(date: 2023-12-13 16:00:31)
date: 2023-12-14, from: ETH Zurich, recently added
de Lalouvière, Nicole
http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11850/647399 Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-13, updated: 2023-12-13, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Google popped a bunch of AI models onto its cloud platform on Wednesday for folks to try out and perhaps adopt.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2023/12/13/google_gemini_duet_ai/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-13, from: SCV New (TV Station)
The Gibbons Conservation Center is thrilled to announce they reached their goal, thanking everyone who donated to their November Matching Gift of $15,
https://scvnews.com/gibbons-conservation-center-gives-thanks-for-november-matching-gift/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-13, from: San Jose Mercury News
Menlo Park levee breach is major milestone in $100 million restoration of Bay from salt ponds to wild marshes.
https://www.mercurynews.com/2023/12/13/re-wilding-san-francisco-bay-one-pond-at-a-time/ Save to Pocket
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2023-12-13, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
The power of open formats.
https://feedland.blog/2023/12/13/the-power-of-open-formats/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-13, from: SCV New (TV Station)
The November fire that shut down a section of the 10 Freeway — subsequently reopening more than a week after the blaze severely damaged a crucial artery for Los Angeles drivers — brought comparison to the 1994 Northridge earthquake and damage it caused to roadways across the region
https://scvnews.com/csun-prof1994-earthquake-recovery-influenced-quick-repair-of-recent-10-freeway-fire/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-13, from: Santa Barbara Indenpent News
December 11, 2023 (Ventura, CA) – On Saturday, December 9, California State Senator MONIQUE LIMÓN and Assemblymember STEVE BENNETT presented a check for
The post Rubicon Theatre Company in Ventura Receives $1.5 Million Gift from Senator Monique Limón and Assemblymember Steve Bennett appeared first on The Santa Barbara Independent.
https://www.independent.com/2023/12/13/rubicon-theatre-company-in-ventura-receives-1-5-million-gift-from-senator-monique-limon-and-assemblymember-steve-bennett/ Save to Pocket
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2023-12-13, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
I've been blogging for over 29 years, and have no plans on stopping, ever. 😀
https://blog.ayjay.org/bring-back-the-blog/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-13, from: VOA News USA
The Biden administration’s support of Israel in the war against Hamas has drawn sharp criticism both from Americans protesting Palestinian civilian deaths and from State Department staff calling for a cease-fire. Meanwhile, President Joe Biden has been signaling to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that he needs to change course or risk international standing. VOA Senior Diplomatic Correspondent Cindy Saine reports.
https://www.voanews.com/a/biden-warns-netanyahu-israel-losing-support-in-war-against-hamas-/7397104.html Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-13, from: San Jose Mercury News
In what plaintiff Sarah Depoian called “an extreme violation,” Dr. Merle Berger, an OBGYN professor at Harvard and founder of Boston IVF, one of the nation’s largest fertility clinics, is accused of inseminating her with his own sperm.
https://www.mercurynews.com/2023/12/13/lawsuit-ex-harvard-doctor-accused-of-inseminating-woman-with-his-own-sperm-without-permission/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-13, from: SCV New (TV Station)
Burrtec Waste Industries has partnered with the city of Santa Clarita to establish four convenient locations for residents to recycle their Christmas trees this holiday season
https://scvnews.com/recycle-trees-after-the-holiday-season-at-drop-off-locations/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-13, updated: 2023-12-13, from: Jason Kittke’s blog
https://kottke.org/23/12/0043619-ive-discovered-a-new-word Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-13, from: San Jose Mercury News
Global cuisine lined up for Travis Kalanick’s hush-hush venture
https://www.mercurynews.com/2023/12/13/san-jose-downtown-food-halls-first-mystery-restaurant-tenants-coming-to-light/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-13, from: San Jose Mercury News
As details of the plan emerged, advocates for immigrants and members of President Joe Biden’s own Democratic Party fretted about the policies under discussion. Some demonstrated at the Capitol, warning of a return to the hardline border and immigration policies of the Trump era.
https://www.mercurynews.com/2023/12/13/biden-mulls-new-border-restrictions-in-quest-for-ukraine-deal/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-13, from: San Jose Mercury News
A spacious house located in the 800 block of Matadero Avenue in Palo Alto has new owners. The 2,083-square-foot property, built in 1949, was sold on Nov. 30, 2023.
https://www.mercurynews.com/2023/12/13/single-family-residence-sells-in-palo-alto-for-3-8-million-3/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-13, from: VOA News USA
https://www.voanews.com/a/pakistan-seeks-us-help-against-pakistani-taliban-in-afghanistan/7397076.html Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-13, from: Santa Barbara Indenpent News
SANTA BARBARA, CA – December 13, 2023 It’s hard to have a happy holiday when you’re arrested for drunk driving.
The post 2023 Winter Holiday Season “Drive Sober or Get Pulled Over” Campaign appeared first on The Santa Barbara Independent.
https://www.independent.com/2023/12/13/2023-winter-holiday-season-drive-sober-or-get-pulled-over-campaign/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-13, from: Heatmap News
More than 2 million Tesla vehicles are set to receive over-the-air updates to address failures in the Autopilot system, the carmaker’s much-hyped and oft-abused driver-assistance program. But the recall report published by the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration shows regulators are willing to keep risky technology on the road as long as the driver gets nagged enough.
What’s at issue with the recall is less Autopilot’s ability to brake and accelerate and more its Autosteer functionality, which allows the car to follow curves and make turns. According to NHTSA, “the prominence and scope of the feature’s controls may not be sufficient to prevent driver misuse.”
That “misuse” has been well documented in the years since Autopilot’s release. It began with Teslas being “hacked” with a water bottle to allow drivers to keep their hands completely off the wheel (and sometimes their bodies in the back seat); after that, researchers found that Autopiloted Teslas were involved in 273 crashes over a one-year period. Autopilot has been investigated in almost a dozen cases of vehicles crashing into emergency vehicles, and just this August, thousands of Autopilot complaints from German customers were leaked to Handelsblatt, a German business newspaper.
The initial NHTSA investigation began in 2021, and late this year U.S. regulators met with Tesla twice to address fixes. The automaker eventually decided to resolve the matter by voluntarily administering the recall — while, according to NHTSA, “not concurring with the agency’s analysis.”
While a 2 million-car recall isn’t something usually construed as a win, in this case, U.S. regulators did not conclude the technology itself was unsafe, and also determined that drivers are responsible for using Autopilot safely. This is what Tesla has contended since the beginning, and it’s a rebuke to safety advocates, many local legislators, and lawyers representing accident victims and their families.
Both Tesla and NHTSA point out that Autopilot is similar to other Level 2 automated driving systems offered by competing automakers — although these competitors have more cautiously waded into autonomy, building in myriad restrictions and ways to track driver focus. That’s in contrast to Tesla, which, despite ample contravening evidence and multiple lawsuits, still hosts a video of a Model X “self-driving” with no intervention from the passenger on its website.
https://heatmap.news/sparks/tesla-recall-elon-musk-win Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-13, from: Smithsonian Magazine
UNESCO announced 55 new additions to its list of Intangible Cultural Heritage
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/italian-opera-added-to-unescos-list-of-intangible-cultural-heritage-180983433/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-13, from: Santa Barbara Indenpent News
The force multiplier making this moment happen, I think, was Grand Jury member Stan Roden, who behind all his progressive earnestness still packs some serious — albeit tempered — swagger.
The post Poodle Smells Hope and Goodwill in Santa Barbara County appeared first on The Santa Barbara Independent.
https://www.independent.com/2023/12/13/poodle-smells-hope-and-goodwill-in-santa-barbara-county/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-13, from: Santa Barbara Indenpent News
City is looking to tighten its eviction ordinance to give tenants the right to re-rent and stop landlord harassment.
The post Santa Barbara’s New Tenant Protections Move Forward appeared first on The Santa Barbara Independent.
https://www.independent.com/2023/12/13/santa-barbaras-new-tenant-protections-move-forward-2/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-13, from: San Jose Mercury News
Jason Verrett inspires his 49ers teammates with his latest comeback from injury.
https://www.mercurynews.com/2023/12/13/49ers-re-signed-cb-verrett-my-heart-was-always-wanting-to-be-here/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-13, updated: 2023-12-13, from: Jason Kittke’s blog
https://kottke.org/23/12/0043617-the-national-lyrics-or-th Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-13, updated: 2023-12-13, from: The LAist
Mayor Bass made an ambitious campaign pledge to address homelessness by housing 17,000 Angelenos. We’ve been trying to keep tabs, but it’s complicated.
https://laist.com/news/housing-homelessness/why-its-so-hard-to-know-how-many-unhoused-people-mayor-bass-has-housed Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-13, from: San Jose Mercury News
Draymond Green’s looming suspension is a big issue for Steph Curry and the Warriors — but it’s far from the team’s only problem.
It all might be too much to overcome.
https://www.mercurynews.com/2023/12/13/kurtenbach-the-warriors-demise-was-years-in-the-making-itll-take-years-and-possibly-the-unthinkable-to-reverse/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-13, from: Smithsonian Magazine
The agreement, which ended the COP28 climate conference, is not legally binding, but it’s the first to explicitly call for moving away from fossil fuels
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/nations-agree-to-transition-away-from-fossil-fuels-in-landmark-climate-deal-180983431/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-13, from: Michael Tsai
VMware (via Hacker News): Broadcom’s close of the VMware acquisition has brought together two engineering-first, innovation-centric teams to help build the world’s leading infrastructure technology company. […] VMware has been on a journey to simplify its portfolio and transition from a perpetual to a subscription model to better serve customers with continuous innovation, faster time […]
https://mjtsai.com/blog/2023/12/13/vmware-transition-to-subscriptions/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-13, from: Michael Tsai
Daniel Gonzalez Reina (via Hacker News): On the one hand you have that Macs will use a HFP when the microphone is in use, and on the other you have that HFP use audio codecs which prioritizes low latency over audio quality. Therefore,☠️ Using the Bluetooth headset’s microphone will make your Mac sacrifice audio quality […]
https://mjtsai.com/blog/2023/12/13/why-is-bluetooth-sound-quality-bad-on-my-mac/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-13, from: Michael Tsai
Apple (downloads): Xcode 15.1 includes SDKs for iOS 17.2, iPadOS 17.2, tvOS 17.2, watchOS 10.2, and macOS Sonoma 14.2. The Xcode 15.1 release supports on-device debugging in iOS 12 and later, tvOS 12 and later, and watchOS 4 and later. Xcode 15.1 requires a Mac running macOS Ventura 13.5 or later. Robin Kunde: There’s a […]
https://mjtsai.com/blog/2023/12/13/xcode-15-1/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-13, from: Michael Tsai
Kyle Orland: The jury unanimously answered “yes” to all 11 questions on the verdict form, indicating that Epic had proven those monopolies existed in every worldwide market except for China. Google “engaged in anticompetitive conduct” to establish or maintain the monopoly and illegally tied the Google Play store to the use of Google Play billing, […]
https://mjtsai.com/blog/2023/12/13/epic-wins-antitrust-case-with-google/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-13, from: Liliputing
The Topton FU02 is a small fanless computer with aluminum body featuring heat spreading fins on the top and sides. When we first reported on the FU02 last year, it was available with support for up to an AMD Ryzen 7 4700U processor. But it looks like Topton’s been busy adding newer processor options since then, […]
The post Topton FU02 fanless mini PC is now available with up to a Ryzen 7 7730U processor appeared first on Liliputing.
https://liliputing.com/topton-fu02-fanless-mini-pc-is-now-available-with-up-to-a-ryzen-7-7730u-processor/ Save to Pocket
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2023-12-13, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
SpaceX blasts FCC as it refuses to reinstate Starlink’s $886 million grant.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/12/spacex-blasts-fcc-as-it-refuses-to-reinstate-starlinks-886-million-grant/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-13, from: San Jose Mercury News
Chunliam Saechao was the subject of two lengthy armed standoffs as police waited outside his Pleasant Hill home.
https://www.mercurynews.com/2023/12/13/retired-pittsburg-detective-charged-with-attempting-to-kill-pleasant-hill-cops/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-13, from: NASA breaking news
The asteroid and comet-hunting infrared space telescope has gathered an impressive haul of observations, but it’s now at the mercy of the Sun, which is accelerating its demise. NASA’s NEOWISE has had a busy decade. Since its reactivated mission began on Dec. 13, 2013, the space telescope has discovered a once-in-a-lifetime comet, observed more than […]
https://www.nasa.gov/missions/neowise/nasas-neowise-celebrates-10-years-plans-end-of-mission/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-13, from: San Jose Mercury News
A spokesperson for the Jewish Community Relations Council said that the menorah had been smashed, its pieces strewn across the area. Anti-Semitic graffiti was also sprayed on concrete benches near the display.
https://www.mercurynews.com/2023/12/13/hanukkah-menorah-near-lake-merritt-destroyed-by-vandals/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-13, from: San Jose Mercury News
“The emails at issue demonstrate poor judgment, but they are not criminal,” the suspect’s lawyers wrote in a memo to the court.
https://www.mercurynews.com/2023/12/13/criticizing-a-judge-is-not-illegal-charges-dropped-against-san-mateo-county-man-accused-of-threatening-jurist/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-13, from: Santa Barbara Indenpent News
Santa Barbara’s Thomas Reynolds Gallery is presenting their 29th annual group exhibition ‘(Mostly) Small Treasures’ through January 31st.
The post Santa Barbara’s Thomas Reynolds Gallery Presents ‘(Mostly) Small Treasures’ appeared first on The Santa Barbara Independent.
https://www.independent.com/2023/12/13/santa-barbaras-thomas-reynolds-gallery-presents-mostly-small-treasures/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-13, from: NASA breaking news
NASA currently is working with several commercial companies as part of the agency’s VADR (Venture-Class Acquisition of Dedicated and Rideshare) launch services contract, providing new opportunities for science, and technology payloads. These include: Building on NASA’s previous procurement efforts to foster development of a growing U.S. commercial launch market, VADR provides Federal Aviation Administration -licensed […]
https://www.nasa.gov/directorates/somd/launch-services-office/lsp/nasa-provides-update-on-venture-class-launch-services/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-13, from: Santa Barbara Indenpent News
County gives major polluter Central Coast Agriculture 180 days to install a critical piece of clean-air technology.
The post Lompoc Cannabis Lab Granted Temporary Permit appeared first on The Santa Barbara Independent.
https://www.independent.com/2023/12/13/lompoc-cannabis-lab-granted-temporary-permit/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-13, from: SCV New (TV Station)
As the busiest shopping season of the year ramps up, Team DEO is calling on all L.A. County residents to shop at local mom and pop shops and small businesses across the County during the holiday season
https://scvnews.com/win-a-500-gift-card-to-local-mom-pop-shops/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-13, from: The Signal
A 21-year-old Lancaster resident was arrested on suspicion of DUI of alcohol causing injury on Monday night, and held in lieu of $100,000 bail, according to officials with the California Highway Patrol Newhall-area Office. According to Officer Josh Greengard, a spokesman for CHP Newhall, on Monday at approximately 8:30 p.m. the suspect was involved in […]
The post <strong>CHP: 21-year-old arrested following DUI crash on SR-14</strong> appeared first on Santa Clarita Valley Signal.
https://signalscv.com/2023/12/chp-21-year-old-arrested-following-dui-crash-on-sr-14/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-13, from: Blog by Fabrizio Ferri-Benedetti
I’m not only a technical writer and an avid collector of old manuals: I’m also a gamer. One of the bits I always enjoyed about video games were the manuals, from the slim booklets that accompanied arcade games to the hefty guides that helped build virtual worlds in our heads while we waited for a few kilobytes to load in memory. Those manuals still hold valuable lessons for the software documentation we write today.
https://passo.uno/video-game-manuals-docs/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-13, from: The Signal
A person was trapped aboard a cherry picker in Castaic and subsequently rescued by Los Angeles County Fire Department personnel on Tuesday night, according to L.A. County Fire Department officials. According to Esteban Benitez, a spokesman for the L.A. County Fire Department, fire personnel responded to a person trapped call at 6:07 p.m. at the […]
The post <strong>Person trapped, then rescued from cherry picker in Castaic</strong> appeared first on Santa Clarita Valley Signal.
https://signalscv.com/2023/12/person-trapped-then-rescued-from-cherry-picker-in-castaic/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-13, from: NASA breaking news
Growing up, Bruce Askins was passionate about space and oceanography. His desire to explore other worlds always made him want to be an astronaut. Though he did not become an astronaut, Askins has built a 42-year career at NASA, and, as the infrastructure management lead for NASA’s SLS (Space Launch System) Program at the agency’s […]
https://www.nasa.gov/image-article/i-am-artemis-bruce-askins/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-13, from: Heatmap News
This year may forever be remembered as the start of the American clean energy manufacturing boom.
Since the beginning of 2023, companies have announced more than 150 separate investments in new and expanded factories to manufacture solar panels, wind turbines, batteries, and other clean energy technologies in the U.S., for a total pledged outlay of nearly $60 billion, according to tracking by the nonpartisan group E2. And these factories won’t just be assembling the final products. Entire supply chains have arrived on shore.
This is all, of course, due to the Inflation Reduction Act, the historic climate legislation President Biden signed in 2022. The projects announced this year are on top of some 60 announcements made right after the law passed.
But more specifically, these factories are the result of one program in the law that has perhaps not been fully appreciated — the 45X tax credit. The IRA’s X-factor, if I may.
In ecology, scientists refer to animals that have a disproportionate effect on their ecosystem as “keystone species.” Beavers, for example, engineer the landscape around them, creating habitat that allows certain other plants and animals to thrive. If beavers suddenly disappeared, those habitats and the creatures they supported would vanish, too.
Similarly, 45X is the “keystone” of the IRA, according to Harry Godfrey, managing director at Advanced Energy United, an industry association that represents a variety of clean energy companies. This one provision engineers the ecosystems supporting three key technologies — wind, solar, and batteries — by offering tax relief to U.S. manufacturers producing components up and down their supply chains.
The goal is not just to lower the cost of these climate solutions, but also to level the global playing field for American-made goods. Before the end of the year the Treasury Department will propose new guidance on how the 45X tax credit will work — for example, how the government will prevent fraud and abuse of the program — but the basic mechanics established in the IRA have given companies enough confidence to get to work.
The size of the credit companies are eligible for is specific to each manufactured component. Let’s look at how solar panels are made, as an example:
1. At the top of the supply chain are the companies that make polysilicon, the key material that helps transform sunlight into electricity. Those producers will earn $3 per kilogram of polysilicon fabricated in the U.S.
2. Next are the companies that buy polysilicon and turn it into solar wafers, thin slices that are later stacked to produce solar cells. They will receive $12 per square meter of wafer they produce.
3. The solar cell fabricators will receive a refund based on how much electricity their cells are capable of producing, paid out at 4 cents per watt, or $40 per kilowatt.
4. Producers of “polymeric backsheets,” a protective layer applied to the back of the final solar panels, can earn 40 cents per square meter.
5. Finally, companies that assemble the cells into a solar panel and apply the backsheets will get $70 per kilowatt.
Advanced Energy United made a rough estimate of what those five incentives would mean for solar using 2018 manufacturing data. It found that 45X would reduce the cost of a domestically produced solar panel by 41%. “That’s huge to the global competitiveness of this industry,” said Godfrey.
There are additional incentives under 45X not even included in their analysis. The program pays back 10% of the cost of producing the aluminum that goes into the solar panel’s frame and into the inverter that enables it to send power onto the electric grid, for example. Producers of “torque tubes” and “fasteners,” the structural components used to mount solar panels to a field or roof, are also eligible. Inverter manufacturers qualify, as well.
There’s no per-company cap or annual funding limit on the tax credit, and it will be in effect until 2032. But if it succeeds, it could become self-sustaining, encouraging companies to come to the U.S. in the future because that’s where the supply chain and workforce is. “Suddenly you’re shifting the gravity back into the United States,” Godfrey told me.
Proponents of subsidizing a domestic clean energy manufacturing industry tout benefits like job creation, economic development, and improving U.S. energy security and independence. Renewable energy technologies like wind and solar already inherently do this, as they reduce our exposure to the price volatility of oil and gas, as when energy prices spiked around the world in 2022 due to Russia’s war in Ukraine.
Diversifying supply chains and bringing them to the U.S. further insulates the country from being overly dependent on China, which currently controls some 60% of the manufacturing capacity of clean energy technologies. Being so reliant on any one country is risky — and when that country is China, a country with which the U.S. has a longstanding rivalry, the risk is greater still. For instance, China recently restricted exports of graphite, a key mineral for electric vehicles, in retaliation to U.S. export limits on semiconductors.
45X is not the only program in the IRA that encourages domestic production. The consumer tax credit for electric vehicles, for example, which gives car buyers a $7,500 discount on a new EV, only applies to models that were assembled in the U.S., with at least 50% of their battery components made in the country, too. But the IRA creates a push and pull dynamic — 45X provides the push for that consumer-based pull to work.
“In order for these demand side credits to be effective, we need the manufacturing capacity,” Thomas Boylan, regulatory director at the Zero Emissions Transportation Association told me. “Broadly speaking, this is what will make or break the success of some of these other credits.”
Treasury’s upcoming guidance will help clarify exactly which processes and technologies qualify. But unlike some of the IRA’s other programs, where the department has had to contend with big, industry-shaping questions, like how a company can prove it is using clean electricity, the uncertainty around 45X is mostly around small details.
For example, Boylan told me there’s some confusion in the industry about who can claim which aspect of the credit. Can producers of critical minerals claim 45X, or is the credit just for companies who buy the minerals? And if one company is involved in multiple steps of the supply chain, can they claim 45X for each one? There’s also uncertainty about whether only producers of new materials are eligible, or whether, for example, an electric vehicle battery recycling company can claim the credit.
But as evidenced by the investment numbers, companies haven’t exactly been waiting for the guidance to make moves.
https://heatmap.news/economy/biden-ira-tax-credit-45x Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-13, from: Smithsonian Magazine
Following many failed attempts to retire, the legendary animator has released a new semi-autobiographical feature
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/the-boy-and-the-heron-miyazaki-last-film-180983419/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-13, updated: 2023-12-13, from: Jason Kittke’s blog
https://kottke.org/23/12/0043616-from-alexandra-lange-mark Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-13, from: SCV New (TV Station)
Circle K, the global convenience store chain, is lighting up the holiday season with a major discount at the pump throughout the West Coast
https://scvnews.com/dec-14-circle-k-offering-40-cents-per-gallon-off-fuel/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-13, from: Santa Barbara Indenpent News
This edition of Full Belly Files was originally emailed to subscribers on December 8, 2023. To receive Matt Kettmann’s food newsletter in
The post Full Belly Files | New Machines, Feasting on Seven Fishes, and More appeared first on The Santa Barbara Independent.
https://www.independent.com/2023/12/13/full-belly-files-new-machines-feasting-on-seven-fishes-and-more/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-13, from: Santa Barbara Indenpent News
SANTA BARBARA – Cottage Health is expanding access to healthcare with a new, primary care clinic, Cottage Primary Care –
The post Cottage Primary Care – Santa Barbara – Oak Park Now Open and Accepting New Patients appeared first on The Santa Barbara Independent.
https://www.independent.com/2023/12/13/cottage-primary-care-santa-barbara-oak-park-now-open-and-accepting-new-patients/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-13, from: The Signal
News release Samuel Dixon Family Health Center announced it has received a $30,000 grant from the Henry Mayo Newhall Foundation to go toward bolstering mental health services within the community. The funding will be allocated for counseling and support services for individuals and families who have little to no access to mental health resources […]
The post Dixon health center receives $30,000 grant from Newhall Foundation appeared first on Santa Clarita Valley Signal.
https://signalscv.com/2023/12/dixon-health-center-receives-30000-grant-from-newhall-foundation/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-13, from: Liliputing
Sipeed is continuing to expand its system of devices powered by a removable LM4A system-on-a-module with a RISC-V processor. One of the latest additions to the Sipeed Lichee family is the Lichee Pocket 4A, a handheld gaming PC with a 7 inch display and integrated game controllers. There’s no word on how much it will […]
The post Lichee Pocket 4A is a RISC-V powered handheld game console appeared first on Liliputing.
https://liliputing.com/lichee-pocket-4a-is-a-risc-v-powered-handheld-game-console/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-13, from: The Signal
By Alan Nunn Navy Recruit Training Command Public Affairs GREAT LAKES, Ill. — Seaman Recruit Jessica Stitzinger, a native of Santa Clarita, graduated as the top sailor from Recruit Training Command, Division 380, earning the Military Excellence Award, Dec. 7. The Navy Club of the MEA is the top award presented to the No. 1 recruit […]
The post Santa Clarita native earns Military Excellence Award at Recruit Training Command appeared first on Santa Clarita Valley Signal.
https://signalscv.com/2023/12/santa-clarita-native-earns-military-excellence-award-at-recruit-training-command/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-13, from: Theodore Paine Foundation
On the ride to drop my daughter of at school a couple of days ago on a cold December morning, it was foggy. Really foggy. We could barely see ten feet in front of us. As the car heater was warming up, she shivered in the back seat. Don’t worry I told her, it will […]
https://theodorepayne.org/foggy-mornings/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-13, from: Liliputing
The AYA Neo Pocket S is an upcoming handheld game console powered by Qualcomm’s Snapdragon G3x Gen 2 processor. The chip is designed for handheld gaming, and Qualcomm says it offers up to twice the graphics performance of the first-gen processor used in the Razer Edge. AYA first introduced the AYA Neo Pocket S in August, […]
The post AYA Neo Pocket S handheld game console with Snapdragon G3x Gen 2 and WiFi coming soo appeared first on Liliputing.
https://liliputing.com/aya-neo-pocket-s-handheld-game-console-with-snapdragon-g3x-gen-2-and-wifi-coming-soo/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-13, from: SCV New (TV Station)
SCV Water recently partnered with the College of the Canyons Employee Training Institute to develop a Project Management training for local water professionals
https://scvnews.com/scv-water-partners-with-coc-to-develop-project-management-training-for-local-water-professionals/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-13, from: The Signal
News release In what has become a Newhall Christmas tradition, Faith Community Church looks forward to welcoming hundreds of neighbors to the church campus for this year’s “Festividad for Christ” event. “This is our 18th year of hosting Festividad, and we so enjoy celebrating Christmas with our local community,” Senior Pastor Steve Jackson said in […]
The post Faith Community Church to host 18th Annual ‘Festividad for Christ’ neighborhood Christmas celebration appeared first on Santa Clarita Valley Signal.
https://signalscv.com/2023/12/faith-community-church-to-host-18th-annual-festividad-for-christ-neighborhood-christmas-celebration/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-13, from: Shady Characters
https://shadycharacters.co.uk/2023/12/advent-calendar-addiator/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-13, from: Santa Barbara Indenpent News
Our mother, Frances Corcoran, was proud of the fact that she was in the first graduating class of Santa Barbara
The post In Memoriam </br> Frances Corcoran </br> 1928-2023 appeared first on The Santa Barbara Independent.
https://www.independent.com/2023/12/13/in-memoriam-frances-corcoran-1928-2023/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-13, from: Santa Barbara Indenpent News
SANTA MARIA, CA – Today, Assemblymember Gregg Hart and Senator Monique Limón will present a $1,000,000 check for the City of
The post Assemblymember Gregg Hart Secures $1 Million for Santa Maria Sports Complex appeared first on The Santa Barbara Independent.
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date: 2023-12-13, from: NASA breaking news
Crews at NASA’s Stennis Space Center cleared a milestone Dec. 11, installing a key component in preparation for future Green Run testing of NASA’s new Exploration Upper Stage (EUS) vehicle for use on the SLS (Space Launch System) rocket. Four large diffusers, each weighing 14 tons, were lifted by crane for installation on the Thad […]
https://www.nasa.gov/centers-and-facilities/stennis/nasa-stennis-continues-preparations-for-future-artemis-testing/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-13, updated: 2023-12-13, from: The LAist
Even in a sort-of dark location you’ll see some spectacular sights.
https://laist.com/news/climate-environment/how-to-watch-geminids-in-socal-the-years-best-meteor-shower Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-13, from: NASA breaking news
It’s been another great year at NASA’s Ames Research Center in California’s Silicon Valley. Join us as we review some of the highlights of the science, engineering, and innovation from 2023. Announcing a New Innovation Hub Planned for NASA Research Park at Ames Berkeley Space Center is a proposed new campus of the University of […]
https://www.nasa.gov/centers-and-facilities/ames/2023-nasa-silicon-valley/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-13, from: Care
<p>Finance editor Ed Ongweso on Israel’s strategy to weaken Palestinians’ ability to resist, in particular through the use of technology and water deprivation.</p>https://logicmag.io/policy/the-genocide-industry-mowing-the-lawn Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-13, from: Heatmap News
As North America slept, delegates from around the world concluded the global climate conference in Dubai, when the chair — local oilman Sultan al-Jaber — quick-gaveled through an agreement that included a sentence calling for “transitioning away from fossil fuels in energy systems, in a just, orderly and equitable manner.”
That may not seem like much — it is, after all, the single most obvious thing one could possibly say about climate change, akin to “in an effort to reduce my headache, I am transitioning away from hitting myself in the forehead with a hammer.” And by itself it will accomplish nothing. As Samoa, speaking on behalf of the Small Island Nations, said a few minutes later, “we have come to the conclusion that the course correction that is needed has not been secured.”
But it is — and this is important — a tool for activists to use henceforth. The world’s nations have now publicly agreed that they need to transition off fossil fuels, and that sentence will hang over every discussion from now on — especially the discussions about any further expansion of the fossil fuel energy. There may be barriers to shutting down operations (what the text of the agreement obliquely refers to as “national circumstances, pathways and approaches”). But surely, if the language means anything at all, it means opening no more new oil fields, no more new pipeline. No more new LNG export terminals.
In fact, that last point — export terminals for liquefied natural gas — will almost certainly be the first real test of whether this agreement means anything. The American envoy John Kerry, who celebrated his 80th birthday during the talks, could be forgiven for thinking of it as a crowning achievement. Though he acknowledged stronger language would have been nice, “I think everybody here should be pleased that in a world of Ukraine and the Middle East war and all the other challenges of a planet that is foundering, this is a moment where multilateralism has actually come together and people have taken individual interests and attempted to define the common good,” Kerry said. “That is hard. That is the hardest thing in diplomacy, the hardest thing in politics.”
But Kerry’s job isn’t done. He needs to return home and convince the White House to pause the granting of new export licenses for the ongoing LNG buildout, a project so enormous that by itself it could produce more greenhouse gas emissions than all of Europe. If the White House agrees — and Dubai saw the release of a letter from 230 environmental organizations urging just such a pause — then we will know there was something real in all this endless talk.
And in that case, the bland sentence — “transitioning away from fossil fuels in energy systems, in a just, orderly and equitable manner” — would join at least two others in the long history of the climate talks as historically significant.
The first came in 1995, when the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, in its second assessment report, said “the balance of evidence suggests that there is a discernible human influence on global climate.” That bland sentence — bland for the same reason, because it also had to get past every government in the world — was the death knell for the argument that climate change wasn’t real; after it, no serious person (admittedly a category with many exceptions) could argue there was no need to do anything.
The second came in 2015, in the preamble to the Paris accords, when (at the urging of those same small island states) the text included a pledge to “substantially reduce global greenhouse gas emissions to hold global temperature increase to well below 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels and pursue efforts to limit it to 1.5 degrees C above pre-industrial levels, recognizing that this would significantly reduce the risks and impacts of climate change.” That recognition of 1.5 degrees changed the debate — but only because activists and scientists used it to demand that governments and businesses identify a “1.5 degree path,” which increased the seriousness of those plans. We’re not going to stay below 1.5 degrees — but that sentence may, in the end, knock half a degree off how much the planet warms.
If today’s sentence is to matter, it will need that same kind of activism, especially since the fossil fuel industry — the most well-represented ‘nation’ at the talks — managed to lard the text with wiggle words. For instance, the agreement “recognizes that transitional fuels can play a role in facilitating the energy transition while ensuring energy security,” which the fracked gas industry is going to interpret as permission for them to go on pumping. We need to insist that the clear, plain meaning of the language is, the fossil fuel era is over. No more new digging and drilling.
What I’m trying to say is, today’s agreement is literally meaningless — and potentially meaningful. But the diplomats are done now — the rest of us are going to have to supply that meaning.
Note: A version of this article originally appeared in the
author’s newsletter,
The
Crucial Years, and has been repurposed for Heatmap.
https://heatmap.news/climate/bill-mckibben-cop28-sentence Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-13, from: TidBITS blog
https://tidbits.com/watchlist/mimestream-1-2-1/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-13, updated: 2023-12-13, from: Jason Kittke’s blog
https://kottke.org/23/12/0043615-hey-just-wanted-to-re-up Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-13, from: TidBITS blog
https://tidbits.com/watchlist/chronosync-11-0-1/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-13, from: TidBITS blog
https://tidbits.com/watchlist/1password-8-10-22/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-13, from: TidBITS blog
https://tidbits.com/watchlist/pixelmator-pro-3-5/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-13, from: The Signal
Cruella, Karma, Coco, Chanel and Clarise, Santa’s “reindeer” who were alpacas dressed in antlers, waited for residents to visit the third annual Barnyard Light Tour on Saturday at William S. Hart Park. In an event hosted by Friends of Hart Park and the Los Angeles County Department of Parks and Recreation, residents came to take […]
The post Hart Park hosts Barnyard Light Tour appeared first on Santa Clarita Valley Signal.
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date: 2023-12-13, from: VOA News USA
https://www.voanews.com/a/hunter-biden-defies-congressional-order-to-testify-about-business-affairs/7396680.html Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-13, from: NASA breaking news
On Aug. 8, 2023, Artemis II crew members (from left) Jeremy Hansen, Victor Glover, Reid Wiseman, and Christina Koch took a photo in front of their Orion crew module at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Announcing the crew and continuing work on the Space Launch System rocket and Orion are part of the significant […]
https://www.nasa.gov/image-article/2023-in-review-artemis-ii-crew-visits-kennedy/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-13, from: Smithsonian Magazine
A new study sheds light on just how many creatures domestic cats will eat—including hundreds that are threatened or endangered
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/cats-prey-on-more-than-2000-different-species-180983429/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-13, updated: 2023-12-13, from: The LAist
The CHP said 75 people were arrested in connections with the demonstration that snarled traffic for miles.
https://laist.com/news/protesters-calling-for-ceasefire-in-israel-hamas-war-shut-down-portion-of-110-freeway-near-downtown-la Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-13, from: Nieman Journalism Lab
There is a word I can’t stop thinking about recently, and once you hear it, you won’t be able to stop thinking about it either. That word is “kayfabe,” the carney term popularized by professional wrestlers to describe what is happening within the theatre of the absurd and fantastical world of good guys and bad…
https://www.niemanlab.org/2023/12/the-cable-news-kayfabe-is-dead/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-13, from: Nieman Journalism Lab
It’s hard to come out of this year without acknowledging the impactful work that independent college media outlets spearheaded: The Stanford Daily dethroning their university president, The Daily Tar Heel capturing the terror of a shooting lockdown, and The Daily Northwestern exposing a football hazing scandal. This work was incredible, and with the help of…
https://www.niemanlab.org/2023/12/college-media-remains-the-news-industrys-younger-cooler-aunt/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-13, from: Nieman Journalism Lab
As some social media platforms diminish in significance as primary news sources for news junkies — because of their perceived unreliability and chaotic nature — there will be a notable rise in the importance of homepages and newsletters as those readers seek more authoritative and trustworthy sources for news. The reality today is most voracious…
https://www.niemanlab.org/2023/12/the-homepage-is-back/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-13, from: Nieman Journalism Lab
At the tail end of 2023, we’re starting to see the decay or active dismantling of a number of the bastions of scale that shaped the digital news experience throughout the 2010s. Sure, some outlets closely associated with this time period are still holding on effectively, like The Verge and The Daily Beast. But companies…
https://www.niemanlab.org/2023/12/scale-is-a-trap/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-13, from: Nieman Journalism Lab
In 2009, I logged onto Twitter for the first time. My journalism professor required students to join the platform, which he described as a necessary tool for breaking, reporting, and distributing news. Ten years later, I began teaching my own journalism courses, and similarly pushed students to join Twitter so that they could engage with…
https://www.niemanlab.org/2023/12/journalists-abandon-social-media-and-news-audiences-follow-eventually/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-13, from: Nieman Journalism Lab
Who are you? Who funds your journalism? Who controls your news company? Do you keep community donations in your community? Do you have a political point of view? Why do you cover some things and not others? One of the most actionable steps we can take as news people to counter misinformation and disinformation is…
https://www.niemanlab.org/2023/12/to-build-trust-news-outlets-prioritize-transparency/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-13, from: Liliputing
The Sipeed Lichee Console 4A is tiny laptop computer with 7 inch display, a QWERTY keyboard, up to 16GB of RAM and up to a 2TB SSD. It’s also one of the only mini-laptops (or laptops at all) to be powered by a RISC-V processor, thanks to support for a Sipeed LM4A computer-on-a-module with a […]
The post Lichee Console 4A mini-laptop with a RISC-V processor is shipping soon appeared first on Liliputing.
https://liliputing.com/lichee-console-4a-mini-laptop-with-a-risc-v-processor-is-shipping-soon/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-13, from: 404 Media Group
InflateVids went down after it was hacked in what administrators say was a random attack.
https://www.404media.co/hackers-popped-a-porn-site-for-inflation-fetishists/ Save to Pocket
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2023-12-13, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
Adam Singer: We need Twitter/X now more than ever.
https://www.hottakes.space/p/we-need-twitter-now-more-than-ever Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-13, updated: 2023-12-13, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
The US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration’s (NHTSA) investigation into safety risks associated with Tesla’s Autopilot have concluded with a recall of more than two million vehicles, with the agency determining Autopilot’s safety controls are “insufficient to prevent misuse.” …
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2023/12/13/tesla_recall_autopilot_safety/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-13, from: VOA News USA
ISLAMABAD — A special Pakistani court Wednesday indicted former Prime Minister Imran Khan on unprecedented and disputed charges of disclosing classified information involving the United States while in office.
The indictment has dealt a fresh blow to the incarcerated popular leader’s chances of contesting national elections in February and returning to power.
Co-defendant Shah Mahmood Qureshi, Khan’s deputy and a former foreign minister, was also indicted for his alleged role in the case. Foreign media representatives were not allowed to cover the legal proceedings, while only a handful of local journalists were given access as usual.
“The charges were read out loudly in the courtroom,” government prosecutor Shah Khawar told Reuters, saying Khan and Qureshi both pleaded not guilty.
Khan’s lawyer, barrister Gohar Khan, disputed the indictment. He told reporters after the hearing that “no charge was framed before us nor signed by the accused.” The trial was being conducted “hastily without ensuring transparency and fairness,” the lawyer alleged.
“Again, justice is being rushed, and whenever it is rushed, it is always crushed,” he added. The defense attorney lamented the trial could not be conducted openly and said most foreign and local media reporters were barred from covering the proceedings in violation of a judicial order.
“The criminal justice system of Pakistan is being used as a tool for political victimization. We have had enough of it. This must stop,” he said.
The court initially indicted Khan and Qureshi in October on the same charges in closed-door proceedings, but a higher court scrapped the process and ordered authorities to ensure an open trial and allow family members and journalists to attend it.
The judicial proceedings are underway inside a prison facility near the capital, Islamabad, for security reasons, the government says.
Legal experts say that a guilty verdict could result in a maximum sentence of 14 years imprisonment or a death sentence.
The lawsuit stems from a classified cable, internally known as a cipher, sent to Islamabad by Pakistan’s ambassador in Washington in March 2022.
Khan alleged the cipher documented the United States’ role in the toppling of his government a month later with the help of his country’s powerful military to punish him for visiting Moscow a day before Russia invaded Ukraine.
Both Washington and the Pakistan military deny the charges.
On Monday, the State Department spokesman again refuted allegations the U.S. had anything to do with Pakistan’s internal affairs.
“The United States does not play any role in choosing the leaders of Pakistan. We engage with the leadership shown by — or the leadership decided by the Pakistani people — and we will continue to engage with the government of Pakistan on all these issues,” Matthew Miller told a news conference in Washington.
Khan’s Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf, or PTI, party won the last general elections in 2018, making him the prime minister for the first time.
The charismatic cricketer-turned-politician discussed details of the cipher at party rallies and during media interviews in the run-up to the controversial vote and continued doing so after his ouster.
Khan maintains he was doing so lawfully because he was duty-bound to inform Pakistanis about “the foreign conspiracy” against the government they had elected.
Since his removal from power, the ousted prime minister has faced dozens of lawsuits filed by authorities, which he claims to be a ploy by the military to prevent his comeback to power because of his advocacy for an independent foreign policy for Pakistan, one free from the influence of the United States.
Last August, Khan was convicted in a graft case and sentenced to three years in jail. A superior court later suspended his sentence and ordered the government to release him on bail, but authorities refused, citing the cipher and other lawsuits against him.
Unless his conviction is overturned, the former prime minister remains disqualified from running in the upcoming elections or leading the PTI under election laws.
Meanwhile, Pakistan’s Supreme Court on Wednesday allowed controversial military tribunals to resume trials of more than 100 Imran Khan supporters on charges of attacking army properties during anti-government protests last May.
The judicial order came less than two months after a five-judge panel of the top court ruled against trying civilians in military courts. Khan and his party maintain the military trials of political activists are a violation of the constitution and are meant to scare their candidates away from the upcoming polls.
The military has staged three coups against elected prime ministers since Pakistan gained independence from Britain in 1947, and it ruled the country for more than three decades.
Pakistani politicians, including former prime ministers, say the unconstitutional military interventions have encouraged generals to influence policymaking significantly, even when not in power.
https://www.voanews.com/a/pakistan-s-ex-leader-indicted-over-revealing-us-tied-state-secrets-/7396570.html Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-13, from: The Round Up (Peirce College Student Paper)
“I had a really tough year, so I’m just trying to get back on track. One of my New Year’s resolutions is to
The post Streetbeat: Did you accomplish your New Year’s resolution? appeared first on The Roundup.
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date: 2023-12-13, from: NASA breaking news
A NASA technology experiment on the International Space Station completed its first laser link with an in-orbit laser relay system on Dec. 5, 2023. Together, they complete NASA’s first two-way, end-to-end laser relay system. NASA’s LCRD (Laser Communications Relay Demonstration) and the new space station demonstration, ILLUMA-T (Integrated LCRD Low Earth Orbit User Modem and […]
https://www.nasa.gov/missions/tech-demonstration/laser-communications-relay/nasas-space-station-laser-comm-terminal-achieves-first-link/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-13, from: VOA News USA
Washington — President Joe Biden is taking a more active role in Senate negotiations over changes to the immigration system that Republicans are demanding in exchange for providing money to Ukraine in its fight against Russia and Israel for the war with Hamas.
The Democratic president has said he is willing to make “significant compromises on the border” as Republicans block the wartime aid in Congress. The White House is expected to get more involved in talks this week as the impasse over changes to border policy has deepened and the funds remaining for Ukraine have dwindled.
“It’s time to cut a deal that both sides can agree to,” Biden’s budget director, Shalanda Young, said Sunday on CBS’ “Face the Nation.”
Republicans say the record numbers of migrants crossing the southern border pose a security threat because authorities cannot adequately screen all the migrants and that those who enter the United States are straining the country’s resources. GOP lawmakers also say they cannot justify to their constituents sending billions of dollars to other countries, even in a time of war, while failing to address the border at home.
Republican Sen. James Lankford of Oklahoma, who is leading the negotiations, pointed to the surge of people entering the U.S. from Mexico and said “it is literally spiraling out of control.”
“All we’re trying to do is to say what tools are needed to be able to get this back in control, so we don’t have the chaos on our southern border,” Lankford said on CBS.
But many immigration advocates, including some Democrats, say some of the changes being proposed would gut protections for people who desperately need help and would not really ease the chaos at the border.
Connecticut Sen. Chris Murphy, the top Democratic bargainer, said the White House would take a more active role in the talks. But he also panned Republican policy demands so far as “unreasonable.”
“We don’t want to shut off the United States of America to people who are coming here to be rescued from dangerous, miserable circumstances, in which their life is in jeopardy. The best of America is that you can come here to be rescued from terror and torture,” Murphy said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”
Much of the negotiating is taking place in private, but some of the issues under discussion are known: asylum standards, humanitarian parole and fast-track deportation authority, among others.
A look at what they are and what might happen if there are changes:
Humanitarian parole
Using humanitarian parole, the U.S. government can let people into the country by essentially bypassing the regular immigration process. This power is supposed to be used on a case-by-case basis for “urgent humanitarian reasons” or “significant public benefit.” Migrants are usually admitted for a pre-determined period and there’s no path toward U.S. citizenship.
Over the years, administrations, both Democratic and Republican, have used humanitarian parole to admit people into the U.S. and help groups of people from all over the world. It’s been used to admit people from Hungary in the 1950s, from Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos during the latter half of the 1970s, and Iraqi Kurds who had worked with the U.S. in the mid-1990s, according to research by the Cato Institute.
Under Biden, the U.S. has relied heavily on humanitarian parole. The U.S. airlifted nearly 80,000 Afghans from Kabul, the capital of Afghanistan, and brought them to the U.S. after the Taliban takeover. The U.S. has admitted tens of thousands of Ukrainians who fled after the Russian invasion.
In January the Democratic administration announced a plan to admit 30,000 people a month from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela via humanitarian parole, provided those migrants had a financial sponsor and flew to the U.S. instead of going to the U.S.-Mexico border for entry.
The latest U.S. government figures show that nearly 270,000 people had been admitted into the country through October under that program. Separately, 324,000 people have gotten appointments through a mobile app called CBP One that is used to grant parole to people at land crossings with Mexico.
Republicans have described the programs as essentially an end run around Congress by letting in large numbers of people who otherwise would have no path to be admitted. Texas sued the administration to stop the program aimed at Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans and Venezuelans.
What might change with asylum?
Asylum is a type of protection that allows a migrant to stay in the U..S. and have a path to American citizenship. To qualify for asylum, someone has to demonstrate fear of persecution back home due to a fairly specific set of criteria: race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group or political opinions. Asylum-seekers must be on U.S. soil when they ask for this protection.
They generally go through an initial screening called a credible fear interview. If they are determined to have a chance of getting asylum, they are allowed to stay in the U.S. to pursue their case in immigration court. That process can take years. In the meantime, asylum-seekers can start to work, get married, have children and create a life.
Critics say the problem is that most people do not end up getting asylum when their case finally makes it to immigration court. But they say migrants know that if they claim asylum, they essentially will be allowed to stay in America for years.
“People aren’t necessarily coming to apply for asylum as much to access that asylum adjudication process,” said Andrew Arthur, a former immigration court judge and fellow at the Center for Immigration Studies, which advocates for less immigration in the U.S.
Some of what lawmakers are discussing would raise the bar that migrants need to meet during that initial credible fear interview. Those who do not meet it would be sent home.
But Paul Schmidt, a retired immigration court judge who blogs about immigration court issues, said the credible fear interview was never intended to be so tough. Migrants are doing the interview soon after arriving at the border from an often arduous and traumatizing journey, he said. Schmidt said the interview is more of an “initial screening” to weed out those with frivolous asylum claims.
Schmidt also questioned the argument that most migrants fail their final asylum screening. He said some immigration judges apply overly restrictive standards and that the system is so backlogged that it is hard to know exactly what the most recent and reliable statistics are.
What is expedited removal?
Expedited removal, created in 1996 by Congress, basically allows low-level immigration officers, as opposed to an immigration judge, to quickly deport certain immigrants. It was not widely used until 2004 and generally has been used to deport people apprehended within 100 miles of the Mexican or Canadian border and within two weeks of their arrival.
Defenders say it relieves the burden on the backlogged immigration courts. Immigration advocates say its use is prone to errors and does not give migrants enough protections, such as having a lawyer help them argue their case. As president, Republican Donald Trump pushed to expand this fast-track deportation policy nationwide and for longer periods of time. Opponents sued and that expansion never happened.
What might these changes do?
Much of the disagreement over these proposed changes comes down to whether people think deterrence works.
Arthur, the former immigration court judge, thinks it does. He said changes to the credible fear asylum standards and restrictions on the use of humanitarian parole would be a “game changer.” He said it would be a “costly endeavor” as the government would have to detain and deport many more migrants than today. But, he argued, eventually the numbers of people arriving would drop.
But others, like Schmidt, the retired immigration court judge, say migrants are so desperate, they will come anyway and make dangerous journeys to evade Border Patrol.
“Desperate people do desperate things,” he said.
https://www.voanews.com/a/biden-congress-mulling-big-changes-on-immigration/7396635.html Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-13, from: Smithsonian Magazine
The new image gives astronomers a near-infrared look at the stellar explosion called Cassiopeia A, located around 11,000 light years away from Earth
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/james-webb-telescope-captures-image-of-supernova-that-absolutely-shattered-a-star-180983421/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-13, from: TidBITS blog
Although the addition of the iPhone 15 lineup and Macs using the M2 family of chips to Self Service Repair is welcome, the release of the remote Apple Diagnostics for Self Service Repair troubleshooting tool is more interesting.
https://tidbits.com/2023/12/13/apple-self-service-repair-adds-remote-diagnostics-and-supports-new-devices/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-13, from: The Sundail (CSUN student paper)
Doing your homework is hard enough. Now, imagine your assignment is to construct a Formula One-style race car that goes head-to-head in an international competition against other universities. While this may sound like the plot for a “Fast and Furious” spinoff, this is the reality for CSUN’s Formula Society of Automotive Engineers (FSAE) team, a…
https://sundial.csun.edu/177326/print-editions/print-stories/a-formula-for-success/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-13, updated: 2023-12-13, from: Educated Guesswork blog
https://educatedguesswork.org/posts/northern-yosemite/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-13, updated: 2023-12-13, from: Educated Guesswork blog
https://educatedguesswork.org/posts/transparency-part-1/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-13, from: Heatmap News
The 2020s got off to a parched, smoky start in the West. But after three years of unrelenting drought, 2023 brought the region some relief.
Thanks to a very snowy winter followed by a very rainy spring, the worst of the Western drought receded rapidly in the early months of this year, data from the U.S. Drought Monitor shows. The extent bottomed out in the early summer, when only one-sixth of the West was experiencing any level of drought at all. It’s crept upward since then to about 45% of the region, but still — that’s the lowest drought level the contiguous Western states have seen at this time of year since 2019.
Most remarkable, in some ways, has been California’s transformation. After years with far too little precipitation, in 2023 California often received far too much. A spate of atmospheric rivers early in the year dumped inches of rain on its lower elevations and feet of snow in its mountains. In April, Hurricane Hilary smashed rainfall records across the southern part of the state.
Two years ago this week, 100% of California was drought-stricken; early this fall, the last patches disappeared (though a small but declining percentage of the state is still considered “abnormally dry”). This is the first time drought has been absent from California since 2019. The most recent time before that was 2011. Before that, it was 2006.
Meanwhile, the uptick in Western drought since summer has been most severe in Arizona and New Mexico, where the vast majority of places are drier than usual and conditions in some areas are becoming more severe. Temperatures in Phoenix rose above 110 degrees Fahrenheit on a record 55 different days between June and September, including an historic 31-day streak that baked the city for almost all of July, the Arizona Republic reported. While the wet winter replenished some of the Colorado River’s dwindling water supply, the temporary boost wasn’t enough to avert imminent cutbacks among the Southwestern states that depend on it.
This precipitation rebound won’t last, of course. The above-average mountain snowpack that piled up from heavy winter snows and kept streams flowing through the spring and into the summer is long gone now. And the decline this year in infernos terrorizing the West is almost certainly a blip in the trend toward ever more devastating fire years, The Washington Post reported last week. If historic patterns hold true, there might not be another fire season this quiet for decades.
“We have just had a respite,” Tonya Graham, the mayor of Ashland, Ore., told the Post. “We have had a little bit of breathing space in this trajectory that is taking us toward higher wildfire and smoke risk and more extreme temperatures.”
But that rest doesn’t look to be over for everyone just yet. Snowpack is already starting to accumulate again. And the National Weather Service forecasts that at least in California and neighboring states, there’s a good chance precipitation will stay higher than normal through the winter.
https://heatmap.news/sparks/california-drought-rainfall-2024 Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-13, from: Liliputing
The upcoming AOKZOE A2 is a handheld gaming PC with a 7 inch, 1920 x 1200 pixel IPS LCD display, an AMD Ryzen 7 7840U processor and hall effect sensors for the joysticks and shoulder triggers. AOKZOE has been saying a crowdfunding campaign for the AOKZOE A2 is “launching soon” since June, and repeated the message […]
The post AOKZOE A2 handheld gaming PC has a 7 inch screen and Ryzen 7 7840U (crowdfunding campaign coming soon) appeared first on Liliputing.
https://liliputing.com/aokzoe-a2-handheld-gaming-pc-has-a-7-inch-screen-and-ryzen-7-7840u/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-13, from: Cory Doctorow’s blog
Today’s links Housing is a labor issue: The eternal labor September bodes well for the American housing crisis. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. This day in history: 2003, 2008, 2015, 2018, 2022 Colophon: Recent publications, upcoming/recent appearances, current writing projects, current reading Housing is a labor issue (permalink) There’s a reason Reagan declared war on unions before he declared war on everything else – environmental protection, health care, consumer rights, financial regulation. Unions are how working people fight for a better world for all of us. They’re how everyday people come together to resist oligarchy, extraction and exploitation. Take the 2019 LA teachers’ strike. As Jane McAlevey writes in A Collective Bargain, the LA teachers didn’t just win higher pay for their members! They also demanded (and got) an end to immigration sweeps of parents waiting for their kids at the school gate; a guarantee of green space near every public school in the city; and on-site immigration counselors in LA schools: https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/23/a-collective-bargain/ Unionization is enjoying an historic renaissance. The Hot Labor Summer transitioned to an Eternal Labor September, and it’s still going strong, with UAW president Shawn Fain celebrating his members victory over the Big Three automakers by calling for a 2028 general strike: https://www.teenvogue.com/story/uaw-general-strike-no-class The rising labor movement has powerful allies in the Biden Administration. NLRB general counsel Jennifer Abruzzo is systematically gutting the “union avoidance” playbook. She’s banned the use of temp-work app blacklists that force workers to cross picket lines: https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/30/computer-says-scab/#instawork She’s changed the penalty for bosses who violate labor law during union drives. It used to be the boss would pay a fine, which was an easy price to pay in exchange for killing your workers’ union. Now, the penalty is automatic recognition of the union: https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/06/goons-ginks-and-company-finks/#if-blood-be-the-price-of-your-cursed-wealth And while the law doesn’t allow Abruzzo to impose a contract on companies that refuse to bargain their unions, she’s set to force those companies to honor other employers’ union contracts until they agree to a contract with their own workers: https://onlabor.org/gc-abruzzo-just-asked-the-nlrb-to-overturn-ex-cell-o-heres-why-that-matters/ She’s also nuking TRAPs, the deals that force workers to repay their employers for their “training expenses” if they have the audacity to quit and get a better job somewhere else: https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/14/prop-22-never-again/#norms-code-laws-markets (As with every aspect of the Biden White House, its labor policy is contradictory and self-defeating, with other Biden appointees working to smash worker power, including when Biden broke the railworkers’ strike:) https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/18/co-determination/#now-make-me-do-it A surging labor movement opens up all kinds of possibilities for a better world. Writing for the Law and Political Economy Project, UNITE Here attorney Zoe Tucker makes the case for unions as a way out of America’s brutal housing crisis: https://lpeproject.org/blog/why-unions-should-join-the-housing-fight/ She describes how low-waged LA hotel workers have been pushed out of neighborhoods close to their jobs, with UNITE Here members commuting three hours in each direction, starting their work-days at 3AM in order to clock in on time: https://twitter.com/MorePerfectUS/status/1669088899769987079 UNITE Here members are striking against 50 hotels in LA and Orange County, and their demands include significant cost-of-living raises. But more money won’t give them back the time they give up to those bruising daily commutes. For that, unions need to make housing itself a demand. As Tucker writes, most workers are tenants and vice-versa. What’s more, bad landlords are apt to be bad bosses, too. Stepan Kazaryan, the same guy who owns the strip club whose conditions were so bad that it prompted the creation of Equity Strippers NoHo, the first strippers’ union in a generation, is also a shitty landlord whose tenants went on a rent-strike: https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/20/the-missing-links/#plunderphonics So it was only natural that Kazaryan’s tenants walked the picket line with the Equity Stripper Noho workers: https://twitter.com/glendaletenants/status/1733290276599570736?s=46 While scumbag bosses/evil landlords like Kazaryan deal out misery retail, one apartment building at a time, the wholesale destruction of workers’ lives comes from private equity giants who are the most prolific source of TRAPs, robo-scabbing apps, illegal union busting, and indefinite contract delays – and these are the very same PE firms that are buying up millions of single-family homes and turning them into slums: https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/08/wall-street-landlords/#the-new-slumlords Tucker’s point is that when a worker clocks out of their bad job, commutes home for three hours, and gets back to their black-mold-saturated, overpriced apartment to find a notice of a new junk fee (like a surcharge for paying your rent in cash, by check, or by direct payment), they’re fighting the very same corporations. Unions who defend their workers’ right to shelter do every tenant a service. A coalition of LA unions succeeded in passing Measure ULA, which uses a surcharge on real estate transactions over $5m to fund “the largest municipal housing program in the country”: https://unitedtohousela.com/app/uploads/2022/05/LA_City_Affordable_Housing_Petition_H.pdf LA unions are fighting for rules to limit Airbnbs and other platforms that transform the city’s rental stock into illegal, unlicensed hotels: https://upgo.lab.mcgill.ca/publication/strs-in-los-angeles-2022/Wachsmuth_LA_2022.pdf And the hotel workers organized under UNITE Here are fighting their own employers: the hoteliers who are aggressively buying up residences, evicting their long-term tenants, tearing down the building and putting up a luxury hotel. They got LA council to pass a law requiring hotels to build new housing to replace any residences they displace: https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2023-11-28/airbnb-operators-would-need-police-permit-in-l-a-under-proposed-law UNITE Here is bargaining for a per-room hotel surcharge to fund housing specifically for hotel workers, so the people who change the sheets and clean the toilets don’t have to waste six hours a day commuting to do so. Labor unions and tenant unions have a long history of collaboration in the USA. NYC’s first housing coop was midwifed by the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America in 1927. The Penn South coop was created by the International Ladies Garment Workers’ Union. The 1949 Federal Housing Act passed after American unions pushed hard for it: http://www.peterdreier.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/Labors-Love-Lost.pdf It goes both ways. Strong unions can create sound housing – and precarious housing makes unions weaker. Remember during the Hollywood writers’ strike, when an anonymous studio ghoul told the press the plans was to “allow things to drag on until union members start losing their apartments and losing their houses?” Vienna has the most successful housing in any major city in the world. It’s the city where people of every income and background live in comfort without being rent-burdened and without worry about eviction, mold, or leaks. That’s the legacy of Red Vienna, the Austrian period of Social Democratic Workers’ Party rule and built vast tracts of high-quality public housing. The system was so robust that it rebounded after World War II and continues to this day: https://www.politico.eu/article/vienna-social-housing-architecture-austria-stigma/ Today, the rest of the world is mired in a terrible housing crisis. It’s not merely that the rent’s too damned high (though it is) – housing precarity is driving dangerous political instability: https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/06/the-rents-too-damned-high/ Turning the human necessity of shelter into a market commodity is a failure. The economic orthodoxy that insists that public housing, rent control, and high-density zoning will lead to less housing has failed. rent control works: https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/16/mortgages-are-rent-control/#housing-is-a-human-right-not-an-asset Leaving housing to the market only produces losers. If you have the bad luck to invest everything you have into a home in a city that contracts, you’re wiped out. If you have the bad luck into invest everything into a home in a “superstar city” where prices go up, you also lose, because your city becomes uninhabitable and your children can’t afford to live there: https://pluralistic.net/2021/09/27/lethal-dysfunction/#yimby A strong labor movement is the best chance we have for breaking the housing deadlock. And housing is just for starters. Labor is the key to opening every frozen-in-place dysfunction. Take care work: the aging, increasingly chronically ill American population is being tortured and murdered by private equity hospices, long-term care facilities and health services that have been rolled up by the same private equity firms that destroyed work and housing: https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/26/death-panels/#what-the-heck-is-going-on-with-CMS In her interview with Capital & Main’s Jessica Goodheart, National Domestic Workers Alliance president Ai-jen Poo describes how making things better for care workers will make things better for everyone: https://prospect.org/labor/2023-12-13-labor-leader-ai-jen-poo-interview/ Care work is a “triple dignity investment”: first, it makes life better for the worker (most often a woman of color), then, it allows family members of people who need care to move into higher paid work; and of course, it makes life better for people who need care: “It delivers human potential and agency. It delivers a future workforce. It delivers quality of life.” The failure to fund care work is a massive driver of inequality. America’s sole federal public provision for care is Medicaid, which only kicks in after a family it totally impoverished. Funding care with tax increases polls high with both Democrats and Republicans, making it good politics: https://www.dataforprogress.org/blog/2021/4/7/voters-support-investing-in-the-care-economy Congress stripped many of the care provisions from Build Back Better, missing a chance for an “unprecedented, transformational investment in care.” But the administrative agencies picked up where Congress failed, following a detailed executive order that identifies existing, previously unused powers to improve care in America. The EO “expands access to care, supports family caregivers and improves wages and conditions for the workforce”: https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/presidential-actions/2023/04/18/executive-order-on-increasing-access-to-high-quality-care-and-supporting-caregivers/ States are also filling the void. Washington just created a long-term care benefit: https://apnews.com/article/washington-long-term-care-tax-disability-cb54b04b025223dbdba7199db1d254e4 New Mexicans passed a ballot initiative that establishes permanent funding for child care: https://www.cwla.org/new-mexico-votes-for-child-care/ New York care workers won a $3/hour across the board raise: https://inequality.org/great-divide/new-york-budget-fair-pay-home-care/ The fight is being led by women of color, and they’re kicking ass – and they’re doing it through their unions. Worker power is the foundation that we build a better world upon, and it’s surging. Hey look at this (permalink) Rich countries are in Debt Default https://globalsouthperspectives.substack.com/p/rich-countries-are-in-debt-default Repair Manifesto https://www.ifixit.com/Manifesto (h/t Naked Capitalism) Beeper vs. iMessage is a fight about how tech works — and who’s really in charge https://www.theverge.com/23998294/beeper-imessage-apple-app-security This day in history (permalink) #20yrsago Two rants on Geneva’s crappy WiFi, one fictional, one non- https://memex.craphound.com/2003/12/13/two-rants-on-genevas-crappy-wifi-one-fictional-one-non/ #20yrsago Bringing pinball to MAME, one table at a time https://web.archive.org/web/20031226090824/http://www.vpforums.com/ #15yrsago McCain-Palin campaign dumps Blackberries loaded with personal numbers, internal email https://web.archive.org/web/20081217004629/http://www.myfoxdc.com/myfox/pages/News/Politics/Detail?contentId=8055902&version=1&locale=EN-US&layoutCode=TSTY&pageId=3.14.1&sflg=1 #15yrsago BBC episode rescued by illegal home taper — the sort of thing the Beeb is stamping out with DRM https://memex.craphound.com/2008/12/13/bbc-episode-rescued-by-illegal-home-taper-the-sort-of-thing-the-beeb-is-stamping-out-with-drm/ #10yrsago Why the Trans-Pacific Partnership sucks: short, funny animation https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M9A0QUdkdf4 #10yrsago Android gives you the ability to deny your sensitive data to apps https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/11/awesome-privacy-features-android-43 #10yrsago British Library uploads one million public domain images to the net for remix and reuse https://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/digital-scholarship/2013/12/a-million-first-steps.html #5yrsago Paper Girls 5: fate and free will (and dinosaurs and monsters) https://memex.craphound.com/2018/12/13/paper-girls-5-fate-and-free-will-and-dinosaurs-and-monsters/ #5yrsago The strange and complex world of flame-effect LED bulbs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XuppeUZ6Z7w #5yrsago Ships are just giant floating computers, filled with ransomware, BadUSB, and worms https://www.ics-shipping.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/guidelines-on-cyber-security-onboard-ships-min.pdf #5yrsago Ajit Pai killed Net Neutrality and Trump gave away a huge tax break; Verizon got billions and killed 10,000 jobs https://www.vice.com/en/article/pa5x4z/verizon-trims-10000-employees-despite-billions-in-tax-cuts-and-government-favors #5yrsago Company behind the Grenfell Tower fire says it could have been put out with a simple fire extinguisher https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/dec/12/grenfell-cladding-firm-arconic-fire-could-have-been-put-out-with-simple-extinguisher #5yrsago Clash of the corporate titans: Who’s spending what in Europe’s Copyright Directive battle https://memex.craphound.com/2018/12/13/clash-of-the-corporate-titans-whos-spending-what-in-europes-copyright-directive-battle/ #1yrago Web apps could de-monopolize mobile devices https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/13/kitbashed/#app-store-tax Colophon (permalink) Today’s top sources: Currently writing: A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING Picks and Shovels, a Martin Hench noir thriller about the heroic era of the PC. FORTHCOMING TOR BOOKS JAN 2025 The Bezzle, a Martin Hench noir thriller novel about the prison-tech industry. FORTHCOMING TOR BOOKS FEB 2024 Vigilant, Little Brother short story about remote invigilation. FORTHCOMING ON TOR.COM Spill, a Little Brother short story about pipeline protests. FORTHCOMING ON TOR.COM Latest podcast: Daddy-Daughter Podcast, 2023 edition https://craphound.com/news/2023/12/10/daddy-daughter-podcast-2023-edition/) Recent appearances: Science Fiction and the Future of Science https://council.science/podcast/science-fiction/ AI needs to work with humans — not replace us (CBC IDEAS) https://www.cbc.ca/radio/ideas/artificial-intelligence-provocation-ideas-festival-1.7046841 Explore the Future of the 🔥 Climate and Information Climate (Andrew Revkin) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-OGT-cvs4_Q Latest books: “The Lost Cause:” a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org). Signed, personalized copies at Dark Delicacies (https://www.darkdel.com/store/p3007/Pre-Order_Signed_Copies%3A_The_Lost_Cause_HB.html#/) “The Internet Con”: A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245). “Red Team Blues”: “A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before.” Tor Books http://redteamblues.com. Signed copies at Dark Delicacies (US): and Forbidden Planet (UK): https://forbiddenplanet.com/385004-red-team-blues-signed-edition-hardcover/. “Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin”, on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com “Attack Surface”: The third Little Brother novel, a standalone technothriller for adults. The Washington Post called it “a political cyberthriller, vigorous, bold and savvy about the limits of revolution and resistance.” Order signed, personalized copies from Dark Delicacies https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1840/Available_Now%3A_Attack_Surface.html “How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism”: an anti-monopoly pamphlet analyzing the true harms of surveillance capitalism and proposing a solution. https://onezero.medium.com/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism-8135e6744d59?sk=f6cd10e54e20a07d4c6d0f3ac011af6b) (signed copies: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p2024/Available_Now%3A__How_to_Destroy_Surveillance_Capitalism.html) “Little Brother/Homeland”: A reissue omnibus edition with a new introduction by Edward Snowden: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250774583; personalized/signed copies here: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1750/July%3A__Little_Brother_%26_Homeland.html “Poesy the Monster Slayer” a picture book about monsters, bedtime, gender, and kicking ass. Order here: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781626723627. Get a personalized, signed copy here: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p2682/Corey_Doctorow%3A_Poesy_the_Monster_Slayer_HB.html#/. Upcoming books: The Bezzle: a sequel to “Red Team Blues,” about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books, February 2024 Picks and Shovels: a sequel to “Red Team Blues,” about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books, February 2025 Unauthorized Bread: a graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2025 This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution. How to get Pluralistic: Blog (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): Pluralistic.net Newsletter (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): https://pluralistic.net/plura-list Mastodon (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic Medium (no ads, paywalled): https://doctorow.medium.com/ Twitter (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising): https://twitter.com/doctorow Tumblr (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising): https://mostlysignssomeportents.tumblr.com/tagged/pluralistic “When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla” -Joey “Accordion Guy” DeVilla
https://pluralistic.net/2023/12/13/i-want-a-roof-over-my-head/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-13, from: Liliputing
AMD’s new Ryzen 8040 “Hawk Point” chips are nearly identical to the previous-gen Ryzen 7040 series processors when it comes to CPU and graphics core counts and frequencies. But thanks to a next-gen neural processing unit (NPU), AMD says its new chips should deliver up to a 1.4X improvement in on-device AI tasks. So it’s […]
The post ASRock 4×4 BOX 8040 mini PCs feature AMD’s new Ryzen 8040U chips with AI features appeared first on Liliputing.
https://liliputing.com/asrock-4x4-box-8040-mini-pcs-feature-amds-new-ryzen-8040u-chips-with-ai-features/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-13, updated: 2023-12-13, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
NASA’s MAVEN (Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution) mission has observed an abrupt and dramatic drop in the solar wind, resulting in an expansion of the Martian atmosphere and magnetosphere by thousands of kilometers.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2023/12/13/maven_mars_solar_wind/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-13, updated: 2023-12-13, from: One Foot Tsunami
https://onefoottsunami.com/2023/12/13/so-how-did-you-two-meet/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-13, from: VOA News USA
https://www.voanews.com/a/us-britain-impose-new-sanctions-against-hamas-operatives-/7396514.html Save to Pocket
@Dave Winer’s Scripting News (date: 2023-12-13, from: Dave Winer’s Scripting News)
I
miss Frontier so much.
Debugging its database was several orders of magnitude less work than
the Node+SQL setup where the runtime and the database are very far
apart. In Frontier the database and the language are the same thing. And
because Frontier did the rational thing with synchronization, it was
handled in the kernel, the code you write doesn’t have to worry about
it, you can write reasonably readable code. In Node it’s a real chore to
come back to some code you worked on last a while back. Makes my mind
tired, but I do it, because it’s where I work now.
http://scripting.com/2023/12/13.html#a161529 Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-13, from: The Sundail (CSUN student paper)
To an athlete, the body is a temple. The way they treat their bodies from the offseason to the regular season can be the deciding factor for a great year. No matter what sport they play, an athlete must dedicate their time to becoming a great player. For many, that begins with what they eat….
https://sundial.csun.edu/177332/print-editions/print-stories/eat-to-win-the-diet-of-an-athlete/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-13, from: Smithsonian Magazine
The 712-year-old artifact is a horary quadrant, a medieval tool used to tell time based on the position of the sun
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/englands-oldest-known-scientific-instrument-is-for-sale-180983425/ Save to Pocket
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2023-12-13, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
Andrew Hickey is using Bluesky as a blogging platform, and because we're connected via RSS, you can read it in FeedLand. The power of standards. Just a bit more interop betw these systems and we'll have broken free of the possibility of being dominated by bigco's. This is how bootstraps work and they're super-important to progress.
https://feedland.com/?river=https://rss.firesky.tv/?filter=from:andrewhickey.bsky.social Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-13, from: Marketplace Morning Report
The child care sector has recovered nearly all of the jobs it lost when the pandemic hit. Yet there are still major staffing shortages, and the end of federal pandemic funding could put the industry’s rebound in peril. Also on the program: early reactions to COP28 agreement and a look at how to utilize fear to move your career forward.
https://www.marketplace.org/shows/marketplace-morning-report/the-child-care-industry-is-rebounding-and-at-risk Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-13, from: VOA News USA
WASHINGTON — The House on Wednesday authorized the impeachment inquiry into President Joe Biden, with every Republican rallying behind the politically charged process despite lingering concerns among some in the party that the investigation has yet to produce evidence of misconduct by the president.
The 221-212 party-line vote put the entire House Republican conference on record in support of an impeachment process that can lead to the ultimate penalty for a president: punishment for what the Constitution describes as “high crimes and misdemeanors,” which can lead to removal from office if convicted in a Senate trial.
Authorizing the months-long inquiry ensures that the impeachment investigation extends well into 2024, when Biden will be running for reelection and seems likely to be squaring off against former President Donald Trump — who was twice impeached during his time in the White House. Trump has pushed his GOP allies in Congress to move swiftly on impeaching Biden, part of his broader calls for vengeance and retribution against his political enemies.
The decision to hold a vote came as House Speaker Mike Johnson and his leadership team faced growing pressure to show progress in what has become a nearly yearlong probe centered around the business dealings of Biden’s family members. While their investigation has raised ethical questions, no evidence has emerged that Biden acted corruptly or accepted bribes in his current role or previous office as vice president.
Ahead of the vote, Johnson called it “the next necessary step” and acknowledged there are “a lot of people who are frustrated this hasn’t moved faster.”
In a recent statement, the White House called the whole process a “baseless fishing expedition” that Republicans are pushing ahead with “despite the fact that members of their own party have admitted there is no evidence to support impeaching President Biden.”
House Democrats rose in opposition to the inquiry resolution Wednesday.
“This whole thing is an extreme political stunt. It has no credibility, no legitimacy, and no integrity. It is a sideshow,” Democratic Representative Jim McGovern of Massachusetts said during a floor debate.
Some House Republicans, particularly those hailing from politically divided districts, had been hesitant in recent weeks to take any vote on Biden’s impeachment, fearing a significant political cost. But GOP leaders have made the case in recent weeks that the resolution is only a step in the process, not a decision to impeach Biden. That message seems to have won over skeptics.
“As we have said numerous times before, voting in favor of an impeachment inquiry does not equal impeachment,” Representative Tom Emmer, a member of the GOP leadership team, said at a news conference Tuesday.
Emmer said Republicans “will continue to follow the facts wherever they lead, and if they uncover evidence of treason, bribery or other high crimes and misdemeanors, then and only then will the next steps towards impeachment proceedings be considered.”
Most of the Republicans reluctant to back the impeachment push have also been swayed by leadership’s recent argument that authorizing the inquiry will give them better legal standing as the White House has questioned the legal and constitutional basis for their requests for information.
Representative Dusty Johnson, a Republican from South Dakota, said this week that while there was no evidence to impeach the president, “that’s also not what the vote this week would be about.”
House Democrats remained unified in their opposition to the impeachment process, saying it is a farce used by the GOP to take attention away from Trump and his legal woes.
“You don’t initiate an impeachment process unless there’s real evidence of impeachable offenses,” said Representative Jerry Nadler, the ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, who oversaw the two impeachments into Trump. “There is none here. None.”
Democrats and the White House have repeatedly defended the president and his administration’s cooperation with the investigation thus far, saying it has already made a massive trove of documents available.
Congressional investigators have obtained nearly 40,000 pages of subpoenaed bank records and dozens of hours of testimony from key witnesses, including several high-ranking Justice Department officials currently tasked with investigating the president’s son, Hunter Biden.
While Republicans say their inquiry is ultimately focused on the president himself, they have taken particular interest in Hunter Biden and his overseas business dealings, from which they accuse the president of personally benefiting. Republicans have also focused a large part of their investigation on whistleblower allegations of interference in the long-running Justice Department investigation into the younger Biden’s taxes and his gun use.
Hunter Biden is currently facing criminal charges in two states from the special counsel investigation. He’s charged with firearm counts in Delaware, alleging he broke laws against drug users having guns in 2018, a period when he has acknowledged struggling with addiction. Special counsel David Weiss filed additional charges last week, alleging he failed to pay about $1.4 million in taxes over a three-year period.
Hunter Biden arrived for a rare public statement outside the U.S. Capitol on Wednesday, saying he would not be appearing for his scheduled private deposition that morning. The president’s son defended himself against years of GOP attacks and said his father has had no financial involvement in his business affairs.
His attorney has offered for Biden to testify publicly, citing concerns about Republicans manipulating any private testimony.
“Republicans do not want an open process where Americans can see their tactics, expose their baseless inquiry, or hear what I have to say,” Biden said outside the Capitol. “What are they afraid of? I am here.”
https://www.voanews.com/a/house-set-for-key-vote-on-biden-impeachment-inquiry-as-republicans-unite/7396428.html Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-13, from: VOA News USA
Washington — The U.S. Supreme Court agreed on Wednesday to take up a dispute over a medication used in the most common method of abortion in the United States, its first abortion case since it overturned Roe v. Wade last year.
The justices will hear appeals from the Biden administration and the maker of the drug mifepristone asking the high court to reverse an appellate ruling that would cut off access to the drug through the mail and impose other restrictions, even in states where abortion remains legal. The restrictions include shortening from the current 10 weeks to seven weeks the time during which mifepristone can be used in pregnancy.
The nine justices did not take up a separate appeal from abortion opponents who challenged the Food and Drug Administration’s initial approval of mifepristone as safe and effective in 2000.
The case will be argued in the spring, with a decision likely by late June, in the middle of the 2024 presidential and congressional campaigns.
Mifepristone, made by New York-based Danco Laboratories, is one of two drugs used in medication abortions, which account for more than half of all abortions in the United States. More than 5 million people have used it since 2000.
The Supreme Court overturned the constitutional right to an abortion in June 2022. That ruling has led to bans on abortion at all stages of pregnancy in 14 states, with some exceptions, and once cardiac activity can be detected, which is around six weeks, in two others.
Abortion opponents filed their challenge to mifepristone the following November and initially won a sweeping ruling six months later revoking the drug’s approval entirely. The appeals court left intact the FDA’s initial approval of mifepristone. But it would reverse changes regulators made in 2016 and 2021 that eased some conditions for administering the drug.
The justices blocked that ruling from taking effect while the case played out, though Justices Samuel Alito, the author of last year’s decision overturning Roe, and Clarence Thomas said they would have allowed some restrictions to take effect while the case proceeded.
Women seeking to end their pregnancies in the first 10 weeks without more invasive surgical abortion can take mifepristone, along with misoprostol. The FDA has eased the terms of mifepristone’s use over the years, including allowing it to be sent through the mail in states that allow access.
In its appeal, the Democratic administration said the appeals court ignored the FDA’s scientific judgment about mifepristone’s safety and effectiveness since its approval in 2000.
Lawyers for the anti-abortion medical groups and individual physicians who have challenged the use of mifepristone had urged the Supreme Court to turn away the appeals.
“The modest decision below merely restores the common-sense safeguards under which millions of women have taken chemical abortion drugs,” wrote lawyers for the Alliance Defending Freedom, which describes itself as a Christian law firm. The lead attorney on the Supreme Court filing is Erin Hawley, wife of Republican Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri.
U.S. District Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk, an appointee of President Donald Trump in Texas, initially revoked FDA approval of mifepristone.
Responding to a quick appeal, two more Trump appointees on the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said the FDA’s original approval would stand for now. But Judges Andrew Oldham and Kurt Engelhardt said most of the rest of Kacsmaryk’s ruling could take effect while the case winds through federal courts.
Besides reducing the time during which the drug can be taken and halting distribution through the mail, patients who are seeking medication abortions would have had to make three in-person visits with a doctor. Women also might have been required to take a higher dosage of the drug than the FDA says is necessary.
Health care providers have said that if mifepristone is no longer available or is too hard to obtain, they would switch to using only misoprostol, which is somewhat less effective in ending pregnancies.
https://www.voanews.com/a/us-supreme-court-will-rule-on-limits-on-commonly-used-abortion-medication/7396454.html Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-13, from: VOA News USA
WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Wednesday said it would hear an appeal that could upend hundreds of charges stemming from the Capitol riot, including against former President Donald Trump.
The justices will review a charge of obstruction of an official proceeding that has been brought against more than 300 people. The charge refers to the disruption of Congress’ certification of Joe Biden’s 2020 presidential election victory over Trump.
That’s among four counts brought against Trump in special counsel Jack Smith’s case that accuses the 2024 Republican presidential primary front-runner of conspiring to overturn the results of his election loss. Trump is also charged with conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding.
The court’s decision to weigh in on the obstruction charge could threaten the start of Trump’s trial, currently scheduled for March 4. The justices separately are considering whether to rule quickly on Trump’s claim that he can’t be prosecuted for actions taken within his role as president. A federal judge already has rejected that argument.
A lawyer for Trump didn’t immediately return a message seeking comment on the Supreme Court’s decision to review the charge.
The Supreme Court will hear arguments in March or April, with a decision expected by early summer.
The obstruction charge, which carries up to 20 years behind bars, is among the most widely used felony charges brought in the massive federal prosecution following the deadly insurrection on January 6, 2021, when a mob of Trump supporters stormed the Capitol in a bid to keep Biden, a Democrat, from taking the White House.
At least 152 people have been convicted at trial or pleaded guilty of obstructing an official proceeding, and at least 108 of them have been sentenced, according to an Associated Press review of court records.
A lower-court judge had dismissed the charge against Joseph Fischer, a former Pennsylvania police officer, and two other defendants, ruling it didn’t cover their conduct. The justices agreed to hear the appeal filed by lawyers for Fischer, who is facing a seven-count indictment for his actions on January 6, including the obstruction charge.
The other defendants are Edward Jacob Lang, of New York’s Hudson Valley, and Garret Miller, who has since pleaded guilty to other charges and was sentenced to 38 months in prison. Miller, who’s from the Dallas area, could still face prosecution on the obstruction charge.
U.S. District Judge Carl Nichols found that prosecutors stretched the law beyond its scope to inappropriately apply it in these cases. Nichols ruled that a defendant must have taken “some action with respect to a document, record or other object” to obstruct an official proceeding under the law.
The Justice Department challenged that ruling, and the appeals court in Washington agreed with prosecutors in April that Nichols’ interpretation of the law was too limited.
Other defendants, including Trump, are separately challenging the use of the charge.
Defense attorney Kira Anne West, who has represented several January 6 defendants charged with obstruction of an official proceeding, said the courts will have to “undo a whole bunch of cases” and adjust many sentences if the Supreme Court rules in their favor.
“This is a watershed day,” she said. “In our world — defense lawyer world — this is huge.”
West represents a man scheduled to be tried in early January on charges including the obstruction count. She doesn’t yet know if she will seek a delay until the Supreme Court resolves the challenge.
More than 1,200 people have been charged with federal crimes stemming from the riot, and more than 700 defendants have pleaded guilty.
https://www.voanews.com/a/supreme-court-to-hear-case-that-could-undo-capitol-riot-charge-against-100s-including-trump-/7396421.html Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-13, from: Heatmap News
After two weeks of intense negotiations and apparent stalemate in Dubai, all 198 delegates swiftly approved a breakthrough climate agreement this morning at COP28. The deal — a culmination of a two-year process known as the global stocktake — isn’t perfect, and it was met with a mix of praise and disappointment. United Nations climate chief Simon Stiell said that while the deal doesn’t “turn the page” on fossil fuels, it marks “the beginning of the end” of the fossil fuel era. Here are five things worth knowing about the agreement:
1. It doesn’t call for a fossil fuel phase-out
The agreement avoids the contentious “phase out” wording that nearly derailed the climate talks earlier. But it does call on countries to accelerate the transition away from fossil fuels this decade in pursuit of achieving net zero by 2050. This marks the first time a post-oil and gas future has been mentioned in a COP agreement, something that would have been “unthinkable just two years ago,” said Business Green’s James Murray.
The text also calls for tripling renewable energy capacity, phasing down unabated coal, reducing methane emissions, phasing out “inefficient” fossil fuel subsidies, and accelerating zero and low-emissions technologies including nuclear energy and carbon capture and storage.
“This sends a clear signal that the world is moving decisively to phase out fossil fuels,” said Jake Schmidt, the senior strategic director for the Natural Resources Defense Council. “It puts the fossil fuel industry formally on notice that its old business model is expiring.”
2. It appears to greenlight natural gas
The final text features a paragraph making it clear that “transitional fuels” can play a role in the energy transition. This is likely a nod to natural gas — a fossil fuel often labeled as “clean” compared with coal but that leads to emissions of methane, an extremely potent greenhouse gas. Environmentalists worry those emissions will put net zero goals in danger, but “producers have long argued that gas should complement the roll-out of intermittent renewables, replacing dirtier fossil fuels like coal and oil,” explained Stephen Stapczynski at Bloomberg Green.
3. It uses ‘weak’ language
One of the biggest criticisms of the deal is that it only “calls on” countries to cut greenhouse gas emissions, which some see as little more than an invitation. “It is the weakest of all the various terms used for such exhortations,” said CarbonBrief’s Leo Hickman.
4. Saudi Arabia gave a nod of approval
Saudi Arabia was chief among major oil-producing nations to object to a call for phasing out fossil fuels, so to eke out a deal, the COP presidency had to find language that signaled progress on curbing pollution without crossing Saudi Arabia’s red line. A source told Reuters the Saudis agreed to the deal because it offers “a menu where every country can follow its own pathway.”
5. It doesn’t do nearly enough on finance
The text lacks specific commitments from rich nations to help developing nations transition away from fossil fuels. “Asking Nigeria, or indeed, asking Africa, to phase out fossil fuels is like asking us to stop breathing without life support,” Ishaq Salako, Nigeria’s environmental minister, told The New York Times.
The theme emerging from the reactions seems to be that this deal is good, but not nearly as good as it could have been. Former Vice President Al Gore’s lukewarm reaction sums it up pretty well:
https://heatmap.news/sparks/cop28-agreement-5-things Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-13, from: NASA breaking news
Brown dwarfs are objects that straddle the dividing line between stars and planets. They form like stars, growing dense enough to collapse under their own gravity, but they never become dense and hot enough to begin fusing hydrogen and turn into a star. At the low end of the scale, some brown dwarfs are comparable […]
https://www.nasa.gov/missions/webb/nasas-webb-identifies-tiniest-free-floating-brown-dwarf/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-13, updated: 2023-12-13, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
The US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is reminding telcos of their obligations to keep consumers safe from SIM swapping and port-out scams.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2023/12/13/fcc_sim_swapping_carriers/ Save to Pocket
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2023-12-13, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
Axel Springer, OpenAI strike "real-time news" deal for ChatGPT.
https://www.axios.com/2023/12/13/openai-chatgpt-axel-springer-news-deal Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-13, from: VOA News USA
Immigrants from Belarus, Ukraine and other Eastern European countries are actively exploring the American IT startup market. One immigrant-run venture capital firm is helping them find investments. Evgeny Maslov has the story, narrated by Anna Rice. Camera: Michael Eckels.
https://www.voanews.com/a/eastern-european-startups-come-to-us-searching-for-opportunities/7396358.html Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-13, from: VOA News USA
What should young people be taught about the Israeli-Palestinian crisis? It’s a question one California school district has struggled with, even before the war in Gaza. Genia Dulot has our story.
https://www.voanews.com/a/israeli-palestinian-history-course-divides-california-school-district/7396357.html Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-13, from: San Jose Mercury News
The justices will hear appeals from the Biden administration and the maker of the drug mifepristone asking the high court to reverse an appellate ruling that would cut off access to the drug through the mail and impose other restrictions, even in states where abortion remains legal.
https://www.mercurynews.com/2023/12/13/the-supreme-court-will-rule-on-limits-on-a-commonly-used-abortion-medication/ Save to Pocket
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2023-12-13, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
Unread: An RSS Reader.
https://www.goldenhillsoftware.com/unread/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-13, from: San Jose Mercury News
Arizona remained atop the Best of the West rankings, followed by Gonzaga and BYU. But Colorado, Utah and New Mexico improved their positions.
https://www.mercurynews.com/2023/12/13/best-of-the-west-utah-upsets-byu-now-comes-the-hard-part-arizona-remains-on-top-colorado-and-new-mexico-rise/ Save to Pocket
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2023-12-13, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
I asked ChatGPT who won the 2020 election and if there was fraud, and why do some people say the election was stolen.
https://chat.openai.com/share/1fd92d6c-fbce-4a76-b213-7e4a22a45097 Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-13, from: San Jose Mercury News
It’s not practical or necessary to test everyone who has a runny nose, cough or fever. But there are specific circumstances that warrant it.
https://www.mercurynews.com/2023/12/13/as-respiratory-viruses-spread-everywhere-what-should-you-do-if-you-get-sick/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-13, from: NASA breaking news
Here’s a look back at 2023’s most significant events at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida: JANUARYDay of Remembrance Marks 20th Anniversary of Columbia Tragedy NASA senior management and guests paid tribute to the crew members of space shuttle Columbia, as well as other astronauts who perished in the line of duty, during the agency’s […]
https://www.nasa.gov/centers-and-facilities/kennedy/nasa-kennedy-space-centers-top-20-stories-of-2023/ Save to Pocket
@Dave Winer’s Scripting News (date: 2023-12-13, from: Dave Winer’s Scripting News)
Another time I blog about is when I figure something out that I’ve been trying to understand for a long time, in some cases my whole life. That still happens. The other day I found myself talking with a friend about love, why when someone says “I love you” it doesn’t mean what it seems to. Love comes from understanding someone well enough that you know what they desire, what they ache to have, and you to try to help them get it. See all the qualifications in that. Try. Help. Them. In other words, you can love someone when you know them. And you don’t give them what they want, you help them get it. You can’t love someone who your whole idea of is based on a dream you have about them. That’s different. Anyway, lots more to say about all this. It’s a recurring topic. It might be the only topic. Someday they’ll invent an AI that can analyze my writing and tell me if I’ve ever written for any other purpose than being worthy of love.
http://scripting.com/2023/12/13.html#a142503 Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-13, from: San Jose Mercury News
Billions of dollars are at stake: in-app spending is forecast to reach $182 billion next year and $207 billion in 2025. And competitors are ready to steal a piece of it.
https://www.mercurynews.com/2023/12/13/whats-next-in-the-fight-over-apple-and-googles-app-stores/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-13, from: San Jose Mercury News
Some business leaders are asking whether those stories can now be leveraged to distinguish the city within a growing Tri-Valley mega-region that is becoming increasingly indistinguishable.
https://www.mercurynews.com/2023/12/13/can-opium-dens-and-secret-tunnels-get-people-to-stop-for-lunch-in-this-bay-area-city/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-13, updated: 2023-12-13, from: Deno blog
We compare Deno KV to other serverless data stores on performance, price, developer experience, and more.
https://deno.com/blog/comparing-deno-kv Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-13, from: 404 Media Group
After breaking trains simply because an independent repair shop had worked on them, NEWAG is now demanding that trains fixed by hackers be removed from service.
https://www.404media.co/polish-hackers-repaired-trains-the-manufacturer-artificially-bricked-now-the-train-company-is-threatening-them/ Save to Pocket
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2023-12-13, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
Scripting News: Why services launch without APIs.
http://scripting.com/2014/09/28/#a1411931064 Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-13, from: VOA News USA
Washington — The Biden administration has notified Congress that it intends to spend nearly $700 million to buy a former Dublin hotel, demolish it and construct new buildings to turn the site into the new U.S. Embassy in Ireland. The State Department also announced that it had broken ground on a new embassy complex in Saudi Arabia as part of a revamp of its diplomatic facilities in the Gulf.
The department informed lawmakers late Monday that it plans to buy the former Jury’s Hotel in Dublin’s upscale Ballsbridge neighborhood for $171 million. Associated costs, including the design and construction of the new chancery and furnishing it, will bring the total to $688.8 million, according to a notice sent to Congress.
The 4.2 acre (1.7 hectare) property is located just a block from the existing U.S. embassy in the Irish capital, which dates to the 1960s and the State Department said “is well beyond its useful life, is too small for our operational needs, and is not functional in its layout.”
The new compound will include the embassy, a residence for Marine guards, support facilities and parking, the notice said. It did not give an estimate for when the project would be completed but estimated that there would be 189 employees at the new embassy in 2028, at least 109 of whom would require office space.
The U.S. has been planning to relocate its embassy in Dublin for more than a decade and the Ballsbridge site had been the expected site after Irish authorities approved zoning and other changes for it last year.
On Tuesday, the department announced that it had broken ground on construction of a new U.S. embassy on a 27.5-acre (11.1-hectare) site in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, that it acquired in early 2020. That cost, along with the construction of a new U.S. consulate in Jeddah and planning for a new consulate in Dhahran, was more than $1 billion.
https://www.voanews.com/a/us-to-spend-700m-on-new-embassy-in-ireland-breaks-ground-on-new-embassy-in-saudi-arabia/7396306.html Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-13, from: San Jose Mercury News
San Jose Sharks scored his fourth game-winning goal of the season Tuesday against the Winnipeg Jets
https://www.mercurynews.com/2023/12/13/the-sharks-preached-patience-with-their-top-prospect-its-starting-to-pay-off/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-13, from: 404 Media Group
On this week’s episode we discuss the bizarre case of Sergey Ochigava, who somehow flew from Denmark to the US with no ticket or passport. What happened? No one knows.
https://www.404media.co/404-media-podcast-17-russian-lax-plane-no-passport/ Save to Pocket
@Dave Winer’s Scripting News (date: 2023-12-13, from: Dave Winer’s Scripting News)
I
had a long chat yesterday with
Guy
Kawasaki. Along the way he wondered how I find something to write
every day. The answer – I don’t find things to write, it doesn’t work
that way. I don’t sit down in the morning and say OK now I have to write
1000 words and it doesn’t matter what it’s about. If I have something to
say I say it. And as you can tell, I usually do have something to say,
because I’m always thinking and planning, trying to figure out what I
want, or if I already know, how to get other people to help me get
there. A lot of trial and error, let’s see if this way of putting it
works, or that one, etc. There’s a slogan for this –
Narrate
Your Work – and my work is narratable and creates its own record
because I do my work right
here, because
much of my work involves other people. Actually all of it. And if I can
get the people I need to listen to me, ie read my blog, then we can work
together (a recurring theme) to make great communication systems out of
the web and avoid flushing our future down the toilet, which we always
seem to be doing.
http://scripting.com/2023/12/13.html#a140021 Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-13, from: NASA breaking news
A NASA study expands the search for life beyond our solar system by indicating that 17 exoplanets (worlds outside our solar system) could have oceans of liquid water, an essential ingredient for life, beneath icy shells. Water from these oceans could occasionally erupt through the ice crust as geysers. The science team calculated the amount […]
https://www.nasa.gov/science-research/planetary-science/astrobiology/nasa-some-icy-exoplanets-may-have-habitable-oceans-and-geysers/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-13, from: Guam Daily Post
A man was shocked with a stun gun by an officer with the Guam Police Department before allegedly trying to pull the stun gun from the officer’s hands.
https://www.postguam.com/news/local/suspect-accused-of-disarming-police-officer-after-being-tased/article_ec47863c-9952-11ee-afe6-232c59934689.html Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-13, from: Guam Daily Post
The Guam Police Department will be conducting driving while impaired checkpoints for the next several weeks and into the new year.
https://www.postguam.com/news/local/gpd-will-be-conducting-dwi-checkpoints-until-january-2024/article_388e73fa-9955-11ee-8199-0b27d5dcf15b.html Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-13, from: Guam Daily Post
The Guam Homeless Coalition is looking for 300 community volunteers to conduct the 2024 point-in-time (PIT) homeless count, which will take place Jan. 26, 2024.
https://www.postguam.com/news/local/volunteers-sought-for-homeless-point-in-time-count-in-january/article_2c167dc6-9959-11ee-86e9-0319d9ea962b.html Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-13, from: Guam Daily Post
The Office of the Attorney General is suggesting increasing tobacco taxes and funneling that additional revenue into relevant agencies so that they can hire personnel and enforce regulations on tobacco and related products.
https://www.postguam.com/news/local/oag-increase-taxes-on-tobacco-use-money-to-fund-enforcement/article_4f0b9e70-9976-11ee-8260-9f8b6edb2f26.html Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-13, from: Guam Daily Post
Gov. Lou Leon Guerrero is calling the Guam Legislature into a special session to consider a measure that would extend the moratorium on most liquid fuel taxes and surcharges through the remainder of fiscal year 2024.
https://www.postguam.com/news/local/governor-calls-special-session-gas-tax-moratorium-extension/article_0a43cbd0-9978-11ee-8fcb-afd3ebe8f6b6.html Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-13, from: Guam Daily Post
Branty Walliby was found guilty of manslaughter for his involvement in a fatal attack last year at New Fatima Mart in Dededo, which resulted in the death of Arnold Narruhn.
https://www.postguam.com/news/local/branty-walliby-found-guilty-of-manslaughter-in-2022-fatal-fight/article_385bd38a-9970-11ee-9510-9f909ab878ea.html Save to Pocket
@Dave Winer’s Scripting News (date: 2023-12-13, from: Dave Winer’s Scripting News)
I’m
pretty sure federation in social media is the wrong bet. We have to
think more broadly. What are the benefits we want from interop in social
media. Federation isn’t itself a benefit. It’s an idea hatched by
techies who aren’t thinking about how people actually use these systems
and which features are valued and which are problematic. Imho, what’s
valued is the ability to publish something quickly, and without much
fuss, and follow others, again easily without having to have a deep
understanding of how these things are architected. No one but us
programming plumbers cares. I think the idea of conversation not
only is overrated, but it’s where all the problems are, where all the
abuse happens. If we focus on the benefits, quick dissemination of news,
and the power of the individual to choose their sources and share them
with others – that’s where the juice is. Imho of course, ymmv, praise
Murphy, I am not a lawyer and my mother loved me, even though at times
it was hard to tell. ❤️
http://scripting.com/2023/12/13.html#a135218 Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-13, from: San Jose Mercury News
Large stormwater filtering devices are being installed in San Jose, but an unexpected problem is delaying completion at one site.
https://www.mercurynews.com/2023/12/13/stormwater-filtering-devices-being-installed-in-san-jose-but-one-site-left-construction-litter-in-its-wake/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-13, from: San Jose Mercury News
Pedro Martinez, of Hesperia, who’s been jailed since January 2019, was found not guilty on Monday on all 10 counts against him.
https://www.mercurynews.com/2023/12/13/southern-california-school-janitor-who-spent-years-in-jail-acquitted-of-child-sexual-abuse/ Save to Pocket
@Tomosino’s Mastodon feed (date: 2023-12-13, from: Tomosino’s Mastodon feed)
Board games with tokens should come with snackstitution rules. Tell me how many snacks of distinct types I’ll need if i want to replace the game pieces with edible things.
Imagine Catan where you can eat the sheep!
https://tilde.zone/@tomasino/111573375395714925 Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-13, from: San Jose Mercury News
The NFC-leading 49ers are playing their best offense in at least 25 years, and the upcoming playoffs offer tight end George Kittle to cement his place in franchise lore.
https://www.mercurynews.com/2023/12/13/49ers-mailbag-putting-this-offense-george-kittle-no-1-seed-into-historical-perspective/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-13, from: San Jose Mercury News
San Jose International Airport passenger totals have stalled.
https://www.mercurynews.com/2023/12/13/san-jose-airport-air-travel-economy-airline-tech-covid-south-bay/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-13, updated: 2023-12-13, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Cloudflare says that global internet traffic grew 25 percent this year, while Google regained its crown as the most visited web destination. Only a third of IPv6-capable requests were actually made over IPv6, and a third of all global bot traffic came from the US.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2023/12/13/cloudflare_internet_traffic_2023/ Save to Pocket
@Tomosino’s Mastodon feed (date: 2023-12-13, from: Tomosino’s Mastodon feed)
I seriously thought this was going to be about Brandon Sanderson
https://tilde.zone/@tomasino/111573288762615047 Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-13, from: Marketplace Morning Report
Both Spotify and Apple Music recently published their annual lists of the most listened to artists and songs. Unsurprisingly, Taylor Swift dominated. But delve deeper, and you can also start to see the influence of social media and strength of growing international audiences. Plus, as oil prices slide, COP28 comes to an agreement using the words “fossil fuel” for the first time ever.
https://www.marketplace.org/shows/marketplace-morning-report/what-spotify-wrapped-can-reveal-about-the-music-industry Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-13, from: Nieman Journalism Lab
All right, I’ll say it: I’m extremely nervous about Press Forward, the national initiative to inject $500 million into local journalism nationwide. Am I hater? A cynical 26-year-old? At the helm of a two-year-old hyperlocal newsroom still waiting on a transformational investment? All of the above? Two years ago, I quit my job in New…
https://www.niemanlab.org/2023/12/press-forward-must-prove-itself-to-the-black-press/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-13, from: Nieman Journalism Lab
Author’s note: In June, The Government of Canada passed the Online News Act to “ensure that platforms compensate news businesses fairly.” Meta responded by blocking Canadian news from all its platforms, while Google threatened to do the same when the law came into effect on Dec. 19. As November drew to a close, Google and…
https://www.niemanlab.org/2023/12/after-the-breakup-canadian-news-orgs-learn-to-live-without-facebook/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-13, from: Nieman Journalism Lab
I recently joined the board of Honolulu Civil Beat, and one of the things I’ve always loved is reading their (heavily moderated) comments. The comments can be just as engaging as the pieces themselves. They demonstrate varied perspectives, deep knowledge, and vigorous but respectful debate from readers. This is in large part because a team…
https://www.niemanlab.org/2023/12/for-more-engagement-and-trust-try-this-one-weird-trick/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-13, from: Nieman Journalism Lab
We know we need to invest in health benefits, time off, and comprehensive training for our journalists covering the most difficult stories — particularly with the increase of visual content being handled by reporters and editors. But too often, we open our tool kits only after a crisis. In the wake of January 6, several…
https://www.niemanlab.org/2023/12/peer-support-will-be-a-critical-part-of-newsroom-resilience/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-13, updated: 2023-12-13, from: The LAist
The new course at Anaheim Union High School District teaches Korean American history while encouraging students to learn their family’s past.
https://laist.com/news/education/korean-american-history-virtual-anaheim-orange-county-california Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-13, updated: 2023-12-13, from: The LAist
When the summer of 2020 brought a reckoning over diversity and inclusion, hobbyist magician Carly Usdin renewed their commitment to making the club better — just as two members tried to get Carly kicked out. ‘Imperfect Paradise: The Castle,’ Part 3.
https://laist.com/news/arts-and-entertainment/the-fallout-from-the-2020-reckoning-at-the-magic-castle Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-13, updated: 2023-12-13, from: The LAist
California’s ‘failure to protect’ law allows child welfare agencies to take kids from households scarred by domestic violence. Advocates say the separation can worsen a family’s trauma.
https://laist.com/news/education/california-can-take-kids-from-abused-moms-why-the-separation-can-harm-both Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-13, updated: 2023-12-13, from: The LAist
California is spending almost $5 billion to address a growing youth mental health crisis. In Los Angeles County, a contract with teletherapy provider Hazel Health is funding free therapy sessions for all interested students.
https://laist.com/news/education/la-county-invests-big-in-free-virtual-mental-health-therapy-for-k-12-students Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-13, from: The Markup blog
We answer the questions readers asked in response to our guide to anonymizing your phone
https://themarkup.org/levelup/2023/12/13/without-a-trace-how-to-keep-your-phone-off-the-grid Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-13, from: Nieman Journalism Lab
In 2024, more for-profit newsrooms will produce content using AI in an effort to reduce costs and increase pageviews. They will be joined by thousands of other businesses, industries, and marketers who will use AI at scale to try and gain attention and leads by any means necessary. Marketers are already bragging about their ability…
https://www.niemanlab.org/2023/12/the-web-floods/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-13, from: Nieman Journalism Lab
I predict that local news sources will have a robust presence in the American heartland, and that these sources will be founded, run, and staffed by people from the heartland. I predict that these will be journalists committed to facts and the accurate reflection of the communities they serve, and that they’ll be invested in…
https://www.niemanlab.org/2023/12/journalism-outside-urban-areas-thrives/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-13, from: VOA News USA
The White House — In a sign that the United States is getting increasingly concerned over the scale of civilian casualties from Israel’s military campaign in Gaza, President Joe Biden delivered a public rebuke to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Tuesday, even as he maintains staunch support for Israel.
“We have made it clear to the Israelis, and they are aware that … the safety of innocent Palestinians is still a great concern. And so, the actions they’re taking must be consistent with attempting to do everything possible to prevent innocent Palestinian civilians from being hurt, murdered, killed, lost, etc,,” Biden said at a press conference during Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s visit to the White House.
Zelenskyy is in the U.S. to lobby for military and economic aid for his country’s fight against Russia’s invasion. Aid to Ukraine and Israel are being blocked by Republican lawmakers who are demanding concessions on U.S. immigration policy.
Biden has grown more vocal with his public criticism of Israel’s military campaign that is now into its third month. Speaking off-camera to Democratic donors for his 2024 reelection bid earlier Tuesday, Biden said Israel is starting to lose support around the world because of its “indiscriminate bombings,” according to a White House transcript of the event.
Biden’s comment stands in contrast to those of White House officials who say Israel has taken measures to make their strikes more targeted to avoid civilian deaths.
“He’s [Netanyahu] a good friend, but I think he has to change. … This government in Israel is making it very difficult for him to move,” Biden said.
The president singled out Itamar Ben-Gvir, Israel’s far-right national security minister.
“Ben-Gvir and company and the new folks, they don’t want anything remotely approaching a two-state solution,” he said. “They not only want to have retribution, which they should for what the Palestinians — Hamas — did, but against all Palestinians.”
He suggested Netanyahu will need to empower the Palestinian Authority to become a partner in the peace process toward the two-state solution, which Israeli hard-liners oppose.
“You cannot say there’s no Palestinian state at all in the future. And that’s going to be the hard part,” Biden said, even as he underscored that the U.S. will not do “a damn thing other than protect Israel in the process.”
Biden said national security adviser Jake Sullivan will travel to the region this week and meet with the Israeli war Cabinet to emphasize U.S. commitment to Israel, as well as the need to protect civilian life and ensure more humanitarian assistance into Gaza.
Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin will also travel to the region to step up international efforts to protect the free flow of commerce through the Red Sea that has been disrupted by Iran-backed Houthi militants attacking vessels heading into Israel.
Cease-fire resolution
Biden’s remarks came amid an overwhelming vote at the United Nations General Assembly supporting a cease-fire in Gaza that further isolates Washington. The vote in the 193-member world body was 153 in favor, 10 against and 23 abstentions.
“Our duty is to try to save the lives who are still alive by having this resolution adopted and by forcing Israel to comply with it. And those who are shielding Israel to comply with the global consensus,” said Riyad Mansour, Palestinian permanent observer to the United Nations.”
The vote followed a similar resolution in the U.N. Security Council last week that failed due to a U.S. veto. There are no vetoes in the General Assembly.
While General Assembly resolutions are nonbinding, they carry political weight. U.N. member states are shaping “the narrative that the U.S. is standing alone in opposing the cease-fire,” and “looking for every means possible to create a sense of moral pressure on the U.S. to change its posture,” said Richard Gowan, U.N. director of the International Crisis Group.
“The Arab group at the U.N. wants to make the Americans nervous,” he told VOA. “It wants to send the message that America is losing international goodwill because of its stance.”
Biden’s critics say his unwavering support to Israel jeopardizes Washington’s interests.
The administration is inflicting “deep damage and lasting damage” to its ties with key countries beyond the Middle East, said Josh Paul, a former U.S. diplomat who resigned in protest over U.S. policy of sending arms to Israel without oversight.
“But also, where we are arguing, for example, in the United Nations to gain the support of the Global South for our just condemnation of Russia’s abhorrent invasion of Ukraine,” Paul told VOA. “We are also going to lose votes if we are seen to be hypocritical, if we’re seen to be walking away from our values.”
Administration officials and other supporters of Israel say they support humanitarian pauses but that a cease-fire would allow Hamas, a U.S.-designated terror organization, to regroup and plan future attacks.
A cease-fire allows Hamas to have a legitimacy that it hasn’t earned, said Julie Rayman, managing director of policy and political affairs at the American Jewish Committee.
“It’s giving trust to terrorist leaders who have proven unequivocally that they are not trustworthy,” she told VOA.
Hamas fighters stormed from the Gaza Strip into nearby Israeli towns on October 7, killing 1,200 people and taking more than 200 hostages. Gaza health officials say Israel’s military response has displaced at least 2 million people and killed more than 18,000 in the bloodiest campaign of the decadeslong Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
VOA’s United Nations correspondent Margaret Besheer contributed to this report.
https://www.voanews.com/a/isolated-internationally-on-gaza-biden-delivers-rebuke-to-netanyahu-/7396199.html Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-13, from: The Signal
Amid simultaneous wars in Europe and the Middle East and mounting tensions with China, calls to strengthen our nation’s defense have only grown louder on both sides of the aisle. In March, the Biden administration came out with the largest Pentagon budget request in American history, to the tune of an eye-popping $842 billion. Ranked […]
The post Scott Hoolahan | To Secure the Military, End Price Gouging appeared first on Santa Clarita Valley Signal.
https://signalscv.com/2023/12/scott-hoolahan-to-secure-the-military-end-price-gouging/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-13, from: The Signal
Recently the presidents of Harvard, MIT and Penn went before Congress to give testimony. They were repeatedly asked about demonstrations by students and administrators on their campuses calling for genocide of Jews. Demonstrations are happening because Israel decided to wisely respond with aggression and brute force in response to the barbaric act perpetuated against them […]
The post Brian Richards | Rot in Higher Education appeared first on Santa Clarita Valley Signal.
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date: 2023-12-13, from: The Signal
Nobody invented capitalism. It’s what all people voluntarily do, to everyone’s benefit. And it’s quite a contrast with socialism, statism, leftism, naziism, fascism and communism, which were all cooked up by intellectuals and imposed with violence. Rob Kerchner Valencia
The post Rob Kerchner | Capitalism Is only Natural appeared first on Santa Clarita Valley Signal.
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date: 2023-12-13, from: Heatmap News
Current conditions: Spain recorded its highest-ever December temperature • Flooding forced some London drivers to abandon their cars • It will be cold but clear tonight in New York City for Taylor Swift’s blowout birthday bash.
A deal has been reached at the COP28 climate summit that marks “the beginning of the end” of the fossil fuel era, says United Nations climate chief Simon Stiell. After two weeks of intense negotiations and several rejected drafts, an agreement was swiftly finalized today that calls on countries to accelerate the transition away from fossil fuels this decade in pursuit of achieving net zero by 2050. It also calls for tripling renewable energy capacity, phasing down unabated coal, reducing methane emissions, phasing out “inefficient” fossil fuel subsidies, and accelerating zero and low-emissions technologies.
COP28
leaders and delegates applaud a breakthrough at the
conference.Fadel
Dawod/Getty Images
The text of the deal will not please everyone. It is weak on financial commitments for helping developing countries. It allows for the use of “transition fuels” – such as natural gas, a fossil fuel – in facilitating the energy transition, as well as carbon capture technologies. It uses vague language that leaves much room for interpretation and loopholes. But this deal marks the first time oil and gas has been mentioned in a COP agreement, which would have been “unthinkable just two years ago,” says Business Green’s James Murray. COP28 president Sultan Al-Jaber called the deal historic but followed that with a word of caution: “Any agreement is only as good as its implementation. We are what we do, not what we say. We must turn this agreement into tangible action.”
The positive:
The negative:
A new study concludes electric car adoption is seeing “genuine exponential growth” across the world and that EVs “are highly likely to dominate the global passenger car fleet in the near future, less than a decade from today.” After analyzing the uptake of passenger EVs across 17 individual countries, Europe, and the world, the researchers believe that “system-wide adoption” will happen much faster than other estimates suggest. In Europe, for example, the researchers predict the majority of passenger cars will be EVs by 2031. The findings, published in the journal PLOS One, hint at “radical economic and infrastructural consequences in the near future.”
Estimated
future share of EVs within fleets across
regions.PLOS
One
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)’s annual Arctic Report Card, out yesterday, outlines the many ways climate change is dramatically transforming the Arctic’s delicate landscape. Some key takeaways:
There was one bright spot: A restoration initiative in Finland has helped protect nearly 130,000 acres of carbon-storing peatland and brought the return of more than 200 species of birds.
The Department of Energy (DOE) yesterday announced the creation of a new office that will focus on “emerging technology” including artificial intelligence and how it could be used to address climate change. The Office of Critical and Emerging Technology will help the DOE research how AI could help the nation prepare for “climate-related risks, enable clean-energy deployment (including addressing delays in permitting reviews), and enhance grid reliability and resilience.” “We are preparing to ensure that, as new technologies emerge, the United States leads the way in exploring those frontiers,” said Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm.
The Gila River Indian Community in Arizona recently broke ground on America’s first project to line a water canal with solar panels.
https://heatmap.news/climate/am-briefing-a-cop-breakthrough Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-13, from: VOA News USA
The UN says Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine has driven more than 5 million people from their homes, many of them older adults. Now, some are finding safe places to live thanks to the American charity To Ukraine With Love and a community called Miracle Village. Lesia Bakalets reports from the development of 107 apartments outside Kyiv.
https://www.voanews.com/a/us-charity-provides-free-housing-for-displaced-older-ukrainians-outside-kyiv-/7396177.html Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-13, from: VOA News USA
Detroit, Mich — Tesla is recalling more than 2 million vehicles across its model lineup to fix a defective system that’s supposed to ensure drivers are paying attention when they use Autopilot.
Documents posted Wednesday by U.S. safety regulators say the company will send out a software update to fix the problems.
The recall comes after a two-year investigation by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration into a series of crashes that happened while the Autopilot partially automated driving system was in use. Some were deadly.
The agency says its investigation found Autopilot’s method of ensuring that drivers are paying attention can be inadequate and can lead to foreseeable misuse of the system.
The recall covers nearly all of the vehicles Tesla sold in the U.S. and includes models Y, S, 3 and X produced between Oct. 5, 2012, and Dec. 7 of this year.
The software update includes additional controls and alerts “to further encourage the driver to adhere to their continuous driving responsibility,” the documents said.
The update was to be sent to certain affected vehicles on Tuesday, with the rest getting it at a later date, the documents said.
Autopilot includes features called Autosteer and Traffic Aware Cruise Control, with Autosteer intended for use on limited access freeways when it’s not operating with a more sophisticated feature called Autosteer on City Streets.
The software update apparently will limit where Autosteer can be used.
“If the driver attempts to engage Autosteer when conditions are not met for engagement, the feature will alert the driver it is unavailable through visual and audible alerts, and Autosteer will not engage,” the recall documents said.
Depending on a Tesla’s hardware, the added controls include “increasing prominence” of visual alerts, simplifying how Autosteer is turned on and off, additional checks on whether Autosteer is being used outside of controlled access roads and when approaching traffic control devices, “and eventual suspension from Autosteer use if the driver repeatedly fails to demonstrate continuous and sustained driving responsibility,” the documents say.
Recall documents say that agency investigators met with Tesla starting in October to explain “tentative conclusions” about the fixing the monitoring system. Tesla, it said, did not agree with the agency’s analysis but agreed to the recall on Dec. 5 in an effort to resolve the investigation.
Auto safety advocates for years have been calling for stronger regulation of the driver monitoring system, which mainly detects whether a driver’s hands are on the steering wheel. They have called for cameras to make sure a driver is paying attention, which are used by many other automakers with similar systems.
Autopilot can steer, accelerate and brake automatically in its lane, but is a driver-assist system and cannot drive itself despite its name. Independent tests have found that the monitoring system is easy to fool, so much that drivers have been caught while driving drunk or even sitting in the back seat.
In its defect report filed with the safety agency, Tesla said Autopilot’s controls “may not be sufficient to prevent driver misuse.”
A message was left early Wednesday seeking further comment from the Austin, Texas, company.
Tesla says on its website that Autopilot and a more sophisticated Full Self Driving system cannot drive autonomously and are meant to help drivers who have to be ready to intervene at all times. Full Self Driving is being tested by Tesla owners on public roads.
In a statement posted Monday on X, formerly Twitter, Tesla said safety is stronger when Autopilot is engaged.
NHTSA has dispatched investigators to 35 Tesla crashes since 2016 in which the agency suspects the vehicles were running on an automated system. At least 17 people have been killed.
The investigations are part of a larger probe by the NHTSA into multiple instances of Teslas using Autopilot crashing into parked emergency vehicles that are tending to other crashes. NHTSA has become more aggressive in pursuing safety problems with Teslas in the past year, announcing multiple recalls and investigations, including a recall of Full Self Driving software.
In May, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, whose department includes NHTSA, said Tesla shouldn’t be calling the system Autopilot because it can’t drive itself.
In its statement Wednesday, NHTSA said the Tesla investigation remains open “as we monitor the efficacy of Tesla’s remedies and continue to work with the automaker to ensure the highest level of safety.”
https://www.voanews.com/a/tesla-recalls-over-2-million-vehicles-to-fix-defective-system-that-monitors-drivers-using-autopilot/7396169.html Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-13, updated: 2023-12-13, from: Bruce Schneier blog
This is not about mass surveillance of mail, this is about the sorts of targeted surveillance the US Postal Inspection Service uses to catch mail thieves:
To track down an alleged mail thief, a US postal inspector used license plate reader technology, GPS data collected by a rental car company, and, most damning of all, hid a camera inside one of the targeted blue post boxes which captured the suspect’s full face as they allegedly helped themselves to swathes of peoples’ mail.
https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2023/12/surveillance-by-the-us-postal-service.html Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-13, from: Marketplace Morning Report
From the BBC World Service: After last minute horse-trading at the COP28 climate conference, 200 countries have agreed to a deal that calls for a transition away from fossil fuels for the first time. But critics argue it doesn’t go far enough. Meanwhile, Argentina’s new president Javier Milei is pressing ahead with his shock therapy plan for the economy, starting with a devaluation of the peso. And we also take a look at the economic problems at the top of the agenda in Egypt’s election.
https://www.marketplace.org/shows/marketplace-morning-report/cop28-is-it-better-to-transition-or-phase-out Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-13, updated: 2023-12-13, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Cloud giant AWS collected a staggering 76 percent more direct public sector revenue from the UK government in the past financial year.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2023/12/13/aws_sees_direct_uk_government/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-13, from: RIP Corp
RIP Corp is a Charts & Leisure production. Find us at ripcorp.biz, or follow in places @ripcorpdotbiz for all your dead business needs.
To support the show, please consider aligning yourself even more deeply with the brand, via our merch shop: ripcorp.threadless.com
RIP Corp is written and hosted by Ingrid Burrington. Produced by Meghal Janardan and Mike Rugnetta. Associate producer, Taylor Behnke. Original music and sound design from Andrew Atkin and Michael Simonelli. Fact-checking from Matt Giles. Logo design by Beatriz Lozano and illustrations by Megan Mulholland. Executive produced by Jason Oberholtzer.
https://ripcorp.biz/episodes/2500-and-a-dream-fansteel-and-the-history-of-tantalum-T15G5g7n Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-13, updated: 2023-12-13, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Close to a million records containing personally identifiable information belonging to donors that sent money to non-profits were found exposed in an online database.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2023/12/13/donorview_database_breach/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-13, from: Hawaii Tribune Harold
<p><strong>HONOKA‘A 60 - WAIAKEA 46</strong></p>
https://www.hawaiitribune-herald.com/2023/12/13/sports/wildcats-dragons-down-warriors/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-13, from: Hawaii Tribune Harold
<p>Last week, the Big Island’s top Pop Warner team took the national stage at the 66th Pop Warner National Championships in Orlando, Fla.</p>
https://www.hawaiitribune-herald.com/2023/12/13/sports/photos-eagles-represent-west-hawaii-on-national-scale/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-13, from: Hawaii Tribune Harold
<p>SAN FRANCISCO — Slugging South Korean outfielder Jung Hoo Lee and the San Francisco Giants have agreed to a $113 million, six-year contract, a person familiar with the negotiations told The Associated Press. </p>
https://www.hawaiitribune-herald.com/2023/12/13/sports/south-korean-outfielder-jung-hoo-lee-gets-113-million-6-year-deal-giants-ap-source-says/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-13, from: Hawaii Tribune Harold
<p>Tak could be annoying.</p>
https://www.hawaiitribune-herald.com/2023/12/13/sports/stephen-tsai-takeuye-was-part-of-the-uh-hoops-family/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-13, from: Hawaii Tribune Harold
<p>DALLAS — Luka Doncic had 33 points and 17 assists, Tim Hardaway Jr. scored a season-high 32 points and the Dallas Mavericks beat Los Angeles 127-125 on Tuesday night in the Lakers’ first game since winning the inaugural In-Season Tournament. </p>
https://www.hawaiitribune-herald.com/2023/12/13/sports/doncic-hardaway-led-mavs-over-lakers-127-125-in-las-first-game-since-winning-nba-cup/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-13, from: Hawaii Tribune Harold
<p>The AFC is up for grabs with four weeks remaining in the regular season. </p>
https://www.hawaiitribune-herald.com/2023/12/13/sports/analysis-the-afc-is-up-for-grabs-with-four-potential-division-races-coming-down-to-the-final-week/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-13, from: Hawaii Tribune Harold
<p>CHICAGO — Reggie Jackson scored 25 points and short-handed Denver held off the Chicago Bulls for a 114-106 victory on Tuesday night after Nuggets star Nikola Jokic was ejected in the second quarter. </p>
https://www.hawaiitribune-herald.com/2023/12/13/sports/jackson-scores-25-points-as-nuggets-beat-bulls-114-106-after-jokic-ejection/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-13, from: Hawaii Tribune Harold
<p>The 2024 UH-Hilo Softball schedule will have 47 total games on tap with more than half of them played in the home state.</p>
https://www.hawaiitribune-herald.com/2023/12/13/sports/uh-hilo-softball-2024-schedule-released/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-13, from: Hawaii Tribune Harold
<p>COSTA MESA, Calif. — Justin Herbert’s fourth year as an NFL starting quarterback is over with four games remaining in the season. </p>
https://www.hawaiitribune-herald.com/2023/12/13/sports/chargers-qb-justin-herbert-will-miss-rest-of-season-after-surgery-on-his-broken-index-finger/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-13, from: Hawaii Tribune Harold
<p>Pahala is the first Hawaii Island ZIP code to be fully enabled to receive Hawaiian Telcom’s high-speed fiber internet service.</p>
https://www.hawaiitribune-herald.com/2023/12/13/hawaii-news/pahala-gets-access-to-high-speed-internet-service/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-13, from: Hawaii Tribune Harold
<p>Hawaii County is presenting its annual “Magic of the Season” holiday open house this week at the County Building in Hilo.</p>
https://www.hawaiitribune-herald.com/2023/12/13/hawaii-news/experience-the-magic-of-the-season/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-13, from: Hawaii Tribune Harold
<p>The National Park Service is seeking public feedback about the Hawaii Volcanoes National Park’s draft Accessibility Self-Evaluation and Transition Plan.</p>
https://www.hawaiitribune-herald.com/2023/12/13/hawaii-news/hvnp-seeks-public-input-on-accessibility-plan/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-13, from: Hawaii Tribune Harold
<p>After acquiring a run-down coffee farm in Puna and turning it into an award-winning brand, the founders of Big Island Coffee Roasters are taking on a new challenge by opening a café and roastery in Hilo.</p>
https://www.hawaiitribune-herald.com/2023/12/13/hawaii-news/big-island-coffee-roasters-opens-roasting-facility-cafe-in-hilo/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-13, from: Hawaii Tribune Harold
<p>Multiple witnesses told police they saw a 21-year-old Pahoa man fire several shots in the air early Saturday morning before pointing a semiautomatic pistol at another man in a public parking lot in Hilo.</p>
https://www.hawaiitribune-herald.com/2023/12/13/hawaii-news/man-accused-of-firing-multiple-shots-in-isles-incident/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-13, from: Hawaii Tribune Harold
<p>The Hamakua Community Development Plan Action Committee is mulling whether to request the county maintain Mud Lane or to open it up as an emergency evacuation route.</p>
https://www.hawaiitribune-herald.com/2023/12/13/hawaii-news/2-options-mulled-for-mud-lane-including-evacuation-route/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-13, from: Hawaii Tribune Harold
<p>The U.S. Coast Guard and Hawaii Fire Department on Tuesday cleared Young Brothers to resume operations at the Port of Hilo.</p>
https://www.hawaiitribune-herald.com/2023/12/13/hawaii-news/us-coast-guard-clears-young-brothers-to-resume-operations-at-port-of-hilo/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-13, from: Hawaii Tribune Harold
<p>ATLANTIC CITY, N.J. (AP) — Shawn Fain, the international president of the United Auto Workers union who recently won large raises for his workers, is taking aim at a new target: New Jersey lawmakers who are delaying votes on a bill to ban smoking in Atlantic City’s casinos.</p>
https://www.hawaiitribune-herald.com/2023/12/13/nation-world-news/auto-union-boss-urges-new-jersey-lawmakers-to-pass-casino-smoking-ban/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-13, from: Hawaii Tribune Harold
<p>Results from testing ash samples in Lahaina show concerning high levels of toxic chemicals.</p>
https://www.hawaiitribune-herald.com/2023/12/13/hawaii-news/elevated-levels-of-toxins-found-in-lahaina-ash-test-results-show/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-13, from: Hawaii Tribune Harold
<p>A former student of the man who fatally shot three people at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, said he resigned from a tenured teaching position after making sexual comments about an outfit she wore to class.</p>
https://www.hawaiitribune-herald.com/2023/12/13/nation-world-news/unlv-gunman-resigned-past-professor-job-after-inappropriate-comments-report/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-13, from: Hawaii Tribune Harold
<p>KAILUA-KONA — The Kona Kohala Chefs Association recognized six recent scholarship winners Saturday at the sold out “Christmas with the Chefs” gala on the grounds of Courtyard by Marriott King Kamehameha’s Kona Beach Hotel.</p>
https://www.hawaiitribune-herald.com/2023/12/13/community/six-culinary-scholarships-awarded-to-budding-young-chefs/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-13, from: Hawaii Tribune Harold
<p>The Kingston Trio’s status in American music history is secure — so much so, the seminal modern folk trio was awarded a lifetime achievement Grammy in 2011.</p>
https://www.hawaiitribune-herald.com/2023/12/13/entertainment/the-kingston-trio-brings-rich-legacy-to-palace-stage/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-13, from: Hawaii Tribune Harold
<p>Police and federal agents are asking the public to remain vigilant while they investigate antisemitic graffiti and a threat made on the third day of Hanukkah to detonate hidden explosives “inside of every Hawaii synagogue.”</p>
https://www.hawaiitribune-herald.com/2023/12/13/hawaii-news/authorities-probe-threat-to-bomb-hawaii-synagogues/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-13, from: Hawaii Tribune Harold
<p>DETROIT (AP) — U.S. auto safety regulators say they have taken the first step toward requiring devices in vehicles that prevent drunk or impaired driving.</p>
https://www.hawaiitribune-herald.com/2023/12/13/nation-world-news/us-agency-takes-first-step-toward-requiring-new-vehicles-to-prevent-drunk-or-impaired-driving/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-13, from: Hawaii Tribune Harold
<p>Three-time Grammy winner and four-time Na Hoku Hanohano award-winner Kalani Pe‘a returns to the Kahilu Theatre in Waimea for a special “Purple Hawaiian Christmas” concert at 7 p.m. Friday, Dec. 15.</p>
https://www.hawaiitribune-herald.com/2023/12/13/entertainment/its-a-purple-hawaiian-christmas-in-waimea-kahilu-presents-kalani-pea-on-friday/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-13, from: Hawaii Tribune Harold
<p>RAFAH, Gaza Strip — Israel and the United States on Tuesday showed their sharpest public disagreement yet over the conduct and future of the war against Hamas as the two allies became increasingly isolated by global calls for a cease-fire.</p>
https://www.hawaiitribune-herald.com/2023/12/13/nation-world-news/israel-and-us-show-sharp-divisions-over-mounting-casualties-and-future-of-war-against-hamas/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-13, from: Hawaii Tribune Harold
<p>Google’s legal defeat at the hands of Fortnite maker Epic Games Inc. threatens to roil an app store duopoly with Apple Inc. that generates close to $200 billion a year and dictates how billions of consumers use mobile devices. The loss — handed down by a San Francisco jury on Monday — is a blow to the two companies’ business model in apps, where they charge commissions of as much as 30% to software developers who typically have few other options.</p>
https://www.hawaiitribune-herald.com/2023/12/13/nation-world-news/googles-epic-legal-defeat-threatens-200-billion-app-store-industry/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-13, from: Hawaii Tribune Harold
<p>It’s a common accusation: “You just hate Trump.” But this dismissive assertion always implies a subtext: “Your hatred of Trump blinds you to his virtues and accomplishments.”</p>
https://www.hawaiitribune-herald.com/2023/12/13/opinion/you-dont-have-to-hate-trump-to-want-a-better-president/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-13, from: Hawaii Tribune Harold
<p>If you’ve ordered a coffee and been asked to tip your barista at Starbucks and hesitated, you’re not alone: If you don’t tip, will your chipper barista be let down? What does everyone else do?</p>
https://www.hawaiitribune-herald.com/2023/12/13/opinion/tip-requests-are-everywhere-are-americans-greedy-or-is-service-worse/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-13, from: Hawaii Tribune Harold
<p>To hear his lawyers tell it, Donald Trump was alarmed by Russia’s interference in the 2016 election, motivated as president to focus on cybersecurity and had a good-faith basis four years later to worry that foreign actors had again meddled in the race.</p>
https://www.hawaiitribune-herald.com/2023/12/13/nation-world-news/how-the-2016-election-could-factor-into-the-case-accusing-trump-of-trying-to-overturn-the-2020-race/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-13, from: Hawaii Tribune Harold
<p>Harvard President Claudine Gay will remain leader of the prestigious Ivy League school following her comments last week at a congressional hearing on antisemitism, the university’s highest governing body announced Tuesday.</p>
https://www.hawaiitribune-herald.com/2023/12/13/nation-world-news/harvard-board-keeps-president-as-leader-of-ivy-league-school-following-antisemitism-backlash/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-13, from: Hawaii Tribune Harold
<p>Debraline H. Stanley, 71, of Keaau died Nov 21. Born in Kahuku, Oahu, she was a manager with Hawaii Care and Cleaning. Services at a later date. Survived by sons, Paul (Mahea) Stanley and Ammon K. Stanley of Keaau; daughters, Marlo (Eric) Mello of Mountain View, Stephanie (William) Hudnall of Keaau, Luana (Gem) Ahina of Kona and Kaui (Tana Sr.) Stanley of Waimea; daughter-in-law, Marleen Stanley; brothers, C. Puni Kaio and Steven Kaio of Keaau; sisters, Dell-Fin Brooks of Pahoa and Jerilyn Fely of Keaau; 30 grandchildren and 11 great grandchildren; aunts, uncles, cousins, nieces and nephews. Arrangements by Ballard Family Mortuary.</p>
https://www.hawaiitribune-herald.com/2023/12/13/obituaries/obituaries-for-december-13-11/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-13, from: Hawaii Tribune Harold
<p>WASHINGTON — His country’s future at stake, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy used inspirational words, optimistic resolve and a nod to Christmas in appealing Tuesday to leaders in Congress for U.S. aid for his fighters in the war with Russia.</p>
https://www.hawaiitribune-herald.com/2023/12/13/nation-world-news/with-ukraine-aid-in-peril-zelenskyy-pleads-his-case-on-capitol-hill-and-at-the-white-house/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-13, from: Hawaii Tribune Harold
<p>Tired of too much
political correctness</p>
https://www.hawaiitribune-herald.com/2023/12/13/opinion/your-views-for-december-13-7/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-13, updated: 2023-12-13, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Britain’s data watchdog has issued the Ministry of Defence with a financial penalty of £350,000 for the BCC email blunder that exposed names and contact data of Afghan interpreters locked in the Taliban-controlled country.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2023/12/13/mod_bcc_email_fine/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-13, from: Heather Cox Richardson blog
Last night, Special Counsel Jack Smith asked the Supreme Court to decide Trump’s claim that he is immune from any and all criminal prosecution for anything he did while in office. That claim is central to Trump’s defense; he has requested the charges against him be dismissed because of that immunity.
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/december-12-2023 Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-13, from: Robert Reich on Substack
If so, how?
https://robertreich.substack.com/p/office-hours-should-the-us-pressure Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-13, from: Daniel Stenberg Blog
You know I spend all my days working on curl and related matters. I also spend a lot of time thinking on the project; like how we do things and how we should do things. The security angle of this project is one of the most crucial ones and an area where I spend a … Continue reading Making it harder to do wrong
https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2023/12/13/making-it-harder-to-do-wrong/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-13, from: Raspberry Pi News (.com)
YouTuber Kevin McAleer decided Elf on the Shelf shouldn’t be reserved for kids, so he trained a robot to help him get in on the fun.
The post Elf on the shelf for grown-ups (make a robot do it) appeared first on Raspberry Pi.
https://www.raspberrypi.com/news/elf-on-the-shelf-for-grown-ups-make-a-robot-do-it/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-13, from: Tilde.news
https://git.sr.ht/~lioploum/offpunk/refs/v2.1 Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-13, updated: 2023-12-13, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
NASA has celebrated the Perseverance Rover’s 1000th Martian day of operations, and prepared the longest ever flight for the helicopter that accompanied it to the home of Marvin.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2023/12/13/perseverance_1000_sols_ingenuity_record/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-13, from: The Signal
Dear Savvy Senior, What can you tell me about seasonal affective disorder? I’ve always disliked winter, but since I retired and am home a lot more, the gray, cold winter months make me feel really blue. — Sad Sam Dear Sam, If you get depressed in the winter but feel better […]
The post The Savvy Senior | How to Ease the Winter Blues appeared first on Santa Clarita Valley Signal.
https://signalscv.com/2023/12/__trashed-2/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-13, from: SCV New (TV Station)
1900 – Automobile Club of Southern California founded; first car in SCV appeared 1902. [story
https://scvnews.com/today-in-scv-history-dec-13/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-13, from: Alex Schroeder’s Blog
I come home from a friendly meetup and notice that my tiny web-server has a load of 80 instead of the usual 0.5. What the hell is going on? I look at the logs of the last 24 hours and see an IP number with more than 100 000 hits in the last 24h. What are they doing?
Whois tells me it is from the “Alibaba Cloud”. Oh yeah? What are the Chinese trying to do on my site?
I start poking around. More and more IP numbers from all over the net show up. Alibaba Cloud, Tencent Cloud.
All right, so I’m blocking some of them individually as I go, but after a while I realize that I probably have to block them at the network level.
For the moment I’m also taking down one of the wikis that’s overloading my server.
Just looking at the top 10 offenders for two of my domains, and running whois on them to find the entire network they belong to, and checking that it’s Alibaba or Tencent:
# Alibaba Cloud 2023-12-10
RewriteCond "%{REMOTE_ADDR}" "-R '47.76.0.0/14'" [or]
RewriteCond "%{REMOTE_ADDR}" "-R '47.80.0.0/13'" [or]
RewriteCond "%{REMOTE_ADDR}" "-R '47.74.0.0/14'" [or]
RewriteCond "%{REMOTE_ADDR}" "-R '47.235.0.0/16'" [or]
RewriteCond "%{REMOTE_ADDR}" "-R '47.246.0.0/16'" [or]
RewriteCond "%{REMOTE_ADDR}" "-R '47.244.0.0/15'" [or]
RewriteCond "%{REMOTE_ADDR}" "-R '47.240.0.0/14'" [or]
RewriteCond "%{REMOTE_ADDR}" "-R '47.236.0.0/14'" [or]
# Tencent Cloud
RewriteCond "%{REMOTE_ADDR}" "-R '42.192.0.0/15'" [or]
RewriteCond "%{REMOTE_ADDR}" "-R '49.232.0.0/14'" [or]
RewriteCond "%{REMOTE_ADDR}" "-R '101.34.0.0/15'" [or]
RewriteCond "%{REMOTE_ADDR}" "-R '43.142.0.0/16'" [or]
RewriteCond "%{REMOTE_ADDR}" "-R '124.220.0.0/14'"
RewriteRule ^ https://alexschroeder.ch/nobots [redirect=410,last]
If I want this to be for the entire server and not repeat it for each location, I guess I’ll have to use Apache rewrite rules.
While I’m doing this, I notice a new pattern… My wiki software allows you to fetch a feed for every page. Either it contains updates to the page (Oddmuse), or a feed of the pages linked (Oddmu). It’s for humans.
Of course some shit engineer decided that it was a good idea to scan the web for all the feeds that are out there (so rare! so precious!) and to download them all, forever (uncover the darknet! server our customers!) and now I have to block IP number ranges, add robot agents to robots.txt files (not all of them provide one), or block user agents (not all of them provide a useful one) and I block and block and block (for the environment! to avoid +2.0°C and the end of human civilization!) and all this while I know that all these shit requests exist out there, for all the sites, everywhere – a hundred thousand requests or more per day, per site, wasting CO₂ – and what am I going to do, kill the feeds for humans because some shit engineer decided to feed a machine?
I’m on the Butlerian Jihad again.
Oh, and Virgin Media is downloading tons of PDFs I’m hosting? Are they looking for copyright violations? On the blocklist they go.
And what’s this, Feedly is also downloading feeds like crazy, every few minutes? Slow down, idiots. My news is not important. On the blocklist they go. Or are you trying to train your stupid intelligence? Fuck this AI training stuff. I already use “X-Robots-Tag: noimageai” but I guess I should add even more HTTP headers to block even more engineers overstepping boundaries?
Ah, and MonitoRSS going into overdrive, from the Amazon Cloud. Really, I don’t think there are humans in the Amazon Cloud. Onto the blocklist they go. Well, at least this IP range.
And who’s that VelenPublicWebCrawler, zealously collecting pages? Onto the blocklists they go.
Following a lead from StackExchange and looking at the
ipset manual I see that the type hash:net
supports banning entire networks!
Here’s a fish script:
#! /usr/bin/fish
# Use hash:net because of the CIDR stuff
ipset create banlist hash:net
iptables -I INPUT -m set --match-set banlist src -j DROP
iptables -I FORWARD -m set --match-set banlist src -j DROP
# Alibaba 2023-12-10
set -l networks \
47.76.0.0/14 \
47.80.0.0/13 \
47.74.0.0/14 \
47.235.0.0/16 \
47.246.0.0/16 \
47.244.0.0/15 \
47.240.0.0/14 \
47.236.0.0/14
# Tencent 2023-12-10
set -a networks \
42.192.0.0/15 \
49.232.0.0/14 \
101.34.0.0/15 \
43.142.0.0/16 \
124.220.0.0/14
# OVH 2023-12-10 (Borked Feed Reader)
set -a networks 141.94.0.0/16
# Bell Canada 2023-12-10 (Borked Feed Reader)
set -a networks 142.177.0.0/16
# Amazon 2023-12-10 (MonitoRSS?)
set -a networks 44.192.0.0/11
# Virgin Media 2023-12-10
set -a networks 81.108.0.0/15
# BSO 2023-12-10 (maybe Feedly?)
set -a networks 8.29.192.0/21
# ASAHI 2023-12-10 (idiot bot getting 1PDC PDF repeatedly)
set -a networks 220.146.0.0/16
for network in $networks
ipset add banlist $network
end
#Bots #Butlerian Jihad #Administration
https://alexschroeder.ch/view/2023-12-10-bots-again Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-13, updated: 2023-12-13, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Back in 2016, a member of the Microsoft community asked the Windows giant to add a time input field its Forms product, and received word from an employee that the feature request had been put on the to-do list.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2023/12/13/microsoft_forms_feature_request_delay/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-13, updated: 2023-12-13, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
AI and the chips that run it are so hot right now.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2023/12/13/equinix_liquid_cooling/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-13, updated: 2023-12-13, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Cybercrime gangs like the notorious Lazarus group and spyware vendors like Israel’s NSO should be considered cyber mercenaries – and become the subject of a concerted international response – according to a Monday report from Delhi-based think tank Observer Research Foundation (ORF).…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2023/12/13/cyber_mercenary_orf_report/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-13, from: VOA News USA
U.S. lawmakers called for a tougher stance against Iran Tuesday as the conflict between Israel and Hamas threatens to expand across the Middle East. Iranian proxies have launched more than 90 attacks against U.S. forces since October 17th, 10 days after the Hamas terror attack on Israel. Some Republican lawmakers are demanding that the Biden administration impose stricter sanctions on the Islamic Republic. VOA’s Congressional Correspondent Katherine Gypson has more.
https://www.voanews.com/a/us-lawmakers-seek-harder-stance-on-iran-amid-growing-mideast-tension/7395999.html Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-13, updated: 2023-12-13, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Hello, dear [READERNAME], The Register today brings you the news that the heir to Lotus Notes has added the ability to mail merge emails.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2023/12/13/hcl_modernises_notes_by_adding/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-13, from: VOA News USA
Ukraine’s president, alongside President Joe Biden, pleaded with U.S. lawmakers Tuesday to approve $61 billion in aid for the country as it continues to fight off Russia’s invasion. Without those funds, they say, a cold, grim winter looms. White House Correspondent Anita Powell reports.
https://www.voanews.com/a/biden-echoes-wish-for-ukraine-victory-asks-congress-to-approve-aid/7395989.html Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-13, from: VOA News USA
In a sign that the United States is getting increasingly concerned over the number of civilian casualties from Israel’s military campaign in Gaza, President Joe Biden delivered a public rebuke to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu even as he maintains staunch support for Israel. White House Bureau Chief Patsy Widakuswara has this report.
https://www.voanews.com/a/isolated-internationally-on-gaza-biden-delivers-rebuke-to-netanyahu/7395986.html Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-13, from: The Signal
Recognition, resolutions and even a Sheriff’s Department challenge coin were among the gifts given to outgoing Santa Clarita Mayor Jason Gibbs as he passed the gavel Tuesday to the incoming one, Cameron Smyth. But the best, he said, came from College of the Canyons’ culinary program, which made Gibbs’ favorite dish: a plate of pork […]
The post Smyth named mayor for 2024 appeared first on Santa Clarita Valley Signal.
https://signalscv.com/2023/12/smyth-named-mayor-for-2024/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-13, from: The Signal
State Sen. Scott Wilk, R-Santa Clarita, honored Santa Clarita Magazine and its publishers, Moe, Linda and Alex Hafizi, as the Small Business of the Month for December at City Hall on Tuesday.
The post Photos: Small Business of the Month appeared first on Santa Clarita Valley Signal.
https://signalscv.com/2023/12/photos-small-business-of-the-month/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-13, updated: 2023-12-13, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Dutch photolithography dominator ASML has reached an agreement to build its first-ever offshore research lab, to be located in South Korea in partnership with Samsung.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2023/12/13/asml_samsung_hynix_alliance/ Save to Pocket
@Jessica Smith’s blog (date: 2023-12-13, from: Jessica Smith’s blog)
The last few days have been really productive for me creatively. I’ve made so much progress on a thorough outline of book 2 of my WIP, with proper through-lines of narrative tension,1 and I’m feeling really good about how the actual writing of it is going to go. I also did a cold reread of book 1, and was really happy with it, actually! I’d even say it’s about ready to start seeking out feedback from other people 😬
And… what did I have to do to start making progress again? It seems like the solution is simple:
So there you have it; that’s what I’ve been up to. In what has otherwise been a bit of a tough year for me, it feels great to be optimistic about something for once 😊
If you’re really curious, last year I wrote this blog post about how bad my previous outline was. This new one is sooooo much better. So much. If only the ideas that struck me this year had come a little earlier 🤪 ↩︎
https://www.jayeless.net/2023/12/outlining-progress.html Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-13, from: VOA News USA
The White House — A barrage of Russian missiles targeted Ukraine’s capital, injuring at least 45 people Wednesday, as President Volodymyr Zelenskyy urged U.S. officials to approve $61 billion in new aid to help his country fight off Russia’s invasion.
Ukraine’s air forces said the country’s air defenses downed all 10 ballistic missiles launched by Russia.
Falling debris from the downed missiles damaged a children’s hospital and the city’s water system, Kyiv Mayor Vitaly Klitschko said, while Serhiy Popko, head of Kyiv’s military administration, said debris also hit several homes.
“Russia has proven once again that it is a heinous country that fires missiles at night, trying to hit residential areas, kindergartens, and energy facilities during the winter,” Zelenskyy said Wednesday on social media. “There will be a response. Certainly.”
Zelenskyy added that he and U.S. President Joe Biden had agreed to work on increasing the number of Ukraine’s air defense systems, and that Russia had “demonstrated how critical this decision is.”
The Biden administration Tuesday announced up to $200 million in new military aid, including air defense missiles and components, for Ukraine from previously approved resources.
The announcement came as Zelenskyy used his visit to Washington to make a forceful case for a new commitment of $61 billion in aid to help his country’s war cause as the U.S. Congress decides on the matter.
The Ukrainian leader rejected the notion that his nation would cede territory to the Russians after nearly two years of brutal warfare.
“That’s insane, to be honest,” Zelenskyy said.
He added: “I don’t know whose idea it is, but I have a question to these people: if they are ready to give up their children to terrorists. I think not.”
Biden also pressed for Ukrainian victory and seemed to push back against starting negotiations with Moscow.
“We need to ensure Putin continues to fail in Ukraine and Ukraine to succeed,” he said. “And the best way for that to do that is to pass the supplemental” funding request.
But the U.S. Congress, which signs the checks, is not yet convinced. Earlier Tuesday, Zelenskyy met with lawmakers in an attempt to persuade them.
Republicans say they want to see “proper oversight” of the funding, and they also want to see “a clear articulation of strategy.”
Biden, meanwhile, accused Republicans of playing into Moscow’s hands by failing to pass the aid package.
“The host of a Kremlin-run show said, ‘Well done, Republicans. That’s good for us,’” he said, adding: “If you’re being celebrated by Russian propagandists, it might be time to rethink what you’re doing. History will judge harshly those who turn their back on freedom’s cause.”
Russia’s Foreign Ministry accused Zelenskyy of “cadging” – slang meaning to beg for something undeserved – and said he is an American puppet.
But U.S. taxpayers are showing signs of Ukraine fatigue, and some Republicans question why about a third of U.S. money goes not toward weapons, but government assistance.
John Jameson, a mine-clearing campaigner who recently visited the country, said Ukraine needs every penny.
“The deminers were working while we heard the sound of artillery going on,” he told VOA, on Zoom. “And they’re doing that because they know it’s essential for them to be able to start farming and producing and going back to work now so they can live so they can not only just to fight the war but so they can live but no, we can’t wait until the fighting is over.”
But when will it end? Analysts say this may take more than a year – and question whether Ukraine’s supporters are funding it enough, considering how well this small army has done against a much larger foe.
“They’ve become, in some ways, victims of their own success,” said Dalibor Rohac, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. “I don’t think we should be sort of reasonably asking Ukrainians to do more, especially given the almost homeopathic nature of Western assistance. When you think about the amounts of munitions that are being delivered – the miniscule amounts of long range artillery, precision artillery, air defenses, etc, etc, that are being delivered to Ukraine. I think they are making a really impressive use of very limited resources that are given to them, provided to them, against a much larger adversary.”
This urgent discussion comes as Biden on Tuesday announced another $200 million in military aid for Ukraine from previously approved resources.
Biden has asked Congress for a $110 billion package of wartime funding for Ukraine and Israel, along with other national security priorities.
But Republicans in the U.S. Senate have balked, saying major U.S. border security changes are needed.
Some Republicans are asking for the immediate deportation of migrants who entered the country illegally, stripping them of a chance to seek U.S. asylum. They have also called for greatly scaling back Biden administration programs that have allowed hundreds of thousands of migrants to enter the U.S. lawfully.
The U.S. has already provided Ukraine $111 billion for its fight against Russia’s 2022 invasion.
VOA’s Carla Babb contributed to this report. Some information came from The Associated Press, Agence France-Presse and Reuters.
https://www.voanews.com/a/biden-echoes-wish-for-ukraine-victory-asks-congress-to-approve-aid/7395958.html Save to Pocket
@Dave Winer’s Scripting News (date: 2023-12-13, from: Dave Winer’s Scripting News)
If Threads supported outbound RSS 2.0 feeds we could avoid the dominance Twitter had over news for so long. There’s nothing hard or magical about it, the technology of RSS is simple, and well understood by thousands of developers.
http://scripting.com/2023/12/12.html#a025624 Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-13, updated: 2023-12-13, from: Daring Fireball
This new feature will add significant protection against a thief who steals your iPhone and knows your device passcode.
https://daringfireball.net/2023/12/ios_17-3_stolen_device_protection Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-13, from: Santa Barbara Indenpent News
The City’s LEAD Goleta Community Academy is one month away, and the City is encouraging local high school and college
The post Attention High School and College Students: Invitation to Attend Upcoming LEAD Goleta Academy appeared first on The Santa Barbara Independent.
https://www.independent.com/2023/12/12/attention-high-school-and-college-students-invitation-to-attend-upcoming-lead-goleta-academy/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-13, from: Santa Barbara Indenpent News
SANTA BARBARA, Calif. – Today, Environment California Research and Policy Center announced petitions at an event on the UCSB campus, calling
The post Environment California Joined Local Supporters to Announce New Proposals to Safeguard Ocean Life appeared first on The Santa Barbara Independent.
https://www.independent.com/2023/12/12/environment-california-joined-local-supporters-to-announce-new-proposals-to-safeguard-ocean-life/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-13, from: Santa Barbara Indenpent News
The City of Santa Barbara Parks and Recreation Department will host its annual Rose Pruning Day on Saturday, January 13,
The post Annual Rose Pruning Day Scheduled for January 13 appeared first on The Santa Barbara Independent.
https://www.independent.com/2023/12/12/annual-rose-pruning-day-scheduled-for-january-13/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-13, from: Santa Barbara Indenpent News
Supervisors approve new public nuisance language making it easier for sheriff to pull the plug on for-profit parties.
The post Santa Barbara County Puts Lid on Party Profiteers in Isla Vista appeared first on The Santa Barbara Independent.
https://www.independent.com/2023/12/12/santa-barbara-county-puts-lid-on-party-profiteers-in-isla-vista/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-13, from: The Signal
The Sierra Vista Junior High School Clubhouse will now be known as the Thomas E. Dierckman Clubhouse — Boys & Girls Club of Santa Clarita Valley after the William S. Hart Union High School District board approved a resolution at last week’s meeting. Dierckman has been serving on the board of directors for the Boys […]
The post <strong>Sierra Vista clubhouse renaming approved by Hart district</strong> appeared first on Santa Clarita Valley Signal.
https://signalscv.com/2023/12/sierra-vista-clubhouse-renaming-approved-by-hart-district/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-13, from: Santa Barbara Indenpent News
A tour through Montecito Union School’s lush Nature Lab.
The post Connecting Kids and Community Through Soil appeared first on The Santa Barbara Independent.
https://www.independent.com/2023/12/12/connecting-kids-and-community-through-soil/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-13, from: Santa Barbara Indenpent News
Precocious and Grammy-fied jazz star Samara Joy makes Santa Barbara debut, with Christmas/family ties in tow.
The post Review | Breaking Musical Bread, Sharing the Spotlight appeared first on The Santa Barbara Independent.
https://www.independent.com/2023/12/12/review-breaking-musical-bread-sharing-the-spotlight/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-13, from: The Signal
Former Valencia High School softball coach Donna Lee and current Hart High School girls’ soccer coach Brett Croft have both been honored by multiple organizations recently, including by the California Interscholastic Federation. Getting recognized for their hard work in their own backyard, as was the case at last week’s William S. Hart Union High School […]
The post <strong>Hart district recognizes Croft, Lee</strong> appeared first on Santa Clarita Valley Signal.
https://signalscv.com/2023/12/hart-district-recognizes-croft-lee/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-13, from: The Signal
By Michelle Mason Guest Contributor My mom, Donna Mason, has been a nurse at UCLA Mattel Children’s Hospital in their acute pediatrics unit for the last 38 years. As she retires, I want to highlight her work as a dedicated nurse, mother and wife. Right after graduating nursing school in 1985, she started working as a […]
The post A daughter’s tribute: Pediatric nurse retires after 38 years of service appeared first on Santa Clarita Valley Signal.
https://signalscv.com/2023/12/a-daughters-tribute-pediatric-nurse-retires-after-38-years-of-service/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-13, updated: 2023-12-13, from: The LAist
Mayor Karen Bass delivered a speech on the one year anniversary of taking office, saying she’s made important progress on homelessness.
https://laist.com/news/politics/bass-touts-first-year-accomplishments-critics-give-mixed-reviews Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-13, from: Santa Barbara Indenpent News
County agrees to delay implementation of a new state law that could expand involuntary 5150 holds tenfold.
The post Grave Disability Law Poses Grave Problems for Santa Barbara County’s Mental-Health System appeared first on The Santa Barbara Independent.
https://www.independent.com/2023/12/12/grave-disability-law-poses-grave-problems-for-santa-barbara-countys-mental-health-system/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-13, from: Santa Barbara Indenpent News
Rick Estrin & The Nightcats inspires a new attitude.
The post An Evening of Blues That Helped Me Get Over Mine appeared first on The Santa Barbara Independent.
https://www.independent.com/2023/12/12/an-evening-of-blues-that-helped-me-get-over-mine/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-13, from: The Signal
Zamora: Positive campus culture, unique grading system highlight Bowman High Upon finishing her site report on Bowman High School at last week’s William S. Hart Union High School District governing board meeting, Bowman High School Principal Nina Zamora was awarded the One Hart Award by governing board member Cherise Moore. Moore, who represents Trustee Area […]
The post <strong>Bowman principal honored with Hart district’s One Hart Award</strong> appeared first on Santa Clarita Valley Signal.
https://signalscv.com/2023/12/bowman-principal-honored-with-hart-districts-one-hart-award/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-13, from: The Canyons News (COC student paper)
Car enthusiasts of the Santa Clarita Valley gathered for the highly anticipated…
The post Local Car Show Rolls into Town at the Burgers and Brews Car Show appeared first on Canyons News.
https://canyonsnews.com/local-car-show-rolls-into-town-at-the-burgers-and-brews-car-show/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-13, updated: 2023-12-13, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
The Biden administration has taken a special interest in Nvidia’s sale of accelerators to China and is now working with the chipmaker to establish which chips the Middle Kingdom is permitted to acquire.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2023/12/13/us_commerce_dept_nvidia/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-13, from: The Canyons News (COC student paper)
Harmony strikes a chord in Santa Clarita at the Good Karma Music…
The post Santa Clarita hosts Good Karma Music and Arts Festival appeared first on Canyons News.
https://canyonsnews.com/santa-clarita-hosts-good-karma-music-and-arts-festival/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-13, updated: 2023-12-13, from: The LAist
An online effort called “Project Menorah” asks people of all faiths to put menorahs in their windows for Hanukkah as a show of support for Jewish neighbors. It started in Los Angeles.
https://laist.com/news/la-born-effort-asks-people-of-all-faiths-to-light-a-menorah-in-support-of-jewish-neighbors Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-13, from: The Canyons News (COC student paper)
The Farmers Market at College of the Canyons supplies many fruits and…
The post College of the Canyons Farmer’s Market protects against Fruit Flies appeared first on Canyons News.
https://canyonsnews.com/college-of-the-canyons-farmers-market-protects-against-fruit-flies/ Save to Pocket
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2023-12-13, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
The year Twitter died: a special series from The Verge.
https://www.theverge.com/c/23972308/twitter-x-death-tweets-history-elon-musk Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-13, from: The Sundail (CSUN student paper)
If you ask a student on campus about what they eat on a daily basis, they might joke and say that they survive on Cup Noodles. For a number of students, there is some truth to that. According to a Health Affairs survey, 30% of college students faced food insecurities. Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic,…
https://sundial.csun.edu/176805/print-editions/print-stories/the-menu-affordable-eating/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-13, updated: 2023-12-13, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
It’s the last Patch Tuesday of 2023, which calls for celebration – just as soon as you update Windows, Adobe, Google, Cisco, FortiGuard, SAP, VMware, Atlassian and Apple products, of course.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2023/12/13/december_2023_patch_tuesday/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-13, from: VOA News USA
washington — Unabated anger and tensions over the ongoing conflict between Israel and Hamas could spill over into the holiday season in the United States, potentially putting large public gatherings at risk, according to law enforcement and homeland security officials.
The FBI and the Department of Homeland Security late Tuesday issued a public service announcement, warning of a heightened threat to holiday or faith-based events and New Year’s Eve celebrations in the coming weeks.
The announcement further warned of potential dangers to protests, rallies and other First Amendment-protected events.
“Ongoing tensions related to the conflict between Israel and Hamas likely heighten the threat of lone actor violence targeting large public gatherings throughout the winter,” the statement said. “These targets likely remain attractive to lone actors inspired by a range of ideologies due to their accessibility and symbolic nature.”
According to the FBI and DHS, there is no specific or credible intelligence to suggest an attack is in the works, but the statement warns there has been “a spike in reporting on potential hate crimes or other criminal violations” since the October 7 Hamas terror attack in Israel that killed about 1,200 people, mostly civilians, with some 240 people taken hostage.
The Israeli military response has since displaced an estimated 2 million Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, where the Hamas-run Health Ministry says nearly 18,000 people have been killed, most of them women and children.
The FBI and DHS warning said any escalation of the conflict could “further exacerbate the threat of violence.”
Just last week, DHS issued a new guide to help faith-based organizations, including churches, synagogues and mosques, take steps to better secure their facilities and their congregations.
The same day, FBI Director Christopher Wray told U.S. lawmakers that the bureau’s hate crime caseload had spiked by 60% since October, with the majority of threats targeting the Jewish community.
The just-released public service announcement noted both the FBI and DHS have also seen a jump in hoax bomb threats and active shooter threats aimed at synagogues “likely intended to disrupt services and intimidate congregants.”
The new advisory updates a previous warning from October 25.
U.S. homeland security officials have previously said the country has been mired for more than a year now in a “heightened threat environment,” with the biggest threat coming from U.S.-based extremists motivated by “enduring racial, ethnic, religious and anti-government ideologies.”
https://www.voanews.com/a/7395885.html Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-13, from: OS News
Three years after Fortnite-maker Epic Games sued Apple and Google for allegedly running illegal app store monopolies, Epic has a win. The jury in Epic v. Google has just delivered its verdict — and it found that Google turned its Google Play app store and Google Play Billing service into an illegal monopoly. After just a few hours of deliberation, the jury unanimously answered yes to every question put before them — that Google has monopoly power in the Android app distribution markets and in-app billing services markets, that Google did anticompetitive things in those markets, and that Epic was injured by that behavior. They decided Google has an illegal tie between its Google Play app store and its Google Play Billing payment services, too, and that its distribution agreement, Project Hug deals with game developers, and deals with OEMs were all anticompetitive. ↫ Sean Hollister for The Verge Good news, of course, but it does make one wonder why a judge in Epic’s case versus Apple ruled the exact opposite as the jury did today. We don’t yet know what this verdict will mean for Google in a practical sense – that’s up to the judge, and Google intends to appeal, for course – so if consumers will actually see any benefit from this remains to be seen.
https://www.osnews.com/story/138063/epic-win-jury-decides-google-has-illegal-monopoly-in-app-store-fight/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-13, from: Tilde.news
https://libreboot.org/news/10.html Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-13, updated: 2023-12-13, from: Daring Fireball
https://www.wsj.com/sports/baseball/shohei-ohtani-700-million-contract-deferral-067a345f?mod=hp_lead_pos9 Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-13, from: OS News
As part of our transition to subscription and a simplified portfolio, beginning today, we will no longer sell perpetual licenses. All offerings will continue to be available as subscriptions going forward. Additionally, we are ending the sale of Support and Subscription (SnS) renewals for perpetual offerings beginning today. ↫ Krish Prasad of VMware This sucks. Every few years, I would buy a cheap VMware license on eBay for like €10 or something, to keep my Windows virtual machine going for the incredibly rare cases where I need one for my job because some popular CAT tools are Windows-only. I really do not wish to buy a subscription for that. I guess it’s time to transition to VirtualBox.
https://www.osnews.com/story/138061/broadcom-stops-selling-perpetual-vmware-licenses-subscription-only-from-now-on/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-13, from: OS News
The Timeline feature in Maps helps you remember places you’ve been and is powered by a setting called Location History. If you’re among the subset of users who have chosen to turn Location History on (it’s off by default), soon your Timeline will be saved right on your device — giving you even more control over your data. Just like before, you can delete all or part of your information at any time or disable the setting entirely. If you’re getting a new phone or are worried about losing your existing one, you can always choose to back up your data to the cloud so it doesn’t get lost. We’ll automatically encrypt your backed-up data so no one can read it, including Google. ↫ Marlo McGriff, Director of Product, Google Maps, at Google’s official blog All else being equal, moving location data from residing unencrypted in the cloud to on your device is a good thing. That being said, if Google is giving up access to this data, it most likely means they’ve gotten really good at estimating your whereabouts using other data instead.
https://www.osnews.com/story/138059/google-to-move-location-data-and-maps-history-to-your-device/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-13, updated: 2023-12-13, from: The LAist
A new proposal would keep eviction protections in place for renters in the city of L.A. who adopted COVID cats or pandemic pups.
https://laist.com/news/housing-homelessness/los-angeles-city-pets-covid-19-eviction-protections-pandemic-housing-landlord-renters-tenants Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-13, from: James Fallows, Substack
To be more precise: Here are young people who are doing the right things. Different regions, different backgrounds, different goals. Similar pluck.
https://fallows.substack.com/p/the-kids-are-all-right Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-13, from: The Sundail (CSUN student paper)
There is no longer a significant competitive gap in the sport of women’s soccer. There is a brighter future than we expected. The 2023 Women’s World Cup held in Australia and New Zealand has wrapped up, where for the first time since the inaugural edition in 1991, the final featured two new teams: Spain and…
https://sundial.csun.edu/177338/print-editions/print-stories/world-cup-down-under-brings-womens-soccer-to-new-heights/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-13, from: John Naughton’s online diary
Remembering Tony Holden On Monday I went to the Memorial Service for Tony Holden in St Martin-in-the-Fields. He was one of the best journalists of his generation, but also a hospitable friend and a writer who was vastly more erudite … Continue reading
https://memex.naughtons.org/wednesday-13-december-2023/38897/ Save to Pocket
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2023-12-13, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
How to Brainstorn Ideas with Google Bard.
https://www.geeky-gadgets.com/how-to-brainstorn-ideas-with-google-bard/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-13, from: SCV New (TV Station)
The College of the Canyons Workforce and Economic Advancement division was distinguished as one of the top-performing training providers by the South Bay Workforce Investment Board for its 100 percent job placement of Uniquely Abled Academy graduates.
https://scvnews.com/colleges-uniquely-abled-program-receives-award-for-100-percent-job-placement/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-13, from: San Jose Mercury News
Mercury News Letters to the Editor for April 13, 2023
https://www.mercurynews.com/2023/12/12/letters-1526/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-13, updated: 2023-12-13, from: nlnet feed
https://nlnet.nl/news/2023/20231213-bluehats.html Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-13, updated: 2023-12-13, from: nlnet feed
https://nlnet.nl/news/2023/20231213-CCC.html Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-12, from: San Jose Mercury News
Board approves exploration of providing dedicated contact for the TRUST program aimed at responding to an array of psychiatric emergencies without a police presence.
https://www.mercurynews.com/2023/12/12/santa-clara-county-supervisors-back-direct-access-to-non-police-mental-health-team/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-12, from: SCV New (TV Station)
Do you have a child or student that is a sixth to eighth-grader with no plans during Winter Break the week of Jan. 2-5? The College of the Canyons Winter Institute is offering hands on career exploration for junior high school students entering sixth, seventh or eighth grade
https://scvnews.com/jan-2-5-coc-winter-institute-for-6-8-grade-students/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-12, from: Dan Rather’s Steady
At Steady, we are fans of clear, compelling writing, whatever its source and whoever the author. But rarely do we turn to U.S. Supreme Court appeals for stirring prose. Yesterday, however, Jack Smith, the special counsel investigating former President Trump, argued that the ex-president should not be immune from prosecution. It’s a legal matter, but one that will define the future of American democracy. And we were struck by the language Smith used in making his case.
https://steady.substack.com/p/an-extraordinary-case Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-12, from: San Jose Mercury News
Jung-Hoo Lee and the Giants are reportedly in agreement on a six-year, $113M free-agent contract.
https://www.mercurynews.com/2023/12/12/sf-giants-ink-korean-center-fielder-to-113m-contract-report/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-12, from: San Jose Mercury News
Surprise December announcement offers a sneak preview of their finds, but we won’t know about stars until mid-2024
https://www.mercurynews.com/2023/12/12/michelin-honors-7-california-restaurants-as-new-discoveries/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-12, updated: 2023-12-12, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Automaker General Motors and construction equipment manufacturer Komatsu have partnered to turn one of the world’s largest trucks into an emissions-free, hydrogen-powered behemoth.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2023/12/12/gm_komatsu_hydrogen_mining_truck/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-12, from: Santa Barbara Indenpent News
“Adult day care” offers purposeful engagement and peace of mind to those living with cognitive decline and their family caregivers.
The post Active, Social, Talk Therapy at the Friendship Center appeared first on The Santa Barbara Independent.
https://www.independent.com/2023/12/12/positive-help-for-memory-impairment/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-12, from: The Signal
Foothill and Heritage League play is in full swing after an exciting opening two weeks of local basketball. Several teams are on the rise while others are looking to improve over the holiday break. All three of last season’s Foothill League champs from both girls and boys’ hoops remain unbeaten while the rest of the […]
The post SCV basketball weeks 1-2 roundup appeared first on Santa Clarita Valley Signal.
https://signalscv.com/2023/12/scv-basketball-weeks-1-2-roundup/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-12, from: San Jose Mercury News
North West is one of the collaborators on her father’s new album ‘Vultures,’ who performed with him at his listening party during Miami’s Art Basel.
https://www.mercurynews.com/2023/12/12/kanye-west-had-north-10-on-stage-when-he-donned-a-black-kkk-hood-and-disparaged-a-jewish-woman/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-12, from: Gary Marcus blog
A few days ago it looked like the EU AI Act had finally been negotiated, and resolved. There was much rejoicing. But the big tech executives that would need to deal with it aren’t happy, and are doing their best after the fact to undermine a hard-won compromise that involved years of negotiations and multiple all-nighters.
https://garymarcus.substack.com/p/metas-chief-ai-officer-is-lying-about Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-12, updated: 2023-12-12, from: The LAist
Why service gaps are being filled by volunteers and mutual aid groups
https://laist.com/news/how-to-la/la-leaders-homelessness-crisis-services-mutual-aid Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-12, from: Santa Barbara Indenpent News
Four Santa Barbara men were charged after a stray bullet killed an innocent bystander in December 2022.
The post One Year Later, Stearns Wharf Murder Cases Make Way Through Courts appeared first on The Santa Barbara Independent.
https://www.independent.com/2023/12/12/one-year-later-stearns-wharf-murder-cases-make-way-through-courts/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-12, updated: 2023-12-12, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
OpenAI’s non-profit arm reported revenues of just $44,485 in its latest US tax filing, despite its for-profit business likely making millions from ChatGPT.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2023/12/12/openai_nonprofit_figures/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-12, from: Liliputing
The Zotac ZBOX pico PI430AJ is the first computer to feature Frore’s AirJet solid state cooling technology, which is designed to offer active cooling without the use of noisy fans. First unveiled earlier this year, the PI430AJ is now available in select markets and the first reviews are starting to come in. Hong Kong-based website […]
The post Lilbits: ZBOX Pico PI430AJ mini PC with solid state cooling reviewed, Bose Frames discontinued, Epic beats Google in court, Google plans to appeal appeared first on Liliputing.
https://liliputing.com/lilbits-zbox-pico-pi430aj-mini-pc-with-solid-state-cooling-reviewed-bose-frames-discontinued-epic-beats-google-in-court-google-plans-to-appeal/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-12, from: San Jose Mercury News
The 4-3 decision from the New York Court of Appeals could have major ramifications as Democrats angle for more favorable district lines in the state next year. Republicans, who won control of the House after flipping seats in New York, sought to keep the map in place.
https://www.mercurynews.com/2023/12/12/new-yorks-high-court-orders-new-congressional-maps/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-12, from: VOA News USA
WASHINGTON — U.S. Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo vowed Monday to take the “strongest action possible” in response to a semiconductor chip-making breakthrough in China that a House Foreign Affairs Committee said “almost certainly required the use of U.S. origin technology and should be an export control violation.”
In an interview with Bloomberg News, Raimondo called Huawei Technology’s advanced processor in its Mate Pro 60 smartphone released in August “deeply concerning” and said the Commerce Department investigates such things vigorously.
The United States has banned chip sales to Huawei, which reportedly used chips from China chip giant Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp., or SMIC, in the phone that are 7 nanometers, a technology China has not been known as able to produce.
Raimondo said the U.S. was also looking into the specifics of three new artificial intelligence accelerator chips that California-based Nvidia Corp. is developing for China. “We look at every spec of every new chip, obviously, to make sure it doesn’t violate the export controls,” she said.
Nvidia came under U.S. scrutiny for designing China-specific chips that were just under new Commerce Department requirements announced in October for tighter export controls on advanced AI chips for civilian use that could have military applications.
China’s Foreign Ministry responded to Raimondo’s comments Tuesday, saying the U.S. was “undermining the rights of Chinese companies” and contradicting the principles of a market economy.
‘Almost certainly required US origin technology’
The U.S. House Foreign Affairs Committee in a December 7 report criticized the Commerce Department’s Bureau of Industry and Security, or BIS, the regulatory body for regulating dual-use export controls.
The report said Chinese chip giant “SMIC is producing 7 nanometer chips — advanced technology for semiconductors that had been only capable of development by TSMC, Intel and Samsung.”
“Despite this breakthrough by SMIC, which almost certainly required the use of U.S. origin technology and should be an export control violation, BIS has not acted,” the 66-page report said. “We can no longer afford to avoid the truth: the unimpeded transfer of U.S. technology to China is one of the single-largest contributors to China’s emergence as one of the world’s premier scientific and technological powers.”
Excessive approvals alleged
Committee Chairman Michael McCaul said BIS had an excessive rate of approval for controlled technology transfers and lacked checks on end-use, raising serious questions about the current U.S. export control mechanism.
“U.S. export control officials should adopt a presumption that all [Chinese] entities will divert technology to military or surveillance uses,” said McCaul’s report, but “currently, the overwhelming approval rates for licenses or exceptions for dual-use technology transfers to China indicate that licensing officials at BIS are likely presuming that items will be used only for their intended purposes.”
According to BIS’s website, a key in determining whether an export license is needed from the Department of Commerce is knowing whether the item one intends to export has a specific Export Control Classification Number, or ECCN. All ECCNs are listed in the Commerce Control List, or CCL, which is divided into ten broad categories.
The committee’s report said that “in 2020, nearly 98% of CCL items export to China went without a license,” and “in 2021, BIS approved nearly 90% of applications for the export of CCL items to China.”
The report said that between 2016 and 2021, “the United States government’s two export control officers in China conducted on average only 55 end-user checks per year of the roughly 4,000 active licenses in China. Put another way, BIS likely verified less than 0.01% of all licenses, which represent less than 1% of all trade with China.”
China skilled in avoiding controls
But China is also skilled at avoiding U.S. export controls, analysts said.
William Yu, an economist at UCLA Anderson Forecast, told VOA Mandarin in a phone interview that China can get banned chips through a third country. “For example, some countries in the Middle East set up a company in that country to buy these high-level chips from the United States. From there, one is transferred back to China,” Yu said.
Thomas Duesterberg, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, told VOA Mandarin in a phone interview that the Commerce Department’s BIS has a hard job.
“If you forbid technology from going to one company in China, the Chinese are experts at creating another company or just moving the company to a new address and disguising its name to try to evade the controls. China is a big country and there’s a lot of technology that is at stake here,” he said.
“It’s true on the one hand that BIS has been successful in some areas, such as advanced semiconductors in conjunction with denial of Chinese ability to buy American technology companies,” said Duesterberg. “But it’s also true as the [House Foreign Affairs Committee] report emphasizes that a lot of activities that policymakers would like to restrict is not being done.”
Insufficient resources or political will?
Despite its huge responsibility to ensure that the United States stays ahead in the escalating U.S.-China science and technology competition, the Commerce Department’s BIS is small, employing just over 300 people.
At the annual Reagan National Defense Forum on December 2, Secretary Raimondo lamented that BIS “has the same budget today as it did a decade ago” despite the increasing challenges and workload, reported Breaking Defense, a New York-based online publication on global defense and politics.
U.S. Representatives Elise Stefanik, Mike Gallagher, who is chairman of the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party, and McCaul released a joint response to Raimondo’s call for additional funds for the BIS, saying resources alone would not resolve export control shortcomings.
Raimondo also warned chip companies that the U.S. would further tighten controls to prevent cutting edge AI technology from going to Beijing.
“The threat from China is large and growing,” she said in an interview to CNBC at the December 2 forum. “China wants access to our most sophisticated semiconductors, and we can’t afford to give them that access. We’re not just going to deny a single company in China, we’re going to deny the whole country access to our cutting-edge semiconductors.”
https://www.voanews.com/a/us-commerce-secretary-vows-strongest-action-on-huawei-chip-issue/7395468.html Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-12, from: The Signal
An Orange County judge declined to issue a preliminary injunction Monday that would have granted the wishes of 29 cities seeking to stop L.A. Superior Court’s Oct. 1 implementation of essentially a no-cash bail schedule. While Judge William Claster on Monday did not stop the re-implementation of the emergency-bail system L.A. County used during COVID-19 […]
The post OC judge won’t toss LA bail ruling; lawsuit continues appeared first on Santa Clarita Valley Signal.
https://signalscv.com/2023/12/oc-judge-wont-toss-la-bail-ruling-lawsuit-continues/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-12, from: San Jose Mercury News
A house in Dublin that sold for $2.5 million tops the list of the most expensive residential real estate sales in Danville, San Ramon, Dublin, Pleasanton in the past week.
https://www.mercurynews.com/2023/12/12/the-10-most-expensive-homes-reported-sold-in-danville-san-ramon-dublin-pleasanton-in-the-week-of-dec-4/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-12, from: San Jose Mercury News
Golden State Warriors: A closer look at the numbers behind the record
https://www.mercurynews.com/2023/12/12/three-numbers-that-explain-the-warriors-disappointing-start/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-12, from: SCV New (TV Station)
The Santa Clarita Valley Corvette Club recently delivered carloads of toy donations for the Santa Clarita Valley Sheriff’s Station annual toy drive. The SCV Sheriff’s Station is collecting toys through Monday, Dec.
https://scvnews.com/scv-corvette-club-donates-to-sheriffs-annual-toy-drive/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-12, from: San Jose Mercury News
The NFL superstar picked a Milpitas-based agency working with foster youth to be his My Cleats My Cause beneficiary.
https://www.mercurynews.com/2023/12/12/49ers-qb-brock-purdy-lifts-up-silicon-valley-nonprofit-agency/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-12, from: Tilde.news
https://unifoundry.com/unifont/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-12, updated: 2023-12-12, from: The LAist
In the Palestinian territory’s second-largest city, Khan Younis, thousands have taken shelter on the grounds of Nasser Medical Complex, where staff describe an increasingly desperate situation.
https://laist.com/news/gaza-hospital-doctors-fleeing-supplies-low Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-12, from: The Signal
Compiled by Signal staff The Santa Clarita Valley Water Agency welcomed the news that the California Department of Water Resources has taken a major step forward to make the state’s water system more resilient to climate change and natural disasters while protecting and enhancing the environment in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, SCV Water announced in […]
The post SCV Water expresses support as state moves forward with Delta Conveyance Project appeared first on Santa Clarita Valley Signal.
https://signalscv.com/2023/12/scv-water-expresses-support-as-state-moves-forward-with-delta-conveyance-project/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-12, from: The Signal
News release The National Hockey League’s “United by Hockey” Mobile Museum is scheduled to visit The Cube from 3 to 9 p.m. on Wednesday. The mobile museum is a free fan experience that celebrates hockey’s trailblazers, changemakers and business leaders across the nation. “As close collaborators with the Los Angeles Kings, this museum is perfect […]
The post NHL’s ‘United by Hockey’ mobile museum checking into the Cube appeared first on Santa Clarita Valley Signal.
https://signalscv.com/2023/12/nhls-united-by-hockey-mobile-museum-checking-into-the-cube/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-12, from: Smithsonian Magazine
Enslaved workers toiled for hours in a dark, cramped space to grind grain for bread
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/archaeologists-discover-a-brutal-bakery-prison-at-pompeii-180983420/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-12, from: San Jose Mercury News
Bay FC is building out its roster ahead of Friday’s expansion draft.
https://www.mercurynews.com/2023/12/12/bay-fc-adds-former-nwsl-best-xi-center-back-two-others-in-trio-of-trades/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-12, updated: 2023-12-12, from: The LAist
Hemmed in by Israeli forces and the Mediterranean Sea, Palestinians in Gaza seemingly have only one place left to go — across the border to Egypt. But Egypt is resistant to letting them in.
https://laist.com/news/why-egypt-doesnt-want-palestinians-in-gaza-to-cross-the-border Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-12, from: Smithsonian Magazine
The six-and-a-half-foot-long pliosaur skull was excavated from a rock cliff in England and may belong to a new species, scientists say
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/fossil-hunters-uncover-prehistoric-sea-monster-skull-at-a-uk-beach-180983423/ Save to Pocket
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2023-12-12, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
The best I’ve read so far about the immorality of the Dobbs decision is the chapter on abortion in Elie Mystal’s book. I wish we could buy it from his publisher so everyone could read it. Basically the law is as immoral as slavery for pregnant women.
https://www.amazon.com/Allow-Me-Retort-Black-Constitution-ebook/dp/B0C4QC66JH/ref=tmm_kin_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1702416539&sr=8-1 Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-12, from: Santa Barbara Indenpent News
The Santa Barbara County Genealogical Society is pleased to welcome the community to attend their monthly meeting on Saturday, December
The post Santa Barbara County Genealogical Society to Host Annual Member Share Event on December 16 appeared first on The Santa Barbara Independent.
https://www.independent.com/2023/12/12/santa-barbara-county-genealogical-society-to-host-annual-member-share-event-on-december-16/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-12, updated: 2023-12-12, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
The Arena Group, publisher of Sports Illustrated, fired CEO Ross Levinsohn on Monday, characterizing the decision as a strategic business move that has nothing to do with the AI scandal that rocked the sports title recently.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2023/12/12/sports_illustrated_ceo_fired/ Save to Pocket
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2023-12-12, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
Kate Cox’s nonviable pregnancy didn’t matter to the judges who run amok in Texas.
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2023/12/kate-cox-nonviable-pregnancy-judicial-control-abortion-texas.html?via=rss Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-12, from: Santa Barbara Indenpent News
The Santa Barbara County Board of Supervisors approved the selection of Mette Richardson as the incoming Director of Child Support
The post Santa Barbara County Announces New Child Support Services Director appeared first on The Santa Barbara Independent.
https://www.independent.com/2023/12/12/santa-barbara-county-announces-new-child-support-services-director/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-12, from: Santa Barbara Indenpent News
(SANTA BARBARA, Calif., DEC 12, 2023)— Maravilla, an active retirement community, has earned the prestigious 2023 ICAA NuStep Beacon Award
The post Maravilla Named “Best in Wellness” Among Senior Communities appeared first on The Santa Barbara Independent.
https://www.independent.com/2023/12/12/maravilla-named-best-in-wellness-among-senior-communities/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-12, from: Santa Barbara Indenpent News
‘Echoes of the Sea’ calls for environmental protections with a twist.
The post Nature’s Plea For Help appeared first on The Santa Barbara Independent.
https://www.independent.com/2023/12/12/natures-plea-for-help/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-12, from: NASA breaking news
Now at 1,000 days on Mars, the mission has traversed an ancient river and lake system, collecting valuable samples along the way. Marking its 1,000th Martian day on the Red Planet, NASA’s Perseverance rover recently completed its exploration of the ancient river delta that holds evidence of a lake that filled Jezero Crater billions of […]
https://www.nasa.gov/missions/mars-2020-perseverance/perseverance-rover/nasas-perseverance-rover-deciphers-ancient-history-of-martian-lake/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-12, updated: 2023-12-12, from: Jason Kittke’s blog
https://kottke.org/23/12/thanks Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-12, from: Santa Barbara Indenpent News
Legal papers raise serious doubts about supervisors’ decision to award the ambulance contract to the county Fire Department instead of AMR.
The post California Attorney General Bonta Weighs in on Santa Barbara County’s Ambulance Fight appeared first on The Santa Barbara Independent.
https://www.independent.com/2023/12/12/california-attorney-general-bonta-weighs-in-on-santa-barbara-countys-ambulance-fight/ Save to Pocket
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2023-12-12, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
Zach Seward Is the Newsroom’s Editorial Director of A.I. Initiatives.
https://www.nytco.com/press/zach-seward-is-the-newsrooms-editorial-director-of-a-i-initiatives/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-12, from: SCV New (TV Station)
The city of Santa Clarita will host a Community Passports Fair for Santa Clarita residents on Thursday, Dec. 14 from 11:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. to apply for a new passport.
https://scvnews.com/dec-14-one-day-only-passport-fair-in-newhall/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-12, from: Liliputing
The Epic Games Store will be giving away a different PC game for free every day for 15 days starting December 13, 2023. The GOG Winter sale begins the same day. And Humble Bundle is already bringing back some of the year’s most popular bundles on PC games and other content. If you’re looking for […]
The post Daily Deals (12-12-2023) appeared first on Liliputing.
https://liliputing.com/daily-deals-12-12-2023/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-12, updated: 2023-12-13, from: The LAist
The longstanding public servant will spend her last year before retirement overseeing the board that steers the education of more than 400,000 students.
https://laist.com/news/education/jackie-goldberg-reelected-lausd-school-board-president-2023 Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-12, from: NASA breaking news
Supernova remnant Cassiopeia A (Cas A) shines in a new image from Dec. 10, 2023, from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope. Webb’s Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam) view of Cas A displays this stellar explosion at a resolution previously unreachable at these wavelengths, revealing intricate details of the expanding shell of material slamming into the gas shed […]
https://www.nasa.gov/image-article/webb-sheds-light-on-an-exploded-star/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-12, from: The Signal
The Santa Clarita City Council is expected to approve spending $20,000 to acquire and preserve for the local library system a priceless collection of Santa Clarita Valley antiquity that belonged to one of the area’s modern forefathers. The collection from Arthur Buckingham “A.B.” Perkins features more than 600 books, as well as correspondence, photos, ledgers, […]
The post City to receive historical archives for library appeared first on Santa Clarita Valley Signal.
https://signalscv.com/2023/12/city-to-receive-historical-archives-for-library/ Save to Pocket
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2023-12-12, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
Kentucky woman seeking court approval for abortion learned her embryo no longer has cardiac activity.
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/health/kentucky-woman-seeking-court-approval-for-abortion-learned-her-embryo-no-longer-has-cardiac-activity Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-12, from: San Jose Mercury News
A spacious house located in the 20600 block of Sevilla Lane in Saratoga has new owners. The 3,073-square-foot property, built in 1969, was sold on Nov. 29, 2023.
https://www.mercurynews.com/2023/12/12/single-family-residence-sells-in-saratoga-for-4-2-million/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-12, updated: 2023-12-13, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Kettle Over the last week AMD has been extolling the virtues of its latest kit, including the MI300 which Su’s crew claim is the fastest AI processing package on the market.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2023/12/12/kettle_amd_chips/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-12, from: The Sundail (CSUN student paper)
Dear Sundial readers, This fourth issue of the Sundial’s magazine has stories connected to sports. With the middle of the semester coming around, it can be hard to keep up with studies and taking care of oneself. Everyone can relate to a sport in some way. Either your parents made you join a sport when…
https://sundial.csun.edu/177328/print-editions/print-stories/letter-from-the-editor-sports/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-12, from: San Jose Mercury News
Winfrey said Barrymore was just being her ‘endearing’ self when she got so close to her during an interview that it made some viewers uncomfortable.
https://www.mercurynews.com/2023/12/12/oprah-winfrey-was-more-than-ok-with-drew-barrymores-cringey-caress/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-12, from: San Jose Mercury News
Moss’ testimony came hours after the judge scolded Giuliani for comments made outside the federal courthouse in Washington on Monday in which he insisted his claims about the women were true.
https://www.mercurynews.com/2023/12/12/election-worker-giulianis-lies-made-her-fear-for-her-life/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-12, from: NASA breaking news
In 2023, as NASA pushed the limits of exploration for the benefit of humanity, the agency celebrated astronaut Frank Rubio becoming the first American astronaut to spend more than one year in space; delivered samples from an asteroid to Earth; sent a spacecraft to study a metal-rich asteroid for the first time; launched multiple initiatives […]
https://www.nasa.gov/news-release/breaking-records-returning-asteroid-samples-among-nasas-big-2023/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-12, from: Smithsonian Magazine
The layer of lichen, moss and cyanobacteria helps shield the historic structure from erosion, a new study finds
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/parts-of-chinas-great-wall-are-protected-by-a-living-cover-of-biocrust-180983415/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-12, from: The Signal
Photos by Dan Watson/The Signal
The post Photos: Santa Clarita holds blood drive in partnership with American Red Cross appeared first on Santa Clarita Valley Signal.
https://signalscv.com/2023/12/photos-santa-clarita-holds-blood-drive-in-partnership-with-american-red-cross/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-12, from: VOA News USA
Washington — Newly declassified U.S. intelligence indicates Russia has suffered from some staggering losses as a result of its nearly two-year-old invasion of Ukraine, including major setbacks during its latest offensive.
The assessment, parts of which were shared with VOA, estimates more than 13,000 Russian forces have been killed or wounded since Moscow launched its October offensive along the Avdiivka-Novopavlivka axis in eastern Ukraine.
U.S. intelligence also believes Ukraine’s military has destroyed or immobilized more than 220 Russian combat vehicles, the equivalent of six battalions’ worth of vehicles.
“Russia’s attempt at an offensive has resulted in no strategic gains,” National Security Council spokesperson Adrienne Watson told VOA in a statement, describing the Russian losses as “severe.”
“But Russia is determined to press forward,” she added. “Russia seems to believe that a military deadlock through the winter will drain Western support for Ukraine and ultimately give Russia the advantage despite Russian losses and persistent shortages of trained personnel, munitions, and equipment.”
The decision to declassify the latest intelligence Tuesday comes as Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is in Washington, visiting with U.S. lawmakers and with U.S. President Joe Biden.
During a speech at the National Defense University in Washington on Monday, Zelenskyy pleaded with U.S. lawmakers “not to betray” Ukraine’s forces and provide more weapons and support, warning Moscow sees Ukraine as “just a stepping-stone.”
“We know what to do,” he said. “You can count on Ukraine, and we hope just as much to be able to count on you.”
The White House has been pushing U.S. lawmakers to approve more than $61 billion in supplemental funding for Kyiv before the end of the year.
But some lawmakers have balked, with some Republicans insisting any deal to provide more money to Ukraine must also include provisions to strengthen U.S. immigration policies and security along the U.S. southern border with Mexico.
White House officials, however, point to the latest declassified intelligence to argue that funding for Ukraine simply cannot wait.
“This shows how Ukraine is having success stopping Russian forces, but Putin is continuing to order his troops forward,” a senior administration official told VOA, speaking on the condition of anonymity due to the sensitive nature of the intelligence and the political negotiations.
“It’s critical we continue to support Ukraine and make sure they have what they need to defend themselves,” the official added.
Top U.S. military and intelligence officials have previously said Russia’s losses in Ukraine have set its military back by as much as five to ten years.
Still, the Pentagon warned Monday a failure to back Ukraine will send Russian President Vladimir Putin the wrong message.
“Despite his isolation, Putin still believes that he can outlast Ukraine, and that he can outlast America,” Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said Monday, speaking with Zelenskyy at the National Defense University. “If we do not stand up to the Kremlin’s aggression today, if we do not deter other would-be aggressors, we will only invite more aggression, more bloodshed, and more chaos.”
Patsy Widakuswara contributed to this report.
https://www.voanews.com/a/declassified-us-intelligence-reveals-massive-russian-losses-in-ukraine/7395271.html Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-12, from: NASA breaking news
Fifteen years ago, astronomers delivered what is now an iconic direct image of an exoplanet, Beta Pictoris b.
https://science.nasa.gov/universe/exoplanets/seeing-and-believing-15-years-of-exoplanet-images/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-12, from: SCV New (TV Station)
The Los Angeles County Department of Consumer and Business Affairs has announced the official launch of the $68.6M Landlord Relief Fund to assist mom-and-pop landlords recoup losses resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic.
https://scvnews.com/landlord-relief-fund-officially-launched-in-l-a-county/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-12, from: The Signal
News release Rep. Mike Garcia, R-Santa Clarita, has cosponsored H.R. 6671, Alexandra’s Law, which would significantly increase penalties for drug dealers of lethal fentanyl. This legislation would require convicted fentanyl dealers to sign a sworn statement acknowledging that fentanyl is fatal and they could face murder charges if they deal again and it results […]
The post Garcia cosponsors bill to charge fentanyl dealers with murder appeared first on Santa Clarita Valley Signal.
https://signalscv.com/2023/12/garcia-cosponsors-bill-to-charge-fentanyl-dealers-with-murder/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-12, from: VOA News USA
https://www.voanews.com/a/netanyahu-us-support-remains-firm-against-hamas-/7395188.html Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-12, from: The Signal
Santa Clarita City Manager Ken Striplin told the public for weeks that officials were in constant communication with MV Transportation over the company’s contract with Santa Clarita Transit’s drivers, who ended a nearly 60-day strike last week by agreeing to terms. With the release of the agenda for Tuesday’s City Council meeting, residents get the […]
The post City Council expected to increase bus contract appeared first on Santa Clarita Valley Signal.
https://signalscv.com/2023/12/city-council-expected-to-increase-bus-contract/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-12, from: San Jose Mercury News
The troupe comes from a long history of famed San Francisco circus acts, but continues to forge its own path with new ‘Kaleidoscope’ show.
https://www.mercurynews.com/2023/12/12/sfs-circus-bella-enters-different-era-with-new-downtown-show/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-12, updated: 2023-12-12, from: Jason Kittke’s blog
https://kottke.org/23/12/turtle-riddle-comic Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-12, from: San Jose Mercury News
Discrimination has long been a concern for both patients and health providers in the U.S., where racial disparities in health outcomes are vast and particularly unfavorable toward Black people.
https://www.mercurynews.com/2023/12/12/many-people-of-color-worry-good-health-care-is-tied-to-their-appearance/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-12, from: The Signal
West Ranch, Valencia, Hart all set to have inaugural seasons next year In the spirit of providing as many opportunities as possible, the William S. Hart Union High School District board approved a resolution last week that will see girls’ flag football be adopted as a districtwide sport starting in the 2024-25 school year. The […]
The post <strong>Girls’ flag football approved as new sport by Hart district</strong> appeared first on Santa Clarita Valley Signal.
https://signalscv.com/2023/12/girls-flag-football-approved-as-new-sport-by-hart-district/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-12, from: Michael Tsai
Juli Clover (release notes, security, developer, full installer, IPSW): macOS Sonoma 14.2 introduces an Enhanced AutoFill feature for PDFs, which Apple announced earlier this year. It automatically identifies common fields like name and address, allowing them to be autofilled similar to a website.In the Messages app, stickers can be added directly to chat bubbles with […]
https://mjtsai.com/blog/2023/12/12/macos-14-2/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-12, from: Michael Tsai
Apple (full installer): This document describes the security content of macOS Ventura 13.6.3. Apple (full installer): This document describes the security content of macOS Monterey 12.7.2. Previously: macOS 14.2 macOS 13.6.2 macOS 13.6.1 and macOS 12.7.1
https://mjtsai.com/blog/2023/12/12/macos-13-6-3-and-macos-12-7-2/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-12, from: Michael Tsai
Apple: Journal, a new iPhone app available today, helps users reflect and practice gratitude through journaling, which has been shown to improve wellbeing. With Journal, users can capture and write about everyday moments and special events in their lives, and include photos, videos, audio recordings, locations, and more to create rich memories. On-device machine learning […]
https://mjtsai.com/blog/2023/12/12/apple-launches-journal-app/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-12, from: Michael Tsai
Juli Clover (release notes, security, developer): The iOS 17.2 update includes the new Journal app, which is designed to allow iOS users to record key moments in their lives. The Journal app includes journaling suggestions, scheduled notifications, and options for adding photos, locations, and more.For the iPhone 15 Pro models, iOS 17.2 adds a Translate […]
https://mjtsai.com/blog/2023/12/12/ios-17-2-and-ipados-17-2/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-12, from: San Jose Mercury News
Serra finishes No. 1 again. Only two teams in final rankings end season with a victory, including one that missed the playoffs.
https://www.mercurynews.com/2023/12/12/season-ending-bay-area-news-group-high-school-football-rankings-plus-early-top-5-for-2024/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-12, from: Michael Tsai
Juli Clover (release notes, security, developer): The watchOS 10.2 update adds support for using Siri to access and record data in the Health app on the Apple Watch Series 9 and the Apple Watch Ultra 2. Users can ask Siri questions like “How did I sleep last night?” or “How many steps have I taken […]
https://mjtsai.com/blog/2023/12/12/watchos-10-2/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-12, from: Michael Tsai
Juli Clover: Apple does not specify what’s included in the HomePod 17.2 software, and the generic release notes only say that it includes bug fixes and performance improvements. All I know is that it’s 2.6 GB, took a really long time to install, and doesn’t fix the bug with not being able to play music […]
https://mjtsai.com/blog/2023/12/12/homepod-17-2/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-12, from: Michael Tsai
Apple (MacRumors): Today Apple unveiled a redesigned Apple TV app that makes it even easier for users to watch Apple’s award-winning original series and films, as well as live sports, movies, and television shows across their favorite Apple devices, smart TVs, streaming sticks, gaming consoles, and more. The simplified interface’s new sidebar allows users to […]
https://mjtsai.com/blog/2023/12/12/tvos-17-2/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-12, updated: 2023-12-12, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
An ex-First Republic Bank cloud engineer was sentenced to two years in prison for causing more than $220,000 in damage to his former employer’s computer network after allegedly using his company-issued laptop to watch pornography.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2023/12/12/cloud_engineer_bank_prison/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-12, from: San Jose Mercury News
The Wildcats are one of five schools ranked in the CFP top-25 and AP basketball poll.
https://www.mercurynews.com/2023/12/12/pac-12-stock-report-arizonas-dollar-for-dollar-wins-the-heisman-tilt-oregons-new-qb-and-rileys-defensive-upgrades/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-12, from: SCV New (TV Station)
The Governing Board of the Castaic Union School District met on Monday, Dec. 11 to elect new officers for 2024. Janene Maxon will serve as board president and Fred Malcomb will serve as clerk
https://scvnews.com/castaic-school-district-board-elects-2024-officers/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-12, from: Heatmap News
This year’s United Nations Climate Change Conference, COP28, has been broadly defined by two facts. The first is that the conference is headed by the CEO of the United Arab Emirates’ state-owned oil company. The second is that this is the year of the first global stocktake, a document that should, in theory, set the world on a path to achieve the goals laid out in the Paris Agreement of 2015.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, that combination has not produced tremendous results. The latest draft of the stocktake dropped language calling for a fossil fuel phase-out. The condemnation was swift: “We will not sign our death certificate,” said the Association of Small Island States in a statement. “We think there are elements in the text that are fully unacceptable,” Spain’s environment minister said.
I was curious: How, exactly, does a global stocktake come to be? To find out, I called up Tom Evans, a policy advisor and climate negotiations specialist at the climate change think tank E3G, who is currently on the ground in Dubai. Our conversation, which has been lightly edited for length and clarity, is below.
Catch me up. How are things going on the ground?
It’s … going along. There’s a lot of discussions at the moment around the text that came out yesterday. Many, many parties are dissatisfied with the level of ambition in that text. It didn’t have the fossil fuel phaseout, it wasn’t strong enough on things like finance or adaptation, so that has triggered this big backlash. It’s all happening behind closed doors at the moment with ministers and politicians talking about the text, and the rest of us are kind of in a black box with regards to what’s going on. But it’s all really on a knife’s edge.
What is happening behind those doors, as best as you can tell?
The process is somewhat unclear. COPs don’t have any strict procedures; the presidency can choose how to do this diplomacy to get to the outcome it needs. At the moment, we’re in the phase of basically bilateral consultations being led by the UAE. The presidency is bringing people together behind the scenes. Everyone’s kind of slowly talking to each other.
What do you mean by bilateral consultations, exactly?
The UAE sitting down with a party — let’s say India, for example — and hearing their concerns and understanding what their red lines are, what they’re looking to change in the text. And then with that knowledge they’ll have another meeting, sitting down with, say, the U.S., having the same conversation and trying to map out where people sit based on these conversations.
They don’t have a big meeting room where everyone is at the table. They haven’t done a plenary yet. Last night they did a heads of delegation meeting, which brought all parties together. It was a closed meeting, and it started at 10 p.m. and finished at about 2 a.m. last night, which we hadn’t seen before.
Of course, at the same time, countries are talking to each other in different configurations. So there are different groups who will come together, such as the regional groups [who might have common goals]. And the U.S., I’m sure, is talking to China and Saudi Arabia.
The UAE has other tools at their disposal — earlier this week they hosted an informal ministerial circle where they talked about the issues together — but at the moment, they’re choosing to do this very closed or bilateral diplomacy, probably because the stakes are high and they need to act sensitively around what this next iteration of text looks like. Because an awful lot hinges upon it.
There must be some real power dynamics at play here. Are there some countries that the UAE is more inclined to listen to than others?
The UNFCCC is weird because some of the times those power dynamics are different from what you might expect. Small island states and other countries have an awful lot of power compared to [the regular UN framework], where they’re not the geopolitical shapers. But in this space, they have much more power because of their moral authority.
This word, “stocktake,” implies a kind of mathematical act. Is there an emissions reckoning happening?
Stocktake is definitely a bad name — we’ve already done a lot of the stock-taking. The past two years had the process of technical dialogues among parties and experts and non-party stakeholders, and we had reports including the IPCC which fed into that. Those conclusions were published back in September, and that report kind of tells us what we already know: Action is growing but inadequate, finance is not there at the scale needed, it’s not going to the right people in the right places at the right time. We think we know what we need to do, we just have to find the ways to do it. How do we commit [to] things here in Dubai that will bend the emissions curve and make sure that actions are implemented on the ground?
Before this COP, I had the impression that the stocktake is going to be some sort of big reckoning of past and future emissions. But it sounds like what’s happening now is similar to how past COP negotiations have gone. Is there something that makes the stocktake stand out from the agreements that were negotiated at previous COPs?
One big difference is that this is the central mechanism of the Paris Agreement, where we take stock and assess how to close gaps to meeting those goals. And that hasn’t happened in a formal way before.
The Paris Agreement was designed to have a stocktake so that we could make sure that our successive action, as the years go by, was ratcheting up, making sure that we’re not just coasting along but really delivering stronger and stronger progress. So that’s an important part of this. We are engaging with the Paris Agreement and saying, “okay, can we make sure it fulfills its goals in that formal way?”
The other part of it is that the stocktake, because it’s had this two-year process, has clearly identified the gaps. No one can deny that we’re not doing enough on finance and that adaptation is massively neglected. We’ve acknowledged that there’s been some progress on emission reductions, but it’s just an incremental push towards what’s needed. Those conclusions have a certain weight that we can draw from.
What happens if there is no agreement? Is that an option?
I don’t think that is an option. No agreement would be a failure, a clear sign of an inability of the parties to rise to the challenge of what’s needed. There’s obviously a difficult question about what level of agreement is not good enough, but that’s the reason why the parties are working so hard right now to rescue this — because the deal on the table at the moment was clearly falling below that line. That’s why we saw the backlash.
The UAE certainly will be aware that that is what’s at stake. It’s their presidency, they need to deliver what they set out to do. They need to be able to show the final success. After a year of many pledges and announcements, new money, new initiatives — all of that is important, but it doesn’t count unless you negotiate this final outcome.
And every party has to agree to the final outcome?
It has to be consensus, though what exactly consensus means can be debated. Everyone would have to not object. The weird state of the UNFCCC process means that sometimes there have been things which aren’t necessarily fully agreed 100% but still reached consensus.
Consensus isn’t perfect. It’s a political call, it’s not a mathematical number game where you tally up votes. For example, even this year, when the parties agreed [to] the loss and damage fund, the U.S. said in that meeting that they didn’t agree to it. But they said they weren’t in the room when consensus was reached, because the negotiator had left the room temporarily, so an agreement was reached and they approved it here in Dubai.
So there’s ways you can play with the system and survive. There have been instances in the past I’ve heard many years ago where decisions have been gaveled through despite objection because the presidency felt confident that the objections were not sufficient to obstruct the outcome.
This is the first stocktake process. Do you think part of what’s making it so hard is that there is no previous framework?
To an extent we’re creating something new, trying to do this for the first time. But I think also, it’s the politics. We are looking at the hardest issue, and for the first time in years getting on the edge of agreeing [to] something like a fossil fuel phaseout. And that brings up deep challenges for countries who are extremely dependent on fossil fuels. That’s true on all sides — not just producers, but also consumers.
We’re talking about initiating a model for the world which doesn’t have fossils in it. And that’s never been done — even in countries who have decarbonized to a great degree, they have not been able to show how that works at an international level.
So it is a huge ask, and there is no doubt that there can be challenges when trying to do that. And that’s what we’re seeing. We’re seeing the pains of trying to get something that’s useful. We’re no longer negotiating a treaty like we were in Paris. We’re no longer agreeing on a rulebook, which we did for five years up until COP26. We’re now really firmly talking about implementation. What does it mean to deliver the Paris Agreement? What does it mean to actually reduce emissions, not just pledge targets? So obviously it’s going to be a painful conversation, but it’s a difficult and important one.
Is there a misconception or something frustrating about this process that you wish people knew more about?
I think the biggest frustration is that this isn’t about just a technical exercise where you’re like, “oh, we need to phase out fossil fuels, because that’s what is needed.” I mean, that’s true. But there’s a deeper question here of “how does the Paris Agreement work?”
The Paris Agreement works on the basis of a deal that if we have finance, if we have cooperation, if we have means to deliver action, [then] we can do more ambitious things, we can raise and accelerate action. That is what is at stake here. So when we’re talking about phasing out fossil fuels, we should also be asking, where’s the financial pathway to do that? When we’re talking about trying to make sure that countries have more adaptation, where is the money on the table to do that? And at the moment, we know it’s a drop in the ocean. These are the contours of the deal that we need to really examine.
And it won’t be all sealed here. It goes on and on until COP30 and after that. But the global stocktake is, I think, like a marriage vow renewal. You need to kind of renew the trust and the faith that that deal, that system’s working. And right now it’s looking like maybe a shaky marriage.
https://heatmap.news/climate/cop28-global-stocktake-negotiations Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-12, from: San Jose Mercury News
Vienna retained its spot at the top of the list; San Francisco comes in at 37 and is the top US city.
https://www.mercurynews.com/2023/12/12/these-are-the-best-and-worst-cities-for-expats-to-live-and-work-in-2023/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-12, from: The Sundail (CSUN student paper)
“Alan Wake II” is Remedy Entertainment’s magnum opus. This is Remedy’s first venture in survival horror gaming after making award-winning action games, which goes to show their storytelling scope. The studio offers a terrifying multimedia experience that is second to none. “Alan Wake II” is a sequel to “Alan Wake” (2010) and “Alan Wake’s American…
https://sundial.csun.edu/177412/arts-entertainment/alan-wake-ii-review-a-triumph-in-storytelling-psychological-survival-horror/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-12, from: San Jose Mercury News
The $2 million in donations Harry and Meghan’s nonprofit received in 2022 is significantly less than the $13 million it netted in 2021, which mostly came from an infusion of cash from a mysterious donor through the Silicon Valley Community Foundation.
https://www.mercurynews.com/2023/12/12/harry-and-meghan-spin-archewells-growth-as-revenue-drops-11-million-grants-also-decline/ Save to Pocket
@Tomosino’s Mastodon feed (date: 2023-12-12, from: Tomosino’s Mastodon feed)
Step 1: Think of an animal. Any animal.
Step 2: Imagine that animal drawn as a cartoon. Style is up to you. Disney, Rankin/Bass, whatever. Not 3D, though. 2D. Got it?
Step 3: Is your animal a protagonist or a villain? Base your choice purely on your imagined cartoon character.
https://tilde.zone/@tomasino/111569070801051141 Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-12, updated: 2023-12-12, from: Jason Kittke’s blog
https://kottke.org/23/12/playing-the-spiderharp Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-12, from: The Sundail (CSUN student paper)
The California Faculty Association at CSUN organized a one-day strike on Dec. 5, calling on the CSU for a 12% pay increase and more benefits. The strike started with a rally outside CSUN’s library, where food and water were handed out to demonstrators, which included students, CFA members and union supporters. Music blared through speakers…
https://sundial.csun.edu/177390/news/brief-faculty-members-still-fighting-for-better-pay/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-12, from: Smithsonian Magazine
In laboratory experiments, gene transfer occurred in 5 percent of zebrafish larvae that were near eels when they discharged electricity
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/eels-can-genetically-modify-nearby-fish-with-their-electrical-pulses-180983422/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-12, from: San Jose Mercury News
The Suns return Bradley Beal from a back injury, but Durant is out with a sprained ankle.
https://www.mercurynews.com/2023/12/12/kevin-durant-to-miss-another-game-against-warriors-tonight/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-12, from: The Sundail (CSUN student paper)
University and community leaders joined together next to Geronimo’s on Nov. 15 for a two-hour groundbreaking event amid a Teamster strike. CSUN has begun the construction phase for the two new dorms located on the corner of Lassen and Zelzah. Before the ceremony, members of the Teamsters Local Chapter 2010 rallied together in the pouring…
https://sundial.csun.edu/177371/news/ground-breaking-dorm-construction-ceremony/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-12, from: Liliputing
The Onyx BOOX Note Air3 is an ePaper tablet with a 10.3 inch, 1404 x 1872 pixel E Ink Carta 1200 glass display, 4GB of RAM, 64GB of RAM, and a pressure-sensitive pen that lets you write or draw on the screen. Announced this week, the Note Air3 is available for purchase for $400 and should […]
The post Onyx BOOX Note Air3 and Air3 C are 10.3 inch E Ink tablets with pen support (and an optional color display) appeared first on Liliputing.
https://liliputing.com/onyx-boox-note-air3-and-air3-c-are-10-3-inch-e-ink-tablets-with-pen-support-and-an-optional-color-display/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-12, updated: 2023-12-12, from: The LAist
The L.A. nonprofit HOPICS got $140 million in public funds to house the homeless, but it failed to pay rent and some of its clients wound up back on the streets.
https://laist.com/news/housing-homelessness/hundreds-of-formerly-unhoused-people-get-evicted-after-la-nonprofit-fails-to-pay-rent-on-time Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-12, from: NASA breaking news
Some of the same properties of light and optics that make the sky blue and cause rainbows can also help scientists unlock mysteries about cloud formation and the effects of tiny particles in our air. NASA’s upcoming PACE mission will offer important insights on airborne particles of sea salt, smoke, human-made pollutants, and dust – […]
https://www.nasa.gov/earth/new-nasa-satellite-to-unravel-mysteries-about-clouds-aerosols/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-12, from: The Signal
Local Jewish congregations gathered at Valencia Town Center on Sunday evening to celebrate Hanukkah and light the fourth candle on the menorah. “This is our 25th year that we’re having this event here in the mall,” said Rabbi Choni Marozov of Chabad of SCV. “And it’s really a community spirit event. All three synagogues get […]
The post <strong>SCV Jewish community lights menorah at Valencia Town Center</strong> appeared first on Santa Clarita Valley Signal.
https://signalscv.com/2023/12/scv-jewish-community-lights-menorah-at-valencia-town-center/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-12, from: VOA News USA
https://www.voanews.com/a/us-imposes-hundreds-of-new-sanctions-in-connection-to-russia-s-invasion-of-ukraine-/7395145.html Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-12, from: Om Malik blog
It shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone that I am a big fan of Apple’s Vision Pro, a spatial computer that probably will reshape our relationship with entertainment, media, and content—if nothing else—when it comes to market. Ever since Apple announced the device at WWDC 2023, I have used it twice—and both times I came away …
https://om.co/2023/12/12/so-whats-the-latest-with-apples-visionpro/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-12, from: SCV New (TV Station)
California State Parks welcomes the public to start 2024 in a healthy way and to enjoy the fresh air with the annual First Day Hikes, on Monday, Jan. 1. Currently, up to 60 state parks will be participating, with over 70 guided hikes taking place across the state.
https://scvnews.com/kick-off-2024-with-annual-first-day-hikes/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-12, from: San Jose Mercury News
Retail analysts say the famed department store’s valuable real estate, including its flagship store in New York City, is a coveted asset to investors.
https://www.mercurynews.com/2023/12/12/why-investors-have-targeted-macys-for-a-takeover/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-12, from: Santa Barbara Indenpent News
The Santa Barbara congressmember votes in favor of Republican-sponsored House resolution equating anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism.
The post Carbajal Supports Resolution Condemning Anti-Zionism appeared first on The Santa Barbara Independent.
https://www.independent.com/2023/12/12/carbajal-supports-resolution-condemning-anti-zionism/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-12, from: San Jose Mercury News
Ahead of Zelenskyy’s high-stakes meetings, the White House late Monday pointed to newly declassified intelligence that shows Ukraine has inflicted heavy losses on Russia in recent fighting along the Avdiivka-Novopavlivka axis — including 13,000 casualties and over 220 combat vehicle losses.
https://www.mercurynews.com/2023/12/12/zelenskyy-appears-to-change-few-minds-on-more-ukraine-aid/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-12, from: San Jose Mercury News
A former First Republic Bank cloud engineer was sentenced to two years in prison for vandalizing the company’s computer network after he was fired in 2020.
https://www.mercurynews.com/2023/12/12/ex-first-republic-engineer-gets-two-years-prison-for-cloud-hack/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-12, from: Santa Barbara Indenpent News
This play set in 13th-century Assisi has parallels with 21st-century Santa Barbara.
The post Theater Review | ‘Poor Clare’ appeared first on The Santa Barbara Independent.
https://www.independent.com/2023/12/12/theater-review-poor-clare/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-12, from: The Signal
Friday night’s Foothill League matchup between West Ranch Wildcats boys’ basketball and the Valencia Vikings was a prime example of how one bad quarter can flip a game. West Ranch won the physical bout at home, 74-63, with most of the damage coming in a dynamic second quarter. The Wildcats (5-2, 4-0) outscored the Vikings […]
The post <strong>West Ranch basketball holds off Valencia </strong> appeared first on Santa Clarita Valley Signal.
https://signalscv.com/2023/12/west-ranch-basketball-holds-off-valencia/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-12, from: Santa Barbara Indenpent News
“The sage-on-the-stage model does not resonate with this generation of students,” shares CSU Channel Islands President.
The post Dr. Richard Yao Is Featured Speaker at Santa Barbara Scholarship Foundation Luncheon appeared first on The Santa Barbara Independent.
https://www.independent.com/2023/12/12/dr-richard-yao-is-featured-speaker-at-santa-barbara-scholarship-foundation-luncheon/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-12, from: Santa Barbara Indenpent News
Student athletes receive recognition at the final SBART Press Luncheon of 2023.
The post SBART Press Luncheon: Justine Katz of Dos Pueblos and Marcus Scudder of Cate Are Athletes of the Week appeared first on The Santa Barbara Independent.
https://www.independent.com/2023/12/12/sbart-press-luncheon-justine-katz-of-dos-pueblos-and-marcus-scudder-of-cate-are-the-athletes-of-the-week/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-12, from: Nieman Journalism Lab
People in our industry love the word ecosystem. We especially love to talk about healthy news ecosystems. The thinking goes that when publications champion each others’ work, collaborate on big news stories, and even fundraise together, their impact becomes greater than the sum of their parts. Journalism support organizations herald that kind of networked systems…
https://www.niemanlab.org/2023/12/journalism-intermediaries-start-to-coordinate/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-12, from: Nieman Journalism Lab
For a long time, legacy publishers have looked down on social media influencers and Patreon-style creators, if indeed they think of them at all. Meanwhile, thousands of successful influencers and content creators have been building real and valuable relationships with their communities, who now trust them more than traditional journalism — and sometimes pay for…
https://www.niemanlab.org/2023/12/publishers-will-finally-be-influenced-by-influencers/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-12, from: Nieman Journalism Lab
More than half the world’s population will get to vote for their government in 2024, making it the biggest election year in history, according to The Economist. It should be a high point for the press. Even countries where elections are not free or fair may see a bump in people’s demand for news. Unfortunately,…
https://www.niemanlab.org/2023/12/in-a-year-of-polarized-elections-media-will-be-a-target/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-12, from: San Jose Mercury News
Singer Tammi Brown, who’s performed with Bobby McFerrin and many others, has been battling cancer.
https://www.mercurynews.com/2023/12/12/bay-area-music-community-goes-to-bat-for-beloved-ailing-singer/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-12, from: Nieman Journalism Lab
Generative AI makes it easier than ever to crank out commoditized content. Local newsrooms are understaffed, fighting to keep their heads above water, and often owned by private equity firms who worship volume and scale. What could possibly go wrong? I see two short-term futures for generative AI in local news: The first is one…
https://www.niemanlab.org/2023/12/trust-good-crap-bad/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-12, from: Nieman Journalism Lab
A significant portion of designing a text on future scenarios in the media industry involves a retrospective process — not as an exercise in intellectual nostalgia, but as a way to contextualize the relationship between technologies, media, and societies to identify emerging paradigms. As a journalist, communications professor, and digital media consultant, I’ve strived to…
https://www.niemanlab.org/2023/12/the-algorithm-will-be-the-message/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-12, updated: 2023-12-12, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
There was only one US Air National Guardsman behind the leak of top-secret US military documents on Discord, but his chain of command bears some responsibility for letting it happen on their watch.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2023/12/12/us_air_force_discord_leaker/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-12, from: Nieman Journalism Lab
It is truly magical to speak to a machine using the same language you’d use to talk to a human. And that initial awe at the technology commonly known as generative AI caught a lot of us in the hype over artificial intelligence this past year. We also learned that while the large language models…
https://www.niemanlab.org/2023/12/more-open-source-ai/ Save to Pocket
@Dave Winer’s Scripting News (date: 2023-12-12, from: Dave Winer’s Scripting News)
My idea of a friend is someone who laughs at my jokes.
http://scripting.com/2023/12/12.html#a175636 Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-12, from: Santa Barbara Indenpent News
“Inside/Outside,” in the Santa Barbara Museum of Art’s contemporary gallery showcases emerging artists under an inclusive theme.
The post Involuted Perspectives, in Process appeared first on The Santa Barbara Independent.
https://www.independent.com/2023/12/12/involuted-perspectives-in-process/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-12, from: San Jose Mercury News
Rock of ages: Jazz and blues artists are expected to get better as they age. But do veteran musicians who play rock, a genre created by young people for young people, face an uphill battle of diminishing returns?
https://www.mercurynews.com/2023/12/12/should-there-be-a-mandatory-retirement-age-from-concerts-for-over-the-hill-rock-stars/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-12, updated: 2023-12-12, from: The LAist
The county is offering millions of dollars in relief for COVID-era losses.
https://laist.com/news/housing-homelessness/la-county-landlords-can-now-apply-for-relief-from-covid-losses Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-12, updated: 2023-12-12, from: Jason Kittke’s blog
https://kottke.org/23/12/full-moon-haiku-cards Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-12, from: San Jose Mercury News
If the caller says your Social Security number or benefits are suspended, or they want you to pay, hang up.
https://www.mercurynews.com/2023/12/12/how-to-spot-4-social-security-scams-and-protect-your-identity/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-12, from: Cory Doctorow’s blog
Today’s links An Epic antitrust loss for Google: They can’t help but put it in writing. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. This day in history: 2008, 2013, 2018, 2022 Colophon: Recent publications, upcoming/recent appearances, current writing projects, current reading An Epic antitrust loss for Google (permalink) A jury just found Google guilty on all counts of antitrust violations stemming from its dispute with Epic, maker of Fortnite, which brought a variety of claims related to how Google runs its app marketplace. This is huge: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/11/technology/epic-games-google-antitrust-ruling.html The mobile app store world is a duopoly run by Google and Apple. Both use a variety of tactics to prevent their customers from installing third party app stores, which funnels all app makers into their own app stores. Those app stores cream an eye-popping 30% off every purchase made in an app. This is a shocking amount to charge for payment processing. The payments sector is incredibly monopolized and notorious for its price-gouging – and its standard (wildly inflated) rate is 2-5%: https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/04/owning-the-libs/#swiper-no-swiping Now, in theory, Epic doesn’t have to sell in Google Play, the official Android app store. Unlike Apple’s iOS, Android permit both sideloading (installing an app directly without using an app store) and configuring your device to use a different app store. In practice, Google uses a variety of anticompetitive tricks to prevent these app stores from springing up and to dissuade Android users from sideloading. Proving that Google’s actions – like paying Activision $360m as part of “Project Hug” (no, really!) – were intended to prevent new app storesfrom springing up was a big lift for Epic. But they managed it, in large part thanks to Google’s own internal communications, wherein executives admitted that this was exactly why Project Hug existed. This is part of a pattern with Big Tech antitrust: many of the charges are theoretically very hard to make stick, but because the companies put their evil plans in writing (think of the fraudulent crypto exchange FTX, whose top execs all conferred in a groupchat called “Wirefraud”), Big Tech keeps losing in court: https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/03/big-tech-cant-stop-telling-on-itself/ Now, I do like to dunk on Big Tech for this kind of thing, because it’s objectively funny and because the companies make so many unforced errors. But in an important sense, this kind of written record is impossible to avoid. Any large institution can only make and enact policy through administrative systems, and those systems leave behind a paper-trail: memos, meeting minutes, etc. Yes, we all know that quote from The Wire: “Is you taking notes on a fucking criminal conspiracy?” But inevitably, any ambitious conspiracy can only exist if someone is taking notes. What’s more, any large conspiracy involving lots of parties will inevitably produce leaks. Think of this as the corollary to the idea that the moon landing can’t be a hoax, because there’s no way 400,000 co-conspirators could keep the secret. Big Tech’s conspiracies required hundreds or even thousands of collaborators to keep their mouths shut, and eventually someone blabs: https://www.science.org/content/article/fake-moon-landing-you-d-need-400000-conspirators This is part of a wave of antitrust cases being brought against the tech giants. As Matt Stoller writes, the guilty-on-all-counts jury verdict will leak into current and future actions. Remember, Google spent much of this year in court fighting the DoJ, who argued that the company bribed Apple not to make a competing search engine, paying tens of billions every year to keep a competitor from emerging. Now that a jury has convinced Google of doing that to prevent alternative app stores from emerging, claims that it used these pay-for-delay tactics in other sectros get a lot more credible: https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/boom-google-loses-antitrust-case On that note: what about Apple? Epic brought a very similar case against Apple and lost. Both Apple and Epic are appealing that case to the Supreme Court, and now that Google has been convicted in a similar case, it might prompt the Supremes to weigh in and resolve the seeming inconsistencies in the interpretation of federal law. This is a key moment in the long project to wrest antitrust away from the pro-monopoly side, who spent decades “training” judges to produce verdicts that run counter to the plain language of America’s antitrust law: https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/13/post-bork-era/#manne-down There’s 40 years’ worth of bad precedent to overturn. The good news is that we’ve got the law on our side. Literally, the wording of the laws and the records of the Congressional debate leading to their passage, all militate towards the (incredibly obvious) conclusion that the purpose of anti-monopoly law is to fight monopoly, not defend it: https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/14/aiming-at-dollars/#not-men It’s amazing to realize that we got into this monopoly quagmire because judges just literally refused to enforce the law. That’s what makes one part of the jury verdict against Google so exciting: the jury found that Google’s insistence that Play Store sellers use its payment processor was an act of illegal tying. Today, “tying” is an obscure legal theory, but few doctrines would be more useful in disenshittifying the internet. A company is guilty of illegal tying when it forces you to use unrelated products or services as a condition of using the product you actually want. The abandonment of tying led to a host of horribles, from printer companies forcing you to buy ink at $10,000/gallon to Livenation forcing venues to sell tickets through its Ticketmaster subsidiary. The next phase of this comes when the judge decides on the penalty. Epic doesn’t want cash damages – it wants the judge to order Google to fulfill its promise of “an open, competitive Android ecosystem for all users and industry participants.” They’ve asked the judge to order Google to facilitate third-party app stores, and to separate app stores from payment processors. As Stoller puts it, they want to “crush Google’s control over Android”: https://www.epicgames.com/site/en-US/news/epic-v-google-trial-verdict-a-win-for-all-developers Google has sworn to appeal, surprising no one. The Times’s expert says that they will have a tough time winning, given how clear the verdict was. Whatever this means for Google and Android, it means a lot for a future free from monopolies. Hey look at this (permalink) An Influencer Ended Up With $60,000 of Shrimp and Squid at Lunch, and It’s Kind of Her Fault https://www.foodandwine.com/diner-shares-qr-code-for-restaurant-to-social-media-8410442 (h/t JWZ) Beeper Mini Is Back https://blog.beeper.com/p/50e2ca9a-f904-4828-a52a-e57763db5430 (h/t Eric Migicovsky) Funbox https://www.funbox.design/ This day in history (permalink) #15yrsago Paul A. Young Fine Chocolates of London — some of the best chocolate in the world https://memex.craphound.com/2008/12/12/paul-a-young-fine-chocolates-of-london-some-of-the-best-chocolate-in-the-world/ #15yrsago Epilogue: Austin schoolteacher who didn’t believe Linux existed https://linuxlock.blogspot.com/2008/12/character-assasinations-aint-us.html #15yrsago Former Nasdaq chairman busted for running a $50 billion fraud — largest Ponzi scheme ever < href=“https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB122903010173099377”>https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB122903010173099377 #15yrsago James Boyle’s “Public Domain” — a book that balances accessibility with thoroughness; criticism with solutions https://memex.craphound.com/2008/12/12/boyles-public-domain-a-book-that-balances-accessibility-with-thoroughness-criticism-with-solutions/ #10yrsago Stephen Harper government wants lifetime gag agreements from Canadian parliamentary staffers https://ca.news.yahoo.com/mps-39-staff-asked-sign-lifetime-confidentiality-agreements-090357420.html #10yrsago All Norewegian books to be digitized, made available https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/12/norway-decided-to-digitize-all-the-norwegian-books/282008/ #10yrsago Aluminum castings of ant-nests https://www.anthillart.com #10yrsago US spy agency adopts globe-encircling giant octopus as new logo https://www.theverge.com/2013/12/9/5193500/us-adorns-its-newest-spy-rocket-with-malevolent-octopus #5yrsago Adam Ruins Big Tech: how monopolies, DRM, EULAs, and predatory tactics have delivered our dystopian future https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mid1VvK9Xpg #5yrsago Theresa May faces a no confidence vote today https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2018/12/brexit-tories-launch-no-confidence-vote-against-may.html #1yrsago Orphaned neurological implants https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/12/unsafe-at-any-speed/#this-is-literally-your-brain-on-capitalism Colophon (permalink) Today’s top sources: Currently writing: A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING Picks and Shovels, a Martin Hench noir thriller about the heroic era of the PC. FORTHCOMING TOR BOOKS JAN 2025 The Bezzle, a Martin Hench noir thriller novel about the prison-tech industry. FORTHCOMING TOR BOOKS FEB 2024 Vigilant, Little Brother short story about remote invigilation. FORTHCOMING ON TOR.COM Spill, a Little Brother short story about pipeline protests. FORTHCOMING ON TOR.COM Latest podcast: Daddy-Daughter Podcast, 2023 edition https://craphound.com/news/2023/12/10/daddy-daughter-podcast-2023-edition/) Recent appearances: Science Fiction and the Future of Science https://council.science/podcast/science-fiction/ AI needs to work with humans — not replace us (CBC IDEAS) https://www.cbc.ca/radio/ideas/artificial-intelligence-provocation-ideas-festival-1.7046841 Explore the Future of the 🔥 Climate and Information Climate (Andrew Revkin) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-OGT-cvs4_Q Latest books: “The Lost Cause:” a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org). Signed, personalized copies at Dark Delicacies (https://www.darkdel.com/store/p3007/Pre-Order_Signed_Copies%3A_The_Lost_Cause_HB.html#/) “The Internet Con”: A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245). “Red Team Blues”: “A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before.” Tor Books http://redteamblues.com. Signed copies at Dark Delicacies (US): and Forbidden Planet (UK): https://forbiddenplanet.com/385004-red-team-blues-signed-edition-hardcover/. “Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin”, on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com “Attack Surface”: The third Little Brother novel, a standalone technothriller for adults. The Washington Post called it “a political cyberthriller, vigorous, bold and savvy about the limits of revolution and resistance.” Order signed, personalized copies from Dark Delicacies https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1840/Available_Now%3A_Attack_Surface.html “How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism”: an anti-monopoly pamphlet analyzing the true harms of surveillance capitalism and proposing a solution. https://onezero.medium.com/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism-8135e6744d59?sk=f6cd10e54e20a07d4c6d0f3ac011af6b) (signed copies: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p2024/Available_Now%3A__How_to_Destroy_Surveillance_Capitalism.html) “Little Brother/Homeland”: A reissue omnibus edition with a new introduction by Edward Snowden: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250774583; personalized/signed copies here: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1750/July%3A__Little_Brother_%26_Homeland.html “Poesy the Monster Slayer” a picture book about monsters, bedtime, gender, and kicking ass. Order here: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781626723627. Get a personalized, signed copy here: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p2682/Corey_Doctorow%3A_Poesy_the_Monster_Slayer_HB.html#/. Upcoming books: The Bezzle: a sequel to “Red Team Blues,” about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books, February 2024 Picks and Shovels: a sequel to “Red Team Blues,” about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books, February 2025 Unauthorized Bread: a graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2025 This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution. How to get Pluralistic: Blog (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): Pluralistic.net Newsletter (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): https://pluralistic.net/plura-list Mastodon (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic Medium (no ads, paywalled): https://doctorow.medium.com/ Twitter (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising): https://twitter.com/doctorow Tumblr (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising): https://mostlysignssomeportents.tumblr.com/tagged/pluralistic “When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla” -Joey “Accordion Guy” DeVilla
https://pluralistic.net/2023/12/12/im-feeling-lucky/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-12, from: Nieman Journalism Lab
Television journalists have long been encouraged to have a social media presence to build their brands and provide additional outlets for network content. Journalists have always been influencers for their stations — but in 2024, we’ll see them start to be additionally compensated for this labor, and financially benefit from their own social media presence….
https://www.niemanlab.org/2023/12/tv-reporters-become-tiktok-influencers/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-12, from: The Sundail (CSUN student paper)
Matadors football played its final game with a 50-43 loss to Portland State University on Saturday, Nov. 17, 2001. Just a little less than a week after the final game, then-President Jolene Koester announced the CSUN football program would be eliminated. Athletic director Dick Dull recommended ending the 40-year-long CSUN football program to address budget…
https://sundial.csun.edu/177334/print-editions/print-stories/remembering-csuns-football-program/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-12, from: Santa Barbara Indenpent News
SBMM takes a deep dive into the Harbor’s history with the current exhibit.
The post Santa Barbara Maritime Museum Shows 170 Years of Harbor History appeared first on The Santa Barbara Independent.
https://www.independent.com/2023/12/12/santa-barbara-maritime-museum-shows-170-years-of-harbor-history/ Save to Pocket
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2023-12-12, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
DeJoy’s US Postal Service leadership is deadly.
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/12/11/2211085/-DeJoy-s-US-Postal-Service-leadership-is-deadly Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-12, updated: 2023-12-12, from: The LAist
This comes a month after the FCC adopted new rules to stop broadband providers from discriminating against customers based on race, religion and income.
https://laist.com/news/politics/los-angeles-could-become-first-us-city-to-end-digital-discrimination Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-12, from: Smithsonian Magazine
The rare images are among a collection of artifacts connected to the “Lady with the Lamp” that recently sold at auction
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/florence-nightingale-photos-auction-180983413/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-12, from: Heatmap News
In the weeks leading up to Elon Musk’s latest round of controversies, 27% percent of Americans who reported wanting to buy an EV in the future said that the billionaire’s behavior made them less likely to pick a Tesla, down from 36% who said the same in February. On the other hand, 35% of prospective EV buyers said that Musk had made them more likely to purchase a Tesla — a reversal of the results from the last time Heatmap took Americans’ temperature on the controversial CEO, when more people were put off by Musk’s behavior than swayed by him.
Heatmap’s new poll — which was conducted by Benenson Strategy Group between Nov. 6 and Nov. 13, 2023 — notably did not account for Musk’s latest scandal: reinstating Infowars founder and Newtown massacre denialist Alex Jones to the website formerly known as Twitter. The poll was also conducted days before Musk endorsed an anti-semitic post on X, leading to an advertiser exodus from the platform.
Still, since the last Heatmap poll in February, Americans have had plenty of time to see other negative headlines about Musk, including around his volatile ownership of X, his “outsize role in geopolitics, thanks to SpaceX,” his mockery of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, and his public attacks on a disabled ex-employee, George Soros, and the Anti-Defamation League.
Even so, Tesla outsold its next 19 rival EV automakers combined, and by a wide margin, in the first six months of 2023, Reuters reports. And despite declining earnings, its shares have risen 94% so far this year, far outpacing the S&P 500. When trying to account for this resilience in the face of Musk’s parade of recent scandals, Platformer’s Casey Newton mused last week on The New York Times’ Hard Fork podcast that there might still be “a contingent of folks who want to believe that the Elon Musk of 2023 is the Elon Musk of 2013, and that he said a couple of kooky things here and there, but at his core, he’s billionaire genius, Tony Stark, savior of humanity.” But at the same time, he went on, this might be a “moment in the sun for Tesla” and “maybe a few years from now, we look back and we think, oh yeah, that’s when the wheels started to come off the wagon.”
Overall, Heatmap found that some 39% of Democrats and left-leaning Independents said Musk has made them less likely to look at a Tesla, a small drop from 44% who said the same in February. Only 17% of Republicans and right-leaning Independents said the same. Of all respondents surveyed, though, a plurality (46%) said Musk ultimately has “no impact” on their decision to buy or lease a Tesla, proving there apparently are some people lucky enough to not have to think about this guy.
Additionally, 35% of men but only 15% of women said that Musk has made them more likely to buy a Tesla. Make of that what you will!
The Heatmap Climate Poll of 1,000 American adults was conducted by Benenson Strategy Group via online panels from Nov. 6 to 13, 2023. The survey included interviews with Americans in all 50 states and Washington, D.C. The margin of sampling error is plus or minus 3.1 percentage points. You can read about our results here.
https://heatmap.news/electric-vehicles/elon-musk-tesla-poll-ev-buyers Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-12, from: San Jose Mercury News
The collision happened on Nov. 30.
https://www.mercurynews.com/2023/12/12/man-fatally-hit-by-bart-train-near-richmond-station-identified/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-12, from: San Jose Mercury News
Chocolate, multi-fruit, gluten-free cakes join the traditional version
https://www.mercurynews.com/2023/12/12/bay-area-2023-holiday-sweets-10-panettone-to-try-this-season/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-12, from: Santa Barbara Indenpent News
A decade in, Willows Restaurant + Bar provides classic steaks and seafood with a splash of Santa Barbara, in Santa Ynez.
The post Fine Dining at the Chumash Casino Resort appeared first on The Santa Barbara Independent.
https://www.independent.com/2023/12/12/fine-dining-at-the-chumash-casino-resort/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-12, from: San Jose Mercury News
Durango opened last week, Fontainebleau opens this week.
https://www.mercurynews.com/2023/12/12/two-new-casinos-opening-in-las-vegas-one-in-huge-blue-tower-on-the-strip/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-12, from: National Archives, Text Message blog
Salmon Fisheries in Alaska (Auke Bay)
https://text-message.blogs.archives.gov/2023/12/12/auke-bay-laboratory-part-1-fishing-for-answers-alaskan-salmon-research/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-12, from: Nieman Journalism Lab
The next year will see alliances of news publishers around the world trying again to get payments from Google, and possibly Meta, influenced by the successes of Australia’s News Media Bargaining Code. These alliances will be useful for the negotiations that need to happen with AI companies using news content in their large language models….
https://www.niemanlab.org/2023/12/publishers-keep-trying-to-extract-revenue-from-google/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-12, from: NASA breaking news
Three NASA-funded commercial space station partners are on track for the design and development of their orbital destinations and the transition of agency’s low Earth orbit needs from the International Space Station. “We are ending the year on a high note with multiple important milestones being completed by our partners,” said Angela Hart, manager of […]
https://www.nasa.gov/humans-in-space/commercial-space/leo-economy/nasas-commercial-partners-continue-progress-on-new-space-stations/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-12, from: Smithsonian Magazine
New research suggests the electricity costs would exceed $300 million per year and carbon dioxide emissions could approach one million metric tons annually
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/could-a-550-mile-pipeline-from-the-ocean-save-the-great-salt-lake-scientists-say-probably-not-180983406/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-12, from: San Jose Mercury News
Ubisoft adroitly adapts the gameplay from the series into virtual reality bring players closer to the life of the Assassin Brotherhood
https://www.mercurynews.com/2023/12/12/review-assassins-creed-nexus-vr-brings-players-closer-to-franchises-iconic-experiences/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-12, from: San Jose Mercury News
President Joe Biden hailed the progress on inflation, as it’s now down nearly two-thirds from its peak of 9.1% hit last June.
https://www.mercurynews.com/2023/12/12/inflation-is-slowly-coming-down-and-no-longer-outweighing-americans-wages/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-12, updated: 2023-12-12, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Devs at well-loved distros Mint and Zorin are hard at work, with Mint 21.3 expected before the holidays, although Zorin OS 17 may take a little longer. Their respective betas show both are shaping up nicely and boast attractive desktops.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2023/12/12/mint_21_3_zorin_17/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-12, from: San Jose Mercury News
A huge San Jose housing development will consist of several hundred affordable homes.
https://www.mercurynews.com/2023/12/12/san-jose-home-house-afford-housing-build-develop-real-estate-economy/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-12, from: Liliputing
The Banana Pi BPI-M4 Zero is a tiny computer board that features an ARM Cortx-A53 quad-core processor, 2GB of LPDDR4 memory, 8GB of eMMC flash storage, and a familiar form factor: it’s just about the same size and shape as a Raspberry Pi Zero and even features a Raspberry Pi-compatible 40-pin connector. But while the […]
The post Banana Pi BPI-M4 Zero is now available (Raspberry Pi Zero clone with Allwinner H618 and dual USB-C ports) appeared first on Liliputing.
https://liliputing.com/banana-pi-bpi-m4-zero-is-a-raspberry-pi-zero-clone-with-allwinner-h618-and-dual-usb-c-ports/ Save to Pocket
@Dave Winer’s Scripting News (date: 2023-12-12, from: Dave Winer’s Scripting News)
Working my way through loose-ends. The feed-only editor built into FeedLand has now been converted to mobile.
http://scripting.com/2023/12/12.html#a161822 Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-12, from: Mozilla Developer Network blog
Puppeteer now supports the next-generation, cross-browser WebDriver BiDi standard. This new protocol makes it easy for web developers to write automated tests that work across multiple browser engines.
The post Puppeteer Support for the Cross-Browser WebDriver BiDi Standard appeared first on Mozilla Hacks - the Web developer blog.
https://hacks.mozilla.org/2023/12/puppeteer-webdriver-bidi/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-12, from: San Jose Mercury News
Arizona once again tops the Hotline’s power ratings, but there was plenty of movement elsewhere after a series of upsets.
https://www.mercurynews.com/2023/12/12/pac-12-basketball-power-ratings-arizona-on-top-after-the-conferences-best-weekend-in-eons/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-12, from: San Jose Mercury News
Danny Gokey, Natalie Grant, Mac Powell delight fans at 3Crosses Church in Castro Valley during K-LOVE’s Celebrate Christmas Tour.
https://www.mercurynews.com/2023/12/12/danny-gokey-natalie-grant-headline-k-loves-celebrate-christmas-tour/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-12, updated: 2023-12-12, from: Jason Kittke’s blog
https://kottke.org/23/12/diary-comics-nov-13-15 Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-12, from: David Rosenthal’s blog
The attitude of the crypto-bros and tech more generally is that they are going to make so much money that paying for whatever resource they need to make it will be a drop in the ocean. Amd that externalities such as carbom emissions are someone else’s problem.
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| de Vries Fig. 1 |
Corsicana will sell Riot the water. Jackie only discovered how much water Riot needed via records requests. “They asked for 1.6 million gallons a day in the height of the summer, and we are all being told to conserve,” Jackie said.In Bitcoin’s growing water footprint Alex de Vries discovers some very large water losses:
“When Riot tells people they are going to be wasting 1.6 million gallons a day, more than the iron smelt, more than the candy factory, they are going to be the number one user of water,” said Jackie.
Amid growing concerns over the impacts of climate change on worldwide water security, Bitcoin’s water footprint has rapidly escalated in recent years. The water footprint of Bitcoin in 2021 significantly increased by 166% compared with 2020, from 591.2 to 1,573.7 GL. The water footprint per transaction processed on the Bitcoin blockchain for those years amounted to 5,231 and 16,279 L, respectively. As of 2023, Bitcoin’s annual water footprint may equal 2,237 GL.That is, each Bitcoin transaction consumes a small swimming pool worth of water.
The first involves onsite (direct) water use for cooling systems and air humidification. Water usage depends on cooling system types and local climate conditions. It is important to differentiate between water withdrawal and water consumption in terms of this usage. Water withdrawal pertains to the water taken from surface water or groundwater sources, while water consumption refers to the portion of water that becomes unavailable for reuse after withdrawal, primarily due to evaporation in cooling systems. Water consumption is not extensively studied in Bitcoin mining or generic data center research, as reliable data on water consumption factors are challenging to obtain.And:
The second way in which miners use water relates to the (indirect) water consumption associated with generating the electricity necessary to power their devices. Thermoelectric power generation plays a major role in water consumption, as a portion of the withdrawn water for cooling purposes evaporates (unless dry cooling technologies utilizing air are employed).Note some caveats (my emphasis):
These systems can utilize both freshwater and non-freshwater sources. This commentary, however, exclusively focuses on freshwater consumption. … The total water footprint of Bitcoin examined in this commentary encompasses the freshwater consumed due to both direct and indirect water consumption during the operational stage of Bitcoin mining devices.It is important to note that water consumed is not the only concern, withdrawn water can be too. Sawicky points out that:
The water gets quite hot — over 100 degrees Fahrenheit — and that hot water needs to go somewhere. Where will it go?Hot water kills fish, and any pollution from the Riot facility will end up in the water supply.
Jackie hasn’t been able to get a clear answer, but she has concerns. “The property Riot purchased here in Navarro Country feeds into Richland Creek and Richland Creek feeds into Richland-Chambers Reservoir, and that’s the tap water for Arlington-Fort Worth.”
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| de Vries Fig. 2 |
includes 34 Bitcoin mines, with the power requirement for each mine ranging from 38 to 450 megawatts (MW) as of March 2023. Together, these 34 mines are responsible for 3.91 GW of power demand, representing roughly a quarter of Bitcoin’s total estimated power demand in the same month (i.e., 16.2 GW) and a majority of the share that can be attributed to the US according to the CCAF (i.e., 37.84% as of January 2022).de Vries estimates that:
This means the total water footprint of US Bitcoin miners, after adding their direct water consumption, could be an annual 93–120 GL, which is 10%–41% more than the estimated indirect water consumption of 84.9 GL per year. It also means the total water footprint of US Bitcoin miners could be equivalent to the average annual water consumption of around 300,000 US households, comparable with a city such as Washington, DC.
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| Source |
90% of transaction volume on the Bitcoin blockchain is not tied to economically meaningful activities but is the byproduct of the Bitcoin protocol design as well as the preference of many participants for anonymity.
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| Source |
Hugging Face reported that its BigScience Large Open-Science Open-Access Multilingual (BLOOM) model consumed 433 MWh of electricity during training.4 Other LLMs, including GPT-3, Gopher and Open Pre-trained Transformer (OPT), reportedly used 1,287, 1,066, and 324 MWh, respectively, for training. Each of these LLMs, was trained on terabytes of data and has 175 billion or more parameters.de Vries then turns to the less-studied inference phase:
Research firm SemiAnalysis suggested that OpenAI required 3,617 of NVIDIA’s HGX A100 servers, with a total of 28,936 graphics processing units (GPUs), to support ChatGPT, implying an energy demand of 564 MWh per day. Compared to the estimated 1,287 MWh used in GPT-3’s training phase, the inference phase’s energy demand appears considerably higher. Furthermore, Google reported that 60% of AI-related energy consumption from 2019 to 2021 stemmed from inference.He estimates for Google the energy needed per inference in LLMs:
SemiAnalysis estimated that implementing AI similar to ChatGPT in each Google search would require 512,821 of NVIDIA’s A100 HGX servers, totaling 4,102,568 GPUs. At a power demand of 6.5 kW per server, this would translate into a daily electricity consumption of 80 GWh and an annual consumption of 29.2 TWh. New Street Research independently arrived at similar estimates, suggesting that Google would need approximately 400,000 servers, which would lead to a daily consumption of 62.4 GWh and an annual consumption of 22.8 TWh. With Google currently processing up to 9 billion searches daily, these scenarios would average to an energy consumption of 6.9–8.9 Wh per request. This estimate aligns with Hugging Face’s BLOOM model, which consumed 914 kWh of electricity for 230,768 requests,4 averaging to 3.96 Wh per request.And similarly for ChatGPT:
…
Alphabet’s chairman indicated in February 2023 that interacting with an LLM could ’’likely cost 10 times more than a standard keyword search.6” As a standard Google search reportedly uses 0.3 Wh of electricity,9 this suggests an electricity consumption of approximately 3 Wh per LLM interaction.
SemiAnalysis’ assessment of ChatGPT’s operating costs in early 2023, which estimated that ChatGPT responds to 195 million requests per day, requiring an estimated average electricity consumption of 564 MWh per day, or, at most, 2.9 Wh per request.
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| de Vries Fig. 1 |
In 2021, Google’s total electricity consumption was 18.3 TWh, with AI accounting for 10%–15% of this total. The worst-case scenario suggests Google’s AI alone could consume as much electricity as a country such as Ireland (29.3 TWh per year),Fortunately, the hardware supply chain can’t deliver the chips needed to do this, and even if it could Google would not want to make the roughly $100B investment. A more realistic scenario is based on Nvidia’s projected sales of 100,000 AI servers in 2023:
these servers would have a combined power demand of 650–1,020 MW. On an annual basis, these servers could consume up to 5.7–8.9 TWh of electricity. Compared to the historical estimated annual electricity consumption of data centers, which was 205 TWh, this is almost negligible.Note that this estimate assumes 100% duty cycle but ignores the power needed to cool the servers, two effects which tend to cancel each other. It also ignores the embedded energy in the servers, and their eventual contribution to the e-waste problem. de Vries concludes:
While the exact future of AI-related electricity consumption remains difficult to predict, the scenarios discussed in this commentary underscore the importance of tempering both overly optimistic and overly pessimistic expectations. Integrating AI into applications such as Google Search can significantly boost the electricity consumption of these applications. However, various resource factors are likely to restrain the growth of global AIrelated electricity consumption in the near term. Simultaneously, it is probably too optimistic to expect that improvements in hardware and software efficiencies will fully offset any longterm changes in AI-related electricity consumption. These advancements can trigger a rebound effect whereby increasing efficiency leads to increased demand for AI, escalating rather than reducing total resource use.
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| Luccioni Fig. 1 |
propose the first systematic comparison of the ongoing inference cost of various categories of ML systems, covering both task-specific (i.e. finetuned models that carry out a single task) and ‘general-purpose’ models, (i.e. those trained for multiple tasks). We measure deployment cost as the amount of energy and carbon required to perform 1,000 inferences on representative benchmark dataset using these models. We find that multi-purpose, generative architectures are orders of magnitude more expensive than task-specific systems for a variety of tasks, even when controlling for the number of model parameters.As with de Vries, they justify their focus on inference:
According to AWS, the largest global cloud provider, inference is estimated to make up 80 to 90% of total ML cloud computing demand [2, 28], whereas a 2021 publication by Meta attributed approximately one-third of their internal end-to-end ML carbon footprint to model inference, with the remainder produced by data management, storage, and training [56]; similarly, a 2022 study from Google attributed 60% of its ML energy use to inference, compared to 40% for training [40].Luccioni et al’s Figure 1 (note Y axis logarithmic) shows that the range of carbon emissions for the various tasks they tested spans 3 orders of magnitude. Generative tasks are by far more expensive, with image generation particularly costly.
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| Luccioni Fig. 2 |
We do observe a relationship between model size and quantity of emissions produced during inference, with differing progressions for each modality – however, the task structure accounts for more of the variation than the model size does. We can observe once again that text-to-image is by far the most carbon- and energy-intensive task, with smaller image generation models such as segmind/tiny-sd that have around 500M parameters producing magnitudes more carbon than text-to-category models (100g vs. 0.6 g of CO 2 per 1,000 inferences).They conclude:
…
For context, the most carbon-intensive image generation model (stable-diffusion-xl-base-1.0) generates 1,594 grams of CO 2 for 1,000 inferences, which is roughly the equivalent to 4.1 miles driven by an average gasoline-powered passenger vehicle.
Using multi-purpose models for discriminative tasks is more energy-intensive compared to task-specific models for these same tasks. This is especially the case for text classification (on IMDB, SST 2 and Rotten Tomatoes) and question answering (on SciQ, SQuAD v1 and v2), where the gap between task-specific and zero-shot models is particularly large, and less so for summarization (for CNN-Daily Mail, SamSUM and XSum). As can be seen in Table 4, the difference between multi-purpose models and task-specific models is amplified as the length of output gets longer.One of the most-hyped applications of AI is autonomous vehicles, and Soumya Sudhakar, Vivienne Sze and Sertac Karaman examine their externalities in Data Centers on Wheels: Emissions From Computing Onboard Autonomous Vehicles which is summarized by Brandon Vigliarolo in Self-driving car computers may be ‘as bad’ for emissions as datacenters. Sudhakar et al use probabilistic models to estimate the power needed for autonomous navigation:
…
While we see the benefit of deploying generative zero-shot models given their ability to carry out multiple tasks, we do not see convincing evidence for the necessity of their deployment in contexts where tasks are well-defined, for instance web search and navigation, given these models’ energy requirements.
Based on current trends, a widespread AV adoption scenario where approximately 95% of all vehicles are autonomous requires computer power to be less than 1.2 kW for emissions from computing on AVs to be less than emissions from all data centers in 2018 in 90% of modeled scenarios. Anticipating a future scenario with high adoption of AVs, business-as-usual decarbonization, and workloads doubling every three years, hardware efficiency must double every 1.1 years for emissions in 2050 to equal 2018 data center emissions. The rate of increase in hardware efficiency needed in many scenarios to contain emissions is faster than the current rate.Again, note that in aggregate autonomous vehicles will consume far more power in inference than in training.
|
|
Sudhakar et al
Fig. 1 |
Emissions from computing onboard AVs driving 1 h/day. With one billion AVs, an average computer power of 0.84 kW yields emissions equal to emissions of all data centers.
In all these cases we see the industry’s total lack of concern for
externalities such as carbon emissions, grid stability, e-waste and
water consumption. In cryptocurrency’s case we can add
crime
and
money
laundering. In the case of autonomous vehicles we can add
death,
injury
and
traffic
congestion. All these papers propose ways to reduce the
externalities they document, but in almost all cases my reaction is
“good luck with that!”.
https://blog.dshr.org/2023/12/why-worry-about-resources.html Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-12, from: Marketplace Morning Report
The immigration system in the U.S. has not been significantly updated in decades. Today, we examine what pathways look like for immigrants who want to work in the States and for the employers who want to hire them. Also on the show: Price increases seem to be settling in higher than the Federal Reserve wants, small business optimism ticks down in November, and the UAW goes after non-union automakers.
https://www.marketplace.org/shows/marketplace-morning-report/why-its-so-hard-to-actually-get-u-s-visas-and-green-cards Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-12, from: San Jose Mercury News
The pandemic didn’t just close parks in 2020 and ’21, it also led companies to cancel new projects — some of which would have debuted next year.
https://www.mercurynews.com/2023/12/12/niles-lack-of-new-attractions-coming-to-california-theme-parks-in-2024-is-covids-legacy/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-12, from: San Jose Mercury News
Know a gardener who needs a gift? Try these!
https://www.mercurynews.com/2023/12/12/12-christmas-and-holiday-gifts-for-the-gardeners-in-your-life/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-12, updated: 2023-12-12, from: Jason Kittke’s blog
https://kottke.org/23/12/0043608-five-sweaters-to-knit-for Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-12, updated: 2023-12-12, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Oracle has seen its market valuation dip on the back of lower than expected revenue growth for Q2 of its fiscal 2024 ended November 30.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2023/12/12/oracle_shares_hit_as_it/ Save to Pocket
@IIIF Mastodon feed (date: 2023-12-12, from: IIIF Mastodon feed)
Unfortunately, we must postpone our planned Community Call with @flickrfdn. Please stay tuned for a new date and time.
https://glammr.us/@IIIF/111540714313159267
https://glammr.us/@IIIF/111568139782181952 Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-12, from: VOA News USA
CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — Harvard President Claudine Gay will remain leader of the prestigious Ivy League school following her comments last week at a congressional hearing on antisemitism, the university’s highest governing body announced Tuesday.
“Our extensive deliberations affirm our confidence that President Gay is the right leader to help our community heal and to address the very serious societal issues we are facing,” the Harvard Corporation said in a statement following its meeting Monday night.
Only months into her leadership, Gay came under intense scrutiny following the hearing in which she and two of her peers struggled to answer questions about campus antisemitism. Their academic responses provoked a backlash from Republican opponents, along with alumni and donors who say the university leaders are failing to stand up for Jewish students on their campuses.
Some lawmakers and donors to the university called for Gay to step down, following the resignation of Liz Magill as president of the University of Pennsylvania on Saturday.
The Harvard Crimson student newspaper first reported Tuesday that Gay, who became Harvard’s first Black president in July, will remain in office with the support of the Harvard Corporation following the conclusion of the board’s meeting. It cited an unnamed source familiar with the decision.
A petition signed by more than 600 faculty members asked the school’s governing body to keep Gay in charge.
“So many people have suffered tremendous damage and pain because of Hamas’s brutal terrorist attack, and the university’s initial statement should have been an immediate, direct, and unequivocal condemnation,” the corporation’s statement said. “Calls for genocide are despicable and contrary to fundamental human values. President Gay has apologized for how she handled her congressional testimony and has committed to redoubling the university’s fight against antisemitism.”
In an interview with The Crimson last week, Gay said she got caught up in a heated exchange at the House committee hearing and failed to properly denounce threats of violence against Jewish students.
“What I should have had the presence of mind to do in that moment was return to my guiding truth, which is that calls for violence against our Jewish community — threats to our Jewish students — have no place at Harvard, and will never go unchallenged,” Gay said.
Testimony from Gay and Magill drew intense national backlash, as have similar responses from the president of MIT, who also testified before the Republican-led House Education and Workforce Committee.
The corporation also addressed allegations of plagiarism against Gay, saying that Harvard became aware of them in late October regarding three articles she had written. It initiated an independent review at Gay’s request.
The corporation reviewed the results on Saturday, “which revealed a few instances of inadequate citation” and found no violation of Harvard’s standards for research misconduct, it said.
https://www.voanews.com/a/7394751.html Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-12, from: Jeff Geerling blog
Forget spaceships; I just want my music
<div class="clearfix text-formatted field field--name-body field--type-text-with-summary field--label-hidden field__item"><p>A couple weeks ago, as my kids settled into the car, I asked like I always do, "what songs do you want me to play?"</p>They have a range of favored earworms, from Baby Shark to Babaloo, and usually the songs are tolerable, at least.
But a few albums, like Bluey’s soundtrack, transcend the children’s genre. They’re genuinely fun to listen to, for everyone in the car.
Well, that fine day, the kids chose Ladybug Music. And let me tell you, besides a few duds, Ladybug Music slaps. And the songs incorporate diverse styles, too, it’s not just the same nursery rhymes regurgitated in a bubbly voice.
So I found the album on my phone and noticed the songs were all greyed out.
I tapped one, and nothing. Just this notice:
Not available in my region? Well, that’s weird. I pay for Apple Music. And I know the artist is in the US, and I’m in the US…
<span class="field field--name-uid field--type-entity-reference field--label-hidden"><span>Jeff Geerling</span></span>
https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2023/forget-spaceships-i-just-want-my-music Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-12, from: NASA breaking news
The last Wednesday in November proved to be a full-circle moment for two engineers at NASA’s Stennis Space Center near Bay St. Louis, Mississippi. Josh Greiner heard a familiar voice on the headset as he prepared to conduct an RS-25 engine test on the Fred Haise Test Stand on Nov. 29. It was Peyton Pinson, […]
https://www.nasa.gov/centers-and-facilities/stennis/nasa-stennis-engineers-share-the-stage-on-test-day/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-12, from: PeerJ blog
A PeerJ Computer Science Special Issue featuring research aiming to transform healthcare by utilizing Artificial Intelligence. “This is a New Era of Technological Healthcare, providing tools and methods to empower medical treatments. Machine learning and sensors can promote these advances.” – Ivan Miguel Pires, Adjunct Professor, Universidade de Aveiro. Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) have […]
https://peerj.com/blog/post/115284888642/call-for-papers-revolutionizing-healthcare-the-role-of-ai-and-machine-learning/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-12, from: NASA breaking news
NASA astronauts Frank Rubio, Stephen Bowen, and Woody Hoburg, as well as UAE (United Arab Emirates) astronaut Sultan Alneyadi will visit the agency’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama at 1 p.m. CST Thursday, Dec. 14, to discuss their recent missions to the International Space Station. Media are invited to speak with the astronauts […]
https://www.nasa.gov/news-release/media-invited-to-nasas-spacex-crew-6-expedition-69-visit-to-marshall/ Save to Pocket
@Dave Winer’s Scripting News (date: 2023-12-12, from: Dave Winer’s Scripting News)
Chuck did a Dark Mode for FeedLand “boost” for the Arc browser.
http://scripting.com/2023/12/12.html#a144431 Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-12, updated: 2023-12-12, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Microsoft is considering adding a text editor back into the command line world, thus risking some heated discussions on the subject.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2023/12/12/microsoft_cli_text_editor/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-12, updated: 2023-12-12, from: Jason Kittke’s blog
https://kottke.org/23/12/0043609-this-family-with-young-ki Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-12, from: NASA breaking news
NASA’s Wildfire Climate Tech Challenge, part of the MSI Incubator initiative, seeks innovative solutions for wildfire prevention and climate technology. NASA invites students and employees of Minority Serving Institutions (MSIs) to address the escalating issues caused by wildfires exacerbated by climate change. Successful participants will have the opportunity to join a startup incubator program and […]
https://www.nasa.gov/directorates/stmd/stmd-prizes-challenges-crowdsourcing-program/center-of-excellence-for-collaborative-innovation-coeci/nasa-msi-incubator-wildfire-climate-tech-challenge/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-12, from: The Sundail (CSUN student paper)
A crowd stood across the University Library, with unlit candles in one hand and warm drinks in the other. They waited for the sun to go down as Rabbi Chaim Brook greeted those trickling in. In front of them stood a large menorah with the words “Happy Hanukkah.” Chabad at CSUN hosted their annual menorah…
https://sundial.csun.edu/177347/featured/chabad-at-csun-celebrates-hanukkah-on-campus/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-12, updated: 2023-12-12, from: Jason Kittke’s blog
https://kottke.org/23/12/0043607-this-is-perhaps-a-little Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-12, from: 404 Media Group
nContext looks like an ordinary adtech or marketing company. It’s actually owned by military contracting giant Sierra Nevada Corporation.
https://www.404media.co/navy-bought-global-data-ncontext-sierra-nevada-snc/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-12, from: Guam Daily Post
A fifth individual is now facing charges in connection to the death of Jason Susuico earlier this year.
https://www.postguam.com/news/local/5th-suspect-facing-charges-in-susuico-murder-investigation/article_198d0592-9898-11ee-bf83-b77a77119722.html Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-12, from: Guam Daily Post
A former police officer terminated after an alleged altercation in July has appealed his case at the Civil Service Commission, but those proceedings will have to wait until pending criminal matters are completed at the Superior Court of Guam.
https://www.postguam.com/news/local/ex-officers-termination-appeal-waits-on-criminal-proceeding/article_c067b590-97f5-11ee-b2a7-0788207b72ba.html Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-12, from: Guam Daily Post
Santa runs across the DFS T-Galleria, on his way to play the drums, leaving one band and joining another outside the front of the mall for the tourists along Tumon Bay.
https://www.postguam.com/news/local/721st-army-band-fills-dfs-with-holiday-melodies/article_c416d7de-97cd-11ee-a95e-3b83e3827830.html Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-12, from: Guam Daily Post
A man was allegedly found with methamphetamine at a bus stop near a school in Sinajana.
https://www.postguam.com/news/local/man-sleeping-at-a-bus-stop-near-school-accused-of-having-meth/article_c6da306c-97e4-11ee-be4b-6747336aabbe.html Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-12, from: Guam Daily Post
The U.S. Department of Agriculture awarded $5 million to the University of Guam to work with forestry managers and farmers to produce more eco-friendly and sustainable materials and practices, the university announced in a press release.
https://www.postguam.com/news/local/uog-awarded-5m-to-work-with-growers-on-sustainable-farming/article_528105a0-97c7-11ee-9709-3f57c752b2fd.html Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-12, from: Guam Daily Post
With the extension to Guam’s H2-B limit exemption within the compromise version of the fiscal year 2024 National Defense Authorization Act, the governor’s administration stated over the weekend that it will continue to find solutions to restrictions on bringing foreign…
https://www.postguam.com/news/local/adelup-says-it-will-continue-to-seek-relief-on-h-2b-issue/article_ab09f9f4-97b1-11ee-91db-7f19c48a702b.html Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-12, from: Guam Daily Post
A man on trial for murder admitted to police he punched a man multiple times in a fight. The victim died days later.
https://www.postguam.com/news/local/detective-defendant-admitted-to-punching-victim-in-fatal-attack/article_a7a8b614-988e-11ee-8dcb-ab17c53e2c0e.html Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-12, from: Guam Daily Post
More than $3.2 billion in defense authorizations will be heading to Guam through the fiscal 2024 National Defense Authorization Act, should it be signed into law, according to Guam Del. James Moylan.
https://www.postguam.com/news/local/3-2b-could-come-to-guam-in-ndaa-still-a-chance-for-reca/article_ca1a5e7c-988f-11ee-bfb0-db0354e0cb58.html Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-12, from: Guam Daily Post
A man suspected of having methamphetamine with intent to deliver was arrested and charged after allegedly “swerving” his car toward a Guam Police Department vehicle.
https://www.postguam.com/news/local/im-dying-drug-dealing-suspect-tells-police-he-did-too-much-meth/article_f7c0d612-97e5-11ee-b28e-a7db179620bc.html Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-12, updated: 2023-12-12, from: One Foot Tsunami
https://onefoottsunami.com/2023/12/12/scarcity-is-part-of-the-appeal/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-12, updated: 2023-12-12, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
An official review of the Police Service of Northern Ireland’s (PSNI) August data breach has revealed the full extent of the impact on staff.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2023/12/12/psni_data_breach_forces_officers/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-12, from: Heatmap News
Current conditions: It’s getting windy in Queensland as Tropical Cyclone Jasper approaches land. America’s chances of a white Christmas are looking increasingly slim. It’s cold but sunny in Washington, D.C., today, where Ukrainian President Zelensky will meet with President Biden.
Negotiators at the COP28 climate summit remain divided over the text that will appear in the final deal to emerge from the conference, and in particular whether the text will call on countries to phase out fossil fuels. The conference was scheduled to end this morning but is running into overtime. Yesterday an updated draft text was swiftly and widely condemned in part because it eliminated the “phase out” language in an attempt to appease Saudi Arabia, among other nations. This morning COP28 Director General Majid Al Suwaidi said that draft was just a starting point for talks. He added that the United Arab Emirates COP presidency wants the text to include fossil fuels but that in the end, it will be up to the nations in attendance to come to an agreement. A new draft of the text is expected sometime today.
Youth
climate activist Licypriya Kangujam interrupts COP28 demanding an end to
fossil
fuels.
Sean Gallup/Getty Images
A group of 18 kids in California is suing the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), accusing it of failing to protect them from the effects of climate change and therefore violating their constitutional rights. The lawsuit, Genesis B. v. United States Environmental Protection Agency, was filed by the Oregon-based nonprofit law firm Our Children’s Trust, the same firm that in August represented a group of Montana children in their successful landmark climate suit against that state. The Genesis suit calls climate change the “single greatest driver of the health of every child born today” and says young people are “actively being harmed and discriminated against by their government’s affirmative allowance of dangerous levels of climate pollution.” The plaintiffs don’t want compensation, but are asking “for various declarations about the environmental rights of children and the EPA’s responsibility to protect them,” NPR reports.
Ford will significantly scale back production of its F-150 Lightning electric pickup truck in 2024, Automotive News reports, citing an internal memo. The company had planned to make 3,200 trucks per week but will cut that in half to 1,600, “marking a major reversal after the automaker significantly increased plant capacity for the electric vehicle in 2023,” explains CNBC. EV sales continue to climb: F-150 Lightning sales are up 53% year over year. But even so, the pace of growth hasn’t matched some automakers’ ambitious expectations as prices and interest rates remain stubbornly high. As a result, companies including Ford are being forced to pull back on their EV investment and expansion plans. A Ford spokesperson said the company will “continue to match production with customer demand.”
A quarter of the world’s freshwater fish are at risk of extinction due to environmental degradation, according to a new assessment from the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN). Climate change and pollution pose some of the biggest threats to freshwater fish, but overfishing, dam construction, and invasive species also play a part. The assessment found that the global population of Atlantic salmon plummeted by 23% between 2006 and 2020. “Ensuring freshwater ecosystems are well managed, remain free-flowing with sufficient water, and good water quality is essential to stop species declines and maintain food security, livelihoods and economies in a climate resilient world,” says Kathy Hughes, co-chair of the IUCN SSC Freshwater Fish Specialist Group.
Europe’s largest economies have managed to reduce carbon dioxide emissions from electricity production by nearly 25% over the last five years by switching from fossil fuels to renewables, Reuters reports, citing data from electricitymaps.com. Emissions from electricity generation across Germany, France, the United Kingdom, Italy, Spain, and the Netherlands have declined by 156 million tonnes in 2023 compared to 2018. “As every major European economy is set to expand renewables generation further each year through the rest of this decade, the region’s overall carbon intensity will continue to decline, and will likely help the region emerge as the global hub for low-carbon electricity generation by 2030,” Reuters’ Gavin Maguire says.
“While it may look broken in the short term, somehow this dysfunctional process can still deliver.” –Eve Tamme, a former climate negotiator for the European Commission, speaking to Heatmap’s Robinson Meyer on the future of COP.
https://heatmap.news/climate/am-briefing-overtime-at-cop28 Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-12, from: Nieman Journalism Lab
Monetization and the push for traffic still drive most business decisions in the media industry. Whether publishers seek to generate subscription revenue directly from readers or indirectly monetize reader attention through advertising or sponsorship, their target audiences are shaped through the lens of profitability. This is not necessarily a bad thing — monetization can serve…
https://www.niemanlab.org/2023/12/its-time-to-prioritize-audiences-we-know-we-cant-monetize/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-12, from: Nieman Journalism Lab
Dear TK, Congratulations on being named CEO of NPR! You are inheriting a world-class journalism organization at a pivotal moment in U.S. history. While the need for a non-partisan, independent press has never been more urgent, the headwinds you’re facing have never been stronger. Think F-5 hurricane. They include the collapse of local journalism and…
https://www.niemanlab.org/2023/12/an-open-letter-to-the-incoming-ceo-of-npr/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-12, from: Nieman Journalism Lab
Every day, for four decades, I have put my right shoe on first, and then my left. Same goes for my socks and pant legs. Over the past week, I tried switching it up. Each morning, I forced my right foot to stay put, as I raised my left. It felt hard and quite unnatural,…
https://www.niemanlab.org/2023/12/we-learn-to-unlearn/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-12, from: Nieman Journalism Lab
My prediction is that 2024 will be the year when the generative AI models begin to stop confabulating, hallucinating, or, as journalists put it more bluntly, stop making things up. As soon as the public got access to AI chatbots, the models became infamous for their unreliability. Lawyers were shocked their AI-generated briefs included made-up…
https://www.niemanlab.org/2023/12/ai-gets-accurate/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-12, from: Nieman Journalism Lab
It’s not about innovating; it’s about surviving. With the rise of conversational search, media outlets will have to move on from obsessing over the Google algorithm. Even if the reach provided by Google maintains its pace, the real success needle for media shouldn’t be vanity reach, but cultural relevance. In the content industry, what will…
https://www.niemanlab.org/2023/12/the-year-of-the-horizontal-newsroom/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-12, from: Nieman Journalism Lab
Over the next year, the news industry will have to confront the realities of building an audience in a post-social media world — a world where the news not only doesn’t reach those who aren’t looking for it, but is not a consistent presence in many Americans’ lives. The last year has reminded many news…
https://www.niemanlab.org/2023/12/news-confronts-reaching-audiences-in-a-post-social-world/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-12, updated: 2023-12-12, from: The LAist
More than a dozen students talked to LAist about how music powered them through pre-calculus homework, helped them navigate the perpetual question of who you are in the world, and gave life “more vibes.”
https://laist.com/news/education/los-angeles-high-school-gen-z-best-music-2023 Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-12, updated: 2023-12-12, from: The LAist
Activists worry support for expanding the L.A. City Council is losing momentum.
https://laist.com/news/politics/la-city-council-members-wrestle-with-increasing-their-numbers Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-12, from: The Markup blog
Here’s how to turn off “automated content recognition,” the Shazam-like software on smart TVs that tracks what you’re watching
https://themarkup.org/privacy/2023/12/12/your-smart-tv-knows-what-youre-watching Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-12, from: Marketplace Morning Report
Republicans in Congress want to tie aid to Ukraine and Israel with immigration reform, and time is running out to make a deal. Immigration is a topic fraught with emotion, but we decided to take a look at immigration through the lens of economics. What does the evidence show about the costs and benefits of immigration? What about it’s effect on wages and jobs? Plus, Google loses an antitrust case against Epic Games.
https://www.marketplace.org/shows/marketplace-morning-report/what-the-data-says-about-immigrations-impact-on-the-economy Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-12, from: The Signal
It’s the season of celebration. A time for people to come together with those they love and reflect on the year. However, that’s tough for so many people I know, who are ending this year really struggling. Struggling to find housing they can afford. Struggling to access health care. Struggling to cover the basics. That’s […]
The post Pilar Schiavo | A Time for Celebration and Reflection appeared first on Santa Clarita Valley Signal.
https://signalscv.com/2023/12/pilar-schiavo-a-time-for-celebration-and-reflection/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-12, from: The Signal
Re: Larry Moore, “Alternate Universe,” letters, Dec. 7. I find that I enjoy The Signal opinion page much more by just skipping certain “contributors.” Currently, my list is only three names: Gary Horton, Thomas Oatway and Lois Eisenberg. Walter McKee Valencia
The post Walter McKee | Skipping These Three appeared first on Santa Clarita Valley Signal.
https://signalscv.com/2023/12/walter-mckee-skipping-these-three/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-12, from: The Signal
At Wednesday’s board of trustees’ meeting, the leadership at College of the Canyons will have an opportunity to join over 100 other United States colleges and universities by signing the statement, “We Stand Together with Israel Against Hamas.” The statement itself is direct, simple and elegant. It clearly identifies Israel as the victim of violence […]
The post Stephen C. Petzold | COC Must Stand Against Terrorism appeared first on Santa Clarita Valley Signal.
https://signalscv.com/2023/12/stephen-c-petzold-coc-must-stand-against-terrorism/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-12, from: The Signal
Will someone inform Thomas Oatway (letters, Dec. 8) that Bernie Madoff died in 2021? And also inform him that it is highly unlikely that Donald Trump will be able to resurrect him from the dead. Steven H. Baron Newhall
The post Steven H. Baron | Need Another Choice for Treasury appeared first on Santa Clarita Valley Signal.
https://signalscv.com/2023/12/steven-h-baron-need-another-choice-for-treasury/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-12, from: The Signal
I disagree with Lois Eisenberg again (letters, Dec. 8). Mike Johnson is the fresh face we need in the speaker’s position. Isn’t abortion murder? That is harsh but isn’t that what it is? Aren’t wind and solar the most undependable sources of energy? Climate change happens without our involvement. Did you know that Earth was […]
The post Bob Comer | Disagreeing with Lois Again appeared first on Santa Clarita Valley Signal.
https://signalscv.com/2023/12/bob-comer-disagreeing-with-lois-again/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-12, updated: 2023-12-12, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Brit telecoms regulator Ofcom is proposing fresh rules that take a swipe at companies who impose inflation-linked price rises in the middle of a contract, saying pricing should be more transparent for customers.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2023/12/12/ofcom_takes_aim_at_inflation_contract_terms/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-12, from: VOA News USA
LAHAINA — The heart of Lahaina, the historic town on the Hawaiian island of Maui that burned in a deadly wildfire that killed at least 100 people, reopened Monday to residents and business owners holding day passes.
The renewed access marks an important emotional milestone for victims of the Aug. 8 fire, but much work remains to be done to safely clear properties of burned debris and rebuild.
The reopened areas include Banyan Tree Park, home to a 150-year-old tree that burned in the fire but that is now sprouting new leaves, Lahaina’s public library, an elementary school and popular restaurants.
An oceanfront section of Front Street, where the fire ripped through a traffic jam of cars trying to escape town, reopened Friday.
Authorities are continuing to recommend that people entering scorched lots wear protective gear to shield them from hazards.
On Sunday, the state Department of Health released test results confirming the ash and dust left by the fire is toxic and that arsenic is the biggest concern. Arsenic is a heavy metal that adheres to wildfire dust and ash, the department said.
The tests examined ash samples collected Nov. 7-8 from 100 properties built from the 1900s to the 2000s. Samples also showed high levels of lead, which was used to paint houses built before 1978.
The clean up is still in its early stages. For the past few months, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has been removing batteries, propane tanks, pesticides and other hazards from the town’s more than 2,000 destroyed buildings.
Residents and business owners have been able to visit their properties after the EPA has finished clearing their lots. In some cases, residents — often wearing white full-body suits, masks and gloves — have found family heirlooms and mementos after sifting through the charred rubble of their homes.
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers will begin hauling away the remaining debris and take it to a landfill after it gets permission from property owners.
The EPA and the state’s health department have installed 53 air monitors in Lahaina and Upcountry Maui, where a separate fire burned homes in early August. The department is urging people to avoid outdoor activity when monitor levels show elevated air pollution and to close windows and doors.
https://www.voanews.com/a/heart-of-hawaii-s-historic-lahaina-burned-in-wildfire-reopens-to-residents-business-owners/7394522.html Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-12, from: Marketplace Morning Report
From the BBC World Service: The UN climate change talks in Dubai are reaching their final phase, but because the nations can’t agree on a draft deal to phase out fossil fuels, the conference has gone into overtime. Some countries unhappy with the draft language are small island nations like Tuvalu. We take a closer look. Plus, Poland’s right-wing party is out of power after eight years.
https://www.marketplace.org/shows/marketplace-morning-report/will-cop28-talks-end-with-a-deal Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-12, updated: 2023-12-11, from: Bruce Schneier blog
Interesting attack based on malicious pre-OS logo images:
LogoFAIL is a constellation of two dozen newly discovered vulnerabilities that have lurked for years, if not decades, in Unified Extensible Firmware Interfaces responsible for booting modern devices that run Windows or Linux….
The vulnerabilities are the subject of a coordinated mass disclosure released Wednesday. The participating companies comprise nearly the entirety of the x64 and ARM CPU ecosystem, starting with UEFI suppliers AMI, Insyde, and Phoenix (sometimes still called IBVs or independent BIOS vendors); device manufacturers such as Lenovo, Dell, and HP; and the makers of the CPUs that go inside the devices, usually Intel, AMD or designers of ARM CPUs……
https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2023/12/new-windows-linux-firmware-attack.html Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-12, updated: 2023-12-12, from: Deno blog
Access our zero config distributed database, Deno KV, in your Node projects with our new npm package.
https://deno.com/blog/kv-npm Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-12, from: National Archives, Pieces of History blog
As we celebrate the 232nd anniversary of the ratification of the Bill of Rights, we’re looking back on the document’s 175th anniversary—and a major exhibit at the National Archives Building. The original joint resolution of Congress proposing what we call the Bill of Rights has been on permanent display at the National Archives Building since … Continue reading The Bill of Rights at the National Archives Building
https://prologue.blogs.archives.gov/2023/12/12/the-bill-of-rights-at-the-national-archives-building/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-12, updated: 2023-12-12, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
re:Invent At the recent AWS re:Invent conference, the hype was all around AI, but the big launch for many users was S3 (Simple Storage Service) Express One Zone – a S3 tier offering much lower latency than standard S3 buckets. This means S3 can be used directly by a wider range of applications, altering the storage cost and performance calculations.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2023/12/12/the_changing_focus_of_aws/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-12, from: Raspberry Pi (.org)
Young children have a unique perspective on the world they live in. They often seem oblivious to what’s going on around them, but then they will ask a question that makes you realise they did get some insight from a news story or a conversation they overheard. This happened to me with a class of…
The post AI isn’t just robots: How to talk to young children about AI appeared first on Raspberry Pi Foundation.
https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/how-to-talk-to-young-children-about-ai/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-12, updated: 2023-12-12, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
The developer behind Beeper Mini just released an updated version of the standalone Android app that users say can sidestep the block Apple put in place over the weekend.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2023/12/12/apple_beeper_update/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-12, from: Hawaii Tribune Harold
<p><strong>GIRLS KSH 0 - KONAWAENA 0</strong></p>
https://www.hawaiitribune-herald.com/2023/12/12/sports/weekend-of-biif-soccer-sees-a-rout-and-two-ties/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-12, from: Hawaii Tribune Harold
<p>EAST RUTHERFORD, N.J. — Tommy DeVito threw a 32-yard pass to Wan’Dale Robinson to set up Randy Bullock’s 37-yard field goal as time expired, and the New York Giants beat Green Bay 24-22 on Monday night to hand the Packers their first December loss since Matt LaFleur took over as coach in 2019. </p>
https://www.hawaiitribune-herald.com/2023/12/12/sports/devito-leads-clutch-drive-to-bullocks-winning-kick-as-new-york-giants-top-green-bay-packers-24-22/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-12, from: Hawaii Tribune Harold
<p>DALLAS — Kate Cox has left the state to get an abortion following a late-night decision Friday by the Texas Supreme Court that blocked her ability to terminate her nonviable pregnancy under a medical exemption.</p>
https://www.hawaiitribune-herald.com/2023/12/12/nation-world-news/texas-woman-flees-state-to-get-abortion-after-supreme-court-decision/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-12, from: Hawaii Tribune Harold
<p>The whereabouts of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny were unknown on Monday as officials at the penal colony where he is serving his sentence told one of his lawyers that he is no longer on the inmate roster, his spokeswoman said.</p>
https://www.hawaiitribune-herald.com/2023/12/12/nation-world-news/navalnys-whereabouts-are-unknown-and-a-russian-prison-says-hes-no-longer-there-a-spokeswoman-says/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-12, from: Hawaii Tribune Harold
<p>Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy urged the United States to break a deadlock over more than $60 billion in military aid, warning on a visit to Washington that the funding fight only benefits President Vladimir Putin and risks his country’s ability to push back against Russian forces.</p>
https://www.hawaiitribune-herald.com/2023/12/12/nation-world-news/zelenskyy-in-washington-to-rally-us-in-crucial-week-for-alliance/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-12, from: Hawaii Tribune Harold
<p>Tucker Carlson, who was ousted from his Fox News program earlier this year, is going it alone via streaming.</p>
https://www.hawaiitribune-herald.com/2023/12/12/nation-world-news/ousted-fox-news-host-tucker-carlson-is-launching-a-streaming-service/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-12, from: Hawaii Tribune Harold
<p>TEL AVIV, Israel (AP) — Israel’s defense minister on Monday pushed back against international calls to wrap up the country’s military offensive in the Gaza Strip, saying the current phase of the operation against the Hamas militant group will “take time.”</p>
https://www.hawaiitribune-herald.com/2023/12/12/nation-world-news/israeli-defense-chief-resists-pressure-to-halt-gaza-offensive-says-campaign-will-take-time/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-12, from: Hawaii Tribune Harold
<p>As we start thinking about gathering with family and friends, here are some tried and true easy recipes that are sure to please your guests.</p>
https://www.hawaiitribune-herald.com/2023/12/12/features/lets-talk-food-holiday-pupu-ideas/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-12, from: Hawaii Tribune Harold
<p>Pancakes are the superstar of the breakfast table — at least my breakfast table. A little sweet, a little eggy, a little salty and a touch buttery, they combine all the flavors people love in the morning (well, it’s missing bacon, but you can serve that on the side). And, with this week’s recipe, Butter-Toasted Oat Pancakes, you can also add toasty and nutty to the list.</p>
https://www.hawaiitribune-herald.com/2023/12/12/features/say-hello-to-your-new-favorite-pancake-recipe/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-12, from: Hawaii Tribune Harold
<p>U.S. Rep. Elise Stefanik posed a simple question to the presidents of three prominent schools of higher education: Would calling for the genocide of Jews violate each university’s code of conduct?</p>
https://www.hawaiitribune-herald.com/2023/12/12/opinion/when-elise-stefanik-asked-college-presidents-gave-terrible-answers/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-12, from: Hawaii Tribune Harold
<p>Trump wants to be
king, not president</p>
https://www.hawaiitribune-herald.com/2023/12/12/opinion/your-views-for-december-12-9/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-12, from: Hawaii Tribune Harold
<p>Kate Cox, a 31-year-old Dallas-Fort Worth married mother of two, might die. She’s not recovering from some tragic accident, nor does she have some kind of untreatable ailment. The best path to her health is eminently clear and medically proven: an abortion to terminate an unviable 20-week pregnancy, as recommended by her doctors.</p>
https://www.hawaiitribune-herald.com/2023/12/12/opinion/put-up-for-sacrifice-anti-abortion-zealot-ken-paxton-makes-mom-of-two-into-an-example/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-12, from: Hawaii Tribune Harold
<p>Melvin D. Aki, 85, of Hilo died Dec. 1 at home. Born in Ewa Beach, Oahu, he was a retired security guard former the former HT&T Trucking and enjoyed canoe paddling, walking, fishing, watching sports, and doing yard work. Private services. Survived by wife, Jenedina “Jena” Aki of Honomu; daughter, Cherry Ann Aki of Hilo; hanai son, Kimo Aki of Hilo. Arrangements by Dodo Mortuary.</p>
https://www.hawaiitribune-herald.com/2023/12/12/obituaries/obituaries-for-december-12-11/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-12, from: Hawaii Tribune Harold
<p>Jay Tauala-Harris went 2,558 miles to find a home for the next four years.</p>
https://www.hawaiitribune-herald.com/2023/12/12/sports/hawaii-lands-commitments-from-o-lineman-wrs-two-way-player/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-12, from: Hawaii Tribune Harold
<p>Some of the best and most comforting dishes take a long time to cook. With time more precious than ever during the holiday season, meals can add an extra level of pressure. But smart hosts know that a make-ahead plan, with a slow-cooker assist, can be the key to a memorable, relaxing meal.</p>
https://www.hawaiitribune-herald.com/2023/12/12/features/a-slow-cooker-is-the-help-you-need-for-this-years-holiday-dinner/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-12, from: Hawaii Tribune Harold
<p>Greta Gerwig’s “Barbie” dominated the Golden Globe Awards nominations with nine nods for the blockbuster film, including best picture musical or comedy as well as acting nominations for Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling and three of its original songs.</p>
https://www.hawaiitribune-herald.com/2023/12/12/nation-world-news/barbie-leads-golden-globe-nominations-with-9-followed-closely-by-oppenheimer/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-12, from: Hawaii Tribune Harold
<p>Paul Lonyangata made a last-minute uphill push to increase his lead and secure his first Honolulu Marathon victory with an official gun time of 2:15:42.</p>
https://www.hawaiitribune-herald.com/2023/12/12/sports/lonyangata-gives-kenya-another-important-title-at-honolulu-marathon/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-12, from: Hawaii Tribune Harold
<p>PARIS — Organizers of the Paris Olympics say work will resume this week to prepare the surfing venue in Tahiti, after an uproar over damage to a coral reef put efforts on hold. </p>
https://www.hawaiitribune-herald.com/2023/12/12/sports/work-to-resume-at-tahitis-legendary-olympic-surfing-site-after-uproar-over-damage-to-coral-reef/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-12, from: Hawaii Tribune Harold
<p>WASHINGTON — President Joe Biden goes into next year’s election with a vexing challenge: Just as the U.S. economy is getting stronger, people are still feeling horrible about it.</p>
https://www.hawaiitribune-herald.com/2023/12/12/nation-world-news/biden-goes-into-2024-with-the-economy-getting-stronger-but-voters-feel-horrible-about-it/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-12, from: Hawaii Tribune Harold
<p>LAS VEGAS (AP) — A man shot and killed a woman and two children and critically wounded a third child Monday before fatally shooting himself at a Las Vegas apartment complex, authorities said.</p>
https://www.hawaiitribune-herald.com/2023/12/12/nation-world-news/man-shoots-woman-and-3-children-then-himself-at-las-vegas-apartment-complex-police-say/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-12, from: Hawaii Tribune Harold
<p><strong>WAIAKEA 55 - HPA 49</strong></p>
https://www.hawaiitribune-herald.com/2023/12/12/sports/warriors-notch-wins/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-12, from: Hawaii Tribune Harold
<p>MIAMI GARDENS, Fla. — Rookie Will Levis threw for a career-high 327 yards and directed two touchdown drives in the final 4 1/2 minutes, and the Tennessee Titans rallied to stun Miami 28-27 on Monday night, knocking the Dolphins out of the top spot in the AFC. </p>
https://www.hawaiitribune-herald.com/2023/12/12/sports/will-levis-rallies-titans-for-2-late-tds-28-27-win-over-dolphins/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-12, from: Hawaii Tribune Harold
<p>NEW YORK — Shohei Ohtani will receive just $20 million of his $700 million contract with the Los Angeles Dodgers over the next 10 years, with $680 million payable from 2034-43. </p>
https://www.hawaiitribune-herald.com/2023/12/12/sports/ohtanis-dodgers-contract-has-680-million-deferred-lowering-tax-value-to-46-million-annually/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-12, from: Hawaii Tribune Harold
<p>The state Department of Business, Economic Development and Tourism revised its economic growth projection upward to 1.9% for 2023, and lowered its projection for 2024 from 1.5% to 1.3.%</p>
https://www.hawaiitribune-herald.com/2023/12/12/hawaii-news/state-lowers-economic-projection/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-12, from: Hawaii Tribune Harold
<p>DUBAI, United Arab Emirates (AP) — Negotiators from around the world haggled deep into the night to try to strike a deal to halt global warming at United Nations climate talks, with Western powers and vulnerable developing countries worried that a proposed text fell far short of goals to save the planet.</p>
https://www.hawaiitribune-herald.com/2023/12/12/nation-world-news/as-cop28-nears-finish-critics-say-proposal-doesnt-even-come-close-to-whats-needed-on-climate/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-12, from: Hawaii Tribune Harold
<p>PORTLAND, Maine (AP) — A federal program that protects the health and wellbeing of commercial fishermen should be expanded to include substance use disorder and worker fatigue, a group of lawmakers from New England and Alaska said.</p>
https://www.hawaiitribune-herald.com/2023/12/12/nation-world-news/commercial-fishermen-need-more-support-for-substance-abuse-and-fatigue-lawmakers-say/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-12, from: Hawaii Tribune Harold
<p>A 47-year-old Kalapana Black Sands Estates man who held off police attempting to serve a narcotics search warrant at his home late last month is out of custody.</p>
https://www.hawaiitribune-herald.com/2023/12/12/hawaii-news/puna-standoff-suspect-out-on-bail-under-indictment/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-12, from: Hawaii Tribune Harold
<p>Hawaii Care Choices is creating a new tradition to help people grieve and remember lost loved ones during the holiday season.</p>
https://www.hawaiitribune-herald.com/2023/12/12/hawaii-news/public-invited-to-season-of-light/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-12, from: Hawaii Tribune Harold
<p>SAN FRANCISCO — A federal court jury has decided that Google’s Android app store has been protected by anticompetitive barriers that have damaged smartphone consumers and software developers, dealing a blow to a major pillar of a technology empire.</p>
https://www.hawaiitribune-herald.com/2023/12/12/nation-world-news/epic-games-wins-antitrust-lawsuit-against-google-over-barriers-to-its-android-app-store/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-12, from: Hawaii Tribune Harold
<p>WASHINGTON — Special counsel Jack Smith on Monday asked the Supreme Court to take up and rule quickly on whether former President Donald Trump can be prosecuted on charges he plotted to overturn the 2020 election results.</p>
https://www.hawaiitribune-herald.com/2023/12/12/nation-world-news/special-counsel-jack-smith-asks-the-supreme-court-to-rule-quickly-on-whether-trump-can-be-prosecuted/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-12, from: Hawaii Tribune Harold
<p>When The Beatles released “Abbey Road” in September 1969, the seeds of discontent that caused the band’s official split in April 1970 were already sowed.</p>
https://www.hawaiitribune-herald.com/2023/12/12/features/more-than-two-dozen-singers-musicians-to-perform-classic-beatles-album-in-live-show/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-12, from: Hawaii Tribune Harold
<p>Pahala is the first Hawaii Island ZIP code to be fully enabled to receive Hawaiian Telcom’s high-speed fiber internet service.</p>
https://www.hawaiitribune-herald.com/2023/12/12/hawaii-news/pahala-becomes-first-hawaii-island-zip-code-with-full-access-to-hawaiian-telcoms-fiber-internet-service/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-12, from: Hawaii Tribune Harold
<p>Adrian Lee — a Mililani-reared fighter who recently fought in Hilo during the Toughman Hawaii Next Generation season finale — signed his first professional contract last week, inking a deal with ONE Championship.</p>
https://www.hawaiitribune-herald.com/2023/12/12/sports/lee-goes-pro/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-12, from: Raspberry Pi News (.com)
SolarSPELL brings digital libraries to remote, unconnected places via rugged, portable Raspberry Pi-powered devices.
The post SolarSPELL off-grid wireless hotspots appeared first on Raspberry Pi.
https://www.raspberrypi.com/news/solarspell-off-grid-wireless-hotspots/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-12, updated: 2023-12-12, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
The Debian maintainers have identified a problem in kernel 6.1 that can cause corruption on ext4 volumes. As a result, the planned 12.3 release won’t happen.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2023/12/12/kernel_6_1_ext4_corruption/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-12, from: Robert Reich on Substack
The same person who sought Zelensky’s help in digging up dirt on Hunter and Joe.
https://robertreich.substack.com/p/impeaching-biden Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-12, updated: 2023-12-12, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
BlackBerry has decided its plan to split into two separate companies is not a good idea and will instead reorganize itself into two independent divisions.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2023/12/12/blackberry_cancels_split_plan/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-12, from: SCV New (TV Station)
1891 – Actor Buck Jones, a Placerita Canyon and Vasquez Rocks “regular,” born in Indiana [story
https://scvnews.com/today-in-scv-history-dec-12/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-12, from: The Sundail (CSUN student paper)
The Matadors entered the 2023 season with high hopes and expectations after an impressive 2022 run. In 2022, the Matadors posted a 9-6-4 record, and made a playoff run to the Big West semifinals, falling 4-1 to UC Riverside. One of the main goals established by the team was to secure another Big West conference…
https://sundial.csun.edu/177358/sports/2023-matadors-soccer-season-in-review/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-12, updated: 2023-12-13, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Space weather can wreak havoc on electronic systems, but while most folks focus on protecting datacenters or the power grid, a group of UK researchers are warning that relatively mild solar storms could bork train signaling systems. …
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2023/12/12/train_solar_storm/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-12, from: The Sundail (CSUN student paper)
For the first time, in what seems like a long time, there is buzz building about the CSUN men’s basketball team. With a 92-54 win over Bethesda University, a National Christian College Athletic Association school, or NCCAA, this new Matador squad has shown lightyears of improvement in just one off-season. CSUN has to trace their…
https://sundial.csun.edu/177353/sports/column-csun-mens-hoops-heading-to-a-promising-future/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-12, updated: 2023-12-12, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Hundreds of suspected people smugglers have been arrested, and 163 potential victims rescued from servitude, as part of an Interpol-coordinated operation dubbed “Turquesa V” that targeted cyber criminals who lure workers into servitude to carry out their scams.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2023/12/12/interpol_cyberscam_trafficker_action/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-12, updated: 2023-12-12, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
A mere two-and-a-half months after Indonesia imposed a ban on social commerce, made-in-China social media giant TikTok and local super-app company GoTo have announced a “strategic e-commerce partnership” in a form that appears to evade the ban.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2023/12/12/bytedance_tokopedia_deal/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-12, from: Heather Cox Richardson blog
As is sometimes the case in American politics, a bill that many people are likely not paying a great deal of attention to is likely to have enormous impact on the nation’s future. That $110.5 billion national security supplemental package was designed to provide additional funding for Ukraine in its war to fight off Russia’s invasion; security assistance to Israel, primarily for missile defense systems; humanitarian assistance to citizens in Gaza and the West Bank, Ukraine, and elsewhere; funding to replenish U.S. weapon stockpiles; assistance to regional partners in the Indo-Pacific; investments in efforts to stop illegal fentanyl from coming into the U.S. and to dismantle international drug cartels; and investment in U.S. Customs and Border Protection to enhance border security and speed up migrant processing.
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/december-11-2023 Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-12, updated: 2023-12-12, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Chinese private space biz i-Space (not to be confused with Japanese aerospace concern iSpace) has recycled a rocket just 38 days after its previous flight.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2023/12/12/ispace_china_test_success/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-12, from: The Daily Trojan (USC Student Paper)
The flames originated from a shed or garage detached from the complex. The complex itself is not damaged, and there were no injuries.
The post Fire at residential complex contained, LAFD says appeared first on Daily Trojan.
https://dailytrojan.com/2023/12/11/fire-residential-complex/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-12, updated: 2023-12-13, from: Daring Fireball
It’s fun watching this cat-and-mouse game from the sidelines, but if I were Beeper, I wouldn’t want to be playing.
https://daringfireball.net/2023/12/beeper_mini_is_back Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-12, from: Santa Barbara Indenpent News
Verdict rendered against the district for sexual abuse and grooming of students by a former employee and football coach from 2008 to 2011.
The post Santa Barbara Unified School District Found at Fault in $25M Lawsuit appeared first on The Santa Barbara Independent.
https://www.independent.com/2023/12/11/santa-barbara-unified-school-district-found-at-fault-in-25m-lawsuit/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-12, from: Rachel Kwon blog
I spent a lot of time and energy in my life worrying about things I felt like I had to do for one reason or another. Either everyone else was doing the thing, or specific people were pressuring me to do the thing, or I never saw real examples or models of people who didn’t do the thing, etc. At some point I started to realize that, if I really challenged myself, I didn’t have to do some of the things I believed I had to in order to win at life (and I would include the idea of having to “win at life” on this list).
https://kwon.nyc/notes/things-i-dont-have-to-do/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-12, from: The Signal
The College of the Canyons board of trustees is scheduled to vote at Wednesday’s regular meeting on a community member’s request to have the board instruct the chancellor to sign a statement of support for Israel. According to a Nov. 9 letter sent to COC Chancellor Dianne Van Hook and board President Edel Alonso, Universities […]
The post <strong>COC board to consider statement of support for Israel</strong> appeared first on Santa Clarita Valley Signal.
https://signalscv.com/2023/12/coc-board-to-consider-statement-of-support-for-israel/ Save to Pocket
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2023-12-12, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
Jezebel is back.
https://jezebel.com/hey-were-back-1851088809 Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-12, from: Heatmap News
It didn’t attract a lot of attention, but for a few months, it looked like the United Nations climate process might break down.
There, process is substance: One of the most important acts every year is the selection of the next country to run the Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, or COP. This distinction normally rotates among the UN’s five regional country groups; next year, a country in the “Eastern Europe” group is due to host. All the members of a group must unanimously agree on which country will get to host.
This is a highly contingent way to decide who gets to host a climate conference. Really, the entire schema of UN regional groups represents a hangover of Cold War geopolitics that is now indefinitely unchangeable. (The “Western Europe” group is essentially the early members of NATO; it includes such notably non-western-European countries as Turkey, the United States, and — hilariously — Australia.)
The “Eastern Europe” group, meanwhile, amounts to more or less the former members of the Warsaw Pact. For obvious reasons, these countries cannot agree on a consensus choice in 2023. Russia, the group’s largest member, was not amenable to holding the COP in any eastern Europe NATO member state, such as Poland, Latvia, or Finland. The eastern European NATO members — as well as Ukraine, which is also in the UN regional group — were similarly opposed to holding the COP in Russia.
That meant that attention focused on the group’s countries in the Caucasus, at the edge of central Asia: Georgia, Azerbaijan, and Armenia. Yet difficulties presented themselves here too. Azerbaijan successfully seized an Armenian exclave earlier this year, evicting up to 120,000 Armenians as part of a campaign described as ethnic cleansing. Armenia blocked any Azeri bid to host the COP.
For the first time in the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change’s history, no country would have been able to lead COP the following year. Geopolitics had seemingly broken the consensus mechanism that makes the climate conference work.
This amounted to more than just a deficiency in party planning. It would have forced Bonn, Germany — the home of the UNFCC’s permanent headquarters — to host COP29, a kind of “break in case of emergency” default option. And it would have allowed the United Arab Emirates, a petrostate that has reportedly used the COP to make oil deals, to retain the conference presidency for at least another year.
That didn’t happen. Late last week, Armenia lifted its block of Azerbaijan’s bid, and the two countries mutually released prisoners in a gesture of good will. (Their rapprochement happened suspiciously close to President Vladimir Putin’s visit to the U.A.E.) Next year’s COP will seemingly happen in Baku, the Azeri capital.
But just because the COP process didn’t break doesn’t mean that it’s not being stretched. All is not well with the COP. During this year’s conference, a picture emerged of a COP being tested by a more rivalrous, conflict-prone world. Geopolitics, the heightened importance of climate change, and the sheer size of the conference have transformed the event into something that it was never meant to be.
This year, more than 100,000 people attended the COP. It was held at Dubai’s opulent Expo City, the Disney World-style convention campus initially built for the 2020 World Expo, the modern successor to World’s Fairs. Hundreds of nonprofit groups and companies, as well as more than 190 countries, ran public pavilions that advertised their climate accomplishments and views on decarbonization. Negotiators divided into different blocs: China and the United States, oil-producing states and small island nations, the West and the rest.
It wasn’t always like this. When the first COP was held in Berlin in 1995, the world was in a very different era, Lee Beck, the senior director for Europe and the Middle East at the Clean Air Task Force, told me. It was “the peak of multilateralism, followed by relative geopolitical stability and peace,” she said. The United States and the broader West set the agenda for global events.
“In the last two years — others would say the writing was on the wall as early as 2014 — geopolitical fragmentation really is visible,” she said. “You’re really pushing the limits of multilateralism at this one. One of the cracks is we’re unable to agree where the COP even will be.”
But geopolitics are not the only force stretching COP to the limit. Another is the sheer size of the event itself.
There used to be “big COPs” and “small COPs”: COP21, the 2015 meeting where the Paris Agreement was finalized, was a “big COP,” but the following year’s conference in Marrakech, Morocco, was a fairly minor one. Even COP21 was less than half the size of this year’s COP. And in one possible read, this year should have been a smaller COP — the biggest to-dos were formally launching the Loss and Damage fund and writing the Global Stocktake report, a kind of report card on the world’s climate progress (or lack thereof).
But small COPs don’t seem to happen any more. Since the pandemic ended and COP26 took place in Glasgow, Scotland, COPs have swollen in size, creating the age of the new “mega-COP.” More than 100,000 people attended the conference this year, making it by far the biggest COP ever. It was more than twice the size of last year’s confab in Sharm al-Sheikh, Egypt, which was previously the biggest COP ever. Most of those attendees had nothing to do with the negotiations ostensibly at the center of the conference — they were investors, technologists, scholars, scientists, or experts — and instead made up a de facto global trade show on climate solutions.
COP is now so big and climate is now so important that even the lack of news about the conference can generate news. When President Joe Biden declined to attend this year’s conference, The New York Times push-alerted it.
But there are possibilities that could improve the situation. One of them might be that COP simply becomes so unmanageable that it has to scale back. Few cities have the spare capacity to house an extra 100,000 visitors for 12 days. New York City, for instance, only has about 123,000 hotel rooms total. If COP were to keep growing, the problem would only get harder. When 150,000 people descended on San Francisco for Salesforce’s annual conference in 2015, the company docked a cruise ship in the bay to provide an extra thousand rooms.
There are solutions, Beck said. She noted this was the first year that every continent had held its own Climate Week: a smaller event focusing on more region-specific decarbonization challenges. This COP has also seen the emergence of country coalitions that rally around different issues or approaches. The set of countries that backed a pledge to triple renewable capacity, for instance, is different from the smaller coalition that wanted to triple nuclear capacity. These smaller, more sector-specific coalitions may have more ability to actually decarbonize and address climate change, she said.
For all these challenges, perhaps the biggest miracle is that the UNFCC process works at all, Eve Tamme, a former climate negotiator for the European Commission, told me.
“The UNFCCC process is based on consensus between almost 200 countries. Judging based on the complexity of the issue at hand and the divergence of views among the countries, it seems impossible that such a process could deliver anything at all,” she said. Even when you follow the negotiations closely, it may seem like there’s barely any movement at all, she said.
“But then again, we got the Kyoto Protocol,” she said. “And we got the Paris Agreement. So while it may look broken in the short term, somehow this dysfunctional process can still deliver.”
https://heatmap.news/climate/cop28-cop29-uae-azerbaijan-armenia Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-12, from: The Signal
Hart district expected to approve first interim financial report Local school boards in the Santa Clarita Valley will be holding their annual organizational meetings this week to elect the new board officers for each respective school district. The Newhall and Saugus Union school districts will be holding their meetings on Tuesday while the William S. […]
The post <strong>School boards to hold organizational meetings</strong> appeared first on Santa Clarita Valley Signal.
https://signalscv.com/2023/12/school-boards-to-hold-organizational-meetings/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-12, updated: 2023-12-12, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Epic Games has won its antitrust battle against Google.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2023/12/12/epic_v_google_epic_wins/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-12, from: Dave Winer’s Scripting News
Former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy has officially pledged his fealty to former President Donald Trump in the 2024 presidential election — despite some concerns about Trump’s messaging.
http://scripting.com/2023/12/11/023402.html?title=aLighterNote Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-12, from: Santa Barbara Indenpent News
Santa Barbara is one of the most expensive zip codes in the United States.
The post Pay? Meh. appeared first on The Santa Barbara Independent.
https://www.independent.com/2023/12/11/pay-meh/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-12, updated: 2023-12-12, from: Daring Fireball
https://www.theverge.com/2023/11/20/23969690/google-spotify-android-billing-commission-secret-deal Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-12, updated: 2023-12-12, from: Daring Fireball
https://www.theverge.com/23994174/epic-google-trial-jury-verdict-monopoly-google-play Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-12, updated: 2023-12-12, from: Daring Fireball
https://www.apple.com/legal/privacy/law-enforcement-guidelines-us.pdf Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-12, updated: 2023-12-12, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Many US businesses may be required to assist in government-directed surveillance – depending upon which of two reform bills before Congress is approved.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2023/12/12/setction_702_renewal/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-12, from: Santa Barbara Indenpent News
The Santa Barbara County Fire Department’s Fire Investigations Unit is actively investigating a series of wildland fires that occurred at La Purisima Mission State Park on December 6, 2023, around 4 p.m.
The post Public Assistance Requested in La Purisima Mission State Park Fires Investigation appeared first on The Santa Barbara Independent.
https://www.independent.com/2023/12/11/public-assistance-requested-in-la-purisima-mission-state-park-fires-investigation/ Save to Pocket
@Tomosino’s Mastodon feed (date: 2023-12-12, from: Tomosino’s Mastodon feed)
I forgot to tell you all, Godzilla Minus One is great. If you like the big guy, go see this one.
https://tilde.zone/@tomasino/111564790015288808 Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-12, from: VOA News USA
Berlin — Holocaust survivors from around the globe will mark the start of the fifth day of Hanukkah together with a virtual ceremony as Jews worldwide worry about the Israel-Hamas war and a spike of antisemitism in Europe, the United States and elsewhere.
Survivors can join an online ceremony of a menorah lighting Monday night to pay tribute to the 6 million European Jews killed by the Nazis in the Holocaust.
Several dozen survivors were also expected to gather in-person for a menorah lighting at Jerusalem’s Western Wall — the holiest place where Jews can pray.
“Holocaust survivors somehow overcame the depravity of concentration camps, death camps and killing centers, among other horrors, to become our living exemplars, providing a roadmap on how light can overcome darkness,” Greg Schneider, the executive vice president of the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, said in remarks released to The Associated Press ahead of the ceremony.
The New York-based conference is organizing the event in observance of International Holocaust Survivors Night.
“Their resilience, their strength and their fortitude leave a truly indelible light in this world,” Schneider added.
Hanukkah, also known as Judaism’s festival of lights, marks the rededication of the Temple in Jerusalem in the 2nd century B.C., after a small group of Jewish fighters known as the Maccabees liberated it from occupying Syrian forces.
This year’s holiday comes as many Jews feel traumatized by Hamas’ deadly Oct. 7 attack on Israel that killed 1,200 people and in which the militants took some 240 as hostages. Israel responded with a bombing campaign and a ground offensive that has so far killed more than 18,000 people in Gaza, according to the Hamas-run territory’s Health Ministry. The ministry does not differentiate between civilian and combatant deaths.
Several celebrities and world leaders spoke about the attack in messages that were to be shown at the ceremony. German Chancellor Olaf Scholz said “Hamas’ terrorist attack on Israel has affected us all deeply. Something of abyssal evil broke free that day,” according to comments released to the AP.
“The perpetrators’ motive is clear: They wanted to hit Israel,” the chancellor added. “They wanted to murder Jews. In its repugnant brutality and abhorrence, however, the terror is also directed against humanity itself.”
Scholz, addressing Holocaust survivors, said he tries “to imagine how much the images from Israel, how much antisemitic hatred on the internet and on the streets around the world must be hitting you, of all people right in the heart.”
“This … pains me a lot,” he said.
The virtual event, which starts at 8 p.m. Monday in Germany, will also include musical performances, celebrity guests and messages from Holocaust survivors from around the globe.
Leon Weintraub, a Holocaust survivor from Sweden, who was in Israel during the Hamas attack, recounted what he experienced that day.
“On Oct. 7, I woke up from the sirens in the center of Tel Aviv. All at once I was again in September 1939 when the Nazis invaded Poland,” he said. “A terrible feeling, a shiver, a feeling of dread to be again in a war.”
“We celebrate Chanukah now, the festival of lights. I hope that the light will also bring the people enlightenment,” Weintraub added. “That people will rethink and look at us people of Jewish descent as normal, equal. Human beings.”
American comedian Billy Crystal, actress Jamie Lee Curtis and actor Jason Alexander will also speak at the event, and there will also be a by a musical performance from Grammy and Tony Award-winning singer Barry Manilow, as well as the cast of Harmony.
https://www.voanews.com/a/holocaust-survivors-mark-hanukkah-amid-worries-of-israel-hamas-war-antisemitism-/7394182.html Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-12, from: The Canyons News (COC student paper)
Have you been in Santa Clarita without any water and had to…
The post A new water filtration store opens for the community in Canyon Country appeared first on Canyons News.
https://canyonsnews.com/water-filtration-store-opened-for-the-community-in-canyon-country/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-12, from: The Signal
Members of the community braved the high wind warning and 53-degree weather on Friday night to witness the annual Valencia Marketplace tree lighting. “Now you know how it is where I live,” said Santa Claus. Levels on levels of seats were filled with not only bodies, but also anticipation to see the approximately 15-foot tree […]
The post <strong>Valencia Marketplace flips the switch </strong> appeared first on Santa Clarita Valley Signal.
https://signalscv.com/2023/12/valencia-marketplace-flips-the-switch/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-12, from: OS News
Today, Apple pushed out the public releases of iOS 17.2, iPadOS 17.2, macOS Sonoma 14.2, watchOS 10.2, and tvOS 17.2. iOS 17.2 and iPadOS 17.2’s flagship feature is the new Journal app, which Apple teased when it first introduced iOS 17 earlier. The app mimics several existing popular journaling apps in the App Store from third-party developers but leverages data from your Photos, workouts, and other Apple apps to make journaling suggestions. Other features include the ability to tap a “catch-up arrow” to scroll to the first missed message in a conversation in Messages, the ability to take spatial video photos for later viewing on Vision Pro, and several tweaks and additions to the Weather app. ↫ Samuel Axon for Ars Technica Makers of journalling applications for iOS are not going to be in a good mood today, I reckon.
https://www.osnews.com/story/138057/apple-releases-ios-17-2-and-macos-14-2/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-12, from: The Signal
The William S. Hart Union High School District governing board heard a presentation at last week’s board meeting that details what it would cost to add air conditioning units to each of the district’s seven high school gyms. The governing board ultimately decided to table the talks as members were unsure of where the funding […]
The post <strong>Hart district tables talks on A/C for gyms</strong> appeared first on Santa Clarita Valley Signal.
https://signalscv.com/2023/12/hart-district-tables-talks-on-a-c-for-gyms/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-12, updated: 2023-12-12, from: The LAist
The Salton Sea contains a third of the world’s lithium, but the exposed bed lake also contains heavy metals and pesticides which could threaten nearby residents.
https://laist.com/news/climate-environment/your-future-ev-could-come-from-the-salton-sea-but-at-what-cost Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-12, from: VOA News USA
https://www.voanews.com/a/harvard-faces-pressure-to-respond-to-president-s-congressional-testimony/7394176.html Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-12, from: VOA News USA
https://www.voanews.com/a/house-to-vote-on-formalizing-biden-impeachment-inquiry-/7394164.html Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-12, from: OS News
NetDrive is a DOS device driver that allows you to access a remote disk image hosted by another machine as though it was a local device with an assigned drive letter. The remote disk image can be a floppy disk image or a hard drive image. ↫ Michael B. Brutman An incredibly useful tool for modern-day DOS work.
https://www.osnews.com/story/138055/netdrive-access-remote-disk-images-in-dos/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-12, from: OS News
Porporo is an experimental operating system specification for Varvara, written in TAL and ANSI C. This is a work in progress, for more details follow the development during december. ↫ rabbits So, what is Varvara? Varvara is a specification for devices communicating with the Uxn CPU intended to run little audio and visual programs. ↫ Varvara official website …so, what is the Uxn CPU? This one-page computer, programmable in Uxntal, was designed with an implementation-first mindset and a focus on creating portable graphical tools and games. It lives at the heart of the Varvara personal computer. ↫ Official Uxn CPU website I have no idea what any of this means, but I feel like there’s something incredibly cool going on here.
https://www.osnews.com/story/138053/porporo-an-experimental-operating-system-specification-for-varvara/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-12, from: San Jose Mercury News
“He wanted us to assault the house. He was waiting for us to assault the house with the intentions then of killing us and also of being killed by us.”
https://www.mercurynews.com/2023/12/11/pleasant-hill-leaders-defend-police-decision-to-disengage-with-barricaded-ex-detective/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-12, from: SCV New (TV Station)
Commitment to a literal six-day creation has marked The Master’s University since its founding
https://scvnews.com/feb-24-tmus-30th-annual-creation-summit/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-12, updated: 2023-12-13, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
+Comment Broadcom’s VMware Cloud Foundation Division has announced what it’s described as “a dramatic simplification of our product portfolio,” plus the end of perpetual licenses and a move to subscriptions – some at half their previous price.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2023/12/12/vmware_broadcom_licensing_changes/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-12, from: San Jose Mercury News
A condominium located in the 600 block of Forest Avenue in Palo Alto has new owners. The 1,392-square-foot property, built in 1977, was sold on Nov. 20, 2023.
https://www.mercurynews.com/2023/12/11/condominium-in-palo-alto-sells-for-1-7-million-2/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-12, from: San Jose Mercury News
East Bay Times Letters to the Editor for Dec. 12, 2023
https://www.mercurynews.com/2023/12/11/letters-1525/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-12, from: San Jose Mercury News
The referral by Supervisor Otto Lee aims to streamline access to the TRUST program and expand the reach of the civilian-run program to people wary of a police response to psychiatric emergencies.
https://www.mercurynews.com/2023/12/11/south-bay-proposal-would-create-direct-line-for-non-police-mental-health-response/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-12, from: SCV New (TV Station)
Calling all William S. Hart Union High School District performers, students, teachers and administrators! WiSH is excited to introduce Hart District’s Got Talent Variety Showcase
https://scvnews.com/wish-foundation-seeking-performers-for-hart-district-talent-show/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-12, from: San Jose Mercury News
“We’re in the entertainment business and stuff like that is great. I may have to respond with something of my own, so we’ll see how it is.”
https://www.mercurynews.com/2023/12/11/notebook-why-the-warriors-need-more-jonathan-kuminga-steve-kerrs-reaction-to-suns-dj-remix/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-12, from: San Jose Mercury News
While the 49ers (10-3) are not celebrating their newfound stature as the NFC’s potential No. 1 playoff seed, they are happy to welcome back cornerback Jason Verrett.
https://www.mercurynews.com/2023/12/11/shanahan-downplays-49ers-move-to-no-1-seed-cornerback-jason-verrett-returns/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-12, from: San Jose Mercury News
Lawsuit includes alleged nine-page “slave contract.”
https://www.mercurynews.com/2023/12/11/bay-area-ceo-accused-in-lawsuit-of-enslaving-assistant-taking-her-into-dark-abyss-of-sexual-horror/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-12, from: SCV New (TV Station)
College of the Canyons traveled to San Diego Mesa College recently, snapping a five-game losing streak by bringing home an 83-77 double-overtime victory.
https://scvnews.com/cougars-snap-five-game-losing-streak-at-san-diego-mesa/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-12, from: San Jose Mercury News
Mercury News Letters to the Editor for Dec. 12, 2023
https://www.mercurynews.com/2023/12/11/letters-1524/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-12, updated: 2023-12-12, from: Go language blog
deadcode is a new command to help identify functions that cannot be called.
https://go.dev/blog/deadcode Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-12, from: PostgreSQL News
Dear Community Members,
We are excited to announce the release of IvorySQL 3.0, a significant update to our PostgreSQL database project with enhanced Oracle compatibility features.
initdb -m Feature: Choose between
postgres mode or oracle mode for flexible
database management.
For a detailed list of all the new features and fixes, please visit our release notes at IvorySQL GitHub Releases and IvorySQL Release Page.
A huge thank you to all our users who contributed patches, reported bugs, and proposed new features. The names of all contributors to this release are listed in the release notes.
IvorySQL thrives on community contributions. We warmly welcome your ideas, feature requests, or patches. Please share your contributions on our GitHub page.
We look forward to your feedback on IvorySQL 3.0 and your continued support in making IvorySQL even better.
Best regards,
IvorySQL Dev Team
https://www.postgresql.org/about/news/ivorysql-30-released-2764/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-12, from: PostgreSQL News
Pgpool Global Development Group is pleased to announce the availability of Pgpool-II 4.5.0. This is the first stable release of Pgpool-II 4.5.x.
Pgpool-II is a tool to add useful features to PostgreSQL, including:
For more information, please see the website.
V4.5 contains new features and enhancements, including:
You can download it from here.
Please take a look at release notes.
https://www.postgresql.org/about/news/pgpool-ii-450-is-now-released-2763/ Save to Pocket
date: 2023-12-12, from: PostgreSQL News
The PostgreSQL pgJDBC project has a new release. This release deals with a few regressions.
See full release notes
Many thanks to all who contributed.
The project is located in our Github Repo
https://www.postgresql.org/about/news/postgresql-jdbc-4271-released-2765/ Save to Pocket