trash day
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sippicancottage

A Man Who Has Nothing In Particular To Recommend Him Discusses All Sorts of Subjects at Random as Though He Knew Everything

The Industrial Revolution in Reverse, and Other Discontents. Tuesday Trash Day

Well, it’s Tuesday again. Trash day. It’s usually a joyous occasion at our house. You put your bag of trash on the curb, and wait for the magic trash fairies to come and whisk it away later in the morning.

By the way, I can’t recommend calling the two fellows hanging off the back of the trash truck “magic trash fairies.” I think their electronic anklets make them cranky.

On to the Tuesday Trash Day roundup! You can call me the internet trash fairy if you want.

Hackers Exploited a PC Driving Sim to Pull Off Massive Disney Data Breach

The hackers behind the event are self-described furry hacktivist collective Nullbulge, which is apparently some kind of pornographic term. According to PCGamer, Nullbulge published a mod for BeamNG that contained a Trojan, or a kind of malware that allowed Nullbulge to remotely access computers it was activated on. One of the people to unwittingly install it was a Disney software development manager, who also had the company’s Slack channels active on the same computer.

This is what happens when you run a company with mickey mouse security.

Running One-man SaaS, 9 Years In

At least for the time being I’m not looking to expand the team. A large part of why I’m a “solopreneur” is because I do not want to manage or be managed. A cofounder or employee would mean regular meetings to discuss what’s done, and what’s to be done. It would be awesome to find someone who just magically does great work without needing any attention. Just brief monthly summaries of high-quality contributions, better than I could have done. But I don’t think I can find someone like that, and I also don’t think I could afford them.

His business grosses $14,000 a month, and it’s run on his own servers. It’s kinda funny how internet kiddies invent words for things that already exist, and think they discovered them. In my day, we’d wear an onion on our belt and a “solopreneur” was just “self-employed,” and that’s the way we liked it.

What could a future sovereign Mars economy look like?

These five conditions outlined in Sovereign Mars include all permanent settlers on Mars completely acquiescing Earth citizenship and interests; Earthlings being unable to interfere with the Mars affairs, including financial, political, and social aspects; Earthlings requiring permission from Mars to conduct scientific investigations on the Red Planet; only Mars citizens can own land; and all resources brought from Earth, including technological or other items, will remain on Mars permanently.

Sounds great. Now substitute “United States” for Mars, and “foreigners” for earthlings, and rewrite the paragraph.

Over 900 Artifacts Recovered From Ming Dynasty Shipwreck

They lie under nearly 5,000 feet of water. In 2023, a group of researchers from different institutions set about surveying and collecting artifacts from the wrecks, work which has been ongoing over the months. Submersibles were lowered to explore the wrecks and retrieve items, while cameras and laser technology were used to photograph and 3D-map the wrecks.

They spent millions to loot an underwater Crate & Barrel.

Cocaine found in muscle and liver of sharpnose sharks off coast of Rio de Janeiro

The researchers purchased 13 of the sharks from local fishermen. Each was dissected in the lab, where the team also collected muscle and liver samples and assessed them with tandem mass spectrometry. They found cocaine in all the samples at concentrations approximately 100 times higher than observed in any other marine animal.

The sharks were also partially deaf from listening to electronic music at high volumes.

Brain-Invading Parasite Could Be Hacked to Deliver Meds in Your Head

A parasite that is able to cross the blood-brain barrier to infect the brains of its hosts could one day be a means of delivering important therapeutics.

Toxoplasma gondii – a parasite that thrives in nearly all warm-blooded life on Earth – could be engineered to deliver therapeutic proteins to cells in the brain, providing treatment options for conditions that are difficult to access.

Hmm. I’m no doctor, but I can think of about four hundred reasons that this is a bad idea. Oh well. I believe toxoplasma gondii causes toxoplasmosis, a disease you get from cat feces. The article doesn’t mention it, but they could save a lot of research money by simply giving box wine to Covid Karens and measuring how many CNN news notes spill out of their brains.

Was early modern writing paper expensive?

To put this in perspective, the average laborer making 6-12 pence a day could purchase up to 75 sheets of paper with a day’s wages. Put another way, if we accept D.C. Coleman’s estimate that the average annual consumption of white paper per head in England in 1600 was 6 sheets (p. 15), that’s a penny per year spent on paper. These numbers are all slightly wobbly, of course, but they suggest that regular writing paper was not an expensive consumable for laborers or aristocrats.

Modern office workers still  spend about a penny a year on paper. They steal the rest from their office.

Why did the U.S. miss the battery revolution?

The failure of both American media and the American government to anticipate the battery revolution is actually a huge historical outlier. When it comes to any other major technological revolution I can think of, the U.S. was very early to the party — driving the key research and development, hyping up the technology well before it was commercially viable, and making a major effort at early commercialization.

The headline is a textbook example of petitio principii. That’s “begging the question” in its correct, original meaning. The author assumes the question is already answered and goes from there. Who says the US missed the battery revolution? The US is too busy missing the Industrial Revolution in reverse to worry about missing anything else.

Well, that’s it for internet trash day. I hope the trash fairies visit you today, and brighten your curb.

3 Responses

  1. “only Mars citizens can own land”

    huh. This sounds wrong but In can’t quite…

    Alienist……… Marsist…… Earthlingist……

    There is some oppression in there somewhere. After all the Earthlings came a long way to teach the backwards Mars denizens how to be properly (New England) civilized.

  2. The sharks off Rio were also big on headbanging, particularly during Carneval. Most of them used to be lawyers, but really just want to direct.

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