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After Elon Musk called a rescue diver a "pedo", all sorts of people have been crawling out of the woodwork to bash him. But this bit takes the cake:

SpaceX — which Musk touts as replacing NASA and colonizing Mars — has been a literal failure to launch. So many of its rockets have burned up or crashed that Musk, for reasons unknown, has made a blooper reel.

Jesus Fucking Christ.

Northrop Grumman's Faulty Payload Adapter Reportedly Responsible for "Zuma" Failure

SpaceX celebrates its many failures in hilarious new blooper reel

I'll let you judge whether the other attacks in the article (mostly about Tesla) are accurate.

‘60 Minutes’ Boss Hired Law Firm Over #MeToo Story

One of television’s most powerful men, 60 Minutes Executive Producer Jeff Fager, hired a law firm that boasts about “killing stories” for a Washington Post investigation into him, three sources familiar with the matter told The Daily Beast.

The story was a deep dive into what CBS managers knew about former anchor Charlie Rose’s alleged sexual misconduct, but due to the aggressive tactics of law firm Clare Locke, the sources said, the story was “effectively neutered.”

Clare Locke also did work for former Today show host Matt Lauer and current New York Times reporter Glenn Thrush, three sources say. Both men were accused in news publications of sexually harassing women. The law firm was also recently hired by David Pecker, the CEO and chairman of American Media Inc., parent company of the National Enquirer, to try and shut down a negative story from a newspaper, according to two sources.

Accused Russian agent Mariia Butina tried to trade sex for influence, say prosecutors - Previously, the FBI had said Butina was trying to establish relationships with a "gun rights organization," which NBC News has reported is the NRA.

The gunslinging Russian woman accused of cozying up to American officials to infiltrate the U.S. political system — at the behest of her Kremlin-linked mentor and with the help of her American boyfriend — allegedly tried to trade sex for influence.

The "Red Sparrow" scenario was unveiled Wednesday in a government memorandum that laid out the reasons why prosecutors believe Mariia Butina, 29, should remain jailed until trial.

During a detention hearing in federal court on Wednesday afternoon, Butina pleaded not guilty to being an unregistered foreign agent and was again ordered held without bail.

A turtle scientist’s crude behavior has sparked a #metoo moment in herpetology

Scientist Loses Distinguished Award After Acceptance Presentation Full of Racy Photos

Scientist Loses Award After Acceptance Lecture Featured Students in Bikinis

I like turtles

New Grow Light Technology Being Tested in Canada

A new, broad-spectrum light that mimics sunlight more closely than others is being tested in Canada, the Edmonton Journal reports. The light is manufactured by Edmonton-based G2V Optics and was originally designed to test solar cells at the University of Alberta.

Michael Taschuk, the developer of the light, previously managed a team of researchers at the University of Alberta. The lights have been in use at Endless Sky Canna Corp in British Columbia, Canada.

Endless Sky’s CEO Travis George reports that the lights are twice as effective as other grow lights the company has used.

The potential for scamming is reasonably high with any online market. I've liked Ebay for years now, because it usually enables me to beat competitors prices with a nice margin.

Recently, my OBD2 scanner has gone AWOL. The thing is pretty old, and pretty basic, it just gets the codes, and leaves you to figure out what they mean. So, it's AWOL. I asked my brainy son about a good replacement. Among his recommendations was the Autel MaxiLink ML629. It's not a super brainy device, but it does a little more than just read the codes. ABS brake alarms, airbag alarms, and transmission codes, as well as some kind of database to let you know what the codes mean.

I priced the thing as high as $160, Amazon had it for $129, and Ebay gave me about five hits for $109, with several other priced higher.

I didn't buy immediately. I just sat on the information for a few days. Went back to Ebay yesterday, and found that the particular sale that I "watched" had ended. So, do a search for the same item, and I'm faced with a wall of $114 sales.

Now, that price is obviously not "bad", but it seems suspicious that less than a week ago, there were five hits for $109, but now, the lowest "buy it now" price is $114.

Is Ebay running some kind of algorithm (like Amazon is purported to do) that establishes what I might be willing to pay, then gives me that price? It just seems odd, and oddities tend to catch my attention.

Possibly, they are trying to pressure me to buy now, rather than wait a few more days? "Oh, geez, it's gone up 5 dollar in four days, what will it be in five or ten more days?"

All of that, plus, I have an email in my inbox. "Your Ebay rock star report". WTF? Common dumbass television advertising tactics? Maybe that email is punishment for blocking advertising and trackers.

Is anyone else having weird and/or creepy experiences with Ebay? Are they beginning to go downhill?

An additional bit of weirdness:

In a different browser, using a different proxy, I did another search for the same item. There is a similar wall of offers for $114, but I'm also seeing others priced as high as $210, $199, $151, and $147. I'm definitely NOT seeing precisely the same results when using different browsers, or, more accurately, when I'm more anonymous.

I feel like I'm being gamed. Maybe not as badly as Amazon does, but the feeling is still there.

HOME / INSPIRING

NASA Is Training This 17-Year-Old Girl to Become One of the First Humans on Mars

Better than dying on the Space Shuttle, I suppose.

ThorCon Molten Salt Reactor can be safer safe and scalable to 100 GW within a decade

Nvidia GTX 1180 to Use New High-Speed Connector: What You Need to Know

Quadrupling Wealth with a ten billion person Global City

Japan's Video Game Bars Are In Danger

14m2s video: TWITCH VICTIMS

Polygon article: Streamer Amouranth is latest example of ‘Twitch thot’ harassment problem¹

In summary (since you may not be arsed to watch a 14 minute video), (some... many?) girl streamers wear skimpy clothing and cultivate a fanbase on Twitch and other streaming platforms. People, mostly young men (or boys with the parents' credit card), shell out lots of money² to get attention from these streamers, despite getting far less for their money than what a camgirl would show off. The streamers are often accused of violating Twitch's terms of service by "accidentally" shaking their ass, showing major cleavage, actual nudity, and other on-camera mishaps (you can look for compilations of these on YouTube if you want). However, Twitch tends to overlook these infractions (which are lucrative for Twitch since scantily-clad girl gamers drive traffic and Twitch gets a cut of the stream's ads or revenue), while punishing males more regularly for their bits of nudity and terms of service violations, sometimes including things that are done/said on entirely different platforms.

In this case, the streamer repeatedly lied on camera to portray herself as single, fueling the fevered dreams of her fans. She also revealed that she lived in Houston, TX (making doxxing her an easy task), and filmed inside of a gym (identifying it, since it was getting phone calls) and lied about it to the gym's employees and manager until she decided to leave. None of this is justification for being harassed or really so bad at all (lying to grift some horny kids and acting like an asshole in a private establishment aren't exactly crimes), but after being called out on her deception by fans and apparently harassed/"doxxed", she found a ready-made ally in the form of a lazy gaming media outlet.

^{1. Polygon appears to have made itself resistant to archive.is, but not archive.org.}

^{2. Apparently, lots more money than I expected. One of Amouranth's fans donated about $10-13k. Yikes.}

Why you should care: You don't have to, but it's another fascinating look at how millennials make a buck online these days.

Similar drama:

Pewdiepie vs. Twitch streamer Alinity

TanaCon (one big unmentioned detail is that the venue was intended to hold about a thousand, not the ~5,000 that tickets were sold to, so the event was doomed from the start and there are layers of lies involved)

Come to think of it, I keep on forgetting that Twitch is a subsidiary of Amazon now.

To go really highbrow here in my journal.

Yo mama so fat that when she sits around the house, she sits around the house!

Yo mama so ugly that they need to tie a steak on to get the dog to play with her!

Yo mama so fat, she got her own zip code!

Yo mama so stank, she's her own superfund site!

Yo mama so stupid, when I told her I had to take a piss, she asked for it back!

Yo mama so ugly, she crashed Facebook's facial recognition software!

Yo mama so fat, her blood type is Ragu!

There's a good start. Please tell us more about 'Yo mama'!