Saturday December 7th, 2019
Stripchat Partners with Psychologist to Crush Anti-Masturbation Shame
Adult cam site Stripchat has partnered with the Sexual Health Alliance (SHA) to offer live and private virtual counseling sessions to cam viewers concerned about their consumption of adult entertainment.
The ultimate goal of Stripchat and the SHA’s Dr. David Ley is to ease the greater awareness and acceptance of sexual freedom
Hey, remember when everyone was calling New York City stupid for not caving in to every single Amazon demand... Amazon signs lease for new Manhattan office space less than a year after scrapping plans for Queens headquarters
Friday December 6th, 2019
https://twitter.com/ajthelawyer/status/1202389720417931264
Today someone called my office for advice about what to tell a Soldier with a "confederate" flag on his car. My advice was that, as an Army officer, he needs to infom the SM of Lee's order to surrender, and should accept the SM's surrender.
I was recently at a tech conference, and at modern tech conferences there's a lot of discussion about makerly things and kids, so it came out that I went to a Waldorf school through 7th grade. And someone else in the circle introduced themselves as a "fellow Waldorf survivor".
I was the runt of my class, and there was at least one instance where I was beaten pretty severely on the playground by a mob, one instance where it was bad enough that adults intervened, at least, and in critiques of Waldorf I've often seen references to such things and the general philosophy of a hands-off letting kids find their own social structures.
I never know how much of that is specific to Waldorf. I keep seeing indications that, no, in fact all grade school education is pretty fucked up. Which I guess is good, there are some things in the Waldorf process that I think are valuable.
But, yeah, I think I know something of playing dead while being kicked and poked, and why this kid chose the path they did.
An 8-year-old killed himself after being bullied, police say. The school district wants immunity.
Two days before 8-year-old Gabriel Taye ended his life, his classmates wandered around him as he lay motionless on a bathroom floor. They nudged and poked him, a school surveillance video shows, but no one helped until an assistant principal walked in several minutes later. Gabriel's parents allege....
Academia is predicated on abusive behavior: I Told My Mentor I Was a Dominatrix
She rescinded her letters of recommendation
Any of y'all done anything with the JavaScript AudioContext API? What is epsilon for ramps? I'm trying to set up arpeggios with an oscillator and a gain control, and it gets weird when notes get short.
As a precaution while authorities investigate, Chippenhook Court, a cul-de-sac has been evacuated. Cranston Drive is closed between Route 33 and Dummerston Court, the next street east in the subdivision.
This is what happens when you have sex-negative culture:
Thursday December 5th, 2019
Hackers Trick Venture Capital Firm Into Sending Them $1 Million
A Chinese VC firm and an Israeli startup had the money stolen right out from under their noses thanks to spoofed emails and bogus domains.
Evernote Gave Dark Web Dealer’s Notes to the DEA
"One flashdrive provided by Evernote consisting of 18 data folders in Evernote proprietary software," the executed search warrant from July 2018, listing what data Evernote provided, reads.
Some self-hosted (although you've still gotta figure out how to hide that from your hosting provider) alternatives:
Wednesday December 4th, 2019
Lost Whamageddon
A Newspaper Typo Led to “Satan” Showing Up at a Christmas Parade
Tim “Skippy” Miller decided it was a perfect opportunity to have a little fun while making sure all the visitors got exactly what they came for. So he put on a red suit and a red hat and a red face and made himself available to anyone who wanted a picture.
Keybase and the Chaos of Crypto, in which the fall of Mt Gox is nicely tied to the horrible spamfest that Keybase has become.
In Appeal to Hard Left, Bloomberg Praises Chinese Communism
It’s now clear, however, that Bloomberg is casting a wider net. In a recent interview with PBS — which recirculated on social media on Sunday — the former New York mayor signaled that he intends to run in the “unrepentant Stalinist” lane of the Democratic primary. Asked by Firing Line’s Margaret Hoover about how the U.S. can get China and India to be good partners in the fight against climate change, Bloomberg argued that the Chinese Communist Party was ecologically friendly, democratically accountable, and invulnerable to the threat of revolution.
Ruh roh: Careful about granting permissions to anything right now: Vulnerability in fully patched Android phones under active attack by bank thieves
"StrandHogg" spoofing flaw exploited by 36 apps, including bank trojans.
Tuesday December 3rd, 2019
Kamala Harris reluctantly agrees to concede an outcome she believes is unfair and unjust because economics, bias, and the overwhelming might of opponents forecloses any other avenue.
Sounds familiar.
Except the latest research demonstrates the reverse is true. Britain is about to make a vast mistake. In the recently published The Great Reversal, leading economist Thomas Philippon of New York University and member of the advisory panel of the New York Federal Reserve, mounts a devastating attack on the conventional wisdom, so perfectly embodied by the witless Boris Johnson. The news is that over the last 20 years per capita EU incomes have grown by 25% while the US’s have grown 21%, with the US growth rate decelerating while Europe’s has held steady – indeed accelerating in parts of Europe. What is going on?
America’s Air Quality Worsens, Ending Years of Gains, Study Says
An analysis of Environmental Protection Agency data published this week by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University found that fine particulate pollution increased 5.5 percent on average across the country between 2016 and 2018, after decreasing nearly 25 percent over the previous seven years.
and is likely associated with 10,000 premature deaths during that time.
Monday December 2nd, 2019
Bacon is our God, because Bacon is Real.
His Company Makes Speakers. Now He's Speaking Out, Opposing Tariffs
His factory is still in Minnesota, but it depends on some components imported from China. Since last fall, the company has had to pay tariffs on those components — tariffs that are now 25%. Ironically, if Digre built whole speakers in China, like some of his competitors do, he'd have to pay only a 15% import tax.
The company is MISCO speakers, I'm poking through their amplifiers to see if they've got something that'd fill one of my needs...
Friends are people who, when you say "hey, y'all, watch this!", hold your beer for ya.
Reminder: If it's not end-to-end encrypted, it's public: Report: Millions of Americans at Risk After Huge Data and SMS Leak:
The TrueDialog database is hosted by Microsoft Azure and runs on the Oracle Marketing Cloud in the USA. When we last looked at the database it included 604 GB of data. This included nearly 1 billion entries of highly sensitive data, which we’ll detail below.
Millions of SMS messages exposed in database security lapse.
https://it.slashdot.org/story/...-exposed-in-unencrypted-database
According to the Oxford English Dictionary, punk was first printed in 1575, the year Shakespeare became a teenager. It appeared in a song, a ballad called Simon The Old Kinge, or sometimes Old Simon The King. The song’s narrator suggests that being drunk is “a sin, as it is to keep a punk.” It seems to be a joke, a drinking song disguised as a morality tale, or vice versa. The song was popular, and was reprinted often, becoming a standard for hundreds of years. According to one writer in 1776, it was played drunkenly in taverns, with “half a dozen fiddlers” playing “till themselves and their audience were tired.” Despite its “harsh and discordant tones,” “people thought it fine music.”
Can't turn over a Catholic school without finding pedophiles: CNN: Pedophile priests operated at this Salesians of Don Bosco California school for decades
Sunday December 1st, 2019
British Journal of Sports Medicine: Sugar addiction: is it real? A narrative review
Abstract In animal studies, sugar has been found to produce more symptoms than is required to be considered an addictive substance. Animal data has shown significant overlap between the consumption of added sugars and drug-like effects, including bingeing, craving, tolerance, withdrawal, cross-sensitisation, cross-tolerance, cross-dependence, reward and opioid effects. Sugar addiction seems to be dependence to the natural endogenous opioids that get released upon sugar intake. In both animals and humans, the evidence in the literature shows substantial parallels and overlap between drugs of abuse and sugar, from the standpoint of brain neurochemistry as well as behaviour.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1136/bjsports-2017-097971
So, yeah, sex addiction isn't real, sugar addiction is real, and sugar is a gateway drug.
We went down to Fresno for Thanksgiving to visit with Charlene's family. Someone mentioned Raphio Chocolate, so we went by their unassuming strip mall presence, tasted a few chocolates, bought some, and put ourselves on the waiting list for a tour, not optimistic on Thanksgiving weekend.
We were planning on coming home yesterday afternoon, but a spot opened up on the 4:30 tour last night so we postponed the trip (making our arrival home later, and risking driving through the storm front predicted to come through), and we are super glad we did.
Raphio does small batch bean to bar processor. Their largest batch size is 100 lbs. They do single-origin bars, and some flavors in conjunction with Enzo's olive oil.
The tour was 12 of us squeezed into the 3 rooms of their little strip mall store front and facility, starting with a slide show of growing (enhanced by the fact that the patriarch of the family of the other 10 people on our tour grows chocolate in the Phillipines), passing around a dried chocolate pod and a taste of the juice from the pulp of the chocolate fruit, and progressed to tasting each of the single-origin chocolates, and then the Enzo's mixes, hot chocolate, and some other variants.
The couple that own the operation are charming, the flavors amazing, it was really cool to see the evolution of the stacked bagged bars as they spent their several months going from the roller mill to the tempering step.
And the different flavors of the different beans!
Care About Journalism? Maybe You Should Cancel Your Newspaper
If an out-of-town owner is gutting your local paper, think about who’s getting your money.
RESULTS: In the 2 groups uncertain about receiving intercessory prayer, complications occurred in 52% (315/604) of patients who received intercessory prayer versus 51% (304/597) of those who did not (relative risk 1.02, 95% CI 0.92-1.15). Complications occurred in 59% (352/601) of patients certain of receiving intercessory prayer compared with the 52% (315/604) of those uncertain of receiving intercessory prayer (relative risk 1.14, 95% CI 1.02-1.28). Major events and 30-day mortality were similar across the 3 groups.
CONCLUSIONS: Intercessory prayer itself had no effect on complication-free recovery from CABG, but certainty of receiving intercessory prayer was associated with a higher incidence of complications.
In other words: Pray for someone's health, or don't, that doesn't have an impact on outcomes, but don't tell them you're praying for them, because that has a negative impact on outcomes.
Saturday November 30th, 2019
Christmas decorating: nailed it.
Christmas decorating: nailed it.
You can tell it's been a while since I've lived in any place with any sort of warnable threat, because that siren on a pole seems like some sort of Cold War throwback artifact.
The Atlantic: Why It Was Easier to Be Skinny in the 1980s
A new study finds that people today who eat and exercise the same amount as people 20 years ago are still fatter.
Results Between 1971 and 2008, BMI, total caloric intake and carbohydrate intake increased 10–14%, and fat and protein intake decreased 5–9%. Between 1988 and 2006, frequency of leisure time physical activity increased 47–120%. However, for a given amount of caloric intake, macronutrient intake or leisure time physical activity, the predicted BMI was up to 2.3 kg/m2 higher in 2006 that in 1988 in the mutually adjusted model (P < 0.05).
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.orcp.2015.08.007
https://getpocket.com/explore/...easier-to-be-skinny-in-the-1980s
Friday November 29th, 2019
Fresno, where 4 lanes each way one direction and 3 lanes each way in the other, the day after a heavy rain, still has a tumbleweed in the middle of the intersection...
We're in Fresno, inn a Lithuanian grocery, and I think my Christmas gifts are sorted now
Smokey Chipotle is the hero of my new hyper-testosteroned genre fiction series.
Shadow forwarded along a picture of a 3d model of a tracked mountain bike concept, and it's interesting to think about why, even if the materials science allowed something like this to work without huge efficiency losses from the flex keeping those front tracks round, this wouldn't work. Like the fact that during turns the front and rear wheels have different radius circles, so you'd be sliding all over the place...
Wednesday November 27th, 2019
Shout-out to the dude in the mobility scooter who recognized the dangerous design of this MUP and took the lane with the cars. When we talk about making environments safe for the elderly and disabled, this ain't it.
Catholic order moved pedophile priest to church property with summer camp after CNN investigation
Father Luk Delft was recalled to Belgium in June this year after CNN informed the order that two boys in the Central African Republic had accused Delft of abusing them.
Read the full CNN investigation
The Salesians of Don Bosco, a religious order established specifically to protect children, housed the convicted abuser on the campus in Sint-Pieters-Woluwe in Belgium after the 50-year-old priest was removed from his role as country director of the Catholic charity Caritas in the CAR.