2026-08-19

Horseshit

• Screentime for kids not necessarily bad

• Forget Work. Passive Income Is the New American Dream

• Missed shifts were costly to this McDonald's. An app has fixed the problem

  In 2025, Escalate received a grant from the state of Maryland to run a pilot with Hopkins-Navies Ford Management, a McDonald's franchise with seven locations in Prince George's County, Md. For six months, employees would have access to Escalate's app, through which they could request last-minute help with emergencies: An Uber voucher when transportation is the problem. A grocery gift card if a worker was short on food. A Visa gift card they could use to pay a family member or neighbor to watch their kids.

  • With enough government grants, we can provide a shadow of the benefits of friendship and community.

• Democracy vs. the machine: birth of digital age,the warnings that were ignored

• Suicide hotlines don't seem to help

• Theban tomb reveals how Egyptian burial trends evolved in time

• An Engineer's Old Cooking Trick Is Going Viral, Divides the Internet

• Will you be wearing an exoskeleton in ten years?

• These Mammoth Ivory Carvings May Be the "Find of the Year"

• Babies born under sugar rationing grew into adults with lower cancer risk

• Why is the Amish population growing so fast in America?

• Retro phone trend reveals growing desire to disconnect, research finds

• Protein Ate Our Grocery Stores

• Is the World Getting Uglier?

• The Lost Drive: American Culture Has Decayed the Value of Hard-Working Men

  Building upon this policy failure is a corrosive cultural fable that has been fed to the younger generations, which is the notion that everyone is entitled to a job that falls in line with their own passions perfectly. Over decades, higher education institutions and popular media have preached a doctrine of self-fulfillment above everything. Young men have been conditioned to believe that a job in manufacturing or heavy construction is a compromise of the potential they have when it doesn't align with their dream career.

• Smoking Is Back in Fashion. Why?

• Top album releases linked to rise in fatal crashes

Epstein

• FOIA Documents Show Epstein Files Had Flag List Which Included the Term 'POTUS'

Musk

• Nvidia discloses $21B stake in SpaceX

• Einride orders 500 Tesla Semis for Amazon etc. in largest Semi deployment

• LRO images of lunar crater formed by Falcon 9 impact

  The new crater is 18 meters in diameter and is less than 3 meters deep

• Starship arrives at Christmas Island after 24-day ocean ordeal

Electric / Self Driving cars

• Maiden voyage for India's first hydrogen train

• Edison Motors Offering All-Mechanical Trucks, At Least To Start

Robot uprising / Humanoid Helpers

• America Wants to Make Its Own Humanoid Robots. That Won't Be Easy

• Humanoid Robots Need a Supply Chain in North America

• Ban on Chinese robots leaves U.S. startups stranded

Edumacationalizing / Acedemia Nuts

• Department of War Orders Research Security Audits at 30 Academic Institutions

Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising

• Meta faces pivotal kids' safety trial

  • Meta faces a $1.4T reckoning in latest trial over social media addiction

  • States Seek $200B from Meta over Child Social Media Addiction Claims

  • 29 states suing Meta for $1.4T over youth mental health claims

  • Meta pays pro-Meta influencers when countries look into teen safety on Instagram

  • 'They knew their platforms could harm young people'

  • Meta lawsuits: Is social media facing a global legal reckoning?

  • US states accuse Meta of covering up research on teen social media addiction

• Reddit begins testing a new audio and video experience, similar to TikTok videos

• Linux finally follows Windows and makes a CPU feature requirement mandatory

  Linux now requires TSC on x86, ending decades of legacy support for older processors. For those wondering, the TSC is a special 64-bit register that acts as a processor counter and has been around since the Intel Pentium era.

• Micron, SK Commit Billions to RAM Capacity, but Almost Nothing Lands Before 2028

• Memory prices climb 500% in 12 months

• YouTube will now count a view as soon as a video starts playing

• Honey loses over 7M users and 7k stores following YouTuber's viral expose

  PayPal Honey has lost more than seven million Chrome users and around 7,000 merchant partners since YouTuber MegaLag first accused the coupon extension of diverting creator commissions.

• Columbia House Is Shutting Down

  Columbia House, the 71-year-old mail-order music club that is somehow still operating in 2026, is finally shutting down for good. ”After 9/15/26, The Columbia House will no longer be accepting new orders,” reads a recent message on its website.

• Apple's Camera-Equipped AirPods See Them in Action

  • AirPods with Cameras Leak: Used for Visual Intelligence

• 'Unprecedented' number of Apple users received recent spyware alert

• Petlibro accused of "gaslighting" users over smart pet feeder outage

• Apple's US App Store Commission Revenue Down 18% This Year

• The National Park Service Is Using Flock. Rangers Are Pissed

  • The Cop Who Took on Flock

  • Unless Flock Is Reined In, Mass Video Surveillance Will Grow More Pervasive

  • As Wisconsin cities flee Flock, its shared camera network loses value

  • Viral Halloween 'De-Flock' campaign gains momentum

• Star Citizen has a disastrously laggy stream with horrendous vibes

  • Star Citizen's disastrous Siege of Orison stream

  omments under the stream described it as “incredibly awkward, cringe, forced, slightly sinister feeling at times,” with one viewer adding “felt like a hostage video.” A Reddit thread that broke down the bugs the team hit thanked CIG for the exposure: “You accidentally gave the community the most honest look at Star Citizen in months.” Kotaku reports fans were baffled that the studio left the VOD up.

• New Nightmare Eclipse zero day gives system privileges on patched Windows

• You Can Buy a Fairphone in the US

• There's No Reason to Buy a New Phone Anymore

TechSuck / Geek Bait

• The 90-year history of the binoculars bolted to scenic overlooks

AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World

• Operation Blue Skies: Reducing aviation climate impact with AI

• Google buys crashed airline Spirit's data at auction, because AI

  • Google wins bankruptcy auction for Spirit Airlines emails, chats, documents

  • Google is buying all of Spirit Airlines' data to feed its AI models

• Anthropic's Annualized Revenue Tops $65B Before IPO

• OpenAI and Anthropic in price war as Chinese AI rivals gain ground

• Breakthrough as scientists use AI to predict how breast cancer could progress

• What if the AI capex bubble may not be a bubble after all?

• OpenAI disbanded the team that assessed catastrophic model risks

• Debating the role of large language models in the kernel community

• Expert Witness to ChatGPT: "Show how 3M is 0 percent at fault"

• Sick of A.I. Slop? So Are Tech Giants

• Anthropic's Claude Will Add Watermarks to AI-Generated Text and Files

• US grid operator PJM proposes forcing data center off the grid during emergencies

• OpenAI has announced it is building an 8GW AI datacenter in Ohio, with a $105 billion guarantee from Nvidia.

• Japanese repair shop sells GPU VRAM upgrades for $25 per GB during memory crisis — RTX 2080 Ti modded to 22GB of GDDR6 for just $282, double the VRAM creates a budget AI powerhouse

• The hyperscalers' exploding 'purchase commitments' reach $1.5T

• We still don't know how people are using AI

• State Farm defense lawyers admit AI generated fake cases in LA lawsuit

• Excel's Copilot function is headed for the Recycle Bin

• The A.I.s Are Already Out of Control

• Anthropic crossed 40% of ARR from indirect channels

• Perplexity's free AI offer left it with millions more users in India

• She told no one about her agony except ChatGPT. What her death reveals about AI

• Can AI Coexist with Privacy? Proton's Andy Yen Says It Will Have To

• AI to help planes avoid climate-warming 'sky graffiti'

• What Happens If OpenAI Dies?

  Back in late June, The New York Times reported OpenAI was “leaning toward” going public some time in 2027, but that was before Anthropic started one of the most-aggressive pre-IPO marketing campaigns I’ve ever seen, with investors “leaking” to the Financial Times that they thought it would have a $2 trillion valuation and have (sigh) annualized revenues of $100 billion to $120 billion by end of 2026, an entirely fictional statement made with the intent of pumping their bags, with the FT, for whatever reason, printing it with little pushback. Yet what’s likely far-scarier for OpenAI is that even Anthropic’s pre-IPO marketing has a whiff of desperation. A Reuters report from late last week that feels precision-engineered to manipulate dimwitted investors said that “Wall Street [was] looking further into the future than it ​commonly does to put a price on the AI company, valuing it based on how much revenue it could generate two years from now,” adding that it was “projecting revenue of roughly $190 billion to $200 billion.”

  We are, of course, in the era of madness, so I’ve already read three or four people on Twitter say that OpenAI’s actual annualized revenue is so much higher, because they’ve heard stuff from people they trust. The AI industry’s loudest advocates think and act like cultists at the end of a doomsday prophecy, except instead of the world ending, OpenAI and Anthropic become the largest companies — or in the case of giga-oaf hedgie Gavin Baker, the only companies — in the world, rewarding all those who believed with…something. Glory? Smugness? Salvation?

• WSJ Catches Up, Discovers AI's Off-Balance Sheet Liabilities Are $3 Trillion And Growing $1.2 Trillion Per Quarter

• Recent grads say AI is making it harder to get a job. Economists aren't sure

• Secret tracking device placed in rare book ends up in Amazon processing

• GitHub: Your contributors are AI-first now. Is your project?

• OpenAI introduces 'ChatGPT for Teens' as AI safety concerns mount

  • What Parents Need to Know About OpenAI's New ChatGPT for Teens

• OpenAI Is Slowing Down Its AI Training

  • OpenAI Overhauls Safety Protocols, Pauses Training Runs After Rogue Agents

  • OpenAI pauses frontier model training

  We have paused some frontier RL training to ensure that we can meet the appropriate alignment, security and monitoring standards for the new level of capabilities in front of us. Model progress is now extremely rapid, and we always said we would take action if we felt that model capabilities were outstripping the pace of safety and alignment. We care very deeply about AI safety. We believe the entire field will have to coordinate on shared safety standards, but will act unilaterally in the meantime.

• Cargo Thefts Have Turned Violent in Pursuit of AI Hardware

• Silicon Valley's AI boom is remaking American charity

• AI-drafted bills are swamping the House office that writes US laws

• OpenAI's Second-Quarter Sales Show Tepid Growth Compared with Anthropic

Neo Gambling / Crypto con games

• SEC Proposes New Regulation Crypto Assets

  The proposed rules include two exemptions from the registration requirements of the Securities Act of 1933 specifically tailored to certain investment contracts involving crypto assets. The first is a one-time exemption that would permit offerings of up to $5 million during a four-year period. The second exemption would permit offerings of up to $75 million during each 12-month period. Under both exemptions, issuers would be required to make certain principles-based narrative disclosures available to their investors. In addition, issuers under the second exemption would be required to provide financial statements and be subject to ongoing reporting requirements. The proposed rules also include a conditional safe harbor from the term “investment contract” in the definitions of “security” in the Securities Act of 1933 and the Securities Exchange Act of 1934. If the conditions of that proposed safe harbor are satisfied, then a crypto asset would be deemed not to be subject to an investment contract for purposes of those definitions of “security.” In addition, the proposed rules would preempt state securities law registration and qualification requirements with respect to offers and sales of securities issued pursuant to an exemption in Regulation Crypto Assets, as well as certain secondary market transactions.

Economicon / Business / Finance

• US diesel crack surpasses $100 a barrel for the first time on supply disruptions

  • Diesel Margins Top $100 a Barrel to Reach Record High as Supply Crunch Grows

• A $21B 'Kids in Chips' Startup Is Scooping Up Nvidia Talent

• Supply chain concerns increase risks for US power grid

• Remote work benefits are much bigger than a paycheck

• Global Bond Slump Sends Long-Term Borrowing Costs to Highest in Decades

• Tech stocks weigh on Wall Street as Iran stalemate lifts oil, yields

• Mastercard payments declined due to 'global' outage caused by system update

• 30-year Treasury yield tops 5.33%, new 19-year high: inflation, spending worries

• Former SpaceX engineers are building a robotic factory for making steel parts

• Largest Fan Manufacture Purchased for $5B

• Investors Slam SEC Plan to Remove Best-Price Rule

• A 'Texas Hedge' Amplified the Losses at Situational Awareness

• Electronics has a little-known price pain point. And it's getting worse

• The most influential economist is oddly unconvincing

• What If America Went Dark?

Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making

• In May 2021, Acting FDA Commissioner Emailed Fauci With Concerns About COVID Vaccine Injuries, Said ‘No One Takes Them Seriously’

  The correspondence, released by Senators Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) and Rand Paul (R-Ky.) on Sunday, expose how federal health officials ignored early safety signals. Woodcock said she had personally received reports from people, including many healthcare professionals, experiencing hard to classify adverse events that were not being captured by existing surveillance systems like VAERS. She said all three of the vaccines— Pfizer-BioNTech, Moderna, and Johnson & Johnson—were resulting in these injuries. “The symptoms do not fit into a specific syndrome and most are not easily quantifiable or evaluated with standard laboratory testing,” she wrote, adding, “no one takes them seriously, no one knows how to treat them, and there is no effort to study this.”

• Intel Politics: NSA sat on election threat reporting over Trump ‘deep state’ label, memo shows

  The memo, dated March 13, 2020, and declassified on Aug. 12, 2026, by White House Counsel David Warrington, was written by one of the analysts who had produced the report. The author repeatedly refers to “we, the analysts” and notes personal frustration that higher-ups had delayed the product for 16 months while the analytic work itself had been completed in a timely manner. The report in question had been proposed for release in December 2018 and concerned foreign targeting of the United States that began in 2014. The report also included activity related to the 2016 election.

Trump

• Trump administration Announces New "Hacking Back" Program

Democrats

• Poll showing Bass leading Raman by double digits was bogus "social experiment"

  A poll claiming Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass was leading Council member Nithya Raman by a wide margin — and picking up support from most voters who supported Spencer Pratt in the mayoral primary — was bogus, the company behind the poll acknowledged Monday. The fake poll by Median Strategies showed Bass leading Raman by nearly 12 percentage points ahead of the Nov. 3 mayoral runoff, and said the results were based on a survey of 560 Los Angeles voters between July 30 and Aug. 5. It said it had a 4.1% margin of error. “Median Strategies was created as a short term social experiment to examine how purported polling information could enter and spread through the political information ecosystem without independent verification,” the company said in an email to The Times. “We are not seeking publicity or attribution for the individuals involved and are declining interviews.”

  • Fake polls on Wisconsin and California elections

  • Polls for propaganda are nothing new. Honest polls are long extinct.

• ‘I Didn’t Realize You Support Abolishing the Electoral College’: Andy Beshear Stuns CBS Anchor With Plan to ‘Fix the Darn’ Gov

  fix the darn government. Constitutional amendment. It is time. It should outlaw partisan redistricting and enshrine part of the Voting Rights Act right there in the constitution. It should create term limits for Congress and the Supreme Court. No more gaming those appointments. It should also overturn Citizens United, and I think call for direct elections of the president and the vice president. That could actually make things work. A big idea that would, yes, change government, but in a way enshrined in the constitution where people would know it's going to get better.

• 10 years ago: Abdul El-Sayed oversaw animal 'slaughterhouse' as over 4,000 puppies and kittens killed under his watch

Left Angst

• Elon Musk made flying worse so Palantir could profit

• Searching for Answers from the Man Accused of Sabotaging Alaska's Senate Race

• The Wrong Kind of American

• ABC Files First Amendment Lawsuit Against FCC

  ABC’s lawyers said the company was being punished for editorial decisions and news coverage and had “no alternative means to eliminate these ongoing and immediate threats other than total capitulation to the Administration’s demands. “The company also said the Trump administration had “attacked ABC’s speech” on multiple occasions, including “the stories its journalists report and the viewpoints its network programs air. Over time, those attacks have escalated into express demands that ABC be stripped of its broadcast licenses because of its speech.” The Federal Communications Commission, led by Chairman Brendan Carr, ordered Disney to file for renewals for eight of its stations years ahead of schedule. In filings, Disney has said its applications were made “under protest in response to an unlawful, arbitrary, and unconstitutional order.”

  • Nor are they happy about "Equal Time" rules.

• A Green Light for Crooks

• 'Unending Nightmare': LA Family Details 120 Days in ICE Detention in Texas

• Federal Court Rules That Blocking Speech Is Protected By The First Amendment, But Recommending It Isn’t

• US Government is pushing to gain unprecedented access to your medical records

• Trump 2.0 has deleted or altered nearly 400 US datasets

• A Texas University Becomes a Petri Dish for a Conservative Overhaul

External Security / Militaria / Diplomania

• USS Benfold Stalled and Lost Power in the South China Sea for Four Days

  • U.S. Navy destroyer lost power for 4 days in South China Sea

• US announces new sanctions on top ICC figures

World

• Saudi wealth fund scales back 'fantastical' plans for Neom

• Wetherspoons bans customers playing music from phones in pubs

• How Turkey may have solved the Kurdish insurgency

• Warnings sent to French taxpayers after hackers allegedly sell stolen data

• Small webshops struggling with new EU rules around packaging waste

• Brazil's President Lula hails oil discovery near Amazon river

Iran / Houthi

• Iran is losing control of the Strait of Hormuz

Israel

• Gold medal at International Olympiad in Informatics lost over flag waving

• Israeli Soldiers Write ID Numbers on Palestinians in Dehumanising West Bank Raid

Russia Bad / Ukraine War

• Senior Russian banker fired after scathing speech on wartime economy.

China

• China Hunts for Scientific Talent. The U.S. Is Making It Easier

• Google plans to stop making Pixel products in China in 2027

  • Google plans to stop making Pixel products in China in 2027

• Low-tech animation Niu Lai trounces the Odyssey at Chinese box office

• US advisory body says China's data dominance gives it AI advantage

• So Far This Year, China Has Wasted Enough Clean Energy to Power Mexico

• China Removes Microsoft Windows at State Users Ahead of Plan

Health / Medicine

• Voluntary attention regulates acute immune responses in humans

• CDC: U.S. kindergarten vaccine exemptions hit record high as coverage falls

• Rising number of people seeking ADHD diagnosis without treatment

  People are increasingly seeking to an obtain an ADHD diagnosis without pursuing treatment, according to experts who have called for more research to understand why. Some people now regard ADHD as “an identity, rather than a disorder”, with the result that many obtain assessments from poor quality private providers, which lead them to “believe they have a condition needing treatment”, said the psychiatrist Dr Marios Adamou, the founder of the UK Adult ADHD Network.

  • They dont want treatment, they want the privileges afford by law once a doctor designates them in this protected class.

Pox / COVID / BioTerror AgitProp

• Measles Used to Be in Our Rearview Mirror. Now Cases Are Reaching Record Highs

Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda

• Laser mosquito zapper promises precision strikes as backers itch for answers

• Each degree of warming could add a month of intolerable heat for 1B people

• The controversial story of the North American raccoons wreaking havoc in Germany

• Europe's heatwave boosted solar by up to 17% on hot days

• Jellyfish force shutdown of three reactors at French nuclear plant

• New York utilities now want to build solar and wind farms

• A Japan without 'katsudon'? New forecast reveals 2050 heat crisis

• California's new tire efficiency rules could save drivers $1B a year

  • California's New Tire Rule Could Wipe Out 70% of What's on the Shelf

  The Commission tested 537 tire models to set those numbers, and its own math says the fix costs drivers about $1.50 more per tire in phase one and $6.50 more in phase two, paid back through fuel and electricity savings within months. Goodyear says that math is fiction. In comments filed with the Commission, the company argued real-world price increases could run into the hundreds of dollars per tire, not single digits, and that the rule would eliminate about 70 percent of today’s replacement tire market by the time phase two lands. Bridgestone and Michelin didn’t dispute the physics — Michelin’s government affairs director actually endorsed the targets — but both raised a quieter concern: how do you enforce a rolling-resistance spec without turning every shop audit into a fight over lab methodology? The Commission’s answer is to build its own test lab and start checking retailers directly, a new kind of authority for an agency that had never regulated a physical car part before Monday.

  • California regulators approve new rules limiting what replacement tires you can buy for your car

• Constantine's Bridge Has Surfaced from Beneath the Danube

• Pilots and Flight Attendants Are Bombarded by Cosmic Radiation

• Humans aren't the only animals that seem to like having pets

• Are Beavers Actually Good at Dams?

• Sea Turtle Sex Crisis: Why 99% Are Now Female

• Screwworm Infections Get Worse, Government Unleashing Drone Army to Surveil Them

• 3M accused of withholding toxicity of PFAS firefighting foam for decades