Afternoon Tea 2.6.25: Shadow Fleet

Made it to February! Gray lameness for all Northern Hemisphere types, while Australia and Brazil shake off their summer holidays. We’ve got a shadow fleet, a slow-moving coup, Proud Boys getting dunked on, a way to reduce antibiotic resistance, and Ayn Rand-people have a new patron saint: Beavers who don’t wait for permits.

Shipowners have made £4.8bn selling tankers to Russian ‘shadow fleet (Guardian) Instead of junking your old tanker, sell it to Russia! The ships have non-problematic transponders, so they get to transport oil unfettered by ham-fisted American enforcement. The secret to evading sanctions? Changing your license plate apparently.

A Coup Is In Progress In America (TechDirt) & The Young, Inexperienced Engineers Aiding Elon Musk’s Government Takeover (Wired) If you haven’t heard about this, you’re probably watching 3-letter network news. Stop that. Musk has a bunch of tiny baby brownshirts helping him gain access to every system you can think of. And boy howdy do they suck. This is that “unelected tyrant grabbing power” scenario that the gun lobby has been fearmongering about since Columbine. Anyone at the Treasury department see a good guy with a gun or nah?

@arithmetc

Problem is the company fails shortly after #fyp #usa #2025

Twenty Lessons On Tyranny (Timothy Snyder) If you’ve not read The Origins of Totalitarianism or familiarized yourself with Nuremberg testimony, this is a good read. If you’re familiar with the horrors, best skipped.

Project 2025 tracker is now live (KeepTrack) Have you or someone you love remarked “Boy, someone should keep track of all of those Project 2025 promises to use against them in 2028?” KeepTrack is doing just that. Easiest thing to favorite & forget exists you’ll see all month.

Was Zuck Right about Chinese AI Models? (Kevin Xu) & The Short Case for NVIDIA (Jeffrey Emanuel) DeepSeek probably has a few billion in restricted NVIDIA GPUs. But the weird way everyone’s GPU habit remapped from crypto to AI is eery. Given how much stock value NVIDIA lost on the vapors of economical LLMs, real advances from here on out could make short sellers very rich.

Black church in DC that was vandalized by the Proud Boys gains control over the group’s trademark (AP) Couldn’t happen to a nicer group of dickheads! Press F to pay respects!

Exploiting the fitness cost of metallo-β-lactamase expression can overcome antibiotic resistance in bacterial pathogens (Nature Microbiology) We can debuff bacteria to make them less resistant to antibiotics! Someone who plays a ton of tactical RPGs worked in the lab where this breakthrough happened, I’d bet. This has “STOP DOTS” written all over it. (Editor’s Note: If you got that joke, we’re so very sorry.)

When a Crystal Ball Isn’t Enough to Make You Rich (Elm Wealth) They gave 120 adults the news one day in advance, just with stock/price data voided. The game was put online, and with 1500 having tried their hand, 50% lost money and 17% went broke. Completely broke, with a crystal ball. Don’t listen to people who say you can day trade, please.

 How Spotify Killed Lo-Fi Hip Hop (GameChops) Spotify declared profitability for the first time this year. I bet it has everything to do with AI slop ambient & lo fi tracks that don’t have human creators.

Beavers build planned dams in protected landscape area, while local officials still seeking permits (Czech Radio) Beavers built natural dams in the exact places local officials wanted to put up. They couldn’t get the permits fast enough, so the beavers took matters into their own…paws. It’s not who is going to let them, it’s who is going to stop them.

 Quote of the week

Believe those who are seeking the truth; doubt those who find it.
~André Paul Guillaume Gide

Poem of the week 

Lovely meta-poetry by Billy Collins c/o Litbowl 

Vibe of the week

realnormansann

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More smart hippity hop for your ears. Believe in yourself.

Keep thinking,
tnh