2025-03-01

he was a clear thinker, keeping it in the family, sorry about the gore, remember skype?, AMD 9070, bank snafus, Presidents do make laws, MAGA censors, Trump and Zelensky clash, "flawed" BBC propaganda

Horseshit

• A journey through the hyper-political world of microchips

• Becoming a Beer Sommelier Is Almost Impossible.

• Intelligent Life May Be Hiding in the Moons

• Rolls-Royce's recovery is stunning: from basket case to No 8 in the Footsie

• Mount Vesuvius eruption turned a man's brain into glass

  • Ancient Vesuvius victim's brain contains first natural organic glass ever seen

• Dominant individuals are more confident in their decisions but not more accurate

• Meet Bernd das Brot, a depressed German loaf of bread

• Humanity May Achieve the Singularity Within the Next 12 Months

• Empowering or TMI? Moms are sharing ‘unfiltered’ home birth videos, offering a raw glimpse into one of life’s most intimate moments.

  • yeah well the 1980's had VHS videos and "placenta milkshakes"

celebrity gossip

• US Attorney General Releases First Phase of Declassified Epstein Files

• (Dec 2024) Ghislaine Maxwell Lead Prosecutor Joins Diddy Trial

  Maurene Ryan Comey, a lead prosecutor in the sex trafficking case against Jeffrey Epstein accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell, has joined the prosecutors’ team in the ongoing case against Sean “Diddy” Combs. Comey, who also happens to be the daughter of former FBI director James Comey, filed a notice at the United States District Court in the Southern District of New York on Monday (Dec. 2), and the document obtained by Billboard notes that the attorney will be joining the legal team in the case.

• Scattered Pills Found Near Body of Hackman's Wife as Inquiry Continues

Rank Propaganda / Thought Policing / World Disordering

• Nonprofits get more donations when they vary their Facebook fundraising messages

Musk

• Elon Musk fans believe he can make Dogecoin the currency of Earth

• Elon Musk 'cancels' Tesla engineer for complaining about the CEO's behavior

Electric / Self Driving cars

• Tesla drivers are racking up fines using FSD in China

• Ford pulls plug on stocking EVs at regional hubs instead of dealer lots

Religion / Tribal / Culture War and Re-Segregation

• Is nearly a quarter of Gen Z queer – or is something else going on?

Edumacationalizing / Acedemia Nuts

• You read the terms and conditions, right? For your children's classes, right?

• Trump administration shutters online form for student debt repayment

Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising

• Meta fires around 20 employees for leaking confidential information

• Meta apologises over flood of gore, violence and dead bodies on Instagram

  • Instagram Flooded Feeds with Gore. 'Sorry' Doesn't Cut It

• Apple's Find My exploit lets hackers track any Bluetooth device

  • Turning a Bluetooth device into an Apple AirTag without root privileges

• The iPhone 16e

  • The low-cost (for Apple) iPhone 16E is here and it's... Okay.

• Apple introduces new child safety initiatives, including an age-checking system

• Microsoft is reportedly killing Skype after 14 years of neglect

  • Skype announces it will close in May

  • Microsoft hangs up on Skype: service to shut down May 5, 2025

• Microsoft releases a Copilot app for Mac

• Microsoft begins turning off uBlock Origin and other extensions in Edge

• Google Tweak Creates Crisis for Product-Review Sites

• Mozilla's new Terms of Use causes confusion among Firefox users

  • Mozilla responds to backlash over new terms, saying it's not using people's data

• Bookshop CEO Andy Hunter's crusade to save books from Amazon

• Videogaming's All-In Bet: Can Two Titans Lift a $58B Industry?

• AMD Radeon RX 9070 Series Technical Deep Dive

  With RDNA 4, AMD has made a tactical retreat from the enthusiast segment. There is not going to be a "big Navi" GPU based on RDNA 4, and the Navi 48 chip powering the RX 9070 series will be the biggest chip this generation. With this, AMD will look to throw everything it has to bringing the most amount of performance and value out of its RX 9070 series, and look to target price points undercutting NVIDIA's performance-segment SKUs such as the recently announced RTX 5070 Ti, and the upcoming RTX 5070. It is unencumbered from the burden of beating the RTX 5090 or even the RTX 5080, which are both impossible to find at three-figure prices. Given that the real world pricing of the RTX 5070 Ti, particularly the custom OC cards are nearing $1,000, AMD has a great opportunity to disrupt the performance segment of the RTX 50-series the way the RX 5700 XT did for the RTX 20-series.

  • There Will Not Be Official ROCm Support for Radeon RX 9070 Series on Launch Day

  during the Q&A I asked a question about ROCm support for RDNA4. The answer basically amounted to that it's coming but not for launch day. The answer was rather vague and I attempted to follow up via email but unfortunately have yet to receive any response clarifying the ROCm support in advance of today's announcement embargo. Not for launch day, but does it mean ROCm will officially be out for RDNA4 days/weeks later or is it more like months later?

  • AMD RDNA 4 – AMD Radeon RX 9000 Series Graphics Cards

• Reporters launch new TikTok-like news platform

• Bezos changes at Wapo lead to mass subscription cancellations – again

• Lawsuit Alleges GM Illegally Sold Arkansans' Driving Data to Insurance Companies

TechSuck / Geek Bait

• Introducing: Raspberry Pi Official Magazine

• Open Source Initiative defends disallowing board candidate after timezone SNAFU

• Adverse appeals court ruling could kill GPL software license

Space / Boomy Zoomers / UFO

• Astroscale aced the first rendezvous with a piece of space junk

Crypto con games

• SEC says memecoins are not securities

• Hester M. Peirce on the Dismissal of Civil Enforcement Action Against Coinbase

Economicon / Business / Finance

• Payday from hell as several UK banks report major outages

  • Thousands report Lloyds, Halifax and TSB banking apps not working

  • UK Banking Apps Partial Outage

• Citigroup mistakenly credits customer account $81T in "near miss", FT reports

  • Citigroup credits account with $81tn instead of $280

  • Citi mistakenly credits $81T to customer account

  • Citigroup Makes (and Then Fixes) an $81T Mistake

• Boss Wants You Back in the Office. This Surveillance Tech Could Be Waiting

• Google's Sergey Brin Asks Workers to Spend More Time in the Office

• Nvidia enjoys $130B annual earnings despite gaming segment 'supply constraints'

• Consumer Bureau Drops Lawsuit Against Capital One

• San Francisco tech giant Autodesk cuts 1,350 jobs as part of move toward AI

• Eli Lilly says it will spend billions to move drug manufacturing to U.S. soil.

• Intel Postpones Ohio Chip Project Until 2030s in Latest Delay

  • Intel delays its Ohio chip factory to 2030

• Europe stocks secure 10-week winning streak, outperforming U.S. in February

Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making

• FAA Aims to Boost Hiring of Air-Traffic Controllers and Update Its Technology

• Trump Is the Law for the Executive Branch

  The actions of the four million or so people who work in the federal executive branch are heavily governed by law. More than 20,000 executive branch lawyers (the exact number is elusive) interpret this law and provide guidance to help ensure that executive branch officials conform to the law. This task is especially important since most executive branch action is not subject to judicial review. The president sits atop these thousands of executive branch lawyers. Article II requires him to “take care that the Laws be faithfully executed,” which means that he must obey the law and enforce the law. But as an incident to this duty, the president must interpret the law. Because it is his duty, and because the executive power is vested in him, his interpretations bind the executive branch. But the president is busy (and is often not a lawyer). So he typically delegates his interpretive authority to the attorney general (AG), who by custom delegates it to the Office of Legal Counsel (OLC). This authority is also decentralized to agency general counsel, and down from there. Agency lawyers are basically (skipping over small complications) bound by the legal interpretations of the Justice Department (the AG and/or OLC), which in turn can be (but rarely are) overturned or revised by the president himself, who can receive advice in this regard from the White House counsel. This is the standard structure. But nothing about it is set in stone except for the president’s ultimate interpretive authority. The president can organize this authority and the advice he receives basically however he likes.

• Supreme Court Review Sought to Revoke H-1B Spouses' Work Permit Rule

• 5M dollar gold card for immigrants make sense

Trump

• Trump to Sign Executive Order Making English Official U.S. Language

• JD Vance says Big Tech has "too much power"

Left Angst

• FAA targeting Verizon contract in favor of Musk's Starlink, sources say

  • Musk Takes $2.4B Contract from Verizon to Give It to Starlink

  • Starlink to take over $2.4B contract to overhaul air traffic control comms

• Musk suggests retired air traffic controllers consider returning to job

• U.S. Terminates Funding for Polio, H.I.V., Malaria and Nutrition Programs Around the World - The New York Times

• Global democracy score hits historic low

• Hundreds of NOAA weather forecasters fired in latest wave of cuts

  • Hundreds in US climate agency fired in latest cuts

  • Mass firings across NOAA, National Weather Service ignite fury from scientists

  • Who needs weather reports anyway?

• Farmers sue over purge of climate data needed for agricultural decisions

• The Trump Admin Thinks Affordable Fiber Broadband Is 'Woke'

• The Bewildering Irony Behind the Trump-Musk Partnership

• 'Economic Blackout', it's tapped into Americans' anger

  In early February, John Schwarz, a self-described “mindfulness and meditation facilitator,” proposed a 24-hour nationwide “economic blackout” of major chains on the last day of the month. Schwarz urged people to forgo spending at Amazon, Walmart, and all other major retailers and fast-food companies for a day. He called on them to spend money only at small businesses and on essential needs.

  • What Is Friday’s ‘Economic Blackout’ and What’s the Best Way to Miss It?

• The full force of this administration's destruction is about to hit

• Elon Musk Executed His Takeover of the Federal Bureaucracy

• Cofounder of Airbnb is joining DOGE

• US universities curtail PhD admissions amid Trump science funding cuts

• Opinion | The MAGA War on Speech - The New York Times

  President Trump and many of his supporters — from tech leaders like Elon Musk to populist politicians like Vice President JD Vance — have spent the past several years portraying themselves as free-speech crusaders. Capitalizing on the censorial strains of the left, they regularly lecture about the necessity of letting people say whatever they want, even if it’s hateful, asinine or corrosive. That form of free-speech absolutism, which aims to defend not just favored speech but also disfavored speech, has a long and welcome role in American society. The problem is that for all their bluster, these supposed free-speech crusaders have proved themselves consistently intolerant when it comes to words, ideas and perspectives they disagree with. Over the past month Mr. Trump and his allies have embarked on an expansive crackdown on free expression and disfavored speakers that should be decried not just as hypocritical but also as un-American and unconstitutional.

  • let us know when they hanging they ass out to the "Hunter's laptop is Russian propaganda, so it should be suppressed on social networks" level, k?

• WSJ: 'Inside DOGE's Clash with the Federal Workforce'

• State Department terminates U.S. Aid in Ukraine energy grid restoration

• Hegseth orders Cyber Command to stand down on Russia planning

Law Breaking / Police / Internal Security

• US authorities can see more than ever, with Big Tech as their eyes

External Security / Militaria / Diplomania

• Why US Navy ships are rusty

• Allies Assess What Intelligence They Can Still Share with Trump

• Russia and China are attempting to recruit disgruntled federal employees

• Trump And Vance Clash With Zelensky In Fiery White House Meeting

  “You don’t have the cards right now,” Trump added. “With us you start having cards. You’re gambling with the lives of millions of people. You’re gambling with World War III, and what you’re doing is very disrespectful to the country.”

  • Zelensky leaves White House after angry meeting

  • Trump Zelenskiy Live: Ukrainian leader exits White House early after clash, no deal signed | Reuters

  • Ukraine updates: Zelenskyy leaves after clash with Trump – DW – 02/28/2025

  French President Emmanuel Macron, commenting on a shouting match between Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and US President Donald Trump in the Oval Office, said that Russia is the aggressor and Ukrainians are the aggressed people. "We must... respect those who have been fighting since the beginning," Macron told reporters in Portugal. Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk also supported the Ukrainian leader. "Dear President Zelenskyy, dear Ukrainian friends, you are not alone," Tusk wrote on X after the Trump-Zelenskyy row.

  • Ukraine 'gambling with world war three', Trump tells Zelenskyy in fiery meeting

  • Zelenskyy's meeting with Trump unravels into an extraordinary clash

  • Zelensky’s Tweet After Disastrous White House Visit Is What You Post When You’ve Been Totally Defeated.

  Thank you America, thank you for your support, thank you for this visit. Thank you POTUS, Congress, and the American people. Ukraine needs just and lasting peace, and we are working exactly for that. — Volodymyr Zelenskyy

  • European leaders show support for Zelenskiy after Trump clash

World

• Singapore charges three with fraud that media link to Nvidia chips

• 100 Years of Kewpie: How the Mayonnaise Became a Japanese Icon

• France is about to pass the worst surveillance law in the EU

• Elections Over, German Government Launches National Snitch Line

Israel

• BBC apologises for 'serious flaws' over Gaza documentary

  The BBC has apologised and admitted "serious flaws" in the making of a documentary about children's lives in Gaza. The documentary, Gaza: How to Survive a War Zone, was pulled from iPlayer last week after it emerged its 13-year-old narrator was the son of a Hamas official.

Russia Bad / Ukraine War

• North Korea refuses to repatriate dead from Ukraine in fear of civil unrest

China

• IBM shuts China research arm after lay-offs and revenue decline

• Why China's Xiaomi Can Make an Electric Car and Apple Can't

Health / Medicine

• For first time in Canada, surgeons put teeth in patients' eyes to restore sight

• Violence alters human genes for generations, researchers discover

• Vaccine targeting pancreatic cancer shows promise in new study

Pox / COVID / BioTerror AgitProp

• If "masks work", why don't they work? New research suggests the reason.

• What We Know About African Mystery Illnesses That Have Sickened Over 400 People And Can Kill Within Hours | ZeroHedge

  The outbreaks began on January 21 in two villages separated by more than 120 miles. In the tiny village of Boloko, the first victims were children who had eaten a bat (oh?). Within 48 hours, they were dead, according to the Associated Press. Weeks later, hundreds more cases surfaced in Bomate, where at least some patients also tested positive for malaria. Are the two outbreaks connected? Health officials still don’t know.

• The Texas Measles Outbreak Is Even Scarier Than It Looks

Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda

• Drone captures narwhals using their tusks to explore, forage and play

• 'Spoonful of plastics in your brain' paper has duplicated images

• Sneaky bamboo can control the genes of the Pandas eating it, scientists discover

• New footage shows sneaky killer is decapitating baby seals on California beaches

• Stanford Scientists Just Found a Faster, Cheaper Way to Store Carbon Permanently

• Climate Change Puts the Safety of Drinking Water at Risk

• Norway’s Melting Glaciers Are Spilling Out Troves of Lost Artifacts.