2025-04-21

Horseshit

• An Inside Look at the Subway's Archaic Signal System

• Texas Officials Invited the Rigging of the State Lottery

• I've Worked at Google for Decades. I'm Sickened by What It's Doing

• Trade Tensions with China Clear Path for Salt-Powered Batteries

• The Last Of Us: The science behind the real 'zombie' fungus – is it a threat?

• (Mar 2023) How Smart People Can Stop Being Miserable

  The Hemingway hypothesis, however, is less straightforward. I can think of a lot of unhappy intellectuals, to be sure. But is intelligence per se their problem? Happiness scholars have studied this question, and the answer is—as in so many parts of life—it depends. The gifts you possess can lift you up or pull you down; it all depends on how you use them. Many people see intelligence as a way to get ahead of others. But to get happier, we need to do the opposite.

• An Age of Extinction Is Coming. Here’s How to Survive. - The New York Times

  much of this extinction will seem voluntary. In a normal evolutionary bottleneck, the goal is surviving some immediate physical threat — a plague or famine, an earthquake, flood or meteor strike. The bottleneck of the digital age is different: The new era is killing us softly, by drawing people out of the real and into the virtual, distracting us from the activities that sustain ordinary life, and finally making existence at a human scale seem obsolete. In this environment, survival will depend on intentionality and intensity. Any aspect of human culture that people assume gets transmitted automatically, without too much conscious deliberation, is what online slang calls NGMI — not going to make it.

  Languages will disappear, churches will perish, political ideas will evanesce, art forms will vanish, the capacity to read and write and figure mathematically will wither, and the reproduction of the species will fail — except among people who are deliberate and self-conscious and a little bit fanatical about ensuring that the things they love are carried forward. Mere eccentricity doesn’t guarantee survival: There will be forms of resistance and radicalism that turn out to be destructive and others that are just dead ends. But normalcy and complacency will be fatal.

• In 1859, a South African declared himself emperor of the United States | History | Al Jazeera

  Elon Musk wasn’t the first South African to shape the national conversation. Joshua Norton, a San Francisco cult figure, was.

• We were warned about Orwell. But we're living in Huxley

• How Ham Became an Easter Tradition in the South

• Billionaires dream of building utopian techno-city in Greenland

• Go Delete Yourself from the Internet. Seriously, Here’s How

• Porsche Heir's Plan to Build a Private Tunnel

celebrity gossip

• Mike Wood, Whose LeapFrog Toys Taught a Generation, Dies at 72

Musk

• Musk's less than original measures: Developing the ideas of his grandfather

• How Starlink took over Nigeria's internet market

• UMass Boston student, 19, charged in firebombing Tesla dealership.

• Tesla whistleblower says Musk wanted to deport her team for raising brake issue

Electric / Self Driving cars

• Subaru's only EV adds 25 percent more range, faster charging, and improved AWD

Religion / Tribal / Culture War and Re-Segregation

• The Hilarious Meltdown of Men Who Think They’re Women

• 'Biological reality': What genetics has taught us about race

  there is more genetic variation within racial groups than between them. Race, it showed, is a social construct. But despite that fundamental finding, which has only been reinforced as work on human genomes has continued, race and ethnicity are still often deployed to categorise human populations as distinct biological groups. These are views that can be found circulating in the pseudoscience on social media, but they also still creep into scientific research and healthcare systems.

• Christianity Was Always for the Poor

Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising

• Welcome to slop world: how the hostile internet is driving us crazy

• Google lost its online advertising case: its ad markets violate antitrust laws

• More reasons to avoid them: Intel's next-gen CPU series "Nova Lake-S" to require new LGA-1954 socket

• Meta's Monopoly Made It a Fair-Weather Friend

• OpenAI considering own social network to compete with Elon Musk's X

TechSuck / Geek Bait

• Raspberry Pi Lidar Scanner

AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World

• Scientist Left OpenAI Last Year. His Startup Is Already Worth $30B

• AI-generated videos now possible with gaming GPUs with just 6GB of VRAM

• OpenAI's $3B Windsurf Gamble

  • Why on Earth is OpenAI buying Windsurf?

• Maybe Meta's Llama claims to be open source because of the EU AI act

• Anthropic Joins Palantir's FedStart Program to Deploy Claude Application

Space / Boomy Zoomers / UFO

• NASA's Lucy spacecraft about to have its second close encounter with an asteroid

• Oldest serving US astronaut returns to Earth on 70th birthday

  America's oldest serving astronaut Don Pettit has returned to Earth on his 70th birthday. The Soyuz MS-26 space capsule carrying Pettit and his Russian crewmates Alexey Ovchinin and Ivan Vagner made a parachute-assisted landing in Kazakhstan's steppe at 06:20 local time (01:20 GMT) on Sunday. They spent 220 days on board the International Space Station (ISS), orbiting the Earth 3,520 times, the US space agency Nasa said. For Pettit - who has now spent a total of 590 days in space - it was his fourth mission. Still, he is not the oldest person to fly in orbit - that record belongs to John Glenn, who aged 77 flew on a Nasa mission in 1998, and died in 2016.

• SpaceX launches third fleet of spy satellites in 8 days.

Economicon / Business / Finance

• Boeing begins flying back planes refused by Chinese airlines

• Baby chickens became America's hottest commodity

• Bay Area tech workers see post-Covid hiring boom morph into jobs bust

• They Were Deactivated from Delivering. Their Finances Were Devastated.

• Goodwill to close 11 Bay Area locations and lay off staff after major merger

• DHL suspends high value US deliveries

Trump

• Hegseth Said to Have Shared Attack Details in Second Signal Chat

  • Pete Hegseth shared Yemen attack details in second Signal chat

Democrats

• LeBron James Endorsed Kamala Harris. Then She Paid His Company $50K.

  • LeBron James Cashed In: $50K Harris Paycheck Exposes Sham Celebrity Endorsements.

• When Government Is Endlessly Intrusive and Omnipresent, and Also Not There At All.

  As I drove by on Wilshire, two extremely alert LAPD officers on motorcycles were sitting at the edge of that parking lot, postures tight and poised for action, urgently scanning the street. It was like watching a gunfighter movie, in the scene when the camera closes in on the gunfighter’s eyes, watching his opponent for the draw. These dudes were ready. If you did 38 in the 30 MPH zone, then brother, you were dead-ass done, nailed up in the trophy case.

  Also, no more than thirty feet away from them, a little gaggle of filthy human zombies was passing a glass pipe around the circle, throwing up clouds of smoke, at the top end of an alley wall-to-wall full of open drug use and not terribly subtle drug dealing (and probably the prostitution that pays for the drugs, but I didn’t wander into the alley to look). But California made the possession and use of heroin, meth, and cocaine a misdemeanor, and the DA at the time was very proud that he wouldn’t allow his office to file most misdemeanor cases, because misdemeanors are lifestyle crimes that punish people for being poor, or for being “individuals experiencing homelessness.” So that alley full of people Hunter Bidening all day out in the open weren’t doing anything that could lead to prosecution, but your expired registration tags would bring down an immediate police response in you happened to roll by them.

Left Angst

• Musk and AI among biggest threats to brand reputation, global survey shows | World news | The Guardian

  Associating with the Donald Trump administration’s multibillionaire adviser Elon Musk and misusing artificial intelligence are among the most surefire ways for companies to damage their brands, a new survey of more than 100 international public affairs leaders found. Those findings stem from an appraisal conducted by the Global Risk Advisory Council, which was chaired by the head of the US Small Business Administration during Joe Biden’s presidency, Isabel Guzman.

  • and received how much taxpayer money for this job?

• See How Government Spending Is Up Even as Musk Touts Savings

• Historians: Quibbling over Concentration Definition Camp Sign of Healthy Society

• Musk Said He Would Protect Lifesaving Aid for Kids. It Quietly Got Canceled. - The Atlantic

  two weeks ago, without any fanfare, the Trump administration then canceled all of its upcoming orders—that is, everything beyond those old orders that were previously reinstated—according to emails obtained by The Atlantic. The move reneged on an agreement to provide about 3 million children with emergency paste over approximately the next year. What’s more, according to the two companies, the administration has also not awarded separate contracts to shipping companies, leaving much of the food assured by the original reinstated contracts stuck in the United States.

• Elon Musk Cuts Funding for Internet Archive

• The Americans the House GOP want to uninsure

• Harvard showdown is the latest front in a long conservative war against academia

• Doge Is Just Getting Warmed Up

• Downward DOGE: Musk keeps revising cost-trimming goals in a familiar pattern

• How Mark Zuckerberg is flipping the script on kids' safety online

• Tariffs are pure psychology for the president, fused into his brain

• Sensitive files, including White House floor plans, shared with thousands

World

• British firms urged to hold video or in-person interviews amid N. Korea job scam

• Police algorithm said Lina was at 'medium' risk. Then she was killed

• A Visit to Costco in France: Oversized American Shopping Comes to France

  I had a membership at Costco in San Francisco but mostly to get large bags of sugar and flour and other supplies for writing cookbooks in quantity, so I didn’t have to keep running to the supermarket. But I eventually let my membership expire as I could get the same things elsewhere, and it was a chore to shop there with legendary checkout lines and people elbowing their way to the tables offering free samples. Living in France has tempered my American-style consuming habits, and residing in smaller spaces meant there was no room for stocking up on forty rolls of toilet paper or bags of tortilla chips as large and round as body pillows. I also like to shop in the stores in my neighborhood that sell fruits, vegetables, cheeses, and meats from local or small producers. It costs a little more, (but truly, not a lot more…). On the other hand, I also can’t resist a bargain. And I wanted to see what Costco was like in France.

• Bluesky restricts access to 72 accounts in Turkey amid government pressure

• Japan is starting to charge tourists more to visit

• EU Might Ban Carbon Fiber in Cars by Classifying It as 'Hazardous'

• UAE set to use AI to write laws in world first

Russia Bad / Ukraine War

• Ukraine Agrees To Putin's Easter Truce, But Zelensky Says He 'Cannot Be Trusted' | ZeroHedge

  Russian President Vladimir Putin announced Saturday that he has ordered his forces to "stop all military activity" in Ukraine, declaring an "Easter truce" out of "humanitarian considerations" until the end of Sunday. Putin said that all hostilities would halt between 6 pm Moscow time on Saturday (11 a.m. ET) and midnight on Monday (5 pm Sunday ET), and stated: "We assume that the Ukrainian side will follow our example." The truce if held to will total 30 hours. Both countries have majority Orthodox Christian populations, and in Orthodox tradition Pascha (Easter) services in churches begin around midnight and continue for several hours, followed by more celebrations later into Sunday.

China

• Man versus Machine as China Shows Off Humanoid Robots in Half-Marathon

  • Stumbling and Overheating, Most Humanoid Robots Fail to Finish Beijing Marathon

• China is in third phase of its development

Health / Medicine

• Up to 13% of Dementia Cases May Actually Be a Misdiagnosed Treatable Condition.

• At 77, She is as fit as a 25 year old

• 99% Effective: First Hormone-Free Male Birth Control Pill Enters Human Trials

• CT Scans Projected to Result in 100,000 New Cancers in The US.

Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda

• An image of the Australian desert illuminates satellite pollution

  “There were satellite trails visible in almost every single photo,” he wrote on Instagram. “Instead of trying to get rid of them for a star trail, I decided to put the satellite trails together into a single image to show how polluted the night sky is becoming.” Stitching together 343 distinct photos, Rozells illuminates a growing problem. When Elon Musk’s SpaceX launched Starlink in 2019, 60 satellites filled the skies, with a race from other companies to follow. That number has now topped 10,000, with tens of thousands more in the works. SpaceX alone plans to launch 40,000 more.

• Ghost forests are growing as sea levels rise

• Group Wants Nearly 1,200 Grizzlies in California, but Could It Happen?

• Melting glaciers will harm us all. Yet still we watch, unmoved

• Red, pink or white, all roses were once yellow says genomic analysis

• To Avoid Deer Strikes, Finland Is Painting Deer Antlers with Reflective Paint

• La Nina exits after three weak months, leaving Earth in neutral climate state