"Scientifically known as Palaeoloxodon antiquus, the towering animals were the largest land mammals of the Pleistocene, standing more than 13 feet (4 meters) high. Despite this imposing size, the now-extinct straight-tusked elephants were routinely hunted and systematically butchered for their meat by Neanderthals, according to a new study of the remains of 70 of the animals found at a site in central Germany known as Neumark-Nord, near the city of Halle."
"The bright pink bird won supporters beyond New York City as people hoped the young king pigeon, dubbed Flamingo, would survive its ordeal of being dyed with chemicals and then released into the wild… But it was not to be: The Wild Bird Fund rescue group said on Tuesday that Flamingo died roughly a week after a rescuer found him in Manhattan's Madison Square Park."
"The proposed rule involves a section of the federal law that offers exceptions to its broad prohibitions on harming species listed as endangered or threatened. It allows 'taking' — killing — individual plants or animals for scientific purposes, or to preserve a species through steps such as establishing new populations."
"'Killer whale mothers pay a really huge cost to take care of their sons,' says Weiss. That cost is that they have fewer offspring. 'And they do this throughout their son's life and never really stop paying that cost to keep their sons alive.'"
"Mysterious Russian satellites are now breaking apart in low-Earth orbit… 'This suggests to me that perhaps these events are the result of a design error.'" Hey Ivan, stop leaving your trash all over the place.
"An uncrewed Russian spacecraft docked at the International Space Station has lost cabin pressure, but the incident does not pose a danger to the station's crew, the Russian space corporation said on Saturday."
"President Joe Biden sparked a firestorm in energy circles when he said in Tuesday’s State of the Union address that the United States will need oil 'for at least another decade.'"
Jason Sanford's long awaited article on the AI "revolution"… "I choose to be optimistic about all this. As Maurice Broaddus recently told me, 'The market has always been horrible for writers and artists. But the way it's been terrible changes over time. What we do as writers and artists is we adapt. We change. We thrive." So many thoughts that it could take several books to explain them all. In general I agree with much of Jason's reporting here and his extrapolation. There are some missing aspects here (which is unsurprising, again, this is a subject that could take an Encyclopedia Britanica amount of space and still not cover everything). Humans are making the same mistakes we've always made, mostly in thinking "this is New!" What we are experiencing is the start of another industrial revolution. Most people are familiar with the 2 recognized periods of this, steam and electricity, but there have been thousands of smaller revolutions. And just like the mass manufacturing brought about by the electrical revolution in the late 1800's spawned the Art Nouveau and "craft" response, they where then subsumed into Art Deco, and finally Modernism and Brutalism. In graphic design I've seen two of these (desktop publishing and mass market digital photography) and benefited from a third (computerization). Publishing has recently gone through the revolution that self-publishing brought. So let me jump ahead in the timeline here. We're currently at the stage of Salon and the Salon des Refusés. The Salon will steadfastly resist the changes brought, decry the "loss of creativity, style, craftsmanship, and importance of the individual" and in twenty years the Salon des Refusés will have become the standard Salon, against which there will be a new revolt and the cycle will continue. These machine learning tools are crappy, but they'll get better. They will appeal because of their "democratization" and (more importantly) low cost. There will be a valiant struggle against adoption, the cry of the civilized against the decadence and crassness. There will be the class who see's the opportunities provided by the new tools and will learn to use them. Eventually the tools will be adopted wholesale and the general public will never understand what the big deal was anyway while accepting lower grade output as the height of what is possible. While the factories producing buggy whips have crumbled into dust there is a still a dedicated workforce that cranks them out as a cottage industry and sells into specialty markets (the Amish for instance). As the middle of the old joke goes, "Any technology created before you're 30 is exciting and new and you can probably make a living with it." And us olds will go to our grave and take the knowledge of what was the standards of quality at one time with us, and the young people will shake their heads at our delusions.
"Google’s much-hyped new AI chatbot tool Bard, which has yet to be released to the public, is already being called out for an inaccurate response it produced in a demo this week… In the demo, which was posted by Google on Twitter, a user asks Bard: 'What new discoveries from the James Webb Space Telescope can I tell my 9 year old about?' Bard responds with a series of bullet points, including one that reads: 'JWST took the very first pictures of a planet outside of our own solar system.'" Garbage in, garbage out.
"First out of the gate among big tech companies with a publicly accessible search chatbot, Microsoft executives said this week they had been hard at work on the project since last summer. But the excitement around ChatGPT brought new urgency." Skynet's greatest power, it seems, is its ability to lie to us.
"Employees showed Musk internal data regarding engagement with his account along with a Google Trends chart. Last April, they told him, Musk was at “peak” popularity in search rankings, indicated by a score of '100.' Today, he’s at a score of nine… 'You’re fired, you’re fired,' Musk told the engineer." The "stable genius" at work.
A great twitter thread about the possibility of H5N1 becoming a major threat. Unfortunately the author doesn't seem to have factored in the anti-tax/anti-science brigade and how broken the health system is after COVID into her calculations. But it's a good rundown on the state of where we are vis-a-vis this virus.v
"But 17 months before her three-day ordeal, Tennova had outsourced its emergency rooms to American Physician Partners, a medical staffing company owned by private equity investors. APP employs fewer doctors in its ERs as one of its cost-saving initiatives to increase earnings… This staffing strategy has permeated hospitals, and particularly emergency rooms, that seek to reduce their top expense: physician labor. While diagnosing and treating patients was once doctors' domain, they are increasingly being replaced by nurse practitioners and physician assistants, collectively known as 'midlevel practitioners,' who can perform many of the same duties and generate much of the same revenue for less than half the pay." And it's not just doctors, and it's not just ERs. Lean does not work in service industries, and the creators of that business model specifically called out healthcare as a place their philosophies would never work (and should never be tried).
"During that three-week wait – a wait they had to endure only because of the Ohio law – the risk to Beth of potentially deadly complications grew. Their ability to try to have another baby was delayed, and their 'agony' couldn’t end, Beth said." (Grokked from John Scalzi)
"The Walt Disney Co. announced plans Wednesday to cut about 4% of its entire workforce. That means layoffs for 7,000 employees… The company's stock increased immediately after the announcement, which was expected."
"The average contract interest rate for 30-year fixed-rate mortgages with conforming loan balances ($726,200 or less) decreased to 6.18% from 6.19%, with points falling to 0.64 from 0.65 (including the origination fee) for loans with a 20% down payment. That rate was 3.83% the same week one year ago."
"At a camp for displaced people inside the municipal stadium in downtown Gaziantep, in southeast Turkey, families devastated by this week's magnitude 7.8 earthquake say they are struggling to survive. In a camp set up by Turkey's disaster relief arm, and in makeshift settlements in the fields around it, survivors of the quake say they do not have enough food, water, heating or basic amenities to keep themselves alive."
"Australia's Defense Department will remove surveillance cameras made by Chinese Communist Party-linked companies from its buildings, the government said Thursday after the U.S. and Britain made similar moves." Here's the thing, you can check the equipment to see where it may be sending data. You can monitor its traffic. You can examine the electronics. But this sounds like mostly it's over the fear that the Chinese government may have installed a Trojan Horse.
"Miller worries about China as a rising threat to the U.S., but questioned how much intelligence could be gained from a balloon. China’s bigger threat, he said, is to the U.S. economy. Like many throughout the country, Miller wonders if stricter laws are needed to bar farmland sales to foreign nationals so power over agriculture and the food supply doesn’t end up in the wrong hands."
"Ramzan Kadyrov, a key ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin, has begun rattling off threats about attacking Poland after Ukraine… Kadyrov, the head of Chechnya, suggested Monday that Russia should 'denazify and demilitarize' Poland next." It's always one more thing.
"The Biden administration on Tuesday approved a $10 billion arms sale to NATO ally Poland as Russia’s war in neighboring Ukraine rages… The State Department notified Congress that the sale comprises mid-range, mobile HIMARS artillery rocket systems, associated ammunition and related equipment." And the arms buildup begins.
"The president of SpaceX revealed the company has taken active steps to prevent Ukrainian forces from using the critical Starlink satellite technology with Ukrainian drones that are a key component of their fight against Russia." Wow, that's some pretty quick retconning. And the CEO of Starlink saying she didn't even know Starlink could be used for military comms and directing drones? Is everybody in the top echelon of Elon's companies as dumb as he is?
"An internal investigation by the Oregon Liquor and Cannabis Commission, obtained by The Associated Press via a public records request Wednesday, concluded that Executive Director Steve Marks and five other agency officials had diverted sought-after bourbons, including Pappy Van Winkle’s 23-year-old whiskey, for their personal use."
"A reporter was pushed to the ground, handcuffed and arrested for trespassing while covering a news conference about the derailment of a train carrying toxic chemicals in Ohio."
"The Cardinal Local Schools Board of Education on Wednesday announced it will allow the play (The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee) to proceed, a little over two weeks after it made the controversial decision to cancel the production because it was deemed 'vulgar' and not 'family-friendly.'" The culture wars comes to Middlefield, Ohio.
"One of Tennessee’s most influential Republican lawmakers says the state should stop accepting the nearly $1.8 billion of federal K-12 education dollars that help provide support for low-income students, English learners and students with disabilities." It's easy when your a sociopath and don't give a damn about the poor and people with disabilities.
"A Missouri man who sought to ban several LGBTQ books from schools for depicting sexual content is now facing a felony charge of second-degree child molestation… Accusations against Utterback, according to court documents, describe separate instances in 2020 in which he allegedly touched a 12-year-old girl under her clothes and rubbed a teenager’s leg underneath her jeans. Another case alleged in 2021 that he showed pornographic video footage to a child starting from when she was around 4 years old." Another case in the "every allegation is a confession" group.
"Former Twitter officials denied claims the U.S. government and Joe Biden's presidential campaign were involved in the social network's controversial, short-lived decision to block users from sharing a New York Post story about Biden's son Hunter just weeks before the 2020 election."
"Republicans are living in a reality distortion field… That is the only conclusion that can be drawn from Wednesday’s hearing on Capitol Hill where GOP lawmakers continued to push a factually unsupported narrative about the federal government secretly colluding with Twitter to censor the New York Post’s Hunter Biden laptop story in 2020."
"Fewer than five months after Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis' administration flew about 50 migrants from Texas to Martha's Vineyard, Mass. – a move that ended up costing the state around $1.5 million and is the subject of legal challenges – the Republican supermajority in the legislature has granted the administration another $10 million to transport migrants from other states."
"After four years of punishing the people of Florida with actions largely meant to increase his personal power, Governor Ron DeSantis appears to be bringing his corrosive brand of politics to a presidential run. But DeSantis only looks like an even remotely reasonable or centrist candidate when viewed in a line-up between his gubernatorial predecessor Rick Scott and ex-U.S. catastrophe Donald Trump. That he sits comfortably between the two, accompanied by a host of extremists, should be cause for alarm, not suggestions that he is anything other than an authoritarian."
"But there are reasons why the narrative that Republicans want to cut Social Security and Medicare sticks. Look at recent history — President George W. Bush tried to privatize Social Security, former House Speaker Paul Ryan's budget proposed sweeping changes to Medicare, and even though former President Trump largely tabled serious talk of entitlement cuts, his budget did call for cuts to some aspects of Social Security and Medicaid."
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