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Today Facebook sent a warning to the Babyon Bee, a Christian satirical website (think The Onion, but Christian-themed), alerting them that one of their articles had been fact-checked by Snopes.com and determined to be false. Facebook warned Babylon Bee that if they persisted in posting false content they risked having the distribution of their posts reduced and their ability to advertise removed.

You really have to see the Snopes.com "fact-checking" to believe it: https://www.snopes.com/cnn-washing-machine/.

This is a fact-checking article about a Babylon Bee article that said that CNN bought an industrial-size laundry washer so they could spin the news before reporting it.. Yes, it's that blatant. Why in the world did Snopes fact check this?

It stands out to me here that this article claims "some readers ... interpreted [the washing machine article] literally." That's got to be baloney. Either this is boiler plate that goes into every Snopes.com article about the Onion, the Babylon Bee, and other satirical websites, or this is a third-rate Snopes writer just trying to crank something out to meet a deadline. Or else it's a bold faced lie, but surely not, right? Do they actually have evidence that anyone somewhere actually made this misunderstanding. Or possibly English is not the writer's first language, as evidenced by the grammatical error in "CNN had made a significant investment in heavy machinery to assist their journalists 'spin' the news they report."

Reader who attempted to click the Babylon Bee link from Facebook were faced with a warning that they might rather go see the more factual "additional reporting" on the subject from Snopes: https://twitter.com/MrB_Loves_Jesus/status/969425733100720128/photo/1/

Here is the Babylon Bee owner's screenshot of the warning from Facebook: https://twitter.com/Adam4d/status/969405110324523008/photo/1/

And here is one of the more complete reports of the event I've seen, which includes the fact that Facebook has since corrected the error and acknowledged it was a mistake that should never have happened: http://freebeacon.com/culture/facebook-threatens-satirical-site-article-failed-snopes-fact-check/

What I don't see reported on much is that the owner of Babylon Bee has also recently (mid-January) launched his own news aggregator site based on the idea that internet giants like Facebook, Twitter, Google et al are now exercising too much control over what news people do and do not see: https://www.christiandailyreporter.com/manifesto.html

President Trump promised steel and aluminum executives Thursday that he will levy tariffs on imports of their products in coming weeks. He said the imported steel will face tariffs of 25 percent, while aluminum will face tariffs of 10 percent.

"We're going to build our steel industry back and we're going to build our aluminum industry back," Trump told reporters.

The president announced the action after meeting with leaders of the two industries at the White House. On Thursday afternoon, major stock market indexes fell sharply after Trump's announcement, with the Dow Jones industrial average closing down 420 points, or about 1.7 percent.

The obvious two problems with such a proposal is first, it makes everything more expensive for US companies since steel and aluminum get used in a lot of products. Second, there will be return fire. For example, most steel imports come in from countries friendly to the US (Canada, Brazil, South Korea, Japan, Mexico, etc). Retributive tariffs from our best trade partners is not to going to help the US's situation.

Even if this is a typical hard bargaining tactic (start off with an extreme demand and then negotiate down to what you really wanted), it's pretty provocative. There are already people making decisions based on what Trump might do (such as sell offs in the markets). Countries might follow shortly.

Trump is already looking at a massive route in the 2018 elections. This sounds like it'll dig the hole deeper since even the risk of a tariff war will depress economic activity. Right now, the US economy is doing relatively well. But Trump can fix that. Voters will look even less favorably on the Republicans, if the economy tanks on top of everything else.

The L3+, its sold-separately power supply and DHL shipping set me back $2,295.

I at first intended to set it up this evening, then decided I'd put it off until tomorrow evening because I was too tired. CryptoCompare's LiteCoin Mining Profit Calculator yielded the insight that putting it off that way would set me back $9.35 that I would have otherwise earned.

Or rather, that my L3+ would have earned.

I bought their LiteCoin rig rather than the Antminer S9 BitCoin miner because the S9 requires 220 volts. The L3+ can use 110 volts.

I puzzled over ways I could safely power it from my electric stove outlet. I was widely advised that if I didn't electrocute myself I'd burn my apartment building down. Despite all that I am confident that I could have made it work - safely and reliably - but in the end decided that doing so would be a huge pain in the ass.

I have the hope that I can provide for myself purely through mining. But that's not likely to happen anytime soon:

I ordered my L3+ in December, during the Irrationally Exhuberant Cryptocurrency Bubble. At the time the mining calculator said it would make me ten grand a year.

I live in a very modest way. Were I to buy three of them - and I really did have enough money, which I've since spent on hookers and blow - they would make thirty grand a year, which is far more than what I require to live comfortably.

I once earned $120/hour as a contract programmer but oddly never had any spare cash. My current monastic lifestyle is facilitated by having moved out of state then having changed my cell number.

(If the issue ever comes up I can truthfully claim never to have declared bankruptcy.)

To my great dismay that same mining calculator now tells me that my L3+ will produce just $2,900. That's the result of LiteCoin's fall in price after the bubble burst.

Try it yourself:

504 MH/s - Hash Rate

$0.0816 - per kilowatt-hour of electricity (cheap because Pacific NorthLeft)

800 watts - power consumption

$208.12 - LiteCoin Price

I'm not in a pool yet so I don't know what the pool will charge me. But the pool fee isn't really significant.

This is puzzling - the first time I tried today the calculator said my L3+ would mine 19.6 LTC per year. The second time it said 19.3. Now it says 16.65.

I'm going to try a different calculator...

WhatToMine sez it's 18.3, for an annual profit of $3,200.

Were the LiteCoin price to stay like this it would have been a far, far better investment to have bought a second macintosh. That would enable me to write OSX drivers without using my client's equipment.

Really the only way to know is to actually mine some LTC for the next little while as I follow the exchange rate.

I'm going to post this then play with my new toy.

Hi-Rez president compares new ‘Overwatch’ hero to a ‘Paladins’ protagonist

Just bookmarking so I can check out the videogamedunkey video later.

Nintendo Holds Off on Switch 2.0, Looks to Peripherals for More Sales

It would be bizarre to release a new version of Switch so soon. They talk about a slimmed down version (rather than a mid-cycle upgrade like PS4 Pro or Xbox One X). Compare to PS4 (Nov 2013) and PS4 Slim (Sep 2016), and Xbox One (Nov 2013) and Xbox One S (Aug 2016). In fact, the PS4 Pro and Xbox One X didn't come out very long after the slimmed down versions.

What they could do is drop in newer ARM CPUs and Nvidia GPUs. Even if they underclock and keep performance almost the same, the console would benefit from lower power consumption since it is battery-powered in handheld mode.

AC thinks I'm a creep. I wouldn't want my bad reputation to go to waste

Which of my posts is your favorite?

My wife had her surgery today: everything went well and she'll be in the hospital for a day or two or more.

Now that all is fine, I'm left wondering how much it would have cost us if our health care wasn't free. Enough to bankrupt us? Huh.....

As an aside, while waiting (we got up at 4am to be there for 6am for her surgery at 8am and she was in her room at 2pm) I was reading Isaac Asimovs 'study' of the old testament.

According to him, In The Beginning the Bible talked about, basically, polytheism:

"God
The Bible centers about God, and God is brought into the tale at once:
Genesis 1:1
  In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.

The Hebrew word, translated here as God, is "Elohim" andthat
is a plural form which would ordinarily (if tradition were defied) -be
translated "gods." It is possible that in the very earliest traditions on
which the Bible is based, the creation was- indeed the work of a
plurality of gods. The firmly monotheistic Biblical writers would carefully have eliminated such polytheism, but could not perhaps do any-
thing with the firmly ingrained term "Elohim." It was too familiar
to change.
. Some hints of polytheism seem to have survived the editing. Thus,
after the first created man disobeys God's injunction not to eat of the
tree of knowledge, God is quoted as saying:
Genesis 3:22. . . . Behold, the man is become as one of us, to
know good and evil.. . Then too, still later, when God is concerned over mankind's ar-
rogance in attempting to build a tower that would reach to heaven,
He is quoted as saying:
Genesis 11:7. Go to, let us go down, and there confound their
language . . . It is possible to argue that this is not true evidence of early poly-
theism. God might be viewed as using the royal "we"; or as speaking
to an angelic audience; or even, in the Christian view, as speaking in
the persons of the Trinity.
Nevertheless, as far as we know the history of religion outside the
Bible, early beliefs were always polytheistic and monotheism was a
late development in the history of ideas."

I didn't know this. Interesting. (Copy/pasta from pdf is problematic: it seems to go through OCR which is not perfect. Hoping I didn't miss any fixes).

To me, the only 'true' word of God we have are the ten commandments. Why would anyone try to seek the word of God(s) in the Bible (written by imperfect people long after the events) when you just have to look at the Ten (taken down by an imperfect person and translated by imperfect people).

To me, the Bible just boils down to "be a good person". The ten commandments lay out a guide how to do that.

My wife's surgeons and anaesthesiologists were good. Very good.
Or, at least, good enough, thank god(s).
;)

I saw this the other day and found it quite interesting, given a lot of the 'arguments' being put forward here on SN.

what strikes me about the reaction to this growing backlash is not just its vileness, but its lameness. Trump’s response to Parkland — let’s arm teachers! — wasn’t just stupid, it was cowardly, an attempt to duck the issue, and I think many people realized that. Or consider how the Missouri G.O.P. has responded to the indictment of Gov. Eric Greitens, accused of trying to blackmail his lover with nude photos: by blaming … George Soros. I am not making this up.

Or consider the growing wildness of speeches by right-wing luminaries like Wayne LaPierre of the N.R.A. They’ve pretty much given up on making any substantive case for their ideas in favor of rants about socialists trying to take away your freedom. It’s scary stuff, but it’s also kind of whiny; it’s what people sound like when they know they’re losing the argument.

(Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/26/opinion/the-force-of-decency-awakens.html )

I see it over and over again here. Something's going on? It's George Soros' fault, of course! Don't like the argument someone makes, they're "socialists" who hate America, want to take away all your rights, and are worse (or at least as bad) as Stalin.

Care about your fellow humans or sick of crony capitalists, regulatory capture or xenophobic trashing of anything that's different? You're a Marxist who hates capitalism and pines for a land of gulags, collectivized everything and iron-fisted suppression of speech and expression.

It's pretty sad. If there's an argument to be made for/against stuff like municipal FTTP, single-payer healthcare, civil rights for all, gun control, women having control of their bodies, etc., etc., etc., then make a relevant argument.

"You're a socialist/marxist/anti-capitalist/SJW who wants to destroy $X and are just like Stalin." and other semantically null bullshit aren't arguments. It's just posturing and value-free (although apparently quite satisfying) name calling.

I'm not suggesting that folks not be allowed to spew whatever crap they wish to spew, rather I'm wondering aloud if there aren't more folks who, if they think about it (or at all), might opt for actual arguments rooted in logic and evidence rather than semantically valueless name calling.

He livestreamed his own murder on Facebook in a North Carolina town

Man fatally shot on Facebook Live had been outing suspected drug dealers, sources say

LiveLeak.

Subject: Need to take Tuesday off work

Why time off?

The onset of Manic Depression, Schizophrenia and my own Schizoaffective Disorder typically occurs when one is a young adult. In my case it was in the early Spring of 1984, when I was a sophomore at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, California.

I left in January 1985, and eventually earned my Physics degree at UC Santa Cruz.

I have had very, very little contact with anyone or anything that are connected to Caltech since I left. I was in a profoundly altered state of reality my last few months there. My Bipolar-Type Schizoaffective Disorder was diagnosed during a psychiatric inpatient admission in July 1985.

It happens that if one has ever been psychotic, simply thinking about psychosis will cause one to become psychotic again. This gives me the odd ability to start hallucinating just by thinking about it.

(I discuss this in The Heebie Jeebies.)

It's best that I not do that.

For me, Caltech is Powerful Voodoo.

I was recently invited to join the Caltech Alumni Facebook group. I have never been a member of the Caltech Alumni Association - again that would be Powerful Voodoo.

I explained my mental illness to the Caltech Alumni Facebook group.

When I was still a student there I found that none of the students, faculty or staff had the first clue about any form of mental illness. That no one else knew how to help me made my Schizoaffective Disorder far, far worse than it would have been had I been attending some other school when I experienced its onset.

None of the Facebook group members were at the Institute when I was. Most of them are quite a lot younger than that.

I didn't expect their response: an outpouring of support for me.

I've been thinking quite a lot about Caltech today.

It's best that I not do that.

I actually prefer not to use version control, or rather, my preferred form of version control is to roll a tarball every day then make multiple off-site backups.

svn commit --message "These should have been checked in before building the 1.0b9 installer. However I am confident that the installer has the 1.0b9 binaries. Before I checked these in were some other coder to build the installer they would have done so with out-of-date binaries."