2026-04-19

Horseshit

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

• Father of man who inspired Super Mario was also named Luigi

• Babies Born from Dead Parents Will Increase with New Tech

• The quiet disappearance of the free-range childhood

• Sprawl was caused by the nuclear arms race

• What life is like when you have an unfortunate surname

• Jonathan the Tortoise Crypto Death Hoax and True Age Question

• SF is obsessed with the safest drivers and ignoring the ones killing people

• Mysterious figure has summited Sphere in Las Vegas: It appears it's Alex Honnold

celebrity gossip

• The Publishing Mystery That No One Wants to Talk About

• Venture capitalist Ron Conway says he has 'rare' cancer

• A fiery attack on Sam Altman's home

• Greta Thunberg’s freedom flotilla rocked by sexual misconduct allegations

Musk

• SpaceX Files FCC Complaint over Ariane 64 Amazon Leo Launch

Robot uprising / Humanioid Helpers

• China humanoid robot half-marathon to showcase technical leaps

Religion / Tribal / Culture War and Re-Segregation

• Men caught competing in women's category of prestigious South African marathon

Edumacationalizing / Acedemia Nuts

• Education research is weak and sloppy. Why?

• The nine-to-five PhD: mere myth or an achievable goal?

• Fifth-grade teacher charged with 25 sex crimes against 2 young students, including rape.

Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising

• Microsoft Increases the FAT32 Limit from 32GB to 2TB

• Tinder and Zoom offer 'proof of humanity' eye-scans to combat AI

• Zuckerberg Is Dangerously Close to Cracking Google's Money Machine

• Tomb Raider Studio Faces Fourth Round of Layoffs in Just 12 Months

• Amazon won't release Fire Sticks that support sideloading anymore

• Amazon is discontinuing Kindle for PC on June 30th

• Hackers are abusing unpatched Windows security flaws to hack into organizations

• Apple TV's Upcoming Cyberpunk Series Will Be the Matrix Meets Blade Runner

• Adobe Has Run Out of Allies

TechSuck / Geek Bait

• It's OK to compare floating-points for equality

• Kitten Space Agency: A technical dive into the inner workings of planetary rings

• The electromechanical angle computer inside the B-52 bomber's star tracker

Space / Boomy Zoomers / UFO

• NASA Shuts Off Instrument on Voyager 1 to Keep Spacecraft Operating

AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World

• A new study found that AI has a higher impact in the home than in the office

• Workers say they're drowing in "workslop"

• Peter Thiel Is Launching an "AI Ministry of Truth" Called Objection

• OpenAI Loses Three Executives in One Day as It Refocuses Ahead of IPO

  • OpenAI loses multiple executives in latest leadership shakeup

• OpenAI's Vision for the AI Economy

• The Abstraction Fallacy: Why AI Can Simulate but Not Instantiate Consciousness

• White House and Anthropic hold meetings over Mythos model

• They Built the 'Cursor for Hardware.' Now, Anthropic Wants In

• Failed Companies Are Selling Old Slack Chats and Email Archives to Train AI

• AI Is Finding More Bugs Than Open-Source Teams Can Fight Off

• Anthropic's relationship with the Trump administration seems to be thawing

• 'Tokenmaxxing' is making developers less productive than they think

• The AI Doomers Who Are Playing with Fire

• Voice actors fight to save their livelihoods from Hollywood's AI push

• Filmmakers defend Val Kilmer movie made with AI

• OpenAI Proposes a 'Social Contract' for the Intelligence Age

• The intelligence illusion: why AI isn't as smart as it is made out to be

• OpenAI Pulls Back from Stargate Norway Data Center Deal as Microsoft Takes Over

• Construction delays hit 40% of US data centers planned for 2026

Neo Gambling / Crypto con games

• US-sanctioned currency exchange says $15 million heist done by "unfriendly states"

  Grinex, a US-sanctioned cryptocurrency exchange registered in Kyrgyzstan, said it’s halting operations after experiencing a $13 million heist carried out by “western special services” hackers. “The digital footprints and nature of the attack indicate an unprecedented level of resources and technology available exclusively to the structures of unfriendly states,” Grinex said. “According to preliminary data, the attack was coordinated with the aim of causing direct damage to Russia’s financial sovereignty.”

• Traders placed over $1B in perfectly timed bets on the Iran war

Economicon / Business / Finance

• Traders place $760M bet on falling oil ahead of Hormuz announcement

• Meta prepares to lay off a tenth of its workforce

  • Meta targets May 20 for first wave of layoffs; additional cuts later in 2026

Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making

• Supreme Court Shadow Docket

• Two Magicians Warn the Supreme Court About Junk Science

• String of missing or dead scientists ‘too coincidental’ not to be major concern, congressman says — as 11th mystery emerges.

  • White House probes wave of missing or dead American scientists

  • White House, FBI looking into case of missing scientists: ‘No stone will be unturned.’

• IMF says America's $39T national debt is a global problem

Trump

• Trump announces reforms to accelerate access to psychedelic drug treatments

Democrats

• Dick Morris Confirms a Huge Rumor About Bill and Hillary Clinton

  Dick Morris has finally confirmed what many people have long suspected: Bill Clinton, while sitting in the Oval Office, seriously entertained the idea of divorcing Hillary — and he had his longtime political advisor run the polls to find out if he could survive it politically.

• Ilhan Omar Says She Isn’t a Multimillionaire, Blames Accounting Error.

• Public Stonings are Not “Accountability:” The high-speed demolition of Eric Swalwell is being celebrated as appropriate “accountability,” but removing due process isn’t justice.

Left Angst

• America lost the Mandate of Heaven

  I love America. I am American. And I wish it had the mandate of heaven. I wish America winning meant peace and prosperity. But when it’s for offensive military and the largest psychologically manipulative corporations in history, how can anyone root for this?

• Many anti-AI arguments are conservative arguments

  Most anti-AI rhetoric is left-wing coded. Popular criticisms of AI describe it as a tool of techno-fascism, or appeal to predominantly left-wing concerns like carbon emissions, democracy, or police brutality. Anti-AI sentiment is surprisingly bipartisan, but the big anti-AI institutions are labor unions and the progressive wing of the Democrats. This has always seemed weird to me, because the contents of most anti-AI arguments are actually right-wing coded. They’re not necessarily intrinsically right-wing, but they’re the kind of arguments that historically have been made by conservatives, not liberals or leftists.

• The FBI Director Is MIA

  • Your anon sourced story is BS.

  I’ve never once seen him over drink. Not once. You are spinning that narrative because you know POTUS doesn’t view that favorably, even admitted as much in your story.

• Trump's 'Triumphal Arch' Is Vastly Larger Than Other Washington Monuments

• Takeaways from the Story of Trump's Decision to Go to War with Iran

• Trump's reversal on day care upends a bipartisan push to lower costs

• CNN's Christiane Amanpour issues crazed response to Hegseth criticism of the media

  "And finally an observation: the current Secretary of War, f/k/a Defence, left the military with the rank of Major," she added. "I recall my dogtag in the first Gulf war had the rank of major ... the very same rank. Just sayin'!" she concluded.

• Trump deal with IRS could see him given $14B in taxpayer money

  Donald Trump may have arranged himself a 11-figure payday after his own tax office signalled they would settle a lawsuit with him. The US president and two of his sons have sued the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) for $US10 billion ($14 billion) after his tax information was leaked to the media in 2018 and 2020. Given the president has appointed the senior staff at the IRS and the Department of Treasury and has the power to fire them, the lawsuit has raised the ire of ethics watchdogs. One such group, Democracy Forward, has filed a brief opposing the lawsuit. Democracy Forward CEO Skye Perryman said Trump was "seeking to further illegally line his own pockets at the public's expense".

  • I'd be OK with the IRS dumping all the tax data of every candidate for Federal offices. Or none. Not just the folks they don't like, however.

• Georgia's Voting Technology Blunder

  Pretty much everyone I knew thought that voting machines were garbage technology…right up to the moment that the My Pillow guy, Tucker Carlson, and a whole menagerie of conspiratorial Trumpland mutants started peddling a bizarre story about how Hugo Chavez colluded with the Canadian voting machine company Dominion Voting Systems (who bought Diebold's voting machine business when they finally dumped the division) to rig the 2020 election for Joe Biden.

  That's when something very weird happened. A bunch of people who had been skeptical of voting machines since the Brooks Brothers Riot suddenly became history's most ardent defenders of those same garbage voting machines. The cartel of voting machine companies – who had a long track record of using bullshit legal threats to silence their (mostly progressive) critics – were drafted into The Resistance(TM), and anyone who thought voting machines were trash was dismissed as a crazy person who has been totally mypillowpilled. Every time Trump promotes another election denier to his cabinet, a federal agency, or a judgeship, the idea that voting machines are garbage becomes more Stop the Steal-coded, even though voting machines are, objectively, garbage. Which is bad. Just because some voting machine criticism is conspiratorial nonsense, it doesn't follow that voting machines are good, nor does it follow that every voting machine critic is a swivel-eyed loon or ratfucking Roger Stone protege.

• Trump, When Asked About White House Meeting with Anthropic's Dario Amodei: Who?

• America will come to regret its war on taxes

• Why the Stock Market Makes No Sense

• Homeland Security's New Task Force Website Sanitizes Trump's Deportation Agenda

World

• Australia, Japan sign contracts to start $7B warship deal

• India drops proposal to mandate national ID app on smartphones after pushback

• Google Told to Share Search Data with AI Rivals in EU Proposal

• The UK needs to discuss the risk of a new Pacific War over Taiwan

• India Won't Require Apple to Preinstall Government ID App on iPhones

• Berlin offers free entry for litter picking to make tourists do their bit

Iran / Houthi

• Ships Turn Around After Iran’s Military Says Strait of Hormuz Is Closed Again

  • Iran closes Strait of Hormuz again over US blockade.

• Kuwait Detained Journalist After Comments on Iran War Images, Watchdog Says

  A Kuwaiti American journalist has been detained in Kuwait after he commented on videos and images related to the war in Iran, the Committee to Protect Journalists said on Monday. The arrest of the journalist, Ahmed Shihab-Eldin, which Kuwaiti authorities had yet to publicly confirm, would be one of many detentions across the Persian Gulf as governments there try to repress information about local effects of the war in Iran.

• In the AI propaganda war, Iran is winning

China

• F1 in China: I've never seen so many people in those grandstands

• How China Built Its Vast Natural Gas Stockpile

• Tired of waiting for your EV to charge up? Chinese company has a novel solution

Health / Medicine

• Scientists Reveal Why Bread Can Cause Weight Gain Without Overeating.

• Stanford scientists discover "natural Ozempic" without side effects

• Cannabis may make you remember things that never happened

• Eating fruits, vegetables and whole grains may increase chance of lung cancer

  • Eating more fruits and vegetables tied to unexpected lung cancer risk

• New wave of immunotherapy is eliminating cancers

• Ohio's nursing homes are dumping patients at homeless shelters

• Could Alzheimer's Disease Begin in the Nerves Rather Than the Brain?

• Bacterial enzyme-responsive hydrogels deliver antibiotics to infected wounds

• Beneficial health effects of ultraviolet radiation

Pox / COVID / BioTerror AgitProp

• Three meningitis B cases confirmed in Dorset schools outbreak

Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda

• Proboscis monkey found in Thailand is evidence of cross-border illegal trade

• Tourists Try to Ride Elk Which Are Taking over Beaches in Coastal Oregon Town

• A Japanese poet's diary helps scientists reconstruct solar cycles

• Sperm whales' communication closely parallels human language, study finds

• Escaped wolf returned to zoo after nine-day search

• Why insects aren't huge: a new challenge to a decades-old idea