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Week 49

NYT: "Zelensky’s Government Sabotaged Oversight, Allowing Corruption in Ukraine to Fester"

The web is abuzz with the talk of "Synderverse coming back" 🙄

Netflix buying WB should be preferable from a competition angle. Paramount already had movie studios and related IP, Netflix did not have much presence there. They improving on that front would mean better competition.

It is a good choice. Literally anyone else is better than Jew Ellison.

CNBC: "Netflix to buy Warner Bros. film and streaming assets in $72 billion deal"

Politico: "Poll: Trump's own voters begin blaming him for affordability crisis.. Americans continue to say affordability is out of control, and they place the responsibility on Trump, The POLITICO Poll found."

I never said UFOs cannot possibly exist. I said we need more proof than grainy video footage and an official simply talking about them

For some reason Dana Sculley's hairstyle on The X-Files is the quintessential 90s image in my head.

The Iris Affair is Woke. Also one of the stupidest shows I've ever seen (one ep was enough). It was all about adapting worn out tropes and they somehow managed to screw that up. "Subverting expectations" also failed flat on its face.

Link

It's that time of the political season again. Look, squirrel

"Secretary Of State Marco Rubio Says UFOs Flying Over U.S. Nuclear Sites Are ‘Out Of Control’"

European Commision: "Today, the Commission has issued a fine of €120 million to X for breaching its transparency obligations under the Digital Services Act (DSA). The breaches include the deceptive design of its ‘blue checkmark', the lack of transparency of its advertising repository, and the failure to provide access to public data for researchers."

The Lever: "Congress’ Leaders Have A Capital Gains Problem.. Congressional leaders perform 47 percent better than their peers on the stock market, thanks to their increased legislative influence and access to nonpublic information."

IC: "Democrats in Congress Are Out of Touch With Constituents on Israeli Genocide.. Genocide denial is needed for continuing to appropriate billions of dollars in weapons to Israel, as most legislators have kept doing. Congress members would find it very difficult to admit that Israeli forces are committing genocide while voting to send them more weaponry...

[Ro] Khanna has become more and more willing to tangle with AIPAC, which is now paying for attack ads against him. On Thanksgiving, he tweeted about Gaza and accused AIPAC of 'asking people to disbelieve what they saw with their own eyes.' Khanna elaborated in a campaign email days ago, writing: 'Any politician who caves to special interests on Gaza will never stand up to special interests on corruption, healthcare, housing, or the economy. If we can’t speak with moral clarity when thousands of children are dying, we won’t stand for working Americans when corporate power comes knocking'"

The Guardian: "US considers wider sanctions on Sudanese army and RSF as ceasefire efforts falter"

Stevenson: "[I]t looks like [Labour] are going to basically raise taxes on absolutely everybody. Except the very rich, which is exactly the opposite of what we campaign for here. We call for tax wealth not work. It's going to be phenomenally unpopular. I think it's probably going to be another line on the gravestone of Keir Starmer Premiership..

[T]he [UK] government is basically terrified that they do a budget, financial markets turn against them, the government bonds sell off, and they're forced to basically do another budget. Some people will say.. why don't we just ignore the financial markets? And I understand that because obviously you live in a democracy and you expect the public to determine the policy of the government, and you don't like to see financial markets dominate it.

The answer to that is if your economic policy is to constantly borrow money from financial markets, then you need to keep financial markets happy. And in a sense, this is the reason why I constantly campaign for wealth taxes.. [S]ince COVID, inequality has increased significantly, and one manifestation of that is a big transfer of wealth from the government to the very rich. And you see that in the form of significantly higher government debt and significantly higher savings from the very rich.

Once you've done that, then you are then in a situation where the government, if it wants to provide things like basic services, needs to somehow get those resources back or get access to those resources from the very rich... [T]here's a couple of ways you can do that, but the most obvious ways are you borrow from the rich or you tax the rich.

If you choose not to tax the rich, then the only way for you to get government services like the NHS, like education services, are to borrow from the rich. So basically, as long as governments refuse to tax the rich, they will be consistently, entirely dependent on borrowing from the rich, which means they will need to do whatever the financial traders ask of them. Because they are completely dependent on the financial traders ..[they] are the people who decide whether or not the rich lend their money to the government.. [T]he key here to understand why the government is raising your taxes. Is it's not really about fiscal rules, it is a little bit about the markets, but really, what you have here is a question fundamentally about distribution."

"@lion@computerfairi.es

Insane behaviour from AMD asking me to install a 10.5GB chat bot to ask it what my GPU temperature is"

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#Werleman #Israel

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#ZacRios

"Why More People REGRET Buying Their Electric Vehicle Than Ever Before"

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It would be a major pie in the face for Dems if they get blamed for an ACA related screw up after all they've done to lay the blame on the Republicans including the big bad shutdown. Will karma deliver them some consequence for creating an half-assed, corporate friendly plan?

Politico: "Democrats have vowed to hammer the GOP in the midterms if they allow the [ACA] federal aid to expire, but many on the right expect the political fallout to be minimal, or even to backfire on Democrats. For other conservatives, any blowback will be worth it if it means they get to rein in a system the party has fundamentally opposed since its launch more than a decade ago.

'Democrats have to start acknowledging they blew it,' Wisconsin Republican Sen. Ron Johnson told reporters Tuesday. 'Obamacare has been a huge disaster.'"

Electrek: "Tesla faces class action over Powerwall recall that leaves people with bricked batteries.. The lawsuit, Brown v. Tesla, Inc., was filed yesterday. It alleges that rather than providing swift replacements for the potentially dangerous hardware, Tesla used its software backdoor to effectively shut down customer installations."

Another experiment idea

"Vary exposure time / intensity at low flux; test the Born-rule/τ dependence

The paper shows excitation probability P_exc = 1-exp(−I·τ) (their exctprop function) and argues Born’s rule emerges for small τ (linear regime) .

Predictions

Reading the results

Intensities down to single-photon equivalent rates; variable exposure windows 10 ns to seconds; use detectors with well-known dead-time and dynamic range."

Alternatives are growing..

Cetta & de la Pena, Rashkovskiy & Close, Masse

That anonymous opponent was Mike Pence wasn't it?

Book: "[T]he occurrence of rare or very unusual words or expressions can establish evidence to discover the possible author (e.g., covfefe by Trump (May, 2017) or lodestar used by an anonymous opponent layperson at the White House (Sept., 2018)"

TAC: "The Department of War recently invited The American Conservative to be further integrated into its press operations. We have politely declined."

Spraying wastewater on agricultural fields..? It sounds like better treatment solutions are needed if they use the technique. Polluting companies can be mandated to remove highly concentrated pollutants themselves.

Rolling Stone: "In the spring of 2022, Jim Doherty kept having the same conversation with folks at the only grocery store in Boardman, his eastern Oregon hometown, or at the grain depot where he picked up food for his four ranch dogs. Healthy adults that these people knew were coming down with unexplained medical conditions, including diseases and cancers that usually afflicted the elderly. “It was kinda grim,” Doherty says...

Water hadn’t really been a political priority for Doherty — he’s a Republican, and he focused mostly on economic development and transportation projects — until a couple of years into his second term, when the uptick of stories he heard about young women enduring miscarriages and middle-aged men with organ failure started making him uneasy...

Doherty says he picked up 70.. test kits and went back out a week later, this time knocking on doors across a wider swath of the county. The results were equally bleak. Of the 70 wells he tested, 68 violated the safety threshold, with an average concentration of nitrates close to four times the federal limit...

Every day, the megafarms and food processing plants in Morrow County send millions of gallons of wastewater to the Port of Morrow... When the Port sprays that water back over the farms, some of the nitrates are absorbed by the crops, but there’s a limit to how much the sandy soil and shallow-root plants can hold"

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NPR: "The Ohio River sends billions of gallons of water flowing past Louisville, Kentucky's pumping station every day, where the city's utility sucks it up to turn it into tap water... One type of PFAS that the Louisville water technicians are tracking is HFPO-DA, though it's perhaps better known by a trade name, GenX... Almost a year ago, workers noticed an unexpected spike in the level of GenX detected in a sample of the raw, untreated water drawn from the Ohio River for filtering and processing.

But Goodman's team was curious about what was going on. They traced the chemical up the Ohio River, past Cincinnati and through Appalachian forests, all the way to a West Virginia factory about 400 miles upstream. There, the Chemours Co. uses GenX to make fluoropolymers, a special plastic critical to the semiconductors that power our phones. Its Washington Works facility near Parkersburg, West Virginia, also has a notorious history of PFAS pollution."

The Lever: "Steve Bannon Tells Big Tech To Pay Up.. [Bannon] is leading the conservative fight against artificial intelligence firms’ unrestricted use of copyrighted material."

Reuters: "Italy's Snam wins EU backing for hydrogen pipeline and CO2 storage"

TAC: "The Ukraine War Hawks Sabotaging America First.. Mike Pompeo emerged as a quiet ringleader against President Donald Trump’s original deal to end the Russia-Ukraine war."

TASS: "Japanese vessel expelled from waters of disputed islands — Chinese coast guard.. China also called on Japan to 'immediately cease all unlawful activities in these waters' and assured that it would continue patrols to protect national sovereignty"

A potential improvement on the previous aether experiment idea..

I'll include this one too

"Instead of comparing different detectors, use one detector and test the time-dependence prediction:

  1. Fixed setup: Double-slit, single detector type, constant weak flux

  2. Vary exposure time τ from very short to very long

  3. Measure: Fringe visibility V as function of accumulated counts

Rashkovskiy predicts: V should decrease as V ∝ [1 - exp(-τb)]⁻¹ for longer τ

Standard QED predicts: V constant (when normalized by total counts), limited only by Poisson statistics

This would be a cleaner test because it isolates the claimed τ-dependence without confounding variables from different detector materials."

POTUS suffered another net approval fall, a new one after the gov shutdown debacle..

DW: "Venezuela: Trump signals imminent land attacks"

In tech terms 90s feels like eons behind us, but it wasn't that long ago... Revisiting the era is not a bad idea.

I am digging the 90s backdrop of NCIS Origins. They have cassettes, floppy disks, landlines, and old (new to them) movie references (a character goes "Roadhouse" on someone during a fight). I stopped watching their other shows, but this one - not bad. I remember Franks in the main show was a real tough son of a bitch, total cowboy. Similar character, younger version, written well. All of the cast have great lines. Tech critique back in the 90s knowing what we know now lands well.

HTW: "Trump’s Push to End the Ukraine War Is Sowing Fresh Fear About NATO’s Future.. The U.S.’s latest efforts to end the conflict between Ukraine and Russia have jolted the trans-Atlantic alliance."

What is going on around Myrnohrad? Does UA really only have that thin passage back to their supply lines? The area seems to be a lost cause. But this being the stupid NATO provoked shit war that it is, UA will probably fight there to the death.

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El Pais: "All programmers, from hobbyists to those working at Microsoft or Google, use open-source software, which is present in between 70% and 90% of the computer applications we use today. No one starts a project from scratch; instead, they turn to libraries like GitHub or GitLab to download packages of code already written, reviewed, and improved by the community."

OK.. idea for testing elastic solid theory of Rashkovskiy and Close.. I'm not completely convinced it can work (afaik standard QED does account for detector quantum efficiency variations), but I'll include it anyway

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ItsFoss: "UN Ditches Google for Taking Form Submissions, Opts for an Open Source Solution Instead"

CNBC: "Bitcoin, Ethereum fall sharply as crypto sell-off resumes"

Firstpost: "Global defence manufacturers logged an unprecedented $679 billion in military sales in 2024, driven by the wars in Ukraine and Gaza and rising security fears in Europe, West Asia and beyond. SIPRI’s latest report shows soaring orders for ammunition, aircraft, drones and armoured systems, even as labour shortages, material constraints and supply chain disruptions slow production"

Al-Monitor: "Ex-officer tells inquiry UK military committed war crimes in Afghanistan"

TAC: "Epstein Revelations Won’t Bring Down Trump.. It is unlikely that a smoking gun would have gone unnoticed in years of scrutiny and political acrimony."

The Guardian: "[03/24] How did childcare in the US become so absurdly expensive?.. Many of the US’s national peers have figured out solutions to this problem. In Denmark, parents pay at most 25% of childcare center tuition. Canada has plans to lower the costs of childcare to $10 a day by 2026. France offers tax credits to parents of babies and toddlers that cover up to 85% of what the family pays for center- or home-based care. Germany has a sliding-scale system that charges parents based on their income.

Instead of parents paying huge childcare fees, in other wealthy nations, it’s the government that picks up the tab, spending on average $14,000 per child per year on early childhood education. Compared to those nations, the US – which contributes just 500 per child annually in grants and programs serving low-income families – is woefully behind."

#LLM #IlyaSutskever

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Chat GPT "revealed" a conspiracy? You read the text it is bunch of bullshit, mostly a summary of others' theories. "They push centralised control by promoting lab-grown meat". ???

"What the CMB Power Spectrum Really Protects" #SeeThePattern

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Peace treaties are made when one side clearly loses and the other side wants to cement its wins, the loser does not want to lose anymore but can still cause trouble for the winner. So both sides have incentive to make treaty.

Does that describe Ukraine vs Russia? Actually that describes NATO vs Russia better; 1999, NATO took Czechia, Hungary and Poland. Then it took Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia. In 2009 it took Albania and Croatia. In 2017 NATO took Montanegro, 2020 North Macedonia. It was going to take Ukraine but Russia, the loser of decades at this point, said no more. The winner would be motivated to cement its wins, the loser can cause trouble as it demonstrated. Both sides would be motivated to make peace.

Zelenskyyy, Def Minister Shmyhal. Serhiy Shefir, Oleksiy Reznikov. Before the war started on the US side SecState Blinken, the freak bitch handing out cookies during Maidan, all Jew.

It's not their fault... They maneuver these muckers in place for a certain outcome. Personnel is policy.

Yermak - he Jew

TAC: "Key Ukrainian Hawk Yermak Resigns Amid Anti-Corruption Furor"

CNBC: "Goldman Sachs polled institutional investors on gold, and found many expect it to hit $5K next year"