2025-03-07

pesky thick atmosphere, queer whale porn, Luigi lust, chat log fun, politicizing "hacker", Starship boom, Bitcoin reserve, trimming Dpt. Ed., banning Perkins-Coie, Hunter's art, German bonds

Cool

• Prizewinning Image Shows a Leafy Seadragon in Camouflage

  The tiny seadragon’s elongated body measures less than half an inch.

etc

• A third of US air traffic control systems are 'unsustainable'

• The science behind airplane deicing: A mechanical engineer explains

• (Jan 2025) A ‘Manhole Cover’ Beyond the Solar System? | Centauri Dreams

  Finden notes that his or her work should be considered as a rough estimate because “flight at a mach number upwards of 200 has not been studied and may never be.” Good point. Finden’s calculations show that the cover would have reached temperatures five times its melting point before it could ever escape the atmosphere.

• The first images of humpbacks having sex, and they're both males

  "When I realized that it was two males, it was not what I was expecting," she told As It Happens host Nil Köksal. "I thought, oh my gosh, this is incredible." Stack, chief biologist at the Pacific Whale Foundation in Maui, says this is the first time humpback whale sex has been documented. She co-authored a paper about the rare sighting in the journal Marine Mammal Science. The findings are just the latest in a growing body of evidence that same-sex sexual interactions are widespread in the animal kingdom.

  • And it didn't even take USAID grants to tell them about their sexuality

Horseshit

• Warrior Jesus and a Letter from Luigi - by Ashley Shelby

  While I find it hard to understand why women would “fall in love” with Ted Bundy, I think it’s obvious why Luigi Mangione has turned so many people into limerent, lovesick fools. And it’s not even about his looks.

  • stochastic terrorism doesn't just happen by itself. gotta re-assure those carefully groomed "lone wolf" wannabes that they'll be heroes for popping off Big Bad.

• NYC bodegas have a new strategy to keep prices down: liquid eggs

• A rotten system ensures miscarriages of justice will continue

  But wasn’t all of this sorted out years ago? Aren’t miscarriages of justice a bit … 1980s? While millions might have once tuned into Rough Justice and Trial and Error to watch investigations into miscarriage of justice cases, those shows are now long gone, cancelled due to lack of interest. Even legendary investigative journalists like David Jessel packed up and moved on, admitting that the game had changed. In a seminal speech in 2002 Prime Minister Tony Blair declared that “the biggest miscarriage of justice in today’s system is when the guilty walk away unpunished”. Blair was calling for a reappraisal of what we considered an injustice. Essentially what was being assumed was that the “innocence crisis” had been dealt with and energies should now be focused on other areas where the criminal justice system was misfiring; namely, in the effective punishment of the guilty. Tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime.

  The right wing press gleefully embraced this reframing. Newspapers like The Sun and Express, who had not concerned themselves with miscarriages of justice before Blair’s intervention, were now falling over themselves to expose these new injustices. Two headlines in the Express read: “Rapist who was free to strike again: This is a travesty, a real miscarriage of justice,” and “Don’t let them get away with murder: Proposals that would see murderers spend less time in jail are the biggest miscarriage of justice we have seen”.

• Airplanes of the Future Could Be Fitted with Feather-Like Flaps

• Parents in Tech Want Their Kids to Go into the Arts Instead

• Moore's Law led us to a flawed vision of the future

• Sixty Hours a week? How about 4 uninterrupted hours a day?

Rank Propaganda / Thought Policing / World Disordering

• Exploring the Paramilitary Leaks

  The dataset is, essentially, tons of exports of different Telegram channels from different times, complete with all of the stuff uploaded to those channels. There's a lot in there. There are tons of recordings of Zoom calls. Tons of voice messages. Tons of Office documents. Random drone footage from their gun practice. And so much more that I haven't dug into yet.

• Russian disinformation floods AI chatbots, study finds

Musk

• Italy is having growing doubts about closing €1.5B deal with SpaceX for Starlink

• Tesla's China-made EV sales fall to lowest since August 2022

• The Intercept Is Publishing Elon Musk's Email Address

• Mexican Billionaire Slim Cuts Ties with Starlink, Costing Musk $7B After Tweet

Electric / Self Driving cars

• Tesla now offers discounted financing on Cybertruck as the truck a flop

• VW is testing its robotaxis in snowy, icy Norway

Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising

• Amazon Tests AI Dubbing on Prime Video Movies, Series

• Facebook Live videos will be deleted after 30 days

• Reddit will warn users who repeatedly upvote banned content

• Google Urges Trump DOJ to Reverse Course on Breaking Up Company

• Political poll news site 538 to close

• Brother makes a demon-haunted printer

• Meta keeps 'block' lists of ex-employees – and even a VP can't get you off them

• Apple C1 modem real-world tests: Good enough, but a step slow

• TikTok hasn't negotiated with prospective buyers as deadline looms

• The Guardian now requires users to pay to reject personalised adversiting

• Apple M3 Ultra

• What Went Wrong with Skype?

• Old Sitcoms Are Being Upscaled with AI with No Attention to Quality

• Marvell plunges 19% as outlook falls short of high expectations

TechSuck / Geek Bait

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

  • Its only defense is "it works well for many current uses"; but that's not relevant to the "purity" crowd currently shouting about Rust.

• Who is Free Software for?

  I believe that they also nailed who Free Software is for. Quote:

  For hackers by hackers.

  So much work so many technical communities put into making the path towards becoming a member easier, more inclusive, fairer, etc. Those activities are fundamentally about fulfilling the Open Source promise: To give everyone the ability to have control over the software they use and the tool to build upon what’s already there. Mission … not accomplished but on its way, right? But what are we doing? What are we trying to help “everyone” with? We are trying to give more people the opportunity to “become hackers”. So they can profit off of all this stuff built by hackers for hackers. This isn’t a project to free all of us, it’s a project to give everyone a degree of freedom if they join our club. If they assimilate. This is Borg-mode. We are not meeting people where they are. We expect them to come to us in order to understand why our values matter and are the best. Which – sorry to have to say so – they are not.

  We need to get out of our comfort zones and modes of operation. Need to move beyond the seemingly apolitical cyberspace of free licenses. We need to reshape our thinking towards more political goals and values.

  • "If you don't agree with my politics you can't be a 'hacker!'" ... long history of that, back to the folks who wanted to "kick Jerry Pournelle off our Internet".

AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World

• It begins: Pentagon to give AI agents a role in decision making, ops planning

• The Government Knows AGI Is Coming

• Worry not. China's on the line saying AGI still a long way off

• 1/4 of startups in YC current cohort have almost entirely AI-generated codebases

• A year later, OpenAI still hasn't released its voice cloning tool

• Mistral adds new API that turns any PDF document into an AI-ready Markdown file

Space / Boomy Zoomers / UFO

• Yes, we are about to be treated to a second lunar landing in a week

• The Moon Lander Athena's Fate on the Lunar Surface Is Uncertain

• NASA still working to restore contact with Lunar Trailblazer

• European rocket Ariane 6 launches on first commercial mission

• Spacecraft lands on Moon but 'orientation' unclear

• NASA is making sacrifices to keep the Voyager mission alive

  • NASA powers down two Voyager science instruments to extend mission life

  • NASA squeezes more life from 47-year-old Voyager probes.

  • NASA Shuts Off Voyager Science Instrument

• SpaceX launches Starship Flight 8 - Loses attitude control

  • SpaceX Starship Lost

Crypto con games

• Coinbase cheers demise of CFPB as customer complaints mount to almost 8k

• Trump DeFi Project Grabbed Crypto Assets Ahead of White House Crypto Summit

• Trump Signs Order Setting Up Bitcoin 'Fort Knox' and Digital Assets Stockpile

  • Trump signs executive order establishing U.S. strategic Bitcoin reserve

Economicon / Business / Finance

• Goldman Sachs: Why AI Spending Is Not Boosting GDP

• Microsoft walks away from some CoreWeave commitments ahead of $35B IPO

• ECB dodged a payment disaster in 10 hours of tech meltdown

• Nvidia invested $1B in AI deals in 2024

• Jack Daniel's says Canada pulling US alcohol off shelves 'worse than tariff'

• Americans Fall Behind on Car Payments at Highest Rate in Decades

• Walgreens agrees to be acquired by private equity firm for almost $10B

  • Walgreens Will Go Private in $10B Deal with Sycamore

Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making

• Air-Traffic Staffing Rules Tightened at Reagan Airport After Fatal Crash

• Judge Extends Block on Trump Administration’s Funding Freeze - WSJ

  In a ruling on Thursday, U.S. District Judge John McConnell Jr. in Rhode Island indefinitely prohibited the federal government from freezing or otherwise impeding the disbursement of appropriated federal funds to state governments. McConnell’s order follows a similar one issued by a different federal judge in Washington, D.C., on Feb. 25. He had previously issued a temporary restraining order, which on Thursday he converted into an injunction, a more permanent form of relief. “The Executive’s categorical freeze of appropriated and obligated funds fundamentally undermines the distinct constitutional roles of each branch of our government,” McConnell wrote. The Trump administration had “put itself above Congress” by imposing “a categorical mandate on the spending of congressionally appropriated and obligated funds without regard to Congress’s authority to control spending,” McConnell wrote. The ruling by McConnell, an appointee of former President Barack Obama, came in a lawsuit filed by 22 states with Democratic attorneys general, as well as the District of Columbia.

  The lawsuit focused on a directive from the White House’s Office of Management and Budget instructing federal agencies to pause funding while it assessed whether government programs complied with executive orders issued by President Trump targeting foreign aid, diversity initiatives and green-energy projects. OMB rescinded that directive soon after the lawsuit was filed, but the states say some Congress-approved funds were still being improperly withheld. The initial rollout of the OMB policy sowed confusion among state governments, nonprofits and lawmakers who were trying to understand which programs would be halted.

• Massie Not On Board with Speaker Johnson’s Spending Bill, Vows to ‘Vote Against’ It › American Greatness

  Thomas Massie (R-KY) is vowing to vote against House Speaker Mike Johnson’s “clean” continuing resolution (CR) that seeks to fund the government in 2025 at the same levels as in 2024. This is not the first time that Massie has found himself opposing GOP leadership on fiscal grounds but the stakes are high as Congress seeks to pass a CR to fund government operations beyond March 14. Massie says that Speaker Johnson isn’t following the provision in law that would have cut spending by 1% if the CR were to extend beyond April. The Kentucky Congressman also cited an unwillingness to fund the waste, fraud and abuse that has been uncovered by Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) efforts and the fact that there were suppose to be 12 separate funding bills to encourage transparency. Massie also is standing firm on the fact that Congress was told that the CR passed in December that funded the federal government through March 14 would allow the prioritizing of President Trump’s agenda via the checkbook.

• Alphabet Gets House GOP Subpoena on Alleged Speech Censorship

Trump

• Draft of Trump Executive Order Aims to Eliminate Education Department

  • Trump prepares order dismantling the Education Department

  • Donald Trump expected to sign executive order to dismantle Education Department

  • Dear Colleague: Do what the Ed Department wants -- or else

  Elon Musk's slash-and-burn boys won't be able to cut much from the U.S. Education Department, because the multi-billion-dollar items go to programs Congress has legislated, he writes. "Title I’s $18 billion for poor kids? Mandated. IDEA’s $15 billion for special education? Same deal. Pell Grants topping $30 billion? That’s the Higher Education Act, not some rogue educrat’s hobbyhorse."

• Treasury Secretary says the American dream is not about 'access to cheap goods'

• Trump puts new limits on Elon Musk

• Addressing Risks from Perkins Coie LLP – The White House

  he Attorney General, the Director of National Intelligence, and all other relevant heads of executive departments and agencies (agencies) shall immediately take steps consistent with applicable law to suspend any active security clearances held by individuals at Perkins Coie, pending a review of whether such clearances are consistent with the national interest.

  officials shall, to the extent permitted by law, refrain from hiring employees of Perkins Coie, absent a waiver from the head of the agency, made in consultation with the Director of the Office of Personnel Management, that such hire will not threaten the national security of the United States.

Democrats

• Biden Awarded $28 Million to Mysterious 'Vaccine Company' Run by His COVID Adviser and Based out of a Maryland PO Box

• Well, That Didn’t Take Long: Hunter Biden Is Already Broke – PJ Media

  Just weeks after Donald Trump took back the White House from Joe Biden, his formerly crack-smoking son Hunter is broke. Now, he is seeking to drop his own federal laptop hacking lawsuit against Garrett Ziegler, who exposed the contents of Hunter's infamous laptop through his Marco Polo non-profit website. According to court filings in California, Hunter's attorneys claim he "has suffered a significant downturn in his income and has significant debt in the millions of dollars range." The once high-rolling Biden spawn claims he lost his housing due to Pacific Palisades wildfires in January, making his rental home "unlivable." Joe Biden is out of power, and the Biden Crime Family has lost its only commodity: influence. With no more favors to sell, the promissory notes tied to Hunter’s so-called “artwork” are now utterly worthless, and Hunter has no more cushy board positions in Ukraine to fatten his bank account.

  • Playbook: School’s out forever - POLITICO

  Biden detailed his grim financial situation in a court filing yesterday, saying that he has struggled to sell his paintings in recent months, moving only one in the past 14 months, compared with 27 in the prior two or three years. He reported “significant” debts and lackluster sales of his memoir. Citing the financial burden of ongoing legal fees, he’s asking a federal judge in LA to allow him to drop a lawsuit he filed in 2023 accusing former Trump White House aide Garrett Ziegler of hacking the contents of Biden’s laptop.

Left Angst

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

  • Elon Musk says Post Office, Amtrak should be privatized

  • The justification for having Amtrak is extremely shaky, USPS is in the constitution and should be modernized. Why isn't the USPS the default email, ID, and money transfer provider of the internet?

• 'Trump Gaza' AI video intended as political satire, says creator

• MAGA Wants to End Capitalism as We Know It - Bloomberg

  Roberts sets out a radical set of ideas to eject the managerial corporation from its central role in the heart of the US economy. First: Reverse the managerial revolution. Roberts wants companies to recruit more senior managers from the shop floor rather than from universities. Companies should abandon the algorithms that automatically reject candidates for jobs because they don’t have university qualifications. The state should stop subsidizing universities through tax breaks. Second: Make ownership great again. The US should lighten regulatory burdens on small companies and break up giant companies such as Google and BlackRock. One of the few presidents other than Trump that Roberts treats as a hero is Teddy Roosevelt. Third: Create an “active commerce” for the 21st century by building up tariff barriers to cheap imports and targeting industrial policy to help US companies that make things.

• Investors spy the dawn of a tectonic shift away from US markets

• (2018) The Authoritarian Regime Survival Guide

• Is Trump preparing to invoke the Insurrection Act? Signs are pointing that way

• Why Trump's tariffs are better than you think – and much worse

• The Continuing Crisis, Part VI: Rare Diseases at the FDA and More | Science | AAAS

  The science-based agencies themselves have turned out to be just the early warning signs of what's happening all over the government. It's interesting (in a grim way) that these were so high on the list - you can easily make sense of the other agencies that are coming under attack, since they tend to be those that either Elon Musk has personal hatred for (USAID) or those that inconvenience him and other billionaire businessmen (the EPA, OSHA, the IRS, financial regulators in general, and so on). It's certainly a testimony to the priorities of the Trump administration that they started gutting R&D so quickly and vigorously.

• Trump to revoke legal status for 240k Ukrainians refugees

• China aims to recruit top US scientists as Trump tries to kill the CHIPS Act

• NIH to terminate active research grants

• Trump administration disbands two expert panels on GDP, inflation data

  • these would be the people who assured us the economy was the best ever right up til last November... or some of them, at least.

• CIA Begins Firing Recently Hired Officers

• New U.S. Tariffs Will Impact Consoles, GPUs, and Physical Games, Say Analysts

• Doge plans to cut VA contracts may harm veterans' care, employees say

• Let's Talk About the American Dream

  • "Jeff Atwood (Stack Overflow/Discourse/Coding Horror) and Alexander Vindman (former NSC official) will be discussing the future of the American Dream. They'll explore how we might bridge our current divisiveness,"

• Trump admin wants to review all prospective citizens' social media accounts

• Is the White House trying to engineer a recession?

• Al Green censured by House of Representatives over Trump speech outburst | Fox News

  Ten Democrats joined Republicans in voting for the measure. Green himself voted "present," along with first-term Rep. Shomari Figures, D-Ala. "Al Green's childish outburst exposed the chaos and dysfunction within the Democrat party since President Trump's overwhelming win in November and his success in office thus far. It is not surprising 198 Democrats refused to support Green's censure given their history of radical, inflammatory rhetoric fueled by Trump Derangement Syndrome," House Majority Whip Tom Emmer, R-Minn., told Fox News Digital. Before the formal censure could be read out to Green, however, Democrats upended House floor proceedings by gathering with the Texas Democrat and singing "We shall overcome." Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., was forced to call the House into a recess after failing multiple times to quell the protest. Decorum eroded further afterwards, with several Democrats including "Squad" member Rep. Ayanna Pressley, D-Mass., engaging in a heated exchange with Republicans, including first-term Rep. Ryan MacKenzie, R-Pa.

• Are Trump and DOGE running the fed govt like a private company?

• Senators Call for DOJ Probe of X’s Advertiser Pressure Campaign - WSJ

  Five Democratic senators have asked the Justice Department to investigate whether Elon Musk is leveraging his influence in the Trump administration to bully advertisers into returning to X. The request, from Sens. Elizabeth Warren, Cory Booker, Richard Blumenthal, Adam Schiff and Chris Van Hollen, follows a Wall Street Journal report last month about the social-media platform’s pressuring Interpublic Groupto spend more on X. If Musk uses his government position to harm those who don’t do business with him, “he risks running afoul of criminal ethics laws,” the senators wrote to Attorney General Pam Bondi in a letter, a copy of which was viewed by the Journal.

• State Dept. to use AI to revoke visas of foreign students who appear "pro-Hamas"

• Trump Promises to Abuse Take It Down Act for Censorship, Just as We Warned

• Who Is the Doge and X Technician Branden Spikes?

External Security / Militaria / Diplomania

• Lockheed out of Navy's F/A-XX future fighter competition

World

• Denmark postal service to stop delivering letters

  Denmark's state-run postal service, PostNord, is to end all letter deliveries at the end of 2025, citing a 90% decline in letter volumes since the start of the century. The decision brings to an end 400 years of the company's letter service. Denmark's 1,500 postboxes will start to disappear from the start of June. Transport Minister Thomas Danielsen sought to reassure Danes, saying letters could still be sent and received across the country. One company said it was prepared to take over deliveries. Denmark had a universal postal service for 400 years until the end of 2023, but as digital mail services have taken hold, the use of letters has fallen dramatically.

  • from comments: "When the new postal act went into effect last year, it opened up the market for domestic letter deliveries,"

• Seven injured after SK fighter jet accidentally drops bombs

  Fifteen people in South Korea were injured, two of them seriously, after a pair of fighter jets accidentally dropped eight bombs in a civilian district on Thursday during a live-fire military exercise, local media reported. The incident involving the Air Force KF-16 aircraft, in the city of Pocheon near North Korea, was part of routine drills held by the South to maintain combat readiness against potential attacks from the North.

  • S. Korean fighter jet accidentally drops bombs on civilian village, injuring seven - The Korea Herald

  • South Korea air force jets accidentally drop bombs on homes, injuring 15 | Reuters

• German borrowing costs soar by most since 1997 on ‘historic’ debt deal

  The yield on the 10-year Bund surged 0.25 percentage points to 2.73 per cent, its biggest one-day move since 1997, with markets braced for extra government borrowing. Chancellor-in-waiting Friedrich Merz late on Tuesday agreed with the rival Social Democrats (SPD) to exempt defence spending above 1 per cent of GDP from Germany’s strict constitutional borrowing limit, set up a €500bn off-balance sheet vehicle for debt-funded infrastructure investment and loosen debt rules for states. The euro rose 1.2 per cent against the dollar to $1.075, its highest since November, and German stocks surged.

  • Germany fact of the day

  I would sooner regard this as bad news for German consumption, naming that trying to address some of their problems will involve significant opportunity costs. Share prices did go up, and in part you can think of this as a transfer of resources from German individuals to defense and infrastructure firms. You might think additional German defense spending is necessary, as I do, but still that does not boost living standards. The additional infrastructure might, let us hope they are able to find ways to cut other spending along the way, surely it is not all super-efficient?

• Lithuania quits treaty banning cluster bombs despite outrage

• UK quietly scrubs encryption advice from government websites

Russia Bad / Ukraine War

• European-led Ukraine air protection plan could halt Russian missile attacks

China

• Many Chinese See a Cultural Revolution in America

• Foreign researchers in China face tightening restrictions

Health / Medicine

• Bacterial vaginosis can be sexually transmitted less so with partner treatment

• Scientists discover new part of the immune system - potential for antibiotics

• Novo Nordisk slashes Wegovy price for patients lacking insurance benefits

• Metabolic signature of depression found in blood

• Are Ultraprocessed Foods Addictive?

  • i would scoff, but then i think about cheese, and all my pets stand to attention

Pox / COVID / BioTerror AgitProp

• Patients with long Covid regain sense of smell and taste with pioneering surgery

Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda

• Rare Cyclone Threatens to Swamp Australia's East Coast

• Forces deep underground seem to be deforming Earth's inner core

• UK homes install subsidised heat pumps at record level

• Hidden In Plain Sight: The Chemical Burden of Personal Care Products

• La Niña may end soon. What that may mean for global temps and hurricane season

• A Craze for Tiny Plants Is Driving a Poaching Crisis in South Africa

• Global sea ice hit record low in February, scientists say