THERE WAS A SCANDAL HE DIDN’T ALREADY HAVE? Is This Joe Biden’s Solyndra Scandal?

PAST PERFORMANCE IS NO GUARANTEE OF FUTURE RESULTS:

https://t.co/pxzOZgcCos pic.twitter.com/3cfpj9sTW7

— EducatëdHillbilly™ (@RobProvince) August 10, 2023

KRUISER: Let’s Talk About Trump’s Brain-Dead Support of Ronna McDaniel.

Honestly, the 2024 United States presidential election already has everybody in a bad mood and whatever I write about it angers someone on my side. I am routinely accused of being both too pro-Trump and anti-Trump, often on the same day. There’s a small contingent that thinks that I shouldn’t write anything about the election unless it includes a couple thousand words about fraud. When I do write about fraud, it’s never enough. If I write anything positive about Ron DeSantis, heads start catching on fire.

The joy of 21st century politics.

Back to the topic at hand.

Republican National Committee Chairwoman Ronna Romney McDaniel has been, put mildly, absolutely horrible in the role that she’s occupied since 2017. She’s presided over three trainwreck (for the GOP) elections, including last year’s Red Trickle collapse. If she were working in the private sector, security would have escorted her out of the building years ago.

Politics aren’t governed by normal rules, however, especially in Washington.

Read the whole thing.

BRING IT ON: House GOP to subpoena Biden family: ‘Bank records don’t lie,’ Rep. Comer says.

KEVIN DOWNEY JR: Pay Attention to the Case of the Murdered Mother in Maryland. “Now some of you may be wondering what I, a columnist, comedian, and loud-mouthed, anti-commie radio host can offer in regard to missing person cases.”

WOEING: Boeing Is Getting Absolutely Destroyed by SpaceX.

For the uninitiated, Boeing and SpaceX were simultaneously awarded flush NASA contracts to build crewed rockets back in 2014, a major milestone in NASA’s renewed efforts to get humans back into space.

But over the years since, Boeing’s quest to kick its Starliner into gear have been nothing short of cursed. Though the Boeing-built spacecraft did finally make it into orbit — and manage to successfully dock, uncrewed, at the ISS last year — its attempts at a crewed mission have been plagued by a long series of hardware and software issues, straight-up shoddiness, and shameful company attempts to skirt basic safety precautions to boot.

As it stands, per ExtremeTech, Boeing has reported a staggering $1.1 billion in losses on Starliner. Given the vast expense of the spacecraft, each unforced error has left Boeing and NASA with a fair share of egg on their faces.

You might think that those losses would force Boeing to fix their broken processes but, so far, that hasn’t been the case.

KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: What Color Is the Sky in Chris Christie’s World? “Gov. Has-Been certainly is feeling full of himself after barely eking onto the debate stage, isn’t he?”

HMM: Russia says it will halt foreign currency purchases and launch a digital ruble to keep the currency from spiraling further.

The nation will no longer purchase currencies on the global market from August 10 through the end of the year, Russia’s central bank said in a statement on Wednesday. It will, however, continue to sell foreign currencies located in its sovereign wealth fund worth up to 2.3 billion rubles or $23 million dollars a day, which it has been using to help fund its war against Ukraine.

In a separate statement, the central bank added it had begun pilot testing a digital version of the ruble, which it has planned to do since July to prop up its weakening currency.

The digital ruble will be tested with a limited number of clients across 13 banks, though the Russian central bank aims to launch the currency for public use by 2025.

Meanwhile, Kyiv’s summer counteroffensive so far hasn’t accomplished much (if anything) more than Moscow’s winter/spring offensive.

This would be a great time for Washington to get serious about getting both sides to the table, but Washington isn’t run by serious people.

HE PUTS ON THIS SHOW BEFORE EVERY ELECTION: Is Joe Manchin About to Ditch Democrats?

BRAVE NEW WTF: When AI Is Trained on AI-Generated Data, Strange Things Start to Happen.

Though whether it sticks in the long term remains to be seen, at least for the time being generative AI seems to be cementing its place in our digital and real lives. And as it becomes increasingly ubiquitous, so does the synthetic content it produces. But in an ironic twist, those same synthetic outputs might also stand to be generative AI’s biggest threat.

That’s because underpinning the growing generative AI economy is human-made data. Generative AI models don’t just cough up human-like content out of thin air; they’ve been trained to do so using troves of material that actually was made by humans, usually scraped from the web. But as it turns out, when you feed synthetic content back to a generative AI model, strange things start to happen. Think of it like data inbreeding, leading to increasingly mangled, bland, and all-around bad outputs. (Back in February, Monash University data researcher Jathan Sadowski described it as “Habsburg AI,” or “a system that is so heavily trained on the outputs of other generative AI’s that it becomes an inbred mutant, likely with exaggerated, grotesque features.”)

It’s a problem that looms large. AI builders are continuously hungry to feed their models more data, which is generally being scraped from an internet that’s increasingly laden with synthetic content. If there’s too much destructive inbreeding, could everything just… fall apart?

Yes.

On the flip side, though, is this: AI’s real problem is that it’s boring.

Indeed, as anyone who has spent any time playing with ChatGPT can tell you.

MAID IN CANADA [VIP]: The Doctor Can’t See You Right Now, Would You Like to Kill Yourself Instead? “Stage Four lung cancer? MAID. Permanently disabled and unable to care for yourself? MAID. Chronic pain? MAID. Down in the dumps? MAID. Are you one of those icky poor people? MAID.”

I’VE NOTICED: Colorado ‘restaurant inflation’ highest in nation, reveals data analysis. “Believe it or not, a recent data analysis published by USA Today has revealed that Colorado’s restaurant inflation – the increase in how much Coloradans are spending while eating out – is the highest in the nation, at 24 percent between November 2022 and June 2023.”

I knew it was bad but I didn’t realize it was that bad.

DOES THE BIG GUY GET HIS CUT? Biden Admin Reportedly Set to Buy Back Five U.S. Hostages From Iran for $6 Billion.

YOU’VE CUT THE CORD, NOW STOP THE STREAM! Disney announces price hike for Disney+ and Hulu, crackdown on password sharing.

WOW, I DIDN’T THINK THAT WAS EVEN POSSIBLE: Joe Biden’s Response to Devon Archer Testimony Is More Incriminating Than You Think.

THE COST OF CHINA’S 21% YOUTH UNEMPLOYMENT: ‘Bedmates’ are a hot commodity for China’s broke and jobless youth, who say they need to sleep next to strangers just to survive in the country’s megacities.

YOU’RE GONNA NEED A BIGGER BLOG: Five Nauseating Reasons Why Joe Biden Is a Terrible Human Being.

STILL NOT QUITE READY FOR PRIMETIME: Family ditches electric truck on drive from Winnipeg to Chicago after charging troubles.

Bala’s first stop was about 350 kilometres south of Winnipeg in Fargo, N.D. He paid $56 to charge his vehicle’s battery from 10 per cent up to 90 per cent.

The trouble started at his next stop in Albertville, Minn., where Bala said the only fast charger brought up a faulty connection message in his truck when he plugged in. He called the number on the charger for help but never got a response.

He headed to another charging station in nearby Elk River, Minn., but he said a charger there wouldn’t work either.

With only 15 kilometres remaining on his battery and no fast charger within that range, he decided to ditch his Lightning. Bala got it towed to a Ford dealership and the family rented a Toyota 4Runner to finish their trip to Chicago.

“That’s when we decided we don’t want any more distraction or any frustration,” Bala said.

Previously:

Larson makes a nice diesel EV charger. May look at bootlegging some of these into California in the next few years as the grid continues to fail. pic.twitter.com/fEGzTCLosS

— Dr. Platimus (@SWGaspar) August 26, 2022

VAMPIRE TECH: In Soviet California, Electric Vehicle Charges Grid.

EVERYTHING IS GOING SWIMMINGLY (CHINA EDITION): Beijing Battles Deflation Amid Skyrocketing Debt Crisis.

Now, though, it’s becoming harder for Beijing to refute evidence of deflation. Both food and car prices have dropped in the past several months, with the latter largely due to intense discounting amid price wars in the auto industry. Real estate has taken a beating; across 100 Chinese cities, the prices of homes have dropped an average of 14 percent from their peak in August 2021, and rents have fallen around 5 percent. Exports have declined as has domestic demand for Chinese-made goods.

“The reality looks increasingly grim,” economist Eswar Prasad told Foreign Policy via email, suggesting that “the government’s approach of downplaying the risks of deflation and stalling growth could backfire and make it even harder to pull the economy out of its downward spiral.”

It’s some small comfort knowing that China’s ruling class might be almost as hapless and corrupt as our own.

TEAM PLAYER: Trump Says He Won’t Sign Pledge to Support GOP Nominee, Putting His Debate Attendance in Doubt.

JUST DO IT: DARPA Wants To Capture The Next Chinese Spy Balloon. “The program is being managed through DARPA’s Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program, which sets aside about $150 million out of the agency’s $3.8 billion budget for nontraditional defense companies to submit programs.”

CHANGE: DeSantis Suspends ‘Soft-on-Crime’ Orlando-Area State Attorney Monique Worrell.

POWER, UNLIMITED POWER: For the Second Time, U.S. Scientists Have Achieved Fusion Ignition.

On December 5, 2022, scientists at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) achieved something truly remarkable. After firing 192 lasers at a small pellet filled with deuterium-tritium fuel, the resulting reaction essentially created a tiny star for a few nanoseconds. Crucially, the energy created by this reaction was more than the energy put into the reaction. In other words, science had finally achieved nuclear fusion ignition.

Until that point, humans had never been able to recreate the life-giving power generated in the center of our Sun on Earth. But for the first time, the clean energy promise of nuclear fusion—arguably the greatest energy source imaginable—suddenly seemed possible. Now, fast forward only eight months, and LLNL has achieved ignition again. But this time, they had even greater results.

LLNL spokesperson Paul Rhien spoke with The Financial Times on Sunday, and said that “in an experiment conducted on July 30, we repeated ignition at NIF. Analysis of those results is underway, but we can confirm the experiment produced a higher yield than the December test.”

Maybe the question now isn’t whether we’ll ever achieve usable fusion power but whether the powers that be would allow affordable, unlimited energy. That certainly hasn’t been the case with nuclear fission in recent decades.

KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: The Hunter Biden Bank Records Are Predictably Sleazy. “One of the most stunning things about all of this is that Hunter Biden has no discernible skills related to business. I’m even skeptical that he is creating his own “art.” Despite not being able to do anything other than be a privileged party boy, people from all over the world are throwing cash at the mediocrity.”