2026-06-24

Worthy

• The situation for free speech in Europe is even worse than I thought

  Here’s one of the most surreal cases I’ve seen: a 34-year-old mother of four, Elizabeth Kinney, who says she was beaten badly enough by a man to require hospital treatment. In private text messages to a friend afterwards, she called him a “faggot.” The friend reported her, and prosecutors charged her under the Malicious Communications Act. She pled guilty and was convicted of a homophobic offense, receiving an enhanced community order, unpaid work, and rehabilitation days. As of the last reporting, no one had been charged for the assault. In other words, the woman in the hospital gets a hate-crime conviction; the guy who put her there walks away. If that is your idea of “compassionate” law, something has gone badly wrong.

  the most important point to make here is that, if you have even one example of someone being arrested, getting a visit from the cops, or being charged for taking an unpopular position on one of the biggest political hot-button issues in a society — immigration, crime, religious fundamentalism, religious expression — they will not trust what they hear in the media, or even what they hear in society, as being genuine or authentic. This leads to a genuine epistemic crisis, where people cannot tell what their countrymen honestly think, or what the world actually looks like in terms of public opinion and perception — and that is a disaster. People in control, or at the top of society, can be such fools in thinking that if they could just better control the opinions people express, popular opinion will go right along assuming the preferred ruling class’ position is correct. But that relies on a model in which people are even stupider than ruling class people often assume they are. What happens instead is people conclude that no one is saying what they really think, and that the media, politicians, and even their fellow citizens cannot be counted on to show what they really think — because if there’s even the slightest risk of being arrested or punished for it, who would?

etc

• The Galactic Empire Was Always Gonna Fail

Horseshit

• Music retailer sues Fender over C&Ds in Stratocaster copyright dispute

• Universal basic income, the utopian idea resurging in Silicon Valley

• Human bodies did not simply got bigger and bigger over time in a steady line

• Egypt denied flight to Seattle ahead of final World Cup group match

  “The security authorities refused the team’s request to stay in the city of Seattle as planned after the New Zealand match in the World Cup, and therefore the team’s delegation will return to the city of Spokane,” Hossam said in a statement released by the Egyptian Football Association on Monday.

• Gold coins help crack a centuries-old shipwreck mystery

• Where Has All the Cottage Cheese Gone?

  TikTok and “protein-maxxing” are driving a cottage cheese squeeze that’s left some consumers desperate.

• Million-Dollar Watches Are Absolutely Booming. Here's Why

• The first ticking 'nuclear clocks' are here

• Spying on kids to save kids from spying is stupid

  It's a weird coalition of anti-Big Tech campaigners (who are rightly angry at the platforms' callous disregard for user welfare) and Heritage Foundation-backed culture warriors (who think that if their kids aren't exposed to LGBTQ content they won't come out as queer). While there's plenty these groups disagree about, they share one consensus: there should be a "minimum age" for certain kinds of internet use. The problem is, there's no such thing as "age verification" for the internet. What we call "age verification" is actually mass surveillance, so invasive and pervasive that it makes the ad-tech industry's commercial surveillance look like some kind of cypherpunk darknet pirate utopia.

• Lost memoir of Hiroshima survivor found after decades in US archive

• MSG Made Dossier on Activists Who Opposed Facial Recognition

• This artist uses nails, gold, plants, and flowers to capture the ‘aura of Blackness'

• 75% More Pedestrians Have Been Killed Since 2009. Giant Trucks and SUVs Are Why

  • Remember when you could buy a small car that got 50MPG? Why is the American car market shaped by Federal regulations and not, yaknow, the market?

• A scientist says he can scan prisoners' brains for signs of evil

• Not so empty nesters: record-high number of US adults under 35 live at home

• Bigger bodies were a late addition for humans

Obit

• In memory of the man who put red and green squiggles under words

  Today, there are red (and even green and blue) squiggles in nearly every word processor, and often outside word processors. Tony did it first. The next time a red squiggle catches one of your mistakes, say thanks to Tony. I think he’d appreciate it.

Rank Propaganda / Thought Policing / World Disordering

• Wikipedia cofounder Larry Sanger blocked from editing Wikipedia

• Emerging technologies of 2026 according to WEF

Musk

• SpaceX turns to bond market to raise capital, reports $100.8B cash

• SpaceX launches $25B notes offering, source says

• SpaceX sheds $400B in market value as debut rally hits reverse

  • SpaceX Falls for Third Day, Erases $600B in Market Value

• With Starfall, SpaceX eyes an edge in global cargo delivery from orbit

• Masayoshi Sun dismisses Musk's idea for orbital data centers

• Elon Musk and the plot to hijack America's broadband

• Fatal Tesla Crash into Texas Home Now Under Federal Safety Investigation

  • Tesla logs confirm the driver manually overrode the self-driving system and had the accelerator floored the entire time

  the NYT doesn't bother with a correction because it doesn't fit their narrative.

• Our X account got permabanned on Day 23. Here's the data

  • Mine lasted weeks, after i paid for a year's subscription to "premium". I never managed to get to the 'appeal' stage: the captcha's just looped.

Electric / Self Driving cars

• EV demand powers Europe car market in May, Chinese rivals expand share

• China's CATL bets battery swapping will cut costs for Europe's electric trucks

Edumacationalizing / Acedemia Nuts

• The Lure of "Magic Bullets" in Reforming Schools

  Elderly readers may remember “Career Education” in the 1970s; “restructuring schools” in the 1980s; “systemic school reform” in the 1990s. Middle-aged readers may recall parental “choice” of schools and vouchers in the 1990s when John Chubb and Terry Moe pronounced it as a “panacea.” And since the 2000s, champions of “magic bullets” have touted Common Core curriculum standards, teacher pay-for-performance plans, charter schools, Teach for America, and principals as instructional leaders as ways of turning America’s failing schools into winners.

  For nearly two hundred years, schools have been expected, at various times, to create engaged citizens, instill moral character, sustain community values, reduce social inequities, prepare youth for the labor market, and produce independent thinkers. Since the early 20th century, determined reformers have dreamed of improving government, society, and culture through schooling the young. Yes, achieve all of these competing purposes and, in addition, solve serious problems from poverty to slow economic growth to defending the nation, and even reducing obesity.

• Where Did the K-12 Money Go? Lessons from the Front Lines

  Student population grew 25%. Admin and support layers and their costs rose 400–500% or more.

Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising

• Facial recognition on public buses sparks debate over security and privacy

• Microsoft accidentally kills epic Outlook email threads

• A new generation of music software is shrinking musical theatre orchestras

• Valve engineers talk Steam Machine pricing and heatsinks

• Valve describes just how brutal RAM negotiations are in 2026

• Apple working on camera-equipped AirPods

• Meta debuts new, cheaper smart glasses under its own brand

  • Meta launches cheaper smart glasses without Ray-Ban

  • Meta launches cheaper range of AI smart glasses starting at $299

• Quake Turns 30 Today

• The RAM shortage is coming for everything you care about

TechSuck / Geek Bait

• Finding signal in noisy street recording over 2 weeks

  among all the apparent noise, we see very clear oscillations. Their period is around 85 seconds. This was actually the time scale I was hoping to find: the traffic light cycle around the block.

Space / Boomy Zoomers / UFO

• Do we need a lunar building code to build moon bases safely?

  • Only if everyone involved in the draft process lives there for at least a year beforehand.

• A Source of Mysterious Repeating Radio Signals from Space Has Been Identified

• NASA's Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope Arrives in Florida

AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World

• AI is changing biological and nuclear risks; governance must change accordingly

• HR consultant wins English court case using AI lawyer in apparent legal first

  • Artificial intelligence-based law firm wins in court

• Police officer investigated over AI-generated evidence

• Generative AI is cursing renters with the promise of impossible homes

• Elephant alert AI warning systems aim to avoid deadly clashes

• Chatting with an AI Won't Make You a Top Programmer

• See How Sam Altman's Personal Investments Benefit from Ties to OpenAI

• AI models capable of devastating attacks on governments and business months away

• Three things to watch amid Anthropic's latest feud with the government

• Trump vs. Anthropic: The AI wars are heating up

• OpenAI pitches ChatGPT ads to Cannes marketers ahead of IPO

• Sam Altman Movie 'Artificial' Dropped by Amazon After OpenAI Partnership

• King's study finds AI chose nuclear signalling in 95% of simulated crises

• Google Invests $75M in A24 to Develop AI-Powered Filmmaking Tools

• At the Ambitious New A.I Museum, You Feel the Art, and It Feels You Right Back

• Pew Research: AI adoption is rising. Trust isn't

• Google's online dominance is showing signs of cracking in AI era

• Alphabet Shares Drop After Second AI Star Departs for a Rival

• U.N.: AI companies should release environmental impact, commit to clean energy

• How to burst the AI bubble: Strike at its roots

• Cursor acquires Continue, an open-source alternative to GitHub Copilot

• Three Ways to Think About AI and Jobs

• Doctors Thought It Was Asthma. A.I. Flagged a Serious Heart Problem

• Cargo Culture

  A few weeks ago, I predicted that the AI industry would start pushing the concept of “loops” — effectively LLMs prompting LLMs and being left to their own, token-intensive devices — as a desperate attempt to get users to burn more tokens, I imagine to create more revenue. Now Jensen Huang and Claude Code chief Boris Cherny have both, within 24 hours of each other, intimated that the age of prompting models is over, as you’d just be “handling loops,” which conveniently also means burning more tokens.

  This is what I call the Rot-Com Bubble. Big tech has hit the wall of what modern software can do, and in turn run out of hyper-growth ideas. Nobody has the next Google Search, iPhone, cloud computing, mobile app store ,or other idea that would allow Google, Microsoft, Apple, and Amazon to keep growing at a rate that justifies their valuations. While this is partly a natural process — there are only so many ways to do things! — it’s also a direct result of incentivizing and promoting products that create revenue growth or sustain monopolies, which in turn focuses your R&D and hiring efforts toward those who can come up with ways to make Numbers Go Up. Put another way, the tech industry has become the largest cargo cult of all time.

• Are AI and robotics about to free the wealthy from the threat of revolt?

• Yet Another Piece of AI-Pilled Speculative Fiction Has Gone Dangerously Viral

• Michael Burry: Billions in Nvidia Are Hidden Through Complex Financing Structure

• America's data-centre backlash puts the AI boom at risk

• How to Think About AI Before It's Too Late

  • Aren't we all lucky to have the great minds of "The Atlantic" to instruct us in proper thinking.

Neo Gambling / Crypto con games

• Polymarket's viral videos showed people winning big, but the bets were fake

• Mark Zuckerberg directed meta to create a prediction markets app

Economicon / Business / Finance

• Tencent Is Said to Mull Exits from Game Studios Like Marvelous

• Nonstop Trading, Lots of Leverage. How 'Perp Futures' Are Changing Wall Street

• Zombie unicorns are haunting Silicon Valley

• The Secret Reason Bosses Want Everyone Back in the Office, Every Day: Narcissism

• Tech giant Oracle cuts 21,000 jobs as it embraces AI

  • Oracle sheds 21,000 roles over the past year

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

• When falling housing prices are good news – and when they're not

  • Has NPR ever found 'good' economic news during a Republican administration?

• Factory job cuts in June neared financial crisis and Covid levels, S&P says

  • US manufacturing jobs fall at fastest rate since the pandemic

• NYC Wants to End Surveillance Pricing

• Over 1700 Cargill Meatpacking Workers Locked Out After Demanding Bathroom Breaks

• Walmart, in Biggest Deal in Two Years, Buys Advertising Tech Firm

• Shareholders sue Uber's board over sexual assaults, other incidents

• Tech Slide Deepens as AI Fears Get Worse

• AI stock slump raises the question are investors taking profits or very nervous

• Building a Western gallium supply chain beyond China's reach

Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making

• US announces $17.5B in loans for nuclear power supply chain

• Audit finds San Francisco tax official steered $10M contract to friend

• House passes bill to lower housing costs, sending it to Trump's desk

Trump

• Trump's Prescription Drug Shakedown: How He Made Other Countries Pay Up

Democrats

• What is Gavin Newsom doing?

  these early polls do have some predictive power, believe it or not. Prediction markets have tracked with them, with Newsom’s probability of winning the nomination declining from 35.5 percent on Jan. 1 to 23.3 percent today. No one opponent has emerged as the obvious alternative. Bettors see the field as wide open, with the top six candidates having less than a 60 percent combined probability of winning the nomination. But it’s worth noting where the biggest gains have come from: Kamala Harris and Georgia Sen. Jon Ossoff. Each presents a challenge for Newsom. Harris, who might or might not be serious about running again, is from the same state, and it’s hard to find much daylight between her and Newsom on policy. And Ossoff, you could argue, mogs Newsom in the “good-looking white guy” category, only with youth on his side and the credential of actually having won elections in a swing state. If you ask me, though, the reason for Newsom’s decline is simple: this is reversion to the mean. He doesn’t have a particularly persuasive argument for being the nominee, and his early support may reflect name recognition as much as anything else.

• Read Graham Platner’s Demented Joke About Bestiality, Necrophilia, And Incest

  • Bah, that joke was old in the 1990's

Left Angst

• Judge Shuts Down Trump Admin Database Used To Remove Non-Citizens From Voter Rolls.

• Eli Lilly gave mysterious access to weight loss drug to 79-year-old patient

  STAT has learned that Eli Lilly and the FDA have allowed one person to gain access to the drug through the FDA’s “compassionate use” program, a pathway that gives patients with serious and immediately life-threatening medical issues access to experimental treatments. This person was a 79-year-old man at the time the request was made in April, according to three sources familiar with the matter. Those sources, who requested anonymity due to fear of reprisals, said it drew the interest of top health officials, suggesting the person receiving this drug was well connected.

  • Trump may be mystery patient in case of 79yo getting experimental obesity drug

• New York lawmaker says it's 'sad' that a cafe banned him

  New York Democratic Congressman Dan Goldman has said it is “sad” that a Brooklyn coffee shop banned him over his views on Israel – a move which has put the cafe under investigation by the Trump administration’s justice department. Goldman represents New York’s 10th congressional district and holds pro-Israel views. He made the “sad” remark to CNN after Brooklyn’s Poetica Coffee banned him in a viral, since-deleted social media post after a visit from him on Sunday. The cafe later refunded his coffee purchase – but it did not stop assistant attorney general Harmeet Dhillon of the US justice department’s civil rights division to announce on X that her office was investigating Poetica Coffee.

  • Lefty owner of anti-Israel NYC coffee shop calls US ally ‘Nazi Germany of our time’ in hateful online outburst

• FBI names sixth suspect in alleged UFC Freedom 250 attack plot in DC

• Top intelligence agency begins mass firings under new Trump appointee

Law Breaking / Police / Internal Security

• California police are using drones to disarm people, make arrests

• The Biden Administration Is at the Center of a Massive Fentanyl Trafficking Scandal.

External Security / Militaria / Diplomania

• Trump Suggests GM, Ford to Shift to Missile Production

World

• At least 18 dead in France, including two children in hot car, as Europe bakes

  • Forty drown in France as people seek relief from Europe's heatwave

  • France records its hottest day ever

• Meta to invest $900M in India's CRED, taps founder to lead WhatsApp

  • Kunal Shah to head WhatsApp; Meta invests nearly $1B in Cred

• Europol is going rogue – so Brussels is doubling its budget?

  Keeping double books, operating in legally-murky areas to escape scrutiny, influencing governments to change laws so their illegal activities are legalised – these aren’t just plot points from The Sopranos or another mob thriller but seemingly the playbook of EU’s police agency. Europol might be tasked with dealing with organised crime but that hasn’t stopped it from following similar tactics as those they’re claiming to fight against.

• Millions in UK could claim share of £3B after Apple case given green light

• EU Member States (and Google) suddenly want to keep cookie banners

• Ireland Is Becoming a French Military Protectorate

• The Only Way to Save Europe – The Continent Must Act Like a Country

• UK considers forcing social media firms to prioritise trusted news

• Canada is planning a nuclear renaissance with ten new reactors to be built by 2040 at a cost of $100 billion.

  • Pixy: "They achieved this using one simple trick: They targeted an operational date of 2010 on a budget of $5 billion"

• European Parliament committee backs digital euro

  • Digital euro clears key hurdle as EU seeks to break free from U.S. credit cards

• ‘Send them back’ chants rock European Parliament after landslide vote to speed up deportations.

• Britain is broken, we need an election.

  Starmer isn’t the first Prime Minister I’ve deposed, and he won’t be the last. David Cameron. Theresa May. Rishi Sunak. And next up – Andy Burnham. The reason each leader has failed is the same. What the political class fails to understand is that the electorate won’t accept being taken for fools. They cannot continue to take the votes of the people who supported them for granted, only to betray them upon having gained power. Politics is about trust. That is why I am calling for a General Election at the soonest possible date. You know as well as I do that the country cannot afford to waste another week drifting from crisis to crisis.

• UK tribunal gives go ahead for $4B lawsuit against Apple over iCloud services

• Scars mark Britain's economy 10 years after Brexit vote

• Nationwide railway radio disruptions in Germany

  • Trains halted across Germany because of communication system problem

Iran / Houthi

• Iran war triggers global race to build oil reserves

• Downed US pilot reported 'jellyfish' drone formation before crash

  • So a ‘Jellyfish’ Drone Swarm Might Have Shot Down Our F-15 Over Iran.

• Inside the insurance racket Iran wants to run in the Strait of Hormuz — and how it will devastate Western shipping.

Israel

• Israel targeted Gaza children resulting in genocide, UN inquiry says

  • UN commission of inquiry says Israel committing genocide by targeting children

• Colombia's president accuses Israel of compromising election software

Russia Bad / Ukraine War

• Ukraine disguised a $20B sabotage mission as a 'porn film'

China

• The future of oil prices may depend on China

• China Takes Back Top Spot in Latest Supercomputer Ranking

  • China Takes Supercomputer Crown from U.S. for First Time Since 2017

  • China beats US with fastest supercomputer

• As Chinese Tech Pulls Ahead, U.S. Fears It Will Become Dependent

Health / Medicine

• Hospitals switched to pen and paper to defeat a national cyber-attack

• Smoking grass just might help your memory issues. No, seriously.

• FDA Allows New Sunscreen, but Consumers Are Still Being Burned by Cronyism

  The ingredient will initially be sold exclusively by DSM Nutritional Products under the brand name Parsol Shield. After an 18-month exclusivity period, other manufacturers may use it. In other words, the company that survives the FDA’s slow and expensive process gets a legal monopoly as its reward—at the expense of consumers who will pay more for a product available everywhere else on earth for a quarter century. As Cato has observed, FDA approval serves as a non-tariff barrier, blocking superior foreign products from entering the U.S. market. The approval process does not just delay competition—it structures the market to reward whoever endures it longest.

• Could less caffeine be smarter performance enhancer? Scientists find sweet spot

  • It's not that soluble so there's a limit to how much you can metabolize.

• Faster aging in younger generations linked to rise in early-onset cancer

• The worthlessness of Vitamin D is mildly exaggerated

  if you start with non-insane expectations, the trials look like weak but positive evidence. And if you consider what we know about biology and evolution, I think the balance of evidence tips pretty clearly in the direction that people with low-ish levels would be wise to supplement. Am I certain that vitamin D is beneficial for people with low-ish levels? Absolutely not! But I claim that’s the best bet given the limits of our knowledge.

• Does the war on "ultra-processed foods" make any sense?

Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda

• Heritage sites are at risk in a warming world – and how to save them

• A Team of Meteorologists and Combat Pilots Set Out to Understand Thunderstorms

• Germany battles aggressive outbreak of poisonous caterpillars

• Spider which uses spring trap to capture prey discovered in Australia

  • Scientists discover 'ballista spider', launches prey 140x the force of gravity

• Global heat stress intensification and its expanding footprint on humans

• America Isn't Sweating Climate Change

• Extreme Heat conference cancelled due to extreme heat warning