candidates for party roles spent the bulk of their time campaigning to identity-focused caucuses of DNC members. Buttigieg said the meeting “was a caricature of everything that was wrong with our ability both to cohere as a party and to reach to those who don’t always agree with us.” He went on to criticize diversity initiatives for too often “making people sit through a training that looks like something out of Portlandia.” Democrats talk a big game about “inclusion,” but as Buttigieg notes, they don’t produce a message that feels inclusive to most voters, because they’re too focused on appealing to the very nonrepresentative set of people who make up the party apparatus.
Left Angst
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DOGE staffers resign, saying they won't help 'dismantle' public services
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Apple to fix iPhone dictation bug that replaces word 'racist' with 'Trump'
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Trump allies circulate deportation plans calling for 'processing camps'
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Trump Administration Keeps Citing an Untrue Stat as It Targets Federal Workers
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Trump prepares to change US CHIPS Act conditions, sources say
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Don't like the Gulf of America? MapQuest is allowing users to rename it
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'Trump Gaza is finally here ': US president promotes Gaza plan in AI video
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The Mask of Imperialism, by Anatol Lieven
the current American form of liberal internationalism—the idea that international harmony can best be achieved through the exertion of U.S. influence abroad—remains so deeply embedded in the thinking of the country’s foreign-policy and security establishments that even the rise of Trump and his America First ideology may not be sufficient to displace it. Indeed, if the behavior of the first Trump Administration is any indication, its officials may frequently employ the same tropes of “the rules-based order,” “the promotion of democracy,” and “the defense of human rights” that have been employed so incessantly by the Biden Administration. They will do so, however, only as a transparent strategy in the quest to overthrow rival regimes and weaken or destroy rival states.
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Musk's Attempt to Overhaul FAA Reveals Lack of Air Travel Knowledge
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She Lobbied for a Carcinogen. Now She's at the EPA, Approving New Chemicals
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DOGE 'receipts' saved $0 and killed contracts to boost efficiency
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Veterans Affairs Official Issues Stark Warning About Musk's 'Absolute Chaos'
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Elon Musk Suggests He Alone Decides What Gets Funded in the Government
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Heritage Foundation Details Plans to Doxx and Target Wikipeda Editors
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Elon Musk's Silicon Valley fail-fast ethos is clashing with Washington
External Security / Militaria / Diplomania
World
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The New York Times Gives Liberals the Danish Permission
When The New York Times allows the counter argument to liberal orthodoxy to be published, it signals to its readers that it's time to pivot. On mass immigration, the center-left liberal orthodoxy has for the last decade in particular been that this is an unreserved good. It's cultural enrichment! It's much-needed workers! It's a humanitarian imperative! Any opposition was treated as de-facto racism, and the idea that a country would enforce its own borders as evidence of early fascism. But that era is coming to a close, and The New York Times is using The Danish Permission to prepare its readers for the end. The New York Times is now begrudgingly admitting that the main reason Europe has turned to the right, in election after election recently, is due to the problems stemming from mass immigration across the continent and the channel.
Around the world, progressive parties have come to see tight immigration restrictions as unnecessary, even cruel. What if they’re actually the only way for progressivism to flourish?
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Creative industries protest against UK plan about AI and copyright
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State of emergency declared after blackout plunges most of Chile into darkness
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Romania Far-Right Candidate Georgescu Brought in for Questioning
"Călin Georgescu was going to file his new candidacy for the Presidency. About 30 minutes ago, the system stopped him in traffic and he was pulled over for questioning at the Prosecutor General’s Office! Where is democracy, where are the partners who must defend democracy?," a post on Georgescu’s Facebook account indicated.
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India singles out VW for $1.4B tax evasion, says Kia corrected course
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The secret World War II tunnels set to become a new tourist attraction
Health / Medicine
Pox / COVID / BioTerror AgitProp
Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda
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Scientists study breeding of pet fish to help protect reefs, fuel economy
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Coal's Last Stand? U.S. Power Plants Face a Mass Exodus in 2025
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Plants losing appetite for carbon dioxide amid effects of warming climate
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Ocean circulation won’t entirely collapse because of climate - still in trouble
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NOAA's Homogenized Temperature Records: A Statistical House of Cards?
For years, climate scientists have assured us that NOAA’s homogenized temperature datasets—particularly the Global Historical Climatology Network (GHCN)—are the gold standard for tracking global warming. But what if the “corrections” applied to these datasets are introducing more noise than signal? A recent study published in Atmosphere has uncovered shocking inconsistencies in NOAA’s adjustments, raising serious concerns about the reliability of homogenized temperature records.
A remarkable inconsistency in the identified breakpoints (and hence adjustments applied) was revealed. Of the adjustments applied for GHCN Version 4, 64% (61% for Version 3) were identified on less than 25% of runs, while only 16% of the adjustments (21% for Version 3) were identified consistently for more than 75% of the runs. The consistency of PHA adjustments improved when the breakpoints corresponded to documented station history metadata events. However, only 19% of the breakpoints (18% for Version 3) were associated with a documented event within 1 year, and 67% (69% for Version 3) were not associated with any documented event. Therefore, while the PHA remains a useful tool in the community’s homogenization toolbox, many of the PHA adjustments applied to the homogenized GHCN dataset may have been spurious.
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The 'wooly devil,' a new plant species discovered in Big Bend National Park
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There were 6 tropical storms in the Southern Hemisphere yesterday
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Giant ice bulldozers: How ancient glaciers helped life evolve
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Marshall Islands' vanishing kit for a team under threat from climate crisis