2025-05-05
etc
Horseshit
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How the Highest-Earning Millennials Made It to the Top of Their Generation
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Marathon streamer, online for three years, faces isolation and burnout
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40 years ago, the Ford Taurus revolutionized American car design
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The landscape artist who makes her paint from pearls, crystals and volcanic dust
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The fly-tipped sofa: how an abandoned couch changed a small village -in pictures
Electric / Self Driving cars
Religion / Tribal / Culture War and Re-Segregation
Edumacationalizing / Acedemia Nuts
Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising
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Apple has made splashy bets in Hollywood. Are they paying off?
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Chatting in Movie Theaters Is a No-No. But What About Chatbots?
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How Riot Games is fighting the war against video game hackers
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US House Passes Bill to Assess Threats Posed by Foreign Network Routers
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Chips aren't improving like they used to, killing game console price cuts
TechSuck / Geek Bait
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Switch bouncing reference traces for a variety of different switches
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What went wrong with wireless USB
For a few years, real honest-to-goodness wireless USB devices were actually a thing. Competing standards led to market fracture and the technologies fizzled out relatively quickly in the marketplace, but like the parallel universe of FireWire hubs there was another parallel world of wireless USB devices, at least for a few years. As it happens, we now have a couple of them here, so it's worth exploring what wireless USB was and what happened to it, how the competing standards worked (and how well), and if it would have helped.
AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World
Space / Boomy Zoomers / UFO
Crypto con games
Economicon / Business / Finance
Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making
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Did Covid lockdowns and school closures swing young people sharply right?
Like the Yale poll, the Harvard poll stratifies by age. Harvard breaks respondents into two groups, 18-24 and 25-29. Harvard, like Yale, found that the youngest respondents were more conservative than older ones, though it found a less striking difference — the 18-24 group identified Republican in a 26-24 split. The 25-29 group was exactly 23-23. That’s not the stunning part.
The stunning part is that in 2019, Harvard offered the same age breakdown. And back then, about twice as many 18 to 24-year-olds said they were Democrats as Republicans. 41 percent of respondents said they were Democrats, compared to 21 percent of Republicans. Democrats had a 20 percentage point lead among the young. Flash forward six years, through Covid and lockdowns and insane mask and distancing rules at colleges that ruined both the 2020 and 2021 academic years at most schools. And mRNA vaccine mandates for college students — and for many young people who weren’t college students too. Those 18-to-24 year olds are now 24-to-30. And they aren’t overwhelmingly Democratic anymore. They don’t even lean Democratic.
Trump
Left Angst
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Trump accused of 'mocking' Catholics after posting image of himself as pope
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My Brain Finally Broke | The New Yorker
ten days before he was sworn in, Trump had been sentenced to unconditional discharge on thirty-four felony counts of falsifying business records. But I don’t really remember that, nor do I understand whether it mattered. I do remember Day One of his Presidency, when he renamed the Gulf of Mexico, and also signed executive orders to end birthright citizenship, to restore the federal death penalty, and to razor out anything that gives off a whiff of D.E.I. Same with day five, when he fired the watchdogs, ordered the government to stop investigating book bans, and suggested shutting down FEMA; also day ten, when he announced plans to move migrants to Guantánamo and claimed, without evidence, that the U.S. had sent fifty million dollars’ worth of condoms to Gaza. But there have been ninety more such days and counting, the events of each seeming inconceivable as they materialize in headlines and then are swiftly carried to the purgatorial cognitive landfill of things that have not been fully absorbed or processed or fought against but have been pressed into reality, where they will remain as the fading backdrop of each day’s new, grotesque parade. I had this feeling early in Trump’s first term, too, but those times were quaint in comparison. Now our President, along with his lieutenant content-generator Elon Musk, is working at the pace of an internet that has been relentlessly accelerating for eight years.
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I Should Have Seen This Coming
If there is an underlying philosophy driving Trump, it is this: Morality is for suckers. The strong do what they want and the weak suffer what they must. This is the logic of bullies everywhere. And if there is a consistent strategy, it is this: Day after day, the administration works to create a world where ruthless people can thrive. That means destroying any institution or arrangement that might check the strongman’s power. The rule of law, domestic or international, restrains power, so it must be eviscerated. Inspectors general, judge advocate general officers, oversight mechanisms, and watchdog agencies are a potential restraint on power, so they must be fired or neutered. The truth itself is a restraint on power, so it must be abandoned. Lying becomes the language of the state. Trump’s first term was a precondition for his second. His first term gradually eroded norms and acclimatized America to a new sort of regime. This laid the groundwork for his second term, in which he’s making the globe a playground for gangsters.
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A DOGE recruiter staffing project to deploy AI agents across the US government
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Don’t blame imports for the fall in America’s GDP
Perhaps a last minute rush to beat the deadline was picked up at the border but nowhere else. If so, then the GDP figure is likely eventually to be revised up. Another possibility is that Americans were so keen to beat the tariffs that they cut their spending on home-made stuff to pay for more foreign goods. Such a shift in the composition of spending towards imports can harm GDP in the short term, because factories and workers that are idled are not immediately put to an alternative use. Yet if this is why GDP fell, then, all else equal, there will be catch-up growth later, when Americans redirect their spending homeward. You might call it an overhang. Still, you should expect Mr Trump to try to take the credit—unless his tariffs crash the economy in the meantime.
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Trump, Asked If He Has to 'Uphold the Constitution', Says, 'I Don't Know'
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Maga's era of 'soft eugenics': let the weak get sick, help the clever breed