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2025-03-04

crust displacement, EU-ing USA, propaganda never ends, used Teslas, vibe coding, GDP contraction, redeeming California, political food coloring, "offensive cyber operations" stopped, arms aid pause

etc

  • The Earth Might Flip Over At Any Time - by Bram Cohen

    In the early days of space missions it was observed that spinning objects flip over spontaneously. This got people freaked out that it could happen to the Earth as a whole. Any solid object spinning in three dimensions will do this, and the amount of time it spends between flips has nothing to do with how quickly the flips happen. Since then you might assume that this possibility was debunked. That didn’t happen. People just kind of got over it. The model of the Earth as a single solid object is overly simplistic, with some kind of fluid flows going on below the surface. Unfortunately we have no idea what those flows are actually doing and how they might affect this process. It’s a great irony of our universe that we know more about distant galaxies than the core of our own planet.

  • The Demoralization is just Beginning

    When I got into business, I didn’t understand that business in America was mostly a total scam. Sure, you might look at a single business, and be like, oh, that sounds reasonable, but then you zoom out and look at the entire system, and it doesn’t really make sense. It’s scams feeding other scams.

    America really is at a fork in the road. In one world, they abandon all hopes of being an empire, becoming a regional power with highly protectionist economics. This happened before, and it’s called Europe. I know it’s hard to believe now, but Europe used to be the seat of power for the whole world. The sun never set on the British empire. Now they put you in jail for memes.

  • Neighborhoods are evacuated as 175 wildfires rip through Carolinas

  • Haboob tears across Southwest near-zero visibility shutting down interstates

  • Planes receive mysterious false midair collision alerts near Reagan Airport

Horseshit

  • We Need Universal Basic Land, Not Universal Basic Income

  • Study suggests drunk witnesses are less likely to remember a suspect's face

  • Is It Time to Redefine Time?

  • The heroic media propagandists who sold the "drug war" The cocaine files

    Reporter Christian Smith Jr. went undercover in the 1924 Saskatoon drug scene. His series published in the Saskatoon Daily Star revealed a hidden world of ‘snow sniffers,’ ‘hop heads’ and opium smokers.

  • Breaking News is Made to Break You

    During the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, when what we needed most was reliable information about what was happening in our radically altered world, what we got instead were incessant updates about rising death tolls, overwhelmed hospitals, and the negative economic impacts (both real and imagined) of people not being able to eat at restaurants. These stories dominated the news cycle because they got clicks. They got clicks because we were afraid. Meanwhile, all the stories about the heroic efforts of healthcare workers and the miraculous development of a vaccine were pushed further and further down the page. The development of the COVID-19 vaccine should go down in history as one of the modern era’s most remarkable feats of scientific collaboration. Typically, vaccines take years, if not decades, to develop. In the early days of the pandemic, the most optimistic forecasts predicted that a COVID-19 vaccine would take, at minimum, two years to produce (many believed it would be closer to five). What happened instead? The first vaccines were approved only 11 months after the start of clinical trials. We stayed in lockdown half as long as we might have. Maybe less. A testament to what can be achieved when the global scientific community collaborates and mobilizes its resources to tackle a common challenge! And what did our news providers feed us instead?

    Stories about rare adverse reactions. Stories that amplified rumours and half-truths about its effectiveness. Stories about the logistical challenges of the rollout, delayed shipments, how hard it was to book an appointment. We were witnessing a modern miracle, but the news told us we were being scammed. It made us suspicious and cynical, because, for the news, suspicion and cynicism is good business.

  • The Shrouded, Sinister History Of The Bulldozer - NOEMA

    From India to the Amazon to Israel, bulldozers have left a path of destruction that offers a cautionary tale for how technology without safeguards can be misused.

    If, like gods, we aspire to create machines in our own image, then it’s fitting that the original bulldozers were humans. Leading up to the corrupted U.S. election of 1876, as the Southern states were being reconstructed following the Civil War, terrorist gangs of predominantly white Democrats roamed about, threatening or attacking Black men who they thought might vote for the Republican Party. The thugs were the bulldozers, and the acts they carried out were bulldozing. Wearing black masks or black face paint, and, on occasion, goggles, they brutally whipped, beat and sometimes murdered their victims. In June of that year, a Louisiana newspaper reported that bulldozers took a Black Republican voter named W. Y. Payne from his bed in the night and hung him from a tree two miles away. Later that month, in nearby Port Hudson, a Black preacher named Reverend Minor Holmes was hung from the wooden beams in a Baptist church by bulldozers, but they cut him down before he died.

    The bulldozer we know today took shape in the first quarter of the 20th century. In 1917, the Russell Grader Manufacturing Company advertised a bulldozer in their catalog: a huge metal blade pulled by mules that could cut into the earth and flatten the land. Other manufacturers like Holt, Caterpillar and R. G. LeTourneau were working on similar devices, technological descendants of scraping tools developed in the American West and associated with Mormon farmers. In time, animals were replaced with tractors (on either wheels or continuous tracks) powered first by steam, then gasoline and eventually diesel. The word, which at first referred only to the blade itself, started to mean the entire machine, one that was unrivaled in its ability to rip, shift and level earth.

celebrity gossip

Obit

Musk

Electric / Self Driving cars

Edumacationalizing / Acedemia Nuts

Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising

TechSuck / Geek Bait

  • HN Jobs:

  • The gooey rubber that’s slowly ruining old hard drives

    I’ve been playing around with old Apple-branded SCSI hard drives made by Quantum and Conner in the 1990s. What I’m about to describe is already common knowledge in the vintage computing world, but I thought it would be fun to share my take on it anyway. What I’m talking about is how a lot of these hard drives just refuse to work anymore. This is very common with old Quantum ProDrive models, like the LPS or the ELS. The drive spins up, you don’t hear the expected pattern of click sounds at startup, and then after a few seconds, it spins back down.

    but the culprit is a rubber bumper that slowly disintegrates into goo over the years. There are actually two bumpers that both get sticky — one at each extent of the head’s movement. The really troublesome bumper is the one that the head rests against while parked, toward the center of the platter. The other one prevents the head from falling off the outer edge of the platter.

AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World

  • Apple's Artificial Intelligence Efforts Reach a Make-or-Break Point

  • The end of YC - by Benn Stancil - benn.substack

    Though it’s hard to benchmark how far I got in two days, this is my best guess: The app is roughly equivalent to what a designer and a couple professional engineers could build in a month or two. Granted, I didn’t build any of the scaffolding that a real company would—proper signup pages, hardened security policies, administrative features, “tests”—but the product expresses its core functionality as completely as any prototype that we showed Mode’s early investors and first customers. In 2013, it took us eight people, nine months, and hundreds of thousands of dollars to build something we could sell, and that was seen as reasonably efficient. Today, that feels possible to do with one person in two days. Well, with one more caveat. Because I learned a second thing at the end of my two days of vertigo: That my idea was terrible.

    The entire conceit didn’t work. My long-loved thesis, when rendered on a screen, was catastrophically bad.3 I did not want to start a business around my app. I did not want to take notes in my app. I did not want to use my app. I wanted to start over.4 Great chefs can come from anywhere, but not everyone can be a great chef.

Space / Boomy Zoomers / UFO

Crypto con games

Economicon / Business / Finance

Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making

Trump

Left Angst

Law Breaking / Police / Internal Security

External Security / Militaria / Diplomania

  • The U.S. is already much too large to absorb Canada

  • Hegseth Orders Pentagon to Stop Offensive Cyberoperations Against Russia

  • The Zelensky Implosion.

    If you go by carefully edited snippets in corporate/legacy media, one might think that this was the fault of Trump and/or Vance. If you watch the whole thing, you know nothing could be further from the truth. This was all on Zelensky who arrived like a spoiled toddler cosplaying a role. What Zelensky displayed is far too common in Western Europe, where it is fashionable and acceptable (and far too common for my taste) to display such arrogant entitlement towards America and Americans. I will note that when you get out into the countryside, or more into Eastern Europe, this fades. Or, at least it did when I last traveled around a bit.

    Also, I think calling Vice President Vance a bitch (in Ukrainian) was deliberately done to make the attack as personal as possible. I think it was a deliberate effort to poison the well, not just a bit of temper tantrum. One also needs to keep in mind that Rubio’s death stare was in part because everything had been set to sign, and Zelensky (again) blew up such plans and in so doing attempted to put a knife in Rubio’s back.

  • U.S. Hitting Brakes on Flow of Arms to Ukraine - WSJ

    The Trump administration has stopped financing new weapons sales to Ukraine and is considering freezing weapons shipments from U.S. stockpiles, moves that threaten Kyiv’s ability to fight at a critical time in its battle against Russian forces, current and former U.S. officials said. The financing was halted in recent weeks amid the administration’s freeze on foreign aid. But the move to potentially shut down the main pipeline for arms transfers to Ukraine comes days after a contentious meeting between President Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky at the White House. The tense exchange Friday raised fears across Europe that the U.S. could be moving away from the wider Western alliance. Trump on Monday also lashed out publicly at Zelensky for saying the war with Russia was likely to continue for some time. “This is the worst statement that could have been made by Zelenskyy, and America will not put up with it for much longer!” Trump wrote on his social media platform Truth Social, using a different spelling of the Ukrainian leader’s name.

  • I think I see the endgame, now that all the grift and graft has run out. The whole plan was to make an EU state with its own military and a shared perception that their polity is threatened and must be responsible for its own security. Putin may not accept Ukraine as part of NATO; but perhaps as part of the EU / post-NATO-without-USA...

World

Russia Bad / Ukraine War

China

Health / Medicine

Pox / COVID / BioTerror AgitProp

Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda

<< 2025-03-03 (-1 day)
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<< 2024-03-04 (-1 year) 		Archive (+1 day) 2025-03-05 >>
(+1 week) 2025-03-11 >>