OK, my alliterative synonym abilities failed me with the last one. But you get the idea. It seems even leftwing billionaires get tired of losing $100 million a year. The Washington Post is hemorrhaging readers, and a new CEO has come in to read woke employees the riot act.
Megyn Kelly: The Washington Post is in a slippery downfall, probably to its end. It’s hemorrhaging.
Dave Rubin: Well deserved.
MK: It’s disgusting, isn’t it! It’s worse than The New York Times!
DR: Well, we’d have to really think that one through. I mean, The New York Times is unbelievably horrible.
MK: But still readable yeah. You read it, and you see it’s biased, and you know you’re getting misled. The Washington Post has turned into Slate.
MK: I mean it’s disgusting now, and it has been this way for a couple of years. So you”ll be shocked, shocked to learn they’re hemorrhaging readers. They’re leaving in droves. And it’s not like they had a huge Republican base to begin with. But you know, even the moderate readers seem have said you’re too much for me.
MK: The New York Times reported in July of 2023 that The Washington Post was on pace to lose about $100 million last year.
MK: Then in October of this past fall, Washington Post offered buyouts to cut staff by almost 250, 240 employees.
MK: They cannot increase their number of paying customers, since the 2020 election they peaked at three million subscribers back then. They’re now down by half a million and counting. It’s just going down and down and down.
MK: There was a meeting on [last] Monday where the publisher Will Lewis and the new interim executive editor Matt Murray met with staff. And they they got rid of Sally Busby, who had led the paper for the past couple years, and made a shocking announcement.
MK: Guess who’s coming in to lead the paper? Count them, not one, not two, not three, four white men!
DR: Oh God! During Pride Month?
MK: They’re white, and they’re men! And one of them, jeez, was the leader of the Wall Street Journal prior to this.
DR: I think my analogy of a dinosaur in the tarpits is pretty on point. These things they have grown so large, they’ve been so negligent, to what their job is: Of doing the news and doing it honestly.
DR: You and I are not wizards. How is it that we’ve largely gotten the big things right over the years, or didn’t fall for all of the hoaxes?
DR: How is it that I didn’t fall for all of the covid stuff? How is it that I didn’t fall for Donald Trump very fine people on both sides? How is it that I didn’t think Brett Kavanagh was a serial rapist, or that the Covington kids were racist or that Jussie Smollett was lynched? Why is it that you and I didn’t fall for all those?
DR: The media lies about everything, and then once you see it, you’ve peered behind the curtain, then just know it. And what’s happening is more and more people are seeing it, so their own readers are finally, like, “My God, this is not a newspaper.”
MK: White men! My God, that’s how desperate they are! And of course they’re having a revolt right at the The Washington Post. Staffers are outraged.
MK: The reaction by one reporter at the meeting to finding out four white guys we going to be leading the Post now was everyone was shocked.
MK: Later in the meeting, another reporter asked Lewis whether any women or people of color were interviewed and seriously considered for these positions, a question that prompted applause! “Yeah, there’s got to be a more qualified female or person of color. Look at these guys! So pale and so penisy!”
MK: “Look, we are losing large amounts of money. Your audience has halved in recent years. People are not reading your stuff. I can’t sugarcoat it anymore. So I’ve had to take decisive, urgent action to set us on a different path, sourcing talent that I have worked with that are the best of the best.”
Imagine picking people based on ability and not the color of their skin. The outrage!
As online commentators noted, we’ll know the Washington Post is really serious about cleaning house when it fires Taylor Lorentz…
Adobe has just changed the terms for subscription applications like Photoshop. Nothing big, just a demand of unlimited use of everything you ever create, forever. Oh, and you’re locked out of your existing work until you agree.
A change to Adobe terms & conditions for apps like Photoshop has outraged many professional users, concerned that the company is claiming the right to access their content, use it freely, and even sub-licence it to others.
The company is requiring users to agree to the new terms in order to continue using their Adobe apps, locking them out until they do so …
Adobe says that its new terms “clarify that we may access your content through both automated and manual methods, such as for content review.”
The terms say:
Solely for the purposes of operating or improving the Services and Software, you grant us a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free sublicensable, license, to use, reproduce, publicly display, distribute, modify, create derivative works based on, publicly perform, and translate the Content. For example, we may sublicense our right to the Content to our service providers or to other users to allow the Services and Software to operate with others, such as enabling you to share photos
If you’re using our tools, we get unlimited rights to anything you ever created on our tools for any purpose forever, plus we get to sublicense them. It’s as if Microsoft announced that it was publishing Joe Schmoo’s Misery II: Misery Harder because Stephen King agreed to the license agreement for Word 4.0.
Designer Wetterschneider, who counts DC Comics and Nike among his clients, was one of the graphics pros to object to the terms.
Here it is. If you are a professional, if you are under NDA with your clients, if you are a creative, a lawyer, a doctor or anyone who works with proprietary files – it is time to cancel Adobe, delete all the apps and programs. Adobe can not be trusted.
But don’t worry! It gets worse! You can’t access your server-stored work or even uninstall the app until you agree to the term!
Concept artist Sam Santala pointed out that you can’t raise a support request to discuss the terms without first agreeing to them. You can’t even uninstall the apps!
I can’t even get ahold of your support chat to question this unless I agree to these terms beforehand.
I can’t even uninstall Photoshop unless I agree to these terms?? Are you f**king kidding me??
But don’t worry! Adobe has “clarified” that they’re really not going to steal your content, despite the terms and conditions clearly giving them the permissions to do precisely that. They also swear up and down that they’re never, ever, ever going to use your work to train AI on, despite the fact that we all know that’s exactly what they’re doing.
All of this points out how stupid it is to rely on a subscription model for your software.
Is there a Louis Rossmann rant on the subject? Yes. Yes there is.
“When you are at the mercy of connecting to somebody else’s computer to use your software, this means that your data can be held hostage and they can change the terms on you at any time.”
He states he feels anything he’s published on the Internet is fair game for training AI. But: “I do not want Adobe’s machine learning algorithms going through my personal private content. When I have something in my drawer, that belongs to me. That is not for anybody else to learn from.”
“If you have a halfway finished creative project, you are literally not able to access it unless you agree to terms and conditions that allow their machine learning algorithms to go through all of your private fucking library. You rapist pieces of shit!”
“The problem with having your data on somebody else’s computer is that they can roofy you anytime they want and get access to it.”
“Where on this page does it say that if you don’t want us to access your data, that you can grab all your data out of there and cancel? Does it say that? No, it says you either accept and continue you take the roofy or you don’t get access to any of your stuff ever again.”
Until Adobe actually changes the terms and conditions to provide the narrow permissions they claim they actually need (like the ability to create thumbnails), no one should agree to their terms. And not allowing someone to retrieve or delete their data without agreeing to draconian terms and conditions first is unconscionable extortion.
An anonymous hacker has claimed to have leaked 270 GB of internal data and source code from The New York Times (NYT) on the controversial image board 4chan.
The leak, reportedly containing over 5,000 repositories and 3.6 million files, was published on June 6, 2024. It has since raised widespread concern and speculation about the potential implications for the historic news organization.
The hacker, who has not been identified, posted a magnet link to the files on 4chan, encouraging users to download and share the data. According to the hacker, the leaked collection comprises uncompressed tar files with fewer than 30 encrypted repositories.
The leaked data reportedly contains a variety of source code, including the blueprints of well-known games like Wordle, email marketing campaigns, and ad reports. The hacker’s message was signed “With love from /aicg/,” a nod to a 4chan community.
While the leak’s legitimacy has not been independently verified, cybersecurity experts and media outlets have expressed serious concerns. The Register reported that it had seen a list of files in the purported leak but had not confirmed their authenticity.
Bryan Lunduke of The Lunduke Journal (who’s covered leaked/hacked material like this before) downloaded the files. He says they’re 334GB worth of files (maybe the size discrepancy is zipped vs unzipped) and thinks they’re real.
This dropped June 6.
“We are talking about a 334 gigabyte archive containing supposedly 3.6 million and some change files, individual source code files. Massive. Off-the-charts massive.”
He though it might just be every New York Times story ever published, but it doesn’t appear to be. Nor does it look like an email server dump.
“This is massive. It almost is making my brain hurt simply going through all of this.”
“I went through it. I read a bunch of it in depth. When I say a bunch of it, I mean I spent a long time on it and barely made a dent.”
“It truly does look to be over 3 something million source code files.”
“The first things I looked through were tremendously boring. It was just stupid JavaScript files dealing with Markdown.” JavaScript is a front-end programming language used for performing a huge variety of tasks in your browser. Markdown is an HTML-like text markup language used as a basis for rendering documents in a variety of different formats (standard web page, phone webpage, PDF, online help, etc.).
A lot of it appears to be internal website documents.
“It’s from a wide variety of stuff. I mean it’s all over the map. We’re talking onboarding documents and technical documents, hiring documents, switchboard documents, user attribute documents, a huge amount of documentation.”
Plus actual source code for iOS and Android applications.
Lunduke explains legal doctrine on leaked materials and reporting, saying he didn’t commit any crime to obtain the material, which should legally put him in the clear for talking about material therein relevant to the public interest. Normally I’d point out “Hacking is wrong, mkay,” but New York Times has itself published hacked/leaked/stolen material itself at least as far back as The Pentagon Papers, so this is a case of biter bit.
“There a reasonable assumption that publishing some of this leaked material would be of the public interest…There are a number of policies and other interesting things in place documented within this material that could be of the public interest.”
“This does appear to be real. I cannot fathom how all of this could have been created if it wasn’t real.” I am inclined to agree. But! It’s important to note that a real archive can be salted with false information for a variety of nefarious purposes, so caveat lector.
“It is an absolutely monstrous amount. Simply searching through it and scanning it is insane. There are over 5,000 individual mini-archives within this link each one appears to represent an individual source code repository, or at least a folder or subfolder within source code repositories.” He says it appears to be just the latest snapshot, and not all the versions you would find in a source code repository like GitHub.
The time stamps on the files look recent.
“Man, there’s some funky things going on here.”
I am most interested in how internal policies codify/enforce woke social justice priorities, if there are any special instructions for covering Donald Trump (or other Republicans), racial preferences in hiring policies, etc.
Since I didn’t do a separate post on the 80th anniversary of D-Day, here’s a Mark Felton video that covers ships from Operatune Neptune, the naval portion of D-Day, that have survived.
Operation Neptune was “under British control, commanded by Admiral Sir Bertram Ramsey, the man who had been responsible for the Dunkirk evacuation in 1940.”
“Can you imagine the size of the force of ships required to land over 150,000 British, Canadian, American and French troops on five different beaches? It was almost 7,000, from huge battleships to tiny landing craft.”
“Britain supplied 892 warships out of the 1,213 involved, and 3,261 landing craft out of a total of 4,126.
Brits crewed many landing craft carrying American soldiers to the beach.
“112,113 Royal Navy personnel served on D-Day, plus 25,000 British members of the Merchant Navy, with the United States Navy providing the second biggest contingent: 52,889.”
The invasion fleet was split into the Western Naval Task Force under U.S. Admiral Alan G. Kirk, supporting Omaha and Utah beaches, and the Eastern Naval Task Force, under British Admiral Sir Philip Vian, covering Gold, Juno and Sword beaches.
Minesweeping operations began even earlier than the landings.
The landing was originally scheduled on June 5, but had to be delayed due to bad weather.
HMS Medusa arrived at the beach 12 hours before the US Landings began to “act as a marker to show the entrance to a narrow channel to be swept by mine sweepers.” “HMS Medusa still looks exactly the same as she did during World War II, having been extensively restored and carefully looked after, and she could be found today at Haslar Marina in Crossport in Hampshire.”
“Today only one D-Day veteran minesweeper still exists, USS Threat, and incredibly she is still serving in her original role, though no longer with the United States.” She was sold to Mexico, and currently serves as to Mexico where she currently serves as the ARM Francisco Zarco.
The destroyer USS Laffey screened for German ships on D-Day, and performed some shore bombardment on June 8-9. She’s preserved as a museum ship in South Carolina.
The bombarding forces flagship of Omaha Beach still survives: The battleship USS Texas. An old ship in 1944, Texas dated from around 1912, a dreadnaught battleship of the old school. In World War II she had been pressed into convoy escort duties in the Atlantic, and shore bombardment during the Operation Torch landings in North Africa in 1942. She had been modified over the years, and her systems upgraded, and her ten 14 inch guns gave her a formidable hitting power, able to pulverize targets over 20 miles away. On D-Day, Texas was assigned to provide fire support to the Western half of Omaha Beach, where the US 29th Infantry Division was landing, and Pointe du Hoc, in support of the 2nd Ranger Battalion.
The Royal Navy light Cruiser HMS Belfast also carried out shore bombardment, and survives as a museum ship on the Themes.
A surviving Liberty Ship, SS Jeremiah O’Brien, was not only preserved, it carried American veterans across the Atlantic to participate in the 50th Anniversary commemoration, and today she remains fully seaworthy.
Various other, smaller ships (tank landing craft, light ships, and a German patrol boat) have survived in various roles and in museums.
As the largest conflict in human history passes out of living memory, so much of what was common knowledge of that conflict fades into obscurity. People still know Omaha Beach from Saving Private Ryan, but if you were to ask today’s college students “What is the significance of the names Gold, Juno and Sword?”, I venture that most wouldn’t know the answer.
As big an advertisement as the Russo-Ukrainian has been for western technology such as HIMARS and ATACMS, it’s been an even bigger anti-advertisement for Russia’s S-300/S-400 air defense systems. It must be pretty embarrassing to see your SAM systems getting blown up time and time again by the very threat it was designed to intercept.
Just today Suchomimus features yet another instance of HIMARS making an S-300 system blow up real good:
This is not to be confused with his video of ATACMS taking out an S-400 system in Mospino, Donetsk 11 days ago:
That’s the same battery that failed to intercept ATACMS before being hit by it. Six times.
Or the successful ATACMS strike that took out several S-400 system components at Belbek Air Base in Crimea:
Or his video of an S-300 system being taken out by ATACMS at Dzhankoi airfield in May:
Ukraine claimed to have destroyed two S-400 batteries in Crimea in September 2022, out of five that were initially deployed there.
In April 2023, Ukraine said it destroyed or critically damaged four S-400 launchers in Crimea.
In October 2023, Ukraine launched ATACMS missiles that destroyed an S-400 system in Luhansk Oblast.
In November 2023, a UK intelligence update stated that Ukraine likely destroyed at least four Russian S-400 systems in a week.
On April 19, 2024, Ukraine launched ATACMS missiles at a Russian airfield in Crimea, destroying S-400 launchers, three radars, and a Fundament-M air surveillance system.
On April 23, 2024, Ukraine destroyed a 92N2 radar and a 96L6 high-altitude radar of an S-400 system.
On April 28, 2024, Ukraine launched multiple ATACMS missiles in Crimea, destroying more S-400 air defense systems.
On May 6, 2024, Ukrainian forces destroyed a tracked version of a Russian S-400 missile launcher in Zaporizhzhia region.
And, of course, the numerous drone strikes Ukraine has carried out against Russian territory over the course of the war also testify to S-300/S-400 failure.
There’s speculation that Ukraine is taking out S-300/S-400 systems as battlespace prep for deploying F-16s in theater later this year.
The United States (Patriot) and Israel (Iron Dome/David’s Sling/Arrow) both field SAM systems that have been proven effective on the modern battlefield. Russia, by contrast, has fielded a system that’s a demonstrable failure.
There’s an idiomatic express that seems to have fallen out of common usage: “What does that have to do with the price of Tea in China?” The phrase indicates that they speaker has no interest or use in the information you’re conveying. This video has me curious as to what the price of one packet of dried ramen noodles goes for in China.
China seems to be having an unenviable bout of stagflation, with both unemployment and inflation rising at the same time. (So, for that matter, are we, though not as severe, and one which our elites controlling economic data seem determined to hide as much as possible.) In the video, people are complaining that packaged ramen noodles are going up from 2.8 to 3 yuan. (An online Chinese retail price tool puts it at a statistically indistinguishable 2.98 yuan.) At official exchange rates, 3 yuan is about 41¢.
Back in the days of being a poor college student, I could generally eat on 20 dollars a week. Rice, spaghetti, luncheon meat sandwiches, hot dogs and ramen were regular staples. Good ramen (Maruchan or Top Ramen) could readily be found five for $1, and the generic brand (back then they had literal generic brands with plain white packaging) could even be had for 15¢ a pop.
Those days, of course, are long gone. An individual pack of Maruchan Ramen is now 30¢ at Walmart, or 31¢ at HEB.
I had always had the vague impression that China exported ramen to the U.S., but Maruchan is actually packaged just south of San Antonio in Von Ormy.
It’s surprising to me that ramen, the college student survival staple, is actually more expensive in China than here, despite average Americans being much wealthier than average Chinese.
It must really, really suck to be poor in China right now…
Several people have wargamed possible outcomes to the Russo-Ukrainian War, but probably few have so literally gamified it.
His argument is pretty simple: Russia has X-industrial capacity, it’s using up Y amounts of war material, broken down into rough categories of how much Z time it takes to replace said war material. As this material is used up faster than it can be replaced, a scale estimates the chances of the Russian lines collapsing due to lack of material to carry on the fight, which runs from 10% in June to 100% on December 26, 2026.
There is a certain rough and ready logic to this analysis, and Russia is using up its stockpiles of Soviet-era equipment at an unsustainable rate, especially when it comes to aircraft. But there are numerous problems with this gamified analysis:
This is an abstraction of an abstraction of an abstraction. The map is not the territory, and the Russo-Ukrainian War is not a game of Strategic Conquest where any city’s productive capacity can be set to any task.
It’s not a question of how much generic productive capacity, it’s how much steel, gas, titanium, precision machinery, semiconductors, etc., Russia can produce.
By assuming Europe will keep Ukraine well supplied with war material, the YouTuber (Mark Biernat, “a Ph.D. student in Poland and teach college economics in the US”) is making assumptions that may not be warranted, especially when it comes to manpower, which may be a serious constraint on Ukraine.
It also assume that Russia won’t change it’s wasteful, grinding assault tactics to conserve men and material. Maybe not a bad bet, given their continued stupidity, but not a sure thing.
The author has not covered the general state of the Russian economy here, but he seems to have gone into that in other videos. The problem is that YouTubers have correctly predicted 10,000 of the last zero Russian economic collapses, so I’m getting a little jaded on this front. Russia’s economy is clearly in trouble, but large economies can stay in trouble for quite a long time before collapsing.
I am broadly sympathetic to the author’s thesis and worldview, but this argument is too abstracted from reality for me to assign any veracity to the estimation dates for possible collapse.
You may have heard something about a remake of Time Bandits and thought “that sounds like a bade idea.” An even worse idea? Making it without dwarves*.
“Yet another Hollywood reboot that seems to be kicking actors with dwarfism to the curb. So why does Hollywood hate people with dwarfism?”
“I mean, if you were a ginger person with dwarfism, then you’d really be fucked.”
“Time Bandits is getting a reboot, uh, continuation, reimagining, whatever on Apple TV+ and this is the cast.” Not a dwarf in sight.
“Actors with dwarfism who are like, hey, it’s hard enough to get roles right now, so why you keep replacing us with CGI creatures? Hugh Grant was an Oompa Loompa.”
“In their quest to not be offensive, they’re actually making sure that some people are not getting work.”
The same thing happened with Disney’s live-action Snow White before Disney did a 180.
No one (or at least no one rational) was offended when Terry Gilliam used actual dwarves in the original.
“Paradoxically fantasy films such as Time Bandits have often been the one genre in which filmmakers have liberated actors with dwarfism to be fully human.”
“Every character now has to be a black lesbian, because that’s this year’s flavor.”
The Willow reboot was such a massive failure they purged it from Disney+.
I’m far from a fanatic that actor X must share characteristic Y with the person they’re portraying, but when it comes to dwarves in films about dwarves, come on. Plus it’s cheaper, better and more convincing that CGI. Also, I’m pretty sure that every dwarf/midget/little person in Hollywood save Peter Dinklage needs the work more than Lisa Kudrow…
*I know my spellchecker wants me to spell it “dwarfs.” I’m going with Tolkien and D&D on this one.
It may be a stretch to say that everyone’s favorite bombastic Brit petrolhead-turned-farmer is saving UK farming, but he certainly seems to have drawn attention to its post-Brexit, regulation-strangled plight.
“In 2008, during the peak of Top Gear, Jeremy bought a thousand acres of land and farm called Curdle Hill Farm in Oxfordshire England, near Chipping Norton in the Cotswalds. The land came up for sale during the 2008 financial crash and was going for a lot cheaper than usual. When I say ‘cheaper,’ I mean £4.25 million.”
Clarkson: “The truth of the matter was that land almost never comes up for sale around here, and 2008 was the big financial crash, and this came up for sale, and I just thought ‘nobody’s making more land,’ so many people are moving out from London. But it was a lot, lot, lot, lot, lot less then, so I just thought ‘may as well get it.'”
Also for something to leave to his children, since you don’t pay estate taxes on agricultural land.
The guy Clarkson was paying to farm the land for him retired in 2019. That and Flu Manchu gave birth to Jeremy Clarkson, Novice Farmer and newly rechristened Diddly Squat Farm.
I’m going to skip over the details of his farmhouse renovation…
…and note that the new house has a basement theater, among other amenities, so he’s not exactly roughing it.
“Due to the weather, the farm’s crops brought in £90,000 less than the previous year, leaving them with only a profit of £144.”
“When the show released the following year Clarkson’s Farm became the most watched Prime Video Original Series in the UK.” It’s also been at the top of the ratings heap in the U.S. as well, getting much better ratings than things like The Rings of Power, which has to be something like one or even two orders of magnitude more expensive to film.
Clarkson: “What’s happening to farming in this country is ethnic cleansing. That’s a strong thing to say, but it sort of is happening. The government is trying, really, to drive farmers off their land.”
“In five years, the subsidies, the grants, are stopping, so farms have to think of new ways of making money.”
Another farmer: “Most farmers like me are 66 years old. We’re throwing in the towel. Let’s just take the government money. It won’t be our problem if people starve.”
“We’ve been paid to grow wild flowers. We need to have food produced and made in the UK, but people say well we can import from aboard. The same madness is happening in Europe, they’re asking farmers to plant wild flowers instead of food.” This appears to be done under a Sustainable Farming Incentive program, which offers subsidies for “Flower-rich grass margins, blocks, or in-field strips” and “Herbal leys.”
One of the continuing plotlines on Clarkson’s Farm is how the local council opposes every single one of Clarkeson’s money-making farm enhancements in the name of “tradition,” from a farm shop selling locale produce to a restaurant using the farm’s ingredients. This makes for great TV, but I can only imagine how difficult such a battle would be for a farmer without Clarkeson’s fame and resources.
“Clarkson has done more for the farming community to bring attention to their case with just two seasons than any farming organization has done in decades.”
“Farmers across the world have praised the show for highlighting the struggles they have to go through.”
“The many bases that this show covers is pretty incredible, from animal conservation, bureaucratic jargon, climate change, and just generally detailing how difficult it is to run a farm, especially in these current times.”
“It’s educated the masses about an industry that gets easily neglected, despite its glaringly obvious necessity.”
Someone needs to save farmers, not just in the UK but here as well, from the global warming fanatics who would drive them out of business.
In the tradition of “something lite for the weekend,” here’s The Babylon Bee’s Satan asking Democrats to tone it down a notch:
“I love the homicidal thing that you got going on there. I really dig it. OK, but maybe market it just a little bit differently. Like the serial killer that everyone thinks is such a sweet guy. You know, he’s got 27 bodies in the basement, but he’s like, you know, coaching Little League. That’s what I want.”
