2026-06-11

etc

• Why Excess Regulation?

  More recently, empires found that they could get stronger local support for wars by merging local cultures into national cultures, and this required them to get more involved in shaping and regulating culture. And then people in national cultures became much more interested in using government to regulate each others’ behaviors. Since forager times, that’s what people who strongly feel part of the same community tend to do to each other. And that’s my view of the status of regulation today. Government regulation is mostly justified in our world as fixing local problems, much like foragers who meddled in their local social worlds to fix what they saw as local problems. Debates about regulation almost never mention the harms of letting weak adaptive systems drive strong ones, and most specific regulations seems to me maladaptive, relative to the private alternatives that would likely arise in their absence. So regulation likely exists as a result of prior strong selection pressures to create central governments to prosecute big wars, and to create law and national cultures to support them. Excess regulation is a side effect of making such asymmetric powers.

  • Who cares about local elections now, vs national ones that make the news?

Horseshit

• Humans prefer to walk anticlockwise, scientists find – but reason is unclear

  • Scientists Just Accidentally Discovered a Strange, Hidden Rule of Human Nature

  • Nearly Everyone, Everywhere, Veers Left When Walking

  • Most humans are right handed, too: keeping that hand "out" may be a reason.

• The Revenge of the Publicists: How Comms Execs Stormed the C-Suite

• ‘Teenagers’ didn’t exist until the 20th century

  For most of human history, you were either a child or an adult. The word “teenager” first entered the lexicon in 1913, appropriately enough, but it wasn’t until decades later that it took on its current significance.

• UniFi Physical Security Expansion: vape detection

• Social science is good for many things, but we should stop citing it for these sorts of questions, even when it confirms our biases.

  I hate this thing we do, this thing where we feel like we have to use social science studies many of which are bunk, to make moral claims—which Helen Andrews once aptly called "bloodless moralism"—as though we can't make moral claims on their own. If the moral claim here is that excess screen time is bad and might be leading people to form fewer romantic relationships and have fewer babies than they otherwise would, I don't understand why we can't just say that. I don't understand why we have to point to specific numbers and pretend to know more than we actually do, especially seeing that what we actually know is enough to understand that things right now aren't great!

• American Boomers Ask 'Who's Messi?' As World Cup 2026 Arrives

• Collective of economists considers 'growth' a doomed strategy

• Air Canada pilot accused of flying over 900 flights without valid license

• U.S. kids no longer reading for pleasure

• Somali referee for World Cup denied entry into United States

• Driving in America Is Headlight Hell

Epstein

• The White House Freakout over the Epstein Files

celebrity gossip

• How Bill Gates’ Billions Shape US Medical Research

  a trove of federal whistleblower documents provided to RealClearInvestigations is renewing questions about how Gates money has bought what critics complain is an untoward influence on government health policy. For almost a quarter of a century, his main vehicle of power, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, has donated hundreds of millions of dollars to the National Institutes of Health (NIH), allowing Gates to shape the direction of the country’s health strategy in ways that have benefitted his own priorities and pet causes while polishing his image as a benevolent global do-gooder.

• Nick Reiner seeks trust fund left by parents to pay for defense in their killing

  • He's an orphan after all...

• Paris Hilton is Android's first icon in residence

Musk

• Not having an opinion on SpaceX is going to cost you

• SpaceX IPO demand is approaching four times oversubscribed

• Musk Looks to an Army of Loyalists to Help Make Him a Trillionaire

• Wall Street's undignified SpaceX mania

• Elon Musk accused of fuelling unrest after Belfast knife attack

• Why the blockbuster SpaceX IPO may spell more bad news for crypto

• SpaceX's $1.78T IPO asks investors to buy Musk's moonshots

• Musk's xAI accused of illegally firing engineer who raised safety concerns

• Life on the edge of Musk's Starbase brings fortunes and fractures

Electric / Self Driving cars

• Mercedes‑Benz starts large‑scale production of electric axial flux motor

• Donut Lab's 'solid-state' battery exposed as regular li-ion in damning investigation

  A comprehensive investigation by battery researcher Ziroth, involving over 20 independent battery experts, has produced what amounts to definitive proof that Donut Lab’s “miracle” solid-state battery is actually a lithium-ion cell. The company raised approximately $25 million from over 1,300 mostly small investors based on claims that now appear to be false. The investigation traces the battery technology back to a German company called CT Coatings, reveals a web of companies hiding behind aggressive NDAs, and presents electrochemical evidence — including voltage curves and cell expansion data — that conclusively identifies the tested cell as lithium-ion, not the revolutionary sodium-ion solid-state chemistry Donut Lab promised.

  • Statement regarding recent discussions on Donut Battery

  A video published by YouTuber Ziroth concerning the Donut Battery has recently circulated in international media. The video and the related media coverage give the impression that the announcement brought something new to light. However, the material simply compiles previous claims that we have already addressed. It is worth noting that this content creator is publicly engaged in a commercial partnership with our Chinese competitor, the battery technology company CATL.

• BYD to install 5-minute EV chargers across Europe

Edumacationalizing / Acedemia Nuts

• Why a Computer Science Degree Still Opens Hidden Doors

Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising

• The Kimwolf Aftershock: Residential Proxy Botnets One Year Later

  daily active DDoS botnet endpoints climbed from roughly one million in summer 2025 to over eight million today, and aggregate bandwidth capacity remains in the hundreds of terabits per second. We close by examining the industrial-scale AI scraping demands driving residential proxy growth and what this means for defenders.

• High-severity vulnerability in Linux caused by a single faulty character

  The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-23111, is located in nf_tables, a subsystem of the Linux kernel that provides packet filtering capabilities. It’s used to manage firewall rules and replaces older subsystems such as iptables, ip6tables, arptables, and ebtables. The presence of a single mis-issued exclamation point in code implementing nf_tables introduced a use-after-free, a class of vulnerability that corrupts memory by placing malicious code at memory addresses that haven’t been properly freed of their previous contents. CVE-2026-23111 can be exploited by an unprivileged user or process to elevate system rights to root.

• Bluesky was launched as a Twitter rival – but it's less popular

• Valve removes Steam Gift Cards from stores due to scammers

  As Steam Gift Cards run out of stock at retail locations, we will not be restocking them. We expect all retailers to be out of stock by the end of 2026. Though we will no longer be selling physical gift cards, you will still have the ability to use your existing gift cards on Steam whenever you choose, subject to local laws.

  • Valve is phasing out physical Steam gift cards due to scammers

• Ninety Percent of Job Platforms Sell User Data, Study Finds

• Locked in heated rivalry with researcher, Microsoft fixes 0-day they disclosed

• BBC cancels Doctor Who Christmas special and Russell T Davies announces exit

• Close encounters of a deferred kind in Spielberg's conspiracy spectacular

  Humans have been secretly abusing aliens for almost 80 years in this big-hearted thriller starring Josh O’Connor as a worried whistleblower and a never-more-magnetic Emily Blunt as a weather forecaster channelling UFO chat

  • Disclosure Day – Close Encounters of the Sappy Kind

  “Disclosure Day” boasts a trippy cast, a timely premise and the potential for endless thrills. The result is a mess, suggesting that the iconic storyteller’s best days are behind him. Boy, were those days movie magic. Now? The only illusion here is thinking this saga is worth its bloated running time.

• Roblox Wants Deluge of Child Sex Abuse Cases Moved Out of Court

• Barry Diller says MGM's physical assets are more valuable in AI age

• Meta's oversight board says account bans lack due process, transparency

• Apple Made a Sports App That Does Almost Nothing. It's Incredible

Space / Boomy Zoomers / UFO

• NASA Marches Toward Artemis III Mission in 2027, Names Crew Members

• FCC lifts looming deadline for Amazon Leo satellite broadband constellation.

  Amazon won regulatory approval for the Amazon Leo network in July 2020. The FCC’s authorization came with two deadlines. First, Amazon had to launch half of its 3,232 satellites by July 30, 2026, in order to maintain authorization to launch the rest of the network. The regulator gave Amazon a deadline of July 30, 2029, to have all of its first-generation satellites in orbit. It has been apparent for some time that Amazon would not meet the FCC’s requirement to launch half of its satellites—1,616 spacecraft—by the end of next month. Amazon filed an application in January requesting the FCC extend the deadline to July 2028 or waive it altogether. The commission decided on the latter option, removing any time limit for the 50 percent deployment milestone, but keeping the July 2029 deadline in place for the entire constellation.

AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World

• Initial impressions of Claude Fable 5

  • You're not even allowed to ask Fable about basic biology questions

  • Claude Fable 5 System prompt

  Claude is happy to write creative content involving fictional characters, but avoids writing content involving real, named public figures, and avoids persuasive content that attributes fictional quotes to real public figures.

  • Anthropic is intentionally nerfing Fable when asked to develop other LLMs

  • Anthropic releases 'safe' version of Claude Mythos AI model to public

• Anthropic Bulks Up Its Enterprise Partner Program Amid IPO Plans

• Is symbolic AI more relevant than ever?

• Can tech companies learn to love cheaper AI models?

• Lawyers Barred for A.I.-Generated Citations to Fake Cases

• Apple pays Google $1B/yr for Gemini. Google pays Apple $20B/yr for search

• Three Labs with a Plan and a Memorandum

  we have the Administration giving us an AI memorandum, that I read as an attempt to legally implement ‘Anthropic is fired forever and we will use any models we have for whatever we want no matter what’ combined with some good government and diffusion plans.

• Microsoft AI boss no longer believes that AI will replace human workers

• Intel is reportedly providing three million chips to Google

• UN Scientists: AI Is Threatening Natural Resources for Billions

• Is the Space Pope Reptilian?

  makes me wonder again how my life got so far off track that I’m studying something the pope wrote. I was raised Mormon. To me the pope is the guy who, when I was twenty-one, finally apologized to Galileo. This one seems nice enough, for a pope — but he still can’t write a treatise on AI without noting in passing that his heaven has a ‘no fags allowed’ sign.

• Global watchdog calls for tighter controls on agentic AI in finance

• Samsung, Greek shipowner, Supermicro to bring floating AI data centers to market

• The Market Behind the Wall

  Our estimate is that roughly two-thirds of enterprise AI queries are lookups wearing a chatbot’s clothes. Salesforce built a test, called HERB, to measure precisely how often these systems invent an answer when they don’t actually know. OpenAI’s flagship does it 77 times out of 100. Salesforce’s own best effort was 32. Ours does it 3 — and those three aren’t lies, they’re refusals: the system saying I can’t verify that instead of guessing. Knock that number down and you don’t win a cheaper slice of the market that already exists. You unlock the market that’s been sitting behind a wall the entire time. The reason 2Brains doesn’t lie and the reason it’s cheap are the same reason. It looks the fact up instead of guessing it — so it cannot fabricate, and the lookup runs on a processor that sips power instead of a chip that gulps it. Trust and thrift are not a trade-off you balance against each other. They fall out of a single design decision. You do not pay extra for the honest version. The honest version is the cheap version. That sentence is the whole company.

• Visa plugs its payment network into ChatGPT, letting AI agents shop and pay

• 'AI-pilled' firms spend $7,500 per employee each month on AI

• Anthropic CEO Says Government Should Be Able to Block New Models

• Says OpenAI: PRC-linked influence operations are targeting AI debates in the US

  • OpenAI says Chinese propaganda is being deployed to foment dissent over tariffs

• Did a Chatbot Write a Prize-Winning Story? Does It Matter?

• Ads in New York must now label AI-generated 'synthetic performers'

Neo Gambling / Crypto con games

• Sam Bankman-Fried Applies for Trump Pardon

Economicon / Business / Finance

• The Countdown to a Major Oil Price Surge Has Begun

• South Korea's SK Hynix Eyes US Listing as Soon as August

• Salesforce lays off employees in a new round of cuts

• SoftBank Attempt to Get $6B OpenAI Margin Loan Stalls

• Paramount accuses Netflix of "scorched-earth campaign" against WBD merger

• Private Equity Faces Reckoning with Struggle to Clear Buyout Backlog

• Meta Launches 'Workforce Academy' to Train Workers to Build Data Centers

• Chinese Automakers Building Presence in US Despite Fact They Can't Sell Anything

• Why the $55B acquisition of Electronic Arts isn't your usual leveraged buyout

  The FC Sports giant is being bought for $55 billion by the PIF, Silver Lake, and Affinity Partners, with more than $20 billion in debt financing from US banking behemoth JPMorgan. The deal is set to close by the end of EA's first quarter of fiscal 2027, aka by June 30, 2026. ... the company had $1.49 billion in debt as of March 2026; once the deal closes, this figure will grow to north of $20 billion. Over 30% of the deal is being financed through debt.

• American capitalism is run by millionaires, not billionaires

• Wall Street’s IPO boom threatens era of shrinking US stock supply

  US markets are close to ending more than two decades of declining equity supply as a trio of mega initial public offerings brings a flood of new shares that investors warn could strain the limits of demand. Goldman Sachs estimates net supply of equity in the US — measured by new shares hitting the market less equity removed by buybacks or companies going private — will be almost flat in 2026, having been in negative territory since 2003. The bank expects an even greater influx of new shares in 2027, as lock-up periods on this year’s IPOs expire.

  • So the value of the stock market has been an illusion propped up by numerical trickery?

• Oracle beats on earnings, but stock drops on plans to raise another $20B

• US Consumer Price Index up 4.2%

  • Inflation Heated Up to 4.2% in May, as Energy Costs Continued to Bite

  • US Inflation tops 4% for the first time in 3 years on spike in gasoline prices

  • Consumer prices rose 4.2% annually in May, highest in three years

  • "Energy isn't part of inflation" only during Democrat administrations.

Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making

• Why the Supreme Court Is Debating Which Founding Fathers Were Drunks

• San Francisco Rejects a Tax Hike on Companies with Highly Paid Executives

• Illinois' new social media tax explained

Trump

• Trump says he thinks AI companies will agree to 'giving back' to the public

• Trump says 'I love the inflation' after CPI hits 3-year high

  President Donald Trump on Wednesday said, “I love the inflation” after being asked if he was concerned about new consumer price index data that showed the annual inflation rate at 4.2%, a three-year high. Trump, speaking with reporters in the Oval Office, also predicted that inflation is “going to come down like a rock” after the United States’ war against Iran is over. The president linked that prediction to a confusing statement about the U.S. “taking” oil and ships. “No, I love it, the numbers were great,” Trump said when a reporter asked him about the CPI number issued earlier in the morning by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. “You know what I really love? I love the inflation. You know why?” Trump said. “Because as soon as this war is over, you know I can say it now ... you know we’ve been taking out millions of barrels of oil.”

Democrats

• Platner’s ‘living on the sea’ claim dismantled by critics as financial docs paint a different picture.

  Platner’s 2025 financial disclosures show that he listed “other $5,001” as his annual income from farming oysters. The candidate’s entire business is only worth between $50,000 and $100,000, which accounts for his boat, lines, anchors and other farming equipment, per the disclosure. He earned an additional $3,000 serving as the harbor master for Sullivan, Maine, — a role the Washington Free Beacon reported was largely clerical and where he was responsible for overseeing the 17 boat moorings on the small town’s coast. Taken together, these sums are dwarfed by the $4,800 Platner says he receives through monthly disability payments. Platner is legally entitled to such a sum owing to injuries he suffered while serving in the armed forces.

  • Comments suggest that the max VA disability payout is $4,148/mo

  • Democrats Are Literally Blaming Trump for Their Support of Graham Platner

  "We are now witnessing the post-cancellation, post-purity style of politics that the Republican Party has ushered in," he claimed. "I'm not going to sit here and defend things Graham Platner did in his past. Not even Graham Platner defends these things that he did in his past. But we have watched for a decade as Republicans have repeatedly lowered the threshold, lowered the standards for their candidates, and now Democrats are going to keep holding our candidates to an infinitely higher standard while we have Ken Paxton in Texas, while we have Donald Trump sitting in the Oval Office right now," Mockler said.

• LA Skid Row homeless claim they've been paid to vote in LA mayor's election

  A series of shocking videos show homeless residents on Los Angeles’ Skid Row claiming they were paid to vote for Mayor Karen Bass and councilwoman Nithya Raman. “They gave you an optional choice,” Shepherd claimed, alleging the was offered $2 but negotiated for a higher payment and ultimately received $4. Shepherd further claimed he completed a mail-in ballot for Bass and deposited it in a ballot box. Skid Row resident, Rene Johnson, 39, also claimed she received $5 after being told to vote for Bass. Johnson said she supported Bass, but told the creator she was still unclear about some of the forms she had completed. Another woman, who said she was living on the street, also claimed she accepted money to vote for Mayor Bass. “It was like two bucks,” the unidentified woman said, adding that “yeah they come out here all the time.”

  • this is not actually illegal in California.

Left Angst

• European sentiments towards the US hit an all-time low

• How Silicon Valley Misreads the Lord of the Rings

  The post and the flood of Tolkien-themed anti-immigration memes that followed are symptomatic of a larger trend: the use of Tolkien, especially his heroic good-versus-evil imagery, in the rhetoric of the New Right.

  • (2023) A Marxist View of Tolkien's Middle Earth

  • If you misread Tolkien properly, you'd see he's really an advocate for totalitarian central planning!

• The DOGE Bros Want Another Shot

• The Cost of Killing 'Silly Science'

  A stupid person is someone who causes problems for others without any clear benefit for himself, possibly incurring losses. Firing the NSB struck me as a textbook case of that kind of stupidity in action. But while it’s easy (and fair) to blame Trump, I wanted to better understand how people like Sen. Proxmire helped create a narrative context that enables that kind of stupidity. It strikes me as a grave threat to our nation, and our planet.

• It's not enough to have better ideals.

  Although pro-social values are important, it’s never enough to build something that is ideologically better. We need to build tools that are practically better for people today, based on people’s actual needs. “Twitter but decentralized” is not a particularly useful idea. You need to figure out who you’re going to help first, get to know them, understand what is painful for them, and solve that pain. Extractive networks have literally brought down democracies and enabled genocides, so we know we need software that encodes better ideals

• ICE denies having a protester database. A letter to Congress sheds more light

• Postal Service won’t deliver mail ballots for states that don’t hand over voter lists, under plan for Trump directive

  State election officials could soon face a stark choice: Hand over voter lists to the Trump administration or risk losing Postal Service delivery for mail-in ballots. So far, 23 Democratic-led states and the District of Columbia are suing, as are Democratic Party leaders and non-partisan voter advocacy groups, setting up a potentially active summer of high-stakes judicial rulings. The Trump administration cleared an initial legal hurdle last month, when a federal judge in Washington, DC, who is overseeing one set of the cases, declined to block Trump's executive order, allowing the Postal Service to begin implementing it.

Law Breaking / Police / Internal Security

• Karmelo Anthony found guilty, sentenced to 35 years in prison

  Jurors have found Karmelo Anthony guilty of murder for fatally stabbing 17-year-old Austin Metcalf at a 2025 track meet. Prosecutors labeled the fatal stadium stabbing a provoked, unjustified "sneak attack" inside a team tent, while the defense countered that it was a split-second action in self-defense out of fear and chaos. Anthony received a 35-year prison sentence. He faced anywhere from five to 99 years.

• CIA officer arrested with gold bars accused of making up top secret program

• Video shows Marine fighting off group of would-be carjackers; 2 teens arrested

• Cops Keep Getting Arrested for Using Flock to Stalk People

External Security / Militaria / Diplomania

• Robots are about to overtake armed soldiers as the deciders of war

• The Great Powers Are Learning They Have Limits

• Pentagon Official Admits Boat Strike May Have Killed Human Trafficking Victims

World

• Ottawa's bill regulating social media, AI expected to include age restrictions

  • Ottawa moves to restrict social media for kids under 16

• German ruling declares Google liable for false answers in AI Overviews

• Taiwan Mulls Curbs on AI Chip Exports to China to Align with US

• Europe's Growing Rift with Trump Ensnares a $115M Tech Deal

• India exploring $1 tax per 100GB

• Germany's €100B bid to make the trains run on time

• EU to favor European satellite services to prevent Musk's Starlink expansion

• Canadians told to "Exercise a high degree of caution in Germany"

• Apple Wants Europe to Blink

• This week tells you everything about Europe's digital sovereignty transition

  By switching to Qwant, the EU is leading by example. Small adjustments can have a large impact — in this case, lawmakers will no longer feed all their search queries into Google’s surveillance machine. But they will need to go much, much further.

• Britain Became as Poor as Mississippi

• Australia's Social Media Ban Is Floundering. Can It Still Help Younger Kids?

• Attempted Beheading in Belfast

  where might someone who is likely more familiar with the terrain of Khartoum than with that of Belfast have gotten the idea that the perfect response to certain outrages, insults and provocations would be to behead the man who committed them?

  • Belfast burns after knife attack protests

  • As I watch Belfast burn in violent protests, I think of the far right in England and the US spreading poison

  Right-thinking people are horrified by more than one thing that is happening. They are appalled by Monday’s knife attack and also appalled by the negative, damaging and dangerous scenes that have flowed from it. Racists, online and in person, including politicians, have been showing us all what their real agenda is. Far-right online figures, racist elements in England and the US have used Monday’s events to justify spreading their poison. It is so depressing to see burning barricades and to know that non-white people are in fear for their lives because casually racist characters online and in the real world are frothing at the mouth to spread their hate.

  • Social media platforms warned over role in fuelling Belfast riots

Iran / Houthi

• U.S. Launches Strikes on Iran in Retaliation for Downed Army Helicopter

• US bombs Iran's water facilities

Russia Bad / Ukraine War

• Ukraine builds cheap alternative to Patriot missiles

• Autonomous drones have killed human soldiers for the first time

  A senior figure in the Ukrainian defence industry told New Scientist that a test took place two years ago involving fully autonomous drones set to destroy anything in a given area, with confirmed casualties

  • I think torpedoes count.

• A Twist in Ukraine's Drone Campaign Is 'Hurting the Russians'

China

• Beyond Protectionism: Why EU should put up trade barriers against Chinese goods

• China crackdown brings drone users down to earth

• China's BYD aims to be biggest car firm within five years

• China recenters North Korea ties as nuclear silence reshapes balance

• China plans to spend $295B on AI buildout

Health / Medicine

• Microsoft is drifting: Why don't cancer medicines work the same for everyone?

• Low Vitamin B9 and B12 linked to chronic fatigue and low motivation

Pox / COVID / BioTerror AgitProp

• Could Be the Worst Ebola Outbreak in History

Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda

• Scientists Identify the Biggest Known Scorpion, the Size of a Dog

• Dangerous blue-green algae emerging in Austin lakes for another year

  Call it Austin’s grossest rite of spring: Toxic cyanobacteria, also known as blue-green algae, has awoken from its cold-weather slumber to spread in local lakes and waterways for another year.

  • "Toxic" and also a very popular vitamin supplement in pill form.

• A lack of sex held back life's diversity for millions of years

• Improving the carbon footprint assessment of milk production

• Humans killed vultures. We're now living with the consequences

• Solar power electricity surpasses coal for the first time in U.S.

• A whale necropolis has been found

  • Whale graveyard dating back five million years discovered

  • Largest whale graveyard discovered by sub at bottom of ocean