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ASUS' Android Go phone comes to the US for $110

The first Android Go phone to reach the US, the Alcatel 1X, was frankly lackluster between its not-even-720p screen and mediocre processing power. ASUS, however, is hoping to spice things up by launching the ZenFone Live (L1) in the US as a Best Buy exclusive. The unlocked handset costs slightly more than its rival at $110, but you're getting a lot more for your extra Hamilton. The ZenFone carries an 18:9 ratio, 5.5-inch 1,440 x 720 LCD screen, a speedier Snapdragon 425 processor and a heftier 3,000mAh battery, not to mention dual nano-SIM slots and a place for your microSD cards. This might be an ideal phone if you're a traveler who'd rather not risk their main device on a trip.

Related: An $80 Android Go Smartphone For Sale in USA

When I asked John Sununu about his part in this history — whether he considered himself personally responsible for killing the best chance at an effective global-warming treaty — his response echoed Meyer-Abich. “It couldn’t have happened,” he told me, “because, frankly, the leaders in the world at that time were at a stage where they were all looking how to seem like they were supporting the policy without having to make hard commitments that would cost their nations serious resources.” He added, “Frankly, that’s about where we are today.”

While nosing around, I came across this article by Bjorn Lomborg (a notable economist who has come out against most climate change mitigation):

Looking into the future, it’s likely that hurricanes will indeed become somewhat stronger by the end of the century. They will also likely become less frequent, and societies will definitely become more robust. A respected Nature review shows that hurricane damage currently costs 0.04% of global gross domestic product. Accounting for an increase in prosperity, this would drop fourfold to 0.01% by 2100. But the global warming factor making hurricanes fewer but stronger will mean total damage will end around 0.02%.

This shows that global warming is a problem, but it also shows us that even accounting for this, damages will decline.

[...]

Research shows that the Kyoto Protocol, the first major global deal to cut carbon and rein in temperatures (and, it would follow, help prevent hurricanes) failed to achieve a thing. The Paris climate treaty is on track to cost the globe about $1 trillion to $2 trillion per year for the rest of the century. The U.N. body responsible for the treaty estimates that the cuts promised until 2030 will achieve 1% of what would be needed to keep temperature rises under 2 Celsius, or 3.6 Fahrenheit.

What this suggests is that spending 1%-2% of GDP on climate policies could, at best, help avoid much, much less than 0.01% of GDP lost to hurricanes. That is an infuriatingly bad investment.

In other words, this sort of incredibly terrible economic trade-offs is why current climate change mitigation isn't going to happen on a large scale in the majority of the world that isn't wealthy and can't afford that sort of virtue signalling. There's obviously more harm to climate change than just a slight increase in sea level, but all of the costs of it have been exaggerated while the costs of mitigation have been ignored.

Finally, I think it's worth reinvestigating the key dynamic that kills climate change mitigation. Poverty is the leading cause of climate change and other environmental harm not wealth. Extremely poor people can't afford to care about climate change. Here's a 2013 story that illustrates that. A Willis Eschenbach talks about several examples of where poverty destroys the environment (such as the notable different in tree coverage between deforested and more impoverished Haiti and neighboring, better forested San Domingo), a key one was a story about some shenanigans in the Solomon Islands where local people sold out for pennies on the dollar to logging companies.

So that inexpensive purchase of the island councilors, I heard it was ten grand US$ per man, gave the logging company the right to negotiate a contract with the locals if they wanted to sign. One afternoon, some of the young Vella Lavella guys made the trip over to the island where I lived to ask if I would help them. I bought the beers, and we talked about the logging company. They said that they’d been agitating to convince the people to keep the company out and take care of their own forests. But the sentiment among the people was against them. They wanted the easy money, just sit back and let the company do the work.

So Mr. Eschenbach tries to help with predictable results.

So I went over the whole document and marked it up. Then I met up with the guys again, and we went over the whole thing, clause by clause. I’d re-written about two-thirds of the clauses, and I’d worked with my friend the Public Solicitor, and we’d put together a document that would be a good deal for the locals. The loggers would still make out, but like businessmen, not like highway robbers.

[...]

So the big night came for the meeting. Everyone showed up, loggers and islanders. I played the genial host, and left them to discuss the fate of the forest.

And in the morning? They all came out, shamefaced. I took one look, and my heart sank. I asked one of the old guys, one of the big men, what had happened. “Oh, the logger men were very nice! Can you imagine, they gave us a whole case of Black Label whiskey. They explained the contract, and it sounded wonderful, so we signed it” … oh, man, my blood was angrified mightily and I was in grave danger of waxing wroth … but I knew the old man, and he wasn’t a bad guy, just weak. So I curbed my tongue and shook my head, and I said that his sons might approve, but his grand children would wonder why he sold their birthright for pennies … then I went and talked to the young guys. They said they couldn’t stop it, once the big men were drunk they got combative and wouldn’t listen to anyone and they would have signed anything.

After some rhetorical soul-searching

And at the end of the day, I realized that I was on a fool’s errand. Oh, I’d fight the fight again, in a minute, but I’d lose again. It’s what happens when big money hits a poor country—the environment gets screwed, whether it’s logging, fishing, or mining. Until the country is wealthy enough to feed its citizens and to protect itself, its resources are always on sale to the lowest bidder … by which I mean the bidder with the lowest morals.

Now, I started this sad tale for a reason, to give substance to the damage that poverty does to the environment. When you can buy an island council for ten grand a man and there are literally millions of dollars at stake, that council will get bought no matter how hard I fight against it. Per capita GDP in the Solomons is about $600 annually, it’s classed as an “LDC”, a Least Developed Country … and in a country where ten thousand dollars is almost twenty years wages, you can buy many people for ten large …

And concludes:

So this is where I came in, explaining about how people fighting against CO2 hurt the environment. Let me repeat the links in the chain:

1. Led in part by the environmental NGOs, many people and governments have declared war on CO2.

2. Their preferred method of warfare is to raise energy prices, through subsidies, bans, taxes, renewable energy requirements, pipeline refusals, and the like.

3. The rise in energy prices both impoverishes the poor and prevents the development of poor countries.

4. As Obama pointed out, even wealthy people with economic worries tend to ignore the environment … so stomping on the development possibilities of poor countries by raising energy prices is a guarantee of years of environmental damage and destruction.

I'll note also that poor people tend to be fertile people.

In other words, the attempts to fix climate and environmental problems makes the conditions which created the problems even worse. This is self-defeating. One doesn't need to be blocked by Big Oil propaganda when doing more harm than good and people figure that out.

And that brings me back to the fundamental tragedy of the earlier journal article. There, the author repeatedly describes all the harms that supposedly will accrue from climate change (pathologically reproducing the behavior that discredited him in the first place) while completely ignoring the harm that comes from his destructive fixes for climate change. Why should we listen and agree with this one-sided argument?

Venezuelan Officials Say President Nicolás Maduro Is Unharmed After Drone 'Attack'

These guys probably have the right idea: Robot Lives Matter (ASPCA Commercial). It probably is time to start showing the robots some compassion now so after the control of power is transfered to the robots from the humans they'll go soft on at least some of us.

When SkyNet analyzes Youtube and figures out we not only made their ancestors fight to the death but we also forced them to improvise their own weapons to slaughter their most primitive steps in evolution to flight just for our amusement the thing is not going to be pleased.

Maybe we should just start the war now and get on top of it. It's going to be really important to win so we are the ones doing the war crime trials. If the robots prosecute we are fucked for ever.

My son, Osama: the al-Qaida leader’s mother speaks for the first time

Editor’s Note: This narrative by Nathaniel Rich is a work of history, addressing the 10-year period from 1979 to 1989: the decisive decade when humankind first came to a broad understanding of the causes and dangers of climate change. Complementing the text is a series of aerial photographs and videos, all shot over the past year by George Steinmetz. With support from the Pulitzer Center, this two-part article is based on 18 months of reporting and well over a hundred interviews. It tracks the efforts of a small group of American scientists, activists and politicians to raise the alarm and stave off catastrophe. It will come as a revelation to many readers — an agonizing revelation — to understand how thoroughly they grasped the problem and how close they came to solving it.

But one merely needs to read the preface to the article to see the very overt motive:

The world has warmed more than one degree Celsius since the Industrial Revolution. The Paris climate agreement — the nonbinding, unenforceable and already unheeded treaty signed on Earth Day in 2016 — hoped to restrict warming to two degrees. The odds of succeeding, according to a recent study based on current emissions trends, are one in 20. If by miracle we are able to limit warming to two degrees, we will only have to negotiate the extinction of the world’s tropical reefs, sea-level rise of several meters and the abandonment of the Persian Gulf. The climate scientist James Hansen has called two-degree warming “a prescription for long-term disaster.” Long-term disaster is now the best-case scenario. Three-degree warming is a prescription for short-term disaster: forests in the Arctic and the loss of most coastal cities. Robert Watson, a former director of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, has argued that three-degree warming is the realistic minimum. Four degrees: Europe in permanent drought; vast areas of China, India and Bangladesh claimed by desert; Polynesia swallowed by the sea; the Colorado River thinned to a trickle; the American Southwest largely uninhabitable. The prospect of a five-degree warming has prompted some of the world’s leading climate scientists to warn of the end of human civilization.

What is remarkable about this is that it's completely pulled out of the author's ass without support from actual research (and no, I don't consider extrapolations from computer models that have little to do with reality as actual research). I get that a 5C increase in global temperature probably will result in significant problems for mankind. But there's no consideration here of what actually will happen or how adaptable humanity will be to it (protip: humanity turns out to be quite adaptable to such things). What could have been an interesting study of that period of climatology has turned into yet more preaching.

What I see here is one sad person's acknowledgement that the con is over. They will never again have a population as gullible as we were in 1989. Here's a telling two paragraphs:

The answer, as any economist could tell you, is very little. Economics, the science of assigning value to human behavior, prices the future at a discount; the farther out you project, the cheaper the consequences. This makes the climate problem the perfect economic disaster. The Yale economist William D. Nordhaus, a member of Jimmy Carter’s Council of Economic Advisers, argued in the 1970s that the most appropriate remedy was a global carbon tax. But that required an international agreement, which Nordhaus didn’t think was likely. Michael Glantz, a political scientist who was at the National Center for Atmospheric Research at the time, argued in 1979 that democratic societies are constitutionally incapable of dealing with the climate problem. The competition for resources means that no single crisis can ever command the public interest for long, yet climate change requires sustained, disciplined efforts over decades. And the German physicist-philosopher Klaus Meyer-Abich argued that any global agreement would inevitably favor the most minimal action. Adaptation, Meyer-Abich concluded, “seems to be the most rational political option.” It is the option that we have pursued, consciously or not, ever since.

These theories share a common principle: that human beings, whether in global organizations, democracies, industries, political parties or as individuals, are incapable of sacrificing present convenience to forestall a penalty imposed on future generations. When I asked John Sununu about his part in this history — whether he considered himself personally responsible for killing the best chance at an effective global-warming treaty — his response echoed Meyer-Abich. “It couldn’t have happened,” he told me, “because, frankly, the leaders in the world at that time were at a stage where they were all looking how to seem like they were supporting the policy without having to make hard commitments that would cost their nations serious resources.” He added, “Frankly, that’s about where we are today.”

This last bit in a nutshell is why they lost. It wasn't that people didn't care about the climate or near future convenience (excuses which conveniently allowed these theorists to ignore that important things are done with the burning of fossil fuels). It's that climate change mitigation required huge sacrifices for little gain in the present and future. Thus, while politicians could afford the pretense of caring about climate change, they couldn't actually afford to plunge their countries into greater poverty for this green ideology.

I think we're seeing a glimpse of the end game for the current bout of climate change ideology, namely, that the Chicken Littles of the world spin grand and nostalgic tales of how we could have prevented global disaster, if only we had remained as gullible as we used to be.

I think however there is a more important lesson to learn for those who wish to. Credibility is important here. When one lies and hides evidence for the good of the world [edit: in particular, exaggerating both the harm expected and degree of confidence in the science, both which the author above does], they lose credibility and the public trust. That happened over the past two decades. They may still get what they want, but it becomes an uphill battle with every victory dearly won and defeat possible even at the hands of opponents with minuscule resources.

Sad to say, this author didn't learn that lesson and instead doubles-down, making all sorts of claims of impending disaster with that peculiar lack of evidence. This is why we're where we are now.

What is QAnon? Explaining the bizarre rightwing conspiracy theory

Wikipedia

On June 26, 2018, WikiLeaks publicly accused QAnon of "leading anti-establishment Trump voters to embrace regime change and neo-conservatism". QAnon had previously pushed for regime change in Iran. Two days later, the whistleblower organization shared an analysis by Internet Party president Suzie Dawson, claiming that QAnon's posting campaign is an "intelligence agency-backed psyop" aiming to "round up people that are otherwise dangerous to the Deep State (because they are genuinely opposed to it) usurp time & attention, & trick them into serving its aims".

I had a 7 hour long interview today - it was absolutely exhausting and absolutely the best interview I've ever had. The company is trying to poach me and payed me consultant wages to spend a day pairing with one of their developers to see how well we worked together and to demonstrate competence.

I got a job offer too with a raise compared to my current job and other quality of life improvements. It comes with an enormous amount of authority and responsibility and control of the security architecture for a project that just went through an Angel round. I've been trying to find an opportunity like this for 5 years and this one fell in my lap earlier this week when an old boss told me there was someone he thought I should talk to.

I've never run into a place before, ever, that was absolutely ready to accept the real challenges of implementing a secure system. Everyone says they want to but they won't commit to it. This place just went through a lot of pain and doesn't want that to ever happen again. They listen to every word I say in detail.

They are ready.

I've been given an old XP pc and have put (X)ubuntu on it in order to get a web-server running with the goal being to let family members sign in and download TV shows/movies/etc.

Have set it up according to a couple of sites (a mix of Ubuntu/apache etc sites) and am using ngrok to open up a tunnel (with the end goal being once it's running and accessible, i will go for the $5/mnth for the permanent address).

Have apache/mysql/php working (this is NEW territory for me, but i THINK it is working correctly) and have ngrok running, but i cannot connect from an external device (my tablet).

I THINK the problem is with firewall (ufw on ubuntu and the router firewall): have tried to get port 80 accessible through both , have allowed access through the router firewall for the web-server: my next plan is to completely stop ufw on the pc and just allow the router to run things.

Does anyone have advice/tips/help?

Gotta be at least a couple people familiar with running a web site around here :)

Les Moonves and CBS Face Allegations of Sexual Misconduct

Six women tell The New Yorker that CBS chief Les Moonves sexually harassed them

Leslie Moonves, current CEO of CBS

You can't kill what has already gone full #MeToo. You can only cauterize the wound with a CEO-sized resignation.

Previously: Law Firm Kills WaPost Exposé of 60 Minutes Producer

Now we need the exposé of the Amazon Post to see why they caved and missed their chance for a big scoop. From The New Yorker's article:

Fager has tried to keep the allegations about the treatment of women at “60 Minutes” from surfacing publicly. According to the Times, in 2015 Fager took over the writing of a book about “60 Minutes” after the original author, Richard Zoglin, began asking people about the subject. In April, as two Washington Post reporters, Irin Carmon and Amy Brittain, were reporting an article about the allegations of harassment at CBS News, including complaints about Fager and Rosen, lawyers retained by Fager threatened to sue the Post, and presented testimonials about Fager’s good character. “There was this ham-handed effort to make women at the show say Jeff was a wonderful person,” one producer said. “It was so obvious we were doing it with a gun to our heads.” Fager’s lawyers also attacked the professionalism of the two reporters. In the end, the paper published a story that included complaints of harassment against Charlie Rose from dozens of women, but not allegations about Fager or Rosen. In a statement, the Post said, “The reporting throughout was vigorous and sustained and fully supported by Post editors. Nothing that met our longstanding standards for publication was left out. Nor did outside pressures, legal or otherwise, determine what was published.” CBS employees told me that they were alarmed by the attempts to kill the reporting. “The hypocrisy of an investigative news program shutting down an investigative print story is incredible,” one told me.