2026-07-01

etc

• How Minerals Create the Dazzling Colors of Independence Day Fireworks

• A Florida Condo Began Collapsing Weeks Before Anyone Knew

  In the early morning of June 24, 2021, a high-rise condominium building collapsed in South Florida, killing 98 people. Investigators uncovered the litany of errors and missteps that led to this avoidable tragedy.

  • NIST Releases Technical Findings on What Caused the 2021 Partial Collapse of Champlain Towers South

  Following an extensive technical investigation, the team has concluded that the collapse began in early June 2021, when two connections between garage columns and the pool deck failed. These initial column failures caused cracks to grow and loads to redistribute in the pool deck over the next three weeks, resulting in the transfer of their loads to adjacent slab-column connections that were not strong enough to support them. This led to the larger catastrophic collapse on June 24.

  “The low margins against failure were primarily caused by two factors,” explained Bell. “First, severe and widespread deviations in the building’s original structural design from the codes and standards of the day, but also some limitations in those codes and standards. And second, deviations in the building’s construction from the design drawings.”

Horseshit

• JetBlue flight hit drone while approaching JFK airport, FAA says

• Simulate altitude training by tilting your bed

• Artifacts dating back 400,000 years show ‘complex and rich’ pre-human society

• Should every baby's DNA be sequenced?

• ‘Logan’s Run’ at 50: Remembering this disco-age sci-fi classic on its golden anniversary.

• I Spent a Week in a Hacker House

• A pediatrician stands by her parenting advice despite a backlash

  The four pieces of “unhinged” advice I’ve given in my office:

  1. Take a girls’ trip to wean your baby off the breast.
  2. You need a date night more than your baby needs you at every single bedtime.
  3. Don’t make separate meals. Your kids eat what you eat, or they don’t eat.
  4. Let your kid fail.

• The Tech Innovations Readers Want to See in the Next 20 Years

• Will machines replace humans? A chess grandmaster has thoughts

• When Earth Was an Asteroid Rain Hell

• Can a $60 Plastic Cube Solve Our Screen-Time Crisis?

• Forget Work. Passive Income Is the New American Dream

• Microsoft’s Topological Quantum Computing Claims Once Again In Question

  For a few years now Microsoft’s quantum computing department (Azure Quantum) has made claims here of major progress, which have subsequently repeatedly been shot down in peer review.

• New Sweden: the US's long-lost 'secret' colony

  From 1638-1655, this forgotten Swedish settlement extended across the Delaware Valley, encompassing parts of modern-day New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware and Maryland. In addition to being the smallest, least-populated and shortest-lived European colony in the US, it was also the most clandestine. It started as sort of secret colony," said Deborah-Jean Hoffman, a board member at the New Sweden Centre, which promotes the Delaware Valley's colonial history. "The Swedes weren't flag-planting like the French or the Spanish. The idea was to create an under-the-radar colony where the Dutch wouldn't see them."

• A Founder's Previously Unknown Attempt to Avert the Revolutionary War

• The Freedom of Not Trying to Look Good

• Recovered Memories Aren't Real

  You may have read about the dueling lawsuits concerning the bestselling 2025 memoir The Tell. In the book, Amy Griffin describes “recovering” memories in therapy, memories of being sexually assaulted as a child by a middle school teacher, aided by the use of psychedelics. In a grim twist, Griffin is being sued by a woman named Joleene Altum who claims Griffin stole her story, root and branch. (That’s one way to recover a memory….) Griffin has countersued. Reading about the whole sordid affair, I thought three things. One, at this point I assume memoirs are untrue unless I have compelling evidence to believe otherwise, whether that’s fair to memoirists or not. Two, the publishing world and book media sure do roll out the red carpet for those with immense privilege; Griffin is a venture capitalist and (like Belle Burden) a fabulously rich woman. And, three, I cannot believe that recovered or repressed memories appear in our media with such regularity and with so little skepticism. Because recovered memories, at least in the way they’re conceptualized in the public mind, are not real.

• Will Earth survive the Sun's death? New study suggests it might.

Epstein

• Warren Buffett skips donation to Gates Foundation amid Epstein review

Rank Propaganda / Thought Policing / World Disordering

• The Drivers, Dynamics, and Applications of the Pro-Russia Influence Ecosystem

Musk

• Did Elon Musk Kill Millions?

  The claim is that Musk and DOGE killed, or will kill, millions of people; that the rollback of USAID can be translated into one of the great death tolls of the modern era; that projected deaths from unreliable models should be treated as essentially confirmed casualties. Nope. Sorry, but that’s not how this works. If you want to say certain programs should have been preserved, make that argument. If you want to say the cuts were too abrupt, make that argument. But if you want to accuse someone you dislike politically of killing on the scale of the Civil War every single year, then you do not get to wave around fragile models, online counters, and gross estimates that explicitly do not account for adaptation, and then act as if the matter is settled—especially not when the actual evidence that arrived afterward failed to bear out the catastrophe they predicted.

• Doubt that Elon Musk 'earned' his trillion?

• SpaceX IPO Left Mirae with No Shares on Misunderstanding

• SpaceX may donate stock to Trump's savings accounts for kids

Electric / Self Driving cars

• Ferrari's marketing boss quits after troubled EV debut

• Ferrari and BMW join Tesla, China in switch from copper to aluminium

Robot uprising / Humanoid Helpers

• DoorDash robot refuses to leave SWAT operation in Arizona

• China's humanoid robots captivated the world, a rental market shows their limits

Edumacationalizing / Acedemia Nuts

• They're in Their 60s and Their Student Loans Won't Let Them Retire

• Students are doing worse than you think

• New Student Loan Rules Are Poised to Amp Up Pressure on Colleges

• Salt Lake City's falling birth rate means more schools are likely to close

• ArXiv to start new chapter as nonprofit

• Cornerstone University launches ‘100%’ smartphone business degree.

  Students pay a fixed rate of $2,400 per four-month term or $3,750 for the graduate level work. The intended audience is working adults.

Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising

• Another Major Cable TV Provider is Preparing For Bankruptcy Tomorrow

  EchoStar Corporation’s satellite television subsidiary Dish DBS is set to file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection as early as Tuesday, marking a significant step in the company’s long-running effort to restructure its heavy debt load amid declining traditional pay-TV subscribers and ongoing regulatory challenges, according to the Wall Street Journal.

• Apple iPhone 18 Pro supplier list, parts and photos exposed in Tata data leak

  • Apple iPhone 18 Pro supplier list, parts and photos exposed in Tata data leak

• A history of John Romero wishing Sandy Petersen well before nuking his tweets

• Bandcamp has laid off most of their engineers

• T-Mobile Just Ripped 8M Customers Off Their Grandfathered Plans

  • T-Mobile to automatically upgrade some legacy phone plans to higher-price plans

• Comcast plans to spin off NBCUniversal in strategy reversal

  • Comcast Split Shows Bigger Is No Longer Seen As Better In The Media Business.

• The Steam Cube hasn't even started shipping and the first clones are here.

• AMD Radeon GPUs Can Now Run NVIDIA PhysX Games With 3x Boost Thanks To ZLUDA, Without Requiring A Dedicated PhysX GPU

• Sony Deletes 551 StudioCanal Movies PlayStation Owners Paid For

  • Sony erases digital content from libraries; reminded we don't own what we buy

  • PlayStation to wipe 551 films from customers' accounts

• US offers $10M for info on group behind Signal and WhatsApp hacking spree

• July Xbox layoffs rumored to be 'largest in gaming history'

• Nvidia resurrects older graphics cards as RAM demands impact tech prices

• GTA 6 is shaping up to be a disaster for retailers

Space / Boomy Zoomers / UFO

• New Glenn Return to Flight

  To return to flight this year, we're not rebuilding the same pad. We're going straight to a horizontal/vertical hybrid CONOPS we had already been developing for our 9x4 New Glenn launch vehicle, using existing infrastructure, skipping a new transporter-erector, and creating a common CONOPS across two pads. Our road to space doesn't pause here. We will return to flight by the end of this year.

• NASA makes moves to dodge costly delays on its path to build a $30B moon base

AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World

• Chinese Hedge Funds Warn the AI 'Super Bubble' Is Ready to Burst

• The "I don't know, Claude wrote this" pandemic

• Heavy corporate AI spenders add staff faster than peers

• There's this mystery of what, actually, is this thing?: DeepMind's philosopher

• A Berkeley AI professor makes provocative argument for decelerating AI research

• An Explosion of AI Slop Is Pushing People Offline and Back into the Real World

• AI Data Centers Have Been Great for the Steel Industry, Now a Power Crisis Looms

• 'Humanity has chosen to become idiots': Brown professor discovers mass cheating

• AI money is going to swamp the midterms this year

• Companies Are Making Claude, Codex Talk Like Cavemen to Stop AIs Soaring Costs

• The AI jobs debate just got messier

• People Who Will Thrive in the AI Age

• AI drives a boom in new games but big developers dominate

• The One Simple Reason A.I. Won't Steal All Our Jobs

• The AI Industry Is Losing

  Oracle pivoted to serving AI compute at a time when its core business lines had started to stagnate, and thanks to its large scale, it was able to raise insane amounts of debt. And Oracle, as I’ve noted previously, is a company that, even before the AI bubble, was massively indebted. It just so happens that, as a result of its tryst with OpenAI, Larry Ellison saw fit to twist the debt knob to eleven.

  There is no cogent or rational argument in favor of continued capital expenditures, at least not one without a tacit acceptance that much of the current spend has been a waste outside of pumping equities and incubating two different large, unprofitable AI labs. Those millions of H100 and B200 and B300 GPUs are not going to usher in a digital God, they are not going to create recursive self-improvement, they are not going to be the fulcrum to adding $600 billion or more in brand new revenue to current services, and the only revenue they’re generating is compute spend from Anthropic and OpenAI, which I estimate makes up 20% or more of cloud revenues for Google, Amazon, and Microsoft.

  Another worrying sign is that SoftBank was unable to raise a $6 billion margin loan with its entire OpenAI stake — likely valued, at least on paper, at over $100 billion — as collateral. This suggests banks have little faith in the company. Some might believe that Anthropic has a better chance, and I’m just not sure there’s much that differentiates it from OpenAI anymore, other than how annoying Dario Amodei is and how much he appears to piss off the Trump administration.

• County with 37 Data Centers Asks Schools to 'Conserve Electricity'

• Scammers Sell Seeds for Exotic AI-Generated Flowers That Don't Exist

• The AI boom is colliding with a new threat: weather

• AWS puts $1B into new AI unit to embed engineers with customers

• What AI Will Do to Art

• How the AI bubble could pop and take down the global economy according to BIS

• Claude Sonnet 5 is here

  • Real-time cyber safeguards on Claude Opus and Sonnet

  • Claude Sonnet 5

• Google introduces a faster, cheaper image generator with Nano Banana 2 Lite

• Trump to lift limits on Anthropic's Fable model

  • Department of Commerce has lifted export controls on Claude Fable 5 and Mythos 5

  • Anthropic Mythos & Fable 5 export restrictions lifted

• As better chatbots get harder to build, AI turns to simulated worlds

Neo Gambling / Crypto con games

• Zuckerberg Urges Meta to Explore Working with Polymarket and Kalshi

• Crypto firms have spent $189M so far on 2026 US election, report says

• Visa, Stripe, Coinbase and more join Open USD stablecoin

Economicon / Business / Finance

• Same Product, Same Store, but on Instacart, Prices Might Differ

• Oil stocks in US Strategic Reserve fall by 5.5M – lowest level since 1983

• Silicon Valley Is Obsessed with 'Trust Stacking,' and the IRS Doesn't Like It

• Cisco to lay off more than 400 workers in California

• Super Micro Office Raided as Taiwan Expands Nvidia Chip Smuggling Probe

• America Didn’t Lose Its Tradesmen by Accident.

• Earnings Forecasts Are on Steroids

• Workers' share of income explains why many Americans are down on the economy

• New Business Formation Is Surging–Again

• UK may intervene in $110B Paramount-Warner Bros Discovery deal

• DOJ Requires Egg Producers to End Coordinated Benchmark Manipulation

  Defendants conspired to inflate Urner Barry’s price quotations by agreeing to: (1) submit a large number of bids; (2) cause multiple Defendants to bid in order to signal to Urner Barry that a diverse set of market participants needed to buy eggs; (3) submit a large number of bids in the hours leading up to the publication of Urner Barry’s price quotations; (4) submit bids that were unlikely to lead to executed trades; and (5) execute trades at premium prices. As the complaint also alleges, egg price quotations dropped significantly from their peak after Defendants learned of the Department’s investigation and were instructed to preserve documents in March 2025.

  • Raise your own chickens. I ain't cheaper, but it's better eggs than you can buy in a store.

• Remote Work Is Making It Harder for Grads to Find (and Keep) Jobs

• Lawsuit alleges that RAM manufacturers are colluding to drive up prices

• Volkswagen's Crisis in Five Charts

• The U.S. Added 1,200 New Millionaires a Day Last Year

Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making

• Supreme Court upholds broad conception of birthright citizenship

  • People were expecting this was the decision based on the lack of security around the Court.

  • (PDF) “Children born in the United States to parents unlawfully or temporarily present are “subject to the jurisdiction” of the United States and are citizens at birth under the Fourteenth Amendment’s Citizenship Clause.”

  • Supreme Court rejects Trump bid to restrict birthright citizenship

  • Supreme Court strikes down executive order ending birthright citizenship

  • US Supreme Court upholds birthright citizenship in loss for Trump

• Supreme Court strikes down limits on party spending in federal elections

• Supreme Court Delivers Landmark Title IX Win for Women's Sports

  With today's decision, the Supreme Court, putting it broadly, appears to have affirmed that girls' and women's sports may be restricted to girls and women.

  • Supreme Court upholds state bans on trans athletes in girls' sports

• Supreme Court ruling guts government's use of geofence warrants

• NPR retracts story about Alito retirement

  NPR legal affairs correspondent Nina Totenberg misheard an announcement about retirements as she was leaving the U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday. As a result, an NPR headline erroneously claimed that Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito was retiring. The headline sat atop a lengthy story that recapped the conservative justice's tenure. The error was also reported on NPR's airwaves. Alito is not retiring. The story was wrong.

  • NPR’s Justice Alito ‘Retirement’ Scoop Lasted About 10 Minutes.

• Illinois lawmakers crack down on junk fees, bots in online ticket sales

• After Deadly D.C. Crash, FAA Moves Toward Sweeping Aircraft-Technology Mandate

  The aircraft-tracking technology has two components: ADS-In and ADS-B Out. Many aircraft such as those operated by commercial carriers are already required to broadcast their location information via ADS-B Out. he potential new mandate is expected to apply to military and other aircraft and in more swaths of U.S. civilian airspace, the people said. Aircraft would also be required to have ADS-B In, which would enable pilots to see information from other planes nearby to avoid collisions.

• Fears CIA's mind-control program is still experimenting on Americans

  The CIA's Wild West era of mind control, bioweapons and secret human experiments may still be going on, bombshell testimony at a congressional hearing alleged. On Tuesday, the House Oversight Committee heard from two experts who have investigated the actions of the secretive government program known as MKUltra that was exposed to the American public in the 1970s. O’Neill added: 'Is it happening today? Did it continue? I don't know. I can't imagine that it didn't, though, because the technology they worked to establish over 20-25 years and spent more money than any operation the CIA ever conducted was successful. I imagine it's being used; I have no evidence it's being used.'

• Kids online safety package clears House

Trump

• Trump signs presidential memo that gives Americans more options to fix their cars.

• Clash Unfolds as Trump Admin Pushes Intel Agencies to Share Espionage Targets

Democrats

• ‘Ro’ Me the Money! How Progressive Class Warrior Ro Khanna Lives Like the Oligarchs He ‘Fights,’ With In-Home Elevator, $190K Range Rover, and Family-Owned Golf Courses.

  Khanna lives in a $6 million, 8,000-square-foot luxury home with a four-story elevator and so much premium marble that even the two laundry rooms have marble counters. The Northwest Washington, D.C., home is now for sale, as the Khanna family prepares to move to an even larger, more expensive house a few miles away in the Northern Virginia suburbs. Khanna’s two children, who are minors, have large ownership shares in three private golf clubs, a significant stake in a $65 billion wealth management firm, and investments in hedge funds that focus on distressed debt, of which Khanna has been critical. Khanna’s wife drives a $190,000 Range Rover she was so displeased with that she sued the dealer.

• ‘No New Cops!’ Mamdani Ally Brags NYC Won’t End Up Hiring More Police

Left Angst

• The US ambassador had Belgian police stop our reporting

  After asking an American ambassador a question he didn't like at an event, we were detained by Belgian police and removed from it

• US Supreme Court Just Blew Up EU-US Data Transfers

  On Monday, the US Supreme Court decided in Trump v. Slaughter that the US Federal Trade Commission (“FTC”) may not be independent anymore. Since 2000, the EU has relied on the “independent” FTC as the enforcer of EU-US deals on personal data. According to EU treaty law, such oversight must be independent. In the current EU-US deal, the European Commission relies on the independent FTC 259 (!) times. Max Schrems: “Given that there are no independent authorities in the US anymore, we call on the European Commission to orderly withdraw the adequacy decision on the US.”

• Supreme Court takes sledgehammer to federal regulatory structure

• ICE Tracks Down Woman to Force Her to Delete Instagram Post

• American Pride Falls to 25-Year Record Low

• After Trump's reelection, these U.S. scientists found jobs in the U.K

• Trump's plan to redesign every .gov website leads to AI-designed horrors

• Trump Reports at Least $1.4B in 2025 Crypto Earnings

  • Donald Trump made more than $1B last year in return to presidency

• The new political screening that's stalling NIH grants

Law Breaking / Police / Internal Security

• Exiled Chinese Tycoon Gets 30 Years in Prison for Billion-Dollar Fraud

  • Chinese tycoon sentenced to 30 years in US jail

  New York court judge Analisa Torres said Guo had "preyed on those seeking to bring democracy to China", taking their money to fund his lavish lifestyle.

  • Chinese tycoon Guo Wengui sentenced to 30 years in US prison for fraud

External Security / Militaria / Diplomania

• U.S. declaration to exit USMCA to start a decade-long countdown for the pact

  U.S. President Donald Trump's administration is expected to formally declare on Wednesday that it will not extend the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement on trade, starting a decade-long clock to wind down the 32-year-old North American free trade zone as the three ‌countries haggle over proposed changes. That declaration will kick off a six-year review session, part of a "sunset clause" negotiated by President Donald Trump's first ‌administration. However, it will do little to alter contentious negotiations over the pact's future, including sweeping demands to boost U.S. and regional content in North American automotive production and trade protections to block ​Chinese goods from benefiting from USMCA.

• US is working on ban targeting Chinese energy inverters, sources say

• US Army Women Are More Likely to Be Killed by Army Men Than by War

World

• Australia's competition regulator sues Amazon over Prime subscription terms

  • ACCC sues Amazon over alleged unfair conduct for introducing Prime streaming ads

• 'Swiss Elon Musk' jailed for fraud

• ESA bafflingly declares private Minecraft servers 'illegal'

• Samsung, SK Hynix to Spend $520B on Chip Plants in South Korea

• Swiss e-ID delayed to beef up security

• What you need to know about new customs charges when buying from outside the EU

• UK watchdog plans to break Apple and Google's 'effective duopoly' on app stores

Iran / Houthi

• An inside look at how the war has damaged Iran's historic sites

Russia Bad / Ukraine War

• Russian politician says GTA 6 carries 'the stench of Americanism'

• What a Russian Army Collapse Might Look Like

China

• China's Geely to Ship First Lotus EVs to Canada

• New EV-makers keep appearing in China

• China Prepares Its First Asteroid Landing on Earth's Quasi-Moon

• The Unity Asset Store is ditching publishers based in China and Hong Kong

• World Bank to phase out China lending

Health / Medicine

• Medicare will start covering weight-loss drugs on July 1 for the first time. Here’s what you need to know.

• Millions take omega-3 fish oil for brain health but a new study found no benefit

• FDA allows ZYN to sell pouches on health benefits

  The Food and Drug Administration will announce today that it will allow Zyn nicotine pouches to be marketed as less harmful to human health than cigarettes. Though scientists generally agree that the language is accurate and the pouches — which contain nicotine but not tobacco — are a safer option for smokers, critics worry about the appeal to young people. The FDA will allow 20 Zyn products to be marketed with the claim that "using ZYN instead of cigarettes puts you at a lower risk of mouth cancer, heart disease, lung cancer, stroke, emphysema, and chronic bronchitis."

Pox / COVID / BioTerror AgitProp

• Rare tick-borne virus turns deadly fast as US cases reach record high

  A rare and potentially fatal tick-borne illness currently spreading across the United States can be traced back to a 1958 case involving a young boy on a farm. The disease, known as Powassan virus, was named for the Ontario town near where it was first discovered. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 76 Americans were diagnosed with the virus in 2025, the highest annual total on record. Previously, the U.S. averaged just seven to eight diagnoses each year.

  • Dangerous tick-borne virus on the rise in the U.S.

Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda

• Compare to China's score: Paris deputy mayor blames the US's carbon emissions for deadly heat wave

  • EU Commission HQ forced to shut down air-conditioning amid heatwave

  • Britons ordered to remove air conditioning from homes in 40C heat under Net Zero

  • Chinese pigs have air conditioning, while many Europeans can’t because of government rules

• Beyond Denial How Oil Execs Shaped a Landmark Climate Study

• The emergence of human influence on the ozone layer by the 1960s

• Native American Tribes Secured Rights to Colorado River; States Are Stalling

• How do wombats poop cubes? Scientists get to the bottom of the mystery

• Climate Activists ‘Exaggerating,’ Liberal Journalist Says, Denouncing ‘Shrill Eco-Catastrophism:’ ‘Nose-ringed Just Stop Oil pests’ hurt environmental movement with mainstream voters.

• Scientists estimate there could be 20M species, triple what was thought

• Are there 14 million more insect species than previously thought?

• USDA opens sterile fly plant to fight screwworm as case grow in Texas.

• World Bank to abandon goal to devote 45% of lending to climate change projects

• Too many satellites? Earth's orbit is on track for a catastrophe

• China's Great Green Wall: 66B trees growing faster than natural forests