2025-05-16
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Hotline between National airport, Pentagon disconnected for three years - The Washington Post
A hotline connecting air traffic controllers at Reagan National Airport and their counterparts at the Pentagon has been “inoperable” since March 2022, a Federal Aviation Administration official confirmed Wednesday, further evidence of poor safety coordination between federal agencies responsible for the airspace where a midair collision in January killed 67 people.
Horseshit
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Why has American pop culture stagnated?
If you look at the history of pop culture, novelty has always been driven by changes in technology. Rock music was able to exist only after the amplifier and the pickup microphone were invented. Electronic dance music was only able to exist after synthesizers, mixers, and samplers were created. Movies and TV required cameras and a host of other technologies. Even books were very hard to make before the printing press. And yet in the realm of technology too, we may eventually see stagnation. Innovation is getting more expensive, and the pool of potential researchers is set to shrink. Perhaps AI can save us and revive both technological progress and cultural novelty, but that remains to be seen.
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New research reveals the strongest solar event ever detected, in 12350 BC
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Denver airport air traffic control went out for 6 minutes on Monday, report says
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Children under six should avoid screen time, French medical experts say
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Dolphin whistle decoders win $100k interspecies communication prize
celebrity gossip
Obit
Rank Propaganda / Thought Policing / World Disordering
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I'm a free-speech champion — arrested for words I never said
I never thought I’d end up in handcuffs and a jail cell for something I didn’t say. But last May, police in New Haven, Conn., arrested me — because a parking attendant falsely claimed I had used a racial slur against him nearly a year earlier. I denied it. I asked the cops to check the parking lot’s surveillance video. They didn’t — and the state charged me first with disorderly conduct, then with three counts of breach of peace in the second degree. It took almost a year, tens of thousands of dollars in legal fees and endless stress before the nightmare ended on March 27, when the prosecutor finally dropped all charges. Why? “Insufficient evidence,” “inconsistencies,” “credibility issues,” video that “clearly contradicted” the accuser’s claims — and a possibility that I wasn’t even the right person. The judge dismissed the case. If this can happen to me — a First Amendment advocate with resources, legal counsel and a public reputation to defend — it can happen to anyone.
Musk
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Tesla has yet to start testing Austin robotaxi service weeks before launch
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Tesla took leased cars back to use them as robotaxis, instead sold them
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Musk's Grok makes "white genocide" claims on X about South Africans
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Terrorists seem to be paying X to generate propaganda with Grok
Electric / Self Driving cars
Religion / Tribal / Culture War and Re-Segregation
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ICANN kills off diversity and inclusion
ICANN seems to have become the latest American organization to back away from commitments to “diversity” and “inclusion” in the wake of a universe now controlled by the whims of Donald Trump. The Org has recently started removing references to the D-word from its web site, sloppily editing its diversity-related web pages, replacing it with the less politically loaded term “representation”. Also gone is the link to an ICANN Learn course on “Unconscious Bias”, which teaches you that not all nurses are female and not all CEOs are white men and apparently ICANN has money to burn. While ICANN previously said it offers its staff “Diversity & Inclusion Training”, it now says it offers “Culture Training”.
Edumacationalizing / Acedemia Nuts
Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising
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Nintendo Switch 2 official specs confirm GPU similar to a mobile RTX 2050
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Meta's still violating GDPR rules with latest plan to train AI on EU user data
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CPU ransomware can "bypass every traditional technology we have out there"
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Apple paying $95M in Siri eavesdropping settlement. How to file a claim
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89M Steam accounts reportedly leaked. Change your password now
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Epic CEO says Apple still hasn't approved Fortnite iOS, suggests obstruction
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YouTube announces Gemini AI feature to target ads when viewers are most engaged
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Apple is placing warnings on EU apps that don't use App Store payments
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CarPlay Ultra, the next generation of CarPlay, begins rolling out today
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They Paid $3,500 for Apple's Vision Pro. A Year Later, It Still Hurts
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Microsoft set to pull the plug on Bing Search APIs in favor of AI alternative
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Nvidia’s original customers are feeling unloved and grumpy
On May 19th the chip-design firm will release the GeForce RTX 5060, its newest mass-market graphics card for video gamers. PR departments at companies like AMD and Nvidia usually roll the pitch for such products by providing influential YouTubers and websites with samples to test ahead of time. That allows them to publish their reviews on launch day. This time, though, Nvidia seems to have got cold feet. Reviewers have said that it is withholding vital software until the day of the card’s launch, making timely coverage impossible. May 19th is also the day before the start of Computex, a big Taiwanese trade show that often saturates the tech press. Trying to slip a product out without fanfare often means a company is worried it will not be well received. That may be the case with the 5060. Nvidia, which got its start in gaming, has more recently become a star of the artificial-intelligence (AI) business. But some of its early customers are feeling jilted. Reviews for some recent gaming products have been strikingly negative. Hardware Unboxed, a YouTube channel with more than 1m subscribers, described one recent graphics chip as a “piece of crap”. A video on another channel, Gamers Nexus (2.4m subscribers), complains about inflated performance claims and “marketing BS”. Linus Tech Tips (16.3m) opined in April that Nvidia is “grossly out of touch” with its customers. Price is one reason for the grousing. Short supply means Nvidia’s products tend to be sold at a much higher price than the official rate. The 4060, which the 5060 is designed to replace, has a recommended price of $299. But on Newegg, a big online shop, the cheapest 4060 costs more than $400. The 5090, Nvidia’s top gaming card, is supposed to go for $1,999. Actually getting hold of one can cost $3,000 or more.
TechSuck / Geek Bait
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Read that. Meditate on it. Now, notice: You still don’t know how to solve
Aᵢyᵢ=xᵢfor alliat once. Is it even possible? Did I lie when I said it was? As far as I can tell, what people actually do is try random variations until one seems to work.- I just went straight to C for such work; just before the dawn of NumPy (remember Numeric?). I had a Python module for viewing arrays but that was for debug / interface code; with the heavy lifting done in compiled C.
AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World
Space / Boomy Zoomers / UFO
Crypto con games
Economicon / Business / Finance
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EA Pushes Full Return to Office, Effectively Ends Remote Hiring
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DoorDash driver helped cheat company out of $2.5M using phantom deliveries
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UnitedHealth Shares Plunge Continues On Reported DoJ Probe For Medicare Fraud | ZeroHedge
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A fraction of proposed data centers will get built. Utilities are wising up
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Birkenstock hikes price of sandals globally to help offset tariffs
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Bags of Cash From Drug Cartels Flood Teller Windows at U.S. Banks - WSJ
The network allegedly handled some $50 million in proceeds from drug trafficking over four years, depositing a portion of the tainted cash at ATMs and teller windows at major banks including Citibank in cities around Los Angeles County, according to federal prosecutors. Similar money-laundering operations operate in plain sight around the U.S., hiding the staggering returns which are the sole reason cross-border cartels smuggle the fentanyl, methamphetamine, cocaine and other illegal drugs consumed by millions of Americans, according to current and former law-enforcement officials and court records.
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Smart Money Loses to Retail Crowd That Bet on Epic Stock Rebound
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Retailers urge European Commission to crack down on Visa, Mastercard
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A warning from Walmart during US trade war: Higher prices are inevitable
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Most Americans don't earn enough to afford basic costs of living
Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making
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Georgetown academic released from immigration detention after judge's ruling
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US reportedly plans to slash bank rules imposed to prevent 2008-style crash
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Highlights from oral arguments in case over Trump's birthright citizenship order
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Bill to tax remittances sent by migrants, visa holders to their home countries
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CBP Seizes Shipment of T-Shirts Featuring Swarm of Bees Attacking a Cop
Trump
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Trump Team Ain't Playin' Around: More Hanky Panky Busted at the CFTC – HotAir
“While the Court’s findings have shined a bright light on the CFTC’s widespread violations of both the duty of candor to the Court and applicable rules of attorney professional conduct, these types of failures are rarely an isolated incident and point to a broader breakdown in the culture of the Division of Enforcement. This case clearly shows that the Division has for far too long maintained a culture that the CFTC is above the law and that breaking the rules is justified because the CFTC is a government agency. This culture is a slippery slope that turns good intentions into bad actions and normalizes wrongdoing.
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White House announces AI data campus partnership with the UAE
Democrats
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Biden Cognitive Decline Cover-Up: Media Scramble After Years of Denial
The second and more likely possibility is that the media knew exactly what they were doing and repeatedly, knowingly, and consistently lied to the public anyway because it advanced their political agenda. Now that the lie has become impossible to maintain, they are scrambling to cover their own hides by pinning blame on Biden staffers. Of course, the great irony here is that the lie was never all that believable. Most Americans knew they were being lied to.
Left Angst
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Trump's sanctions on ICC prosecutor have halted tribunal's work
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Regime to try to throw book at that Harvard Medical School researcher with the frozen frog embryos
A computer scientist working at Harvard Medical School now faces up to 20 years in federal prison on a charge of smuggling formally brought by the US Attorney's office in Boston over the frozen frog embryos a researcher at the school had asked her to bring back when she returned from a trip to France. The feds announced the smuggling charge against Kseniia Petrova today, even as she was scheduled for a hearing in Vermont federal court to argue against her continued detention in a for-profit ICE gulag in Louisiana - a different one than Tufts grad student Rümeysa Öztürk had been held in until her release last week. Cambridge Day reports on the Vermont hearing, says another is scheduled in her immigration case on May 28. A magistrate judge in US District Court in Boston had actually ordered Petrova's arrest on the smuggling charge on Monday. If convicted, Petrova, 31, could face up to 20 years in federal prison. Petrova has been locked up since her detention at Logan Airport on Feb. 16.
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Trump’s egg price fiction has suddenly become reality | CNN Business
For months, President Donald Trump has falsely claimed that egg prices are tumbling. It wasn’t true then, but it’s true now. Egg prices fell 12.7% last month, the biggest monthly decline since 1984, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported Tuesday. And they could continue to fall this month, too: The USDA reported last week that a dozen large white-shell eggs now cost $3.30 on average, down a whopping 69 cents from a week before.
Despite Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins’ far more conservative estimate that egg prices would normalize in the summer, Trump last month said, “as you know, the cost of eggs has come down like 93, 94% since we took office.” Those percentage declines Trump stated are not close to accurate – but we now know that consumer egg prices were, indeed, falling sharply when Trump made those remarks (the Consumer Price Index data wasn’t out yet to confirm or deny Trump’s claims). It appears as though Trump may have been talking about wholesale prices, which had been tumbling throughout March before normalizing in recent weeks. Nevertheless, wholesale prices fell by half – not close to the 90%+ figures Trump was citing.
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GAO finds billions in possible government savings, all without DOGE's help
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Stopping States from Passing AI Laws for the Next Decade Is a Terrible Idea
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Trump Administration Leaned on African Countries to Get Business for Elon Musk
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US buried mils of gallons of wartime nuclear waste; Doge could wreck the cleanup
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Trump has "a little problem" with Apple's plan to ship iPhones from India
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RFK Jr.'S Quest to Make Americans Eat Healthier Will Be Costly
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Potential US semiconductor boom complicated by Trump's economic policies
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Senators urge investigation of Trump helping Musk make Starlink deals
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America's immigration system was a landmine, and Trump set it off
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Trump Administration Cancels Scores of Grants to Study Online Misinformation
- They've insisted the "Censorship industry" doesn't exist but look at 'em howl when the funds for it get pinched.
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The stakes of the Trump administration's plans to end animal testing
if the goal is not just to benefit animals, but also to make science better, the Trump administration is surely going about it in a strange way. It’s waging war on scientific institutions, seeking to slash research budgets — massively, seemingly indiscriminately, and questionably legally — at the NIH and the National Science Foundation, undermining decades of American leadership in science and medicine. It hasn’t committed any new funding toward its goal of advancing animal-free research methods. In this light, scientists are understandably skeptical that research policy coming from this administration could benefit science, rather than just sabotage it. Putting animal research on the chopping block, many believe, could merely be a convenient and popular way to slash support for science across the board. Yet those seeking to phase out government-funded animal research aren’t just anti-science radicals — they’re also animal testing critics who correctly point out that animal experiments are expensive, often ineffective, and come at a steep ethical cost. This has created a diverse, sometimes-uneasy coalition of animal welfare advocates, science reformers, and far-right political figures — some are willing to accept reforms any way they can get them; others are more wary of moves made by this administration, even when their agendas align.
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Unprecedented cuts to the National Science Foundation endanger research
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Keep calm (but delete your nudes): the new rules for travelling to America
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Americans would suffer most if Trump imposes pharma tariffs, sector warns
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Uncle Sam claims H-1B fraud crackdown is working as registrations drop 25%
Law Breaking / Police / Internal Security
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Former member of Army National Guard arrested for mass shooting plot at Michigan military base
Said is a former member of the Michigan Army National Guard from Melvindale. Investigators say he planned an armed attack on the U.S. Army's Tank-Automotive & Armaments Command facility in Warren. Investigators say the attack was on behalf of the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham, or ISIS. The plan involved drone reconnaissance of the facility, supplying ammunition, creating Molotov cocktails and using military tactics learned during his National Guard service, court documents say.
External Security / Militaria / Diplomania
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I'd love to see some evidence on this: Rogue communication equipment found in Chinese-made solar power inverters
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Improving Naval Ship Acquisition
US Naval vessels today regularly take far longer to build than scheduled, and greatly exceed their already-high cost estimates. A 2018 GAO report found that more than 80% of both lead ships (the first ship built of a series) and follow-on ships (subsequent ships of the series) were over budget, sometimes dramatically so. The first Zumwalt-class destroyer was over budget by 38%, and the first two Littoral Combat Ships were over budget by 150%. Similarly, of eight lead ships reviewed by the GAO, every one was delivered behind schedule, and five of the eight ships were delivered two years late or more. Delays and cost overruns are wasteful and hamper the effectiveness of the Navy: reducing them would mean getting more ships, faster.
World
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The 'invisible crew' who have 35 seconds to prevent a Eurovision blunder
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Appeals court rules that tracking-based online advertising is illegal in Europe
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Germany Will Build Strongest Conventional Army in Europe.
“Strength deters aggression. Weakness, on the other hand, invites aggression,” Merz said in his first statement to the Bundestag as chancellor, laying out his coalition government’s priorities, Die Zeit reported.
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India and Pakistan Talked Big, but Satellite Imagery Shows Limited Damage
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Saou Ichikawa is Japan's first disabled author to win a top literary prize
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ECB hopes to have political deal on digital euro by early 2026
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Europe's costly military pensions complicate defense buildup