Tag Archives: IFTTT

Homo naledi remains deep in an obscure cave system: “What today’s cavers can do is not a good guide to what a smaller species, better adapted and practiced at climbing, might have done.”

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https://johnhawks.net/weblog/how-homo-naledi-got-into-the-dinaledi-chamber/

One may speculate that for them it was a very secure place to visit or live in.

There are probably other similar spaces we would need to explore via bots.

“Trump is claiming the power to ignore the due process of the law guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution, declare someone is a criminal, kidnap them, send them to prison in a third country, and then claim that there is no way to get that person back.”

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https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/april-13-2025

Move over Nazi, MAGA is here.

“Bukele has been offering to hold U.S. citizens”

Gotta learn more Spanish.

“Once you give up the idea that we are all equal before the law and have the right to due process, you have given up the whole game.

DOGE scam: “One of the group’s largest claims … involves canceling a contract that did not exist”

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https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/13/us/politics/doge-contracts-savings.html

“the contract … was actually canceled when Joseph R. Biden Jr. was president. The third-largest savings that the group claims comes from a canceled grant to a vaccine nonprofit … it had actually been paid in full, so the savings was $0”

DOGE itself is fraud and abuse. Musk is a con man. Join a Tesla Takedown.

90s Globalization (China Shock): “Standard economic theory held that the people and places hit by those losses should have adapted relatively quickly.”

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https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/11/business/economy/tariffs-trump-china-shock.html

THIS! One of my pet theories is that 1990-2020 globalization and IT exceeded a speed limit — a limit on how quickly a socioeconomic system can adapt.

And our society crashed and burned.

“Investigative Case Management (ICM) … by Peter Thiel’s … Palantir, which in 2022 signed a $95.9 million contract with the government to develop ICM”

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https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/april-11-2025

When you see the name Palantir know that it is bad. A database that of those who might be difficult. I want to see my entry.

“April 20, the secretaries of defense and homeland security are supposed to report to the president whether they think he should invoke the 1807 Insurrection Act”

David Brooks admits he got it badly wrong: “To watch the loss of your nation’s honor is embarrassing and painful.”

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https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2025/05/trumpism-maga-populism-power-pursuit/682116/?link_source=ta_bluesky_link&taid=67f3b8cab4a2540001c94e5b

Brooks rarely says anything that is not annoying but I give credit for admitting error.

“Trump … Morality is for suckers. The strong do what they want and the weak suffer what they must.”

“… birds and mammals did not inherit the neural pathways that generate intelligence from a common ancestor, but rather evolved them independently”

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https://www.quantamagazine.org/intelligence-evolved-at-least-twice-in-vertebrate-animals-20250407/

Bird brains are more space efficient.

“circuits that composed the mammalian neocortex and the avian DVR developed at different times, in different orders and in different regions of the brain.”

The base neuron structures seem same. Implications for artificial minds.

“Colossal scientists deciphered the dire wolf genome, rewrote the genetic code of the common gray wolf to match it, and, using domestic dogs as surrogate mothers…”

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https://time.com/7274542/colossal-dire-wolf/

“Creating the dire wolves called for making just 20 edits in 14 genes in the common gray wolf … white coat, larger size, more powerful shoulders, wider head, larger teeth and jaws, more-muscular legs, and characteristic vocalizations, especially howling and whining.”

“elephant genes will simply be rewritten to match the mammoth”

Since 2013 bottom 25% students doing worse, accelerated by COVID

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https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/07/us/low-performing-students-reasons.html

“[bottom tier] Adults have also been struggling with literacy since 2012 …”

I believe it is the tech, especially smartphone. The constant distraction, but also the difficulty the bottom quartile has working with the tech that schools require them to use. #massdisability

Meanwhile in China: vast product production.

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https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/07/business/china-manufacturing-exports-trump-tariffs.html

“China is using more factory robots than the rest of the world combined …. factory output is bigger than the combined manufacturing of the United States, Germany, Japan, South Korea and Britain.”

But

“housing market crash since 2021 has wiped out much of the savings of the middle class and ruined many wealthy families.”

How Waltz added Goldberg to the Signal breach: “he number was erroneously saved during a “contact suggestion update” by Waltz’s iPhone, which one person described as the function where an iPhone algorithm adds a previously unknown number to an exist

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https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/apr/06/signal-group-chat-leak-how-it-happened

So funny. Done in by Apple being helpful. I bet that mistake happens fairly often.

Also, of course, why there are processes and tools around secure technologies to prevent errors like this.

This gets to the root of our true gov problems: “White House had authorized the use of Signal, largely because there is no alternative platform to text in real time across different agencies”

A pragmatic economist reviews the contradictions of Trump’s assault on world trade

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https://www.twincities.com/2025/04/06/real-world-economics-the-flaws-in-trumps-liberation-reasoning-on-tariffs/

“While that tariff will hit every container of unprocessed products clearing customs, trucking, processing, warehousing and retailers’ costs here need not change.”

So a 10% tariff, even if borne entirely by Americans, may be significantly less than a 10% price increase. Good stuff in here.

“Given years to adjust to the new tariffs, seasonal vegetable production and canning could again be important in these mid-Atlantic states, although many farm fields have become suburbs.”

Rick Steves cheerful travelogue style one hour intro to fascism in 20th century Europe.

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https://www.ricksteves.com/watch-read-listen/video/tv-show/fascism

Steves is best known for his chipper and very efficient guided tours of European museums and destinations. His voice guided my daughter and I through the Vatican museum in about 3 hours(!).

He applies this method to a MAGA-inspired tour of fascism. It’s engaging, brilliant, and wicked.

“When we wrote our book on administrative burdens, we pointed to Social Security as a model to emulate”

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https://donmoynihan.substack.com/p/as-savings-crater-social-security

“SSA said that 40 percent of direct deposit fraud occurred via calls to the agency. That is wholly different, and massively less, than 40 percent of calls being fraudulent.”

The way to break social security is to degrade services. As Musk is doing. (Caveat: SSA has pretty bad software. It could be improved with time, money, and thought.)

Trump’s National Park Service makes a happier American history: “webpage changes resulted not from demands from above, but from lower-level employees seeking to comply with what they believed Trump wanted”

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https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/2025/04/06/national-park-service-underground-railroad-history-slavery/

Ben Franklin’s slaves fade away.

Trump loyalists advancing the MAGA agenda, as Project 2025 planned. Fear of job loss drove more expansive revisions.

Fear is the key.

“The notion that taxing Lesotho gemstones is necessary for the U.S. to add steel jobs in Ohio is so absurd that I briefly lost consciousness in the middle of writing this sentence.”

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https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2025/04/tariffs-trump-outcomes-incompatible/682286/?gift=gfZm1tfSiXkcDbEcUH-moKiYluBQDHkwVukxav480nc

This, dear NYT, is how you cover madness. I like how Thompson listed 3 incompatible post-hoc justifications from Team Trump.

Jared Bernstein: “we depend less on trade than most other countries. That means, as Trump has correctly argued, we can hurt them more than they can hurt us.”

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https://contrarian.substack.com/p/a-trade-warfor-what

This essay assumes the US doesn’t invade Greenland or turn Canada into an American colony. Bernstein further assumes rational responses to the trade wars. Given those assumptions, what lies ahead for Americans is merely recession, growing misery, and general decline for decades to come.

Solid reference.

Musk takes down social security services: “downsize its phone operations … forced an influx of traffic to the SSA website. The strain of that traffic has reportedly caused the website to crash multiple times.”

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https://gizmodo.com/doge-orders-layoffs-at-social-security-plans-to-gut-it-team-as-website-continually-breaks-report-2000585252

Twitter goes down and the world is briefly a better place. SSA goes down and vulnerable people suffer.

(This morning the site went down as we tried to document our disabled son’s income.)

Historian of reconstruction on the MAGA age: Crushing reconstruction.

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https://www.salon.com/2025/04/04/from-the-confederacy-to-the-gilded-age-manisha-sinha-on-the-sorry-history-that-inspires-maga/

“even the robber barons were not that bad; at least they endowed some libraries and foundations and fellowships and had some idea of wanting to pretend to some sort of cultural capital. But here, at this moment, we are in a regime with these billionaires who seem unaccountable to anyone”