Tag: russia

Against NYT

The Times’ list is completely fictional. Made up. Divorced from reality. The stated goal of the list is to find (and promote) books that Times editors want people to read, not books that are actually selling a lot. So, they make up ‘rules’ to appear consistent. When Harry Potter was selling like crazy, they invented a new list so that they could take JK Rowling’s books off the real list. When diet and other books started selling a lot, they made up a new ghetto (miscellaneous) for those books. When books started selling in places like Walmart (thus driving the snootiness factor down) the Times penalized sales in chain outlets. And books like the Bible are banished because they’re not current enough.

Carefully curated so as not to have dreck like harry potter or diet books on it.
2013-02-14: Aww, how inconvenient. NYT makes up story, gets owned by pervasive data logging in the car.

After a negative experience several years ago with Top Gear, a popular automotive show, where they pretended that our car ran out of energy and had to be pushed back to the garage, we always carefully data log media drives. While the vast majority of journalists are honest, some believe the facts shouldn’t get in the way of a salacious story. In the case of Top Gear, they had literally written the script before they even received the car (we happened to find a copy of the script on a table while the car was being “tested”). Our car never even had a chance. The logs show again that our Model S never had a chance with John Broder. In the case with Top Gear, their legal defense was that they never actually said it broke down, they just implied that it could and then filmed themselves pushing what viewers did not realize was a perfectly functional car. In Mr. Broder’s case, he simply did not accurately capture what happened and worked very hard to force our car to stop running.

2013-09-12: NYT got trolled by Putin. Syria op-ed by Putin, publication date 9/11. Masterful pr.

RECENT events surrounding Syria have prompted me to speak directly to the American people and their political leaders. It is important to do so at a time of insufficient communication between our societies.

2014-03-19: NYT fails at economics. The rag of record apparently slept through economics class.

most states have limits on direct sales by auto manufacturers. These rules are meant to ensure competition, so that buyers can shop around for discounts from independent dealers, and to protect car dealers from being undercut by automakers.

2016-03-21: NYT middlebrows Terrrrists

To summarize, if you see something on someone’s computer screen that fits the description below, the person with the computer could be an ISIS terrorist!
It looks like “a line of gibberish across the screen.”
It’s “a bunch of lines, like lines of code.”
There’s “no image.”
There’s “no Internet.”

2020-06-26: nyt delenda est

This morning, like many others, I woke up to the terrible news that Scott Alexander—the man I call “the greatest Scott A. of the Internet”—has deleted SlateStarCodex in its entirety. The reason, Scott explains, is that the New York Times was planning to run an article about SSC. Even though the article was going to be positive, NYT decided that by policy, it would need to include Scott’s real surname (Alexander is his middle name). Scott felt that revealing his name to the world would endanger himself and his psychiatry patients. Taking down his entire blog was the only recourse that he saw

2021-02-21: NYT is middlebrow. The reason the NYT is so smug, and yet also consistently wrong about everything, is because it is middlebrow.

The NYT has 7.5M subscribers, mostly progressives in the 90-99% range. These people feel very smart, and they are in fact smarter than 90% of the population. So there’s no point bemoaning the fact that the NYT is not about to tell it’s readers that, “Actually, we provide middlebrow news analysis, and if you want brilliant inspired analysis you need to read blogs like SlateStarCodex.”

Yes, the NYT story is awful in all the ways that are currently being discussed by its critics, but the fundamental problem is inescapable. Any time a powerful middlebrow entity (which wrongly thinks it’s highbrow) evaluates an actual highbrow entity, you will end up with a mixture of resentment and incomprehension. This case is no different. It’s just how things work.

2022-10-24: NYT pretends to do corrections, but only on things that do not matter.

if you’re willing to correct the spelling of 1 vowel in somebody’s middle name or the location of a statue of a rambunctious horse, you should be willing to correct the erroneous statement, “Researchers find that female-named hurricanes kill 2x as many people as similar male-named hurricanes because some people underestimate them,” or various erroneous economic and education statistics.

For Brooks or Kristof to admit to a non-trivial error, as you suggest they do, would be for their admissions to immediately become high-profile fodder for their critics. And not just then, but forever more — a link to the admission, a quote of it, will be repeated at any occasion when a club to use against their credibility is wanted. But more to the point, such a club will work. It will work because people strongly recall that someone was proven wrong about something and especially they recall when someone admitted to it and, finally, they weight that information very heavily when evaluating credibility.

Intersex Dolls

People demand to ban those dolls from being sold on the territory of Russia and claim that it maybe done on purpose by some evil forces from outside of Russia in order to form a bad perception of female/male orientation from the early age.

eh? clearly this is to save production costs. such gullible people

Address Hacking

hack used by Russian netizens to trick e-commerce stores into delivering US/Canada-only merchandise to them in Russia: So what was possible to do is to put totally Russian address in the order delivery form, like: Moscow, Lenin St. 20, Russia in the address fields, usually there is a plenty of space to enter long things like this, and in the field country they put Canada in the field ZIP code – Canadian zip code. What happens next? The parcel travels to Canada, to the area to which the specified ZIP code belongs and there postal workers just see it’s not a Canadian address but Russian. They consider it to be some sort of mistake and forward it further, to Russia.

i guess the post office now routes around problems too?

Russia alaska tunnel

Russia plans to build the world’s longest tunnel, a transport and pipeline link under the Bering Strait to Alaska, as part of a $65b project to supply the US with oil, natural gas and electricity from Siberia. The project would take 15 years to complete. A 6000-kilometer transport corridor from Siberia into the US will feed into the tunnel, which at 100 km will be more than 2x as long as the underwater section of the Channel Tunnel.

Against Diamonds

Stupid kills. In this case, being uneducated about the various states of carbon

Adding to the pot-stirring that De Beers and others incited, a single page ad appeared in Variety a few months ago, paid for by the Kalahari Bushmen of Botswana, who were driven from their land by the government to make way for diamond mining. Their ad directly addressed DiCaprio, asking for help which then came in the form of several Survival International advocacy efforts.

2008-02-20: Finally a situation where the diamondoid surfaces warning sign makes sense.

Designer Wong makes engagement rings that can kill you. The razor-sharp diamond point is set into the ring so it can’t get knocked out when you smash someone’s face in, and the edges of the ring are really soft so it won’t cut into your skin during the pounding. It’s romantic because it means, “Will you marry me” but it also means, “I can’t always be there to protect you so if some jerk won’t stop bothering you, puncture him with this.” The diamond sharp edge will also cut skin down to the bone (with a minimum 1 karat stone – but the larger the better). Or it may simply be used to tag hard surfaces, like cars and windows for S.O.S. messages or that last will and estimate when pen or paper (or lawyers) aren’t conveniently around.


2008-06-16: Extremely cheap diamonds will hopefully do away with the “diamonds are forever” crap this country’s brides are infatuated with.

“This is a virtual diamond mine. If we were in Africa, we’d have barbed wire, security guards and watch towers. We can’t do that in Massachusetts.”

2008-10-27: Can’t wait for those to be done in volume, and the retarded engagement ring industry to die.

The most exciting aspect of this new annealing process is the unlimited size of the crystals that can be treated. The breakthrough will allow kilocarat diamonds of high optical quality

2012-09-18: That’s a lot of engagement rings. Diamond rings are now even more broadcasting your status as an idiot to the world.

Russia has just declassified news that will shake world gem markets to their core: the discovery of a vast new diamond field containing “trillions of carats,” enough to supply global markets for another 3 ka.

2015-01-07: No more Diamonds, with the exception of the engagement ring nonsense, of course.

Even my own diamond-business owning, non-millennial father is turning away from jewelry when it comes to gift giving. Sure, he’s made my mom a handful of statement pieces over the years, but at the same price point, he’s more likely to gift something that has actual purpose, aside from aesthetic value. The last few birthdays and Christmases have yielded vacation getaways, iPhones of every generation, even a smart home thermostat. What hasn’t shown up under the Christmas tree in the last 5 years? Diamond anything.

2015-03-18: Diamond scams

We were called hip-pocketers, because we lived from one deal to the next: Your business could fit in the wallet in your pocket. You bought a used Rolex at a pawnshop for $1000 from the kid who’s just paid $500 for it, hurried it over to your watch guy to hit it on the wheel and make it look new, replaced the old worn buckle with a South American counterfeit for $50, and resold it to your friend who owned the jewelry store a few blocks over for $2200, $2275 if she wanted a counterfeit leather box. She could retail it the same day for $3500. We “worked the float” back then, in the ’80s and ’90s—that meant the few days you had between when you paid for something with a check and the check actually hit your bank account. If you flipped the gold you’d bought with a check the same day, you had a few days of free money. Of course, you tried to make money on every deal, but often you were moving so fast that you had to lose money here and there, waiting for the bigger score that ought to come if you just kept hustling fast enough.

On the icky details of this criminal hustle

I’ll tell you how it’s done. Let’s say you have a 14-karat gold ring that weighs 15 grams. First you weigh it and show the customer that it’s 15 grams. “Now we multiply that by 14 for 14 karat and divide it by 24 for 24 karat, which is what it would be if it were 100% gold,” you explain to the seller. “That gives us the price for your 14-karat gold. Multiply that by 15, for 15 grams. Now, 14 karat is 56% gold and 44% base metal, which burns off at the smelter, so we multiply that by 0.56. Finally, we deduct 10% for the smelter, and 15% for my profit. Most gold buyers will charge you 20 or 25%, which is a reasonable profit margin, but we do such high quantity of gold-buying here that we can afford very low margins. That gives us a final figure of…” You get the picture. The customer’s ring is worth $280 in real gold value. But you just offered $120, with a seemingly sound mathematical justification. And you’ve left yourself plenty of wiggle room if they want to haggle your profit down from 15% to 10% or even 7.5%. The real key to this scam is that you’ve deducted for the impurity of 14 karat not 1x but 2x: first, when you calculated the per-gram price and again when you “deduct for the base metal.”

2016-06-07: Time for a 1M carat synthetic diamond to end this silliness

Lesedi La Rona could, if skillfully cut, yield an even larger stone—the largest polished diamond in history. He described the Lesedi La Rona, a single piece of rough some 3 ga old, as “almost ungraspable.”

2023-05-06: It’s happening. Too slowly because people are dumb, but still.

33% of all engagement rings with center stones purchased last year were created in a lab. That’s 2x the number from 2020. As the technology to make lab-grown diamonds has improved, production has increased and retail prices are falling. Their growing popularity, especially among younger consumers, has caught the attention of jewelers and watchmakers — and is challenging traditional diamonds that are mined from the earth.