2025-03-27
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(Jan 2025) Dittemore’s Law – Casey Handmer's blog
Pournelle’s iron law of bureaucracy states that “In any bureaucracy, the people devoted to the benefit of the bureaucracy itself always get in control and those dedicated to the goals that the bureaucracy is supposed to accomplish have less and less influence, and sometimes are eliminated entirely.”
I think this is one mechanism by which Dittemore’s Law can occur. Within NASA there are plenty of dissenting voices, critical voices, skeptical voices, but the mission assurance apparatus overseen by Ron Dittemore and his colleagues in senior management, as described in various accident investigation reports, systematically sidelined information that conflicted with the desired outcome. But Dittemore’s Law can occur in relatively unbureaucratic places too, such as small team start up companies, failing marriages, and even with an individual unable to halt self-sabotage – think the Streisand Effect.
The coordination problem is a known hard problem, which has beset humanity at least since we first started to build pyramids. Getting large groups of people to work together on a shared collective enterprise is very unnatural and very difficult. Thousands of books have been written on the subject. The entire professional managerial class exists to try to solve this problem, with a track record best described, charitably, as a bloody stalemate.
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Iceland's Covid Baby Surge: Why Third Births Jumped 38% Among Educated Women
Horseshit
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The Ford Executive Who Kept Score of Colleagues' Verbal Flubs
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Online Casinos That Can Operate as Long as They Say They Aren't Casinos
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Why are a growing number of airlines banning power banks on flights?
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Gen Z on why they stopped trusting experts in favor of influencers on TikTok
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The long-awaited Friend Compound laws in California
the basic idea is this: + Step 1: Buy a home with a large lot + Step 2: Subdivide it into smaller lots (up to 10!) + Step 3: Sell the new lots to friends + Step 4: Friends build their own homes
Why this is so powerful is that people can get their own individual loans and sell/exit their own homes. No more tricky co-ownership arrangements with multiple people on a loan. And it means that one “sponsor” (in this case Kristen and I) can get something going without having to fund the capital for a whole big project.
- if you control the financing, you can ensure that only "frens" get to co-own the compound. If you do not control the financing, you've recapitulated the subdivision and HOA. this kind of adventure breaks up families in my experience, "friend" groups are not strong enough to get anything built.
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Clothes dryers and the bottom line: Switching to air drying can save hundreds
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Sports Illustrated to Roll Out Athletics-Linked Wagers Market
celebrity gossip
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Top 50 Nick Fuentes Pedophile Scandals
This 33,000-word exposé is the most in-depth investigation ever conducted into Nick Fuentes’ media empire. It draws on leaks, public records, and interviews with ex-girlfriends, ex-employees, streamers, FBI informants, catboys, police chiefs, and a Catholic priest, to uncover 50 interconnected Groyper scandals ranging from grooming, child pornography, revenge pornography, and pedophilia to swatting, doxxing, drug trafficking, crypto scams, tax fraud, rape, brainwashing, mental illness, mass shootings, election interference, foreign interference, and domestic terrorism. The Groypers operate like a cult, targeting young conservatives grappling with autism, trauma, or sexual identity, and grooming them into unwavering loyalty to wealthy, older gay men who exploit them for sexual gain, blackmail, and kompromat.
- "Who?" Nick Fuentes - Wikipedia
an American far-right political pundit, activist, and live streamer who promotes white supremacist, misogynistic, and antisemitic views. Fuentes has promoted antisemitic conspiracy theories against Jews and called for a "holy war" against them, and has denied the Holocaust. He has been described as a neo-Nazi by various sources.
Rank Propaganda / Thought Policing / World Disordering
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Dems Have No Problem With The Censorship Industrial Complex
Democrats had a tough time at a Senate Judiciary subcommittee hearing yesterday on the censorship industrial complex. They had to argue there was never any censorship during the Biden administration (including during Covid!) and that free speech and freedom of the press were never threatened by the partnership of government agencies with private institutions to combat “disinformation.” After all, the government was just trying to catch foreign disinformation operations, they argued, so any censorship that did happen was necessary and proper. Put another way, the censorship industrial complex never happened — and if it did it was a good thing and the targets deserved it.
Released in tranches to a group of journalists shortly after Elon Musk bought Twitter in 2022, the Twitter Files exposed a coordinated and sustained effort by the intelligence community to co-opt and deputize social media platforms like Twitter into censoring American citizens. Basically, it was a scheme to allow the government to censor Americans in a way that would have been straightforwardly unconstitutional if the feds had tried to do it directly.
Musk
Religion / Tribal / Culture War and Re-Segregation
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The families allege that as Hamas launched its brutal attack, where the terror group killed about 1,200 people and kidnapped 251 others, it put out a message abroad for it’s supporters to “join the battle in any way they can.” The lawsuit accuses Khalil, Kiswani, Alwan and Jones of taking up the call and preparing to launch anti-Israel rallies at Columbia University. “Associational Defendants have distributed pro-terror propaganda produced by and literally stamped with the logo of the ‘Hamas Media Office,’ ” the filing claims.
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Secret CIA files claim Ark of the Covenant has been found
The CIA conducted experiments in the 1980s with individuals who claimed they could perceive information about distant objects, events or other people. The report details one of these tests where Remote Viewer No. 032 was given coordinates to locate a target, and they described the Ark of the Covenant hiding in the Middle East.
Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising
AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World
Space / Boomy Zoomers / UFO
Economicon / Business / Finance
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Dollar Tree to Sell Family Dollar Business for $1 Billion - WSJ
- "Dollar Tree purchased Family Dollar in 2015 for about $8.5 billion"
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Jack Dorsey's Block to lay off nearly 1k workers in another reorganization
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Access to 'gig economy' may reduce reliance on credit, unemployment insurance
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Airline Demand Between Canada and United States Collapses, Down 70%+
Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making
Trump
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will Signal fall from grace as Tesla did? Nothing approved of by Trump can be good for Good Liberals.
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Trump Signs Historic Executive Order To Help Secure U.S. Elections
In order for states to receive federal funds for elections, they will be required to comply with “integrity measures set forth by Federal law, including the requirement that states use the national mail voter registration form that will now require proof of citizenship,” the document said. “The Order improves the integrity of elections by directing the updating of the Voluntary Voting System Guidelines 2.0 and security standards for voting equipment and prioritizing federal grant funds accordingly,” the administration said. “This includes requiring a voter-verifiable paper ballot record and not using ballots in which the counted vote is contained within a barcode or QR code.”
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U.S. Prosecutors Probe Tip About Timing of Pfizer Vaccine (Archive)
Soon after President Trump won the presidential election in November, British drugmaker GSK brought an unusual claim to federal prosecutors in Manhattan, according to people familiar with the matter. A senior GSK scientist, who formerly worked at rival Pfizer, had told GSK colleagues that Pfizer delayed announcing the success of its Covid vaccine in 2020 until after that year’s election.
The scientist disputes that account of what he told colleagues. But prosecutors are taking a closer look at what GSK shared with them, which is potentially politically explosive. Trump for years has claimed that Pfizer sat on the positive results of clinical trials, which could have reflected well on his management of the pandemic. There has never been evidence to support the accusation, and the development of the Covid vaccines is widely viewed as a medical miracle, coming faster than any other vaccine in history. The U.S. attorney’s office in Manhattan has interviewed at least two people in connection with the allegation, including a GSK executive who took notes of a conversation with the former Pfizer scientist, according to one of the people familiar with the matter.
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Trump announces 25% tariffs on imported cars, ratcheting up global trade war
Democrats
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‘Fear and anger’: California town halls are not going well for Democrats, either.
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Katherine Maher, a progressive who previously headed Wikipedia before starting at NPR last year, made the admission after being grilled relentlessly by Marjorie Taylor Greene on Capitol Hill about the broadcaster's alleged bias. 'I do want to say that NPR acknowledges we were mistaken in failing to cover the Hunter Biden laptop story more aggressively or sooner,' Maher said Wednesday, at a hearing centered around whether NPR should receive federal funding.
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Team Biden's Mistreatment of a Pliant Press Corps
Michael LaRosa was Jill Biden’s press secretary for the first 18 months of Biden’s presidency, and in recent weeks he’s loosened his lips about how Team Joe mistreated a pliant press corps.
LaRosa said Joe’s handlers insisted they had to pre-approve the quotes used in stories. That’s helping shape the story, not something an “independent journalist” would accept. LaRosa added “you saw them get caught trying to script questions to radio reporters" last summer. They didn’t just “try.” The radio hosts the Bidenites selected were happy to use the pre-scripted questions. LaRosa added: “It was very reminiscent to me of being on the campaign in 2020, where these young press staffers in these states like New Hampshire, or Iowa, or Nevada, they were sort of like dog trained to make the questions conditional for interviews.” Questions had to be submitted for approval.
Left Angst
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Momentum seems to be building for Jared Isaacman to become NASA administrator
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After Trump's decree: fight for US funding for Tor, F-Droid and Let's Encrypt
- I would trust all of these more with less government funding.
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German electrical engineer with green card stripped and 'violently interrogated'
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DOGE staffer,'Big Balls', provided tech support to cybercrime ring, records show
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How the Social Security Administration is dodging a federal court order
As required by the TRO, the SSA submitted a status report on Monday, certifying that "SSA has taken all necessary steps to implement the Court’s Order" and "revoked all SSA DOGE Team members’ access to SSA systems of records." The status report did note that "SSA may continue work on" projects that "SSA DOGE Team members previously led or worked on" but "without the SSA DOGE Team members’ involvement." The status report also added the caveat that "Acting Commissioner, [then-CIO Michael] Russo, and other SSA employees may continue to access SSA records for other official SSA duties." The next day, the agency replaced Russo with Coulter, who was previously a member of the SSA DOGE Team. It is unlikely that the timing was accidental. By naming Coulter SSA's CIO, the administration appears to be attempting to transform Coulter from a member of the DOGE Team to a regular SSA employee. What does this mean? Despite the court order, someone who, until Tuesday, was identified as a member of the DOGE Team can continue to access sensitive personal information at SSA. And Coulter can use that sensitive information to continue the same projects that were previously led by DOGE. Those projects may even be done by the same people, who presumably could be hired onto SSA's staff by the agency's new CIO.
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Florida debates lifting some child labor laws to fill jobs vacated by immigrants
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Vaccine skeptic hired to head federal study of immunizations and autism
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Kentucky governor vetoes bill ending DEI in state’s higher ed, calls his veto an ‘act of love.’
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US VP JD Vance admits West wants Global South trapped at bottom of value chain
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An honest look at how weather balloon launch cuts should impact forecasting
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Consumer Protection Bureau's Probes of Big Tech and Finance Firms Freeze Up
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Democrats' Attack on Section 230 Plays Right into Trump's Censorial Plans
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Trump Admin Plans to Cut Team Responsible for Critical Atomic Measurement Data
Law Breaking / Police / Internal Security
External Security / Militaria / Diplomania
World
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RSF condemns China state-backed smear campaign against French journalists
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British govt wants to mainline AI, but its arteries are clogged with legacy tech
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Italy pursues payment from Meta, X and LinkedIn in landmark tax case
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TfL bans most e-bikes on trains amid concern over igniting batteries
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A Fire Plunged Heathrow into Darkness. A Nearby Data Center Kept Humming. Why?