2026-05-21

Horseshit

• Schlitz beer discontinued after 177 years.

• Solar cells on vehicles can take the pressure off the grid in Europe

• The weird, wild story of humanity's obsession with gold

• Everlane Represented a Millennial Ideal. Is It Dead?

• The Richest Cat in the World

• The missing men of the American marriage market

  "You're a genius," joked Stern. "You picked a high school where everyone was gay — so you get Scarlett Johansson." It may have been a joke, but it actually points to a broader phenomenon that can affect whole societies. Economists and other social scientists have long studied how gender imbalances can dramatically reshape dating and marriage markets, which can help the romantic prospects of some while hurting the prospects of others.

  The United States is not currently witnessing any demographic imbalances so extreme. The ratio of men to women is pretty even. However, the economic and educational trajectories of men and women have increasingly diverged, with a large swath of men falling behind.

• Woman dies after falling into NYC manhole

• The Alaska Permanent Fund as Loose Precedent for AI Data Center 'UBI' Payments

• Not alive, but not dead: disembodied human brains used for drug testing

celebrity gossip

• What's Next for Stephen Colbert After 'The Late Show'?

Obit

• Greg Hyman, Co-Creator of Tickle Me Elmo, Dies at 78

• Former congressman Barney Frank has died

  Barney Frank, the quick-witted Massachusetts congressman and liberal lion who helped overhaul Wall Street regulations after the 2008 financial crisis and made history as one of the first openly gay members of Congress, died Wednesday, his sister confirmed to NBC Boston. He was 86. He had entered hospice care at his home in Maine in last month. in 2012, he became the first member of Congress to enter into a same-sex marriage, tying the knot with his longtime partner, Jim Ready.

  • Fmr Dem Rep Barney Frank, sharp-tongued liberal trailblazer, Dodd-Frank co-author dies at 86

Rank Propaganda / Thought Policing / World Disordering

• Fewer Bots, More Ads: The Pentagon's Evolving Online Influence Campaigns

Musk

• Why Elon Musk lost his suit against OpenAI

• How Musk Might Defeat the Statute of Limitations Defense

• SpaceX S-1

  • SpaceX Has Picked a Date for Its IPO. Here’s Everything Investors Need to Know Before What Could be the Biggest IPO Ever.

  • SpaceX picks Goldman Sachs for lead left position on record-breaking IPO

  • SpaceX Files for IPO

  • The SpaceX IPO filing has arrived

  • Elon Musk's SpaceX initial public offering filing reveals losses

  • SpaceX IPO Filing Reveals Anthropic Is Paying $15B/Year to Access Data Centers

  • SpaceX files for IPO that could make Elon Musk a trillionaire

• Grokipedia selectively drawing on more right-leaning news sources, new study

• Cybertruck owner believed Elon Musk that it could cross lake – now he's in jail

  • Driver intentionally drove Cybertruck into lake to use vehicle's 'Wade Mode

• SpaceX punts Starship launch as investigation opens into Starbase worker's death

• Elon Musk's X admits noncompliance with Australia child protection request

Robot uprising / Humanioid Helpers

• How Big Tech is harnessing the data of Indian factory workers to train robots

• 'We don't see a robot as a threat: simply another form of presence in the world'

Edumacationalizing / Acedemia Nuts

• Congrats, new grads Welcome to job market hell

• Harvard Votes to Cap A's in Effort to Curb Grade Inflation

• A Cattle Ranch Is Doing What the Ivy League Can't

Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising

• Spotify's ugly new disco ball icon accomplished its goal

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

• Ex-Apple engineer says Apple deliberately slows older phones via updates

• Google to release first smart glasses since Google Glass flop

  • Google's First AI Smart Glasses Launching This Fall with iPhone Support

• Google accused of pushing 'free for life' G Suite users onto paid plans

• Google search is dead, says... Google.

• Discord Voice and Video Calls Now End-to-End Encrypted by Default

• Anna's Archive Hit with $19.5M Default Judgment and Global Domain Takedown Order

• Yearslong fight over users' right to tweak smart TV software heads to trial

• Between-Device Sharing Still Sucks

  • I've seen quite a lot of USB thumb drive sneakernet in environments with actual networks and shared file systems. Creating a new directory on a share is "power user" territory, even when the user has permissions allowing it. Phones etc try to insulate the user from knowing that files exist.

• Xbox hires game industry analyst Matthew Ball to lead strategy

• Online child safety campaigners call for US inquiry into Roblox

AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World

• Public have more fear than hope on AI and future of work, study finds

• AI Could Help the Climate

• Book on Truth in the Age of A.I. Contains Quotes Made Up by A.I

• Google's AI future demands trust and your personal data

• There's no earthly way of knowing which direction we are going

• ChatGPT-generated story won a prestigious literary prize

• The Incompatibilities Between Generative AI and Art: Q&A with Ted Chiang

• Anthropic hires OpenAI cofounder Andrej Karpathy

  • OpenAI co-founder Andrej Karpathy joins Anthropic

• Can a Mediterranean Island Nation Turn AI into a Basic Public Right?

• AI's Promises Are Starting to Materialize – With a Human Cost

• Barnes and Noble CEO says the bookstore will stock AI-written books

• College students drown out AI-praising commencement speeches with boos

  • The AI bots are coming and the young are booing, not applauding

• Microsoft is quietly shopping for an OpenAI replacement

• The impossible maths of the AI boom

• Anthropic, Gates Foundation launch $200M partnership for AI in health, education

• An AI announcer mispronounced and skipped names during a graduation

• OpenAI Prepares to File to Go Public in Coming Weeks

  • OpenAI to confidentially file for IPO as soon as Friday

  • OpenAI Is Preparing to File for an IPO in the Coming Days or Weeks

• Bezos brushes off concerns of an AI bubble: 'You shouldn't worry about it'

• Utah legislature to explore data centers' impacts

• Township Leader Resigns in Tears over OpenAI Data Center Death Threats

• The biggest data center ever is becoming a problem in Utah

• CEO Walks Back Comment About Replacing 'Lower-Value Human Capital' with AI

• The next phase of OpenAI's political strategy

• Fears of unfettered hacking spurred by Anthropic's Mythos AI model overstated

  • "Overstated" is a word that applies to everything "AI" for the past few years.

• How much should we worry about secretly loyal AIs?

• Data centers loom over Georgia governor race

• Sam Altman is giving OpenAI tokens in exchange for equity in YC Companies

• San Francisco turns to AI to save whales from ship strikes as deaths soar

• AI robot is now a Buddhist monk

• Advanced AI models bring government to 'reflection point,' CIA official says

• Linus Torvalds admits he has a 'love-hate relationship with AI'

• The AI economy is rewriting the American Dream

• What will better AI mean?

  The Internet has been fully mined, and it yielded 20T good tokens. For a Chinchilla optimal model, that’s only 1T weights (1e26 training run if dense). 500 GB gets you all of human knowledge in a simple to query archive. For comparison, Wikipedia is 24 GB with mediocre compression. The era of scaling yields clearly better AI is over, now we enter an era of efficiency and taste. Let’s get the tools to hit the end of this S-curve distributed to as many people as possible. Taste is an arena where tons of people can play.

  • Oh joy. The Electronic Gods must have good taste. I say we need Zeus boinking anything that moves in the guise of a variety of species. We need Chaos to be fully human, and we know it. The more deterministic AI is, the less human it can be.

Neo Gambling / Crypto con games

• Polymarket launches private company trading for speculating on Anthropic, OpenAI

Economicon / Business / Finance

• 48000 Samsung workers ready to strike

• Meta Begins Laying Off 8000 Employees

  • Meta lays off 8k employees

  • Meta Begins 8k Global Job Cuts in Asian Hub of Singapore

  • Meta Begins Laying Off Thousands of Employees as It Transforms Around AI

  • Meta begins 8k job cuts in AI efficiency push

  • Meta Begins 8k Global Job Cuts in AI Efficiency Push

  • 8k Meta employees are waking up to an email saying they've been laid off

  • Meta Begins AI-Driven Layoffs, Report Says. Can They Boost the Struggling Stock?

• Intuit to cut 17% of global jobs to streamline operations

• Bloodbath brews at NPR due to federal funding cut — as 300 buyouts offered

  The nonprofit broadcaster told staff this week that roughly 300 employees, mostly on newsgathering desks, are eligible for voluntary buyouts as executives scramble to close an $8 million budget gap. NPR management expects only about 30 employees to accept the buyouts voluntarily, meaning layoffs in the 425-strong newsroom could follow if too few workers opt in.

• James Murdoch Buys Half of Vox Media

  • James Murdoch to Buy New York Magazine, Other Vox Assets for Around $300M

• New York hotel workers union reaches deal to avoid strike ahead of World Cup

• CEO of $300M company Bolt says problems disappeared after firing HR team

• The Morale of Tech Workers Is Plunging as Layoffs Mount

• Nvidia Rides Blistering Chip Sales to Another Record Quarter

Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making

• Massie Ousted by Trump-Backed Challenger in Kentucky Primary

  • Money Well Spent: ‘Moron’ Thomas Massie Joins Marjorie Taylor Greene on Ash Heap of History

• Tennessee man jailed 37 days for Trump meme wins $835,000 settlement

  After spending 37 days in jail for nothing more than posting a meme, retired Tennessee law enforcement officer Larry Bushart has won a substantial settlement from the county and sheriff behind his arrest. Represented by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression and Phillips & Phillips, PLLC, Larry Bushart filed a federal civil rights lawsuit last December against Sheriff Nick Weems, Investigator Jason Morrow, and Perry County, Tennessee, for violating his constitutional rights in retaliation for his protected speech. Today, the parties announced in a joint statement that Larry will receive $835,000 in exchange for dismissing his complaint.

• Los Angeles Tried to Tax Mansions. Apartment Construction Tanked

• Conservative Candidates Sweep Georgia Supreme Court Elections.

Trump

• Trump Order Would Push Banks to Check Clients' Citizenship Status

• Even by Trumpian standards, a $1.8B fund for friends is bad

• US Justice Department 'forever' bars IRS from auditing Trump's past tax returns

Democrats

• House candidate Maureen Galindo pledges to send 'American zionists' to internment camp

  Controversy-tarred congressional candidate Maureen Galindo this week pledged to transform a site south of San Antonio now used by the Trump administration to detain migrants into an internment camp for “American Zionists.” “She’ll turn Karnes ICE Detention Center into a prison for American Zionists and former ICE officers for human trafficking,” Galindo wrote in an Instagram post over the weekend, referring to herself in the third person. “It will also be a castration processing center for pedophiles, which will probably be most of the Zionists.” Galindo’s latest set of inflammatory remarks comes as the Democratic hopeful for Texas’ newly redrawn 35th Congressional District continues to draw national attention for remarks critics have called antisemitic and untethered from reality. The controversy is snowballing as she heads into the May 26 Democratic primary runoff.

Left Angst

• MAHA's latest conspiracy? Blaming Bill Gates for spike in tick bites

• This Company Was an American Success Story. Until MAHA Influencers Sank It.

  And then came April 10, 2023. On that day, at exactly 10:21 a.m. ET, two Facebook posts falsely claimed that Apeel’s product “can’t be washed off” and warned viewers not to “eat anything with the Apeel sticker on it.” The posts linked to the ingredients of a floor cleaner also called Apeel but made by a UK company. Within hours, the posts ricocheted across Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, Telegram, Rumble, and Reddit. The posts ignored the fact that the Food and Drug Administration and the European Food Safety Authority had separately evaluated Apeel, and found no safety concerns. Or that most of the produce sold in stores is coated with a thin layer of wax. This was an online mob, wielding disinformation and threats. And no one could stop it.

• NAACP calls for boycott of Southern college sports programs over voting rights

  Launched on Tuesday, the NAACP’s “Out of Bounds” campaign urges current and prospective Black athletes, their families, alumni and fans to “withhold athletic and financial support” from major public universities in states that “have moved to limit, weaken or erase Black voting representation.”

• The FCC Sends Billions to Alaska Companies Selling Slow Internet

  The federal government pays one company more than $350,000 a year to provide internet to 300 buildings on an island of 80 people.

• Trump Sued Himself and Walked Away with a $100M Tax Debt Erased

• Kennedy Fires Leaders of Key Health Task Force

Law Breaking / Police / Internal Security

• Secret CISA credentials found in public GitHub repo

  the repo appeared to be managed by Virginia-based Nightwing, a CISA contractor. Nightwing has so far not commented publicly, instead referring questions back to CISA.

  • CISA Admin Leaked AWS GovCloud Keys on GitHub

• FBI seeks US-wide access to license plate cameras, wants data in near real time

External Security / Militaria / Diplomania

• Brazil's instant payment system faces scrutiny from Trump administration

• Former Cuban president Raúl Castro indicted in US over fatal downing of 2 planes

World

• German government approves new gas power plant auctions to backup wind and solar

• Missing RAF pilot found strapped in his sunken Hurricane laid to rest

• UK Supermarkets may be asked to freeze prices of milk, eggs and bread

• Architect of the UK Online Safety Act Calls for Its Complete Repeal

• Killing in Japan Stirs Fear of New Crime Rings That Recruit the Vulnerable

• UK radio station apologises for accidentally announcing king's death

Iran / Houthi

• Hormuz closure could trigger 'agrifood shock', price crisis within a year

• UAE says new pipeline that will bypass Strait of Hormuz is nearly 50% complete

Russia Bad / Ukraine War

• Russia is losing in Ukraine. China has noticed – Trump should too

• Russia's plan to advertise on rockets and spacecraft takes off

• Russian fighters almost hit British reconnaissance aircraft

Health / Medicine

• Scientists reveal how seven days of fasting transforms the human body

  monitored 12 healthy volunteers during a seven day water-only fast. Blood samples were collected daily before, during, and after fasting.

• AI atlas reveals hidden whole-body-damage caused by obesity

Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda

• UK needs urgent changes to survive global heating

• A new whale detection network launches in SF Bay, alerting ships in real time

• India's hottest district shuts at 10 am as mercury breaches 48 C mark

• Japan is gripped by mass allergies. A 1950s project is to blame

  The problem is, sugi and hinoki trees also produce large amounts of lightweight pollen which can easily drift into cities. It's this pollen, often released all at once from the monoculture plantations, that is responsible for most seasonal allergies in Japan. The issue has become all the worse since these trees release ever more pollen after maturing at 30 years of age – now the case for nearly all of them.

• El Niño is coming. The last time ocean temp. looked like this, millions died

• Cities are investing tax dollars on trees. Here's why it works

• Denver has a plan to heat and cool buildings without fossil fuels

• Marine scientists discover record number of new species

• India scorched by heat wave, power demand driven to new record

• Starbucks cold plastic cups don't make it to recycling, probe finds