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Submission + - Singapore scammers get the canning treatment (mha.gov.sg) 1

Submitted by D,Petkow
D,Petkow writes: Singapore is often hailed as one of the world’s most ultra-modern hubs — a place of gleaming skyscrapers, cutting-edge fintech, and futuristic urban planning. Yet, beneath the polished surface, the city-state still enforces some of the strictest old-school punishments imaginable.

In a move that stunned many outside observers, Parliament recently passed a law mandating at least six strokes of the cane for scammers and money mules. With scams making up nearly 60% of reported crimes and billions lost since 2020, the government argues that harsh deterrence is necessary.

It’s a striking contrast: a nation leading in smart cities and AI governance, while simultaneously wielding rattan canes against fraudsters. This duality — hyper-modern yet deeply traditional — is part of what makes Singapore fascinating, and sometimes bewildering, to the rest of the world.

https://says.com/my/news/singa...
http://metro.co.uk/2025/11/08/...

Submission + - Why Solarpunk is already happening in Africa (substack.com)

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: You know that feeling when you’re waiting for the cable guy, and they said ‘between 8am and 6pm, and you waste your entire day, and they never show up?

Now imagine that, except the cable guy is ‘electricity,’ the day is ‘50 years,’ and you’re one of 600 million people. At some point, you stop waiting and figure it out yourself.

What’s happening across Sub-Saharan Africa right now is the most ambitious infrastructure project in human history, except it’s not being built by governments or utilities or World Bank consortiums. It’s being built by startups selling solar panels to farmers on payment plans. And it’s working.

Over 30 million solar products sold in 2024. 400,000 new solar installations every month across Africa. 50% market share captured by companies that didn’t exist 15 years ago. Carbon credits subsidizing the cost. IoT chips in every device. 90%+ repayment rates on loans to people earning $2/day.

And if you understand what’s happening in Africa, you understand the template for how infrastructure will get built everywhere else for the next 50 years.

Submission + - Bombshell report exposes how Meta relied on scam ad profits to fund AI (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: Documents showed that internally, Meta was hesitant to abruptly remove accounts, even those considered some of the “scammiest scammers,” out of concern that a drop in revenue could diminish resources needed for artificial intelligence growth.

Instead of promptly removing bad actors, Meta allowed “high value accounts” to “accrue more than 500 strikes without Meta shutting them down,” Reuters reported. The more strikes a bad actor accrued, the more Meta could charge to run ads, as Meta’s documents showed the company “penalized” scammers by charging higher ad rates. Meanwhile, Meta acknowledged in documents that its systems helped scammers target users most likely to click on their ads.

“Users who click on scam ads are likely to see more of them because of Meta’s ad-personalization system, which tries to deliver ads based on a user’s interests,” Reuters reported.

Internally, Meta estimates that users across its apps in total encounter 15 billion “high risk” scam ads a day. That’s on top of 22 billion organic scam attempts that Meta users are exposed to daily, a 2024 document showed. Last year, the company projected that about $16 billion, which represents about 10 percent of its revenue, would come from scam ads.

Submission + - Musk Wins $1 Trillion Pay Package, Creating Split Screen on Wealth in America (nytimes.com)

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: Tesla shareholders approved a plan to grant Elon Musk shares worth nearly $1 trillion if he meets ambitious goals, including vastly expanding the company’s stock market valuation.

Much like an earlier pay plan that Tesla shareholders approved in 2018, this 12-step package asks Mr. Musk, the company’s chief executive, to vastly expand Tesla’s stock market valuation — to $8.5 trillion from around $1.4 trillion — while hitting a variety of other goals. Those include selling one million robots with humanlike qualities and 10 million paid subscriptions to the company’s self-driving software.

Submission + - Israeli army removing Chinese made service cars from officers - espionage risks (x.com) 1

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: The Israeli army has started taking away Chinese-made service cars from officers — espionage risks officially confirmed

The military has strong reasons to believe that built-in cameras, sensors and communication systems in these vehicles could collect data and transmit it to servers in China.

Israel’s Defense Ministry and the IDF have begun a phased phase-out. Hundreds of vehicles are affected — mostly seven-seat CHERY models issued to officers with large families.

  Chinese cars are already banned from entering military bases, and by early 2026 the army plans to completely phase out their use.

Comment Not every 6 months (Score 1) 160

by schwit1 (#65767436) Attached to: Daylight Saving Time: Still Happening. Still Unpopular

Daylight Saving Time (DST): Approximately 238 days per year (about 65% of the year)

From the second Sunday in March to the first Sunday in November
That's roughly 7 months and 3 weeks

Standard Time: Approximately 127 days per year (about 35% of the year)

From the first Sunday in November to the second Sunday in March
That's roughly 4 months and 1 week

Submission + - Ford to End Production of Failed F-150 Lightning (yahoo.com)

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: Ford will stop making its electric vehicle (EV) flagship, the F-150 Lightning. The New York Times reports this could be attributed to both the fire and flagging sales. In the first three quarters of the year, Lightning unit sales were up only 1% to 23,034. The extent to which Ford is entirely a gasoline-powered car company shows up in overall F-Series sales, which rose 12.7% to 620,580. Ford’s management shows wisdom in shutting down Lightning production. The electric pickup never sold well, suggesting its launch was a terrible mistake. Additionally, the U.S. EV market is dying and will not bounce back soon. The $7,500 EV tax credit expired at the end of the third quarter. People who wanted an EV rushed to buy one before the deadline.

Submission + - SpaceX: Starship will be going to the Moon, with or without NASA (behindtheblack.com)

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: SpaceX is going to land this spaceship manned on the Moon, whether or not NASA’s SLS and Orion are ready. And even if those expensive, cumbersome, and poorly designed boondoggles are ready for those first two Artemis landings, SpaceX is likely to quickly outmatch them with numerous other private missions to the Moon, outside of NASA. It has the funds to do it, and it knows it has the customers willing to buy the flights.

Comment SNAP a major cause of obesity (Score 0) 138

by schwit1 (#65762222) Attached to: Obesity Rate Declining in U.S.

45 million people, or 1 in 8 Americans is on food stamps/SNAP.

According to the Wall Street Journal — and I promise I’m not making this statistic up — roughly three-quarters of adult food-stamp beneficiaries are overweight or obese. Three quarters of them. And these people are not particularly sympathetic, either. Half of them are on TikTok at the moment — BMI north of 40, smoke detector ringing off the hook, sass off the charts — and they’re threatening to rob their local grocery store the moment food stamps are cut off.

https://www.dailywire.com/news...

This is a post you may have seen from Calley Means, who used to work in this industry.

Early in my career, I consulted for Coke to ensure sugar taxes failed and soda was included in food stamp funding.
I say Coke's policies are evil because I saw inside the room.
The first step in playbook was paying the NAACP + other civil rights groups to call opponents racist

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