2025-03-06

the 10%, Musk cant stop OpenAI reorg, VMware insecure, Digg is back (in pog form), Disney cuts, astronaut speaks, cuts at IRS and VA, SS Ponzi, Trump speech, Ukraine aftermath, NYT / RFK / MMR

etc

• Two Americas, one bank branch, and $50,000 cash

  • What happens when you ask your bank for $50k in cash?

Horseshit

• The Dead Planet Theory

  Everyone loves to talk about the Dead Internet Theory, but less often discussed is how few people “do things” in any venue or on any platform. This phenomenon is known by several names, including the Power Law, the Pareto Principle, and the 80-20 Rule. One example of this phenomenon is that 10% of Twitter users account for 92% of tweets. This dynamic can be seen in interpersonal relationships, hobbies, and careers.

• Men with higher-quality sperm live longer, study finds

• Warriors' Draymond Green says NBA games are boring: 'No substance'

• Nevada Gaming Board Orders Kalshi to Shut Down Sports Contracts

• High-end California hotel begins banning children

• Remote controls, tumble dryers, do we have to make everything so complicated?

• $19 strawberry sold out in Los Angeles

• Opinion | How Covid Remade Our America, Five Years Later - The New York Times

  At first, the solidarity was breathtaking. Out of concern for ourselves and one another, we suspended nearly all interpersonal activity for months, wiping our lives almost entirely clean of the very people we were trying to protect. But, perversely, that solidarity destroyed our social fabric, dividing Americans into groups of essential workers and remote ones and making briefly real Margaret Thatcher’s dictum that there was no such thing as society, only individuals and families. It was a crash course in libertarianism — and solipsism. For several months the daily lives of many Americans were reduced to the boundaries of their nuclear unit and their phones and televisions and computers. Isolated, we saw one another first as threats and then as something less than real.

• Canada goose fights off bald eagle in rare, symbolism-laden battle on ice

celebrity gossip

• They wanted to save us from a dark AI future. Then six people were killed

Rank Propaganda / Thought Policing / World Disordering

• Memes are a key tool for extremist communities and conspiracy theories

• Partisan TV consumption more widespread than previously thought

Musk

• Judge denies Musk's attempt to block OpenAI from becoming for-profit entity

  • Musk fails in bid to block OpenAI becoming for-profit business

• Tesla Sales Plunge in Germany, Reflecting Broader Slump in Europe

• Teslas set alight outside French dealership in arson attack

Electric / Self Driving cars

• BMW pauses £600M upgrade to Oxford Mini plant as electric car demand falls

• Renault Is Giving Away Its Proprietary Tech to Stop EV Fires Quickly

Religion / Tribal / Culture War and Re-Segregation

• 40-day Target boycott begins following company's DEI diversion

Edumacationalizing / Acedemia Nuts

• UC Davis faces backlash for replacing locker rooms with all-sex locker rooms

• Texas middle schoolers shared needle in tattoo sessions — in front of oblivious teachers

• Was nonsense 'vegetative electron microscopy' phrase a Farsi typo?

• Schools to trial social media blackout scheme

• Problematic Paper Screener: Trawling for Fraud in the Scientific Literature

Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising

• Threat posed by new VMware hyperjacking vulnerabilities is hard to overstate

  VMware warned Tuesday that it has evidence suggesting the vulnerabilities are already under active exploitation in the wild. The company didn't elaborate. Beaumont said the vulnerabilities affect “every supported (and unsupported)” version in VMware’s ESXi, Workstation, Fusion, Cloud Foundation, and Telco Cloud Platform product lines.

• big PR spend: Digg is coming back, with founder Kevin Rose and Reddit's Alexis Ohanian

  • The Return of Digg, a Star of an Earlier Internet Era

  • Digg is being rebooted, with Reddit

  • Digg Returns: Relaunching in Bid to Bring "Good Vibes" Back to Social Media

  • Kevin Rose, Alexis Ohanian Acquire Digg

  • Digg founder teams up with former Reddit rival to buy and revive website

  • Digg returns to rescue us from the social media swamp – what are the odds?

• C++ creator calls for help to defend programming language from 'serious attacks'

• The UEFI hype and Microsoft's lies

• BlackRock to buy Hong Kong firm's Panama Canal port stake amid Trump pressure

• Revealed: The scammers who conned savers out of $35M using fake celebrity ads

• Qualcomm Claims New X85 Modem Creates 'Huge Delta' in Performance versus Apple

• Broadcom urges VMware customers to patch 'emergency' zero-day bugs

• YouTube launches a $7.99 per month, ad-free Premium Lite subscription

  • YouTube brings its more affordable 'Premium Lite' subscription to the US

• 1M Third-Party Android Devices Have a Secret Backdoor for Scammers

  • Badbox 2.0 Targets Consumer Devices with Multiple Fraud Schemes

  • Google Patches Pair of Exploited Vulnerabilities in Android

• SMBC Parts Ways with Hiveworks

• Disney to Cut Nearly 6% of Staff Across ABC News, Disney Entertainment Networks

  • ABC News to lay off dozens, merge ‘Good Morning America’ and ‘GMA3,’ ax ‘538’ data site

  • FiveThirtyEight Gets the Ax as ABC News Slashes Jobs in Major Shakeup

  • A few words about FiveThirtyEight

  “Data journalism” may have been a dumb name for what we were doing — that one’s on me — and Fivey Fox aside, the FiveThirtyEight brand was never warm and cuddly. But it always found a huge audience, and coverage of polls and political data is now much smarter. Compare the extremely analytical polling deep dives that Nate Cohn is doing at the New York Times, for instance, to the vibes-based coverage of the Boys on the Bus era. That trend may get even more entrenched as former 538ers form a diaspora that filters out to the rest of the media.

• Intel Products Unveils Assured Supply Chain Program

  • Intel unveils secure chip supply chain program for government clients

• AMD Radeon RX 9070 Series Linux GPU Compute Performance Review - Phoronix

  with indications of ROCm 6.3 potentially working with the Radeon RX 9070 series, I tried it out. Using Linux 6.14 Git for the latest upstream AMDGPU and AMDKFD kernel drivers paired with the latest ROCm 6.3 packages, I was able to get the Radeon RX 9070 series graphics cards detected by the ROCm software, including working OpenCL support too. OpenCL is working and some level of other ROCm components. But the likes of Blender 4.3's HIP back-end wasn't working with ROCm on the Radeon RX 9070 series on Linux.

• Brother refutes "false claims" that it bricked printers using third-party ink

• Discord in Early Talks with Bankers for Potential IPO

• US congressional panel urges Americans to ditch China-made routers

  • there are very few american made routers

AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World

• We were promised "Star Trek," so why did we settle for these lousy chatbots?

Space / Boomy Zoomers / UFO

• Butch Wilmore says Elon Musk is "absolutely factual" on Dragon's delayed return

  What follows are responses to some key questions during the press conference. The answers have been lightly edited for clarity. Unfortunately, the answers themselves did not provide too much clarity. On one hand, Wilmore says "politics is not playing into this at all" in reference to his extended stay in space. On the other hand, he says he believes Musk, after the founder of SpaceX said he offered to bring NASA astronauts back in 2024, but that this option was rebuffed by the White House for political reasons.

• Bezos injects tough Amazon culture into rocket maker Blue Origin

• NASA Continuing Efforts to Contact, Command Lunar Trailblazer

Crypto con games

• SEC Drops Charges Against Billionaire After He Pumps $30M into Trump's Crypto

Economicon / Business / Finance

• Silicon Valley tech startup taunts Boston job applicants: Don't work here

• Groceries in the U.S. remain expensive; more states want to stop taxing them

• Why TSMC Did a $100B Deal on US Chip Manufacturing

• The illegal gold rush driving up global chocolate prices

• Goldman Sachs to Target Vice Presidents in Next Round of Cuts

• US Demand for Gasoline Faces Long-Term Structural Problem

• Microchip Technology to cut 2k jobs as automotive demand wilts

• Private employers added just 77,000 jobs in February, far below expectations

• Why it still takes days for banks to give you your money

• There Was a Texas Lottery Arbitrage

• Honda Won’t Build Civic Hybrid in Mexico Because of Looming Tariffs.

Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making

• Wyoming Legislature Overrides Governor's Mystery Drone Veto

• Restoring Trust in Public Health: Cooperate With Congress

• IRS drafting plans to cut as much as half of its 90k-person workforce

• Leaked VA memo calls for up to 83,000 layoffs to reduce workforce to 2019 levels

  • US plans to fire 80k Veterans Affairs workers

  • VA has added 83k positions since 2019? why?

  • (Apr 2024) Senators blast Biden administration’s staffing plans for veterans’ healthcare

  In a letter sent to Secretary of Veterans Affairs Denis McDonough Monday, Sen. Jon Tester, a Montana Democrat, and Sen. Jerry Moran, a Kansas Republican, demanded to know why the VA has paused hiring and planned to cut 10,000 full-time jobs despite veterans across the nation experiencing long wait times for care. Their letter, obtained by CNN, called VA’s apparent “zero growth” policy a “drastic” and “shortsighted” decision. Though the VA told the committee that critical staff and some others would be exempt, Tester and Moran wrote that has not been the case. The letter, which noted that the VA last year underwent a hiring spree and had a record number of clinical appointments, stated that congressional staff has heard from VA employees and others that various VA locations have rescinded job offers for mental health providers and stalled hiring of housing case managers, among other issues.

• "work already completed" must be paid for: Supreme Court rejects Trump bid to keep $2B in foreign aid frozen

• EEOC Acting Chair Vows to Protect American Workers from Anti-American Bias

• National Environmental Policy Act on the chopping block

• Is Social Security a Ponzi Scheme?

  Elon is in good company calling social security a ponzi scheme. Social Security is not necessarily a Ponzi scheme but it only generated massive returns in the past because of its Ponzi-like aspects. The Ponzi-like aspects are now over and social security is turning into what is essentially a forced savings/welfare program with, as Krugman recognizes, crummy returns for average workers. Social security is thus a Ponzi scheme which has not gone bust but it has gone flat.

Trump

• Trump grants automakers one-month exemption from tariffs

• Trump calls for repealing the CHIPS Act

  • Trump wants to kill $52.7B semiconductor chips subsidy law

  • Trump Calls for End to $52B CHIPS Act Subsidy Program

  • Trump says US should scrap CHIPS Act, use the cash to cut debt

• Trump bulldozes through joint address to Congress

  • 12 Takeaways From Trump’s First Major Policy Speech to Congress | The Epoch Times

  A series of tariffs—including 25 percent fees on goods from Canada and Mexico and 20 percent in addition to those already imposed on China—took effect on March 4, and across-the-board reciprocal tariffs are set to take effect on April 2. “Other countries have used tariffs against us for decades, and now it’s our turn to start using them against those other countries,” Trump said.

  • Trump hails his whirlwind, six-week ‘common sense revolution’ — as downbeat Dems protest address to Congress

  • Lesotho shocked by Trump's remarks that 'nobody has heard of the country'

  • SOTU Reactions: Business Press Turning on Trump as Tariffs Whack Markets, Look Set to Increase Inflation, Approval Falls and Even Republicans Getting Restive | naked capitalism

  • Trump’s big speech to Congress signaled more chaos ahead

  • Opinion | Trump’s Speech to Congress: The Best and Worst Moments - The New York Times

  Best Moment:

  • Representative Al Green’s stand in defiance of a president who has governed in defiance of the law. Green’s civil disobedience was the behavior of a man who believes that Trump is a threat to American democracy. Why did he stand alone?
  • Green’s heckling. Democrats shouldn’t have shown up at all, but if they were going to be there, noisy protest made more sense than holding up dumb little paddles. There’s nothing dignified about quietly playing the foil to an autocratic thug gloating about stripping America for parts.
  • Trump’s recitation of improbable-sounding expenses he claimed to have cut was funny. More important, it dramatized the growing conviction on the right that too much public money is going to NGOs that operate without direct political accountability.

Democrats

• Democrats Can’t Applaud a Child Who Survived Brain Cancer

• MSNBC's Nicolle Wallace gives sickening take on 13-year-old with terminal cancer honored by Trump | Daily Mail Online

  'I hope he has a long life as a law enforcement officer, but I hope he never has to defend the United States capitol against Donald Trump's supporters and if he does, I hope he isn't one of the six who loses his life to suicide,' she said.

• Sam Altman Returns to Political Fund-Raising

Left Angst

• Trump Repeats Nixon's Failed Plan to Close Federal Agencies

• US Government considers selling FBI and DOJ headquarters

• GSA prepares to sell over 400 federal properties

• More Than 100 Buildings Vanish from Trump's 'For Sale' Wishlist

• Trump Agency Pulls 443 Sites Off Market in Real Estate Reversal

• Best Buy and Target CEOs say prices are about to go up because of tariffs

• Trump's Latest Tariffs on Canada, Mexico and China Could Be His Biggest Gamble

• US embassies end pollution data popular in China and India

  • State Department Kills Global Air Monitoring Program

• Elon Musk creates confusion about IRS' Direct File – but it's still available

• Why Techdirt Is Now a Democracy Blog (Whether We Like It or Not)

• JD Vance sparks British fury as he mocks Ukraine peacekeeping plan

• CFPB drops lawsuit against JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America and Wells Fargo over Zelle fraud

• How the bond market could check Trump’s power

• DOGE's Misplaced War on Software Licenses

• DOGE's Cuts to the IRS Threaten to Cost More Than Doge Will Ever Save

• People Are Paying $5M and $1M to Dine with Donald Trump

• The Big Government Contracts Doge Hasn't Touched

• US withdrawing from plan to help major polluters move from coal

• White House to overhaul $42.5B internet plan – likely to Elon Musk's advantage

• Language Log » Pronouncing DOGE

• Pew Research: What we know about the U.S. H-1B visa program

• Doge seeks to cancel lease on nuclear waste storage facility

  One of the leases DOGE decided to cancel is the lease for Skeen-Whitlock Building in Carlsbad, New Mexico, a 90,000 square foot facility which manages the nation’s only storage area for DOD-created nuclear waste and the only operating deep geologic nuclear waste storage facility in the world. I’m not the first one to report this. It’s been a big issue in New Mexico. The local congressman, Gabe Vasquez, has been all over it. But as far as I can tell NOTUS is the only national outlet to mention it so far. As a secondary matter, I’m not sure I’d lease my building to a nuclear waste processing facility. I feel like that’s got to be hit on subsequent lease value. But that’s sort of not the point. An additional point: it’s not the deep geologic underground place where they store it. Not sure you’re invest in building that and then just see if there’s anyone who’d want to lease it. It’s the facility where they process the nuclear waste before putting it in the super deep nuclear storage hole.

  • WIPP in Carlsbad under DOGE cuts - KOB.com

  Employees at Skeen-Whitlock oversee the storage of nuclear waste that is processed and stored at the waste isolation pilot plant in Carlsbad and their job is to make sure it’s done safely and correctly to avoid spills or leaks.It’s a separate campus from the actual storage facility.

  • U.S. Department of Energy – Cowperwood Company

  • ... why has the government been leasing custom built, long term facilities, rather than owning them?

• Due to new tariffs, many more physical game discs may "simply not get made"

• The Strategic Crypto Swindle

• How Much Should Americans Worry About Elon Musk's Ketamine Use?

• Census Bureau under Trump cuts loose expert advisers who work for free

• Doge eliminated the US government's tech experts – what has been lost?

• Trump Threatens to Imprison Protestors and Expose Anonymous Journalist Sources

• Wozniak blasts Musk's DOGE over 'sledgehammer' approach to government layoffs

  • Steve Wozniak Has Had It with Elon Musk's Antics

• The Rise of the Brutal American

• Federal hiring is nearly frozen. For those who can hire, a roadblock has emerged

• Musk suggests the U.S. should privatize the Postal Service and Amtrak

• Ex-NSA boss says Trump's staff cuts will 'devastate' America's national security

• DOGE Cuts Off Government PACER Access

• A sprawling detention center in Texas to hold migrant children and their parents

• Senate votes to strip the CFPB of its power to regulate Twitter

'The relationship is broken': Canadians respond to Trump's tariffs

Law Breaking / Police / Internal Security

• Detroit woman suing police, claiming faulty facial recognition technology led to unjust arrest

• One Hopped Turnstile, 9 Police Bullets, 4 People Shot. Does It Add Up?

• US charges Chinese hackers in broad cyberespionage campaign

External Security / Militaria / Diplomania

• Pentagon deploys Stryker brigade, aviation battalion to Southern Border

• U.S. Suspends Costly Deportation Flights Using Military Aircraft

• Ukraine: Is this genuine jingoism? – OffGuardian

  Trump made fun of his clothes, Zelensky warned that war would come to the US if Ukraine fell and called Vice-President JD Vance “bitch”. Zelensky disrespected the office of the President or was bullied by big meanies depending on which color you voted for. It’s all very serious, real stuff. As serious and real as the traumatised faces Zelenksy and his First Lady were making during their Vogue photoshoot in 2022. The track-suited former “peace candidate” then either left the Whitehouse voluntarily or was told to leave, again depending who you voted for.

• Zelensky Folds, 'Ready to Work Under President Trump's Strong Leadership' for Peace.

  • Ukraine’s Zelenskyy appeals to Trump after US suspends military aid

• CIA Director Says U.S. Has Paused Intelligence Sharing with Ukraine

  • US cuts off intelligence sharing with Ukraine

  • CIA director says US has paused intelligence support to Ukraine

  • U.S. pauses intelligence sharing with Ukraine used for strikes on Russia

  • US stops sharing intelligence on Russia with Ukraine

• Houthis Re-Designated As Terror Group By State Department

  • Federal Register :: Foreign Terrorist Organization Designation of Ansarallah

World

• 'Shadow fleets' and sabotage: are Europe's undersea cables under attack?

• Jamming: Polish researchers suspect GPS jammers on ships in the Baltic Sea

• Delivering what's needed to make Europe sovereign

• NCSC, GCHQ, UK Gov't expunge advice to "use Apple encryption"

• Macron to open debate on extending French nuclear protection to European allies

• Threat to UK Nuclear Deterrent

• Cargo ship will be stuck in mud of Humber estuary 'for a month'

  H&S Wisdom became stuck near Brough as it made its way to Gunness Wharf Port near Scunthorpe on Sunday. Three attempts have been made to refloat the vessel, but the BBC has now been told the tide conditions will not be suitable for a further attempt until the beginning of April.

Russia Bad / Ukraine War

• Russia circumvents Western sanctions by creating its own parallel economy

• The North Korean Defector Who's Been Called a 'Hero of Ukraine'

China

• Chinese gov shifts focus from x86 and Arm to RISC-V chips

• China will work to firmly advance 'reunification' with Taiwan, premier says

• If war is what the U.S. wants, be it a tariff war, a trade war or any other type of war, we’re ready to fight till the end

• The Secret Campaign in China to Save a Woman Chained by the Neck

Health / Medicine

• Air purifiers are a simple answer to allergies

• Do Emulsifiers, Which Make Food More Appealing, Also Make You Sick?

• Scientists crack how aspirin might stop cancers from spreading

• Humans Have a Third Set of Teeth. New Medicine May Help Them Grow.

Pox / COVID / BioTerror AgitProp

• As Measles Spreads, Kennedy Embraces Remedies Like Cod Liver Oil (Archive)

  • RFK Jr. tells parents to consider MMR vaccine amid outbreak

  • As measles outbreak grows, HHS secretary says vaccination is a personal decision that can protect individuals and communities | CNN

  • Vaccine critic RFK Jr. backs measles vaccine amid deadly Texas outbreak - CBS News

• West Texans, Mennonites at center of measles outbreak choose medical freedom over vaccine mandates

• Five years on: The countries that never locked down for Covid-19

Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda

• Biggest iceberg runs aground after a near-40-year journey from Antarctica

• 'woolly mouse': why scientists doubt it's a big step towards recreating mammoths

• Agriculture is main cause of seasonal carbon ups and downs, study finds

• Plants Are Losing Their Ability to Absorb Carbon Dioxide as Emissions Rise

• Half of CO2 emissions come from 36 fossil fuel firms, study shows

• Rockets Are Blasting the Environment

• New Study Casts Doubt on Accuracy and of the Modern and Paleo CO2 Record

• A Nuclear-Power Revival Brings Back an Old Problem: What to Do with the Waste

• After 120 years, Yellowstone bison are a single breeding population

• Study: The ozone hole is healing, thanks to global reduction of CFCs