Science/Techno Babble Random, Random

[Suliso]

SpaceX is Musk's best company. Not as big as Tesla, but in my opinion at least more innovative and further ahead of competition.

[Suliso]

Actually this Wikipedia article on space flight in 2023 provides a great overview: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_in ... ay%202023.

The bottom line is 222 launches with 210 fully succesfull.

[skatingfan]

Dennis Mersereau
Digital Journalist

Published on Dec. 30, 2023, 7:58 PM

It’s been more than 700 days since the last inch of snow for tens of millions of Americans

Snow days are a thing of the past for an entire generation of kids as online learning replaces sledding and snowball fights during those stormy winter days. But snow days typically require…well, snow, which also seems like a of the past for tens of millions of Americans enduring an unprecedented snow drought from Washington, D.C., to New York City. Many cities are pushing 700 days since their last inch (2 cm) of measurable snowfall from a single storm, which is a tremendous streak that rivals the longest snow-free stretches ever recorded in Canada.

700+ days without enough snow to sweep

The epic snow drought along the densely populated Interstate 95 corridor from New York down through Virginia is truly impressive—and there’s no sign of snow any time soon. New York City’s Times Square is the centre of the world for one glistening moment at the beginning of each year. But the only sparkle in the sky over the city that never sleeps this weekend is the light shining through thousands of crystal panels that adorn the ball that’ll drop to inaugurate 2024.

U.S. Snow Drought 2023

It’s been 685 days since New York City’s Central Park has seen at least 1 in (2 cm) of snow in a single day, which is nearly twice as long as the station’s previous snow-free record. Any records in Central Park are exceptionally impressive given that the site has one of the deepest weather books in North America. Routine observations started there all the way back in 1869—just four years after the end of the U.S. Civil War, and two years after Canadian Confederation. Similar historic snow droughts are ongoing down the coast in Philadelphia (700 days), Atlantic City (699 days), Baltimore (701 days), and in Washington and Richmond (713 days).

US East Coast Average Seasonal Snow

These cities typically see at least a few healthy snowfalls every season. New York City averages about 75 cm of snow every winter, while the milder Washington, D.C., picks up about 35 cm in a normal season. Another nearby city that enjoys a wealth of weather data will also set its own grim snowfall record. Charlotte, N.C., logged its first completely snowless calendar year—without so much as a trace of snow reported—for the first time since records started there in 1878.

Few Canadian cities have gone so long without meaningful snow

It’s hard to fathom going such a long time without snow anywhere in Canada. The longest Toronto’s ever gone without at least 2 cm of snow was 323 days between February 2006 and January 2007. Only folks along British Columbia’s mild coast have seen a similar streak of snow-free conditions, with their all-time records set during the warm period between 2013 and 2016.

Canada Longest Snow Drought

Tofino didn’t report accumulating snowfall between December 6, 2013, and December 21, 2015, a streak that lasted a whopping 747 days to set the benchmark among major Canadian cities. Victoria endured a 670-day stretch without measurable snow, while Vancouver’s longest snow-free streak lasted 402 days.

Last year saw one of the region’s warmest-ever winters

The driving force behind the U.S. East Coast’s tremendous snow drought is the combination of very warm temperatures and an unfavourable storm track. Despite the widespread cold snap that gripped much of North America last winter, the season still came in as the warmest ever recorded for much of the eastern half of the continent. Down in Washington, D.C., the season’s average temperature came in at about 6.6°C, more than 2.5°C above average for a typical winter. New York City’s Central Park saw its second-warmest winter on record (again, that’s since 1869!), where the season’s average temperature of 5.0°C landed on par with the nation’s capital in terms of climbing above seasonal. Even when cold air does manage to spill toward the East Coast, any storms rolling through the region take tracks unfavourable to snow. Earlier this December, the same storm that brought historic rains to Quebec sent temperatures soaring as high as 17°C around New York City. Last year, many of the region’s storms missed west with snow in Ontario, or entirely missed to the east with a track toward Atlantic Canada.

U.S. Winter Forecast 2023-2024

Even though these record streaks are safe through at least the first week of January, winter is far from over along the U.S. East Coast. El Niño winters are infamous for major storms that tend to roll up the Atlantic seaboard. An active jet stream parked over the southern states frequently spins up low-pressure systems that can track up the coast. If these moisture-laden storms coincide with a burst of cold air flooding down from Canada, they can generate memorable snows from the Carolinas straight up into Atlantic Canada. Given the nature of nor’easters, those snow-starved cities along the Interstate 95 corridor are uniquely positioned to see some of the most intense snowstorms possible south of the border.

https://www.theweathernetwork.com/en/ne ... washington

[ti-amie]

Alarmist

/s

[ponchi101]

Same for many regions in Europe.
Which, of course, means economic death for many skiing areas of the past.

[ashkor87]

Have you noticed..though the days are getting longer after the solstice, sunrise is a bit later every day, until Jan 29
Reason is, at this point, the earth, in its elliptical orbit, is moving at its fastest around the sun..as it rotates, the first rays of the sun fall on it a bit later, in the northern hemisphere .
Robs me of a couple minutes play every morning!

[ponchi101]

I did not know that fact. Txs

[ashkor87]

I did not know that fact. Txs

I only came to notice it because I found my tennis getting more and more delayed, so I researched it...

[ponchi101]

I know there is an intrinsically ridiculous thing in posting this in a web-based forum, but I came across this. The Twitter post in is spanish, but the gist is:
NOBODY ENJOYING THE MOMENT. Everybody glued to their phones and, as the year came to an end, nobody hugged or kissed a person next to them.



About NOMOPHOBIA:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nomophobia

[Owendonovan]

Elon Musk Is Spreading Election Misinformation, but X’s Fact Checkers Are Long Gone
Civil rights lawyers and Democrats are sounding alarms about Mr. Musk’s claims about voting. The Biden campaign called his posts “profoundly irresponsible.” By Jim Rutenberg and Kate Conger

I'm grateful to not feel any need, or want, to click any twitter link or visit that cesspool. The likes of him and murdoch are the wrong kind of immigrants we'd like in the US.

In the spring of 2020, when President Donald J. Trump wrote messages on Twitter warning that increased reliance on mail-in ballots would lead to a “rigged election,” the platform ran a corrective, debunking his claims.

“Get the facts about mail-in voting,” a content label read. “Experts say mail-in ballots are very rarely linked to voter fraud,” the hyperlinked article declared.

This month, Elon Musk, who has since bought Twitter and rebranded it X, echoed several of Mr. Trump’s claims about the American voting system, putting forth distorted and false notions that American elections were wide open for fraud and illegal voting by noncitizens.

This time, there were no fact checks. And the X algorithm — under Mr. Musk’s direct control — helped the posts reach large audiences, in some cases drawing many millions of views.

Since taking control of the site, Mr. Musk has dismantled the platform’s system for flagging false election content, arguing it amounted to election interference.. That's rich, Elmo.

Now, his early election-year attacks on a tried-and-true voting method are raising alarms among civil rights lawyers, election administrators and Democrats. They worry that his control over the large social media platform gives him an outsize ability to reignite the doubts about the American election system that were so prevalent in the lead-up to the riot at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

As Mr. Trump’s victory in New Hampshire moved the race closer to general election grounds, the Biden campaign for the first time criticized Mr. Musk directly for his handling of election content on X: “It is profoundly irresponsible to spread false information and sow distrust about how our elections operate,” the Biden campaign manager, Julie Chávez Rodríguez, said this week in a statement to The New York Times.

“It’s even more dangerous coming from the owner of a social media platform,” she added.

What is angering the Biden campaign is delighting pro-Trump Republicans and others who depict the old Twitter as part of a government-controlled censorship regime that aided Mr. Biden in 2020. Under a system now in dispute at the Supreme Court, government officials alerted platforms to posts they deemed dangerous, though it was up to the companies to act or not.

“Oh, boo hoo,” Harmeet K. Dhillon, a lawyer whose firm represents Mr. Trump, said of the Democrats’ complaints. Ms. Dhillon has sued the company for suspending an election-denying client’s account after receiving a notice from the California election officials — the sort of government interplay Mr. Musk has repudiated. She noted the platform was now “a much better place for conservatives,” and said of Mr. Musk, “he’s great.”

X did not respond to a request for comment. Earlier this week, its chief executive, Linda Yaccarino, wrote in a blog post that the platform had expanded its alternate approach to fact-checking misinformation — through crowdsourced “community notes” written by users.

There were no such notes on Mr. Musk’s voting messages. But they were on a post by another X user that made the wild claim that Mr. Biden won the New Hampshire primary only through ballot stuffing.

The freer flow of false voting information is hardly the only perceived threat to elections building on social platforms, with the rise of artificial intelligence, increasingly realistic deep fakes and a growing acceptance of political violence.

That Mr. Biden’s campaign would single out Mr. Musk points to the unique role he is already playing in the 2024 election.

No major media owner of the modern era has used his national platform to insert himself so personally and aggressively into an American election.

While Rupert Murdoch’s conservative media empire, which includes Fox News, has exercised unrivaled influence over United States politics for decades, he has largely kept behind the scenes, generally leaving it to his editors, producers and hosts to determine the specifics of the coverage.

And while Facebook is larger than X, its owner, Mark Zuckerberg, is answerable to shareholders and responsive to advertisers. He has sought to avoid being personally drawn into the political fray.

Mr. Musk jumped in within days of taking ownership of the site, urging his followers to vote Republican. He has been open in his disdain for Mr. Biden, whose White House has at times responded in kind.

Then again, Mr. Musk has no shareholder concerns at X, which he took private in late 2022. He has dismissed advertiser complaints or calls to block content that might degrade confidence in democracy.

Exhibiting a distinctly 21st-century form of raw media power, X has also throttled and punished Mr. Musk’s perceived competitors and foes while reinstating accounts that were previously banned for content violations, some relating to the lie that the 2020 election was stolen. The platform’s algorithm — which dictates how posts are circulated on the site — also now gives added promotion to those who pay to be “verified,” including previously banned accounts.

Among them is @KanekoaTheGreat, a once-banned QAnon influencer who this month circulated a 32-page dossier promoted by Mr. Trump that recounted a barrage of false charges about the 2020 election.

It drew nearly 22 million views.

In 2020, Twitter’s “election integrity hub,” which had an open line with outside groups and political campaigns, either deleted or added context to posts with misleading information about voting.

Posts with false information about when and where to vote, for instance, would be removed. Those with misleading information about mail voting, like Mr. Trump’s, would get notices pointing users to alerts and fact-checking articles.

As Mr. Trump and his allies ramped up their attacks on mail voting — a preferred method for Democrats during the coronavirus pandemic — Twitter expanded its policy to remove or label claims that “undermine faith” in elections.

Those measures proved only so effective. Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and the other major platforms, which had similar measures, were also awash in election lies, and they faced criticism in the months after the Jan. 6 attack that they didn’t do enough.

Agreeing with critics who say the measures caused unfair and one-sided censorship, Mr. Musk said he cut the integrity team last fall because it was in fact “undermining election integrity.” He added, “They’re gone.” (His chief executive, Ms. Yaccarino, quickly disputed that characterization, saying the work would continue and even expand.)

Maya Wiley, the chief executive of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, which communicated regularly with the platforms in 2020, said Mr. Musk’s decision had ripple effects. “It’s also given a free pass to folks like Facebook and YouTube,” she said.

X’s more lenient policy still addresses posts that incite violence, that include verifiably false information about voting locations and dates, or that mislead about eligibility laws, “including identification or citizenship requirements.”

Mr. Musk’s recent posts appear to bump up against that rule.

On Jan. 10, he responded to a post about the recent influx of undocumented immigrants by writing, falsely, that “illegals are not prevented from voting in federal elections. This came as a surprise to me.” A couple of days earlier, Mr. Musk implied that Mr. Biden and the Democrats were being lax on immigration because “they are importing voters,” an echo of the “great replacement” conspiracy theory that Mr. Trump was sharing around the same time.

United States law prohibits noncitizens from voting in federal elections, under the threat of jail time and deportation. Instances of illegal voting by noncitizens are rare.
Image
A worker leans over a railing to remove the letters of the Twitter sign outside a building.
Since taking over Twitter and renaming it, Mr. Musk has reportedly cut back the platform’s “election integrity team.”Credit...Jim Wilson/The New York Times

Mr. Musk has also raised broader doubts about the American election system. On Jan. 8, he wrote that voters in the United States “don’t need government issued ID to vote and you can mail in your ballot. This is insane.” The post was viewed 59 million times.

More than half of states require voters to produce some form of identification at polls, and most that don’t require signatures, affidavits or birth dates; federal law requires identification verification from voters when they register.

In November, he picked up on a story about considerable evidence of widespread absentee-ballot fraud in Bridgeport, Conn., and wrote, “The only question is how common it is.”

Where Bridgeport’s trouble is real — enough that a judge ordered a redo of the Democratic primary — it is also rare. Mail ballots have been used for years, and with various safeguards, have proved exceedingly reliable, with bipartisan acceptance, at least before Mr. Trump intensified criticism of the method.

Mr. Trump failed to provide evidence of any significant fraud in any of his lawsuits contesting his defeat in 2020.

That has not stopped Mr. Musk from adding to the steady hum of doubts about the voting system among millions of Americans, contributing to the already-fraught climate for election workers as Mr. Trump reprises his stolen-election lies for 2024, some election officials said.

“It bubbles, and keeps the temperature higher,” said Stephen Richer, the county recorder in Maricopa County, Ariz., a hot zone for election conspiracy theories. A Republican and longtime admirer of Mr. Musk’s business accomplishments, Mr. Richer added, “Whether it’s President Trump or Mr. Musk talking about this and keeping it very much a top-of-mind issue, that can potentially make our lives more challenging.”

The Biden campaign shares that concern. “We will continue to call out this recklessness as we carry out President Biden’s commitment to protecting our elections,” Ms. Chávez Rodríguez said.

That is, however, the only option the campaign has — the complaint line between the campaign and the platform is dead.

[ti-amie]

Thanks for this Owen. Calling that site a cesspool doesn't go far enough in describing what is going on there now.

[ponchi101]

A cesspool where millions of people swim. That's how dangerous that is.

[Owendonovan]

I don't find its existence necessary or vital for human existence. Just get rid of it. It ended up not working.

[ti-amie]

Jeff Atwood
@codinghorror@infosec.exchange
"The death of cached sites will mean the Internet Archive has a larger burden of archiving and tracking changes on the world's webpages." https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/0

Jamie McCarthy
@jamiemccarthy@mastodon.social
EN

@codinghorror More generally, we have had a problem for a decade where there's two versions of the web. Google gets the full version of all the good stuff, but it's hidden from us humans behind paywalls, popups, text-fades, permission-begs, signup-begs, and so on. The attention economy only exists because the servers pretend that's not happening. It's long past time to stop letting some humans peep through the window. We've always been locked out of the gated community, but now it's official.

[ponchi101]

I don't find its existence necessary or vital for human existence. Just get rid of it. It ended up not working.

The same can be said about FB, IG and TikTok. They are all, in reality, sites or systems with no underlying "need to use".
I can see that IG has a certain value as a marketing tool, but that's about it.
SM in general is not needed. But it is used for fun. TWT has become a different thing; it can actually cause real harm.