2026-04-xx

etc

• The Wild Story of the Teton Dam Failure

  Early in 1976, though, after a particularly snowy winter, it became clear that the spring melt was going to send a lot of water their way. Without the river outlet works, the dam’s ability to release water was limited. The auxiliary outlet tunnel just couldn’t handle the flow they needed. That meant the reservoir would have to fill faster than the foot-per-day limit. So, they relaxed the limit. The dam seemed to be holding fine anyway, and there really wasn’t another choice.

Horseshit

• New Tractor with 12-Valve Cummins and Zero Electronics Goes Back to the Basics

  Wilson’s big idea with Ursa Ag is to sell equipment that’s affordable and serviceable by third-party shops. Because the 12-valve Cummins has powered everything from farm machinery to pickup trucks and more over the years, practically everyone with wrenching knowledge has experience with them. Parts are also easy to come by, so downtime isn’t a concern.

• The arrogant superbanker whose hubris brought Britain to its knees

• Master of chaos wins $3M math prize for 'blowing up' equations

• A Hot-Air Balloon Landed in a California Backyard. The Owner Says It's a 'Very Rare' Event

• The Ferrari of Espresso Machines Is Fueling a Hot Resale Market

• San Francisco Solved Metro Vandalism with One Neat Trick

• Climate Caused the US Civil War

  Because of climate, the North farmed crops like wheat and barley that required very little work, and that work was easy to automate. This tended to make farmers independent, incentivize industrialization for the machinery, and push settlers west very fast, as they weren’t as limited by labor needs. Conversely, the crops grown in the south—mainly cotton, tobacco, sugarcane, and rice—all require substantially more work, so getting lots of workers at the lowest possible cost made or broke fortunes. This is why slavery emerged here, why it was fundamental to the South’s economy, and why Southerners went to war to continue it.

  • "Wheat and barley require very little work" is an astonishing display of ignorance.

• They Built a Legendary Privacy Tool. Now They're Sworn Enemies

  • Wired has published an extraordinarily inaccurate article about GrapheneOS

  • Original GrapheneOS responses to WIRED fact checker

  Donaldson's claims can be proven false by interviewing numerous people who were around at the time. WIRED made no attempt to verify if anything he said was true prior to publishing it. Copperhead was a company founded by 3 people, not 2, and WIRED could have interviewed Dan McGrady who was the 3rd co-founder. There were many other people around back then they could have interviewed including many people who can confirm they had their donations stolen by James Donaldson. Donaldson serially fabricates things about himself and others. Giving him such a huge platform to mislead people is extremely irresponsible.

• A Renaissance gambling dispute spawned probability theory

• 'Wagyu' Used to Guarantee Quality Beef. What Are You Paying for Today?

• Why higher pay hasn't made young adults feel richer

• What is freedom?

  Americans don’t have real politics as an option, you have clowns in a clown show as the frontmen of a largely secret government you don’t see. Not because there’s a grand conspiracy, you can go read the 2,000 page bills they shove through congress, but you don’t. You stay distracted by the clowns who clearly didn’t write the bill. The blog is not real dissent. It’s unclear what real dissent would even mean? Are you voting for the other guy? That is not dissent. Like dissent would require an organization outside the state capable of taking over. Not only does this not exist, it’s hard to even conceive of it being built. I mean, I guess I could think of one organization that could do it, but I don’t see them wanting to. They are busy running a different state. And protest? That’s the most laughable of the three. Do Black Lives Matter more now? Did that protest work? How about Occupy Wall Street? How is the 99% doing? Oh, income inequality is at an all time high? Hmm guess that didn’t work either. But did you feel like you made a difference?

• A Life Hack for the Ultra-Wealthy Is Going Mainstream

• Assault at Antarctic base could be a warning for future travellers to Mars

• The hidden power keeping wages low

  This is Part 2 of the Planet Money newsletter's series on "monopsony power." The first story centered on the labor economics of the classic sci-fi horror movie Alien as an introduction to an extreme version of the concept.

Obit

• Desmond Morris, 98, Dies; Zoologist Saw Links Between Humans and Apes

Rank Propaganda / Thought Policing / World Disordering

• The Onion launches new effort to turn InfoWars into parody website

  • The Onion to Take over InfoWars

  • The Onion Says It Has Deal to Take over Alex Jones' InfoWars

• Silicon Valley is building its own news-industrial complex

Musk

• Elon Musk does not appear at hearing in French prosecutors' X probe

  • Elon Musk Ignores French Prosecutors, Widening Tech Rift with Europe

  • French prosecutors issue summons to Musk after raid on X offices in Paris

• Tesla Q1 2026 earnings preview: the growth story is dead

• SpaceX president Shotwell earned $85M last year, document shows

• Musk bought $1.4B SpaceX shares last year, The Information reports

• Musk and insiders to retain voting control of SpaceX after IPO, filing shows

• SpaceX Said to Agree to Buy Cursor for More Than $50B

Robot uprising / Humanioid Helpers

• Siemens and Humanoid deployed an Nvidia-powered humanoid robot

Edumacationalizing / Acedemia Nuts

• That Time My University Hired a Terrorist

  It started before the first application was reviewed. A colleague — one of the committee’s true believers — laid it out plainly: any new hire “must not be white.” Not “diversity is a priority.” Not “we should broaden our search.” Must. Not. Be. White. This wasn’t a suggestion. It became the operating framework. The committee created a scoring matrix: teaching, research, terminal degree — and diversity. Except “diversity” didn’t mean what the university’s official policy said it meant. The committee’s original definition of “diverse” meant non-male — excluding white men while allowing white women.

  So who was The Candidate? A doctoral student — nearly seven years into a soft interdisciplinary degree he had not yet completed at the time of our offer, with a publication record consisting almost entirely of activist writing and left-wing arts journalism — the kind of work that counts as a "publication" if you squint and want it badly enough. So many publications for a young scholar, the chair gushed. When you’ve decided someone is the answer before you’ve read their file, everything looks like evidence you were right. It didn’t matter that he founded an anarchist group with a documented public record of violence, vandalism, and incitement against certain ethnic and religious groups.

  His group had organized a coordinated rampage through a city’s public spaces and buildings. Equipment destroyed. Property vandalized. Multiple arrests. Significant property damage. The group’s own social media had urged followers to come out and cause destruction. The city’s own left-wing elected officials — not exactly a law-and-order crowd — condemned it publicly as criminal activity. This was not obscure information. It was covered extensively — newspapers, local TV, viral social media posts. The Candidate was named. The group was named. The Candidate was identified as the group’s founder. All of it was searchable on Google at the time of the hire. The committee’s response: hit pieces. Right-wing smears. He’s just an activist. A colleague who taught photojournalism dismissed the video evidence as a coordinated “far right” witch hunt. And besides — this was about viewpoint diversity. Academic freedom. Free speech. Never mind that the committee had spent months filtering applicants by race.

• The School Reformer "Accountability Era" Narrative Simply Does Not Add Up

  One of the hallmarks of the post-social justice era is watching people wrestle with the material consequences of the social justice era. A big part of doing so intelligently is understanding that those material consequences were in fact very limited relative to the discursive dominance of social justice signals from 2012ish to 2022ish. And nowhere is the divide between rhetoric and reality larger than in public education. Yes, a lot of loud voices were calling standardized testing racist and demanding that we decolonize curricula. But when you go looking for how that actually influenced brick & mortar policy, there’s not much there.

• Nothing ever dies. It merely becomes embarrassing.

  This isn’t how science is supposed to work, of course. The secret sauce of science is supposed to be falsifiability: it ain’t science unless you can kill it. If I claim that all swans are white, and you show up with a black swan, then I’m supposed to bid a tearful goodbye to my theory and send it to that big farm upstate where it can frolic and play with all the other failed hypotheses. Falsification sounds straightforward until you actually try it. You show up with your black swan, and instead of admitting defeat, I go, “Hmm, well is it really black? Is it actually a swan? Seems more like a dusky-looking duck to me!” And we publish dueling papers until the end of our days.

Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising

• AMD Ryzen 9 9950X3D2 Dual Edition tested: Sweet, gratuitous overkill

  • AMD Ryzen 9 9950X3D2 Dual Edition: Tons of cache for tons of dollars

• Wearable health tech might be Tim Cook's greatest legacy

Space / Boomy Zoomers / UFO

• JAXA mulls launching H3 test rocket in June after last year's failure

• Disappearing Scientists and UFOs

  I suspect that the current interest in the deaths or disappearances of 10 or 11 people having something to do with rocket science will prove to be similar. Some of those deaths may indeed be tragic or mysterious stories, but there will be no common thread–the Russians, the Chinese, the Iranians, aliens–linking them. Strange things happen in this world, as someone once said.

  • Michio Kaku on Dead Scientists Mystery: ‘Cause for National Concern’

• Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin blasts customer's satellite into wrong place

  • Blue Origin New Glenn rocket grounded after launching satellite into wrong orbit

  • Blue Origin rocket grounded after satellite ‘mishap.’

  • Blue Origin rocket grounded after satellite 'mishap'

  • Blue Origin's New Glenn rocket is grounded after failed satellite launch

• Curiosity rover finds signs of ancient life on Mars

  • NASA's Curiosity rover finds organic molecules on Mars

• Upwards: Where Are All These Meteors Coming From?

AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World

• Want to Speak to the Manager? At a New San Francisco Store, That's A.I

• Amazon to invest up to $25B in Anthropic as part of $100B cloud deal

  • Amazon to invest up to $25B in Anthropic as part of $100B cloud deal

  • Anthropic takes $5B from Amazon and pledges $100B in cloud spending in return

• AI job scams are booming – and I was fooled by one. Here is how to avoid them

• Schmoozebots: Study finds flattery will get AI everywhere

• BlackRock's AI Transformation

• OpenAI-Anthropic enterprise rivalry heats up

• Trump says Anthropic is 'shaping up,' open to deal with Pentagon

• AI Tool Rips Off Open Source Software Without Violating Copyright

• OpenAI Is Working with Consultants to Sell Codex

• Alex Bores rolls out "AI dividend" plan to share AI wealth

  • Why Are Palantir and OpenAI Scared of Alex Bores?

• AI Will Soon Drive a Third of TSMC's Business

• The Luddites Were the First to Attack AI

• AI is changing how Texas universities teach computer science as job market slows

• OpenAI turns on cost-per-click ads inside ChatGPT

• Meta to start capturing employee mouse movement, keystrokes for AI training data

• I Feel So Sorry for My A.I. Sunglasses

• Google's Internal Politics Leave It Playing Catch-Up on AI Coding

• Job Cuts Driven by A.I. Are Rising on Wall Street

• OpenAI faces a criminal probe over ChatGPT's alleged role in a campus shooting

• Demand for AI-related skills has grown and older workers are acing the pivot

• Wells Fargo, Citi and Goldman lead in AI venture investment

• Elite law firm Sullivan and Cromwell admits to AI 'hallucinations'

• Google taps Sergey Brin to lead a specialized AI strike team to take on Claude

• Iconiq, Go-To Wealth Adviser for Tech's Elite, Is Putting Billions into AI

Neo Gambling / Crypto con games

• FanDuel wants to carve a sports niche in the prediction market business

• Prediction markets are breaking the news and becoming their own beat

• Polymarket in talks to raise money at about $15B valuation

• Wall Street's Crypto Ambitions Dealt a Setback by Latest Hack

Economicon / Business / Finance

• JetBlue Responds to Accusations of Using Surveillance Pricing After Viral Tweet

• Emails show Amazon colluded to raise prices, California authorities allege

  • California Accuses Amazon of Price Fixing in Legal Filing

  • Amazon 'strong-armed' Levi's, Hanes to hike prices on rival sites, DA says

  • Internal emails show how Amazon raises prices across the Internet, lawsuit says

• Amazon behind on jobs promised for funding to build Virginia headquarters

• Spirit Airlines in Talks with Trump Administration on Government Investment

• US recession probabilities implied by the yield curve

• Jersey Mike's confidentially files for IPO

• Apple Thrived in 15 Years Under Tim Cook

  • Tim Cook's Rotten Apple

• Top condom maker to raise prices sharply as Iran war strains supply

• The Oil Market Breaking Point Is Here

• Hawaii and Alaska Are Feeling the Brunt of the Energy Shock

• Ford, GM May Delay New Car Production in Favor of Weapons For Iran War.

Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making

• A major US court case could help fix the ills of Citizens United

• FBI Director Kash Patel Sues Atlantic Over Friday’s Article.

• US Supreme Court to assess FCC power to fine in clash with wireless carriers

• New York's New Budget Will Mandate 3D Printer Gun File Censorware

• FAA sets records in effort to hire gamers as air traffic controllers

• California has more money than projected after admin miscalculated state budget

• Southern Poverty Law Center says it's being investigated by Justice Department over paid informants

  The Justice Department is allegedly investigating the Southern Poverty Law Center in connection with the group's use of paid informants to infiltrate extremist organizations decades ago.

• US intel secretly flagged major 2020 election vulnerabilities, including voter data, memo shows

  Porter said much of this information was ordered declassified by then-President Trump, but that CIA leaders refused to publicly release a report on the suspected Chinese threats to election infrastructure. "The President of the United States personally ordered this information declassified and shared with the public because he thought election integrity was so important to our country. Despite this, CIA leaders at the time refused to release the declassified report," "Years later, when he was reelected, CIA went so far as to claim that the report had never been declassified. Even the record of its declassification had been removed from the system," he said.

Democrats

• ActBlue Is Toast, and Democrats Now Have a Massive Problem

  The outside law firm Covington & Burling made the stakes explicit in a February 2025 internal memo, warning that "it could be alleged that ActBlue accepted and/or facilitated the acceptance of foreign-national contributions into American elections,” which, obviously, is a federal crime.

• Dershowitz: Democrats Just Converted Me Through Their Anti-Israel Hate

  There is no denying that the hard left, anti-Israel wing of the Democratic Party has moved from the fringe to the mainstream. Until recently there was an age gap, with younger voters more strongly opposing Israel, but recent polls suggest that the trend now includes Democrats of all ages. Republicans have their own antisemitic fringe, but for now it remains a fringe.

• Scandal-Riddled Dem Congresswoman Resigns

  Rep. Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick, who was found guilty of ethics violations after stealing significant amounts of federal funds for her own campaign and personal luxury shopping, has resigned from Congress. Cherfilus-McCormick appropriated over $5 million in COVID-19 relief from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to her campaign. Not only was she using this taxpayer money for her personal political campaign, which is against federal law, but she even used the taxpayer money for luxury purchases such as a 3.14-carat yellow diamond ring, according to the New York Post. She is also guilty of a "straw donors scheme."

Left Angst

• Washington Rewrites the Rules of Funding Technological Innovation

• Republican Rep. Obsessed with Hating Muslims Unveils Mamdani Act

  Republican Representative Chip Roy is taking aim at free speech and freedom of religion, introducing a bill that would target immigrants who support “socialism, communism, Chinese communism, Marxism, or Islamic fundamentalism.” Roy calls his assault on the First Amendment to the Constitution the “MAMDANI Act,” after New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who was elected last year on a platform of democratic socialism. The legislation would make any “alien” who supports or has supported those ideologies “inadmissible, deportable, denaturalizable, and ineligible for naturalization.” Roy, who is running for Texas attorney general, has a long history of bigotry against Muslims. Late last month, Roy posted “No more Muslims” on X, drawing backlash from Muslims throughout his state. With Republicans having an ever-narrowing majority in the House, the bill is likely just symbolic, but it still shows the level of bigotry and Islamophobia present in the Republican Party and in Texas, even though the state has an estimated 400,000 Muslim residents. Roy will likely face zero consequences for his prejudices, as Republicans are increasingly embracing bigoted conspiracies and opposing constitutional rights.

• Palantir manifesto reads like the ramblings of a comic book villain

  • Palantir manifesto – 'ramblings of a supervillain' amid UK contract fears

  • Alarms Sound over 'Technofascist' Palantir Manifesto

• Homeland Security is making "smart glasses" to collect intelligence on Americans

• Democrats Demand Trump Halt Plan to Collect Federal Workers' Health Data

• Trump Considers Bailing Out His Family's Major Business Partner

• Return of the Saturday Night Special, Courtesy of the SEC

  In a genuinely shocking display of regulatory hubris, the SEC just announced via an “Exemptive Order” the most significant change to the tender offer rules in a generation. The Order shortens the minimum period of a cash tender offer for all of an issuer’s outstanding equity securities from 20 business days to 10. In combination with the Delaware’s well-known statutory and common law, this change gives target management remarkable capacity to lock up a friendly deal and could usher in a new era of the “Saturday night special,” the quick takeover of “proud old companies” that provided rhetorical fuel for adoption of the Williams Act in 1968. More generally, the exemptive order is likely to trigger a new wave of takeovers that seek to take advantage of the shortened period of deal exposure to potential competitors by lowering deal prices.

• Scammer Used an AI-Generated MAGA Girl to Grift 'Super Dumb' Men

• The 'unregistered Americans': because of their parents, they do not exist

• Former D.C. U.S. Attorney Joe diGenova Takes Over Leadership of "Grand Conspiracy" Investigation in Florida -- Why That Is Necessary.

  For 12 of the 16 years from 2008 to 2024 Democrat Presidential Administrations engaged in deliberate hiring practices in order to rid DOJ of the vast majority of experienced conservative trial attorneys who joined from 2000 to 2008.

• A Year After USAID'S Death, Fired Workers Find Few Jobs and Much Loss

• What America Has Lost in the War with Iran

Law Breaking / Police / Internal Security

• Florida Man Working as Ransomware Negotiator Pleads Guilty to Ransomware Attacks

External Security / Militaria / Diplomania

• The US and Europe are still stronger together

• Pentagon pulls the plug on one of the military's most troubled space programs

  The Global Positioning System Next-Generation Operational Control System, known by the acronym OCX, was officially canceled by Michael Duffey, the Pentagon’s defense acquisition executive, on Friday, April 17, the Space Force said. The decision to terminate the OCX program ends a 16-year, multibillion-dollar effort to design, test, and deliver a command and control system for the military’s constellation of GPS navigation satellites.

  The Pentagon awarded the OCX contract to Raytheon, now known as RTX Corporation, in 2010, with a timetable for completion in 2016 at a cost of $3.7 billion. Budget projections to finish the program grew to nearly $8 billion, nearly as much as the cost of an entire fleet of some 30 new GPS satellites. The schedule for OCX extended out a decade longer than anticipated. RTX finally delivered the control system to the Space Force last year, but further tests revealed it was still not ready for GPS operations.

• Pete Hegseth scraps mandatory flu shots for U.S. service members

  • Flu vaccine no longer mandated for US troops

• U.S. Considers Financial Support for Oil-Rich UAE

• U.S. Personnel Who Died in Mexico Were Working for the CIA, Sources Say

  Two U.S. officials who died in Mexico on Sunday worked for the Central Intelligence Agency, two sources told The Intercept. They are among the first known fatalities of PresideFnt Donald Trump’s expanding drug war in Latin America. The American personnel died in a vehicular crash in the mountains of the Sierra de Chihuahua following a drug raid, alongside two Mexican officials, including Román Oseguera Cervantes, the director of the Chihuahua State Investigation Agency.

• Air Force can't quit the A-10 Warthog, extends service into 2030

World

• Milei's New Order Is Running into Argentina's Old Problems

• Japan warns of increased risk of earthquakes at M8.0 or stronger

  • Japan lifts ban on lethal arms exports for first time since second world war

• With Orban Out, the Pianist András Schiff Plans a Return to Hungary

• In major policy shift, Japan scraps limits on lethal arms exports

• Ancient Mughal tradition of pigeon-rearing thrives in India's capital

• Smoking ban for people born after 2008 in the UK agreed

• Microsoft must face $2.8B UK lawsuit over cloud computing licences

• As wars throttle gas, Japan is embracing nuclear

• Challenge over Met Police's use of live facial recognition lost

• The problem with Europe's Big Tech breakup: It's still hooked

Iran / Houthi

• Iran claims US backdoors knocked out networking equipment

• Iran cargo ship seized by US could become ‘spoils of war.’

• Trump says the US will extend its ceasefire with Iran at Pakistan's request

  President Donald Trump said Tuesday the United States is extending its ceasefire with Iran at Pakistan’s request as he waits for a unified proposal from the Islamic Republic. The announcement came as last-minute ceasefire talks between the U.S. and Iran looked uncertain and a two-week truce was set to expire Wednesday.

Israel

• Israeli soldiers using sexual assault to force Palestinians out of West Bank

Russia Bad / Ukraine War

• 'Robots don't bleed': Ukraine sends machines into battle in place of humans

  • Ukraine, Short on Troops, Is Turning to Robots to Help Its War Efforts

• Russian economy is faltering despite oil windfall, Sweden warns

• Mass shooting reignites push to loosen gun laws in war-torn Ukraine

• Russia Is Building Tomorrow's War Machine

• Zelensky says failure of US envoys to visit Kyiv is 'disrespectful'

• Ukraine Proposes Renaming Part of the Donbas in Trump's Honor

China

• China's energy fortress was built to withstand just this type of oil shock

Health / Medicine

• Study suggests eating fruits and vegetables leads to cancer

• Influencers Are Spinning Nicotine as a 'Natural' Health Hack

• 'Uber for nurses': gig-work apps lobby to deregulate healthcare, report finds

• Vaccines mean malaria deaths should be falling – not rising

• Usage of psychedelic psilocybin rises after state decriminalization

Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda

• Denver Water draining, closing Antero Reservoir for drought savings

• Salmon exposed to cocaine and its main byproduct roam more widely

• Global growth in solar "the largest ever observed for any source"

• Digging for clues about the North Pole's past

• Lead chromate pigments dominate lead paints sold in Mexico

• Air is full of DNA

• As Oceans Warm, Great White Sharks Are Overheating

• Long-term cigarette butts' decomposition over 10 years

• Why spring smells like semen and rotting fish.