Tuesday, December 19, 2023

Things You Don’t See in A Recession

 For an author nothing is as dead as a book once it is written.

— Rumer Godden, born in 1907

Jack Smith asks Supreme Court to keep Trump trial on track

Politico: “Special counsel Jack Smith is urging the Supreme Court to urgently resolve Donald Trump’s claim that he’s immune from prosecution for charges related to his bid to subvert the 2020 election.

 Without the Supreme Court’s swift intervention, Trump’s trial could be indefinitely delayed, the special counsel warned in a petition to the high court on Monday. That’s because the trial, scheduled to begin March 4, is effectively suspended while Trump pursues his appeal of the trial judge’s ruling rejecting his immunity arguments, Smith wrote. Resolution of the novel legal question is necessary to ensure the case proceeds “promptly,” he argued. By coming directly to the Supreme Court, Smith is hoping to bypass a federal appeals court and is mounting an aggressive bid to keep the timing of the election-focused trial on track. 

If the March 4 trial date sticks, it would be the first trial for Trump in the four criminal cases he is facing as he mounts a bid for re-election to the White House. “The United States recognizes that this is an extraordinary request. This is an extraordinary case,” Smith wrote in the petition.”

The filing


The blasphemy of pay-as-you-pray.

Facebook watches teens online as they prep for college

PopSci: “Picture a high school student who wants to go to college, likes to cheer on her school’s football team, and plays in a sport or two herself. 

One day after school, she signs up for an official ACT account so she can schedule her college entrance exam and see what score she gets after taking it. Then, she researches a few colleges through the Common App’s website, and like more than a million students every year, she uses the site to start an application for her dream college.  She spends a few minutes starting a presentation for class using the website Prezi

On a homework break, she registers for her high school’s after-school sports program through a service called ArbiterSports, then she hops on her phone, remembering to order a yearbook through the company Jostens. Long day over, she takes out her laptop and flips on her school’s big football game through the NFHS Network, a subscription service for high school sports. Here’s what the student doesn’t know: Although she surfed the internet in the privacy of her home, Facebook saw much of what she did. 

Every single site she visited used the Meta Pixel, a tracking tool that silently collects and transmits information to Facebook as users browse the web, according to testing by The Markup. Millions of invisible pixels are embedded on websites across the internet, allowing businesses and organizations to target their customers on Facebook with ads…”


Herds of Mysterious ‘Glacier Mice’ Baffle ScientistsAtlas Obscura


Take an Immersive Journey Through an Ancient Rainforest’s Mycelial Network in ‘Fungi: Web of Life’ Colossal


Things You Don’t See in A Recession Carson Group


Southwest Airlines Flight Attendants Forced to Rerun Contract Vote After Crew Discovered Ballot System Was Vulnerable to Fraud PYOK. Astonishing, except not:

During a live video stream of the ballot result, a representative of TrueBallot shared their screen, which displayed an internet URL in the address bar of their web browser. A flight attendant watching the stream copied the URL into their own computer and discovered that the link took them to an unsecured database of the vote.

The flight attendant was able to view the name of everyone who had voted and what ballot they had cast, alongside their email address. The database could even be edited, and ballots could be added and deleted.

“TrueBallot.” Never eat at a place called “Mom’s”….

 

A Woman Construction Worker on the SlabBriarpatch. This post is great (even if from 2015). In the most PMC scenario imaginable, I ran across it while searching on the keyword “slab,” hoping to discover text on the Wittgenstein’s “Builder’s Game” for my post on nouns (“But when I call “Slab!”, then what I want is, that he should bring me a slab“).

 

One Significant Adult Culture Study


Natural Selection Orion