2025-03-24
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Why Maui Still Hasn’t Recovered
A year and a half since fires devastated the historic town of Lahaina on the island of Maui, Hawaii, only six houses have been rebuilt—six out of more than 2,000.Why is the recovery effort taking so long? Initially, the biggest hurdles were the pace of debris removal and damage litigation. Both were overcome only last month. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers cleared the final lots on February 19, while the Hawaiian Supreme Court ruled that a $4 billion settlement for victims can begin to move forward. The main challenge now is dealing with a crushing permitting regime that slows or outright bans construction. But local political dysfunction has discouraged state and local leaders from taking emergency action to cut through this red tape... A still unresolved issue is that many historic structures remain illegal to rebuild under modern zoning laws.
- To whom did the 6 rebuilt houses belong and how did they avoid the impediments that block everyone else?
Horseshit
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Is dark energy getting weaker? Fresh data bolster shock finding
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One chef. 30 pizzas a night. Inside the Bay Area's most eccentric pizzeria
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From an evolutionary perspective, the primary goal of anger is to influence another person’s behavior or decisions, aiming to change how they perceive and treat us.
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Adolescence reveals a terrifying truth: smartphones are poison for boys' minds
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Companies chose to save cash from tax cuts rather than invest it into growth
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Are fantasy games like Dungeons and Dragons a cure for US's loneliness epidemic?
celebrity gossip
Rank Propaganda / Thought Policing / World Disordering
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New York Times is Explaining Psyops Now - Defender’s Corner
they’re analyzing a smear campaign that a Hollywood actor (Justin Baldoni) paid for to discredit the work of his collaborator (Blake Lively). The most notable part is that they’re describing the existence of secretive companies you can pay to perform “narrative engineering”, and how genuinely effective it is
I was on the edge of my seat throughout the whole episode: will this be self aware? Will they call out how often journalists themselves use these tactics? They stop just shy of admitting it, but I was VERY pleased that they made this connection to politics explicit, saying, “if this happens in Hollywood, imagine how much of what we consume online is being manipulated to serve one interest or another” (where the stakes are much higher, and there’s much greater incentive)
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Can people be persuaded not to believe disinformation?
- If you manage; have you not just swapped yourself in for whatever idol they were following before?
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Ex-NSA boss: Election security focus helped dissuade Russian meddling with US
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GamerGate foreshadowed the toxic hellscape that the internet has now become
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Legal group seeks info on universities’ role in ‘censorship-industrial complex.’
Bluesky
Musk
Electric / Self Driving cars
Religion / Tribal / Culture War and Re-Segregation
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The Great Hobby Lobby Artifact Heist - by Meghan Boilard
Whatever the case, the sudden appearance of a prolific private collector with unlimited funds and a disregard for the rules that tether secular-minded clientele shook the artifact market as a whole. As soon as the search began, Carroll and the Greens found bargain price tags affixed to one-of-a-kind treasures that more fastidious curators deemed suspect. Each new addition further fueled fantasies of a grand establishment capable of redeeming even the most cynical of souls. The team set on manifesting an unrivaled bible museum went to great, albeit highly unconventional, lengths to procure impressive items to fill future halls. Roberta Mazza has shared a significant amount of evidence suggesting that one artifact, at the very least, came directly from an eBay listing. Carroll found himself deconstructing Egyptian death masks in kitchen sinks in farfetched hopes that the cartonnage14 itself might have been constructed with papyrus scraps tangentially related to holy scriptures.
Edumacationalizing / Acedemia Nuts
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What's Happening to Students? - by Ted Gioia
First of all the kids have no ability to be bored whatsoever. They live on their phones. And they’re just fed a constant stream of dopamine from the minute their eyes wake up in the morning until they go to sleep at night. Because they are in a constant state of dopamine withdrawal at school, they behave like addicts. They’re super emotional. The smallest things set them off. When you are standing in front of them trying to teach, they’re vacant. They have no ability to tune in…. They’re not there. And they have a level of apathy that I’ve never seen before in my whole career. Punishments don’t work because they don’t care about them. They don’t care about grades. They don’t care about college.
Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising
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Fandom and the multimillion dollar business of monetizing volunteer work
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Minecraft is getting a visual overhaul you probably don't need
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California bill would force ISPs to offer 100Mbps plans for $15 a month
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Humming along in an old church, the Internet Archive is more relevant than ever
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Lapham’s Quarterly Announces New Stewardship | Lapham’s Quarterly
Lapham’s Quarterly, the celebrated journal of history and ideas founded by the late editor and journalist Lewis H. Lapham, will relaunch under the stewardship of Bard College and its Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities in 2025. With Bard College’s guidance, the Quarterly will resume publication with an editorial team that works closely with longtime contributors, supporters, and the broader literary community.
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Despite evidence, Oracle Cloud denies break-in as pilfered info goes on sale
TechSuck / Geek Bait
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A USB interface to the "Mother of All Demos" keyset
Engelbart claimed that learning a keyset wasn't difficult—a six-year-old kid could learn it in less than a week—but I'm not willing to invest much time into learning it. In my brief use of the keyset, I found it very difficult to use physically. Pressing four keys at once is difficult, with the worst being all fingers except the ring finger. Combining this with a mouse button or two at the same time gave me the feeling that I was sight-reading a difficult piano piece. Maybe it becomes easier with use, but I noticed that Alto programs tended to treat the keyset as function keys, rather than a mechanism for typing with chords.
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The Mysterious Mindscape Music Board
the 1985 Mindscape Music Board, which was an add-on ISA card that came bundled with Glen Clancy’s Bank Street Music Writer software for IBM PC. it enabled the output of six voices, mapped to six instruments in the software. Outside of this use this card saw no use, however, and it would fade into obscurity along with the software that it was originally bundled with. Only four cards are said to still exist
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I want a good parallel computer | Raph Levien’s blog
The GPU in your computer is about 10 to 100 times more powerful than the CPU, depending on workload. For real-time graphics rendering and machine learning, you are enjoying that power, and doing those workloads on a CPU is not viable. Why aren’t we exploiting that power for other workloads? What prevents a GPU from being a more general purpose computer? I believe there are two main things holding it back. One is an impoverished execution model, which makes certain tasks difficult or impossible to do efficiently; GPUs excel at big blocks of data with predictable shape, such as dense matrix multiplication, but struggle when the workload is dynamic. Second, our languages and tools are inadequate. Programming a parallel computer is just a lot harder. Modern GPUs are also extremely complex, and getting more so rapidly. New features such as mesh shaders and work graphs are two steps forward one step back; for each new capability there is a basic task that isn’t fully supported.
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RDNA 4's "Out-of-Order" Memory Accesses - by Chester Lam
AMD's presentation hints that RDNA 3 and older GPUs had multiple waves sharing a memory access queue. As mentioned above, AMD GPUs since GCN handle memory dependencies with hardware counters that software waits on. By keeping vmcnt returns in-order, the compiler can wait on the specific load that produces data needed by the next instruction, without also waiting on every other load the wave has pending. RDNA 3 and prior AMD GPUs possibly had a shared memory access queue, with each entry tagged with its wave's ID. As each memory access leaves the queue in-order, hardware decrements the counter for its wave. Perhaps RDNA 4 divides the shared queue into per-thread queues. That would align with the point on AMD's slide saying RDNA 4 introduces "additional out-of-order queues" for memory requests. Or perhaps RDNA 4 retains a shared queue, but can drain entries out-of-order. That would require tracking extra info, like whether a memory access is the oldest one for its wave.
AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World
Space / Boomy Zoomers / UFO
Crypto con games
Economicon / Business / Finance
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She's Accused of Duping JPMorgan. Somehow, the Bank Is Feeling the Heat
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How did we do? Fine until you asked
The feedback experience is just horrible,” says David Solana, co-founder of a customer experience management platform called Opinator. He says a deluge of impersonal, time-eating, poorly designed surveys means that he meets potential clients with customer response rates that rarely exceed 20 per cent and are sometimes below 2 per cent. On top of survey fatigue, the responses that businesses do receive can be heavily skewed, because the one time when people are eager to give feedback is when things have gone wrong.
- "Feedback opportunities" feel like pissing in the ocean: personally satisfying but no positive impact is expected.
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Elephants remember: companies using "block lists" to not rehire some employees
Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making
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Obviously, legacy media will oppose nearly every move made by a Republican administration, let alone by the Bad Orange Man and his First Bro, Elon. But conservative platforms also are sounding the alarm. National Review warns Elon Musk to “Cut Spending by Using the Law, Not by Breaking It.” Jonathan V. Last of The Bulwark stokes fears about “The Illegality of DOGE.” Fellow Weekly Standard alum Stephen Hayes points out “The Downside of DOGE,” despite the fact that he praised government gridlock in 2013 because it forced Washington to deal with the national debt. The debt in 2013? A paltry $16.7 trillion. Today it clocks in at more than twice that.
Trump
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Statement of Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche on Investigation into Intelligence Leak
“The Justice Department is opening a criminal investigation relating to the selective leak of inaccurate, but nevertheless classified, information from the Intelligence Community relating to Tren de Aragua (TDA). We will not tolerate politically motivated efforts by the Deep State to undercut President Trump’s agenda by leaking false information onto the pages of their allies at the New York Times. The Alien Enemies Proclamation is supported by fact, law, and common sense, which we will establish in court and then expel the TDA terrorists from this country.”
Left Angst
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'Sesame Street' Faces Uncertain Future Amid Funding Cuts and Layoffs
- Children's Television Workshop has made enough money off the show's ancillary marketing to fund it for the next century. As if we needed them to propagandize our children more.
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From lack of illegal immigrants: Pennsylvania's mushroom industry faces urgent labor shortage
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Immigrants pay 19.2% of taxes in the United States, more than $650B
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With New Decree, Trump Threatens Lawyers and Law Firms - The New York Times
President Trump broadened his campaign of retaliation against lawyers he dislikes with a new memorandum that threatens to use government power to punish any law firms that, in his view, unfairly challenge his administration. The memorandum directs the heads of the Justice and Homeland Security Departments to “seek sanctions against attorneys and law firms who engage in frivolous, unreasonable and vexatious litigation against the United States” or in matters that come before federal agencies. Vanita Gupta, who as a civil rights lawyer and a former Justice Department official has both sued the government and defended it in court, said Mr. Trump’s memo “attacks the very foundations of our legal system by threatening and intimidating litigants who aim to hold our government accountable to the law and the Constitution.”
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We ran the wrong headline about Trump firing the FTC commissioners | The Verge
This is a pretty typical dynamic when the news hedges, equivocates, or neuters its language in the face of an ongoing legal dispute or uncertain outcome. Some news outlets do this reflexively as a general philosophy; it’s why infamous phrases like “officer-involved shooting” and “racially tinged” are so common in the media. At The Verge, we try to call things as they are — up to a certain point. There are journalistic ethics and legal limitations that will leave us sounding ludicrously cautious in many situations. This situation, however, should not have been one of them, but the extraordinary weirdness of what happened caught us flat-footed.
there are no facts in dispute when it comes to the firings of Alvaro Bedoya and Rebecca Kelly Slaughter. There is not even a dispute about whether specific cases or laws are applicable for this situation versus others. The only thing that is in dispute is whether Humphrey’s Executor is valid law. And this SCOTUS — stacked with three Trump-appointed justices — has shown all-too-ready willingness to overturn long-standing precedent, like Roe v. Wade and Chevron. Its deference to Trump, specifically, and the court’s permissive treatment of the January 6 insurrection is even more alarming. It seems that Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito want a king — at least, their wives do.
That’s the rub: we live in what is left of our society after Trump v. US, where the Supreme Court expanded presidential immunity to an outrageous, insensible degree. The things the president does in his official capacity as president are not crimes; it is increasingly clear that the Trump administration has taken this to mean that law isn’t real.
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DOGE cuts are screwing up summer travel plans at national parks
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Trump administration's blockchain plan for USAID is a real head-scratcher
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Pentagon announces leak investigation that will include polygraphs
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America Is Watching the Rise of a Dual State - The Atlantic
we are witnessing the birth of a new dual state. The U.S. has long had a normative state. That system was always imperfect. Our criminal-justice system, for example, sweeps in far too many people, for far too little security in exchange. Even so, it is recognizably part of the normative state. What the Trump administration and its allies are trying to build now, however, is not. The list of measures purpose-built to cleave off a domain in which the law does not apply grows by the day: the pardons that bless and invite insurrectionary violence; the purges of career lawyers at the Justice Department and in the Southern District of New York, inspectors general across the government, and senior FBI agents; the attorney general’s command that lawyers obey the president over their own understanding of the Constitution; the appointment of people such as Kash Patel and Dan Bongino, who seem to view their loyalty to the president as more compelling than their constitutional oath; the president’s declaration that he and the attorney general are the sole authoritative interpreters of federal law for the executive branch; the transformation of ordinary spending responsibilities into discretionary tools to punish partisan foes; the stripping of security clearances from perceived enemies and opponents; the threat of criminal prosecutions for speech deemed unfavorable by the president; and the verbal attacks on judges for enforcing the law.
The singular aim of these tactics is to construct a prerogative state where cruel caprice, not law, rules. By no measure does the extent of federal law displaced in the first few months of the Trump administration compare with the huge tracts of the Weimar’s legal system eviscerated by the Nazis. But it is striking how Donald Trump’s executive orders reject some basic tenets of American constitutionalism—such as Congress’s power to impose binding rules on how spending and regulation unfold—without which the normative state cannot persist.
- Tempted to draw parallels with Biden's "student loan" tricks, which somehow were not dire examples of executive over-reach and threats to the Constitutional order.
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Immigrants to Share Their Social Media Handles When Applying for Citizenship
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Admin wants to build more ships in the United States. It's not so simple
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MSNBC: Segregationist Trump Has Ushered In A New Era Of Jim Crow
Law Breaking / Police / Internal Security
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FBI agent charged with disclosing confidential information | Fox News
Johnathan Buma, a 15-year FBI veteran, was arrested as he was getting ready to board an international flight at John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York City, an arrest affidavit stated. Buma is accused of printing about 130 files of classified FBI documents and messages and later sharing the material with associates for a book he was writing about his career at the bureau. "The book draft contained information that BUMA obtained through his position as an FBI Special Agent that relates to the FBI's efforts and investigations into a foreign country's weapons of mass destruction (‘WMD’) program," according to the court document. "On November 2, 2023, BUMA wrote an email to various personal associates assisting him in negotiating a book deal with a publishing company."
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U.S. border officials have caught more people with eggs than fentanyl this year
External Security / Militaria / Diplomania
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Hegseth beefs up Middle East warship presence with 2 aircraft carriers
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, in a rare move, is beefing up the Navy warship presence in the Middle East, ordering two aircraft carriers to be there next month as the U.S. increases strikes on the Yemen-based Houthi rebels, according to a U.S. official. It will be the second time in six months that the U.S. has kept two carrier strike groups in that region, with generally only one there. Prior to that, it had been years since the U.S. had committed that much warship power to the Middle East.
According to the official, Hegseth signed orders on Thursday to keep the carrier Harry S. Truman in the Middle East for at least an additional month. The official spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss ongoing military operations. The ship has been conducting operations in the Red Sea against the Houthis and was scheduled to begin heading home to Norfolk, Virginia, at the end of March. And Hegseth has ordered the carrier Carl Vinson, which has been operating in the Pacific, to begin steaming toward the Middle East, which will extend its scheduled deployment by three months.
Hegseth’s move shifts the Vinson and its warships away from the Indo-Pacific region, which the Trump administration has touted as its main focus.
World
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(Mar 2024) Secret RCMP report warns Canadians may revolt,when they know how broke they are
coming period of recession will … accelerate the decline in living standards that the younger generations have already witnessed compared to earlier generations,” reads the report, entitled Whole-of-Government Five-Year Trends for Canada. For example, many Canadians under 35 are unlikely ever to be able to buy a place to live,” it adds.
China
Health / Medicine
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This recall is isolated to a limited quantity of batches of the following items: Lean Cuisine® Butternut Squash Ravioli, Lean Cuisine® Spinach Artichoke Ravioli, Lean Cuisine® Lemon Garlic Shrimp Stir Fry, and STOUFFER’S® Party Size Chicken Lasagna that were produced between August 2024-March 2025. These products were distributed at major retailers in the U.S. between September 2024-March 2025. This recall does not involve any other Lean Cuisine® or STOUFFER’S® products.
- 6 months of production of contaminated packages?
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The Longevity Business Is Booming–and Its Scientists Are Clashing
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Anthem Blue Cross 'refusing to' help NYC crack down on soaring health care costs
Pox / COVID / BioTerror AgitProp
Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda
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North American spider species alters its webs to deal with urban noise pollution
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When a mammal holds its breath, the amount of oxygen in the body begins to decrease, while the amount of carbon dioxide steadily climbs. In humans low levels of oxygen mostly do not ring any alarm bells on their own—it is high levels of carbon dioxide that eventually produce the unpleasant urge to breathe. As seals dive more frequently—and for longer—than humans do, the range of carbon dioxide in their bodies varies more widely. That led Chris McKnight, a marine biologist at the University of St Andrews, to wonder if the animals could also sense oxygen. To test the idea, he and his team placed six wild-caught seals in a tank which included an underwater feeding station at one end and a “breathing chamber”, in which the seals could pop up to breathe, at the other. The air in that chamber was then set to one of four conditions: normal air (21% oxygen and 0.04% carbon dioxide, plus other gases); air with reduced oxygen (11%); elevated oxygen (50%); and elevated carbon dioxide (8%). If the seals were, like humans, more sensitive to carbon dioxide, their behaviour would be identical in all but the final condition. The results suggested otherwise. When there was more oxygen, the seals extended their dives by an average of 14 seconds. When there was less oxygen, they shortened them by roughly half a minute. The high carbon dioxide condition, by contrast, produced no statistically significant effect. In other words, the seals seemed able to perceive how much oxygen they had left and then adjust their dives. Dr McKnight believes that this ability may be common to marine mammals and other diving species, and could have evolved as an important defence against drowning.
- Hold your breath for 30sec. Do you feel an increasing need to breathe? Why wouldn't aquatic mammals share and make use of this facility?
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Chicago-Sized Iceberg Hid Ancient Ecosystem, Scientists Reveal
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LA firefighters put out blazes. Now they worry they may have cancer
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Global chocolate supply is limited by low pollination and high temperatures