2025-12-04

Horseshit

• Google will start building data centers in space, powered by the sun, in 2027

• San Francisco sues food giants over ultra-processed products

  • San Francisco sues 10 companies that make ultraprocessed food

  The lawsuit argues that the foods have contributed to a public health crisis in San Francisco and across the nation, saddling cities and other governments with medical costs associated with the consequences of diets high in processed food. It’s a first-of-its-kind attempt to hold food conglomerates accountable for the proliferation of these foods and their established health risks.

• Fabergé egg fetches record $30.2 million at rare auction

• Porsches in Russia Left Unable to Drive, Sat Tracking System May Be at Fault

• Man charged with theft over claims he swallowed $19k Fabergé egg

• Conflict with fathers and friends speeds up aging

• 'Hobby dogging': Germany's viral trend of pretending to walk a dog

• More than 82,000 tires recalled for lengthy identification number, NHTSA says

• 'If you aren't lying, you aren't flying.' Pilots hide mental health struggles

• Palantir CEO Says Making War Crimes Constitutional Would Be Good for Business

Epstein

• Larry Summers gets lifetime ban from economic association over Epstein ties

celebrity gossip

• The long success of the Grateful Dead

Rank Propaganda / Thought Policing / World Disordering

• Matthew Garrett Wins £70K Libel Judgment Against Techrights Publishers

  Garrett claims that since 2023, the Schestowitzs have used their websites, Techrights and Tux Machines, to publish derogatory and unsubstantiated claims, which among other things, say that he’s behind anonymous “sockpuppet” IRC accounts — that is, accounts using fake names — that carried out a vicious trolling and harassment campaign against them. They’ve claimed that through the “sockpuppet” account he has made posts against them that included racist, antisemitic, misogynistic, homophobic, and paedophilic content, along with threats of violence or death. In addition, they accused him of criminal activities, including cybercrime, hate crime, blackmail, and issuing death threats — and of being a user of crack cocaine.

  As the justice put it, their online campaign against him was “unsubstantiated character assassination,” and not the investigative reporting the defendants claimed. In addition to the £70,000 award, the justice issued an injunction preventing further publication of the defamatory content and requiring them to publish a summary of the judgment on their websites. Their counterclaim for harassment was dismissed.

Musk

• Elon Musk is on a racist posting spree again

  Billionaire Elon Musk — who’s long used his X (formerly Twitter) platform to stoke anger at immigrants and support antisemitic conspiracy theories — has spent the past day spreading and praising claims that “White people are on the verge of extinction,” Somali immigrants have “no right to be in America,” and nonprofits who support them are committing “treason and should be met with force.”

  Years ago, Musk’s statements would likely have raised alarm among advertisers on the platform he has owned since 2022. IBM and Apple, among others, pulled ads from the platform in 2023 after Musk praised a far-right poster’s call for white pride and agreed with antisemitic, anti-immigrant statements. But Musk responded with a campaign of legal harassment, and Trump administration officials worked conditions discouraging dropping ads from platforms like X into a major ad company merger proposal. Earlier this year, one ad consulting firm CEO told The Wall Street Journal that brands were “afraid of the legal and political ramifications” of not advertising on X.

Electric / Self Driving cars

• Volvo EX90's Lidar Laser Sensor Will Fry Your Phone's Camera

• Waymo driverless taxi drives directly into active LAPD standoff

• Waymo's Self-Driving Cars Are Suddenly Behaving Like New York Cabbies

Religion / Tribal / Culture War and Re-Segregation

• Women's Institute to Stop Offering Trans Women Membership

Edumacationalizing / Acedemia Nuts

• AI may be scoring your college essay. Welcome to the new era of admissions

Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising

• iPhone Has iPhone Fold Software, but Apple Won't Let You Use It

• US acquisition results in font license hikes for Japanese game studios

  One of Japan’s most widely used commercial font services has ended its affordable license plan for game and app integration, creating a complicated and expensive issue for domestic game developers. As reported by Gamemakers, the service, called Fontworks LETS, discontinued its game license plan as of November 28. Its replacement, offered through Fontworks’s new US-owned parent company Monotype, comes with an annual price tag more than fifty times higher, according to Game*Spark.

  • Japanese game devs face font dilemma as license increases from $380 to $20k

• Wikipedia's most-read articles of 2025

• The "Mad Men" in 4K on HBO Max Debacle

  you can clearly see the pretend puke hose (that is ultimately strapped to the back side of John Slattery's face) in the background, along with two techs who are modulating the flow. Yeah, you're not supposed to see that. It appears as though this represents the original photography, unaltered before digital visual effects got involved. Somehow, this episode (along with many others) do not include all the digital visual effects that were in the original broadcasts and home video releases.

  • HBO Max's Mad Men Vomit Scene Proves 'Remastered' Doesn't Mean 'Better'

• Fastly, Cloudflare, Netflix, Apple Propose QUIC over TCP/TLS Called QMux

• Apple Pushes iPhone Users Still on iOS 18 to Upgrade to iOS 26

• Helldivers 2 devs slash install size from 154GB to 23GB

• Steam Deck lead reveals Valve is funding ARM compatibility of Windows games

  • Steam Machine today, Steam Phones tomorrow

• Micron Announces Exit from Crucial Consumer Business

  Micron Technology, Inc. today announced its decision to exit the Crucial consumer business, including the sale of Crucial consumer-branded products at key retailers, e-tailers and distributors worldwide. Micron will continue Crucial consumer product shipments through the consumer channel until the end of fiscal Q2 (February 2026).

  “The AI-driven growth in the data center has led to a surge in demand for memory and storage. Micron has made the difficult decision to exit the Crucial consumer business in order to improve supply and support for our larger, strategic customers in faster-growing segments,” said Sumit Sadana, EVP and Chief Business Officer

  • Micron to exit consumer memory business amid global supply shortage

  • After nearly 30 years, Crucial will stop selling RAM to consumers

  • Crucial is shutting down – because Micron wants to sell to AI companies instead

• DRAM prices may stay high past 2028 as Samsung, SK Hynix curb oversupply

• RAM is so expensive, Samsung won't even sell it to Samsung

• Meta's Child Sex-Trafficking Problem

• Warner Bros. 'Warming' to Netflix's Offer, Report Says

AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World

• IBM CEO says there is 'no way' spending on AI data centers will pay off

• The AI frenzy is driving a memory chip supply crisis

• CoreWeave Reveals the Significant Fragility of the 'AI Trade' for Broader Market

• AI Is Breaking the Moral Foundation of Modern Society

  Perhaps more destabilizing for society at large: it destroys the folk justification for inequality that the previous system relied on. Right now, even people who reject meritocracy understand its logic. You develop rare skills, you work hard, you create value, and you capture some of that value. You can dispute whether this is true or fair, but it has intuitive coherence. Critically, meritocracy works as folk ideology because most people know someone, be it a neighbor, a relative, a friend, who made it through effort and talent. The story feels real because it maps to lived experience, even if statistically it’s the exception. “I own the compute infrastructure” or “I owned the company that bought the AI systems early”, on the other hand, is just being in the right place at the right time. It’s not about your talents, effort, or contribution. It’s pure capital ownership divorced from any human quality.

• AI's Wrong Answers Are Bad. Its Wrong Reasoning Is Worse

• AI companies' safety practices fail to meet global standards, study shows

• Perplexity's Comet browser is now available to everyone for fre

• YouTube Creators Find a New Consumer for AI Slop: Babies

• Why Does A.I. Write Like That?

• Anthropic taps IPO lawyers as it races OpenAI to go public

  • Anthropic reportedly preparing for $300B IPO

  • Anthropic reportedly preparing for IPO in race with OpenAI: FT

• Microsoft lowers AI software sales quota

• Apple's AI Troubles Are Fading. Just Look at the Stock

• ChatGPT is down worldwide, conversations disappeared for users

• Microsoft stock sinks on report AI product sales are missing growth goals

• Google's toying with nonsense AI-made headlines on articles in the Discover feed

• OpenAI Agrees to Acquire Neptune to Improve AI Model Training

• OpenAI loses fight to keep ChatGPT logs secret in copyright case

• Anthropic's Chief Executive Acknowledges Risks of Spending on A.I

Space / Boomy Zoomers / UFO

• For the 1st time ever, 8 spacecraft are docked to the International Space Station | Space

• Satellite Megaconstellations Are Now Threatening Telescopes in Space

• Moonshot Space Raises $12M for Electromagnetic Launch

  • AFAIK chemical energy storage in explosives is still vastly easier to amass and express than electrical energy in these scales. But its still slightly less silly than spinlaunch.

• Russian cosmonaut removed from SpaceX mission amid security breach

Crypto con games

• Bitcoin's Sky-High Prices Have Not Panned Out

Economicon / Business / Finance

• Big Tech's 'Spend Little, Earn Lots' Formula Is Threatened by AI

• Kalshi Reaches $11B Valuation as App Takes over America

• Google-backed fusion group moves to commercialise neutral-beam technology

• Kroger's Surveillance Pricing Harms Consumers and Raises Prices

• Big Paychecks Can't Woo Enough Sailors for America's Commercial Fleet

• Responding to pressure from US, International Energy Agency forecast sees no end to oil demand.

  In the middle of the COP30 United Nations Climate Change Conference last month, the agency released its annual “World Energy Outlook.” Unlike previous iterations, the report doesn’t base its forecasts of future oil demand on scenarios that assume nations’ commitments to net-zero emissions by 2050 will be met. As a result of the change in forecasting, the agency no longer predicts “peak oil,” a century-old theory that the world will stop using petroleum because either it runs out or transitions to other technologies.

• Calculated Risk: Heavy Truck Sales Collapsed in October and November

  Usually, heavy truck sales decline sharply prior to a recession, and sales have collapsed recently.

• Kalshi raises $1B at $11B valuation, doubling value in under two months

• Omnicom to lay off 4,000 employees after completing IPG acquisition

  The cuts mark one of the biggest restructurings in the ad industry in years and comes as agencies adapt to new technologies and changing client demands.

Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making

• "Captain Gains" on Capitol Hill | NBER

  Using transaction-level data on US congressional stock trades, we find that lawmakers who later ascend to leadership positions perform similarly to matched peers beforehand but outperform them by 47 percentage points annually after ascension. Leaders’ superior performance arises through two mechanisms. The political influence channel is reflected in higher returns when their party controls the chamber, sales of stocks preceding regulatory actions, and purchase of stocks whose firms receiving more government contracts and favorable party support on bills. The corporate access channel is reflected in stock trades that predict subsequent corporate news and greater returns on donor-owned or home-state firms.

• Chicago plans to hold "social media apps accountable for public safety"

  • After ordering police not to enforce the laws, or allow other to do so...

• VA staff flag dangerous errors in Oracle-built electronic health record

• USPS EV fleet behind schedule with $3B in taxpayer funds spent — and only 612 trucks built

  The US Postal Service has spent more than $3 billion in tax dollars on a brand-new all-electric fleet of mail trucks — and gotten just 612 vehicles for its money, according to a letter sent to Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa) and obtained by The Post. Former President Joe Biden’s 2022 Inflation Reduction Act set aside billions for what Ernst has since ripped as a green “boondoggle” that saw almost all of that amount paid to Wisconsin-based defense contractor Oshkosh to design and build 35,000 new environmentally friendly mail trucks. But as of Nov. 10, only 612 of the battery-electric powered vehicles are on the road. A separate group of electric delivery vehicles — Ford E-Transit vans — are more widely in operation, with 2,010 delivering mail and packages. However, more than 6,700 have been delivered and are just sitting idle — in part because they can’t drive all the routes that the specially designed Oshkosh vehicles can

  • All my local post offices still kicking LLV's. Those require expert mechanics now: not because they're complicated but because at this point every one still running is an individual work of bodge art.

• Law Firms, Enviro Groups Got $20 Million in ‘Sue and Settle’ Schemes with EPA

  Law firms representing radical environmental activist groups like the Sierra Club and Center for Biological Diversity reaped more than $20 million in tax-funded legal fees between 2013 and 2024 through “Sue-and-Settle” schemes with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), according to a non-profit government watchdog. The Sierra Club led the way, receiving more than $4 million from the EPA to cover the activist group’s legal fees,

Trump

• Dell family to donate $6B to 'Trump accounts' of 25M US children

• Good: Trump Returns to Gasoline as Fuel of Choice for Cars

• President DJT Appears to Approve Kei Cars for the USA

  Trump announced that he has tasked U.S. Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffey with clearing the regulatory deck to allow small cars of the sort sold in Asia, such as Japan's kei cars, to become available in the United States.

• White House Proposes More Relaxed Fuel-Economy Regulations

Left Angst

• Political anthropologist says military buildup won't bring economic boon to Guam

• America is foolishly waving goodbye to Chinese boffins

• The West's Last Chance – How to Build a New Global Order Before It's Too Late

• Palantir shifted course to play key role in ICE deportations

• U.S. Pauses Immigration Applications from Nations on Travel Ban List

• When Musk joined Trump, countries rolled out the red carpet for Starlink

• LNG Exports Will Drive Explosion in U.S. Natural Gas Consumption

  The expected surge in liquefied natural gas export capacity in the United States is on course to boost gas consumption significantly, from around 18 billion cu ft right now to as much as 40 billion cu ft—and that 18 billion cu ft is already an all-time high. So, the U.S. LNG industry is already growing at breakneck speed, but it may just be the beginning of even more substantial growth, at least according to a senior executive of one of the biggest players in that field. That, in turn, could see higher natural gas prices at home.

• Trump calls Somali immigrants 'garbage' as US reportedly targets Minnesota

• After AI push, Trump administration is now looking to robots

• PR Fallout of the Tennessee Special Election

• Trump Launches Largest Environmental Rollback in U.S. History

• Kristi Noem's ICE hiring chaos laid bare

Law Breaking / Police / Internal Security

• TSA's New $45 Fee at U.S. Airports Unfairly Punishes Families in the Fine Print

External Security / Militaria / Diplomania

• US War Department Claims It's Not Waging a 'Forever War' in Somalia Despite Record Airstrikes - News From Antiwar.com

  The US Department of War insisted on Tuesday that it’s not waging a “forever war” in Somalia despite the fact that the Trump administration has shattered the record for annual airstrikes in the country. Liam Cosgrove, a reporter for ZeroHedge, noted during a Pentagon press briefing on Tuesday that the US has launched 101 airstrikes (now 102) in Somalia and that US troops reportedly conducted a recent ground raid, and asked why the US military is still in the country. The US has been fighting al-Shabaab since it backed an Ethiopian invasion of Somalia in 2006, which ousted the Islamic Courts Union, a coalition of Muslim groups that briefly held power in Mogadishu after taking the capital from CIA-backed warlords.

• US pressures Mexico for violating the 1944 Water Treaty

• Pentagon Launches $1B Program to Buy Hundreds Of Thousands Of Kamikaze Drones

World

• India withdraws mandatory pre-installation of Sanchar Saathi app on smartphones

  • India Says Mandatory Phone App Can Be Deleted After Backlash

  • India revokes state-run security app order for smartphones after outcry

  • India pulls its preinstalled iPhone app demand

• Indian government reveals GPS spoofing at eight major airports

  • Indian Airports Targeted by GPS Spoofing Cyber Attack

• Overtourism Has Reached a Tipping Point in NL, IT, HR, FR, CZ, GR and ES

• Accepting US car standards would risk European lives

• Cars are steadily becoming longer, wider and heavier in the UK and across Europe

• Search for Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 to resume

  • Deep-sea search for Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 to resume Dec. 30

  • Search for long-missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 to resume

• YouTube Set to Comply with Australia's Under-16s Ban

• Japan's low-crime image cracking as car thefts, home intrusions rise

• Brussels pushes for 70% of critical goods to be 'made in Europe'

• DNA analysis suggests first Australians arrived about 60k years ago

• Shibuya Ward cancels New Year countdown event; security to be tightened

• Canada's age-verification bill for porn is a slippery slope

• 'Carspreading' is on the rise – and not everyone is happy about it

  In the UK and across Europe, cars are steadily becoming longer, wider and heavier. Consumers clearly like them – a lot.

• Nearly Half of Young Japanese Workers Spend Big on Fandom Activities

Iran / Houthi

• The face-palming reason Iran is running out of water

Israel

• AI-powered surveillance firms are gunning for a share of the Gaza spoils

• Puppet Regime: Hamas' Coercive Grip on Aid and NGO Operations in Gaza

Russia Bad / Ukraine War

• The EU is finally blacklisting Russia for money laundering

• Europe Wants to Get the Word Out: Russia Is to Blame for Sabotage

• Commission proposes 2 solutions supporting Ukraine's 2026-2027 financing

• Ctrl-alt-defy: how Ukrainians have used memes to counter Russia's propaganda

• Russia blocks access to US children's gaming platform Roblox

China

• Zhuque-3 reaches orbit on test flight, first stage lost during landing attempt

  • LandSpace could become China's first company to land a reusable rocket

  • China's 1st reusable rocket explodes in fireball landing after reaching orbit

• Why China's electric trucks are becoming biggest diesel disruptor

Health / Medicine

• A Fentanyl Vaccine Is About to Get Its First Major Test | WIRED

  ARMR’s experimental vaccine is designed to neutralize fentanyl in the bloodstream before it reaches the brain. Keeping fentanyl out of the brain would prevent the respiratory failure that comes with overdose, which causes death, as well as the euphoric high people get while taking fentanyl. The basic idea behind ARMR’s shot is the same as any other vaccine. It trains the body’s immune system to make antibodies that recognize a foreign invader. But since fentanyl is much smaller than the pathogens our current vaccines target, it doesn’t trigger a natural antibody response on its own. To stimulate antibody production, ARMR has paired a fentanyl-like molecule with a “carrier” protein—a deactivated diphtheria toxin that’s already used in several approved medical products.

Pox / COVID / BioTerror AgitProp

• South Carolina's measles outbreak shows effect of vaccine misinformation

  • Someday i expect it will become "known", without anyone ever specifically having been held at fault; that all this smoke and PR was coverup over "new and improved" vaccines that just didn't work as well as the previous ones had.

Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda

• Environmentally Friendly Coffee

• Young Ants Beg for Death When Sick, New Study Reveals

  • Sick ants invite self-sacrifice to save colony, "Hey, come and kill me"

• Rocks Are Alive

• Satellite captures the first detailed look at a giant tsunami

• Drunk raccoon found passed out in Virginia liquor store

• Authors retract Nature paper projecting high costs of climate change

• Three Ideas for Lowering Electricity Costs

• Thank Climate Change for Our Hurricane-Free Season

  • But don't worry; next year we'll get the superstorms that cleanse all us sinful Humans from the Earth...

• What America Can Learn from Its Largest Wildfire of the Year