Week 33

The private complex does not mess around.. There were serious allegations back then too around the so-called witnesses who were bribed to speak a certain way, against Traficant.

Wiki: "Traficant was expelled from the House on July 24, 2002, after being convicted of 10 felony counts, including taking bribes, filing false tax returns, racketeering"

(Former Congressman) Jim Traficant: "[Israel] control[s] both members of the House, the House and the Senate. They have us involved in wars in which we have little or no interest. Our children are coming back in body bags. Our nation is bankrupt over these wars. And if you open your mouth, you get targeted. And if they don’t beat you at the poll, they’ll put you in prison."

Both actions seem to be aimed at crowd control, one hard way, one the easy way. Just speculating.. If unrest is high in society, you don't want the masses hopped up on Ginkgo Biloba Tea, you want them taking it easy, little weed will do them good. Relax mon.

Note: I am in favor of less restrictions on marijuana.

The Hill: "Trump confirmed his administration is 'looking at' reclassifying marijuana as a less dangerous drug."

PBS: "Trump says he's placing Washington police under federal control and deploying the National Guard"

Sometimes the gore was overdone, but The Killer's Game was good

"The California Department of Transportation (Caltrans) is advancing its emergency preparedness efforts through the successful evaluation of a hydrogen fuel cell backup power system, tested for use at critical signalized intersections during extended power outages...

Caltrans conducted a formal lab evaluation of the system at its.. facility in Sacramento. The test was led by the Electrical Quality Assurance and Source Inspection (EQASI) branch, which confirmed uninterrupted operation for 5 days and 18 hours under a consistent electrical load - a major increase from the 4-hour average provided by traditional battery backup systems."

ProPublica: "[T]wo private schools in Dallas have awarded more than $7 million in combined contracts to their board members.

And at least seven private schools across Texas have issued personal loans, often reaching $100,000 or more, to their school leaders under terms that are often hidden from public view.

Such practices would typically violate laws governing public and charter schools. But private schools operate largely outside those rules because they haven’t historically received direct taxpayer dollars. Now, as the state moves to spend at least $1 billion over the next two years on private education, lawmakers have imposed almost none of the accountability measures required of the public school system.

If held to the same standards, 27 private schools identified by ProPublica and The Texas Tribune through tax filings likely would have violated state law. The news organizations found, and three education law experts confirmed, more than 60 business transactions, board appointments and hiring decisions by those schools that would have run afoul of the state rules meant to prevent self-dealing and conflicts of interest if they were public."

CNN: "[8/1] Tesla ordered by Florida jury to pay $329 million in Autopilot crash"

"[A research] team at the Korea Institute of Energy Research (KIER) has developed a carbon cloth-based electrode that runs stably for more than 800 hours under high current while directly using seawater. In seawater electrolysis, the electrode support plays a decisive role in efficiency and lifespan. Metal-based supports corrode quickly in the presence of chloride ions. Carbon cloth has emerged as an alternative because of its conductivity, corrosion resistance, flexibility, and cost benefits."

Iran could be fine with the Zangezur Corridor at some level.. it's just a freaking road, why would it bother anyone? But if the construction of it and its use means Iran will be blocked access to certain trade, transport, and access that it could normally have, that would cause problems.

That's 8+ trillion infusion businesses received FOR FREE. Without it how much of Silicon Valley would be standing today? We need to realize businesses free-ride all the time. The public spoon feeds them. They need freebies to exist, whether in the form of gov funded research, open source software, or other social structures that exist without private sector paying a dime.

"Today, Open Source runs much of the world's critical infrastructure. It powers government services, supports national security, and enables everything from public health systems to elections. This reliance means the third and final step in its evolution is here: governments must help fund Open Source...

A 2024 Harvard Business School study, The Value of Open Source Software, estimates that replacing the most widely used Open Source software would cost the world $8.8 trillion. If Open Source suddenly disappeared, organizations would have to spend 3.5 times more on software than they do today. Even more striking: 96% of that 8.8 trillion depends on just 5% of contributors."

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In der Kürze liegt die Würze, good one.. is the equivalent form in English "short and sweet" (here it is "spicy" instead of sweet).

Pearlstein: "Because of globalization, technology, deregulation, and changes in business norms, the benefits of economic growth have largely been captured by people at the top. The result has been—for most people, I think—an unacceptable increase in inequality of income and wealth and therefore opportunity, which has polarized our politics and rendered our government dysfunctional to the point that it now threatens our prosperity and our democracy."

Ludwig, The Vanishing American Dream: "GDP is a terrible measure of productivity—it actually declines if a company figures out how to produce the same product at a lower cost. Maybe of even greater concern, as Raskin argued, it does not measure unpaid work like childcare or eldercare, meaning that crucial sectors of the economy aren’t represented whatsoever in the most important figure we use to gauge the economy’s overall health."

GET RICH OR DIE TRYING

Urban Institute: "Large numbers of Americans feel financially insecure, because of increasing volatility in monthly income. Nearly two-thirds of low-income, working-age adults live in households where income spikes or dips significantly in at least one month of the year, and nearly 40 percent live in households with income spikes and dips in at least six months of the year.

This volatility results in many families struggling to meet monthly financial obligations such as rent. It also causes episodic poverty, which the social safety net does not address. In addition, income volatility can complicate a person’s ability to predict the receipt and amount of refundable tax credits, such as the earned income tax credit, which is the largest antipoverty program for working age families."

Tariffs are a form of regulation. They are things businesses would not like to do, left to their own devices, but having to do because of a nationwide policy choice. One can be "against red tape", but tariff barriers of any kind means regulation is introduced via different means. That's a good thing of course.. Businesses need to be regulated. Wealth distribution needs to be regulated. Drugs. Education. It all needs regulation.

Masse, Where Physics Went Wrong: "Newton’s force law of gravity was published in 1687. In 1813, more than 100 years later, Poisson derived another equation that can describe the acceleration due to gravitational force. Although Newton’s and Poisson’s equations are quite different in form, they are nevertheless compatible since each equation can be derived from the other. While Newton’s equation does not lend itself to a direct physical interpretation as to the cause of gravity, Poisson’s equation does.

The equation describing gravitational force developed by Poisson is of a type know as a field equation. This means that Poisson’s equation is based upon and must be interpreted in terms of the existence of a physical medium consisting of contiguous particles known as field particles."

Politico: "Schwarzenegger ready to fight Newsom on redistricting.. The Republican who helped pass California’s independent line-drawing commission wants to defend his legacy."

"Chennai: Indian Railways is set to make a historic leap in green transportation with the imminent launch of India's first hydrogen-powered train"

#Zionism #CC

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#Ukraine 08/05 - 08/13

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Chollet: "Frontier LLM have superhuman text-based world knowledge. Frontier image / video models have superhuman vision-based world knowledge (e.g. Genie).

But current frontier VLMs are still absolutely clown shoes. Why? Relative scarcity of image:text pairs (while there is plenty of text and plenty of images/video)...

Needless to say, this is not how human intelligence works. Human intelligence is compositional, which means you can understand the cross product of two spaces without being explicitly exposed to a dense sampling of data pairs from those spaces.

When reading a book, most people can visually picture what's going on, no matter how far from everyday reality the text gets -- and these people were never exposed to billions of explicit text:video pairs. In fact, they were exposed to virtually no such data."

The 60 years window was chosen to exclude JFK. If you include JFK, BFC is second worst.

There is nothing wrong improving yourself. But if this shit is being sold via every channel, every outlet, becomes a lifestyle replacing all other solutions in a system, we have a problem.

If structural aspects of the economy are against you, there is no bleeping way you will succeed no matter how hard to grind. No wonder the worst president of the past 60 years Bill Clinton was very much into the self-help wave (follower of Tony Robbins). The self-improvement outlook gels with their economic ideology which basically says leave everyone behind except a few (who can hustle with style who became "a better version of themselves").

Watch out for the "grinder lifestyle" propaganda.. It can arrive in many forms; a minority group could be influenced through their most visible representatives, "see how they achived, you can too". Or the influence could be through self-help, psychology, meditation, or astrology. Any guru who is trying to "help you" to be "a better version of yourself" is indirectly selling you the grinder ideology. Grind, work hard, get rich (or die trying -most likely the latter will happen-, and don't give up broo (display grit).

This is a corporate, surface state psy-op. The elites need compliant workers (supposedly citizens) who do not complain, and when things go wrong automatically blame themselves for not being good enough. The self-help propaganda will pacify them some more, give them something to do while they slowly die in misery. You don't own a home? Well, is Taurus conjuncting Gemini and they are all in a trinal whatever-fuck relationship? That's the problem! Your ascendant / descendant / erecting sign says you have to do blah blah when the signs are blah blah.. In other words YOUR FAULT.

"@gvwilson@mastodon.social

There is a lot of ageism in tech. One reason, I think, is that 30-year-olds spouting recycled Y Combinator bullshit don't like having the obvious flaws and contradictions in their statements pointed out by people who've lived through two or three previous hype cycles. Not hiring the elderly ensures that they're always in a high-adulation environment, and never have to worry about whether staff will resist being guilted or bullied into sacrificing their personal lives for someone else's gain."

But the true rate of unemployment is at 24%.

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GDP growth looks ok

2025-01-01   -0.502517
2025-04-01    2.968252

Inflation

2025-01-01  1.991763
2025-04-01  1.986664

New Yorker: "How 3M Discovered, Then Concealed, the Dangers of Forever Chemicals.. The company found its own toxic compounds in human blood—and kept selling them."

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"@raph@social.coop

Norway's $2 trillion wealth fund (largest in the world) has divested from 11 of the 61 Israeli companies it invested in, and is reviewing the others. Italy is considering state sanctions against Israel.

This is far more significant than all the diplomatic and political condemnations that make the news every day: occupation, apartheid, and genocide will only end when the costs to the average Israeli outweigh the benefits. It's as simple as that."

The ill-conceived taking of Gaza plan won't just cause casualties, Hamas will also take more hostages. It's a bad idea.

The Australian: "Pure Hydrogen sees more than $3m roll in from the sale of hydrogen fuel cell trucks.. Pure Hydrogen signs sale agreement with Scott Lovatt Transport for supply of two Taurus Prime Movers. The company also inks a second concrete agitator truck purchase order from Heidelberg Materials.. Managing Director, Scott Brown, said both orders represent the growing traction Pure is gaining in Australia’s transport sector"

This is the price you pay for betting on the wrong base technology. Molecule / physical fuel based approaches allow efficient storage, efficient refueling and transport, all at the same time. But some wanted to see "sparks flying" bcz it looks hi-tech.. their view of technology is second-hand, and retarded.

NN: "Clean energy is here. Getting it to EVs isn’t.. Grid congestion is the key obstacle to EV emissions reduction, new study finds"

‪"@nickstenning.bsky.social‬

I mean we have a frontier model out today that can’t count 'b's in 'blueberry,' let alone addresses in a network. Seems safe to say AGI is not just around the corner."

"@apenwarr.ca‬

The [below] post is proof that modern LLMs are not 'just fancy autocomplete' because clearly there's some text already on the Internet that should have let the '2 raised to the power of 22' sentence finish correctly. In this case we have achieved the dubious goal of being worse than autocomplete"

"@apenwarr.ca‬

Um. Dear Google, you seem very confident about this"

It's not that bad.. And away from Marmara Sea this time, relatively far from Stanpoli and its fault line

Homie got shook again?

eq = u.eq_at(40, 28, 300,ago=4,minmag=6.0)
u.map_coords([40, 28], eq, zoom=6, outfile="map14.html")

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"Why Is Colorado Building a 22 MILLION TON Rock Wall in the Rocky Mountains?"

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