2025-04-08
Horseshit
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You can now get freshly-baked cake from a vending machine in Seattle
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The controversial California city backed by tech elite has a new plan: boats
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Why an Australian journalist is teaching meditation in America's toughest jails
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Yoga Trauma - Dave Barry’s Substack
There is much, MUCH more in the Times story on the fallout from Roma Abdesselam's traumatic trauma, and yoga hydration in general, including (of course) expert commentary from a college professor. The only thing missing — and frankly, as a longtime Times reader, I was disappointed — is a scientist connecting this issue to Global Climate Change.
celebrity gossip
Musk
Religion / Tribal / Culture War and Re-Segregation
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Study finds global downturn in bias against stigmatized groups – News Bureau
In a study that tracked explicit and implicit bias against stigmatized groups in 33 countries between 2009 and 2019, researchers found substantial reductions in explicit, self-reported bias against all categories of stigma they examined: age, race, body weight, skin tone and sexual orientation. The picture for implicit bias, which is sometimes described as “hidden” or “automatically revealed” bias, was more varied, however.
Edumacationalizing / Acedemia Nuts
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The Pandemic Is Not the Only Reason U.S. Students Are Losing Ground - The New York Times
The reason is not just the pandemic. For at least a decade, starting around 2013, students in the bottom quartile have been losing ground on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, a key exam that tests a national sample of fourth and eighth grade students in math and reading. The bottom quartile is made up of students from various backgrounds, but it includes a higher proportion of students with disabilities, students learning English and children from poor families. Since the pandemic, their scores have often continued to fall, even as high achieving students stabilize. “Whatever is happening to the lower performers is still happening,” said Nat Malkus, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a right-leaning think tank, who has tracked the trend.
Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising
TechSuck / Geek Bait
AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World
Space / Boomy Zoomers / UFO
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With new contracts, SpaceX will become the US military's top launch provider
After racking up a series of successful launches with its Falcon 9 rocket more than a decade ago, SpaceX sued the Air Force for the right to compete with ULA for the military's most lucrative launch contracts. The Air Force relented in 2015 and allowed SpaceX to bid. Since then, SpaceX has won more than 40 percent of missions the Pentagon has ordered through the National Security Space Launch (NSSL) program, creating a relatively stable duopoly for the military's launch needs.
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I started working on Voyager in 1977, it was my first job out of college, and I had a choice between the Viking extended mission or the Voyager mission. I, of course, hadn’t heard of Voyager. So I said, where’s Voyager going? And they said, well, Jupiter and Saturn and onto Uranus and Neptune with Voyager 2 if all goes well. And I thought, oh my goodness—I remember in third grade, I got a little telescope I used to use to look at the Moon and look at Jupiter and Saturn, and look for little moons around Jupiter and see if I could spot the rings around Saturn. So the thought of a chance to go visit these worlds that were really only tiny dots in my little telescope, I said, “sign me up.”
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Honda Sets Up Dedicated Business in US to Tap into Space Boom
Crypto con games
Economicon / Business / Finance
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Honda to produce next Civic in Indiana, not Mexico, due to US tariffs
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Circuit breaker triggered in Japan for stock futures trading
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Stock market goes haywire after'fake news'reports on future of Trump tariff plan
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Fake News Story on Tariffs Pause Causes Mayhem in Stock Market
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Tech stocks whipsaw in volatile trading session as Trump stands by tariffs
Amid a morning of pandemonium on Wall Street, a popular news aggregator on X, known as Walter Bloomberg, posted a false report declaring that President Trump was considering a 90-day pause on his controversial tariff proposal. Though the Walter Bloomberg account is not affiliated with any news organization and has no connection to Bloomberg News, the account has long been considered a reliable source of tech and business news. On Monday, a series of reporting errors from CNBC and Reuters, which were then amplified by the Walter Bloomberg account on X, appears to have directly affected the stock market during an already chaotic day.
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Senior partners are leaving their big venture capital firms in droves
Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making
Trump
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Musk Suddenly Distances Himself from Trump over Tariffs
- In liberal world; any disagreements precludes cooperation. Real people can disagree, and still work together on goals they share. For liberals such would be a betrayal of their core principle of "I am Always Right".
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Von der Leyen offers Trump 'zero-for-zero' tariffs deal on all industrial goods
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Trump Threatens Additional 50% China Tariff over Retaliation
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"Proportional" might be a better term. Trump Says Tariffs Are Reciprocal. They Aren't
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(Jan 2025) How Trump Can Rebuild America: Conservative Case for Reindustrialization
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Bessent: Federal layoffs will help fill factory jobs created by Trump tariffs
- Learn to weld.
Democrats
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Barbara Lee was supposed to be a lock for Oakland mayor. Why is the race so close? - POLITICO
Lee’s unexpectedly tight contest against a more moderate former city official will test whether the former lawmaker’s towering stature can overcome the anti-status-quo fervor that has driven Democrats out of office since the pandemic, often putting progressives like Lee on the defensive. Now, amid a confluence of crises culminating in the November recalls of the city’s mayor and district attorney, her opponent Loren Taylor is trying to pull off a major upset in an April 15 special election by capitalizing on seething voter discontent.
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Joe Biden Was “a Shell of Himself” by End of Term. Hunter Biden Didn’t Help
It’s pretty remarkable how they kept him very closed off. He was a shell of himself. When he entered the White House, he was so, so different from the man who I covered as vice president, a guy who would hold court in the Naval Observatory with reporters until the wee hours.
Left Angst
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How Trump's second term just made digital sovereignty a European priority
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No, vaccination is not a “personal choice”
when it comes to public health, there really isn’t such a thing as a “personal” or “individual” choice — because every choice we make as individuals has implications for the health of those around us. Framing vaccination as an issue of “personal choice” disregards the fact that choosing not to get vaccinated ultimately strips other people of their personal choice to stay healthy or to live a normal life.
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The White House Cited My Research to Justify Tariffs. They Got It All Wrong
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Why Trump's tariff chaos actually makes sense
Compared to Bretton Woods, the number of “green countries” got much bigger in the neoliberal order. As long as you were willing to play by the rules of the World Trade Organization, you got good access to the massive US consumer market, the US Dollar banking system, and, as a bonus US navy protection of global shipping. That sure sounds like a pretty good deal. But, of course, the US again got something very big in return for it. With the fixed exchange rates of Bretton Woods gone, Stephen Miran writes that “reserve demand for American assets pushed up the Dollar, leading it to levels far in excess of what would balance international trade over the long run. So, thanks to flexible exchange rates, the US’s exorbitant privilege arguably became even stronger. A strong Dollar meant that the US could keep its massive military all over the world despite becoming a far smaller economy relative to its dominance in the 1950s. On top of that, the strong Dollar made Americans in general much richer than they would otherwise have been.
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"Bretton Woods" was not the US victory liberals like to claim: (2014) This Soviet spy created the US-led global economic system - Vox
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How Investing Will Change If the Dollar No Longer Rules the World
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CDC's top laboratory on STDs is shut by Trump administration
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NIH scientists have a cancer breakthrough. Layoffs are delaying it
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What the Comfort Class Doesn’t Get - The Atlantic
For all of the racial, gender, and sexual reckonings that America has undergone over the past decade, we have yet to confront the persistent blindness and stigma around class. When people struggle to understand the backlash against elite universities, or the Democrats’ loss of working-class voters, or the fact that more and more Americans are turning away from mainstream media, this is why. America is not just suffering from a wealth gap; America has the equivalent of a class apartheid. Our systems—of education, credentialing, hiring, housing, and electing officials—are dominated and managed by members of a “comfort class.” These are people who were born into lives of financial stability. They graduate from college with little to no debt, which enables them to advance in influential but relatively low-wage fields—academia, media, government, or policy work. Many of them rarely interact or engage in a meaningful way with people living in different socioeconomic strata than their own. And their disconnect from the lives of the majority has expanded to such a chasm that their perspective—and authority—may no longer be relevant.
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EU may target US tech services in tariff response to focus US tech giants' minds
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'Golden Dome' Is Impossible–and It'll Make Defense Companies a Ton of Money
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Under Trump and Musk, billionaires wield influence over US national security
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Toronto's University Health Network launches recruitment campaign for scientists
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Democrats have been looking for the next resistance in all the wrong places. Instead of waiting for some politician to say the right words and catch fire, they should look to the people who are already on fire: federal workers. America’s 2.4 million civilian federal workers are, by their nature, generally patriotic and politically moderate. Nearly 30 percent of them are veterans. They all take an oath to defend the Constitution. Also, unlike many politicians from both parties who went to elite schools, are worth millions and have to talk about their parents’ or grandparents’ humble beginnings to claim a connection to their constituents, most federal workers are just like the people they serve: working and middle class. All this makes them uniquely well positioned to lead a new kind of resistance — more mainstream and grounded than the last one, and powerful enough to mobilize millions of Americans under its banner.
- We established during COVID how far Federal workers are allowed to go in disagreement. The question now is whether they owe their loyalty to the Government or to the nameless God of the liberals even when that doesn't hold the elected positions.
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Mark Cuban: Global tariffs with DOGE cuts 'risk far worse situation than 2008'
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The speech police: Chairman Brendan Carr and the FCC's news distortion policy
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It’s difficult to overstate the extent to which every aspect of modern life rests on global supply chains, which are so long and complex that no one can truly understand the effects of messing with them. It has, however, gotten easier to grasp the complexity in recent years: first there was the bungled economic response to COVID, where a temporal interruption in supply chains triggered worldwide supply shortages and contributed to global inflation; then there was last week, when the shock of blanket tariffs from the Trump administration led to a meltdown in worldwide stock markets that seems to still be ongoing. A war over Taiwan, however, would put all of these to shame.
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Trump Cuts Include Forest Service Workers, Who Help Fight Wildfires
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some protesters have good reasons to be there
Charlotte NC man claiming to be protesting President Trump in favor of veterans and social security... later admitted he was a USAID worker living in Vienna Austria who was told to come back home after USAID was shut down
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Trump Tariffs Smash 'Phenomenal' EU Trade Deal - Bloomberg
Perhaps the Trump administration’s hope is simply to blackmail Europe into even greater dependency: What if the EU agreed to buy even more of those guns, gas and gadgets from the US in exchange for lower tariffs? The problem is that Trump’s bullying behavior has made Europe both less able and less willing to make America great again. Pending a US U-turn, continental taxpayers are set to be angrier and poorer with less room to spend.
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NYC woman who punched pro-life activist Savannah Craven accuses her of ‘antagonistic’ behavior.
- "Your speech is violence. The Left’s violence is speech."
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NIH firings delay cancer immunotherapy trials after promising development
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Agenda Behind the Facial Recognition Tech Used by ICE and the FBI Revealed
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A brain drain would impoverish the United States and diminish world science
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55% Of Self-Identified Leftists Say Killing Trump Is Justifiable
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U.S. Gov't eliminates tape data storage at the GSA to save $1M per year
Community Notes attached to the DOGE post reference articles about why tape is still popular for backups in organizations of all sizes and will still be around for “decades to come.”
- I'm guessing none of those folks are talking about oldsk00l reel-to-reel 9 track tapes, but the GSA was.
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Billionaire Trump backer warns of 'economic nuclear winter' over tariffs
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Trump administration rolls back forest protections in bid to ramp up logging
External Security / Militaria / Diplomania
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CIA is reviewing its authorities to use lethal force against drug cartels
- those they don't already own, presumably
World
Israel
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Microsoft deepened ties with Israeli military to provide tech support
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Microsoft fires engineers who protested during company's 50th anniversary
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Israel’s military has transformed every bit of Gazan territory within about half a mile of the Israeli border into a wasteland. Now, in interviews with CNN and testimonials to an Israeli watchdog group, Israeli soldiers who were deployed to Gaza are revealing how the military carried out the destruction of civilian infrastructure to create the buffer area and the loose rules of engagement that have allegedly resulted in Israeli troops firing on and killing unarmed Palestinians. These testimonies reveal Israeli military practices that arguably violate international humanitarian law and, in some cases are war crimes, according to international law experts.
Russia Bad / Ukraine War
China
Health / Medicine
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New stir stick detects drink spiking in seconds
- I will swear i've heard this story before
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Breakthrough discovery solves toxic cannabis problem
Heating and inhaling PM (like from a joint or bong), is very dangerous, and if one leaf is showing the signs, the problem has likely infected the whole space. Powdery mildew-resistant cannabis may sound like a fairy tale to cultivators who have seen a crop burned for less. Unfortunately, the technology is proprietary, and unless Aurora decides to share with the class, they are the only ones who will reap the benefits.
- The danger of consuming mildew is an unpleasant flavor. Growers burn a crop because the stuff spreads fast, and grows even better after harvest during drying and curing.
Pox / COVID / BioTerror AgitProp
Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda
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Consecutive El NiñOS are happening more often and the result is more devastating
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For the first time in 25 years, California has a snowpack trifecta
It’s the third straight year the state has had near-average or above-average amounts of snow.
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World's largest wildlife crossing takes shape in Los Angeles
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Lunar polar regions could have microbes, modeling study suggests
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Colossal Announces World’s First De-Extinction: Birth of Dire Wolves
The successful birth of three dire wolves is a revolutionary milestone of scientific progress that illustrates another leap forward in Colossal’s de-extinction technologies and is a critical step on the pathway to the de-extinction of other target species. Additionally, Colossal has birthed two litters of cloned red wolves, the most critically endangered wolf in the world, using a new approach to non-invasive blood cloning. The birth of red wolves provides further evidence of the link between de-extinction efforts and the company’s growing capacity to support conservation efforts globally through de-extinction technology innovation.
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Failure to communicate: Scientists must learn how to talk about geoengineering
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Deadly storms give way to rising rivers in flood-ravaged Midwest and Southern US