Any Bets On This List?

Magistrate Judge Thomas Hixson has ordered the criminal enterprise formerly known as Facebook™ to tell him who was involved in ordering the torrenting of pirated works in order to train their AI.

If I had a guess, my guess would be that their name rhymes with Lark Buckerberg.

Meta will have to name the people who greenlit its torrenting of pirated books. A federal magistrate judge has ordered the company to identify everyone who approved sourcing books from LibGen and Anna’s Archive. This goes beyond the employees who ran the downloads and includes whoever decided whether to seed the books to others. 

Last month, Magistrate Judge Thomas Hixson ordered Meta to hand over the command histories of the servers it used to torrent pirated books.

………

The server logs could reveal what happened on Meta’s machines. However, publisher Entrepreneur Media also wants to know who approved the torrenting activity.

Entrepreneur Media, which publishes Entrepreneur magazine, filed one of the related lawsuits where it accuses Meta of contributing to piracy by uploading (seeding) works to third parties, similar to the authors’ contributory infringement claim.

To find out more, the publisher asked Meta to identify everyone who “made, authorized, or approved” the decisions to obtain the shadow library datasets, and to do so via BitTorrent.

Meta’s answers named several people who are believed to have been involved in data-related decisions. However, Meta said it couldn’t identify anyone who “formally” made or approved decisions to acquire or use books for its first two Llama models. Those decisions were often the result of team consensus, Meta argued.

When it came to the torrenting itself, Meta pointed to the employees who ran the downloads, describing their choices as technical decisions.

………

Meta added that the acquisition of data from Anna’s Archive went through an internal legal review in early 2024, which involved its in-house lawyers. 

That bit about, "Technical Decisions, "is bullsh%$.  It does not go through legal unless someone senior approving this whole scheme.

While seeing Mark Zuckerberg frog-marched out of his office in handcuffs over something as prosaic as this would be a bit disappointing, they got Al Capone for tax evasion.

There is precedent. 

Even the Liberal The New Republic………

Understands that the consultants tied to the Democratic Party establishment (There is no Democratic Party establishment) are an impediment to the success of the Party.

To paraphrase Matt Taibbi before he went insane, the Democratic Party consultant class is a  is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of the its base, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.

Only about 27¢ out of every dollar makes it past the consultants when you donate in response to those frantic emails.

Your phone buzzes with a frantic text message. “DEMOCRACY IS ON THE LINE.” It’s not the first time you’ve gotten a fundraising text like this from the Democratic Party and its candidates. Nor the first time you’ve rolled your eyes. But the ask makes sense. Democracy really is on the line. You have asked yourself what you would have done if you had lived under the authoritarian regimes of the past, and volunteering some time and money seems like the least you could do. You click the ActBlue link and donate $100. The country must be saved, after all.

………

We’re here to tell you that this view is wrong. The Democratic Party is being devoured by an ecosystem of consultants. Mostly out of view of the party’s voters and activists, political consultants are paid to raise the money, place the ads, and set the strategy. And they’re paid regardless of whether the party wins or loses.

………

A political party is a vehicle for groups in society—voters, activists, and politicians—to come together to elect representatives who will change the world through public policy and governance. It’s a collective enterprise in which different groups debate and negotiate the direction of the party in primary elections and then come together to take control of government and implement that negotiated agenda. The problem is that the incentives of the Democratic consultant class are not aligned with these goals.

This class—and we use the word “class” intentionally to mean the firms, consultants, and strategists paid millions of dollars by Democratic campaigns to raise money, place ads, and set strategy—is extractive, and this extraction is central to many of the party’s pathologies. Just as a private equity firm buys out a corporation and strips it for parts, the consultant class installs friendly operatives, charges fees, raids the party’s long-term assets, and gives strategic advice that ultimately serves itself over the long-term health of the party.

Our thesis is a simple one: Campaign consultants are businesses that act to maximize profits, and this profit-seeking is often at odds with what’s best to defeat American authoritarianism.

Nice to see someone at an establishment media outlet has finally noticed the obvious.

I Know That This is Contrarian Bullsh%$, But I Agree

Over at The Atlantic, they have published an essay calling for putting an end to high school sports.

It works for me. 

Every year, thousands of teenagers move to the United States from all over the world, for all kinds of reasons. They observe everything in their new country with fresh eyes, including basic features of American life that most of us never stop to consider.

One element of our education system consistently surprises them: “Sports are a big deal here,” says Jenny, who moved to America from South Korea with her family in 2011. Shawnee High, her public school in southern New Jersey, fields teams in 18 sports over the course of the school year, including golf and bowling. Its campus has lush grass fields, six tennis courts, and an athletic Hall of Fame. “They have days when teams dress up in Hawaiian clothes or pajamas just because—‘We’re the soccer team!,’ ” Jenny says. (To protect the privacy of Jenny and other students in this story, only their first names are used.)

By contrast, in South Korea, whose 15-year-olds rank fourth in the world (behind Shanghai, Singapore, and Hong Kong) on a test of critical thinking in math, Jenny’s classmates played pickup soccer on a dirt field at lunchtime. They brought badminton rackets from home and pretended there was a net. If they made it into the newspaper, it was usually for their academic accomplishments.

Sports are embedded in American schools in a way they are not almost anywhere else. Yet this difference hardly ever comes up in domestic debates about America’s international mediocrity in education. (The U.S. ranks 31st on the same international math test.) The challenges we do talk about are real ones, from undertrained teachers to entrenched poverty. But what to make of this other glaring reality, and the signal it sends to children, parents, and teachers about the very purpose of school? 

You do not have to think about the signal it, "Sends to children, parents, and teachers about the very purpose of school," you just have to understand the purpose.

They sacrifice teenagers, to the tune of 100-150 deaths annually, to the altar of college sports, who in turn sacrifice 20-somethings to the altar of professional sports, who sacrifice slightly older athletes to line the pocket books of the worst people in the world, sports team owners. 

It is an exploitative and abusive system, and it should be ended. 

It's Thursday ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

And I am very confused.

Initial claims fell again, despite what is clear about the current economy, while continuing claims rose again.

I have no bloody clue what is going on here.

Applications for US unemployment benefits fell to a three-month low last week, underscoring the stability of the labor market.

Initial claims fell by 6,000 to 194,000 in the week ended Oct. 17, according to Labor Department data released Thursday. The median forecast of economists polled by Bloomberg called for 200,000.

Continuing claims, a proxy for the number of people receiving benefits, rose by 25,000 to 1.73 million in the previous week, a six-week high.

You Call THIS a Line?

Pull the lever Kronk!It's the last day of early voting in Maryland.

I've been in line to cast my vote for the past 90 minutes. 

I've still not made it into the room with the ballot boxes.

This is nuts for a mid term election.

Posted via mobile.

(On edit)

It was about 2 hours in total, and I had to add The Emperor's New Groove meme once I got back to my computer. 

Fed Stands Pat

This is not a surprise. It's less than a week before the mid-term elections, and anything beyond holding rates steady would be perceived as meddling in electoral politics.

On the other hand, to quote Rusk, "If you choose not to decide You still have made a choice."

U.S. Treasury yields went in different directions Wednesday as markets reacted to the Federal Reserve’s widely expected decision to hold rates unchanged and to Chairman Kevin Warsh’s press conference.

The 10-year yield increased to 5.036% from 5.020% before the rate decision was announced. The two-year, however, fell to 4.702% from 4.770%, according to Tradeweb.

The disparity came as Warsh avoided forward guidance, while stating that fighting inflation shouldn’t mean stopping economic growth. He said productivity has been moving higher. “And so economic growth is higher. But that doesn’t tell me that economic growth is somehow causing inflation, making our job harder,” he added.

The dollar, in turn, changed direction and weakened during Warsh’s remarks. The WSJ Dollar Index, was down 0.1% following the press conference, after rising slightly before.

Following the monetary policy decision, odds of an interest rate increase in December reached 83%, up from 78% yesterday, according to CME. Gross domestic product data and the Fed’s preferred inflation gauge, the PCE, are due Thursday and could change the outlook for interest rates.

I'm not gonna make predictions, because I foresee that any such prediction would be wrong. 

Headline of the Day

Bolsonaro Escape Jet Tied to Alleged Cocaine Trafficker

—Payday Report

To quote Zathras, "At least there is symmetry."

Trump, of course, has welcomed him with open arms.

Maybe if You Weren't Ineluctably Evil, You Might Get Laid

Women Don't Want to Date Douche Bags

Wired has a story about how tech bros has a sad because women will not f%$# them after they find out that they are working for Tesla or Palantir. 

You know, you are f%$#ing the whole world, why do you need to also f%$# one woman. 

Engaged in a flirtatious conversation at a bar in Manhattan, 23-year-old Gary stood with a Guinness in hand as he explained to a woman why he took an engineering job at Palantir, the data analytics company cofounded by Alex Karp and Peter Thiel. Raking in a $250,000 salary would allow him to help pay off his parents’ mounting medical bills, he explained.

Gary wasn’t met with sympathy. Medical debt, the woman told him, was “not an excuse to work somewhere like that.” She was referring, of course, to Palantir’s controversial work with governments, including the US and Israel, which use the company’s surveillance tools for law enforcement and military operations.

 But wait, there's more:

………

Gary has resorted to saying he works in AI. “Even that gets some pretty bad responses sometimes,” he says. His Hinge profile doesn’t mention his employer. And sometimes he makes up stories out of thin air to justify working for Palantir—like that line about the medical debt. His parents don’t have any, nor are they ill. 

(emphasis mine) 

Seriously, it's no wonder that women would rather be alone in the woods with a bear as opposed to being alone with a strange man or a bear.

You sir, are pond scum, and I hope that you die alone. 

Well, That Only Took 40 Years

Canada has finally released a report showing how the Central Intelligence Agency resettled Nazis to Canada.

Gee, hoocoodanode?  (Well, me, as well as anyone who has followed the saga of the Nazis on the Victims of Communism Memorial,  [also here and here] a Ukrainian Nazi SS member was honored in parliament on live TV, and [of course] Chrystia Freeland's family history.)

Is anyone surprised that the CIA was running a ratline to Canada?

After 40 years the Canadian government has finally released a nearly fully unredacted version of historian Alti Rodal’s investigation into alleged Nazi war criminals in Canada.

The previously redacted sections reveal that the CIA was actively involved in resettling alleged Nazis in Canada after the Second World War, that the CIA deceived Canadian officials, and that a leading CIA officer in charge of resettlement operations was later the CIA’s representative in Ottawa.

“It was a ratline,” said historian Jared McBride, referring to the escape routes used by the Nazis and their collaborators to flee Europe in the aftermath of the Second World War. “In an operational sense, this is what a ratline is.”

While the newly unredacted version of the Rodal Report doesn’t name the specific individuals who gained entry into Canada, it does reveal that Canadian visa control officers posted in Stockholm were aware of falsified documents coming from American sources as early as 1953.

Further, former RCMP deputy commissioner W.H. Kelly was informed in early 1954 of suspicious applications for security screenings coming from the U.S. zone of occupation in postwar Germany.

………

[UCLA historian Jared] McBride noted that the Canadian government has consistently sought to bury the story rather than demanding transparency from the United States.

“The lack of self-respect amazes me,” said McBride. 

The new version of the Rodal Report is not completely unredacted: there remains one censored line that appears to explain why, according to Oscar Holtz, the United States wouldn’t accept known Nazi collaborators, even though there was a standing provision to permit entry to as many as 100 per year at the time. 

McBride told The Maple he wonders what individuals would have been so disreputable they would be considered inadmissible for entry to the United States, but still valuable enough — or such a security risk — they merited resettlement in Canada instead. 

I'm not amazed at all, Dr. McBride.  Canada has served as a toxic waste dump for the detritus of American empire for well over a century.

The Joys of Privatization

Water rates in the United States are 62% more then they were in 2016, well above the rate of inflation.

Maybe selling off government owned water systems to private for a few magic beans was not a good idea.

US households are paying 62% more for drinking water than they did a decade ago – outpacing inflation, grocery prices and household incomes, according to a new study.

Food & Water Watch, a Washington DC-based non-profit, analyzed 2025 billing data from the 500 largest community water systems in the US, which together serve about 155 million people, or 45% of the country’s population. The analysis compared current rates with data from a similar Food & Water Watch survey conducted in 2015. The study does not include wastewater or storm water charges, which are often billed separately from drinking water service.

In 2025, the average household using 60,000 gallons of water paid $531 for drinking water service, according to the study. However, costs varied widely, with annual bills ranging from $133 at the cheapest system to $1,416 at the most expensive.

Water prices rose 1.6 times faster than overall inflation between 2015 and 2025. Consumer prices increased 39% during that period, compared with a 62% jump in water bills, according to the study. Water costs also rose more than twice as fast as groceries, which increased 30%, and eggs, which rose 28%.

………

The study also found a major disparity between publicly owned and for-profit water systems.

Corporate-owned utilities charged the average household $823 a year, compared with $494 for publicly owned systems – a difference of $329, or 67%. Corporate systems accounted for just 11% of the 500 systems the study analyzed but represented 44% of the 25 most expensive systems. The study added that 70% of the top 10 were owned by for-profit corporations.

Outsourcing a public to a bunch of contemptible greed-head sociopaths was such a good idea.

Like Father, Like Son

Failed Brazilian Presidential Candidate Flavio Bolsonaro has had his passport confiscated and has been forbidden from leaving the country.

The allegations are involvement with paramilitaries and financial irregularities, just like his dad.

For more than twenty years, Flavio Bolsonaro has served as a state or federal legislator. Under Brazilian federal law, all legislators have immunity from prosecution.

To run for President, Bolsonaro decided not to run for his Senate seat. Now, after losing the Presidential election, he no longer has legislative immunity when his Senate term expires in January 2027.

Many have already speculated that Bolsonaro could face prosecution for his connections to paramilitary gangs and various financial dealings.

………

Now, a day after Flavio Bolsonaro lost the Brazilian presidential election, the Brazilian federal police have confiscated his passport out of fear that he might flee the country to seek asylum from the Trump Administration. Apparently, Flavio had been leaving a visit to his father, Jair Bolsonaro, who is under house arrest for attempting a coup after Lula lost the last election.

 

Why Yes, This IS Completely Mental

Trump is now threatening to ban Norwegian immigrants because of his butt-hurt over not getting the Nobel Peace Prize.

Ignoring the obvious, the Nobel Committee is a private charity, the fact that Donald Trump has kidnapped a world leader, assassinated another world leader, and started and is losing a war with Iran, would seem to mitigate against Trump getting the award.

He has the FIFA Peace Prize.  Isn't that enough? 

Linkage

Science says your boss should talk less in meetings (Ars Technica) Don't fix meetings, eliminate meetings.

Man’s Meta Muse Agent Sends Him Message So Bizarre That He Permanently Quits (Futurism) He quits using Muse, not quitting his job.

‘We Didn’t Do This Perfectly’: American Fork Police Chief’s Understatement Now Anchors A Civil Rights Lawsuit By Reckless Ben’s Helpers (Techdirt) Corrupt dirtbag admits to being a corrupt dirtbag.

Whoops: Grok Bot Spills Tech CEO’s Bank Data In Public Slack (Techdirt) Clearly, AI is the future.

Maybe There Was an Egg Cartel After All (POLITICO) Of course there was.

Musk and Thiel are Evil Demagogues. What Sustains Them? (Ann Pettifor⁠) Because they are deeply evil psychopaths?

Record Viking Hoard Yields a Coin Not Found in Over 100 Years (Gizmodo) Over 4,000 coins.  Kind of a big deal.

Max Miller gives us a historical near beer recipe. I've had Kvass and rather like it. Unlike many other non-alcoholic malt beverages, it's not too sweet.

Meanwhile in Serbia

Aleksandar Vucic Concedes his election defeat, ending his 14-year run as Prime Minister and President of the Balkan nation.

Serbia’s longtime nationalist strongman, Aleksandar Vucic, conceded defeat Sunday in a general election held after his once-tight grip on power was weakened by nearly two years of student-led street protests.

Serbia’s vote for a new Parliament came just six months after voters in neighboring Hungary rejected their own populist nationalist leader, Viktor Orban, a close ally of Mr. Vucic. The Serbian leader had adopted many of the Hungarian’s authoritarian methods — and, at the end, his gracious acceptance of defeat, as well.

“It is clear that we have lost these elections,” Mr. Vucic said in a surprisingly early speech congratulating the victors, a new political grouping called Student List-Students Win. He said that the slate of candidates selected by protesting students had won at least 135 seats in Serbia’s 250-member legislature, compared with around 105 for his own party.

A rather interesting observation here, neither party is big on joining the EU, and , "European Serbia, the only party that openly campaigned for speeding up Serbia’s stalled application to join the European bloc, failed to reach the 3 percent threshold of votes needed to enter Parliament."

Lula Wins in Brazil

It was close, but not extremely so, with a margin of more than 3%, 51.79% to 48.21%.

This is good news, even if Bolsonaro is refusing to concede and demanding that the results be annulled.

I expect the younger Bolsonaro to flee the country shortly, as his immunity as a senator is expiring.

Headline of the Day

Shellie Flockhart, Who Said a Democrat Endangers Kids, Pleaded Guilty to Endangering Kids

—The Washington Post, discussing how a Republican featured in an attack ad drove drunk with her kids in her car.

Every accusation from these folks is a confession. 

A Republican woman in a campaign commercial gave a grave warning about Sarah Trone Garriott, the Democratic candidate in one of Iowa’s most competitive House districts.

“When it comes to our kids, Sarah is just plain dangerous,” says Shellie Flockhart, a Dallas Center city councilwoman identified in the ad by her first name.

Flockhart, 55, pleaded guilty to charges related to child endangerment and driving under the influence after authorities said she drove drunk with two of her children in the car in 2017. Flockhart provided a one-page statement to The Washington Post with conditions for its use that would violate The Post’s editorial standards.

Sick Burn

He’s Got the White House Looking Like Saddam Hussein Opened a Cheesecake Factory

—Barack Obama, on Donald Trump's White House Aesthetic

I cannot stand Obama.  I believe that his steadfast support of the banksters led directly to Donald Trump, but you have to admire the use of language here. 

Former President Obama poked fun at President Trump’s various Washington, D.C., renovation projects during a campaign stop in Cleveland, Ohio, where he was stumping for Democratic gubernatorial candidate Amy Acton and Senate candidate Sherrod Brown (D).

In his speech, Obama zeroed in on the changes Trump has made to the White House during his second term, saying he believes Trump is more focused on renovating the White House than on the issues voters care about.

“He seems very focused on home renovations. He should be on HGTV,” Obama said of Trump’s White House construction efforts. The Trump administration is expected to spend at least $900 million on the renovation projects.

“What’s with the gold? … He’s got the White House looking like Saddam Hussein opened a Cheesecake Factory,” the former president quipped.

(emphasis mine)

Cotton and Alfalfa? Seriously?

There is a water crisis in the American southwest, and it's getting worse.

As a result many farmers are drawing more heavily on groundwater, and exceeding the carrying capacity of this resource.

The good folks at FT start their report on this with an interview with a farmer who is letting fields lie fallow as a result of the falling water table.

So, what does this farmer grow?  He grows cotton and alfalfa. (alternate link)

These are among the 2 most water intensive crops out there, and this farmer is attempting to grow this in Arizona, just south of Phoenix.

………

“We don’t have enough groundwater or enough pumps,” said Miller, a fifth-generation farmer who grows alfalfa and cotton. Some wells have gone dry, said the 35-year-old, who has had to leave some of his land fallow. 

5 generations of growing water intensive crops in a f%$#ing desert?

Sounds like 5 generations of idiocy.

Given that more than ⅔ of water consumption in the west is agricultural, perhaps the real story is that US agricultural policy is incentivizing farmers make insane choices.

No, Just No

Ewwww!!!!

I'm not the most laid back guy, but in terms of behavior that only effects yourself, or yourself and a consenting partner, I generally do not care.

That being said, there are some lines that should not be crossed.

I am not saying that I would take physical action to prevent the aforementioned line crossing, nor am I suggesting that society should establish formal sanctions through regulation and law to prevent this.

However, when one is brewing an alcoholic beverage using Mountain Dew as the primary ingredient, this is an affront to the universe itself. 

This will not end well. 

2nd Amendment Time

The Trump administration has filed a lawsuit to prevent certification of the US Senate in Alaska if Mary Peltola wins because there are 2 Dan Sullivans on the ballot.

The thing is that Alaska's election are conducted through instant runoff voting, so even if some people vote for the wrong guy as first choice (Unlikely as the incumbent will be clearly labeled as such on the ballot), their 2nd choice would be the correct Dan Sullivan.

Also, there is no precedent for this sort of federal meddling in an election. 

The U.S. Department of Justice filed suit against the Alaska Division of Elections late Thursday, seeking to block the division from certifying the result of the state’s U.S. Senate election if the Democratic challenger, Mary Peltola, wins.

President Donald Trump told reporters on Friday in Florida that he ordered the lawsuit be filed.

“I’m the one that said, ‘do it,’” he said.

Peltola is the leading opponent to incumbent Republican Sen. Dan S. Sullivan, and polls show her with a small lead over Sullivan, but the race also includes two other people — Republican Gerald Heikes of Palmer and undeclared candidate Dan J. Sullivan of Petersburg. In the complaint, the Department of Justice claims that Dan J. Sullivan’s candidacy is “frivolous,” and was intended solely to confuse voters and benefit Peltola.

Until there is an investigation to determine the extent of that confusion, the Department of Justice argues, Alaska should not be permitted to certify the result of the ongoing Senate election.

Legal experts immediately dismissed the federal argument as bunk. ……… 

On the general election ballot, the two Sullivans are listed distinctively, as “Sullivan, Dan S. (Registered Republican) Incumbent” and “Sullivan, Daniel J. Jr.” The state’s Division of Elections does not list a party affiliation for the Petersburg Sullivan, and he is listed as an “undeclared” candidate, a kind of independent, in current records.

In addition, Alaska uses ranked choice voting in general elections, meaning that any remaining confused voters could simply rank both Sullivans in either order.

If none of the four Senate candidates receive at least 50% of the first-choice votes, the lowest finisher will be eliminated and their votes redistributed to voters’ second choices.

This is a part of Trump's ongoing coup attempt.

World's Smallest Violin

Comcast has a sad because, with the increased availability of competitors in the broadband market, what is arguably the most loathed company in America is losing customers.

Merciful heavens!  It appears that these companies are charging prices that are too low.

Comcast reportedly plans significant job cuts in its cable division as the firm continues to lose residential broadband and TV customers. Comcast lost 144,000 residential broadband customers in Q3 2026, up from a 91,000-customer loss in the same quarter a year ago, the company said in its earnings report today.

Comcast historically capitalized on a lack of competition for high-speed wired broadband. But now it faces stronger competition from fixed wireless providers and from fiber providers in parts of its cable territory.

“Fixed wireless remains aggressive and continues to take share, while fiber construction remains elevated, with pockets of irrational pricing and promotional activity,” Comcast co-CEO Mike Cavanagh said today in an earnings call.

Comcast CFO Jason Armstrong said “irrational pricing” from fiber operators includes $30 to $40 monthly broadband offers “in specific markets in the third quarter.” He said $30 to $40 pricing is irrational because deploying fiber costs $1,500 or more per home, and is “getting more expensive with construction costs up as you get into more suburban and rural areas.”

The first, and most obvious, point here is that Comcast co-CEO Mike Cavanagh and Comcast CFO Jason Armstrong are contemptible greed-heads who should have been drowned at birth by their parents.

The second point is that Comcast clearly does not have a handle on the actual installation costs for fiber. 

………

After the latest quarterly drop, Comcast has 28.3 million residential broadband customers in the US. Comcast said it has a plan to turn things around.

“We’ve embarked on the most significant operating and cost transformation in our company’s history, with an opportunity we believe will ultimately amount to billions of dollars over time,” Cavanagh said. The organizational changes will result in a “significant charge” of over $1 billion to be applied in the fourth quarter earnings report, Armstrong said.

It appears likely that job cuts will affect Comcast’s famously frustrating customer service division, replacing some number of humans with AI agents that already handle some customer interactions. “As personal AI agents reshape how consumers discover, purchase, and manage services, we’re positioning Comcast to capitalize on that shift,” Armstrong said.

When a company says that adopting AI to improve their customer service they are lying.

In order for to even remotely approach viability, their existing customer service would have to be so horrifically bad that ……… Oh, right Comcast.

For them, AI might actually be an improvement. 

It's Thursday ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ ………

Initial unemployment claims fell to 194,000 from 200,00 last week while continuing claims rose by 25,000 to 1.73 million.

I have no f%$#ing clue as to what is going on.

Applications for US unemployment benefits fell to a three-month low last week, underscoring the stability of the labor market.

Initial claims fell by 6,000 to 194,000 in the week ended Oct. 17, according to Labor Department data released Thursday. The median forecast of economists polled by Bloomberg called for 200,000.

Continuing claims, a proxy for the number of people receiving benefits, rose by 25,000 to 1.73 million in the previous week, a six-week high. 

Something profoundly weird is going on. 

Bringing a Gun to a Gun Fight

There are allegations that Mary Petola's campaign was involved in recruiting the second Dan Sullivan in the Alaska US Senate race.

Given that the Republicans ran a convicted felon incarcerated in New York State in 2004 (See also here), I have to say that turnabout is fair play.

Alaska Democrat Mary Peltola’s campaign was behind an effort to recruit a challenger with almost the same name as the Republican US senator Dan Sullivan, both of whom will appear on the ballot in next week’s midterm elections, the New York Times reported on Wednesday.

Republicans have condemned the presence in the race of two candidates named Dan Sullivan – one the two-term US senator, the second a retiree living in south-eastern Alaska with scant political experience – calling the newcomer a ploy by Democrats to cost the incumbent re-election by splitting his supporters.

Peltola’s campaign has denied involvement with the other Dan Sullivan, but the Times reports that her officials together with the party’s campaign arm, the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee (DSCC), worked to find other people named Dan Sullivan in Alaska, and encourage them to run. Their reporting is based on interviews with Peltola’s former campaign manager and other sources, together with documents and text messages related to the recruitment effort.

“Alaskan voters need to know,” Elisa Rios, whom Peltola fired in August, told the Times, which added that she later tried to retract her interview with the outlet.

This is not exactly Sean Connery describing the, "Chicago Way," in The Untouchables, but it is a good start.

Headline of the Day

I Teach at a Business School. It’s Time to Shut Them Down

—Chris Marquis in The New York Times on how the MBA is destroying America. (Alternate link here)

I'm inclined to agree.

This fall, another cohort of ambitious young professionals has arrived at business schools around the world for two-year programs with price tags in the six figures. Their presence at some of the nicest and shiniest buildings on campus renews a familiar question: What exactly is an M.B.A. for?

This question has become more urgent as business education has expanded dramatically in the past decades. Today, nearly one in five American undergraduates majors in business, and the M.B.A. is the most popular graduate degree in the United States.

I have taught in business schools for over 20 years, at Harvard, Cornell and Cambridge. While some students appear to care only about their future compensation, I have met many with nobler goals: engineers who want to commercialize clean energy, physicians determined to fix the health care system, nonprofit leaders who have watched good missions fail for want of good management.

These students enroll hoping to learn what business schools say they teach: how to manage people, how to allocate capital and resources and how to make the world a better place through leadership. But I’ve come to see how the institution can reshape the worldviews of those who enter it, often undermining the very ambitions that brought them there.

………

I’ve come to realize that business schools don’t just reflect our economic system — they actively manufacture its priorities and normalize its harms, training the future leaders who will design and defend the structures driving our overlapping global crises. Tinkering at the margins with a class on corporate responsibility or ethics is not going to help. We don’t need to “fix” business schools. We need to abolish them. 

I agree. 

Too Much Power

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Elon Musk ordered that Starlink service to the Ukrainian be slowed.

The fact that one person has the unilateral power to do this is almost as concerning as the fact that the specific person with this unilateral power a paranoid delusional white supremacist hypocrite.

What is interesting here is how quickly this story came out.

It seems to me that it is highly the WSJ reporters already had their hooks into the Musk organization when the Starlink issues arose.

There is a very real possibility that there is a Theranos style exposé in the works.

Elon Musk ordered the slowdown of a military-grade version of Starlink relied on by Ukraine, a decision that sparked panic in Kyiv and confusion inside the Trump administration, U.S. officials and people familiar with the matter said.

Both Musk and President Trump have expressed anger at Ukraine for attacking Russian diesel refineries in recent weeks, which the president blames for high energy prices. Last week, Musk capped the speeds at which Ukrainian hardware could stay connected to the satellite-based network, the people said, rendering some offensive drones and interceptor drones virtually useless.

Musk and Trump discussed the Starlink decision in a call soon after the slowdown became public, while the president was campaigning last week, two of the people said. One of the people also claimed Musk and Trump discussed the matter prior to the decision to throttle Starlink.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s public complaints—namely that Ukrainians could die if the unrestricted service wasn’t restored—led to widespread confusion about who ordered the slowdown, and to an informal investigation inside the White House.

During the uproar, SpaceX representatives called White House counterparts seeking a unified understanding and subsequent message that the company and Trump administration coordinated ahead of Musk’s directive, the people said.

The only question here seems to be whether it was Elon Musk or Donald Trump who is really behind this.

My money is on both.

I'm a bit of a tankie, but I hate Musk more. 

Here is hoping that the Apartheid Era Emerald Heir Pedo Guy™ burns for this.

It's Solar Shingles All Over Again

Guys it’s 2026 can we please stop falling for his BS.

[image or embed]

— Darragh Mc Kenna (@darraghmckenna.bsky.social) October 16, 2026 at 11:00 AM

Roll Tape!

it appears that Elon Musk's cold thruster sports car was little more than a shell.

Or maybe 2 shells set up for the loop de loop and the car jump separately.

Whether it's the fake self driving demonstrations, the diesel powered charger stations, the non-existent battery swap technology,  or the aforementioned solar shingles. musk has a long history of polishing turds and having it swallowed by an all to credulous media.

Flying cars are right around the corner, if Tesla CEO Elon Musk is to be believed.

Last week, he unveiled the automaker’s long-awaited Roadster by having it drive to the top of a ramp, flipping upside down in the process, then fling itself into the air before using its cold-fuel thrusters to gently land in style. Minutes later, another Roadster did its best Evel-Knievel-with-a-jetpack impression by blowing itself into the air and leaping over a row of six Tesla vehicles, including its Semi Truck cab.

Sure, the Roadster can “fly.” There’s no denying that it was an impressive stunt. But huge questions remain, such as whether regulators will ever deem it road — let alone air — worthy. Another is if the cars used in the stunt will remotely resemble the actual product that’s sold to consumers, if such a thing does ever come to pass.

Tesla says the “Rocket” version of its Roadster is loaded with 600 liters of compressed air, 10 directional cold-gas thruster nozzles, and a huge suction-fan system on the bottom. To make room for it all, Tesla says it removed the passenger seat.

But some observers are wondering if the car is even more stripped down than that, perhaps even lacking a full-sized battery so the engineers could save room and cut down weight. Meanwhile, screenshots of the car’s sparse looking underside taken while it was midair seemed to show it lacking a suction fan, fueling further speculation that Tesla hasn’t figured out to fully combine its capabilities as they’re being presented. The car that stuck upside down to the top of the ramp and then cushioned its landing was, some skeptics allege, equipped with different hardware from the one that leaped into the air to leapfrog the other cars.

Given the numbers supplied by Tesla, 250 kg of air compressed down to 600 liters, which gives an internal pressure of 35.1 MPa (350.5 bar or 5084.5 psi) at 20°C.*

That's a bomb on wheels.  Even if the filament wound pressure vessel is designed to fail gracefully, the rest of the car is shrapnel when something goes wrong.  It's about 3x more pressure than a run of the mill compressed gas tank

Also, given the declared curb weight of 1700 kg, and the low Isp of air or nitrogen cold thrusters, less than 80 under perfect conditions, the thrusters would have an endurance of about 11 seconds.  (It would actually be far less than that, because the temperature of the gas would drop as a result of its rapid expansion.)

Can someone arrest this fraud? 

^*OK, here is how I calculated this. The weight of a mole of gas is 28.97g, so 250 kg of air is 8629.6 moles. The ideal gas equation gives us this PV=nRT, where P = pressure, V= volume (.6 m3), n = 8629.6, and T = 293.13°K (20°C).  Solving the for P gives 3.51 x 107 N/m3 (Pascals).

If You Believe This ………

……… I have a bridge for sale in Brooklyn.

The idea that it was just an AI hallucination that caused the suspension of the, "No Kings," Instagram account just as the protests were kicking off by the criminal enterprise formerly known as Facebook™ does not pass the smell test.

Meta Platforms Inc. said an automated security system mistakenly suspended the Instagram account of the No Kings Coalition at the height of a nationwide series of demonstrations.

The technology company offered an apology and a more detailed explanation for the disruption, which came during the group's early-voting push ahead of the Nov. 3 midterm elections.

Instagram's engineering team found that the accounts' "reading" activity triggered the security system. A tool from Anthropic PBC's Claude was accessing profiles, posts and hashtags at roughly four times the normal rate in intense bursts Saturday, Andy Stone, Meta's vice president of communications wrote in a social media post Sunday.

"These abrupt, high-volume, sequential requests in a short period resembled automated bot traffic rather than an ordinary human browsing our systems," Stone said.

Given that Meta has been actively suppressing pro-DaSilva accounts in Brazil ahead of the upcoming runoff election. I'm gonna call bull sh%$ on this excuse.

 

The Ethical AI Company

Anthropic has been lobbying lawmakers for an AI, "Regulation," bill that, "Would let the government block a model’s release or use only if it poses a foreseeable, imminent risk of more than $1 billion in damages, or of killing or seriously injuring more than 50 people."

Furthermore, this would only apply if, the risk is from, "The creation or release of a biological weapon, the model evading its developer’s controls or a cyberattack."

That's awfully white of them.

Representatives for the artificial intelligence giant Anthropic have quietly pitched Capitol Hill lawmakers on a draft bill to regulate frontier AI safety and security, according to three people with knowledge of the efforts who were granted anonymity to discuss private deliberations.

………

The bill would let the government block a model’s release or use only if it poses a foreseeable, imminent risk of more than $1 billion in damages, or of killing or seriously injuring more than 50 people. The risk must stem from the creation or release of a biological weapon, the model evading its developer’s controls or a cyberattack. The language mirrors that found in California’s AI laws including SB 53, which was signed into law last year.

(emphasis mine)

This is not a serious bill, and California's SB 53 is not a serious law. (Which is probably why Gavin Newsom signed it into law)

Headline of the Day

94 Year-Old Electronics Billionaire Accused of Hiring Goons to Infest Chicago With Huge Rat Swarm

Futurism, describing how a Barre Seid's attempts to feed squirrels on a gargantuan scale have led to a plague of rats.

No one could have predicted this, except, or course for anyone with an even passing familiarity with rats and cityscape ecology.

A 94-year-old electronics mogul is in hot water with Chicago authorities, who claim that his hare-brained plan to feed hungry squirrels is instead sustaining a massive plague of rats.

As previous owner of the billion-dollar electrical manufacturing company Tripp Lite, businessman Barre Seid has been putting his largess to use by paying a small army of workers to sprinkle an assortment of tree nuts across Chicago-area parks, Fortune reports.

As local resident Caroline Novak told Chicago WGN, it’s “like a luxury mélange of really nice nuts: I’m talking Brazil nuts and walnuts… these are not acorns.”

Though Seid’s target audience seems to be local squirrels, residents and city officials note that rats have quickly grown to depend on the regular feedings. As Novak’s husband told WGN, he counted over 40 rats digging holes near nut piles during a recent walk through Lincoln Park.

The bizarre operation has evidently been underway for years at this point, earning the billionaire heaps of civil violations carrying relatively small fines. Wealthy as he is, Seid has reportedly had no problem paying those fees and carrying on — the law forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, as the old saying goes.

The local alderman is pushing for the parks department to sue Seid, which I think is the wrong tactic.

They should frog march him out of his mansion in handcuffs. 

Time to Drop Google Maps

Many years ago, I wrote an essay for the now defunct website Netslaves in which I noted that MapQuest had become the first internet application that I found truly essential.

Since that time, largely through anti-competitive business practices, it has been supplanted by Google Maps.

It seems to be having a bit or a renaissance now, what with it ignoring Trump's delusional renaming of Lake Ontario as Lake America, and now the platform is adding features that allows one to look up the locations of Flock and other automated license plate readers.

MapQuest is continuing its push to become the official map and navigation platform of the resistance. After promising not to comply with the Trump administration’s “Lake America” gimmick, the platform announced a new “Surveillance Layer” that displays the locations of automated license plate readers (ALPRs), including those from Flock Safety.

Per MapQuest, its new tool will identify the locations of known outdoor surveillance cameras and plate readers from Motorola Solutions (Vigilant), Genetec, Axis Communications, Axon, Leonardo (ELSAG), Neology, Rekor, PlateSmart, Ubicquia, Verkada, and others. While the company didn’t specify how it sources its data, it appears to be similar to the data amassed by DeFlock, which maintains a user-submitted map of ALPR camera locations. MapQuest may be sourcing the information from DeFlock and the OpenStreetMap project. Gizmodo has reached out to MapQuest for additional information and will update when we hear back.

………

MapQuest’s app has gotten shockingly popular over the last few months, despite otherwise being left for dead as a relic of the Web 1.0 era. The company started to get a lot of buzz when it refused to go along with the Trump administration’s decision to rename Lake Ontario to “Lake America.” That decision was in stark contrast to the dominant map app makers at Google and Apple, who basically suggested it was out of their control because they just follow the U.S. Geographic Names Information System (GNIS), and when Trump’s executive order made GNIS officially change the name, it changed on their platforms, too.

The otherwise forgotten MapQuest saw a massive surge in downloads following its act of resistance, spiking to the top spot in the Apple App Store and recording millions of downloads. But the company was pushing back against Trump’s name changes before it got a big boost in August. MapQuest also held strong during the Gulf of Mexico situation, opting not to make the change despite GNIS officially updating the name to Gulf of America. Instead, it dropped a Gulf Name Generator that allowed users to make up their own gulf name.

Sometimes, when an organization has no f%$#s left to give, they give their best.

Stay Classy, My Friend

Matt Gaetz has doxxed women suing him for allegedly sexually trafficking them.

Well, we've always known that he was a douche bag. (No offense to actual douche bags)

Two women have filed a federal civil lawsuit accusing former Florida Congressman Matt Gaetz and two others of participating in an alleged sex trafficking scheme involving young women, drugs and traveling across state lines.

The allegations are the latest chapter in Gaetz’s high-profile sex scandal that ultimately derailed his nomination by President Trump as U.S. Attorney General and also led him to resign from Congress in 2024. His departure came as a bi-partisian House Ethics Committee was in the final stages of an investigation into his alleged misconduct.

………

Later in the day, Gaetz posted a photo on X in an effort to dox the Jane Does in the lawsuit. Under a photo of three bikini-clad young women, whose backs are shown, Gaetz wrote: “Jane Doe Strikes Again! Two adult women sued me today alleging they were sex trafficked to the Bahamas. I’m shocked nobody responded to their repeated cries for help, posted to instagram.”

The post includes the name of a woman, but Gaetz earlier admitted to a Herald reporter that he wasn’t sure the photo was of any of the Jane Does in the lawsuit.

The 33-page complaint, filed Monday in the Middle District of Florida, details how the former Congressman used two of his friends, now-convicted ex-Seminole County tax collector Joel Greenberg, and former Florida GOP House member Christopher Dorworth, to coordinate the recruitment of young women whom they supplied with drugs in order to facilitate sexual encounters, according to the lawsuit. The incidents occurred from 2017 to January 2019.

(emphasis mine)

He really is a deeply toxic piece of sh%$.

The Fix is In

It appears that Larry Ellison banned the account promoting the new Elon Musk documentary from Tik Tok.

One hand washes the other among the tech bros. 

TikTok has banned the Musk film advertising account, citing a repeated pattern of political content that violates its policies. The move, which comes just as the Alex Gibney’s investigation into Elon Musk expands to more than 470 screens across North America, raises concerns about Big Tech suppression that the very film seeks to expose.

Distributor Bleecker Street was informed Friday afternoon a “permanent suspension” was coming regarding any ads it tried to buy, and the company was unable to do so shortly after. The native unpaid TikTok account, which generally allows more leeway on so-called political content, remains active, though Bleecker Street is not allowed to pay to boost its content, as many companies traditionally do.

A spokesperson for the distributor confirmed that TikTok reps had informed them of the suspension and noted “disappointment” in the timing. After grossing $70,000 in four theaters in New York and Los Angeles in its first weekend of release, Musk is now playing in dozens of cities this weekend. The spokesperson said the company is in the process of appealing the move; even a reversal, however, could still prove costly if it doesn’t come during a weekend window when many people are likely to see the film.

Well, I guess that serial sexual harassers stick together.

Support Your Local Police

The good folks at Techdirt have a good summary about how conspire to conceal their use of various spy tech.

Among other things, this is a violation of the Brady disclosures required by law, and as such this should be treated as a felony criminal conspiracy, at least in a perfect world.

Law enforcement agencies across the country are increasingly relying on spying technologies—automated license plate readers (ALPR), cell-site simulators, and facial recognition, to name a few–causing an outcry in many communities where people are rightly concerned about the threat to civil rights and civil liberties these tools present.

Some authorities are responding to these concerns by trying to hide what they’re doing. Police departments are telling officers not to mention ALPRs when stopping vehicles and concealing their use of ALPRs to avoid citizens’ public records requests. Concealing the use of unpopular spying tools isn’t anything particularly new for law enforcement—cops have been doing it for years—but it’s just as wrong now as it was 20 years ago.

These practices prevent the public from knowing about and questioning how agencies are spending taxpayer dollars on spying technologies and holding them accountable. This is especially troubling when many towns are signing contracts with Flock and other ALPR vendors with little to no public oversight. The practice also violates disclosure obligations, allows cops and prosecutors to hide their tactics from judges, and cheats defendants from being able to challenge the use of evidence gathered by spy tech from being used against them.

404 Media recently revealed that in its usage policy for Flock ALPR cameras, one county in Iowa tells police to keep them a secret when detaining people: “DO NOT MENTION ALPR USAGE TO THE OCCUPANTS OF THE VEHICLE,” the policy document reads. “DO NOT MENTION ALPR USAGE IN YOUR REPORT OR COMPLAINT UNLESS ABSOLUTELY NECESSARY.” If writing a report about an incident, police are told to say they used “county resources” in making a stop instead of acknowledging use of ALPRs.

In Houston, police officers are likewise instructed to “be as vague as permissible” about why they are using Flock because the searches they run on Flock’s surveillance system could be obtained via public records requests.

The cops are crooks.

If you are on a jury, and a cop says that they used, "County resources," vote to acquit. 

Jury nullification is legal, though strongly discouraged, and it should be used here. 

Not a Surprise

It appears that DHS ignored restrictions placed by the issuing judge on the search warrant issued against Congresswoman Ilhan Omar.

This is not a surprise.  The Trump administration in general, and DHS in particular, are to following the law what Ebola is to French kissing.

Lawyers for Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minnesota) on Friday accused federal authorities of ignoring key restrictions that a judge placed on the search of the lawmaker’s D.C. residence this week and demanded the immediate return of all property seized from the home. 

In a letter sent to Justice Department prosecutors, attorneys Amy Jeffress and Joshua Matz condemned the investigation into Omar’s immigration history as a politically motivated attack on one of President Donald Trump’s chief critics, saying it “violates Representative Omar’s constitutional rights and threatens the separation of powers.”

They also alleged that investigators did not follow specific instructions that a U.S. magistrate judge imposed on how the search should be carried out as they descended upon Omar’s residence in Northeast Washington on Monday, according to a copy of their letter obtained by The Washington Post.

Among the restrictions the attorneys said agents did not follow were provisions requiring investigators to provide Omar’s lawyers with a copy of the warrant and to contact the House Office of General Counsel before carrying out the search. That would have given Omar the chance to consult with congressional attorneys on any legislative work product that might have been exempt from federal seizure, her lawyers said. 

The Post has reported that Homeland Security Investigations, the investigative arm of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, is investigating whether Omar, 44, or members of her family may have lied on decades-old immigration paperwork to secure legal status and eventually U.S. citizenship.

I'm pretty sure that the Trump admin wants to denaturalize her, which is beyond the pale in terms of the norms of behavior, but they also ignored black letter Constitutional law, and a judge's instructions, with regard to the, "Speech and debate clause," which gives complete immunity to lawmakers' actions with regard to their constitutional duties.

………

In their letter Friday, Omar’s attorneys said the warrant required federal prosecutors to advise the congresswoman of those “speech and debate” protections and ask her to waive them. The lawyers maintained that did not happen and that agents executing the search prevented Omar from contacting legal counsel for more than an hour after the search had begun.

As much as Trump might want it to be, legislating while black is not a crime. 

It's TACO Day

Trump has canceled the livestream of Nidal Hasan's execution following (completely predictable) widespread and worldwide condemnation of this bit of mindless cruelty.

Evil and stupid.

President Trump on Thursday canceled the Pentagon’s planned livestream of the execution of the Army officer who was convicted in the 2009 Fort Hood mass shooting.

Pentagon officials said last week that the execution of Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, who killed 13 people and wounded 32 others at Fort Hood, Texas, would be broadcast via livestream, a decision Mr. Trump initially said he supported.

But in private, Mr. Trump quickly began to deliberate with his advisers amid widespread criticism of the decision, and learned after the announcement that Mr. Hasan is paralyzed, according to several people familiar with his thinking. The president’s main concern was whether broadcasting the execution would deter other mass shootings, according to a White House official who was granted anonymity to discuss his thinking.

Here is a message to the editors of the New York Times, stop sane-washing Donald Trump and the Trump administration like you did in the last paragraph.

They are people for whom publicly displayed cruelty is a source of pleasure, nothing more.

………

Mr. Trump added that only immediate families of Mr. Hasan’s victims could watch the execution in person.

The president and his advisers remain adamant that Mr. Hasan deserves to be executed, but the president’s decision to change course constituted a rare retreat in the face of enormous public pushback. The criticism came from Democrats, Republicans, military officials and faith leaders who maintained that broadcasting the execution would turn it into a barbaric source of entertainment that violated core democratic principles.

"Rare retreat?"  Not rare at all.

TACO (Trump Always Chickens Out) is a f%$#ing meme.  He reverses himself all the time.

Now you are attempting to imply steadfastness from the man with a back-bone akin to that of a Common Bloodworm. 

Less Than ½ Scaramucci

It appears that lying about your passing the bar and being really bad at your job will get you fired quickly in the Trump administration, at least if you are a woman.

Katie Zacharia lasted just 5 4 days as Trump's Press secretary.

President Trump’s new press secretary, Katie Zacharia, was forced out of her role Friday after five days on the job, a rare reversal by the White House that capped a week of upheaval.

Ms. Zacharia, who had gained Mr. Trump’s attention as a conservative commentator, had gotten off to a shaky start with her first and only press briefing on Tuesday. She largely read off a script and ended questioning after just five and a half minutes. That was followed by an onslaught of headlines about whether she had misrepresented herself as a lawyer — the president called her “an attorney” — despite failing her bar exam.

………

Three people familiar with the matter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe internal discussions, said Ms. Zacharia was ousted from her role as press secretary.

………

She may be remembered as having had what seems to be the shortest tenure in the history of the White House press secretary job: five days and one briefing.

In Mr. Trump’s first term, Anthony Scaramucci was fired as the White House communications director (a different role from press secretary) just 10 days after he was hired.

After news of Ms. Zacharia’s ouster broke, Mr. Scaramucci posted on X: “Records are made to be broken. But I take no pleasure in other people’s pain.”

I will note that Mr. Scaramucci is taking the high road here.  (I never thought that I would ever have to say that)

Fake News

It turns out that the drone strike on Yandex servers in Russia did not take out right wing troll bots all over the world.

While it might be nice if it were true, it simply isn't.

On Monday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy claimed that a Ukrainian bombing strike on Yandex’s data centers, a large Russian technology company, had led to a sudden decrease in bot activity online. “When our strikes reached Yandex’s data centers, it suddenly became a little easier to breathe on many social media platforms,” Zelenskyy declared, speaking at the opening of the Warsaw Security Forum. There was, he added, “less hate, less division, and fewer provocations because there were fewer bots. And it’s pretty clear where those bots were coming from.”

The claim quickly picked up speed, and gained specificity: that following the Ukrainian strikes, all kinds of internet users were suddenly less present online, including MAGA accounts, those supporting Reform UK, and ones supporting AfD, the German ultra-right party. A Polish political scientist shared claims that bot activity supporting AfD had dropped by 56 percent, a post that was viewed millions of times and has since been deleted. As Radio Free Europe has reported, a Czech politician shared a similar claim, writing, “So much talk about German patriotism…then the connection from Russia goes down.”

The underlying claim, in other words, was that a great deal of political activity online across a number of countries is inauthentic and led by Russian bots. Their sudden alleged silencing was a simple, feel-good story amidst the endless fight against online disinformation.

The only problem was that it simply wasn’t true.

Tech experts quickly explained that the “bots” that had been taken offline by the Yandex strike were actually bot crawlers, also known as web crawlers, which continually browse the internet in order to index web pages. A widely circulated chart from Cloudflare, the infrastructure company, did indeed show a drop in traffic from Yandex’s servers, which made sense; both the company’s web crawlers and search index requests were disrupted by the bombing campaign.

………

The second problem, however, was that the ultra-specific claims about less activity in certain areas—MAGA, pro-Kremlin bot accounts, and AfD—had absolutely no basis in fact.

“We see no “dramatic drop” in traffic of Kremlin-aligned human trolls-for-hire targeting Russian domestic users (which we have been tracking for years),” wrote Antibot4Navalny, a group of anonymous researchers who track and respond to Russian disinformation.

The evidence is transparently false, which says nothing about the origins of right wing bots. (My money is on Elon wot done it) 

There are Yandex bots, just like there are Google bots, and Bing bots, and Baidu bots.

Search engines crawl the web.  It's just what they do. 

I'm Not Dead

Yes, I know, I missed posting last night.

Life, and my gut, got in the way last night.

I've got 2 weddings to attend this weekend (I am sitting in a hotel following the reception for the first) and a  yahrzeit. 

To quote a notable movie villain, "I've got my country's 500th anniversary to plan, my wedding to arrange, my wife to murder and Guilder to frame for it; I'm swamped." 

Look Out Below

They come down from Down Under, where two huge IPOs for data center firms just collapsed.

Thankfully, Chuck Jones already came up with the appropriate metaphor for this moment. 

Just a few months ago, companies connected to the AI business couldn’t go public fast enough, as far as investors were concerned. Suddenly, the IPO waters are looking a lot less inviting.

Rising interest rates, a jumpy stock market and heightened political uncertainty are creating a dicey outlook for tech companies that had been aiming for a fourth-quarter public offering, causing some to reconsider their timing.

………

The latest signs of cooling interest came when two Australian data-center companies, Airtrunk and Firmus Grid, pumped their brakes on their public offerings within the span of a few days.

Firmus cited “recent market volatility and prevailing market conditions” in canceling what would have been the country’s largest IPO in 30 years, with a planned raise of almost $5 billion. The company, which has a close relationship with Nvidia and is backed by Coatue and Blackstone, plans to raise funds privately and go public on a U.S. exchange next year, a person familiar with the matter said.

Airtrunk, which was preparing to list in Singapore, now hopes to go public in the first half of next year, The Wall Street Journal reported. The company, which is also backed by Blackstone, was concerned about market volatility and interest rates.

Nothing to worry about.  I'm sure that the masters of tech and finance have got this. 

We Are F%$#ed

Have you heard about the Thwaites, aka the "Doomsday Glacier"?

It just got a lot lot more doomey.

We are seeing more sea water under the glacier, eroding its base, and sea level rise estimates from its collapse have doubled.

One of Earth’s most dangerous glaciers is emerging as a potentially greater driver of future sea-level rise than previously understood.

A team of glaciologists at the University of California and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory developed a new ice sheet model to come up with a more accurate projection of the melting of Thwaites Glacier in West Antarctica. The findings, published in Nature Communications, estimate that the glacier could contribute up to 1.2 inches (30 millimeters) of sea level rise by 2100, even without additional climate warming.

The study highlights an even greater risk of coastal flooding in the coming decades than previously estimated.

………

Also known as the Doomsday Glacier, Thwaites has undergone a profound transformation in recent decades, thinning, accelerating, and retreating inland as warm ocean water eats away at its floating ice shelves from below.

………

The researchers behind the new study set out to reconcile ice sheet models against observations collected over the past 20 years.

Using synthetic aperture radar data from Finland’s ICEYE satellite constellation, researchers detected fluctuations in Thwaites Glacier’s grounding zone along its main trunk. The observations suggest that seawater penetrates several miles beneath the glacier’s grounded ice, lifting it in response to tidal fluctuations.

This movement allows pressurized seawater to travel beneath the ice, potentially carrying ocean heat farther inland and intensifying melting at the glacier’s base. The intrusion of seawater may also be influenced by ocean currents reshaped by climate change.

Clearly, global warming is a fraud.