2025-04-06
etc
Horseshit
-
We find that total horse welfare, including when adjusting for population, peaked in 2000 and has stayed high since. That means that, under our best guess of the population’s happiness, both the average and total welfare was maximized in the early 21st century. Population adjusted welfare peaked in 2000, and remains higher today than at any point in the 20th century.
-
Are porn algorithms feeding a generation of paedophiles – or creating one?
-
Molly Russell: Meta and Pinterest make secret charity donation
Instagram's owner Meta and Pinterest have made significant donations to a charity set up in the name of 14-year-old Molly Russell, the BBC understands. Molly, from Harrow in northwest London, took her own life in 2017 after being exposed to a stream of suicide and self-harm content on the two platforms. A coroner concluded the negative effects of online material contributed to her death. The donations are thought to have gone to the Molly Rose Foundation, which campaigns for internet safety. Meta and Pinterest declined to comment. Molly's family said they had decided not to take legal action against the tech companies and would "never accept compensation" over Molly's death.
-
Anti-Poverty Groups ID Property Taxes as Culprit in Affordable Housing Shortage
-
Kawasaki Reveals Four-Legged Robot You Can Ride Like a Horse
-
YouTuber leaves can of Coke for isolated tribe and gets arrested
celebrity gossip
Rank Propaganda / Thought Policing / World Disordering
-
On the Importance of Fact-Checking
Everywhere Daisey looked, he claimed to have seen evidence of corporate disregard for worker welfare. Some laborers shake from exposure to n-hexane, a toxic chemical used to clean the screens of Apple devices. An elderly ex-worker proffers a hand mangled, Daisey says, during the manufacturing of an iPad case. Because there are few iPads in China, Daisey shows the worker his. The man’s eyes light up. According to Daisey, he told Cathy: “It’s a kind of magic.” “Mr. Daisey and the Apple Factory” is mesmerizing and flawlessly produced. It became the most-downloaded episode of This American Life. There was only one problem. In almost every salient detail, the story was a fabrication.
Glass might never have learned that he’d been bamboozled had not Rob Schmitz, at the time a reporter for Marketplace in Shanghai, listened to “Mr. Daisey and the Apple Factory” and realized that key parts of it (Chinese private security guards are prohibited by law from carrying firearms) are untrue. At the suggestion of an executive at American Public Media, the then-distributor of both Marketplace and TAL, Schmitz called Glass, and Glass engaged him to investigate the entire broadcast.
- Apple swings longer Ira Glass, so they got a retraction. Other egregious lies making up their stories do not get corrected. Comments on this story are full of people unable to process the idea that NPR lied to them even a decade and more ago; it must have been coverup paid for by Apple.
Musk
-
Rock smashes through Tesla windshield, injures pregnant woman: B.C. police - Cloverdale Reporter
The woman was a passenger in a grey 2022 Tesla that was travelling northbound on Nanaimo Street in the evening of March 30. As the vehicle passed East 27th Avenue, a two-pound rock smashed through the windshield and hit the woman before landing on the vehicle's floorboard. She was injured, but is now recovering. The Vancouver Police Department says investigators are working to determine whether it was a criminal act, and if someone intentionally targeted the Tesla.
Vancouver police previously said that between Jan. 1 and March 21, 2025, there have been "eight confirmed acts of mischief in Vancouver that police believe are politically motivated and in opposition to Tesla owner Elon Musk's political affiliation with the U.S. government."
Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising
-
iPhones Could Cost Up to $2,300 in the U.S. Due to Tariffs, Analyst Says
-
only 13% of UK games professionals are from working class backgrounds, a figure Cassidy has said would be closer 37% if it reflected society as a whole. It's a complex issue, but Cassidy's work starts in a simple place: letting working class young people understand that there's a place for them in games to begin with.
-
as are most metrics: 'Views' Are Lies
-
PhysX and Flow GPU Source Code Now Available
Since the release of PhysX SDK 4.0 in December 2018, NVIDIA PhysX has been available as open source under the BSD-3 license—with one key exception: the GPU simulation kernel source code was not included. That changes today. We’re excited to share that the latest update to the PhysX SDK now includes all the GPU source code, fully licensed under BSD-3! In addition, we’re also open-sourcing the full GPU compute shader implementation of the Flow SDK, our real-time, sparse grid–based fluid simulation library.
- "someone please update this shit for us" ... Can't recall ever having seen PhysX used in anger.
-
The TikTok ban is losing support among Americans, study says
TechSuck / Geek Bait
-
The rift among the two types of programmers, Craftsmen and Vibe Coders, will keep growing. As with someone, able-bodied, who faces the decision of taking the elevator or the stairs, knowing the impacts on fitness and cardio-vascular health, each programmer now faces the decision of how much to delegate to an AI or craft by hand.
- Code generators and "4GL" were gonna make programmers obsolete, too. These illusory fads are intended, I think, to get the older, more senior programmers out of the industry, replacing them with younger dipshits who don't get paid as much. People who have experience enough to take pride in their work are more difficult to manage and use in stock scam fundraising.
-
Aversion to History: A PKZIP/Wikipedia Story
What bothers me is the wholesale act of deleting a large amount of information after it has already been created, without making any effort to first summarize that information (as the guidelines specifically suggest) or even alerting the Wikipedia community that there are issues with it.
in fact, I did recently create an account on Wikipedia with that thought in mind, but that was just the first step in a long process. After signing up, Wikipedia wanted me to spend a certain amount of time editing other articles first, learning the ropes, reading the guidelines, etc. Perhaps I could have immediately jumped to the PKZIP page and clicked “undo” on the “Version history” deletion, but even if that had been allowed, that seemed a little too passive-aggressive. t’s much easier for me to just write whatever I want on my own website – adhering at all times to the strictest of guidelines, of course.
AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World
Space / Boomy Zoomers / UFO
-
NASA seeks proposals for two private astronaut missions to ISS
-
SpaceX, ULA, Blue Origin win $13.7B in US Military launch contracts through 2029
-
Satellite Internet Is About to Lift Off | Marcus by Goldman Sachs®
Global satellite operators have submitted or announced 70,000 satellite plans for LEO, which are due to launch in 2025-2031. Chinese players are active, with at least three operators having submitted applications for mega-constellations of more than 10,000 satellites.
Crypto con games
Economicon / Business / Finance
-
Trump's Tariffs Wipe Out over $6T on Wall Street in Epic Two-Day Rout
-
Nissan eyes shifting Rogue production to U.S. due to tariffs
-
Oil in Freefall Reorders Energy Landscape From US to Middle East - Bloomberg
Brent crude, the global benchmark, tumbled 13% through Thursday and Friday to just over $66 a barrel, casting new doubts on Trump’s quest to aggressively boost US fossil fuel output and achieve “energy dominance.” Across the Atlantic, the sell-off is poised to ease soaring energy costs in Europe but also squeeze Middle Eastern petrostates. lready the oil market is tossing aside expectations for 2025. Goldman Sachs Group Inc., one of Wall Street’s long-standing crude bulls, cut its year-end price forecast on Thursday for Brent crude by $5, to $66 a barrel. Enverus has slashed more than a third from its demand-growth model. UBS Group AG, which at the start of the year forecast global demand would grow by 1.1 million barrels per day, is now cutting that up to nearly 50%.
Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making
-
Private Jets, Ferraris, and False Claims: Inside An Obscure Federal Program Rife With Fraud
The trip to the Caymans was the last junket Ansted took before he was busted for fraud in 2018 by the Federal Communications Commission, which found that he had paid for his lavish lifestyle, including the jet and Ferrari, by embezzling millions from the agency’s Universal Service Fund (USF), a little-known program that subsidizes phone and internet access for low-income customers.
Trump
-
With High Tariffs, Has Trump Ended or Revived Neoliberalism?
Business journalists, Wall Street financiers, and economists are in disbelief that Trump actually did what he said he would do, which is to erect giant tariff walls around the U.S. It’s a shocking audacious plan, an attempt to address a big and obvious problem, which is America’s inability to make vital goods we need. As I noted on Sunday, the system we’re in - neoliberalism - is designed around having living standards oriented around raising the value of financial assets through bubbles and design/finance instead of building physical things and selling them for profit. Imports and offshoring were a huge piece of neoliberalism, providing the cheap flat screen TVs that justified losing entire communities. But is Trump breaking from that system, or is he just smashing whatever he can in the name of populism, and thus justifying a revenge tour from Wall Street?
-
Elon Musk hopes for 'zero-tariff situation' between US and EU
Democrats
-
I see a number of people posting favorable, even sycophantic, comments about Cory Booker’s marathon speech in the well of the Senate. He was filibustering NOTHING. There was nothing going on. He just decided to talk for over 24 hours. Oh, and the record for filibuster that he supposedly broke with his non-filibuster? The DEMOCRATS filibuster of the 1964 CIVIL RIGHTS ACT. That’s right. Yes, Booker is a member of the party that tried to stop passage of the landmark civil rights act and founded the KKK. Yes, a large of the anti-Semitic sentiment in this country originates with the Democratic Party. They are the party of resistance to Reconstruction after the Civil War. They hated the Republicans for freeing the slaves. They founded the KKK to keep freed slaves “in line” and began the first gun-control movements in order to prevent blacks from owning guns. All of the party planks you support were all conceived in the name of white, anti-semitic supremacy by the Democratic party.
Left Angst
-
U.S. military aims to turn island bird refuge into SpaceX rocket site
-
Trump's Tariff Formula Makes No Economic Sense. It's Also Based on an Error
-
Countries Targeted by Trump's Tariffs May Strike Back at U.S. Services
-
PC prices up at least 20%: Trump Tariffs may hurt U.S. system integrators most
-
Buffett denies media rumors after Trump shares claim investor backs president
-
Trump officials move to reverse bans on toxic "forever chemicals"
-
Doge Is Planning a Hackathon at the IRS. It Wants Easier Access to Taxpayer Data
-
FEMA moves to end one of its biggest disaster adaptation programs
-
Beyond accountability: How the left finds release in an age of rage
There is a counter-constitutional movement building in law schools and across the country. And although Mystal has not advocated violence, some on the left are turning to political violence and criminal acts. It is part of the “righteous rage” that many of them see as absolving them from the basic demands not only of civility but of legality. hey are part of a rising class of American Jacobins — bourgeois revolutionaries increasingly prepared to trash everything, from cars to the Constitution.
affluent liberal shoppers admitted that they are shoplifting from Whole Foods to strike back at Jeff Bezos for working with the Trump administration and moving the Washington Post back to the political center. They are also enraged at Mark Zuckerberg for restoring free speech protections at Meta. ne “20-something communications professional” in Washington explained “If a billionaire can steal from me, I can scrape a little off the top, too.” These affluent shoplifters portrayed themselves as Robin Hoods.
-
Follow the Science: Why Peter Marks Was Asked to Leave the FDA
We have been told that science is at risk. The irony of these reports is that Marks didn’t resign and is not a vaccine scientist. Dr. Marks was asked to leave and then subsequently wrote that he did not want to become “subservient to [Secretary Kennedy’s] misinformation and lies.” eter Marks is not a hero of the resistance but instead has been subverting the scientific process at FDA for years.
The media proclamation that Dr. Marks’ is “FDA’s top vaccine scientist” is ironic because he decided to give himself that position. Marks is a physician but has no clinical or scientific training in vaccines or immunology. Dr. Marks trained as an oncologist, a field far from the important and complex area of vaccine biology. At FDA in 2021, Dr. Marks removed top career vaccine scientists so he could force through the approval of the COVID vaccine to meet an arbitrary Biden administration deadline. He also declined to convene the FDA Vaccine Advisory Committee to review his decision.
External Security / Militaria / Diplomania
+Rutte smiles and Rubio flees as NATO survives a summit – POLITICO
World
-
German conservatives sound alarm over gold reserves held in US
-
Minister criticizes Indian startup scene for lacking focus on deep tech
-
Bigger than Texas: the true size of Australia's devastating floods
-
UK convicts five romance fraudsters who stole millions from duped singles
-
UK's Jaguar Land Rover to pause shipments to US over tariffs
-
Meta can be sued in Kenya over posts related to Ethiopia violence, court rules
Iran / Houthi
-
U.S. Strikes in Yemen Burning Through Munitions With Limited Success - The New York Times
In just three weeks, the Pentagon has used $200 million worth of munitions in Operation Rough Rider against the Houthi militia, officials said. The total cost could be well over $1 billion by next week, and the Pentagon might soon need to request supplemental funds from Congress, one U.S. official said.
-
Billions for Ukraine but let's not overspend to re-open the Red Sea / Suez Canal? Remember when blocking it for a week was a huge big deal in 2021? It's been choked for a 16 months now.
-
Israel
-
Belgian PM Reverses Stance, Won't Arrest Netanyahu
Prime Minister Bart De Wever on Thursday said his country would ignore a warrant for the arrest of his Israeli counterpart, Benjamin Netanyahu. There is such a thing as realpolitik, I don't think any European country would arrest Netanyahu if he were on their territory. France wouldn't do it, and I don't think we would, either," he said.
Russia Bad / Ukraine War
China
Health / Medicine
-
Nutrition Beliefs Are Just-So Stories
healthier people recognized sugar was bad—because the government and well-regarded authors started saying it was bad—and they turned away from it. But so what? The answer is that selection made sugar bad. Having a more sugary diet was not related to being fat prior to the advent of the government’s advice or Taubes’ popularization of the concept that sugar is bad. And then, after healthy people stopped eating as much sugar, it became bad, at least cross-sectionally, but, because selection drove the change, probably not causally.
This is a common pitfall for nutritional science to fall for. Selection in response to health news, beliefs, theories, myths, memes, and so on makes it difficult to evaluate the effects of different diets cross-sectionally. Certain people eat certain diets, and what we might assume is the effect of those diets could just be the effect of certain people wanting to eat in different ways, irrespective of the effects of diet, as with sugar.
-
Cardiac arrest deaths among marathoners have decreased, study finds