2025-03-16

Horseshit

• Have humans passed peak brain power?

  Data across countries and ages reveal a growing struggle to concentrate, and declining verbal and numerical reasoning

• The Last Decision by the Leading Thinker on Decisions

• The dazzling, $113B world of scratch-off lottery tickets

• I tried the viral $20 strawberry. It tasted like the end of the American empire

celebrity gossip

• Telegram Founder Durov Allowed to Temporarily Leave France

• Ex-NFL star trades the gridiron to grow food for those in need

Rank Propaganda / Thought Policing / World Disordering

• The real history of free speech — from supreme ideal to poisonous politics

  what exactly do we mean by free speech, and should there be any limits on it? In democracies, we celebrate free expression for good and hard-won reasons. Liberty of conscience is superior to enforced theocracy. The right to voice opinions without being persecuted is a hallmark of free societies as opposed to autocracies; so is the creation of challenging art and literature. Whatever your truths, freedom of expression is a valuable and inspiring ideal. But that doesn’t mean its principles are obvious or absolute. We often assume they must have been clearly established by great thinkers of the past, from Milton to James Madison to George Orwell, and that it’s only in the present that we’ve lost our way. But the real history of free speech is far more interesting — and it illuminates our current predicaments in surprisingly direct ways.

  Different ends require different means. Proper rules are constitutive of free expression: they channel it towards its intended aim. It’s also why conflict over free speech is inevitable. If its purpose is to establish truth, it requires one set of conditions; if democracy, a different set; if to create art or generate amusement, yet others and so on. It is an inherently unstable, contradictory ideal, even before we get to our own differences of opinion. If, by contrast, you regard freedom of expression not as a means to an end but as an end in itself, then you elevate it to the supreme ideal: more important than truth, justice, equity, democracy or any other value. That is not only logically problematic, it also implies that any constraint is wrong. The practical effect of such an outlook is to worsen exactly the serious, age-old problems that premodern societies obsessed over, and that all early theorists of free speech were acutely concerned to avoid: a public sphere full of hatred and slander, the poison of untruth and the politics of demagoguery. Welcome to 2025.

• Strings Attached: Talking about Russia's agenda for laws in cyberspace

Musk

• The court rejects Elon's latest attempt to slow OpenAI down

• EV Owners Don't Like Musk

• MAGA Teslas? Elon Musk is upending the politics of EVs

• Ewan Morrison on Elon Musk, brain implants and the danger of tech bros

Electric / Self Driving cars

• Dutch Insurer: Cars with Driver Assistance Systems File More Claims

• Last Year Waymo's Autonomous Vehicles Got 589 Parking Tickets in San Francisco

Edumacationalizing / Acedemia Nuts

• Student who graduated with honors says she's illiterate, sues CT school district

Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising

• Google Being Forced to Sell Chrome Is Not Good for the Web

• Bluesky in the final stages of raising new funding led by Bain Capital Ventures

• Google is rolling out a fix for all the dead Chromecasts, of which there are apparently many.

• Data Broker Brags About Highly Detailed Personal Info on Most All Internet Users

• Calls for Tim Cook's resignation over Apple Intelligence ignore his contribution

• Why SNES hardware is running faster than expected and why it's a problem

• Google is replacing Assistant with Gemini

• New ‘Starship Troopers’ Movie in the Works from ‘District 9’ Filmmaker Neill Blomkamp.

AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World

• No one knows what the hell an AI agent is

Space / Boomy Zoomers / UFO

• Boeing Starliner astronauts say they aren’t stuck in space | CNN

  NASA’s Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore — the two astronauts who launched on Boeing Starliner’s first crewed test flight and have been in low-Earth orbit since June — want to set the record straight: They aren’t stranded on the International Space Station, and they weren’t abandoned.

• To avoid the Panama Canal, Relativity Space may move some operations to Texas

• Musk says first mission to Mars will launch next year

Economicon / Business / Finance

• Chevron advances plans to develop US data centers with power generation

• UBS Doesn't Know What to Do with All the Art It Inherited from Credit Suisse

• Y Combinator founders raising less money signals a 'vibe shift,' VC says

• Gone are the days when a 'good job' gets you a house – and now we have the data

Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making

• USPS Working With DOGE to Fix ‘Broken Business Model’

  DeJoy said the USPS plans to reduce its workforce by “10,000 people in the next 30 days through a Voluntary Early Retirement program.” DeJoy also listed some of the supposed accomplishments that happened since he took over. You know what I didn’t see in the letter? The USPS wanting to spend $10 billion for electric vehicles and infrastructure. That announcement came out in 2022. In August 2022, Congress gave USPS $3 billion in that stupid Inflation Reduction Act for electric vehicles. The final deal came to $77,692 per vehicle. Well, the contractor in charge of providing 60,000 vehicles is way behind schedule. The USPS only received 100 electric vehicles by the end of 2024.

  • USPS Agrees to Work With DOGE, Plans to Cut 10,000 Workers | The Epoch Times

  • NALC statement on DeJoy’s agreement with DOGE

  Postmaster General DeJoy laid out some of the “big problems” DOGE could assist with. Some of these are issues we have been actively engaged in and advocating for years. These include USPS’s misallocated pension liabilities, which have cost the agency tens of billions of dollars, and a new investment strategy for USPS’s three retirement funds, which are currently held in Treasury bonds, missing out on hundreds of millions in annual returns.

• A Congresswoman with Dementia Stopped Coming to Work. The DC Press Never Noticed

• The sun is setting on government transparency in Florida

• Voice of America funding is cut

Trump

• What? TrumpHitler Didn't Explode and Have Reporter Arrested? - Victory Girls Blog

Left Angst

• Trump Admin Nixed Contract Helping Kidnapped Ukrainian Children

• 'Startup Nation' Groups Ask Trump for Deregulated 'Freedom Cities'

• Experts warn about the 'crumbling infrastructure' of federal government data

• Under Trump, AI Scientists Told to Remove 'Ideological Bias' from Models

• Elon Musk Calls for Judges to Be Impeached After Rulings Overturn Doge Firings

• Musk Boosts Claim That Hitler Wasn't to Blame for Holocaust

• 'Musk Said No One Has Died Since Aid Was Cut. That Isn't True.'

• Here's a 'dead' person on Social Security in Seattle, with plenty to say

• Trump calls for 'far reaching investigation' into Democrats and news orgs

• Farmers face steep losses in the middle of Trump's trade war and funding cuts

Law Breaking / Police / Internal Security

• How a Columbia Student Fled to Canada After ICE Came Looking for Her

• Justice Department investigating terrorism charges for pro-Palestine protesters

External Security / Militaria / Diplomania

• US designated South Korea a 'sensitive' country amid nuclear concerns

• Rubio says South Africa's ambassador to the US is no longer welcome

• Canada reconsidering F-35 purchase amid tensions with Washington

  • Carney Reviews Canada's Order of F-35 Jets Amid Rift with US

• US launches wave of air strikes on Yemen's Houthis

  The US has launched a "decisive and powerful" wave of air strikes on Houthi rebels in Yemen, President Donald Trump has said, citing the armed group's attacks on shipping in the Red Sea as the reason. "Funded by Iran, the Houthi thugs have fired missiles at US aircraft, and targeted our Troops and Allies," Trump wrote on his Truth social platform, adding that their "piracy, violence, and terrorism" had cost "billions of dollars" and put lives at risk. The Houthi-run health ministry said at least 13 people were killed and nine others injured in the strikes. The group - which began targeting shipping in response to the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza - said its forces would respond to US strikes. In a statement, the Houthis blamed the US and the UK for "wicked" aggression targeting residential areas in Sanaa. However, it is understood that London is not behind Saturday's strikes on the Middle Eastern country.

World

• Canada has far too few soldiers. Here's a fix – mandatory service

Iran / Houthi

• Iran is using drones and apps to catch women who aren't wearing hijabs

Health / Medicine

• Fitness Trackers Are Only 67% Accurate, New Research Finds

• A doctor on what it's like to end a life rather than extend one

• FDA warns of health consequences amid rising nitrous oxide use.

• Don't beach and booze: Why alcohol makes it easier to get a sunburn

• Ultra-processed babies: are toddler snacks one of the food scandals of our time?

Pox / COVID / BioTerror AgitProp

• US measles cases reach 5-year high; 15 states report cases, Texas outbreak grows

• Keeping with Kennedy's Advice, Measles Patients Turn to Unproven Treatments

• A Pill to Prevent Covid-19 Shows Promise

  • They all show promise until after the funding and liability immunity is secured; then the actual data can be shown.

Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda

• Climate Group Funded by Bill Gates Slashes Staff in Major Retreat

• (PDF) The Climate has changed on climate change

• Can a Geothermal Startup Vaporize Rock to Drill the Deepest Holes?

• Submarine cables connect the world. They can also help us study climate change