2026-05-19

Horseshit

• Why Is the World Losing Color?

• It is time to give up the dualism introduced by the debate on consciousness

• Spirit Airlines Passenger Brings 'Emotional Support' Rotisserie Chicken Thru TSA

• The Global Fertility Crisis Is Worse Than You Probably Think

  I always like to begin my analysis of the subject here: Any complete and responsible explanation of this phenomenon cannot begin in the 21st century and should never pretend that this is some tragedy brought about by exclusively terrible things. Birthrates have been declining in developed countries for a long time, as child mortality has declined; as women’s education has increased; as female labor force participation has soared; as modern contraception has proliferated; and as modern notions of feminism have empowered women to take more control over their bodies and their economic futures.

  The decline is accelerating faster than almost anybody predicted. As Burn-Murdoch reported, UN demographers predicted that there would be 350,000 births in South Korea in 2023; the real figure came in at 230,000—a whopping 50 percent miss. The total fertility rate has fallen below the replacement level of 2.1 births per woman in almost every country in North America, South America, Europe, and Southern and Eastern Asia. It’s falling swiftly in most African countries. And birthrates might be set to crash in China.

• The Backward Logic of Chickenpox Parties

• Shame them, shun them, ban them, beat them!

  Clearly, we’re not missing the right regulations. We’re missing the right motivations. If you want to discover true things about the world, you’ll be interested in the guidelines that help you do that, and you’ll be thankful to the people who develop them. That’s how the replication crisis could have played out: someone demonstrates that our sample sizes are too small, and we all go, “oh wow we should make our sample sizes bigger because want to know what’s real and what’s not”. But if you’re not actually seeking the truth, no amount of “rigor-enhancing practices” will ever cause you to find it. That’s why our revolution in scientific regulation has mostly failed.

• The Rage of the Billionaires Is Coming

  I want to observe a pick-up in rage from the wealthy, as they begin to hear the public disdain for what they stand for. Let’s start with something that has been happening to a few commencement speakers at college graduations. They bring up artificial intelligence, and get booed by the students getting their diplomas. It’s a spontaneous expression of frustration and disrespect for the powerful, by the next generation.

• The Tech Bros Are Going to Etiquette School

• Does earning $500K in San Francisco mean you're in the 'permanent underclass?'

celebrity gossip

• Colombian singer Shakira acquitted of tax fraud in Spain

• For 20 years, Stephen Colbert distinguished truth from truthiness

Rank Propaganda / Thought Policing / World Disordering

• We Are Sliding Back into the Middle Ages

• Hollywood Invented the Girlboss

• Why large-scale donor programs are broken

Musk

• Starlink raises prices across satellite internet plans

• The US space enterprise is desperately waiting for Starship

• Musk's xAI Fails to Pay Staff $420 for Giving Their Tax Returns to Grok

• X accounts are limited to 50 posts and 200 replies a day unless they pay

• Musk Loses Case Against OpenAI

  Elon Musk waited too long to sue OpenAI and its leaders, a jury in Oakland, California, decided on Monday. A lawsuit he filed was barred by the statute of limitations, the jury found after about 90 minutes of deliberation. Their verdict was advisory, but Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers said she agrees with the jury. “The court now confirms the prior indication that it would accept the jury’s findings as its own,” Rogers said.

  • Elon Musk Loses Landmark Lawsuit Against OpenAI

  • Elon Musk losses OpenAI lawsuit as jury sides with Sam Altman and Greg Brockman

  • Elon Musk lost his case against Sam Altman

  • Elon Musk loses lawsuit against OpenAI

  • Jury hands victory to Sam Altman in battle with Elon Musk over OpenAI's mission

  • Jury Sides with OpenAI, Sam Altman in Case Brought by Elon Musk

  • Jury Rejects Musk's Claim Against OpenAI

  • Or not: Why trust is a big question at the Elon Musk-OpenAI trial

  • Elon Musk loses lawsuit against Sam Altman and OpenAI

Edumacationalizing / Acedemia Nuts

• A Master's degree isn't the job guarantee it used to be

Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising

• Old Kindle e-readers will stop working on May 20th

• Flagged on Hacker News: BambuStudio has been violating PrusaSlicer AGPL license since their fork

  • Folks who make their money by stealing Open Source code don't care to hear complaints from open source authors.

• YouTube, Snap and TikTok settle school district's social media addiction claims

• Apple Is Making Hit Products and High Profits from Imperfect Chips

• Handling the great code forge fragmentation

  • Doesn't even mention freshmeat.net

• Pre-announcement of BIND 9 security issues scheduled for disclosure 20 May 2026

  As part of ISC's policy of pre-notification of upcoming security releases, we are writing to inform you that the May 2026 BIND 9 maintenance release(s) that will be published on Wednesday, 20 May, will contain fixes for security vulnerabilities affecting stable BIND 9 release branch(es).

  • BIND 4 was teh bestest

• 'It's felt like homework': Why Star Wars went so wrong

• Shutterstock to pay $35M over hard-to-cancel subscriptions

Space / Boomy Zoomers / UFO

• An asteroid discovered days ago will narrowly miss Earth

AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World

• Multiple commencement speakers booed for AI comments during graduation speeches

  • Ex-Google CEO Eric Schmidt Fails to Read Room on AI, Gets Booed into Oblivion

  • Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt did not receive a warm welcome when he tried to sell the wonders of AI in his commencement speech at the University of Arizona.

  • Eric Schmidt booed by graduates at mention of AI

• Instant AI answers can trivialise human intelligence, warns Royal Observatory

• Microsoft admits Windows 11's dedicated Copilot key breaks certain workflows

• Which people? Nobody's negotiating for the people here: Charlie Berens takes on AI datacenters

• OpenClaw creator burns through $1.3 mio in OpenAI API tokens in a single month

• Surprise AI bills leave AWS and Google Cloud users aghast

• More than 100 UK datacentres plan to burn gas to generate electricity

• Never-ending' AI slop strains corporate hacking reward schemes

• Pope creates AI study group as Vatican prepares release of first encyclical

  • Pope Leo's encyclical on preserving the human person in the AI era drops May 25

• I went inside OpenAI's secretive San Francisco headquarters

• ArXiv will ban authors for a year if they let AI do all the work

• Yum Brands, Nvidia will deploy new AI at 500 restaurants

• Voice AI Systems Are Vulnerable to Hidden Audio Attacks

• The new class of AI jobs

• Siri App to Have Auto-Deleting Chats

• Hershey Bets on Agentic AI to Rethink $2B in Marketing Spend

• Researchers Wanted Preschool Teachers to Wear Cameras to Train AI

• AI Revenue May Jump 5x to $200B This Year as Spending Race Intensifies

• Anthropic's $1.5B copyright settlement is getting messy as judge delays approval

• The Young Are Being Battered by AI as Hiring Shifts to Older Workers

• OpenAI Bought Company That Offered A.I. Tools for Cloning Voices

• The Prehistory of A.I. Slop

• Amazon's Alexa+ Now Produces AI-Generated 'Podcasts'

• Meta layoffs stress harsh AI reality inside Zuckerberg's company

Neo Gambling / Crypto con games

• The Mysterious Crypto Judges Who Settle Polymarket Disputes

• Two Americans Arrested After Crypto Stunt in Punch the Monkey's Zoo Enclosure

• How Trump's crypto venture and Iran's top exchange tapped into the same networks

• Utah lawmakers form united front in push to ban prediction markets

• Admin of darknet market that shut down in 2019 arrested after buying gold bars

• We've calculated your chances of winning money on Polymarket

Economicon / Business / Finance

• Why does Amazon have no Western rivals?

  to be sure, Amazon isn't without competitors in any of the segments it is in, including e-commerce. Major US retailers like Walmart and Target both have broad-based, rapidly expanding online retail arms, and offer their own versions of Amazon's Prime subscription service. In the US, Amazon accounts for 40.5% of all online retail sales, while its nearest rival Walmart has 9.2%, according to figures from last month. Ebay is down at around 3%.

• The era of free money may have ended

• How India's cooking fuel shortage is driving up California's gas prices

• America Needs to Build More Housing

• UBS: The bank that outgrew a country

Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making

• Why Did Torched Ghost Homes of Palisades and Altadena Just Miraculously Reappear on Google Maps?

• Companies start getting tariff refunds after Supreme Court decision

• New York to tax luxury second homes in NYC

• US bill proposes new national EV tax, while some push to slash gas tax to zero

Trump

• Justice Department announces a $1.7B fund to compensate Trump allies

  • $1.8B Fund Could Funnel to Trump Allies

  • U.S. creates $1.7B 'lawfare' fund in exchange for Trump dropping $10B IRS suit

  • Trump drops IRS lawsuit in exchange for DOJ $1.8B 'weaponization' fund

Left Angst

• A Danish Couple’s Maverick African Research Finds Its Moment in RFK Jr.’s Vaccine Policy

• An ICE Firearms Trainer Was Involved in at Least 4 Deadly Shootings

• MAGA allies tell Trump to vet AI before release

• The far-right has got a new weapon: glamorous young women

• The American epoch of oil is collapsing. What comes next could be ugly

• Actually, Democracy Dies in H.R

  It turns out that would-be authoritarians don’t need to staff their regimes with ideological true believers, offer extreme enticements or impose draconian punishments in order to make successful power grabs. They just need to figure out how to target their ideal labor pool: the frustrated and mediocre. Their conclusions have implications for countries around the world grappling with the stability of their democracies — including the United States.

  • Thus the "DEI" push, the latest Democratic name for the effort to make sure incompetent midwits are plentifully available to back their efforts.

• Trump cuts to weather data could make forecasts less reliable, warn experts

• thoughts on constitutional hardball and democratic reform

  I am decidedly frustrated by the increasingly-prevalent belief on the left that the Republican party is illegitimate, and therefore all sorts of extreme measures can be excused. This can get quite messy, but here's a rough shorthand test: do you favor instituting your reform when the other side is in power or will otherwise benefit, or only when you are/will? If it's the latter, that's a good sign that it's not a neutral reform, and not likely to be productive in a non-partisan, democracy affirming and republic-strengthening sense.

• Agencies won't hand over records for an investigation into how DOGE access data

• The FBI Wants to Buy Nationwide Access to License Plate Readers

• EPA and HHS propose rescinding parts of Biden's PFAS limits in drinking water

  • Key landmark regulations against 'forever' toxins removed by Trump admin

Law Breaking / Police / Internal Security

• TSA Experiments with Off-Site Screening to Relieve Airport Congestion

• Judge grants accused CEO killer Mangione's bid to suppress evidence

External Security / Militaria / Diplomania

• Pentagon walks away from Canada-U.S. defence board

World

• Germany goes from labour shortages to hiring freezes

• Australia orders China-linked investors to sell Northern Minerals stake

• Meta Defeated as EU Backs Publishers in Content Pay Dispute

• Which country voted the best at Eurovision?

  Strangely enough, while there’s plenty of work on voting blocs and bilateral biases at Eurovision, most of it asks who votes for whom; I wanted to ask who votes accurately. I couldn’t find anyone asking the question that way, so I decided to do some data analysis myself.

  • This is Europeon notions of "democracy" summed up: The election only counts when the right people win, and the counting system must be whatever is needed to provide the correct winners.

• Poland directs officials to ditch Signal in favor of 'secure' state alternative

• EU plans to force companies to buy parts from non-Chinese suppliers

• Revealed: Facebook AI accounts spreading fake political 'good news'

• Gen Z soldiers' plastic surgeries strain Korea's military readiness

• India missed out on AI and now its run as market darling may be over

Iran / Houthi

• Iran will impose fees on subsea internet cables in Strait of Hormuz

• Iran starts Bitcoin-backed ship insurance for Hormuz strait

Israel

• Gaza is rebuilding with Lego-like bricks made from rubble

Russia Bad / Ukraine War

• The Killer Robots: The Ukrainian Forging the Future of Warfare

• Russia is starting to lose ground in Ukraine

Health / Medicine

• Is the Weight-Loss Drug Revolution Causing a Frailty Epidemic?

Pox / COVID / BioTerror AgitProp

• WHO declares major outbreak of Ebola virus species an international emergency

• Ebola outbreak with uncommon strain erupts in Congo and Uganda; 65 deaths

• At least 100 deaths reported in Ebola outbreak in DR Congo

Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda

• Satellites May Be Driving a Concerning New Form of Atmospheric Pollution

• 'We mould trees to grow into the shape of chairs'

• $6 gas and refinery fears collide with California's climate ambitions

• US countertop workers could have damaged lungs, safety expert says

• Forget the Bermuda Triangle — Bermuda itself is the mystery.

  “Bermuda is an exciting place to study because a variety of its geologic features do not fit the model of a mantle plume, the classic way for deep material to be brought to the surface,” Frazer noted. He elaborated his point to make the implications clearer: “This suggests that there are other convective processes within Earth’s mantle that have yet to be well understood.”

• The Colorado River Is on the Brink of Disaster