2025-06-04
Horseshit
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Why more than 50k passengers have booked on 'flights to nowhere'
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Poison Pill: Is the killer behind 1982 Tylenol poisonings still on the loose?
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Beauty Is Stone Cold in the Arts, but Hot as a Consumer Product
Welcome to the medicalization of beauty. It’s everywhere—and it gives me the creeps. I recently met a young dermatologist. His skin had the pure even sheen of a wax mannequin. I wanted to touch it to see if it was as cold as it looked. This is apparently common in the field. Nowadays physicians do heal themselves—or, at least, Botox themselves. I’m told that people who work in dermatology practices get free (or discounted) services—so some will undergo hundreds of beauty-enhancing procedures even before the age of 30. That is the state of beauty in the current day. And it’s all because the medical profession takes beauty more seriously than the humanists and the artists. If you’re a painter or composer or poet, you can make dismissive comments about beauty—even say you hate it—and nobody is shocked. The audience even expects this hostility. But not if you’re a plastic surgeon or cosmetician or stylist or dermatologist. Those folks believe in beauty with their heart and soul. Their whole world depends on it.
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The Parable of a Communally-Bought Lot
My early-to-mid 20s-era girlfriend was from the northern section of a seaside town here in Connecticut. Her parents, who were affluent but not rich, lived in a lovely little house by a lake. Just prior to my meeting her, her parents and three other families that lived in their “neighborhood” had thrown some money together and purchased a nearby vacant lot; they treated it as a kind of park, splitting the landscaping duties, doing some gardening, putting up a gazebo and some picnic tables. As you can imagine, lakeside property in lovely little New England towns tends to be clustered quite tightly together, and the families felt that another house and family would make the area too cramped, noisy, and otherwise unpleasant. They had the means to buy the plot together, so they did. And I’ll tell you, the little park they built was really quite lovely. So: was that NIMBY behavior? I’ve brought this scenario up many times, and I’m always surprised by the number of people who say that, yes, this is NIMBYism.
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Naked billboard that shocked the establishment – blazed a trail in the art world
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Between 1637 and 1697, people who died at the hospital were dropped into brick-lined underground vaults below a newly built church. Hospital planners expected the remains to skeletonize quickly, but a cool, moist microclimate slowed decomposition. Bodies accumulated and stank, eventually forcing the hospital to seal off the chambers and begin burying people on the outskirts of town. More than 300 years later, the tens of thousands of bodies in the crypt are providing scientists with a remarkable record of the poor in 17th century Milan. It’s a population and time period about which we know surprisingly little, because archaeologists in Europe haven’t paid much attention to how common people lived during the early modern period. “History tells us about politics and war, but nothing about ordinary people,” says Mirko Mattia, a bioarchaeologist at UNIMI. “We know more about the commoners of ancient Rome than we do about the people of the 17th century.”
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When the sun dies, could life survive on the Jupiter ocean moon Europa?
celebrity gossip
Rank Propaganda / Thought Policing / World Disordering
Musk
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So it’s now official: Elon Musk is leaving Washington and returning to his businesses, running Tesla, SpaceX, Starlink, and the other technology companies he founded. The parting was not, evidently, entirely amicable. Predictably, Donald Trump used Musk to do his dirty work, and when he became more of a liability than an asset, he discarded him. Elon Musk is Exhibit A in what’s wrong with our oligarch-dominated society. The accolades that were piled on him before he ventured into politics were well-deserved. Tesla created a new category of industrial product and out of nowhere became a serious car company; SpaceX is the backbone of the American launch industry; and Starlink has proven its worth on the battlefields of Ukraine. As Noah Smith once observed, Musk’s real talent is not as an engineer or technologist, but as a master of industrial organization on a par with pioneers like Henry Ford. But Musk illustrates perfectly our oligarch problem. The United States has produced an impressive group of tech entrepreneurs who have created world-beating companies. But a number of them don’t know how to stay in their lane. They think that because they have become rich and successful in one line of work, they will be good at anything, and stray into areas where they are way out of their depth.
Edumacationalizing / Acedemia Nuts
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Unemployment for US Computer Engineering Grads More Than 2X That of Art History
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My students think it's fine to cheat with AI. Maybe they're onto something
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How universities spend billions in government funds | USAFacts
Twenty universities spent more than a third of total federal R&D expenses in FY 2023. Another 640 universities spent the remaining two-thirds of federal R&D funds.
Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising
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'It's thrilling': almost three centuries of the Belfast News Letter go online
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Universal, Warner and Sony Are Negotiating AI Licensing Rights for Music
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Apps could use on-device ML to profile you. Even when end-to-end encrypted
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Constellation, Meta Sign 20-Year Deal for Nuclear Energy in Illinois
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Virgin Media O2 mobile users' locations exposed for two years in security flaw
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Meta and Yandex are de-anonymizing Android users' web browsing identifiers
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Mario Kart designers had to rethink everything to make it open world
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Social media aimed at kids is driven by profit, not safety
- Why should anyone be motivated by "safety"?
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Dating apps tied to U.S. citizens kidnapped in Mexico, officials warn
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Nostalgia over blogging vs the current social media hellscape
Modern internet users have been trained for a decade in a half to expect social media to involve a single, or small number of sites to do everything, and individual posts are short enough to deal with while waiting for a bus or the kids to walk from school to car. The old blog+rss model simply can't compete with this, and better fits as attention-competition to a given user's news media consumption. Medium and Substack both offering paid subscription options for individual blogs is proof that news media is the competition to blogging, not social media. The nostalgic exhortation to set up a blog and distribute through RSS is in the same vein as calls to return to IRC and dump Slack/Teams. Some people/groups can do that, but the platform features are different enough that the old tools don't feel feature-complete and that lack nudges folk back into the commercial walled gardens.
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The Washington Post is developing an A.I.-powered story editor called "Ember"
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Pornhub, YouPorn and RedTube to block their sites in France starting Wednesday
TechSuck / Geek Bait
AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World
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A teen died after being blackmailed with A.I.-generated nudes
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Anthropic expert accused of using AI-fabricated source in copyright case
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Google working on AI email tool that can 'answer in your style'
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US Prosecutors Sought Builder.ai Data After Sales Overstated
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Yoshua Bengio announces non-profit to develop 'honest' artificial intelligence
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Unlicensed law clerk fired after ChatGPT hallucinations found in filing
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AI company files for bankruptcy after being exposed as 700 Indian engineers
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The creatives and academics rejecting AI – at work and at home
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Is AI sparking a cognitive revolution that leads to mediocrity and conformity?
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Tech pioneer Geoffrey Hinton lays out his stark vision for AI
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AI 'vibe coding' startups burst onto scene with sky-high valuations
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"Godfather" of AI calls out latest models for lying to users
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AI on verge of eight-hour job shift without burnout or break
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In Which I Make the Mistake of Fully Covering an Episode of the All-In Podcast
I have been forced recently to cover many statements by US AI Czar David Sacks. Here I will do so again, for the third time in a month. I would much prefer to avoid this. In general, when people go on a binge of repeatedly making such inaccurate inflammatory statements, in such a combative way, I ignore. Alas, under the circumstances of his attacks on Anthropic, I felt an obligation to engage once more. The All-In Podcast did indeed go almost all-in (they left at least one chip behind) to go after anyone worried about AI killing everyone or otherwise opposing the administration’s AI strategies, in ways that are often Obvious Nonsense. To their credit, they also repeatedly agreed AI existential risk is real, which also makes this an opportunity to extend an olive branch. And some of the disagreements clearly stem from real confusions and disagreements, especially around them not feeling the AGI or superintelligence and thinking all of this really is about jobs and also market share.
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Replika AI chatbot is sexually harassing users, including minors, study claims
Space / Boomy Zoomers / UFO
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Moon Still Geologically Active: Ridges Formed Just 84M Years Ago
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Unlikely suspect caught red-handed over failed rocket launch in Bowen
Gilmour Space posted a photo of a suspect cockatoo chewing electrical wires at its launch pad in Bowen. “Not saying this is the root cause of our electrical issues … but we’re not ruling him out,” a spokesman said in the post. The post has been flooded with comments from people saying, “Lucky he didn’t launch, could have turned into a flamin’ galah.”
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Blue Origin performs 12th crewed New Shepard suborbital flight.
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What Is "Seeing" in Astrophotography? The Science Behind Atmospheric Turbulence
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FAA demands an investigation into SpaceX's latest out-of-control Starship flight
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Space assets could be held ransom. Will we have any choice but to pay?
Crypto con games
Economicon / Business / Finance
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Uber's new shuttles look suspiciously familiar to anyone who's taken a bus
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People are cooking at home at the highest levels since start of pandemic
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The Fannie and Freddie Stakes Are High - Bloomberg
The essential thing to notice there is that the US government’s $348.4 billion senior preferred claim is quite a bit larger than the total shareholders’ equity of $160.7 billion. If Fannie and Freddie liquidated today and returned all their money to shareholders, the US government would get all of it. If Fannie and Freddie’s shareholders’ equity doubled, the US government would still get all of it. The common stockholders, and the holders of regular preferred stock, are underwater by many tens of billions of dollars.
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Anne Wojcicki pushes to reopen 23andMe auction with backing from F500 company
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Interest rates are normal, the world is not
The era of ultra-low interest rates that began in 2007-09, with the financial crises, seems to be over. An era of normality seemed to be returning. Hurrah! But the world does not really look very “normal”. Should we be waiting for big new shocks, instead?
Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making
Left Angst
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It's time for Abundance to get mad
The text of Abundance is only 222 pages long, and the font is large. And yet none of the book’s progressive critics seem to have any idea what Klein and Thompson actually wrote. For example, Aaron Regunberg, a lawyer who has been on a crusade against the abundance movement, writes:
[Y]es, abundance is about defeating progressives and remaking the Democratic Party as a libertarian, Never Trump Republican Party. Great, can we stop pretending it’s anything but that?
This is, of course, complete nonsense. To believe that Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson are libertarians or Republicans requires never having read anything that either of them wrote (or at least, pretending not to have done so). But most importantly, Abundance is all about how the government should have more power to build green energy, provide health care, and accomplish other progressive goals. You can argue with that idea, but you can’t call it libertarian in good faith.
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How the US Could Lose Its Tech Talent Pipeline to Strict Visa Policies
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Pride Month PBS Cues Up Leftist RAGE at Trump's 'Horrific' Anti-Trans Actions
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The Left has decided government debt is bad, now: America's Gratuitous Fiscal Crisis
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The Tech Recruitment Ruse That Has Avoided Trump's Crackdown on Immigration
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The Presidential budget proposal is a death sentence for NASA
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U.S. Scientists Warn That Trump's Cuts Will Set Off a Brain Drain
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Report on Russia's 2016 US Election Meddling Disappears from Senate Website
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(PDF) Senator Warren's report on Elon Musk's 130 days in the Trump Administration
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The White House Gutted Science Funding. Now It Wants to 'Correct' Research
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We Are No Longer a Serious Country And the world is starting to notice
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Trump appears to be building unprecedented spy machine tht could track Americans
Law Breaking / Police / Internal Security
External Security / Militaria / Diplomania
World
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Mount Etna eruption live: volcanic blast in Italy sends tourists fleeing
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'Rust in peace': why are Germany's bridges and schools falling apart?
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Apple Appeals EU's March Ruling on 'Interoperability' Requirements Under the DMA
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South Korea votes for new president after failed martial law bid
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Britain's biggest companies are preparing for a third world war
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'We Irish were never homogeneous. Always hybrids, always mongrels'
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Apple could remove AirDrop from EU iPhones as battle heats up
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Dutch government collapses as Wilders' far-right party leaves coalition
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British challenger bank Monzo's profit soars, revenue tops $1.35B
Russia Bad / Ukraine War
China
Health / Medicine
Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda
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'Half the tree of life' ecologists' horror as nature reserves emptied of insects
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Only a tiny % of the deep seafloor has ever been visually observed
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Three Gorges Dam May Increase the Length of a Day by 0.06 Microseconds
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'Mega-tsunami' mystery solved – source of seismic shook the world for 9 days
Back in 2023, scientists were perplexed by a mysterious seismic signal that shook the world every 90 seconds for nine days. Now, two years later, satellite footage has revealed the frightening source of these vibrations — giant mega-tsunamis sloshing around a Greenland fjord, per a “Nature Communications” study. The massive walls of water — one of which measured 650 feet tall, or about half the height of the Empire State Building — were reportedly caused by the collapse of a massive mountainside that was triggered by a warming glacier, per the report. A total of 25 million cubic meters of rock and ice crashed into remote Dickson Fjord in East Greenland, the Daily Mail reported. This spawned colossal waves known as seiches that undulated back and forth in the water body for nine days like a giant bathtub or wave pool — hence the mysterious reverberations, Live Science reported.
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Why are Smokestacks So Tall? — Practical Engineering
There’s a very old saying that “the solution to pollution is dilution.” It’s not really true on a global scale. Case in point: There’s no way to dilute the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, or rather, it’s already as dilute as it’s going to get. But, it can be true on a local scale. Many pollutants that affect human health and the environment are short-lived; they chemically react or decompose in the atmosphere over time instead of accumulating indefinitely. And, for a lot of chemicals, there are concentration thresholds below which the consequences on human health are negligible. In those cases, dilution, or really dispersion, is a sound strategy to reduce their negative impacts, and so, in some cases, that’s what we do, particularly at major point sources like factories and power plants.
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Did "Big Oil" Sell Us on a Recycling Scam?
“Reduce, reuse, recycle”: these three words have become as ubiquitous as the plastic waste they attempt to combat. Once seen as a simple roadmap toward sustainability, this mantra now conceals a far more complex and troubling reality. While these principles serve as a starting point for environmental action, they also have a deceptive history rooted in the petrochemical industry’s effort to avoid accountability. The truth is, no matter how diligently we sort our waste products, individual actions alone cannot solve the growing crisis of plastic pollution.