2025-04-20

Cool

• When is Easter? Orthodox, western holidays have rare overlap in 2025

Horseshit

• SMRs, not large reactors, are 'future of nuclear power'

• Where Have All the Nicknames Gone?

• Forget the attention economy. Prepare for the intention economy

• The Creator of 'Cowboy Bebop' Thinks Reality Is More Dystopian Than Sci-Fi

• Come with Me If You Want to Survive an Age of Extinction

• ‘Immediate red flags’: questions raised over ‘expert’ much quoted in UK press | National newspapers | The Guardian

  Santini’s output has been prolific, with comments in Vogue, Metro, Cosmopolitan, the i newspaper, the Express, Hello!, the Telegraph, the Daily Star, the Daily Mail and the Sun in recent years. She was also quoted in an article for the BBC’s international site, BBC.com. On closer inspection, her main online presence is as a sex and relationships adviser at an online sex toy outlet, Peaches and Screams. Some of the articles featuring her include a link to the store. Her qualifications are described there as “psychologist and sex adviser – University of Oxford”. However, the British Psychological Society (BPS) said she was not one of its members. She does not appear to have social media profiles,

• The 'freaky and unpleasant' world when video games leak into the physical realm

  • They did a whole movie about that

• Fusion Rockets Could Theoretically Cut Our Travel Time to Mars in Half

• India's sword-wielding grandmother still going strong at 82

Rank Propaganda / Thought Policing / World Disordering

• Biden Made 600 Grants to Stop 'Disinformation.' Trump Now Has a Plan for Them.

  more than 800 federal grants and contracts since 2017, totaling more than $1.4 billion, to help curb speech considered by the U.S. government to be misinformation and disinformation. More than 600 were made during the years when Joe Biden was president. The Biden years saw heightened public scrutiny of some of these programs, which Republican lawmakers and free speech groups criticized as “censorship” devices in the U.S. That culminated in an executive order from President Donald Trump on his first day in office that accused the government of violating the free-speech rights of Americans “under the guise of combating ‘misinformation,’ ‘disinformation,’ and ‘malinformation.’ ” But until now, it has not been clear just how much taxpayer money was spent on these programs and how many federal agencies were involved in the effort. Indeed, it was only when The Free Press began contacting agencies for comment about programs listed in federal documents as active that officials in the Trump administration began to scrutinize them more closely—launching investigations and evaluating internal policies.

  • The Numbers Behind The Government's Anti-Misinformation Explosion

  since 2017, the federal government has awarded about 800 grants to counter mis/disinformation — and the Biden administration is responsible for more than 600 of them. The 800 grants amount to more than $1.4 billion.

• 'The bomber's words sound mainstream. Like he won ' Oklahoma City's tragedy

Musk

• Member of Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz’s administration allegedly caused $20K in damage while vandalizing Teslas: report

• Cybertruck Rusting? That's Normal

• Tesla delays new 'affordable EV/stripped down Model Y' in the US

  • Tesla to delay US launch of affordable EV, a lower-cost Model Y

• Musk's fury over a Tesla investigation foreshadowed his war on Washington

Electric / Self Driving cars

• Surge pricing, the scourge of ridehailing, is evolving for the robotaxi era

Edumacationalizing / Acedemia Nuts

• UC Santa Cruz lost its crown as the 'most stoned campus on Earth

• Texas school district bans Virginia state flag and seal over naked breast

Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising

• Welcome to slop world: how the hostile internet is driving us crazy

• AT&T launches new All-Fi Pro plan with automatic upgrades, free boosters, more

• Synology Lost the Plot with Hard Drive Locking Move

• Apple's airlifting imports to beat tariff deadline included Macs

  • Tim Cook helped Apple out of Trump's tariff storm – for now

  • Why even Donald Trump bows to the power of the iPhone

• Bluesky may soon add blue check verification

• Regrets: Actors who sold AI avatars stuck in Black Mirror-esque dystopia

• Vendors vote to slash website certificate duration

TechSuck / Geek Bait

• Petition to Open Source Initiative to publish 2025 Board election results

• The End of Sierra as We Knew It, Part 2: The Scandal The Digital Antiquarian

  On March 6, 1998, he dispatched his chief accounting officer Scott Forbes — no relation to Walter — from Cendant’s new headquarters in Manhattan to CUC’s old ones in Stamford, Connecticut. The accountant’s orders were to get the numbers he needed by any means necessary, even if it required getting Silverman himself to come onto the speakerphone and threaten somebody’s job. He met with E. Kirk Shelton, Walter Forbes’s right-hand man. Caving at last, Shelton sheepishly explained that there was a little problem — only a little one, mind you — with the former CUC’s books. Its actual revenues during its last year had come in about $165 million under the figures it had reported. While Scott Forbes was still shaking his head at this piece of news, wondering if he had heard correctly, Shelton rushed to add that the problem was easily fixable, by reporting equity from the merger as operating revenue. “We want you to help us figure out how to creatively do this,” said Shelton, as if committing accounting fraud was just another day at the office — which to him it was, as would soon become all too clear.

AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World

• OpenAI's new reasoning AI models hallucinate more | TechCrunch

• Russia seeds chatbots with lies. Any bad actor could game AI the same way

• Microsoft Copilot shows AI increasingly appears like an unwanted party guest

Space / Boomy Zoomers / UFO

• Trump official: "You cannot identify as an astronaut"

• Oldest Satellite Has Been in Space for 67 Years. Engineers Want to Bring It Home

  • Oldest we're aware of. We get to looking close at the other things up there we may find hieroglyphics and cat fur.

Crypto con games

• A new kids' show will come with a crypto wallet when it debuts this fall

Economicon / Business / Finance

• What We Lose When We're Priced Out of Our Hobbies

• Inside Home Depot’s $20 Billion Secret Garden - WSJ

  The event is known inside the company as spring trials. This invitation-only showcase is where breeders flaunt their latest offerings and Home Depot’s suppliers get their first glimpse of new plants that the retailer spent years helping to develop. Soon they will make their way from greenhouses to Home Depots—and then your garden. The garden business rakes in about $20 billion a year for Home Depot—more than appliances, lumber or paint. It’s one of the biggest departments of the biggest home-improvement retailer, covering everything from live goods like plants, flowers and shrubs to soils, grills and patio furniture. In fact, it’s so big that Home Depot makes more money from its garden divisions than Hermès does from all of its luxury goods.

• Cancellations of Chinese freight ships begin as bookings plummet

• Dubai chocolate sparks pistachio shortage as TikTokers go nuts

• US chocolate prices surge amid soaring cocoa costs and tariffs

Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making

• Oregon bill would make doxxing a crime

• Congress Is Investigating 23andMe's Handling of Personal Data

• SCOTUS Freezes Alien Enemy Removals in Rare, Urgent, Late-Night Order

  • Supreme Court Issues Unusual Order in Alien Enemies Act Deportation Case

Trump

• Trump Advisers Took Advantage of Navarro's Absence to Push for Tariff Pause

• 'Lab Leak,' a flashy page on the virus' origins, replaces government Covid sites

  • White House replaces covid.gov website with 'lab leak' theory

• White House Says It Has Tech That Can 'Manipulate Time and Space'

• 'You Could Prosecute Thousands': Peter Thiel Explains How DOGE Is Exposing 'Left-Wing NGOs' | ZeroHedge

Left Angst

• Anxiety at US colleges as foreign students are detained and visas revoked

• NSF starts to kill grants that violate Trump's war on diversity efforts

• Trump's Tariffs Are Starting to Kill Jobs

• U.S. attorney demands journal explain how it ensures 'viewpoint diversity'

• CISA warns threat hunting staff of end to Google, Censys contracts due to cuts

• Doge Is Building a Master Database to Surveil and Track Immigrants

• China Can Have It All – China is currently winner of America's self-sabotage

• Dems fret over DOGE feeding sensitive data into random AI

• Trump Officials Blame Mistake for Setting Off Confrontation with Harvard

• Feds take control of Penn Station rebuild, kick MTA off the project

• The Next Terrorist Attack - by Timothy Snyder

  the present government invites a terror attack. Most of the people directing the relevant agencies are incompetent; the next few layers down have been purged in culture wars; much the remaining personnel have resigned, been fired, or are demoralized; resources have been diverted away from terror prevention; Americans has been distracted by fiction and chaos; and potential attackers have been encouraged. And so we have to think — now — about what would follow such an attack. Musk, Trump, Vance, and the rest would try to exploit the moment to undo remaining American freedoms.

• Take It Down Act nears passage

• DOJ Sends Intimidating Letters to Medical Journals for Supposedly Being Partisan

  • Trump-allied prosecutor sends letters to medical journals alleging bias

• Donald Trump vs. Mr Market

• House Democrats: DOGE is building 'master database' of Americans' information

Law Breaking / Police / Internal Security

• When is a knife a weapon? Oregon Supreme Court to decide

• Cops Used the Shoplifting Panic to Buy Tons of New Equipment

• Police Say He Killed in Self-Defense. His Phone Tells Another Story

External Security / Militaria / Diplomania

• US will abandon Ukraine peace push if no progress soon

• U.S. Gas Exports to China Stopped After Beijing Imposed Tariffs

World

• Unexploded ordnance still haunts Okinawa 80 years after WWII battle

• He's been dead for 300 years. So why is this emperor angering millions today?

• Britain's beloved steam trains trial pioneering technology

• The threat to free speech in Germany

Russia Bad / Ukraine War

• The Ukrainian startup making walkie-talkies caught the attention of US Military

China

• Chinese robots ran against humans in the first humanoid half-marathon

  • Chinese robots lose against humans in half-marathon

  • China hosts world's first half-marathon race between humans and robots

• China to tighten EV battery rules to reduce fire and explosion risks

Health / Medicine

• Pedometers suffice for measuring health-promoting physical activity, finds study

• Cannabis terpenes shown to prevent pain in new study

• Eli Lilly finds its weight-loss pill works just as well as Ozempic — and investors are loving it.

Pox / COVID / BioTerror AgitProp

• Video shows Texas doctor with measles treating kids

Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda

• Plastics are greener than they seem

• Climate change could affect arsenic in rice

• Lichens can survive almost anything, and some might survive Mars

• There's Life Inside Earth's Crust

• Despite improvements, governance in the Pan Amazon falls short

• NASA Analysis Shows Unexpected Amount of Sea Level Rise in 2024

• Certain sunflower strains can be induced to form seeds without pollination

• Microplastics discovered in caddisfly casings from the 1970s suggest long-term contamination.

• Don't overlook the many benefits of plastics

• Climate change and human interventions drive greening of the Thar desert