Link. Yes.
Thiel funds GOP.
Link. Thiel is Ann Coulter ally who hates “globalization”. (? non-euro? asian?)
“private spying has boomed into a renegade, billion-dollar industry, one that is increasingly invading our privacy, profiting from deception and manipulating the news.”
Link. “ Information gathered by private investigators is often laundered through public relations firms, which then shop the material to journalists.”
“Apple has constructed a bureaucracy that has become a powerful tool in China’s vast censorship operation”
Link.
“Apple made Guizhou-Cloud Big Data, or GCBD, a company owned by the Guizhou provincial government, the legal owner of its Chinese customers’ iCloud data.”
Link. Hope not a surprise.
Cheney hasn’t given up.
Link. A stubborn woman.
Air pollution, cognition and NSAIDS.
Link. This feels very squishy. Not enough data to act on it. What do animal models show? How would this even work?
13 AirTag Tracking Scenarios
Link. Need iPhone 11 or 12 to be truly useful. Not great for tracking stolen bikes and the like.
Big Sur lies about free disk space — and that can tank an OS update
Link. Diskutil command line has useful powers, this tells how to delete TM Snapshots to free up space.
“The U.S. government’s top national security leaders soon realized they were dealing with an off-the-books operation by the commander in chief himself.”
Link. You’ve already forgotten haven’t you? Ironically Biden would succeed where Trump failed.
“$2.5 trillion was spent on trying to replace legacy IT systems, of which some $720 billion was wasted on failed replacement efforts.”
Link. Are they really more vulnerable to intrusion? “ the finer details of how the system works are no longer understood.” Not just the finer details.
1981: “The average difference between the sentences that two randomly chosen judges gave for the same crime was more than 3.5 years”
Link. Resembles 1970s medicine. I wonder if more consistent today.
Biden’s GOP charade is about Manchin.
Link. At least the meetings are brief.
Republican war on voting attacks poll workers.
Link. Black voters of Georgia triggered an existential crisis. Never again says the GOP.
“Hook Pro enables you to automatically add and tag bookmarks in Pinboard”
Link. Personal Information Management returns.
Brilliantly Wrong: The Political Cartoons of the Onion’s Stan Kelly | The New Yorker
Link. The explainer I wanted. The gap between Kelly and alt-right cartoonist Ben Garrison is oh so fine. Via a reply to @cstross.
Cannabis and psychosis: “The underdeveloped brain is more complicated than the 30-year-old brain”
Link. Excellent discussion. Redefining “full adult” as 25yo makes a lot of sense — the age of car rental.
From slavery to makers and takers.
Link. Looking back it seems so predictable, like simulations of continental drift.
White women still favored Trump (but less so)
Link. “White women voted 48% for Mr Biden, two points higher than the share that supported Hillary Clinton”. White men shifted more.
“R.J. Reynolds used Eric Garner’s death at the hands of a New York police officer to denounce a proposed ban on menthols in the city”
Link. Friend of the Black man.
Alien encounters: “If so many can deny or downplay a disease that’s killed millions, dismissing some unusual debris would be trivial”
Link. Billions believe in supernatural deities and lead perfectly mundane lives. Aliens would be easy to ignore.
“Air quality in buildings can be improved with a few simple fixes”
Link. This is so obviously the right move.
Rep. Matt Gaetz Snorted Cocaine With Megan Zalonka, Escort Who Had ‘No Show’ Gov’t Job
Link. “Zalonka, who is an amateur fashion model and the communications director for the American Medical Marijuana Physicians Association”.
Her book is going to be big.
Record number of Twin Cities bike trail closures
Link. Mostly for good cause but detours need work.
Perfluorocarbon oxygen enema for murine hypoxia
Link. Breathing through the butt.
“Last week more than 28,800 virus genomes, almost 10 percent of all positive test cases, were uploaded to an international online database called GISAID”
Link. We can still do great things.
“94 percent effective at preventing symptomatic Covid-19 illness”
Link. *symptomatic* is key. Many more will test positive with PCR if timing is right.
Starlink: “unreliable, inconsistent, and foiled by even the merest suggestion of trees.”
Link. “Slack, Zoom, or gaming, simply weren’t usable for me, even when I was seeing the fastest speeds”
NYT has deep dive into how Biden works.
Link. Lots of insider information here. Four historians?
“rarely exhibits the smoldering anger or sense of deep disappointment that advisers to Mr. Obama became familiar with”
CIA “infused” a purée of pasta, sauce, nuts, raisins and hummus into his rectum because he went on a hunger strike, “
Link. Rather than have CIA testify to the Bush-Cheney torture program he will be released.
B.1.617 outbreak among Pfizer/Moderna vaccinated.
Link. None very sick but this is a bad time to be unvaccinated.
Colonial Pipeline Paid Roughly $5 Million in Ransom.
Link. We should fine companies that pay ransom 100 times the ransom paid. It’s cheaper to pay ransom than to have failover backups.
“looking at the money supply in the U.S. context offered basically no information about future inflation”
Link. So what does it tell us?
Inbox Infinity
Link. Seen. I’m reformed Inbox Zero.
How to restore Spotlight search of Rich Text files.
Link. Bug unfixed in Catalina. In Big Sur force reindexing.
Freedom House metrics: “decade and a half now they’ve shown a world inching toward illiberalism”
Link. Obama was an aberration. A less incompetent Trump would rule now, so Biden is also an exception.
How the CDC came up with “less than 10%” for outdoor COVID transmission.
Link. Real number is less than 1%, probably much less.
Susanne Clarke: “She has been given various diagnoses, including Lyme disease, Epstein-Barr virus, and chronic fatigue syndrome.”
Link. She has a new book out. Piranesi.
“Seychelles, the world’s most vaccinated nation, has had a surge in cases despite much of its population being inoculated with Sinopharm”
Link. Ominous for China.
GrandPerspective: view Mac storage use.
Link. TidBITS recommended.
“teenagers have had the sharpest decline in births since 2007, down by 63 percent”
Link. IUD?
Noah Smith tries to salvage Clubhouse.
Link. Clubhouse made less sense than 1970s CB radio. I think it was a pandemic thing. If it dies the world becomes a bit less bizarre.
Dogecoin: “What is happening is ridiculous! It is also actually happening and so we are forced to engage with it. By doing so, we, too, feel ridiculous.”
Link. When giants play the wee folk get squashed.
Why do plants produce so many terpenoid compounds?
Link. Cannabis is only one of innumerable terpenes. Presumed chemical warfare but not well understood.
“Apple’s exploitation of leverage in this situation has been breathtaking.”
Link. Apple is doing the impossible — making Facebook look less deplorable. Their conversion to Evil is even faster than Google’s.
“at retreats in March and April, staff for the National Republican Congressional Committee refused to tell lawmakers how badly Trump is polling in core battleground districts”
Link. A peculiar cult.
Roman chair back extension done right.
Link. I really miss the old back extension machines but this with RDL may come close. Great tutorial for those of us who do back rehab constantly. I do 50 lb weight plus bands.
“preferred solution to the problems created by cryptocurrencies is to treat them all like child pornography”
Link. I think early version of thar deep space network showed up in of Stross books.
M1: “If you’re unable to boot from a bootable disk using an older (non-current) version of macOS, change its boot policy to Reduced Security”
Link.
“Dr. Anthony Fauci, it seems, conspired with nefarious globalists to manufacture the COVID-19 virus in a Wuhan, China, laboratory and unleash it on the unsuspecting world in order to seize control of the global population.”
Link. Almost correct, but omits Fauci’s role in the Trilateral Commission and the true nature of the Trinity.