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Submission + - Fearmongering predictions about climate change keep falling apart (nypost.com)

An anonymous reader writes: Over the past half-century, environmentalists have predicted countless calamities. Their extreme predictions were typically wrong, their draconian countermeasures turned out to be mostly misguided, and we should be grateful we didn’t follow their harmful advice. We need to keep this history in mind as we are inundated with stories of climate Armageddon.

This summer, headlines about the Great Barrier Reef painted a dire picture of climate-driven devastation, with environmental journalists claiming the reef was on the brink of collapse.

In reality, data shows the reef has its fourth-highest coral cover since records began in 1986, revealing these alarmist narratives to be vastly misleading.

Sensible, life-improving environmental policies over recent decades were rarely sold with fearmongering. Rich countries have dramatically reduced air and water pollution through technological advances and then through regulation. Poorer countries are starting to do the same thing, as they emerge from poverty and can afford to be more environmentally concerned. Forests have expanded globally, with this growth clear in rich countries and increasingly across the world.

This isn’t the scary future we were promised by environmentalists.

Submission + - TCS, Infosys, and Cognizant turned H1B program into organized labor trafficking (x.com)

An anonymous reader writes: I'm saying this as an immigrant living here — these parasites are destroying American workers and trapping immigrant workers in wage slavery.

They rig the lottery by filing up multiple sometimes even 80 applications for one fake candidate. They flood the system with fraudulent submissions to guarantee wins.

There were 15,500 fraudulent applications last year, over 52% were complete lies.

American workers get fired after training their own replacements. Immigrant workers get trapped at $65K for $120K jobs with no escape route.

Both groups get destroyed by the same scam while consultancies get rich.

The employer applies for the H1B visa, so they hold complete power over the worker. If you leave the job, you have 30 days to find another employer willing to sponsor you or go back to your home country.

This creates modern indentured servitude where workers can't negotiate or quit.

Submission + - If We Want Bigger Wind Turbines, We're Gonna Need Bigger Airplanes (ieee.org) 2

schwit1 writes: The world’s largest airplane, when it’s built, will stretch more than a football field from tip to tail. Sixty percent longer than the biggest existing aircraft, with 12 times as much cargo space as a 747, the behemoth will look like an oil tanker that’s sprouted wings—aeronautical engineering at a preposterous scale.

Called WindRunner, and expected by 2030, it’ll haul just one thing: massive wind-turbine blades. In most parts of the world, onshore wind-turbine blades can be built to a length of 70 meters, max. This size constraint comes not from the limits of blade engineering or physics; it’s transportation. Any larger and the blades couldn’t be moved over land, since they wouldn’t fit through tunnels or overpasses, or be able to accommodate some of the sharper curves of roads and rails.

So the WindRunner’s developer, Radia of Boulder, Colo., has staked its business model on the idea that the only way to get extralarge blades to wind farms is to fly them there. “The companies in the industryknow how to make turbines that are the size of the Eiffel Tower with blades that are longer than a football field,” says Mark Lundstrom, Radia’s founder and CEO. “But they’re just frustrated that they can’t deploy those machines [on land].”

Radia’s plane will be able to hold two 95-meter blades or one 105-meter blade, and land on makeshift dirt runways adjacent to wind farms. This may sound audacious—an act of hubris undertaken for its own sake. But Radia’s supporters argue that WindRunner is simply the right tool for the job—the only way to make onshore wind turbines bigger.

Bigger turbines, after all, can generate more energy at a lower cost per megawatt. But the question is: Will supersizing airplanes be worth the trouble?

Submission + - White House asks FDA to review pharma advertising on TV (whitehouse.gov) 1

sinij writes:

The Secretary of Health and Human Services shall therefore take appropriate action to ensure transparency and accuracy in direct-to-consumer prescription drug advertising, including by increasing the amount of information regarding any risks associated with the use of any such prescription drug required to be provided in prescription drug advertisements, to the extent permitted by applicable law. The Commissioner of Food and Drugs shall take appropriate action to enforce the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Actâ(TM)s prescription drug advertising provisions, and otherwise ensure truthful and non-misleading information in direct-to-consumer prescription drug advertisements.

Advertising dollars is a major avenue for pharmaceutical companies to influence news and attempt to shape public opinion. Advertising was a major contributor to painkiller addiction, where networks were hesitant to cover early reports of addictivness. It is likely directly contributing today to lack of critical coverage of Ozempic. It is just too big of a conflict of interest to allow to stand.

Submission + - Scientists Prove Dust Helps Clouds Freeze and It Could Change Climate Models (zmescience.com)

An anonymous reader writes: New research shows that the presence of dust can cause the tops of clouds—such as these seen over the Sahara Desert—to freeze more easily. Credit: Diego Villanueva/ETH Zürich.

Dust plays a major role in the formation of ice in the atmosphere. A new analysis of satellite data, published in Science , shows that dust can cause a cloud’s water droplets to freeze at warmer temperatures than they otherwise would. The finding brings what researchers had observed in the laboratory to the scale of the atmosphere and may help climate scientists better model future climate changes.

In 1804, French scientist Joseph Louis Gay-Lussac ascended to about 23,000 feet (7,000 meters) in a hydrogen balloon from Paris, without supplemental oxygen, to collect air samples. He noted that clouds with more dust particles tended to have more frozen droplets.

In the 20th century, scientists found that pure water can remain liquid even when cooled to ?34.5C. But once even tiny amounts of material, such as dust, are introduced, it freezes at much warmer temperatures.

In 2012, researchers in Germany were finally able to test this directly in a cloud chamber experiment. They re-created cloud conditions in the lab, introduced different types of desert dust, and gradually cooled the chamber to observe the temperatures at which droplets froze.

For Diego Villanueva, an atmospheric scientist at ETH Zürich in Switzerland and lead author of the new study, it was striking that scientists had uncovered these processes in the lab, yet no one had examined them in such detail in nature.

Submission + - NASA inspector general: Dragonfly mission is way overbudget and behind schedule (behindtheblack.com)

schwit1 writes: According to a new NASA inspector general report issued today, NASA’s Dragonfly mission to Titan is now billions overbudget and is likely not be ready to launch in 2028.

You can download the report here [pdf]. From its executive summary:

Dragonfly was selected under a New Frontiers Announcement of Opportunity with a $850 million cost cap on Principal Investigator-Managed Mission Costs, which primarily includes development costs but excludes launch vehicle and post-launch operations costs. However, by April 2024, those costs had grown to $2.6 billion and the launch delayed by more than 2 years, from April 2026 to July 2028. The cost increase and schedule delay were largely the result of NASA directing APL to conduct four replans between June 2019 and July 2023 early in Dragonfly’s development. Justifications for these replans included the COVID-19 pandemic, supply chain issues, changes to accommodate a heavy-lift launch vehicle, projected funding challenges, and inflation.

The report now estimates the budget will eventually rise above $3 billion, cost that is eating away at NASA’s entire planetary budget, making other missions impossible. The project itself is far from ready, with multiple unfinished issues that make its present launch target of 2028 very unlikely.

Submission + - Reuters pulls Xi, Putin longevity video after CCP TV demanded its removal (reuters.com)

An anonymous reader writes: Reuters pulled a four-minute video capturing a candid exchange between Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin, where the two discussed the possibility of living to 150 years or having immortality.

The footage was recorded during a military parade in Beijing that commemorated the 80th anniversary of the end of World War II. It was aired on China Central Television (CCTV), and licensed to Reuters for distribution.

CCTV demanded its removal. Reuters ultimately withdrew the video.

Submission + - A Woman Was Stabbed to Death on a Train. Wikipedia Wants to Erase Her Story (archive.is)

An anonymous reader writes: Iryna Zarutska boarded the Lynx Blue Line of the Charlotte, North Carolina, light rail system on August 22 and began looking at her phone. She wore a hat and T-shirt, with trendy wire-rim glasses perched on her nose. Within moments, she had caught the attention of a man wearing a red hoodie seated behind her.

Minutes later, the man took a folded knife from his pocket, opened the blade, and stood over Zarutska, 23, who appeared to have no notion that those moments would be her last. The man who stabbed her, Decarlos Brown Jr., 34, was arrested and charged with first-degree murder.

Those are the facts. But a number of Wikipedia editors don’t want you to know about the attack. Since the online encyclopedia’s article “Killing of Iryna Zarutska” was created on Saturday, Wikipedia editors have fought to have it deleted, as I wrote in a post on X.

“An editor has nominated this article for deletion,” says the text in a box near the top of the article with a red stripe running down the left.

It was another sign of how Wikipedia’s idealistic mission to provide all the world’s information for free has been compromised by editors who battle over their version of the truth. Last year, I wrote that the consensus achieved by all that jostling often lines up with the prerogatives of the Democratic Party and the media establishment that supports it. Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger has criticized the site as too left-wing

Zarutska was a Ukrainian immigrant. Nearly three weeks after she was killed, the story broke not in the national news media, but on X. Surveillance footage of the killing began trending online, pinned to rocketing conversations about crime, race, and representation. As the story spread, it morphed from another crime statistic in urban America into a cultural flashpoint, one positioned by the right as an inverse to George Floyd: a white woman, murdered by a black man, and hardly anyone notices.

The story wasn’t just ignored. It was suppressed, at least by Wikipedia. That notion is reinforced by the twists and turns of the article about Zarutska, created by a user called YeraC. The initial statement about the attack was fairly straightforward: “Iryna Zarutska, a 23-year-old Ukrainian refugee who had fled the Russian invasion of Ukraine, was fatally stabbed by Decarlos Brown Jr., a 34-year-old homeless man with a lengthy criminal history. The incident drew significant attention due to Zarutska’s background as a refugee seeking safety in the United States and raised concerns about public safety on Charlotte’s public transportation system.”

Submission + - Burger King Uses Copyright Law to Nix Security Research (bankinfosecurity.com)

schwit1 writes: Self-described ethical hacker "BobDaHacker" posted Saturday a blog post disclosing authentication bypass and other vulnerabilities in the "Assistant" system used by Toronto-based Restaurant Brands International, parent company to the hamburger chain as well as Tim Hortons, Popeyes and Firehouse Subs.

The "Assistant" system is deployed across RBI brands, BobDaHacker said in the now-deleted report, which remains archived online.

The blog post, titled "We Hacked Burger King," was up for less than 48 hours, until the researcher said they received a copyright infringement notice transmitted by threat intel firm Cyble. "Their complaint specifically states that our use of the 'Burger King' trademark was unauthorized and creates 'a high degree of confusion among the public that the website is in some way endorsed by/or linked with our client,'" BobDaHacker said in a statement posted to the URL where their research previously was live.

Here it is on the wayback machine

Submission + - All Multi-year Bets Payoff When Tesla Unboxed Cybercabs Are Made in 100-200 Days (nextbigfuture.com)

An anonymous reader writes: One of Elon Musks Super powers is hyperfocusing on what really matters.

What really matters for Tesla is get Cybercabs mass produced using the new unboxed manufacturing process.

Tesla can go next level in car production, low cost vehicles with mass produced cybercabs with the new process starting in only 100 days. December 2025.

Cybercab itself is a gamechanging next level. It is designed exclusively for robotaxi and it will not use paint which saves 40% of the factory space using Sheet metal compound.

Unboxed process is going to a giant lego building process that can be 4-7 times faster than traditional manufacturing. This has taken years to develop and requires entirely new production using 48 volt architecture.

Tesla FSD has needed nearly a decade and FSD 14 with ten times the parameters and safer than human driving comes out in September. This month.

All of those huge multi-year bets can payoff in volume next year.

Submission + - Google admits the open web is in 'rapid decline' (theverge.com)

schwit1 writes: For months, Google has maintained that the web is “thriving,” AI isn’t tanking traffic, and its search engine is sending people to a wider variety of websites than ever. But in a court filing from last week, Google admitted that “the open web is already in rapid decline,” as spotted earlier by Jason Kint and reported on by Search Engine Roundtable .

Google submitted the filing ahead of another trial that will determine how it will address its monopoly in the advertising technology business. The US Department of Justice recommends that Google break up its advertising business, but the company argues in the filing that this isn’t ideal because it would “only accelerate” the decline of the open web, “harming publishers who currently rely on open-web display advertising revenue.”

Google:
Finally, while Plaintiffs continue to advance essentially the same divestiture remedies they noticed in their complaint filed in January 2023, the world has continued to turn. Plaintiffs put forth remedies as if trial, the Court’s liability decision, and remedies discovery never happened—and also as if the incredibly dynamic ad tech ecosystem had stood still while these judicial proceedings continued.

But the changes have been many: AI is reshaping ad tech at every level; non-open web display ad formats like Connected TV and retail media are exploding in popularity; and Google’s competitors are directing their investments to these new growth areas. The fact is that today, the open web is already in rapid decline and Plaintiffs’ divestiture proposal would only accelerate that decline, harming publishers who currently rely on open-web display advertising revenue. As the law makes clear, the last thing a court should do is intervene to reshape an industry that is already in the midst of being reshaped by market forces.

The statement sharply contrasts Google’s recent narrative about the health of search on the web. Google has a clear incentive to make itself appear weaker or less monopolistic in the courtroom, but its admission reflects a reality many publishers are going through. Several digital publishers and independent website owners have reported experiencing a decline in traffic following changes to Google Search’s algorithm and the rise of AI chatbots.

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