2025-03-10

burner phones, wikiwar. Tesla trends, gun religion, boy bias beef, unofficial GPU sport, Pi5 PIO hacks, egg cartels, no budget, Musk's past, German distrust, Syrian sectarian slayings, eat ze nutria


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Religion / Tribal / Culture War and Re-Segregation

  • The sacred gun: the religious and magical elements of America's gun culture | Politics and Religion | Cambridge Core

    a distinct and crucial sub-set of owners express an additional and strong attachment to their weapons (Gun Sanctity). Gun Sanctity measures the extent to which owners think their guns make them more patriotic, respected, in control, and valued by their family and community. We propose that Gun Sanctity is a form of quasi-religious or magical thinking in which an object is imbued with unseen powers. To assess this proposal, we look at the extent to which gun ownership, Gun Security, and Gun Sanctity are related to traditional religion and various forms of magical thinking, namely, (a) conspiratorialism, (b) the belief that prayer can fix financial and health problems, and (c) support for Christian Statism, a form of American theocracy. We find that Gun Sanctity is highly predictive of different forms of magical thinking but is often unrelated to more traditional religious practices and beliefs.

    • Neat. Can we have the same study for the 'Gun Control" faithful?
  • Why work is (still) not working for women

Edumacationalizing / Acedemia Nuts

  • Boys Are Falling Behind - by Steve Stewart-Williams

    Terrier compared children’s marks on gender-blind national exams with non-blind marks given by their teachers. The findings revealed a persistent marking bias in favor of girls. Although the effect wasn’t huge, Terrier found persuasive evidence that the bias contributes to boys falling behind in school.

Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising

TechSuck / Geek Bait

  • Rewriting essential Linux packages in Rust

  • How we added interlaced video to Raspberry Pi 5 DPI - Raspberry Pi

    There are some gotchas: the DE signal must be output on GPIO1, whether it’s used or not. PIO is not synchronised to the DPI clock and its VSync output can jitter up to ±5 ns. That isn’t significant at standard-definition TV rates, but it could be a problem at higher resolutions! Finally, the sync fixup consumes most of RP1’s PIO instruction memory, so PIO can’t be used for other cool things at the same time as generating interlaced DPI.

Economicon / Business / Finance

  • Global coffee trade grinding to a halt, hit hard by brutal price hikes

  • Hatching a Conspiracy: A Big Investigation into Egg Prices

    something doesn’t add up about this “avian flu is the sole and natural cause of high egg prices” story. Despite the “act of God” going on — and the skyrocketing prices accompanying it — egg production is actually . . . not down by all that much. 115 million hens is a lot of birds to cull, but it’s important to put the loss of those hens in context: They weren’t lost all at once. They were lost over three years. And there have always been around 300 million other hens alive and kicking to lay eggs for America—not to mention a continuous pipeline of 120-130 million female chicks (called “pullets”) in the process of being raised into adult hens to replace the ones dying or aging out. As a result of this pipeline, the effect of avian flu outbreaks on egg production, while not insignificant, has been relatively small. Monthly egg production during each of the last three years has averaged only 3-5% lower than it was in 2021, the year before the epidemic started. Meanwhile, demand for eggs has actually declined. According to a private report by the Egg Industry Center, Americans went from consuming an average of 210 eggs each in 2021 to less than 190 in 2024 — a ~10-percent nosedive. As many countries have closed their markets to American eggs since 2021 on account of the avian flu, egg exports have also fallen off a cliff — going down by nearly half between 2021 and 2022 and staying there ever since. That dynamic, according to my analysis of USDA data, has shaved another ~2.5% off aggregate demand on U.S. egg production.

    So, reports of an unprecedented egg “shortage” are exaggerated. Nonetheless, egg prices — and egg company profits — have gone through the roof. Cal-Maine Foods — the largest egg producer and the only one that publishes its financial data as a publicly traded company — has been making more money than ever. It’s annual gross profits in the past three years have floated between 3 and 6 times what it used to earn before the avian flu epidemic started — breaking $1 billion for the first time in the company’s history. All of this extra profit is coming from higher selling prices, which have been earning Cal-Maine unprecedented 50-170 percent margins over farm production costs per dozen. Taking Cal-Maine as the “bellwether” for the industry’s largest firms — as people in the egg business do — we can be pretty confident that the other large egg producers are also raking in profits off the relatively small dip in egg production.

Trump

Left Angst

External Security / Militaria / Diplomania

  • Germans no longer see US as trustworthy partner

  • SpaceX, Palantir, Anduril in Talks to Build America's "Golden Dome"

  • Back in Military Service – From Blue to Green – Robert M. Lee

    I was direct commissioned into the Army as a Lieutenant Colonel in Feb 2025 serving as part of the 91st Battalion in Virginia. I was told that I’m the first ever direct commission to the rank of LTC in cyber in the Army – but to be fair I only skipped 1 rank (Major) if you think of my Air Force service – I don’t think the Army counts the Air Force time though (said playfully). My current role is as the Executive Officer of the IOSC Battalion where I get to inherit the amazing work already done by the team on the exercise Cyber Fortress (seriously it’s impressive) and use it as part of the larger strategy. I don’t intend to detail everything in a public blog but the short of it is to establish a strategy for how the government responds to infrastructure attacks in partnership across government agencies and the private sector in Virginia using Cyber Fortress to demonstrate it and then work across government to take insights from all the other pockets-of-excellence that have formed on this topic and roll out a national strategy all while training our most powerful capability – our people – in how to prepare and respond to infrastructure attacks that threaten our citizens.