thomasjkenney
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ht Mr Martyanov:
Russia reignites space race with historic lunar mission
All previous probes have landed in the equatorial region of Earth’s satellite. If successful, Luna-25 would arrive two days before India’s Chandrayaan-3, for a historic first landing in the rugged polar terrain.
Luna-25 is the first Moon probe made in modern Russia, entirely from domestic components. The USSR launched 24 official ‘Luna’ missions between September 1958 and August 1976.
The probe’s objective is to carry out scientific research in the southern polar region of the Moon. Luna-25 is equipped with instruments for analyzing the lunar soil, plasma, and dust components for the presence of rare minerals. The designated landing site is near the Boguslavsky Crater and the mission is scheduled to run for one year.
If the US is actually doing these things, they’re doing a piss-poor job of publicizing it. We get a Star Wars/Star Trek version of space endeavor, when the reality is rather harsh and gritty but very interesting. Have we become simply a spoiler in all things? Compete-Defeat-MoveOn? A globalist Swiper? (That is a Bill Gates tactic, BTW.)
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A ham-fisted attempt to ‘brain drain’ Taiwan?
TSMC Faces Opposition to 500 Taiwanese Worker Visas for Arizona Fab
The “Stand with American Workers” campaign, backed by Arizona Pipe Trades 469 (a labor union), Revitalize Arizona (a PAC), and Residents for Accountability (a PAC) is urging residents to contact local congressional and senate leaders. They demand that TSMC’s foreign worker visas be denied, insisting that the company should employ locals, especially given the CHIPs Act’s implication of predominant U.S. employment.
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I just lost a comment that took me a while and a bit of emotional energy to author. Gone. Roughly, comment was @noirette’s obsv re: poison every damn well. My comment was re: cultural touchstones and erasure.
I’d be in favor of our host doing a home-brew blog, which would probably require a slower pace of interaction (keep comments in offline db, only process them once/twice a day, nightly site refresh from an offline copy, other ‘slow roll’ tactics).
@oroboros re: anarchy
Steve Martin bit from the ’70s:
STEVE: Let’s all recite The Nonconformists’ Oath!
STEVE: Ready?
STEVE: “I promise to be different!”
CROWD: I promise to be different!
STEVE: “I promise to be unique!”
CROWD: I promise to be unique!
STEVE: “I promise not to repeat things other people say!”
CROWD: I pr… huh? mumble mumble mumble@Tbear re: “Another comment has been blocked and patience with the site is evaporating at a great rate. Please explain what and why this is happening. The site is quickly becoming a second rate place. Is it being done to your site or is it the site itself?”
It is a script injection from one of the ad-pipes. If you use a script blocker (even temporarily) it will stop. I tried my vanilla Firefox on my Android phone yesterday, and got a redirect. I then installed uBlock Origin and did nothing else, and the problem stopped.
If you donate(ed) I’m sure our host wouldn’t mind a temporary dip in the ad statistics while this blows over.
From my perspective, this is like getting ‘sagebrush pinstripes’ on a shiny new Ford F-250. The vehicle is loved enough to be driven, yet feared enough to be resisted.
NOTE: I had successfully posted this, saw it show up in the thread, edited it to add a link, and it deleted my post, retroactively blocking me. HAHAHA!!!!
Following is a CalTrans CHP report. There are a few of these (full burn) per day. IIRC, the unibody of these BMWs is aluminum. So the lithium burns, then ignites the aluminum?
Bold is mine, order is date descending (new at top).
CHP Incident 230729FR00206
Jul 29 2023 10:58AM
1179-Trfc Collision-1141 Enrt
I5 S / KK LINEJul 29 2023 12:55PM [79] [CHP] has closed their incident [230729BF00128]
Jul 29 2023 12:31PM [78] [Rotation Request Comment] 1039 JandD TOWING KETTLEMAN **(XXX) XXX-XXXX** [Shared]
Jul 29 2023 12:29PM [76] A88-003 40-50FT OFF RDWY FOR 1185 [Shared]
Jul 29 2023 12:29PM [75] A88-003 START 1185 FB FOR COMPLETE BURN [Shared]
Jul 29 2023 12:24PM [72] 88-S3 ADV CT LANES OPEN [Shared]
Jul 29 2023 12:22PM [71] 88-S3 SMOKE NEG 1125 REOPENING #2 LN [Shared]
Jul 29 2023 11:50AM [63] 88-3 ADVSD WAS #2 LANE AND THEY ARE 97 [Shared]
Jul 29 2023 11:48AM [62] [Notification] [CHP]-CAN UNIT ADVISED IF #2 LANE IS CLOSED OR SHOULDER, THERE IS NOT A #3 LANE AT THIS SECTION [Shared]
Jul 29 2023 11:36AM [61] A88-003 SHUTTING DOWN 3 LANE [Shared]
Jul 29 2023 11:27AM [56] A88-003 97 ACTIVATE TMC SIGNS SB TRAFFIC LARGE FIRE IN ORCHARD DUE TO CRASH [Shared]
Jul 29 2023 11:11AM [45] [Appended, 11:17:01] [19] KINGS CO FIRE IS ENRT
Jul 29 2023 11:09AM [22] 1039 KINGS CO FIRE [Shared]
Jul 29 2023 11:09AM [21] VEH IS FULLY ENGULFED [Shared]
Jul 29 2023 11:08AM [20] BFCC PLZ BOL FOR WHI BMW SUV / CAUSED TC DUE TO HV AND 23103 / LS SB I5 JSO UTICA / NEG DMG [Shared]
Jul 29 2023 11:08AM [35] [Appended, 11:17:01] [8] [Appended, 11:10:38] [1] ALL OCCUPS ARE OO THE VEH
Jul 29 2023 11:06AM [18] RP STATES THET ARE OFF THE RHS
Jul 29 2023 11:04AM [16] RP WAS TRYING TO GET OVER AND TEH BMW WAS SPLITTING THE LANES AND RP HIT THE OTHER SUV
Jul 29 2023 11:04AM [15] ALL SUBJS OO VEH
Jul 29 2023 11:03AM [13] [Appended, 11:03:52] [1] BLK GMC TER VS BLU MAZ
Jul 29 2023 11:01AM [7] NEG 1125
Jul 29 2023 11:00AM [3] DRK SUV IS ON FIRE
Jul 29 2023 11:00AM [2] WHI BMW SUV VS GRY MAZDA 3 VS DRK SUV
Jul 29 2023 10:59AM [1] 3 VEHS INVLDInformation courtesy of
Last updated: 07/29/2023 1:22pm
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…and to supply the juice…
Antelope Valley, west tip of Mojave Desert. Dry lake at right of image is Edwards AFB.
@aspnaz re: violent thug
See my note re: DEC – Gates did that! Whacked a whole strategically important industry, just to sell more/cheaper.
Acer Founder Doubts US Can Match Asia’s Chip Making Dominance:
https://www.tomshardware.com/news/acer-founder-semiconductor-us-falling-behind
According to Shih, the U.S. didn’t do itself any favors by outsourcing much of its semiconductor production decades ago. The supply chain necessary to sustain a consistent flow of chips heavily favors Asia, and there will be a significant lag in getting those operations fully entrenched stateside.
Digital Equipment Corporation:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Equipment_Corporation
They were the new wave of chips in the US at one time, opening a new echelon of computing overlapping the bottom of IBM’s customer range (universities). These were stout chips! I helped do setup on some ruggedized DEC uVAX machines that were to be installed on submarines, and we were conspicuously assured they would not be calling us for further support under this contract. The 911 call centers all used VAXen of some kind. Alcoa Aluminum used VAXen in shop-floor control for their gigantic aluminum smelters.
Compaq bought them with an eye to lower them to the level of other commodity hardware at the time.
You can still get OpenVMS to run, but it’s an aged beast. Think of it as a Harley-Davidson Sportster with a magneto and no lights.
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re: Nuland-Ahab
She has nailed a Franklin Mint Golden Eagle to a doorframe in the West Wing. First man/woman/other to spot Putin outside Russia gets that Eagle!
Most links are working for me, but some seem to ‘boomerang’ where I end up focused on a different comment in this thread. No links have taken me to any wrong or malicious sites.
For ref:
Windows 10
Firefox V115.0.2 + uMatrix + uBlockOrigin (most stuff at this site is unblocked)
LOC: suburb of Los Angeles, Spectrum Cable is ISP
DNS: 1.1.1.1 (CloudFlare public)I will try a few links to see if also affected.
re: World of Warships – I played World of Tanks for about 5 years, got quite good. It’s an extremely trolly environment, and probably trained me to do some things I’d rather not know how to do. It was one of the ‘heavy straws’ that broke my social media backbone. Lost interest after seeing the worst in human interaction unleashed.
There are some very interesting things happening in that kind of system/game. You’re thrown into a 15-v-15 match with randoms, and have to fairly soon assess the competency of your teammates, their willingness to play team roles, their intent, their goodwill or lack of. I was never much surprised at cacophony and mayhem, but sometimes you got a group who, despite lack of communication, could coordinate very well.
It was a brutal numbers game, as is war. You had to play a lot to get good, and good was measured by clawing your way up the percentiles. I had 54% win rates in some of my vehicles, after 20k+ battles in them.
@phoenixvoice re: “…from repetitive motions that can wear down and wear out our biological hardware.”
Aye. Our software also. Fatigue and stultification, neuroses.
I have a tangential reply to DBS: The Luddites simply tried to follow a different path. Theirs, with less complexity, wasn’t vulnerable to warpage in the way ours is. It is, of course, vulnerable to asteroid strikes (queue Niven quote). If human labor is the yardstick, it’s pretty dang hard to be dishonest about daily life.
As the Dune quote re: type of being suggests to me, a life is a sculpted thing and cannot be easily changed, attempts at which may cause structural damage. Much of our core being is developed in parallel with our physical being, in youth. I grew up consuming optimistic SciFi and learning to use some spectacular machines. It’s difficult for me to accept that some Big Problems do not have solutions, or at least solutions that can be pertinent to humans or biological life in general.
It leaves me wondering if all those ‘ADHD victims’ we’ve been drugging are actually new humans capable of handling the next order of complexity, and we’re just too dumb or too scared to let them run.
@oroboros re: “Bradley Deploys Smoke To Cover Evac – Is Still Hit With An FPV”
I once read of a backpacker’s bear encounter at Rae Lakes, a dumping ground for Yosemite’s problem bears. All campers in bed, food stored in steel bear boxes, everything copacetic. BANG…BANG… …BANG… Campers exit tents with lights aimed at the bear box. Bear is momentarily startled, then stands perfectly still. “You can’t see me, you can’t see me, you cant see me…”
I can’t stand memes, but that one is alchemic gold!!!
@Dr D re:
“Why do the likes of AFKTT and Observer still have so much faith in our leaders?”
They’re both old. Now WHY that works I have no idea since they’ve seen 10x more lies and total reversals of Science, with death tolls rising to the hundred-millions if they watch long enough. (Vioxx, Zantac, glyphosate, statins) Yet people are incapable of thought and pin their reality to whatever they grew up with.
I just had a similar experience with a ‘you dumb f#(<‘!’ moment involved I guess. Mom is one of The Afflicted, and is not doing well. Mid 70s, and decline seems apparent month-to-month. She insists, purportedly for price reasons, to get her meds at Wal-Mart. There are 2 pharmacies within 500m of her house, Wal-Mart is ~8km, and into a ‘credit card riche’ neighborhood.
Wal-Mart is disgusting. Wife and I will NOT go voluntarily. Won’t be an issue in future. On a recent trip to get her meds, it was after a short stay in hospital, beautiful, sunny June day, kind of day where energy seems boundless. As we walk to the garden center entrance, she’s slow with the walker but I can see utter joy beaming from her face. While inside, I’m developing a migraine and feeling empathy for the other lost souls. She’s still euphoric. Hmmm…
She grew up first outside of Portland OR, not much there, then in Los Angeles CA, in a world where anything and everything was available in some variety of Very Large Store. Supermarkets, department stores, commercial districts. She saw the rise of the Mega Malls, and the predecessors of Target, White Front, Zody’s, and Gemco. It struck me that shopping, for her, was a happy mass happening that was always happening. It’s a ‘medium-strength’ socializing. You don’t have to commit to a conversation, you never have to be invited, and you can depend on almost everyone else there feeling the same about that.
Same goes for her dependence, not just adherence, to Leader Figure and Media Channel. For her whole life, facts and figures were more-or-less reliably spewed daily from everywhere. And there were actual journalists waiting to bust the bad guys, sometimes.
I’ll finish later…don’t wish to hog the column inches.
correction: symbiosis as much as parasitism. Flippant != accurate
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@susmarie108 re: “I look inside of myself – where am I stuck, and what can I do about it? What kind of opposition am I mounting in my daily living of life?”I could not imagine not having these thoughts. Unexamined life not worth living. How could someone without these kinds of thoughts be at all ‘agreement capable?’ 🙂 How can you avoid the fearsome shoals without that sounding line?
@anticlimactic re: rain forest nutrient
Almost all rain forests are this. All the action is ‘above ground’ so to speak…like a thick stack of parasitism. This is why cutting it in Brazil to make a cow pasture is a losing prop. The stuff to support grass washes away in a few years.
I went for a bike ride in the mountains last night to avoid the heat. I acquired an escort…young grey fox. He/she was curious, and I made non-predator noises and stopped to show my intent. Fox led me down the road for about 4km, stopping occasionally to see if I was still following.
This small corner of the food chain is exposed along roads at night. The road exposes the bugs to rodents and birds. The foxes and coyotes know this, and prowl the edges of roads to catch the rodents as they hunt the bugs.
Damn, I love being a human, and a part of this glorious continuum of existence!
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@Susmarie re: best album art
I also have no favorites, but this one’s on my short list:
@Dr D re: misconstrued
Sorry, forgot the by-line. Let me click and copy that for you: Rev Dupas: (performing the marriage of Alfred and Patsy)
As the Rev says in the quote, many conditions allow for a contract.
Little Murders – 1971 – Elliot Gould, Marcia Rodd, Alan Arkin, Donald Sutherland
Where Catch 22 rode the surface of the surreal bubble, Little Murders is the view out from just inside. I thought it did a delicious job of exploring the disharmonies of societies, almost a Carlin-Kafka-Vonnegut vector. This film comes from a period in which, while the actual ‘sharp objects’ still couldn’t be discussed, at least on most other subjects artists were free to roam about.
The first quote in IMDB’s list:
Why does one decide to marry? Social pressure? Boredom? Loneliness? Sexual appeasement? Love? I won’t put any of these reasons down. Each in its own way is adequate, each is all right. Last year, I married a musician who wanted to get married in order to stop masturbating. Please, don’t be startled, I’m not putting him down. That marriage did not work. But the man tried. He is now separated, still masturbating, but he is at peace with himself because he tried society’s way.
The AI Dividend (B Schneier)
Was Heinlein right? UBI via mining patents?
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@michael reid re: wind farm – HUZZAH!!!! 🙂re: blueberries – spread ’em out a bit. A whole pie is conspicuous consumption.
Pancakes
Cupcakes
Muffins
Cookies
Oatmeal (!)
Salad
Ice CreamMy wife puts fresh blueberries/strawberries on yogurt every day with breakfast. I use dehydrated blueberries with cranberries, cherries, strawberries if avail, to make a ‘trail mix’ with raw cashews, almonds, walnuts, pistachios, pepitas.
China’s YMTC Starts Producing Mysterious New Memory, Ups 3D NAND Prices
The author can feel tremors, but cannot yet link them to the flashing over the horizon. China is going Pickle Rick and will soon beat the US in the head with a KitchenAid mixer.
I just had a very odd thought: Is it possible to tunnel under the Kerch Strait? I’ll probably dig for the answer, but maybe others would like my odd thought also.
@anticlimactic re: hormones ‘n’ stuff
The ‘complete makeover’ folks have permanently lost the ability to feel tickly down there. Sex is over for them. Not having that pop-off valve will kill many.
Threads, a bit tangled it seems…
Threads Unravels: So-Called ‘Twitter Killer’ App Sees Exodus Of Users, Plunge In Engagements (ZeroHedge)
Meta Blocks Access to its Threads App to EU Users with VPNs (thurrott.com)
Seems they need users, but are disallowed more by the very folks that desperately need the users to be corralled. “Can’t think straight, need another fat rail of coke…but my ticker don’t feel so good…”
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@kult: Outline the pre-colonial diets of the following islands: Madura, Borneo, Sumatra, Java, Papua. Or pick 5 other random islands and try it.
@kult
If he intends to show his current community how they might survive in isolation, I find that quite nice. I suspect isolation will only last so long. There is reading, and there is digesting…
@the wind farm mini-saga:
It is my view that we are at a point where people must become self-sufficient again to survive the approaching ‘peeling’ that society will undergo as we are cut off from cheap imports of stuff. A scary parallel (maybe an impetus?) to the recent happenings is the novel The Peace War by Vernor Vinge. Proles are busted to very-low tech by the Peace Authority, who will destroy power generation over a certain capacity, will not allow certain kinds of tech to be researched, etc etc etc. The US fragments, with Cali in a long-term war with New Mex, other oddities.
The building of wind/solar/water systems is a kind of preemptive sanction that forces the ‘import substitution’ required to survive without social structures. Despite building with modern materials and components that will likely be unavailable somewhat soon, the builders will learn things: new techniques, failings and shortcomings of components, non-electric machines for various tasks. ‘Lording it over the dumbs’ is really crass, kulto!!! Doing this kind of project is one of the most wholesome examples to be giving to your community.
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@zerosum re: ‘Gem’ the ghostOT, and slightly humorous… Back in the ’90s, my boss, myself, many colleagues, and probably a good chunk of the computing community in general, had a theory. Micro$ponge had a hidden Windows service running on all machines called the ‘Competing Product Detector.’ It’s function was to determine if the machine was being used to compete with Micro$ponge in some way. If competition was detected, Gates sent out his minions to either buy, steal or destroy the entity viewed as competition.
Carnage… Just… f#(<ing tragic carnage!
@WES re: efficiency, agree. Wind would not be an early use of ‘cobbled’ generators. Start with water power, as humans originally did when horsie wasn’t enough. Then refine, refine, refine…and voila! technology again. Even if you can’t get electrons on the first shot, belt-drive systems are a great environment to refine bearings and such, boosting metallurgy.
@Michael Reid re: low-profile wind generators – NICE!
I saw a video 15+ yrs ago of a set of turbines installed on a roof in a big city. They were horizontal, like rows of long rabbit hutches, box structure with chicken wire covering. Inside, the blade assemblies were long, helical, horizontal, with a few bearings for support, and the generator at one end.
Solar relies on materials the average Joe can’t get, and machines that require infrastructure and an army of employees. An electric motor/generator is something a good blacksmith can knock together in a weekend. As for batteries, Helms Pumped Storage Plant is a battery. This can be done with any size container, or with dry counterweights on a chain…whatever.
@Oroboros re: “All of the ‘data scraping’ for the past couple decades is for the purpose of feeding the bottomless pit and appetite of AI programs.”
At the dawn of the InnerTubes, my then boss turned me on to an important thing that could be done with the new toy, Seti@Home, which was a scheme to farm out analysis of the radio telescope data. It was super-cool, an excellent use of the resources, and was a great model for other projects.
BOINC was devised as a modular ‘project bay’ for this kind of activity. It absorbed Seti@Home and gained a few other interesting projects, and you could apportion your compute resources the way you wanted, ‘weighting’ each project in which you participated.
An early rider of the BOINC system was Folding@Home, a ‘protein folding modeler’ purportedly for medical research that you, John Q Public, could help perform and be a part of the magic! Well, now don’t I feel like a heel for having participated in this f#(<ing scary black box project? In hindsight, I feel like I was asked to take repeated tries at cracking a safe that someone else needed to access.
Scraping, cajoling, gaslighting…ugh!
Bierstadt, haha! Painted Yosemite Valley to look like Shangri La in the French Alps. Ironic that the beauty of the true Yosemite far outstrips his ’embellished’ vision.
Does it occur to this Korybko fellow that the helicopter incident was a side-channel nudge?
Lady With A Fan
While the fire light’s aglow
Strange shadows from the flames will grow
Til things we’ve never seen
Will seem familiar…@Sweet Kenny re:
That Bitcoin quote “wealth is energy” is incredibly ironic since Bitcoin does not generate energy, it wastes it. Bitcoin offers nothing new beyond a different way to speculate financially.
Aye. If it could store energy, then we’d have something.
Fun fact: komodo will bite larger prey and dose it with a massive load of bacteria, then follow until the prey drops dead of systemic infection.
Terrible Lizard (warning, contains math-ish rock wrapped in prog metal, IIRC a prime number 47-beat measure, 2 of the trio refused to play it after half a tour…it’s terrible!)
@Red re: “in the natural world brightly coloured fauna tends to be poisonous!”
Red next to black, friend of Jack.
Red next to yellow, kill a fellow!re: talking trees and stupid monkeys
Another facet of difficulty: it is partly related to our concept of ‘time’ and our experience of entropy. We are, figuratively, on a different track. What if an alien race was (is?) trying to broadcast, and is open about it, but their concept of ‘time’ is tuned such that transmission of one bit of information takes longer than the duration the SETI program existed? What if they like to transmit massively-parallel and send 1Gb of quantum states through a single atom?
What if cats are trying to talk to us, but we’re just too damn slow?
Information flows everywhere. We put our ear to the rail and declare ourselves the only talkers.
@Dr D re: sequoia with boles 8 ft high… ahem…
This one is a ‘lesser’ specimen in a less glamorous grove at the southern end of sequoia’s range. I’d guess the diameter to be 4.5m, about 14-15 ft. The monarch of the Freeman Creek Grove, the George H W Bush Tree, is 6m+ maybe?
Wandering in the Sierra Nevada is a humbling experience. You really start to grok your own insignificance.
@Oroboros re: fender benders
CalTrans Quick Map – enable all layers, red ‘bang’ symbols are the entertaining/important/tragic ones. Three categories in which I noticed an uptick (my percep only, no # to back it): solo guardrail or CD wrecks, motorcycle wrecks, and semi truck wrecks.
Beyond the simple brain fart wrecks, think of how many have their passions barely restrained under the best circumstances. Now drop that bar a little bit. More risk-taking, slower reaction times, etc., like ‘2 beers primed.’
