2025-05-26
etc
-
Reinvent the Wheel | Matthias Endler
One of the most harmful pieces of advice is to not reinvent the wheel. I’m glad that some people didn’t follow that advice; we owe them many of the conveniences of modern life. Even on a surface level, the advice is bad: We have much better wheels today than 4500–3300 BCE when the first wheel was invented. It was also crucially important that wheels got reinvented throughout civilizations and cultures.
Horseshit
-
200 MPH for 500 miles: How IndyCar drivers prepare for the big race
-
Google Researcher Lowers Quantum Bar to Crack RSA Encryption
-
The arts are being crippled by conformity
FITA surveyed nearly 500 respondents working across theatre, visual arts, literature and music. The report found 84 per cent don’t feel free to express their politics. Nearly 80 per cent report harassment for stepping out of ideological line, and 78 per cent agree with the statement “people working in the arts wouldn’t dare own up to right-of-centre political opinions”. Report authors Rosie Kay and Denise Fahmy — one a choreographer, the other a former Arts Council insider — learned first hand the price of nonconformity. Both were professionally kneecapped for thought crimes that wouldn’t raise an eyebrow in the pub.
Those surveyed know instinctively which topics are off-limits: “Discussion of the transgender phenomenon and ideology. Support for Israel or Jewish individuals in the Israel/Palestine conflict. Criticism of CRT and race theories. Any irreverence toward religion, particularly Islam … And so on.” “Admitting you’re a Tory” was almost laughable to some respondents — “might as well wear a sign saying ‘kick me’,” quipped one.
-
The Newark airport crisis is about to become everyone's problem
Obit
-
Death of a Master Manipulator - by Jeff Stein - SpyTalk
Michael Ledeen, the controversial national security journalist, scholar and schemer who died at age 83 on May 17 from complications following a stroke, played a significant covert role leading up to the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, as well as other productions of false intelligence for political ends.
Rank Propaganda / Thought Policing / World Disordering
-
"Completely Insane": Wired Posts DIY Video For Mangione's Ghost Gun | ZeroHedge
YouTube's content rules apparently don't apply to corporate media darlings. Case in point: Wired (Publisher: Condé Nast) recently published a video walking viewers through the exact process of building a copycat version of the untraceable 9mm "ghost gun" allegedly used in the UnitedHealth CEO shooting by Lugi Mangione. YouTube explicitly prohibits content that provides instructions on manufacturing firearms, including ghost guns. The policy even states:
"Don't post content on YouTube if the purpose is to do one or more of the following: Provide instructions on manufacturing any of the following: Firearms."
independent firearm enthusiasts regularly get their videos pulled, age-restricted, or demonetized for far less. The double standard is obvious: if you're mainstream media, you get a pass — but if you're just a gun hobbyist or DIY engineer, the censorship hammer comes down hard.
Religion / Tribal / Culture War and Re-Segregation
Edumacationalizing / Acedemia Nuts
Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising
-
The End of Glitch (Even Though They Say It Isn't)
The post carefully avoids calling this an “Our Incredible Journey” moment, but removing project hosting and user profiles is the end of Glitch as a platform. What’s left is essentially a redirect service with some backlinks (hosted on the Fastly Edge Compute Platform, naturally). You can’t spin the removal of the core product as anything other than what it is: a shutdown.
-
As the game industry cuts back, accessibility is feeling the impact
-
Discord seeks to solve a problem that it created
it’s changed the way that online communities interact, turning groups that may have previously existed as forums or message boards into multi-channel instant message servers. Discord wants to work on features that are “more amicable to structured knowledge sharing, like forums, that we could probably do a better job of investing in.” Another proposed solution to this clutter is to use an LLM to summarize long streams of messages. But culture among Discord users varies so widely that the embrace of AI could simultaneously excite and enrage its audience.
-
Do we need publicly-owned social networks to escape Silicon Valley?
-
Jony Ive's OpenAI Deal Puts Pressure on Apple to Find Next Big Thing
TechSuck / Geek Bait
AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World
Space / Boomy Zoomers / UFO
Crypto con games
Economicon / Business / Finance
-
A Word of Advice for American Automakers Afraid of a Chinese 'Invasion': Git Gud
CarBuzz calls this threat an "invasion," but we might want to label that an overstatement. We aren't living in the 1980s, when Japanese carmakers arrived in the U.S. in earnest and began to decisively disrupt the lock that the Detroit Big Three had previously held on the market. General Motors, Ford, and Chrysler at the time had the onerous task of defending all that market share they had taken for granted. They were literally ripe for the taking. In 2025, U.S. market share has settled into an almost calcified state. It's brutally difficult for an automaker to steal even a point of share, and this situation guides a lot of business planning. It's been more than a decade since GM staked out market share objectives that were significantly higher than its current 17%. For today's car companies, profitability is the name of the game, not outselling the other guy. When Chinese brands are finally permitted to crack into the U.S. they will confront a stark reality: coming to America is one thing, while actually making it in America is another.
-
At Amazon, Some Coders Say Their Jobs Have Begun to Resemble Warehouse Work
-
Immigration Is the Only Thing Propping Up California's Population
Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making
Trump
-
Restoring Gold Standard Science
Actions taken by the prior Administration further politicized science, for example, by encouraging agencies to incorporate diversity, equity, and inclusion considerations into all aspects of science planning, execution, and communication. Scientific integrity in the production and use of science by the Federal Government is critical to maintaining the trust of the American people and ensuring confidence in government decisions informed by science.
My Administration is committed to restoring a gold standard for science to ensure that federally funded research is transparent, rigorous, and impactful, and that Federal decisions are informed by the most credible, reliable, and impartial scientific evidence available. We must restore the American people’s faith in the scientific enterprise and institutions that create and apply scientific knowledge in service of the public good. Reproducibility, rigor, and unbiased peer review must be maintained. This order restores the scientific integrity policies of my first Administration and ensures that agencies practice data transparency,
Left Angst
-
Trump Has Cut Science Funding to Its Lowest Level in Decades
-
the crisis is not a crisis of numbers per se. It is, rather, a crisis of meaning; a rupture not in the ledger, but in the cultural imagination. If America still makes certain kinds of things, it no longer feels like it does. The sensibility once built around the factory - the sense of shared identity, productive pride and visible contribution to a collective life - has withered. What has disappeared is not entirely manufacturing itself, but the mythology that once surrounded it.
That myth no longer holds. Even as industrial output remains high, in dollar terms, its presence in everyday life has diminished to the point of near-invisibility. The goods that surround most Americans, their clothes, their shoes, their phones, their appliances, their back-to-school supplies and their furniture, are overwhelmingly made elsewhere. The tangible proximity between citizen and production has dissolved. What remains are fragments, ephemera separated in space and time: distant supply chains, unmanned factories and disembedded capital-intensive production facilities that yield little in the way of employment, and even less in shared symbolic resonance.
The result is a condition best described as hollowing out, not merely the thinning of industrial employment or the closure of plants, but a more fundamental loss of symbolic density. Barthes’ mythologies relied on visibility, on repetition and on signs woven into the fabric of daily life. Today’s manufacturing economy, though still present, does not register in that way. It is abstract, remote, and largely silent in the sensory world of most people.
-
Psychologist Who Specializes in Narcissists: What We Need to Do to Stop Trump
-
Tripp Mickle on Whether Trump's 'Made in America' iPhone Is a Fantasy
-
The 3.5 percent remittance tax
As someone with broadly libertarian sympathies, I am strongly opposed to this tax. I think often the best way to analyze a tax is not with traditional deadweight loss tools, but rather to ask “does this allow the government to get its paws on a whole new source of revenue?” If it does, be very suspicious. But if you are not libertarian in that manner, I do not see why you should hate this tax. It harms migrants and their relatives back home, but without necessarily harming those countries on net. And international trade economics, and economics more generally, has a long tradition of “nationalistic” points of view that focus on maximizing domestic welfare, not global welfare. I see those pop up all the time — for decades — without people screaming bloody murder (I am myself more Parfitian on these issues of course.) Most Democrats I know really want to raise taxes. Many centrists feel the same way, though perhaps less strongly. So why should they hate this tax hike so much? My views on taxes differ, though I recognize that sometimes you have to raise taxes.
-
Contra MR On Charity Regrants - by Scott Alexander
USAID is not, itself, a charity. It is an organization that funds other charities. Cowen/Rubio’s claim that “only 12% goes [directly] to recipients” is false, because 0% goes directly to recipients, because USAID is not set up in a way where this even makes sense. All USAID money goes through other charities. The 12% number seems to be the amount that goes through foreign organizations (including charities, charitable government programs, and charitably-minded forprofits), with the other 88% going through charities based in the US.
I think when Scott is angry (much less “a new level of angry”) he does not think straight. First, someone should tell him that Emergent Ventures overhead is typically two percent, five percent for dealing with screwier banking systems. (That is one reason why I won the recent Time magazine award for innovation in philanthropy.) I am well aware there are various ways of calculating overhead, but there are now more than one thousand Emergent Ventures winners, and all of them can testify to how radically stripped-down the process is.
-
From Philosophy to Power: The Misuse of René Girard by Peter Thiel, J.D. Vance
-
How Donald Trump Has Remade America’s Political Landscape - The New York Times
Donald J. Trump’s victory in 2024 was not an outlier. It was the culmination of continuous gains by Republicans in much of the country each time he has run for president, a sea of red that amounts to a flashing warning sign for a Democratic Party out of power and hoping for a comeback. The steady march to the right at the county level reveals not just the extent of the nation’s transformation in the Trump era but also the degree to which the United States now resembles two countries charging in opposite directions.
-
There was a time when the US government built homes for working-class Americans
-
Whatever happened to Elon Musk? Tech boss drifts to margins of Trump world
Law Breaking / Police / Internal Security
-
Is violent crime increasing or decreasing in the US | Vox
By the 2024 election, for the first time in awhile, violent crime was a major political issue in the US. A Pew survey that year found that 58 percent of Americans believed crime should be a top priority for the president and Congress, up from 47 percent in 2021. And yet even as the presidential campaign was unfolding, the violent crime spike of the pandemic had already subsided — and crime rates have kept dropping. The FBI’s 2023 crime report found that murder was down nearly 12 percent year over year, and in 2024 it kept falling to roughly 16,700 murders, on par with pre-pandemic levels. The early numbers for 2025 are so promising that Jeff Asher, one of the best independent analysts on crime, recently asked in a piece whether this year could have the lowest murder rate in US history. All of which raises two questions: What’s driving a decrease in crime every bit as sharp as the pandemic-era increase? And why do so many of us find it so hard to believe?
-
Seattle Police moved on counter-protesters at a fundamentalist Christian group’s rally Saturday afternoon in Cal Anderson Park. Multiple arrests and injuries were reported. Groups were in the park to protest against a provocative rally organized by a Spokane fundamentalist church.
Seattle’s mayor has taken the unusual step of putting out a statement on the day’s police activity lauding free speech — and blaming unrest in the crowd on “anarchists” who the mayor says “infiltrated the counter-protestors group.” “I am grateful for those who make their voices heard in support of our neighbors without resorting to violence,” Harrell said in the statement. “In the face of an extreme right-wing national effort to attack our trans and LGBTQ+ communities, Seattle will continue to stand unwavering in our embrace of diversity, love for our neighbors, and commitment to justice and fairness.” In the statement, Harrell said police asked rally organizers to end the event early because of the conflict “which they did.” The permits for the rally event are also being scrutinized, Harrell said Saturday night.