2025-06-05
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Horseshit
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Where's Marty McFly's guitar? Search for Back to the Future prop 4 decades later
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Pet zebra escapes and brings Tennessee interstate to a standstill
The still-at-large animal was spotted several times across Rutherford County, southeast of Nashville, on Saturday, and sheriffs say the animal remains at large, unless its owner has found it and not reported it.
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A High IQ Makes You an Outsider, Not a Genius - The Atlantic
I’ve been thinking about which people attract the genius label for the past few years, because it’s so clearly a political judgment. You can tell what a culture values by who it labels a genius—and also what it is prepared to tolerate. The Renaissance had its great artists. The Romantics lionized androgynous, tubercular poets. Today we are in thrall to tech innovators and brilliant jerks in Silicon Valley.
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Lock manufacturer files lawsuit against social media lock picker
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Kenworth Semi Built to Break Land-Speed Records Is the Coolest Way to Go 140 MPH
W-Series Kenworth dubbed “The Prospector.” It’s specially built to run the salt flats at Lake Gairdner, and while its 142-mile-per-hour top speed might not sound that fast, it’s blistering for a big ol’ brick. 30-foot-long semi with roughly 1,500 horsepower.
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200-year-old condom with explicit print displayed in Amsterdam
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British canoeist 'forced to choose between Olympics and OnlyFans'
Kurts Adams Rozentals, who competes in the individual canoe slalom, was suspended in April by governing body Paddle UK following "allegations" about his posts on social media. He says he has earned more than £100,000 since creating his OnlyFans account in January.
- Dipshits.The LimpLicks needs all the attention it can get; and people are obviously interested in watching this guy pull his oar.
Rank Propaganda / Thought Policing / World Disordering
Musk
Electric / Self Driving cars
Edumacationalizing / Acedemia Nuts
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Science PhDs face a challenging and uncertain future
this level of production of science and engineering Ph.D. students is now in question. Facing significant cuts to federal science funding, some universities have reduced or paused their Ph.D. admissions for the upcoming academic year. In response, experts are beginning to wonder about the short and long-term effects those shifts will have on the number of doctorates awarded, and the consequent impact on science if Ph.D. production does drop.
Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising
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Adobe finally releases Photoshop for Android, and it's free (for now)
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Wyze just built a camera into a light bulb, and it only costs $50
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Meta and Yandex Spying on Your Android Web Browsing Activity
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Disney cuts hundreds of TV and film jobs as company focuses on streaming services | Fox Business
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ISP settles with record labels that demanded mass termination of Internet users
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Two certificate authorities booted from the good graces of Chrome
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Industry welcomes first wave of pensioner gamers
People who have grown up playing games are hungry for new, more sophisticated games, which has prompted start-ups in places including Norwich to compete with more established companies like Jagex, Ninja Theory and Frontier Developments, all based in Cambridge. Nick Poole, chief executive of Ukie, the trade body representing the UK's gaming industry, said: "It's been the most incredible 50 years. "We're about to see the first-ever generation of pensioner gamers.. it's amazing."
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Cops want Apple, Google to kill stolen phones remotely – so why won't they?
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Mexico's 'lucha libre' makes the leap into American entertainment
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Meta found 'covertly tracking' Android users through Instagram and Facebook
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Reddit sues Anthropic for allegedly not paying for training data
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The Constipation of Culture: Why Nothing New Gets Through and Nothing Old Goes Away
That spirit of innovation feels like it has been crushed in a tide of remakes, reboots and sequels. The mainstream cultural sector – the media conglomerates that control the films, TV and music that make popular culture – are decreasingly interested in producing their own intellectual property. They want it ready-made. They don’t create: they harvest. Like so many venture capitalists, they are more about extraction than generation. They sweat existing assets instead of enabling scriptwriters and directors. Why risk it? Why indeed, when there’s so much IP lying about with a near-guaranteed audience. The works of JRR Tolkien have become his own Moria, strip-mined for storylines, aesthetics, even mood, in the lust for wealth. Expect to see dramatisations of his letters or animated visions of his poems in the not-too-distant future. Gotta keep churning.
Modern pop culture has become something we endure, not something that enhances the human spirit. It’s a kind of artistic sewage system with no exit. But when nothing can be cleared, nothing can grow. What we end up with isn’t heritage but dead weight, systemic blockage. If we want a vibrant culture, we have to discard the idea that everything must last forever. We need the occasional artistic bowel movement. We need to make space for and to respect the initial fumblings of creatives. We need to support the small labels and studios making daring, risky new content, and stop watching dross pumped out by cultural barons just because it’s got a recognisable name. And we need to make sure we have spaces for art that allow human connection.
TechSuck / Geek Bait
AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World
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DeepSeek may have used Google's Gemini to train its latest model
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Illustrators call out journals and news sites for using AI art
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No AI, no job. These companies are requiring workers to use the tech
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The West fears AI's threat to jobs. In Japan, it might save them
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No people, no problem: AI chatbots predict elections better than humans
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Google DeepMind's CEO Thinks AI Will Make Humans Less Selfish
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"AI Will Replace All the Jobs " Is Just Tech Execs Doing Marketing
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Tech prophet Mary Meeker drops a report on AI trends-here's your TL;DR
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The AI bubble has passed its peak. The frantic blowing of the media in an effort to keep it inflated will continue for a bit until the next Big Thing (TM) is decided on.
Space / Boomy Zoomers / UFO
Crypto con games
Economicon / Business / Finance
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Retailer Temu's daily US users halve following end of 'de minimis' loophole
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Frothy Tech Returns Helped Mint an Extra 600,000M millionaires in 2024
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VC money is fueling a global boom in worker surveillance tech
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At 10 Am, Stock Options Soar as Retail Traders Unleash New Bots
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Many Dickey's Franchise Owners Lost Everything, Blame Dishonest Sales Tactics
Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making
Left Angst
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RFK Jr., Musk Accused of Using Faulty Data in Firing HHS Workers
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Trump Administration Wants to Create an Office of Remigration
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'They are in shock': Indian students fear Trump has ended their American dream
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The New Feudal Age - The Atlantic
Is feudalism our future? There is no “must” in history, and the present is as much a riddle as anything that lies ahead. A privatized world may be a temporary aberration, a new stage of development, or just the default setting of human society. Our own era doesn’t have a name yet, and it won’t be up to us to give it one. From the perspective of some far-distant vantage point, the age we inhabit may even come to seem “Middle.” With contentious refinement, historians will parse what “privatization” might have meant, and wonder whether we understood it at the time.
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We are Harvard researchers. Trump’s cuts are endangering lives
The Harvard researcher Dr Sarah Fortune was only two years away from creating a vaccine that could have saved the 1.25 million people killed each year by tuberculosis. But last month, she received a letter telling her that the $60 million grant funding her research was being halted by President Trump. Five years and $35 million into her research, Fortune is now in the process of closing 21 labs and “figuring out where to put the monkeys” from her study — while mourning a potential cure for the world’s deadliest infectious disease. “I didn’t have time to process and grieve the loss,” Fortune said. “Our project was awesome. It was part of the largest investment the National Institutes of Health had ever made in TB. It was honestly the most satisfying science I’ve ever been a part of because it was really working.” But now, “all the data and knowledge” her team has gathered “is gone”. “It’s as if those studies never happened,” she said.
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What Is Post-Fascism? – JHI Blog
When the world’s leading scholars of fascism gathered for a conference in Rome in January 2025, the Italian historian Enzo Traverso, who teaches at Cornell University, delivered a fascinating address. According to him, fascism studies can no longer presume to study a merely historical phenomenon from the vantage point of stable democracies. He questioned whether the concept of fascism could adequately capture the novelty of the current situation. Finally, he made a case for the concept of “post-fascism.”[2] Contemporary fascism is neither completely new nor straightforwardly equivalent to historical fascism. Undeniable instances of continuity and links to the past exist alongside new ways to destroy democracy. Traverso agreed with several other historians that, today, state-terrorist violence is the exception rather than the rule. After all, Western post-fascism emerged not from World War I, but rather a peace lasting a solid seventy years. The working class is fully integrated into the movements of Le Pen, Salvini, Orban, and Trump. Post-fascism’s new enemies are not primarily the Jews, but rather migrants, Muslims, and black people, as well as liberal groups—from bourgeois bohemians to environmental activists to advocates for LGBTQI rights. Then, as now, the racist, nationalist, antifeminist (post-)fascists inveigh against “parasites” and portray themselves as representatives of the “decent and hard-working” people. Contemporary Islamophobia distinguishes itself via a colonial matrix, and post-fascists’ authoritarianism is accompanied by an idolization of the market. Certainly, when the utopian age drew to a close, fascism likewise lost its orientation towards the future, even if its intellectual ambitions have not totally faded, as evidenced by authors like Michel Houellebecq, Renaud Camus, and Alain Finkielkraut.
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The tax code time bomb fueling mass tech layoffs
he delayed change to a decades-old tax provision — buried deep in the 2017 tax law — has contributed to the loss of hundreds of thousands of high-paying, white-collar jobs. That’s the picture that emerges from a review of corporate filings, public financial data, analysis of timelines, and interviews with industry insiders. One accountant, working in-house at a tech company, described it as a “niche issue with broad impact,” echoing sentiments from venture capital investors also interviewed for this article. Some spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive political matters. Since the start of 2023, more than half-a-million tech workers have been laid off, according to industry tallies. Headlines have blamed over-hiring during the pandemic and, more recently, AI. But beneath the surface was a hidden accelerant: a change to what’s known as Section 174 that helped gut in-house software and product development teams everywhere from tech giants such as Microsoft (MSFT) and Meta (META) to much smaller, private, direct-to-consumer and other internet-first companies.
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You're just not welcome: researchers grapple with plan to revoke student visas
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Former DOGE engineer on his experience working for the cost-cutting unit
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US immigration officers ordered to arrest more people even without warrants
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Lawsuit: Doge, HHS used "hopelessly error-ridden" data to fire 10k workers
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Trump wants to put humans on Mars – here's what scientists think
Law Breaking / Police / Internal Security
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Video appears to show Boulder suspect speaking to camera while driving before attack - ABC News
The individual is seen in the video wearing a hat and shirt that match videos ABC News has obtained from the scene of the attack. The video, which was posted by a pro-Hamas Telegram group, was filmed in Denver while heading north, ABC News' Visual Verification team has confirmed. In the over two-minute video, the individual talks about his allegiance to God as a Muslim while speaking in Arabic. Soliman has been charged with a federal hate crime and state charges, including 16 counts of attempted first-degree murder, according to court documents. He appeared in court virtually on Monday. He has yet to enter a plea. His wife and children are in the custody of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the family is being processed for expedited removal, according to the Department of Homeland Security. Soliman -- who was arrested after allegedly throwing Molotov cocktails in an "act of terrorism" during a demonstration advocating for hostages being held in Gaza on Sunday on Sunday -- has been in the U.S. on an expired tourist visa, officials said. Soliman allegedly said he had been planning Sunday's attack for one year but waited until his daughter graduated from high school last Thursday to carry it out, state and federal documents said.
External Security / Militaria / Diplomania
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A drone strike devastated Russia's Air Force. The U.S. is vulnerable, too
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Ukraine war spurred infosec vet Mikko Hyppönen to pivot to drones
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Potential 'agroterrorism weapon' fungus smuggled into US by Chinese scientists
Jian is a researcher for the University of Michigan, and Liu, Jian’s boyfriend, allegedly works at a Chinese university and has done research on the fungus. Both were allegedly receiving Chinese government funding for their research. “It is further alleged that Jian’s boyfriend, Liu, works at a Chinese university where he conducts research on the same pathogen and that he first lied but then admitted to smuggling Fusarium graminearum into America — through the Detroit Metropolitan Airport — so that he could conduct research on it at the laboratory at the University of Michigan where his girlfriend, Jian, worked,” according to a DOJ press release.
World
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MPs accuse Apple and Google of profiting from rise in phone thefts
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Pornhub owner to suspend site in France in protest at new verification law
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Germany's Digital Minister wants open standards and OSS as guiding principle
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BBC and Sky bosses criticise plans to let AI firms use copyrighted material
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TSMC to open up chip design center in Munich to help local chip developers
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Danish cities drop Microsoft over Trump policies and financial concerns
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Barnier slams 'authoritarian drift' in Brussels under Ursula von der Leyen