2026-05-27

etc

• WA paper plant: 'Major chemical explosion' kills, injures multiple people

• Chemistry behind the Garden Grove chemical tank

  Poly(methyl methacrylate) or PMMA itself was first commercialized in the early 1930s, and it’s familiar under a lot of early brand names like Plexiglas, Perspex, and Lucite. Acrylic paint is PMMA in water with pigments, along with some additives to keep everything homogeneous.

Horseshit

• Enhanced Games: Think Olympics with No Rigid Doping Rules

• Medieval King Arthur manuscript could fetch £2M at auction

• A look inside ITER, the world's largest fusion energy project

• Why Is It So Hard to Be Ordinary?

• Why the smart home bubble popped

• Scientists MayHave Foundthe Blueprint of the HumanBody Atthe Bottom of the Ocean

• Egypt's Great Pyramid is also a great earthquake dampener

• Dog shoots woman with shotgun at Nebraska convenience store

  Local TV station KNOP News 2 reported that police in the town of Scottsbluff were called out to a local store recently after reports of a blast involving a shotgun. Upon arrival they found a truck with blast damage in one of its doors and a woman who had been struck in the arm by a pellet from a shotgun. However, investigation showed a canine cause behind the shooting when it was revealed the blast happened as the vehicle had pulled up to the store as a dog had been moving from one side of its back seat to another. Somehow, the dog had triggered the shotgun – which had a live round chambered – to fire, damaging the vehicle and striking a female passerby. The victim was taken to hospital though not seriously injured.

• Sometimes, the Best Way to Explore a Landscape Is to Sit Down

• Success Is 'Monotasking'

• The Great Depopulation

• `A sense of trusting one's self': how to start building confidence

• Why some children have iPad-induced rage

• A Luxury Survivalist Community Is Tearing Itself Apart

Epstein

• How A Secretive Firm Tried (& Failed) to Fix an Epstein Friend's Tattered Image

Obit

• Jazz legend Sonny Rollins dies aged 95

  • Sonny Rollins, Jazz’s Saxophone Colossus and Greatest Improvisor, Dead at 95

  • Sonny Rollins Is Dead

Rank Propaganda / Thought Policing / World Disordering

• Wikipedia Whitewashes Mao – The Anatomy of Ideological Capture

Musk

• Battery-powered Starlink Mini is likely on the way

• Pentagon spars with SpaceX over Starlink price hike during Iran war

• SpaceX to drive a Cybertruck through corporate governance norms

• SpaceX's AI Pursuits Have yet to Take Off

• Index funds can't say no to SpaceX

• Musk's Grandiose Media Ambitions Are Now a Real Threat to Some Major Players

Electric / Self Driving cars

• Autonomous bus collided with tram on its first day of service in Sweden

  • Self-Driving bus in Sweden crashes with tram on first day of passenger service

• Ferrari's New Jony Ive–Designed EV Is Swathed in Glass and Aluminum

  • Ferrari Reveals $640k EV Co-Designed by Jony Ive

  • Ferrari Falls After Disappointing Reviews of Its First EV

  • Ferrari shares fall after carmaker unveils first electric vehicle

  • Ferrari shares fall after launch of first EV as Jony Ive design proves divisive

• Waymo suspends all freeway rides over safety issues

• Why New York's push to regulate e-bikes just slammed on the brakes

Edumacationalizing / Acedemia Nuts

• Peter Higgs: I wouldn't be productive enough for today's academic system

• America's schools face a backlash on digital devices

  • America's schools face backlash on digital devices as screens saturate classroom

• Centennial, Franklin high schools hold graduations in torrential downpour

  Heavy rains Thursday night did not stop high school graduations in Williamson County. Both Centennial High School and Franklin High School read the names of their graduating class in a torrential downpour. Students dressed in caps and gowns walked across the stage as the rain fell.

Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising

• HP customer claims firmware update shoved printer off support cliff

• Microsoft to Publishers: Don't Block the AI Bots

• Standard WiFi can identify individuals with near-perfect accuracy

• Tech CEOs summoned to Congress for another hearing on social media's risks

• Motorola phones have started hijacking the Amazon app to insert affiliate codes

• SK Group chairman says memory chip shortage will last until 2030

• Chinese Memory Flood Could Drop DRAM and SSD Prices

• Publishing's Latest Piracy Problem: Audiobooks on YouTube

• Foldable iPhone Reportedly Facing Mass Production Issues

• 7-Eleven data breach exposes personal information of 185,000 people

• Capacitors: Guess what else the PC industry is short of now?

• Nvidia Vera CPU seems to beat AMD and Intel on server workloads

• Nvidia has retired its GeForce Control Panel app after 20 years

• US Supreme Court won't hear Meta's challenge to Vermont social media lawsuit

  • Supreme Court rejects Meta's appeal in Vermont social media addiction case

• Modern Blu-ray drives can now rip GameCube, Wii, and Xbox 360 games to PC

• California push bill to exempt open-source projects from age verification law

TechSuck / Geek Bait

• Linux to Drop ARCnet Support for Old ISA and PCMCIA Hardware

• Print with dozens of colors: Our new open-source ColorMix for PrusaSlicer

Space / Boomy Zoomers / UFO

• Trump releases new batch of previously classified UFO files

• CIA accused of using Ancestry and 23andMe to 'hunt down' alien bloodlines

  The CIA has been accused of gaining secret access to the DNA information of millions of people as the intelligence agency allegedly searches for alien life on Earth. Jason Reza Jorjani, a philosophy PhD and science fiction writer, recently claimed that he spoke with a retired US Army sergeant who served as a 'psychic spy' and knew of the government's secret program to hunt down individuals with extraterrestrial DNA. Jorjani said on the American Alchemy podcast that the CIA, the nation's premier foreign intelligence agency, has a backdoor program that allows it to search through genetic testing companies such as 23andMe and Ancestry.com.

• Analyst on China's spent rocket stages: "Things only continue to get worse"

  China appears to be ignoring long-established norms about disposing of the upper stages of rockets.

• NASA takes steps toward building Moon Base, including discussing a "perimeter"

AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World

• Pope Leo Compares AI Threat to Biblical 'Tower of Babel'

  • Citing Gandalf, Pope Leo says we must "disarm" AI

  • Notes on Pope Leo XIV's Encyclical on AI

  • Excerpts from Pope Leo XIV's manifesto about humanity in the AI era

  • Pope Leo warns AI should be 'disarmed' in manifesto on potential dangers

  • Main Takeaways from Pope Leo's Encyclical on A.I

  • Overview and Comments on Pope Leo's Magnifica Humanitas on AI

• Uber president says AI spending is getting 'harder to justify'

• Checking the math behind OpenAI and Anthropic's latest headlines

• AI guardrails stripped from Meta and Google models in minutes

• AI Gurus Are Charging Wall Street Banks $25,000 a Day

• $2k/mo: Joi AI is hiring masturbation consultants to test "Daily Guided Masturbation"

  • AI Startup Says It Will Pay People $2k a Month to Masturbate

• The terrifying rise of schoolboys making AI girlfriends

• Artificial Intelligence Floods Court Dockets with Home-Brewed Lawsuits

• This big university system is embracing AI. Students and faculty aren't on board

• Sam Altman: I was wrong, AI unlikely to lead to jobs apocalypse

  • Altman and Amodei both walking back on AI jobs apocalypse prophecies before IPOs

• A reality check on the AI jobs hysteria

• The AI bubble isn't like the internet bubble

• Google is cannibalizing the web to feed AI

• AI tools lead to 'clear racial disparities' in job hiring

• 'BusPatrol' Put AI Cameras in School Buses

• ING's 'Vibe Coding' AI Is Building Its New Trading Systems

• Spotify chief defends AI-generated music

  • Spotify boss defends move to AI music, saying it is better than 'slop'

• Anthropic to release Mythos-class models to the public

• AI Is Taking over the Most Cursed Job in the World

• Managers Are Struggling to Keep Up with the AI Productivity Boom

• What AI race? China and U.S. AI are tightly connected

• Anthropic set to close $30B funding at over $900B valuation

• Microsoft's GitHub was positioned to win AI coding race. Outages got in the way

• Too dangerous to release: is Mythos the start of the restricted-AI era?

• The Despair of the Professor in the Age of A.I

• Rogue states are putting AI agents to work on sanctions evasion

• AI may fuel US business creation, but few signs of similar trend in Canada

• AI chatbots show bias toward Catholicism, researchers say

• The AI Superstars Who Say a 'Vibe Slop' Crisis Is Coming

• There's at Least One Job That AI Isn't Killing

• Bay Area mom out thousands after scammers use AI to mimic daughter's voice

• AI agents are scrambling power users' brains

• Qualcomm strikes AI chip deal with TikTok owner ByteDance

Neo Gambling / Crypto con games

• Crypto code commits fall 75% as developers move to AI projects

• The Average Guys Outsmarting Wall Street on Prediction Markets

• Spain blocks prediction markets Polymarket, Kalshi over lack of gambling licence

Economicon / Business / Finance

• Real wages start to shrink in developed countries

• Taiwan Overtakes India as Fifth-Largest Stock Market

• California landlords turn to squatter removal teams to reclaim property

  In their desperation, owners are increasingly turning to a rising crop of private rights enforcers to solve the problem. That includes Jacobs and his company, ASAP Squatter Removal. "In most industries, swords just don't make any damn sense," Jacobs says. "In this particular one, it actually does." It's also an ingenious marketing ploy in the competitive world of squatter removal services. Jacobs' company has received a healthy amount of media attention from local and international outlets that never fail to mention his sword in the headline.

• Apple has an innovation gap. Will its new CEO fill it?

• A Beautiful Theory Falls to Ugly Data

  For all this theory, there have been almost no direct tests of the Coase Conjecture apart from a handful of lab experiments. Ours is one of the first papers to take the conjecture to the real world. We look at e-books, an unusually clean setting: digital goods are durable, marginal costs are low, resale is limited, and prices can be changed quickly. Using the prices of e-books that are in the public domain as a proxy for marginal cost, we ask: (a) do prices rapidly fall to MC, and (b) does the market clear in the first period? The answer to both is no. E-book prices begin well above MC, sales continue over many periods, and prices don’t even decline monotonically. We reject the Coase Conjecture decisively.

  • How many vendors of e-books are there? Is it in any way a "free" market? Or is this a case of carefully choosing the experiment so the "result" can be used for propaganda? ie; "Economics" as normal.

• PayPal's online checkout empire under siege as rivals squeeze its core business

• Uber, Lyft drivers in Massachusetts form first US ride-share union

• It's not just SpaceX: Big Tech is dominating bond markets too

• Bond traders are surrendering to inflation fears. It’s raising the stakes for Washington.

• Walmart shopper found $3 shoes, then paid 6 times the price at checkout

• Baby Boomers are strangling the economy

• GDP Is a Flawed Measure of Prosperity. Alternatives Are on the Way

• Hedge Funds Are AImaxxing

• Dropbox CEO Drew Houston to step down

• IT Capex Now Accounts for More Than a Third of S&P 500 Capex Spending

• Micron hits $1T market cap for the first time

Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making

• 'Epstein class' has become a populist battle cry in US politics

• US government overpaid welfare and Medicare recipients by $186 billion last year — after a shocking surge.

• Can HawaiʻI Deliver All of America from Citizens United?

Left Angst

• Trump admin shutting key US researchers out of global virus response talks

• We need to add 6k seats to Congress

• As Trump Politicizes Justice Dept., Prosecutors Struggle with Grand Juries

• Supreme Court sides with Trump in fight tied to speech curbs on immigration judges

  The U.S. Supreme Court sided on Tuesday with President Donald Trump's administration ​in a dispute involving a free-speech challenge by federal immigration judges to a U.S. government policy restricting what they can publicly say about immigration. The court's ‌ruling did not address the legality of the policy's speech restraint, which was first implemented in 2017 during Trump's first term as president, and appeared to leave the door open for an association representing the judges to continue pursuing their legal challenge in a lower court. The justices faulted the 4th ​Circuit for basing its ruling on an argument that had not been raised by the National Association of Immigration Judges, violating what is known as the "party-presentation" principle.

• U.S. Seeks to Give Weapons-Grade Plutonium to Startups for Fuel

• Federal judge blocks Alabama redistricting plan

  Alabama Republicans sought to use a previously blocked 2023 congressional map following the Supreme Court’s recent ruling curbing the use of race in the drawing of electoral districts that helped minority communities increase their representation in Congress. Under that map, Republicans were slated to gain one electoral seat by erasing a Black-majority seat held by Democrats in the southeastern part of the state. However, the three-judge panel said Republicans must continue to use a map that has two majority-Black districts where Democrats hold significant advantages. "Ultimately, we cannot see our way clear to requiring Alabamians to cast their votes in the 2026 elections under a districting plan tainted by intentional race-based discrimination," the federal judges wrote. "We again cannot understand the 2023 Plan as anything other than intentionally discriminatory."

  • Supreme Court be damned, this here is Alabama!

• Trump's 25% cut on Nvidia chips to China backfired as Beijing blocks H200 sales

• Trump DOJ mass-deletes info on Jan. 6 riot cases, incl violent assaults on cops

• Trump administration proposes NDAs for federal workers

• Trump Administration to Send Americans Exposed to Ebola to Kenya

Law Breaking / Police / Internal Security

• US Law Enforcement Warns of 'Anti-Tech Extremism'

External Security / Militaria / Diplomania

• US Court Summons Pro-Censorship Brazil Judge Moraes in Rumble Lawsuit

World

• EU plans to fine Google high triple-digit million euro sum, Handelsblatt reports

• FIFA World Cup turns up gentrification pressures in Mexico City, say experts

• Stockholm poised to become leading European geospatial intel player

• Netherlands blocks US takeover of vital digital supplier

  Dutch firm Solvinity runs a platform for the country's DigiD app, which allows the country's citizens to authenticate themselves online when they want to book a doctor's appointment, buy a house or interact with public authorities. In November, U.S.-based Kyndryl announced it would acquire Solvinity, triggering concerns that a key Dutch online identification tool would fall under foreign control. Across Europe, there have been increased concerns about the bloc's reliance on U.S. technology.

• 'Incredible' milestone reached as Sweden becomes a smoke-free country

• Childfree adults to pay more for elder care in Germany

• Ontario man dies of MAID after being assessed outside Tim Hortons

  A London, Ont., doctor who assessed a patient with inflammatory bowel disease and a history of mental health issues for MAID outside a Tim Hortons location and later personally drove the man to the place his life was ended has agreed to a minimum six months’ supervision. In another case, Dr. James MacLean failed to administer one of three drugs used in assisted deaths — one that paralyzes the body’s muscles, including the muscles involved in breathing. The patient resumed spontaneously breathing again after initially being pronounced dead, and after MacLean had already left the home.

  In addition to agreeing to mandatory clinical supervision for at least six months as part of an “undertaking” with the college, MacLean will undergo ongoing review of his MAID patient charts and mandatory professional education related to MAID, consent, documentation, professional boundaries and professional behaviour. After six months, he’ll undergo an assessment of his practice, the results of which “may form the basis of further action by the College,” Laura Zilke, a CPSO spokesperson said in an email to National Post.

• Social media as bad for children as smoking, British doctors say

• Drones crash into Sydney harbour after light show glitch

• Germany's regulator considers rule requiring platforms to boost "trusted" media

• Starlink and Amazon may be able to buy into EU mobile satellite spectrum plan

Iran / Houthi

• Iran appears set to restore internet access after 3-months blackout

  • Internet starts coming back in Iran after months-long blackout

  • Iran president ends Internet blackout, orders access to be restored

  • Iran's access to global internet starts to resume after 88-day blackout

Russia Bad / Ukraine War

• Is Russia Losing the War in Ukraine?

• Russia can falsify GPS signals deep into Europe

China

• For the average price of a car in the US, you could buy 5 new Chinese EVs

• China Limits Overseas Travel for AI Talent at DeepSeek, Alibaba, Private Firms

• In a city of high-rises, 'cardboard grannies' collect waste for cash

• Chinese GPU maker sells out over 30k GPUs within 48h

• Huawei touts chip design breakthrough in bid to defy U.S. sanctions

Health / Medicine

• Ultrasound aimed at the brain offers new hope for Parkinson's patients

• Is "colorectal cancer" rising in "young people"?

  if you are currently young, you face higher CRC risk than previous generations did when they were young. That’s the bad news. The other bad news is that when you are old, you may also face higher CRC risk than previous generations did when they were old.

• Americans Have Entered the Age of the Needle

Pox / COVID / BioTerror AgitProp

• What the Hantavirus Story Reveals About Medical Mistrust

Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda

• Our Warming Planet Is a Petri Dish for New and Deadly Microbes

• Toothless, Beaked Crocodile Ancestor Walked on Two Legs

• A Wetland Without Water

• New Species of Tiny Blue Octopus Discovered in the Galápagos

• Warming to Raise Risk of Encounters with Venomous Snakes

• When Tornado Weather Hits, These Scientists Break Out the Colored Pencils

• When Quiet Undersea Volcanoes Turn Disruptive

• Why Scientists Retired the Dire Climate Scenario Used for over a Decade

• Why is Europe the fastest warming continent?