Pasta News Network - New Zealand

According to the latest Rabobank Rural Confidence Survey - completed late last month - farmer confidence is significantly down on the previous (September) quarter. The net confidence reading slumped to -71% from -31% previously.

Rabobank says this net confidence reading is the lowest in the 20-year history of the survey and far exceeds the previous low of -45% recorded amid the dairy downturn in 2015.

In Monash University in Melbourne’s Engineering Garden stands a sobering monument: twisted fragments from the wreckage of the Westgate Bridge collapse in 1970, one of the world’s worst bridge collapses. The tortured chunks of metal are meant to remind engineering students of the devastating consequences if they screw up.

A great many politicians and activists could benefit from the same reminder. The same people who witter about “the precautionary principle” when they’re trying to stop a mining development, throw caution to the winds when it comes to their green-left monomanias.

It’s all very easy to gaily skip off down the primrose path of forcing everyone to adopt electric cars. Much harder to do the hard thinking about what all the consequences will be.

It all comes tumbling down.

Is transgenderism the most openly misogynist ideology this side of Islam? What can we say, after all, about an ideology that asserts that men are better at women at everything, including being women? An ideology that reduces women to “birthing persons”? An ideology that tells lesbians that they must have sex with men, or be labelled “transphobic”?

Or, indeed, an ideology that brands women raped by men as “bigots”?

If you have ever seen the first of the Rambo films (First Blood), you will know that a Vietnam War vet who just wants to be left alone is harassed mercilessly by some small-town law enforcement folks. That is a big mistake, and it leads to all sorts of trouble not just for the sheriff and his colleagues, but for an entire community in America’s northwest.

The idea of just wanting to be left alone is of course one that many of us can approve of and seek for ourselves, our families, and our loved ones. However, I am here to inform you that while this might have been viable not all that long ago in the West, it seems that it is no longer something we can count on.

Annually, friend-of-the-site David Collum writes a detailed “Year in Review” synopsis full of keen perspective and plenty of wit. He strikes again in his usually poignant and delightfully acerbic way. As with past years, he selected Peak Prosperity as the site where it is published in full. It is longer than our usual posts, but worth the time to read in full. While each part stands on its own, and doesn’t need to be read in order.

All Roads Lead to Ukraine. Trying to understand the war from a dead cold start was monumentally hard. Geopolitical events occur to teach Americans geography; I am no exception. As a combination of foreshadowing and trigger warning, I am going to steelman the debate by taking a decidedly Russian perspective but am not sure it is steelmanning if you come to believe it. If this is gonna drive you nuts, I beg you to stop reading because you will just get mad while I wallow in the slime of your frustrated soul.

Three weeks ago and experimental chat bot called ChatGPT was unleashed on the world. When asked questions, it gives relevant, specific, simple answers - rather than spitting back a list of internet links. It can also generate ideas on its own - including business plans, Christmas gift suggestions, vacation ideas, and advice on how to tune neural network models using python scripts.

Now, experts think Google might struggle to compete with these smaller companies offering machine learning chat bots, as they may prove damaging to its business model.

I’ll try to avoid repeating what we already addressed in the previous two articles on this subject. After mRNA vaccination the immune response against Spike is shifting to IgG4, which is how your body responds after repeat exposure to stuff it needs to tolerate, like bee venom, pollen or peanut proteins.

You just don’t want to see an IgG4 response to a respiratory infection. Out of the IgG’s, it’s mainly IgG3 and some IgG1 you want to see. One of the authors claims that it doesn’t matter that they’re switching to IgG4, because the antibodies don’t just matter for triggering phagocytosis (your immune cells eating the virus particles), they also matter for neutralization.

And thus another horseman of the immunity apocalypse appears.

A fearless, selfless Israeli researcher named David Shuldman has worked tirelessly to get data released from the clutches of Government agencies. He recently obtained data via FOIA request on neonatal deaths from the Israeli health insurance fund Maccabi, which covers about 25% of Israelis.

Neonatal deaths are defined as deaths in the first four weeks of life, from the moment after birth until 28 days later. Recently, he obtained data on the quarterly number of neonatal deaths beginning the first quarter of 2019. Here is what that looks like.

If the birth numbers have not improved this time next year, prepare for awkward.

But unlike EternalBlue, which could be exploited when using only the SMB, or server message block, a protocol for file and printer sharing and similar network activities, this latest vulnerability is present in a much broader range of network protocols, giving attackers more flexibility than they had when exploiting the older vulnerability.

“An attacker can trigger the vulnerability via any Windows application protocols that authenticates,” Valentina Palmiotti, the IBM security researcher who discovered the code-execution vulnerability, said in an interview. “For example, the vulnerability can be triggered by trying to connect to an SMB share or via Remote Desktop. Some other examples include Internet exposed Microsoft IIS servers and SMTP servers that have Windows Authentication enabled. Of course, they can also be exploited on internal networks if left unpatched.”