2026-06-19

etc

• There have been 4 major plane crashes in the US in 4 days. What is going on?

• America 250 Commission Seals 900-Pound Time Capsule for 2276

• How the Glorious Revolution crushed the NIMBYs

  Today, the Glorious Revolution is remembered for having introduced the system of constitutional monarchy, which subordinated the power of the monarch to Parliament. What is really interesting, though, is how Parliament used its new power: to untangle excessively strong and complex property rights, making it possible for the first time for sustained investments to take place in infrastructure and agriculture across England. And unlike in most other political revolutions, this happened almost entirely peacefully and with the consent of the people whose rights were being redrawn.

Horseshit

• As the Job Market Stutters, Simulated Work Is Surging

• Americans have never been healthier or more alone. Might these things be related

• Ultra-rare Star Wars Lego collection went missing, sparked viral conspiracies

• US 'nuclear bros' test America's atomic revival

• 'Prototype' Stonehenge Discovered

  • Simpler, older version of Stonehenge found three miles from famous site

• South Korea's Fake Online Stores Help Shopping Addicts Save Money

• How to Become a Person After Smartphones Have Rotted Your Brain

• SF landlord killed tenant to clear Sunset home for sale, lawsuit alleges

• The Suicide Clusters That Threaten Mountain Towns

• Is this England's best World Cup team since 1966?

• No crisis? Universe's expansion is accelerating, study says

• PC Might Soon Demand Proof of Age Before Letting You Browse

• The personal life of Charlemagne, the first Holy Roman Emperor

• The search for dark matter has been blown wide open

• Orgasmic meditation company founder gets 9 years in prison in forced labor case

• Hunter-gatherers in Siberia died of a plague outbreak 5,500 years ago

  • Ancient DNA is rewriting the history of plague

• Qantas plans a 22-hour London-Sydney nonstop flight, set for October next year

• Why I spent $50K to marry myself, after being cheated on by jerky men.

• Longevity medicine's do-or-die moment

• Don't Blame Plunging Birthrates on Phones

• You don’t understand, prices can’t go down

  Since 1980, the economy has grown at 2.6% per year. The stock market has grown at 12.3% per year. Compounded, that’s 3.3x vs 220x. Does this make any sense? It does once you realize that prices can’t go down. That’s simply not allowed. It’s bad for business if prices go down. The economy might collapse if prices go down. And if prices do go down, it shouldn’t happen while our administration is in power. This is America, the land of number go up. That’s why people around the world trust our economy.

• ‘Please avoid chugging your ranch’: TSA forced to issue warning as foreign World Cup fans fall in love with American condiment

  • Ranch dressing trends as TSA warns World Cup travelers about rules for bringing home American delicacy | Sporting News

celebrity gossip

• Jeremy Clarkson, British TV Host, Says He Has Cancer

• The founder of Craigslist has given away half a billion dollars

  • Or, looked at another way; he's spent that much on religious goals which he didn't want to dirty his own hands with.

Obit

• Gregory Williams, Academic with an Uncommon Perspective on Race, Dies at 81

Musk

• xAI sued for firing an engineer who raised alarms about Grok safety

• Pentagon says Grok used to launch missiles at Iran

• Elon Musk tries again to escape FTC audits of X data handling

• Pentagon Plan to Track Aircraft from Orbit Accelerated with New $4B SpaceX Deal

• DOJ aims to block suit over Musk data center pollution, citing national security

Electric / Self Driving cars

• GM may ditch LFP batteries for future EVs

• Ford is building low-cost LFP battery cells to power its $30,000 EV pickup

• Why Waymo's Driverless Taxis Won't Be on Your Streets Anytime Soon

• Waymo recalls 4k robotaxis to stop them driving into construction zones

• A Third Strike for Waymo on Failed Quick Fixes

Robot uprising / Humanoid Helpers

• 'We had to get out of the way': The backlash over delivery robots

Edumacationalizing / Acedemia Nuts

• The Enrollment Cliff Is Here. Which Schools Will Survive It?

Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising

• Tim Cook warns Apple may raise prices as memory costs surge

  • We Did the Math on Why the iPhone 18 Pro Could Cost $1,299

  • Apple boss Tim Cook says prices to rise due to memory chip costs

  • Apple's Tim Cook Says Price Increases Are 'Unavoidable'

• Apple Prepares Second-Generation iPhone Air for Spring 2027

• CBC will no longer air NHL games in 'end of an era' as broadcast deal expires

• How Hackers Found a Back Door into the American Living Room

• Apple 'Records Every Tap' in App Store to Filter Personalized Recommendations

• Commodore's New Flip Phone Focuses on Digital Detox

  • Commodore Computers Is Making a Distraction-Free Cell Phone

• Windows and Linux users: The deadline to update Secure Boot keys is near

  Machines that fail to update the Secure Boot-related keys will continue to function, but they will no longer be protected against new UEFI threats. To be clear, they were already vulnerable to new UEFI threats that exploited the industry-wide LogoFail vulnerability. The key refresh is designed to mitigate that risk and prevent unrelated UEFI attacks that may arise in the future.

  • Linux users face a Microsoft Secure Boot headache – here's the painkiller

• GTA 6 pre-order date and cover art revealed by Rockstar

• Fishtank, the Unhinged Future of Reality TV

• Google told researcher 'Nice catch!' Then denied bug bounty for flaw it still hasn't fixed

• Meta Tapped a Pentagon Supplier to Prototype Face Recognition for Its Glasses

• Why Meta Suddenly Loves the Kids Online Safety Act

• Florida's TikTok lawsuit could signal wider social media crackdown

TechSuck / Geek Bait

• What Ever Happened To The Hero Nerd?

  The only thing that identified Matthew Broderick’s character in WarGames as anything other than a normal teenager in 1983 was the fact that he had a computer in his bedroom and knew how to program it. Steve Guttenberg played a heartthrob roboticist in Short Circuit, and they really screwed the curve up for the rest of us when they cast Val Kilmer as a laser prodigy in Real Genius. The nerds even started to find love, and one wonders how many young men spent their evenings furiously flipping switches on the front panel of their IMSAI 8080 in hopes that a breathless Ally Sheedy might appear in their doorway with an urgent mission that needed their unique expertise. I don’t know about anyone else, but I still haven’t given up hope.

• The History of the First IoT Device

  before there was even a modern Internet — there was a humble Coke machine in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania that could report its contents through a network. Though it was primitive by today’s standards, it holds a unique distinction: It was, as far as anyone knows, the world’s first IoT device. Necessity, as always, was the mother of invention. One day in the early 1980s, David Nichols, a graduate student in Carnegie Mellon University’s computer science department, was in his office on campus at Wean Hall craving a soda. But his office was “a relatively long way” from the building’s Coke machine, and considering his fellow students’ substantial caffeine habits, Nichols knew there was a good chance it would be empty — or that, if the machine had recently been refilled, the sodas inside would be tragically warm. “I never used it, except to see if it was working,” Kazar told Industrious. “I never liked Coke.”

  • Ideas implemented by the unconcerned, for no identifiable benefit, with no concern for privacy or property rights... Sounds like "IoT" today.

• Stop making swap partitions, use swap files instead!

  Swap files have had the same performance characteristics as swap partitions for more than 20 years and yet, linux distributions continue to encourage the use of swap partitions during install.

Space / Boomy Zoomers / UFO

• A space telescope is falling to Earth. NASA is racing to rescue it

• Space Telescopes Drown in Satellite Light Pollution

• Arianespace launches 36 Amazon satellites with Ariane 64 with advanced boosters

AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World

• Claude Fable 5 suspension: Anthropic exec says it may return in the coming days

  • "Dangerous" AI models are coming no matter what

  • Trump admin blocking Fable 5 rerelease unless Anthropic ensures no jailbreaks

  • JPMorgan Chase cuts off Anthropic access for its Hong Kong staff

  • Anthropic asked for regulation. Washington went much further.

  • Anthropic employees accuse Trump Administration of targeting them.

  • The Korean Telecom Giant at the Center of Anthropic's Mythos Controversy

  • Trump's Anthropic restrictions may be illegal

  • Who decides when AI is too dangerous?

  • AI Regulation Should Be Rational, Not Retaliatory

• Noam Shazeer Left Google for OpenAI

  • Google just lost one of its biggest AI names to OpenAI

  • Noam Shazeer Leaves Gemini for OpenAI

• Amazon employees say they're facing termination for backing data center limits

  • Amazon employees say they were interrogated over data center comments

  • Amazon investigating engineers who criticized AI data center expansion

  • Amazon Workers Say Data Center Testimony Prompted HR Calls

• Meta head of product for 'AI for work' transformation is leaving company

• Unreal Engine 5.8 adds MCP server for AI agents

• SmarterChild, Long before ChatGPT, a generation learned how to talk to machines

• AI reshapes global labour market into two distinct paths, rewarding human skills

• The Cloud Has Sound: The Unrelenting and Unseen Cost of A.I. Data Centers

• World leaders want American AI. They just don't want America to turn it off

• Midjourney Medical goes from AI image generation to full-body ultrasounds

• Dear A.I. Companies: The Doom Trolling Needs to Stop

• Microsoft Makes Big AI Inroads in China by Selling OpenAI Models

• The Teachers Getting $50k Bonuses Thanks to a Meta Data Center

• The Leading Deepfake Expert No Longer Trusts His Own Eyes

• Europe must choose between AI and climate goals, data center lobby says

• AI will create more jobs for humans, not replace them says Jeff Bezos

• Uber and Lyft Use Artificial Intelligence to Price Rides

• Love in the Time of A.I. Companions

• Tech Workers Maxed Out Their A.I. Use. Now They're Trying to Minimize It

• Student Cheating Is Becoming Impossible to Detect in an A.I. Era

• Why AI Is Incorrigibly Didactic

• New Super Pac Aims to Rally Tech Workers to Help Limit A.I

• Gig workers are endlessly exploited. AI could make more of us share their fate

• America Is Headed Toward the Infinite Workweek

• Fed regulators order grid operators speed power to energy-hungry AI data centers

  • A Federal Regulator Wants to Fast-Track AI Data Centers onto the Power Grid

• Writing with AI demands more thought from students, not less

Neo Gambling / Crypto con games

• Binance set to lose permission to operate in EU, sources say

• Prediction Markets' Next Major Bet: Wall St. Traders

Economicon / Business / Finance

• Meta's CTO says morale is almost 'the worst it's ever been'

• We Ran the Numbers. Remote Work Is Bad for Us

• Apple to Make Chips in US with Intel, Trump Says

  • Trump says Apple to partner with Intel on US chip design, production

• Private Equity firm loses all its $5B investment in Software Company

• Typical Home Will Cost $1M as Millennials Hit Retirement, Economist Says

• Turbocharged Earnings Are Pushing Stocks Higher. There's a Catch

• Average US gas price drops below $4 – barely

• Apollo Makes Debt Concessions on Shutterfly as AI Competition Pressures Mount

• Peptides Fuel a Multibillion-Dollar Startup Race

• The Job Market Is Thawing

Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making

• SCOTUS backs marijuana user's challenge to gun ban

  • US Supreme Court limits ban on gun ownership by marijuana users

  • SCOTUS: One Toke’s Not Over the Line, Sweet 2A.

• Georgia Republicans scrap redistricting talks before special session begins.

• We Could Have Had Cell Phones 40 Years Sooner

  The basic idea of the cellphone was introduced to the public in 1945 – not in Popular Mechanics or Science, but in the down-home Saturday Evening Post. Millions of citizens would soon be using "handie-talkies," declared J.K. Jett, the head of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). Licenses would have to be issued, but that process "won't be difficult." The revolutionary technology, Jett promised in the story, would be formulated within months. But permission to deploy it would not. The government would not allocate spectrum to realize the engineers' vision of "cellular radio" until 1982, and licenses authorizing the service would not be fully distributed for another seven years. That's one heck of a bureaucratic delay.

Trump

• Spy world panic as Tulsi Gabbard prepares to unleash bombshell file dumps

  Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard has a week left in office, but her enemies are bracing for her final act before she concludes her unique 16-month leadership that strained the intelligence community. Gabbard’s final bow, the Daily Mail can reveal, is expected to be the public release of secret intelligence documents surrounding COVID-19 origins, gain-of-function research, and Anthony Fauci's coverup of the pandemic's origin. She is also planning additional transparency surrounding the CIA's MKUltra mind-control program.

Democrats

• Obama Presidential Center subcontractors claim they’re owed millions and facing financial ruin ahead of grand opening.

  • Barack Obama has built a monument to himself

• Whipping the Democrats into Shape

  The upcoming midterms are likely to be essential for the perpetuation of democracy in the United States. It is largely unspoken, but most understand though many won’t admit, that if the Democrats do not take control of most likely both the House and Senate in November then the chance for any sort of peaceful transfer of power in 2028 from Trump to a potential Democratic successor is vanishingly low.

Left Angst

• Jeff Bezos told Trump the Washington Post was his worst investment before slashing staff: ‘People there are terrible.’

  • Bezos Called Post His Worst Investment and Staff He Laid Off 'Terrible' People

• Ringleader of Plot to Blow Up UFC 250 Fight Is ‘NOT a Citizen.’

• “The Impact was Devastating”: Chicago’s Cross Burning Found to be Set by Liberal, Anti-Trump Protester

  It turns out that this was not evidence of the rise of racism but another possible hoax. Lu bizarrely claimed that he was unaware that a burning cross had racist connotations and insisted that there was no racist message intended. Others suspected that this was a type of false-flag effort to outrage the left. Johnson later denounced the incident as a “symbol of hatred is one that we must continue to reject, and I wholeheartedly reject it. I can’t speak to anyone’s motives; I can only speak to the impact, and the impact was devastating.” It seems curious that Johnson would not “speak to motives” when he knows that this was set by a leftist radical.

• U.S. Demands to Access Africans' Data Raise Privacy, Sovereignty Concerns

• Trump administration Backs Off Plan to End Ocean Monitoring

• Palantir wants to 'defend the West,' but the West is wary

• Crews battle algae bloom in Washington's newly repainted Reflecting Pool

• Mars Is Spending Millions to Give M&M's a MAHA Makeover

• How Stephen Colbert's Replacement Is Helping Tank the Rest of CBS

External Security / Militaria / Diplomania

• Pulsar satellite reveals immense scale of GPS signal tampering

World

• Egypt – Syria undersea cable has been cut in a 'systematic sabotage campaign'

• Farage trying to block Britcoin plans that could be costly for billionaire donor

• EU introduces new agreement on air passenger rights after 13 years

• BBC to axe Radio 4's The World Tonight after more than 50 years

• Kangaroo on the loose in field near Montreal

• Challenging the Narrative of European Decline

• "The Age of the Car Is Over": Fewer and Fewer Private Cars in Berlin

• Civil Servants in the UK Were Paid to Play GTA Online

• Swiss parliament lifts ban on new nuclear power plants

• India sparred with Telegram days ahead of blocking the app

• Brexit tore apart European science – now the research rifts are healing

• France's Louvre museum 'running out of steam', new director says

• UK Even Wants Image Scanners on Unsupported Devices

• Anger at ‘send them back’ chants by rightwing MEPs after EU migration law vote | European Union | The Guardian

  Rightwing MEPs have come under fire after they celebrated a vote aimed at increasing deportations across the EU with chants of “send them back”, leading other lawmakers to respond with cries of “shame on you”. The heated confrontation in the European parliament came on Wednesday after lawmakers voted 418 to 218 to approve controversial measures aimed at increasing deportations of undocumented people. The overhaul has been widely criticised by rights groups including Amnesty International France, which this week described the plans as “absurd, cruel and discriminatory”, and 16 UN experts, who recently outlined more than a dozen ways in which the rules could contravene international human rights.

Iran / Houthi

• The 14-point US-Iran pact as read by US official

• Trump Signs "Treaty of Versailles" in Israeli-American Surrender to Iran

• The 14-point US-Iran peace plan, annotated

• Trump Demanded Iran's 'Unconditional Surrender.' He Got a Surprise Instead

• The Israeli Ultra-Hawks Who Feel Betrayed by Trump's Iran Deal

• An Iran Agreement Defined by Unanswered Questions

• Iran War Misconceptions

• Vance slams Israeli 'freakout' over Iran deal

• Trump Surrenders to Iran on Virtually Every Point

Israel

• Netanyahu and Modi: the making of an unlikely alliance

• The world may not like Trump's Gaza plan – but there is no alternative

Russia Bad / Ukraine War

• Ukraine hits Moscow refinery again

• Ukraine hits Moscow with largest-ever drone attack

• A Drone Barrage on Moscow Escalates Ukraine's Push to Take the War to Russia

• Moscow complains of black rain after largest Ukrainian attack hits oil refinery

• Ukraine strikes Moscow oil refinery in large-scale drone attack, with Zelenskyy saying it’s ‘time the war ended.’

• (video) drone hitting a storage tank at the Moscow Oil Refinery this morning, sending the tank lid perfectly soaring hundreds of feet.

• Researchers have uncovered how Russia's nuclear-powered missile works

  • Modeling the Performance of the Burevestnik Nuclear-Powered Cruise Missile

China

• China's EV Price War Was Built on Cars Sold at a Loss

• Manus original investors plan to buy back AI firm from Meta for $2B

• A secretive Chinese probe has just arrived at one of Earth's 'quasi-moons'

• G7 aims to see China supply no more than 60% of rare earths

• Americans Should Celebrate China's Biotech Revolution

Health / Medicine

• HPV jabs cut risk of dying from cervical cancer before 30 to almost zero

  • Cervical cancer deaths fall to zero in young women given vaccine

• Second carcass-eating fly species cleared by FDA for maggot wound therapy

• Cannabis commercialisation not decriminalisation drives up usage, study finds

• Widely Prescribed Blood Pressure Drugs Could Be Harming Diabetic Kidneys

• 15-minute at-home Lyme disease tick test

• Ozempic and Wegovy linked to surprising drop in violent behavior

• Cholesterol Guidelines Get a Welcome Overhaul

• Does Coffee Count Toward Your Daily Water Intake? Here’s What Experts Say.

Pox / COVID / BioTerror AgitProp

• Infection found in wildlife evolved to spread between humans

Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda

• World-famous Robin Hood oak tree has died

  The Major Oak in the heart of Sherwood Forest in Nottinghamshire was thought to be up to 1,200 years old and has perished after its first spring with no leaves, according to the RSPB. The conservation charity, which manages the woodland, said it had been in decline for some time due to heatwaves, droughts, and high visitor footfall, which heavily impacted the surrounding soil.

  • 'Most famous tree in the world': Sherwood Forest's 1000-year-old Major oak dies

  • World’s “most famous” tree dies after 1000 years in England

• Bees regulate feeding to avoid over-consuming certain essential nutrients

• UK Environment Agency threatens to prosecute campaigner after waterway cleanup

• A Missing Piece in Climate Models: Nature's Own Emissions

• Wolves outperform dogs in following human social cues

• Over 100,000 Kids Have Died Due to Greenpeace Blocking Genetically Enhanced Rice, New Calculation Shows.