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Overnight News Digest for January 29 (Weird Science vs Just Weird edition) [1]
['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']
Date: 2025-01-29
This is an open thread where everyone is welcome, especially night owls and early birds, to share and discuss the happenings of the day. Please feel free to share your articles and stories in the comments.
Critics fear the unusual clean sweep of panels is meant to ease the planned rollback of climate and environmental policy. All members of the Environmental Protection Agency’s boards of outside advisers on science and clean air were dismissed in a letter emailed late Tuesday, an unusual step the Trump administration said was aimed at depoliticizing the panels. Panel members expressed disappointment and confusion at the assertion in the letter signed by James Payne, a career EPA attorney Trump installed as acting administrator. Critics charged the Trump administration with politicizing the process by eliminating the current independent advisers and clearing the way for them to be replaced with hand-picked appointees. “This is not about good governance, this is about rigging the system for polluters; corruption at the expense of the American people,” said Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island, the ranking Democrat on the Committee on Environment and Public Works. Similar efforts to remake science advisory panels came during the first Trump administration, with EPA leaders changing the eligibility rules for serving on boards. The result was fewer university researchers on the panels and more industry consultants and scientists who were supportive of Trump’s deregulatory efforts, like University of Alabama in Huntsville atmospheric scientist John Christy, taking seats.
x Here is how we Americans spent our money in 2023. Almost 1/3 on housing. That's too much. Also kinda depressing that we spent more on alcohol and tobacco than we did on books. Thanks for the graphic, @larydoe.bsky.social
[image or embed] — Laurie Loves Data (@laurelann.bsky.social) January 29, 2025 at 7:22 AM
The president’s executive orders on California water will help irrigate Central Valley farms. They won’t do anything to fight wildfires. While President Donald Trump has issued a flurry of far-reaching decrees during his first week in office, one relatively niche issue has received a disproportionate share of the president’s ire and attention: California water policy. That might make sense if the remedies he’s pursuing could help stem deadly fires like those that have killed at least 29 people in the Los Angeles area in recent weeks. Indeed, the president has claimed that “firefighters were unable to fight the blaze due to dry hydrants, empty reservoirs, and inadequate water infrastructure.” But unfortunately for future fire victims, the sole apparent aim of the president’s new policies is to deliver more water to farmers hundreds of miles away from the state’s fire zones. On his first day as president, Trump issued an executive order that directed his Interior Department to “route more water” to the southern part of the state. Then, on Sunday he issued another order that directed the department to immediately “override” the state’s management of its water, even if it meant overruling California law. The order also suggested Trump could withhold federal wildfire aid if the state failed to comply to his satisfaction. But the new measures wouldn’t deliver any more water to Los Angeles at all. Instead, his attempt to relax water restrictions would move more water to large farms in the state’s sparsely populated Central Valley, a longtime pet issue for the president, who attempted a similar maneuver during his first term.
x Jim Acosta announces on air that he's leaving CNN and says, "it is never a good time to bow down to a tyrant ... don't give in to the lies."
[image or embed] — Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) January 28, 2025 at 11:01 AM
Members of the Minnesota House of Representatives remain entrenched in a partisan power struggle after the GOP gained a temporary one seat majority, but the DFL says they’ll return to the Capitol under one condition – that the GOP honor the will of the voters. The House was set to enter the session with a 67 all tie, and both sides had entered into a power sharing agreement, but the Democrat from District 40B was disqualified after it was discovered he lied about where he lived and he didn’t have a legal address in his district. That gave Republicans the one seat majority. They showed up for work on January 14th; Democrats did not, thereby denying a quorum and preventing any work from getting started. ...Former House Speaker Melissa Hortman said lawmakers must respect what the people want. “The voters gave us a Minnesota House of Representatives where no party has a majority. The only way to make the House work is if we collaborate. We’re asking Republicans to do one simple thing: honor the will of the voters in Shakopee and across the state.”
“Can he really do that?” To anybody who paid attention during President Donald Trump’s norm-shaking first term, that should be a familiar question. And hours into his second, it started coming up once again. As part of a flurry of day-one executive orders, Trump paused funding from two key Biden-era initiatives aimed at subsidizing the rollout of EV charging stations. The action, titled “Terminating the Green New Deal,” halted the disbursement of funds from the National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure (NEVI) Formula and the Charging and Fueling Infrastructure (CFI) programs, casting a cloud of uncertainty over billions of dollars that Congress earmarked to help build out charging infrastructure. NEVI may not be a household name, but over the past few years, the $5 billion program established by the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law has added an array of EV fast chargers across the country. While its rollout has been slower than some expected, it’s setting the stage for long-term electric car infrastructure in America. CFI arms the Federal Highway Administration with another $2.5 billion to build out both slow and fast chargers, with an emphasis on underserved communities. ...“While the rhetoric may grab headlines, the reality is far more complicated,” Beth Hammon, a senior advocate for EV infrastructure at the Natural Resources Defense Council said in a blog post. “These programs are legally entrenched, widely supported, and designed to withstand political turbulence.”
How Big Potato and the other food cartels did greedflation and got away with it. x It's not a crime if we do it with an app
[image or embed] — WORKER19 (@blogwood.com) January 26, 2025 at 8:45 AM ...Inflation is one of the most politically salient factors of this decade, and so much of inflation can be attributed to a crime, done with an app, with impunity for the criminals. The entire food supply has been sewn up by cartels of 2-5 giant companies, and they colluded to raise prices, and bragged about it, and got away with it, because neoclassical economists insist that it's impossible for this kind of price fixing to occur in an "efficient market." …Big Potato controls 97% of the frozen potato market, and any sector that large and concentrated is going to be pretty cozy. The execs at these companies all meet at industry associations, lobbying bodies, and as they job-hop between companies in the cartel. But they don't have to rely on personal connections to rig the price of potatoes: they do it through a third-party data-broker called Potatotrac. Each cartel member sends all their commercially sensitive data – supply costs, pricing, sales figures – to Potatotrac, and then Potatotrac uses that data to give "advice" to the cartel members about "optimal pricing." This is just price-fixing, with an app. The fact that they don't sit around a table and openly discuss pricing doesn't keep this from being price-fixing. What's more, they admit it. A director at McCain said that "higher ups" forbade anyone in the company from competing on price. A Lamb Weston exec described the arrangement as everyone "behaving themselves," chortling that they'd "never seen margins this high in the history of the potato industry." Lamb Weston's CEO attributed a 111% increase in net income to "pricing actions." ...Lots of food categories are as inbred as meat and potatoes: "four firms controlled nearly 80 percent of the almond milk market, for instance. Three companies controlled 83 percent of the canned tuna market, and four companies controlled more than 86 percent of the microwave popcorn market."
Helion, a 12-year-old startup backed by Sam Altman, Peter Thiel and Reid Hoffman, has ingratiated itself amongst Silicon Valley heavyweights eager to unleash the commercial potential of nuclear fusion energy. Its ambitious promises have garnered the attention of deep-pocketed investors—and raised concerns amongst nuclear experts wary of the company’s aggressive timeline. ...Nuclear fusion technology, which harnesses the energy produced when two atoms combine to form a larger one, has yet to be commercialized. Helion believes it can reach this milestone within the next three years, while other fusion companies have put forward decade-long timelines. Scientists are less optimistic. “I even think ten years is very ambitious,” Saskia Mordijck, a physics professor at The College of William & Mary, told Observer. ...Helion’s lofty promise has been met with skepticism from the science community. “They don’t share any information, they don’t publish, they don’t provide data, they don’t share scientific advances,” said Mordijck, adding that such secrecy “makes it really, really challenging for us to assess where they are in the development of their system.” Excitement around nuclear fusion, however, has reached record highs—at least financially. Investors have flocked to nuclear fusion’s potential to one day provide vast amounts of clean energy, with total funding for nuclear fusion companies totaling $7.1 billion as of last summer, according to a report from Fusion Industry Association, $900 million of which was given in the past year .
It’s clever, quirky and self-censoring — but it’s the stuff behind the scenes that really matters. In the short term, you’ve got at least one more buzzy AI chatbot to talk to — or ignore entirely. But the eruption of this Chinese start-up onto the wider AI stage could have lasting effects on how quickly and efficiently AI tools are developed. We’ll keep an eye on all that for you. In the meantime, it’s worth breaking down just what all the commotion is about — and what DeepSeek can actually do ...Oh, and a quick reminder since we’re talking about giving DeepSeek files to parse: In addition to things you upload, data like your chats, device details and even “keystroke patterns” ultimately wind up on servers in China. ...The Washington Post takes a closer look at it in this FAQ, but long story short, the Chinese start-up claimed in a recent paper that it trained its AI model with older, slower Nvidia chips and low investment — under $6 million. If those claims are accurate, it’s proof that a company can develop an impressive AI model without the cutting-edge hardware and costs incurred by companies such as OpenAI. (For scale, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman once said the company’s GPT-4 model — released in 2023 — cost “more than” $100 million to train.)
The narrative that OpenAI, Microsoft, and freshly minted White House “AI czar” David Sacks are now pushing to explain why DeepSeek was able to create a large language model that outpaces OpenAI’s while spending orders of magnitude less money and using older chips is that DeepSeek used OpenAI’s data unfairly and without compensation. Sound familiar? Both Bloomberg and the Financial Times are reporting that Microsoft and OpenAI have been probing whether DeepSeek improperly trained the R1 model that is taking the AI world by storm on the outputs of OpenAI models. Here is how the Bloomberg article begins: “Microsoft Corp. and OpenAI are investigating whether data output from OpenAI’s technology was obtained in an unauthorized manner by a group linked to Chinese artificial intelligence startup DeepSeek, according to people familiar with the matter.” ...I will explain what this means in a moment, but first: Hahahahahahahahahahaha hahahahaha hahahhahahahahahahahahahahaha. It is, as many have already pointed out, incredibly ironic that OpenAI, a company that has been obtaining large amounts of data from all of humankind largely in an “unauthorized manner,” and, in some cases, in violation of the terms of service of those from whom they have been taking from, is now complaining about the very practices by which it has built its company. The argument that OpenAI, and every artificial intelligence company who has been sued for surreptitiously and indiscriminately sucking up whatever data it can find on the internet is not that they are not sucking up all of this data, it is that they are sucking up this data and they are allowed to do so.
Using ground-penetrating radar and laser scanners, researchers identified subterranean structures just a few feet below the ground. The pathways may connect Sforza Castle to a nearby basilica Beneath Sforza Castle in Milan, researchers have discovered a series of secret tunnels—passageways once sketched by the Renaissance artist and scientist Leonardo da Vinci and traversed by a widower sick with grief. The tunnels were discovered by experts from the Polytechnic University of Milan, who used ground-penetrating radar and laser scanners to map the 15th-century stronghold’s subterranean structures. The imaging revealed cavities and passageways positioned just a foot or two below the ground. “The aim is to create a digital twin of the Sforza Castle, a digital model that not only shows the current appearance of the castle, but also allows us to explore the past, by revealing ancient structures that are no longer visible,” says Franco Guzzetti, a geomatics researcher at the Polytechnic University of Milan, in a statement.
x Suddenly, out of nowhere, a declassified World War II-era CIA guide to sabotaging fascism in the workplace has become one of the most popular free ebooks on the internet: www.404media.co/declassified...
[image or embed] — Jason Koebler (@jasonkoebler.bsky.social) January 29, 2025 at 3:53 PM
The case of mistaken identity was quickly resolved, but scientists say it shows the need for transparency around spaceflight traffic in deep space. On Jan. 2, the Minor Planet Center at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts, announced the discovery of an unusual asteroid, designated 2018 CN41. First identified and submitted by a citizen scientist, the object’s orbit was notable: It came less than 150,000 miles (240,000 km) from Earth, closer than the orbit of the Moon. That qualified it as a near-Earth object (NEO) — one worth monitoring for its potential to someday slam into Earth. But less than 17 hours later, the Minor Planet Center (MPC) issued an editorial notice: It was deleting 2018 CN41 from its records because, it turned out, the object was not an asteroid. ...If left unchecked, astronomers say the growing number of untracked objects could hinder efforts to protect Earth from potentially hazardous asteroids. They could lead to wasted observing effort and — if sufficiently numerous — even throw off statistical analyses of the threat posted by near-Earth asteroids, said Center for Astrophysics (CfA) astrophysicist Jonathan McDowell in an email to Astronomy. “Worst case, you spend a billion launching a space probe to study an asteroid and only realize it’s not an asteroid when you get there,” he said.
The crew of the Overnight News Digest consists of founder Magnifico, regular editors side pocket, maggiejean, Chitown Kev, eeff, Magnifico, annetteboardman, Besame, jck, and JeremyBloom. Alumni editors include (but not limited to) Interceptor 7, Man Oh Man (RIP), wader, Neon Vincent, palantir, Patriot Daily News Clearinghouse (RIP), ek hornbeck (RIP), rfall, ScottyUrb, Doctor RJ, BentLiberal, Oke (RIP) and jlms qkw.
OND is a regular community feature on Daily Kos since 2007, consisting of news stories from around the world, sometimes coupled with a daily theme, original research or commentary. Editors of OND impart their own presentation styles and content choices, typically publishing each day near 12:00 AM Eastern Time
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