2025-06-15
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Dangers of Competent Governance - by Robin Hanson
Plausibly most societies were pretty adaptive until a few centuries ago, and so typical governance levels were roughly adaptive. And that is plausibly because governance was then not very competent at dealing with most social areas, compared to competition. Places with more severe coordination problems, like those arising from large scale irrigation opportunities in ancient Egypt and China, tended to have more governance. In the last few centuries the world has greatly increase its average governance levels, having governments do more to manage more areas of life, and at larger spatial scales. Non-government orgs have also greatly increased their scales. In fact, this org scale increase is plausibly THE great change of the industrial era, with other changes resulting more from this key change. One plausible cause of this change is a great increase in the competence of governance, compared to competition. Other possible causes include an increase in the preference for governance, due to a drift to forager attitudes, and an increase in the severity of coordination problems, due to larger scales of war, production, trade, and culture.
In the past, weak governance may actually have been a big reason why we’ve had so much competition, which has induced so much cultural evolution. Stronger governance could let places function with much less competition, which then results in much less adaptive cultural evolution. Which would then allow those cultures to drift even worse into dysfunction. So if our world soon acquires a much more competent form of governance, we might then suffer a new much larger variance in adaptability. Places where this governance is directed toward maladaptive goals would become more maladaptive even faster, while places where this new power is directed toward adaptive goals could become far more adaptive, reversing the decay of prior cultural drift. Overall, in the long run, this variance would be highly adaptive of course. But there might be quite painful transition period.
Horseshit
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San José wreck gold coins reveal depictions of castles, lions&Jerusalem crosses
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Associations Between Demographic and Relationship Variables and Sexual Desire
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Caltrain official lived in secret apartment built illegally inside train station
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A Rural Public Transit Odyssey
I’d searched out and found schedules for about a half-dozen obscure and mostly unknown rural bus routes, and strung them together into a bizarre and dirt-cheap long-distance traveling route. This is much easier said than done. Each county’s transportation department seems to operate independent of the counties adjacent to it, and none of the schedules have been designed with intra-county transfers or long-haul transportation in mind. Moreover, these routes are not generally on Google Maps — in many cases, if they can be Googled at all, whatever digital footprint these bus schedules have is obscure, difficult to find, and often outdated. To find them, you must occasionally leaf through old, grainy PDF files of scanned schedules — some of which are unreadable, corrupted, or ‘dead links’. Very often, you simply have to call the office and see whether a route is still in operation or not; it may take numerous attempts to get them to answer the phone. Once you’ve done this, you must arrive at a stop at a certain time and begin planning which bus is next. Sometimes, to get to the next bus, you must walk miles and miles — or even stay overnight — all to cover a distance that, in a regular automobile, might take just a short while to travel! For obvious reasons, no one does this. In fact, that it could be remotely feasible is not an idea that seems to have ever crossed the minds of the men and women who drive these rural transportation buses. On the bus that took us from Watertown to Lowville, the driver openly marveled at what a strange and unorthodox idea it was for anyone to attempt what we were doing. Yet, by the same token, she seemed pleased at our ardent enthusiasm for rural public transportation — a genre of public works that generally seems to go unseen, unnoticed, and often seems to be chronically underfunded.
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Festival goers told to remove smartwatches after moshpits spark emergency alerts
celebrity gossip
Rank Propaganda / Thought Policing / World Disordering
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Mark Cuban says ‘lack of diversity of thought’ is pushing users back to X
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Bluesky Backlash Misses the Point
In recent weeks, a number of headlines and posts have surfaced questioning whether Bluesky’s growth is declining, if the network has become too much of a left-leaning echo chamber, or if its users lack a sense of humor, among other charges. Investor Mark Cuban, who even financially backed Skylight, a video app built on Bluesky’s underlying protocol, AT Proto, complained this week that replies on Bluesky have become too hateful. “Engagement went from great convos on many topics, to agree with me or you are a nazi fascist,” he wrote in a post on Bluesky. That, he said, is “forcing” people to return to X.
Musk
Electric / Self Driving cars
Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising
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MLB removes A's 'reverse boycott' game broadcasts from digital archive
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Washington Post in talks with Substack about using its writers
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Another one for the graveyard: Google to kill Instant Apps in December
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The Tech Industry Doesn't Understand Consent
This is not the tech industry’s most egregious lack of understanding of consent in recent years. That dishonor belongs to LegalFling: A blockchain app for sexual consent. However, this is still pretty stupid, and the result of an insidious trend that doesn’t get questioned enough in software engineering circles. So I’m asking that my readers shout this from the fucking rooftops.
Opt-Out Is NOT Consent. Opt-out is “our lawyers told us to make this an option to cover our ass, but we don’t want you to actually do it”. Opt-out is “if you missed the memo, we assume we have your consent”.
TechSuck / Geek Bait
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This Secret Math Equation let the US Government Spy on Anyone
In 2006, the NSA hid a secret mathematical backdoor in the Dual EC DRBG cryptographic standard. They denied it for 8 years. The Snowden leaks proved it. Dual Elliptic Curves, as we saw earlier, are used as secure random number generators (RNGs). The mathematical backdoor let the US government decrypt SSL internet traffic. This is a technical deep dive for programmers. We’ll implement both the government’s original paper (SP 800-90 2006) and the backdoor found by Microsoft researchers (Shumow & Ferguson 2007)
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Gnome devs: Xorg is dead and we killed it. And nobody regrets it
AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World
Space / Boomy Zoomers / UFO
Economicon / Business / Finance
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The Tech Job Meltdown - Professor Axelrod
The short version is: this rule change has increased taxable income for businesses in the short term, as they can no longer deduct R&D costs immediately. Anyway, the impact of this tax strategy turned out to be: layoffs of U.S.-based engineers while companies restructured operations abroad.
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There Aren't Enough Cables to Meet Growing Electricity Demand
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Deloitte is now offering employees a unique wellness benefit: subsidized Legos
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UNFI cyberattack shuts down network and leaves Whole Foods and others in limbo
Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making
Mostly Peaceful Riots
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On June 14—Flag Day—President Trump wants tanks in the street and a made-for-TV display of dominance for his birthday. A spectacle meant to look like strength. But real power isn’t staged in Washington. It rises up everywhere else. No Kings is a nationwide day of defiance. From city blocks to small towns, from courthouse steps to community parks, we’re taking action to reject authoritarianism—and show the world what democracy really looks like.
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This "grassroots" day of defiance targets Donald Trump and his "billionaire allies," according to organizers. The dark money network funding it is known as Arabella Advisors, whose benefactors are the left's own billionaire heroes, the CONTROLIGARCHS, including George Soros, Bill Gates, Hansjorg Wyss, Mark Zuckerberg, and Reid Hoffman. Arabella provided nearly $5 million to two leftwing nonprofits involved with the "anti-I.C.E." riots in Los Angeles this past week, according to the most recent financial disclosures available. One of those groups, Community Change Action, supports the L.A. protests and has provided protest tips in Spanish. Its "brainchild," the Fair Immigration Reform Movement, has trained children how to aggressively protest.
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60 detained following veterans protest against Army parade on Capitol Hill, 1 injured
Dozens of people who took part in a protest held by veterans protesting the Army's military parade on Saturday were detained on the U.S. Capitol Grounds after entering a barrier and running towards the steps of the U.S. Capitol building for what organizers said was a "staged sit-in." A 7News photographer captured the moment when roughly 60 people entered through an opening in a barrier toward the steps of the Capitol shortly before 7 p.m. The group had just concluded a protest in front of the Supreme Court building and were preparing to take photos near the Capitol building when the incident occurred. Capitol Police closed off a barrier in front of the U.S. Capitol Building moments after the protesters wrapped up outside the Supreme Court building. Roughly 60 members of the group then pushed down a bike rack and crossed police lines while running towards the Rotunda steps, police officials said.
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CBS reports: "Hundreds of t-shirts, hats, signs and posters are for sale across the internet alluding to the demonstrations. On China-based Temu.com, a seller shipping goods from a U.S.-based warehouse offers a t-shirt reading "No Kings in America" and featuring the statue of liberty and American flag for $5.20. On Amazon, a search for No Kings yielded 1,000 results. Much of the merchandise available on the e-commerce giant's site is printed on demand, meaning not in stock."
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Department of Homeland Security Predator B Drones Are Orbiting over Los Angeles
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"No Kings" -- just commissars? - by Glenn Harlan Reynolds
I attended the “No Kings” rally in Boston earlier today. It looked more like a repurposed Pride rally than an anti-Trump rally, really, and that’s because it was: Boston’s Pride parade got repurposed into the “No Kings but Drag Kings” parade. This was smart in terms of boosting the crowd size — there were a lot more people present than attended the rather pallid anti-Elon protest I attended in Boston a few months ago, which drew numbers in the dozens. This event definitely drew thousands. But while there was plenty of anti-Trump stuff, I’m not sure there was any more than a regular Pride parade would have featured. There did seem to be more commie stuff than usual, though, so that’s something.
I didn’t see a lot of American flags in the crowd, despite efforts to make them prominent at some other rallies. I don’t think I saw any that weren’t upside down, but I saw quite a few Mexican flags. The First Baptist Church of Boston had a lot of flags on display a few blocks away, but I don’t think they had anything to do with this protest. I’m told by locals I trust that the turnout this time was a lot heavier than for last year’s Pride parade, which was reportedly dominated by straight white teenage girls from the suburbs.
Left Angst
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The secret fast track for animal drugs
Author’s note: This piece was written before the 2025 changes to the FDA were brought in, and envisages changes most relevant to an FDA operating along the lines that it did prior to 2025, or other drug approval agencies around the world (such as the EMA and the MHRA). Reforming drug permitting is important, but successful reform is most likely to mean iterating based on an existing, well-staffed, and functional baseline.
- "I wanted the FDA to relax but not that much!"
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Turbo America | The Point Magazine
I’d stumbled onto the protest accidentally, after arriving from New York that morning in search of a “pop-up city” supposedly located in an office building downtown. Crypto builders, startup founders and charter-city advocates were gathering in Austin to discuss the creation of new cities in America and new countries around the world. Their focus, above all, was the creation of “network states,” a novel form of sovereign, state-like entity modeled on the distributed structure of computer networks. Advocates claimed it was the natural heir to the world’s current (failing, sclerotic) model of political organization—i.e., the nation state.
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From Gaza to Ukraine to Iran, Trump's 'peacemaker' promise collapses
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Some US researchers want to leave the country. Can Europe take them?
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A Letter to Europe You're stronger than you think. Act like it
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Trump Is Making Life Worse for Seniors - The Atlantic
recent policy changes are poised to make life significantly harder for Baby Boomers. “If you’re in your 60s or 70s, what the Trump administration has done means more insecurity for your assets in your 401(k), more insecurity about sources of long-term care, and, for the first time, insecurity about your Social Security benefits,” Teresa Ghilarducci, a labor economist at the New School, told me. “It’s a triple threat.” After more than half a century of aging into political and economic trends that worked to their benefit, the generation has become particularly vulnerable at exactly the wrong moment in history. Perhaps the biggest threat to Boomers in the second Trump administration is an overhaul of Social Security, which provides benefits to nearly nine out of 10 Americans ages 65 and older.
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Plan to Kill Dozens of NASA Missions Threatens US Space Supremacy
Law Breaking / Police / Internal Security
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Philladelphia USPS workers charged with stealing Treasury checks – NBC10 Philadelphia
According to an indictment, Tauheed Tucker, 23, and Saahir Irby, 27, stole thousands of envelopes containing U.S. Treasury checks while working as USPS mail processing clerks. Two other men, Cory Scott, 25, of Ardmore and Alexander Telewoda, 25, of Clifton Heights were also charged with conspiracy to steal government funds, theft of government funds and mail theft. The indictment alleges Tucker and Irby sold the stolen checks to Scott and Telewoda, who then advertised the checks for sale on Telegram. Once Scott and Telewoda received the payment from interested buyers, they mailed them to the buyers who then tried to cash them without knowing they were stolen, the indictment said. The face value of the stolen checks totaled more than $80 million, officials said. Around $11 million worth of the stolen checks were successfully negotiated with banks for payment by Scott and Telewoda's customers, officials said.
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Two Minnesota lawmakers and their spouses were shot by someone impersonating a police officer, sources confirmed to FOX 9. Sen. John Hoffman and Rep. Melissa Hortman, as well as their spouses, were shot in the overnight shootings in Champlin and Brooklyn Park, sources told FOX 9's Karen Scullin. Hortman, a Democrat from Brooklyn Park, represents District 34B. Hoffman, a Democrat from Champlin, represents Senate District 34.
Police say they are looking for a suspect in multiple targeted shootings. The suspect is armed and dangerous. The suspect is a white man with brown hair wearing black body armor over a blue shirt and blue pants, and he may be impersonating law enforcement.
Two Minnesota state lawmakers were shot in apparent "targeted" incidents on Saturday that left them in grave condition, officials said, and a manhunt is now underway for the gunman. The two shooting locations were about 8 miles away from each other in Champlin and Brooklyn Park, just north of Minneapolis. Both Hoffman and Hortman are Democrats. Hortman is the former Speaker of the Minnesota House of Representatives.
Two Minnesota lawmakers — a senator and a state representative — and their spouses were shot in their homes early Saturday in what Gov. Tim Walz says were politically motivated shootings. Former House Speaker Melissa Hortman and her husband have died, he said.
Police were searching for the gunman responsible for the attacks on the Democratic legislators. Writings found inside a fake police car recovered at one of the shooting scenes mentioned the names of multiple lawmakers and other officials, Brooklyn Park Police Chief Mark Bruley said. Two people familiar with the matter identified the suspect being sought as 57-year-old Vance Boelter. The people could not publicly discuss details of the ongoing investigation and spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity. Melissa Hortman, a former Minnesota House Speaker, and her spouse were shot and killed early Saturday in their Brooklyn Park home. A second state lawmaker, Sen. John Hoffman and his wife, were shot multiple times in Champlin. Officials say both Hortman and Hoffman were mentioned in the suspect’s writings.
Autopsies will be done to determine extent of injuries, but Hortman and her spouse died from gunshot wounds, Evans said. A “shelter in place” order was in effect early Saturday. Public Safety Commissioner Bob Jacobson said the suspect was posing as a law enforcement officer. “Suspect exploited the trust of our uniforms, what our uniforms are meant to represent. That betrayal is deeply disturbing to those of us who wear the badge with honor and responsibility,” he said. Police Chief Mark Bruley said the suspect fled out of the back of Hortman’s house after an exchange of gunfire with police. The suspect was dressed like a uniformed officer and operating a vehicle that “looked exactly like an SUV squad car. It was equipped with lights, emergency lights and looked exactly like a police vehicle,” Bruley said. The shootings happened at a time when political leaders nationwide have been attacked, harassed and intimidated during a time of deep political divisions.
Minnesota Superintendent Drew Evans said officers received a call at 02:00 local time regarding the incident involving Hoffman and his wife. Evans said another call was placed to police at 03:35, when officers were proactively checking on Hortman. Police then exchanged gunfire with the suspect at Hortman's home, but he managed to escape, Evans said
The Minnesota State Patrol has encouraged the public to avoid the planned No Kings Day protests in St. Paul and across the state. “Given the targeted shootings of state lawmakers overnight, we are asking the public to not attend today’s planned demonstrations across Minnesota out of an abundance of caution,” the patrol said in a statement. Indivisible Twin Cities, one of the groups organizing local No Kings Day protests, said they still planned to demonstrate.
Authorities investigating the shooting recovered an alleged manifesto. “There was a list of individuals and the individuals that were targeted were on that list,” said Bureau of Criminal Apprehension Superintendent Drew Evans. “When we did a search of the vehicle there was a manifesto that identified many lawmakers and other officials, we immediately made alerts to the state, who took action on alerting them and providing security where necessary,” Brooklyn Park Police Chief Mark Bruley added.
“I'm told by a police source in Minnesota the suspect in the shootings of MN state lawmakers is Vance Luther Boelter,” Julio Rosas of The Blaze reports on X. “It appears it is the same Boelter who was appointed to the Governor’s Workforce Development Board in 2019 by Gov. Tim Walz. He appointed to the Governor's Workforce Development Council in 2016 by then-Gov. Mark Dayton.”
External Security / Militaria / Diplomania
World
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Anti-Immigrant Riots Set Northern Irish Town on Edge - The New York Times
Homes, businesses and cars have been attacked and 32 police officers injured during violence in Ballymena and several other areas in Northern Ireland.
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Nvidia and Deutsche Telekom Partner to Advance Germany's Sovereign AI
“In the era of AI, every manufacturer needs two factories: one for making things, and one for creating the intelligence that powers them,” said Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA. “By building Europe’s first industrial AI infrastructure, we’re enabling the region’s leading industrial companies to advance simulation-first, AI-driven manufacturing.”
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How Ireland became the Saudi Arabia of siphoned-off global profits
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‘Nothing will be the same again’: Portugal’s Chega may be spot on | Portugal | The Guardian
Chega’s triumphant performance offers conclusive proof that the era of Portuguese exceptionalism – the notion that the country’s still-recent experience of dictatorship had immunised it against the far right – has come to an end. As in so many countries across Europe, social democratic parties are in retreat while strident populists have made once-unlikely breakthroughs.
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'Venice is worn out': locals see Jeff Bezos wedding as symbol of city's ills
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Taxes now account for $28 of the average $40 price for a packet. For some time a rising tax was associated with the twin benefits of falling smoking rates and rising revenue, but after peaking at $16.3bn in 2019-20, federal excise receipts have plunged. The March budget forecasts tobacco excise receipts will be just $7.4bn in this financial year – the lowest since 2012-13 – and will continue to fall to $6.7bn by the end of the decade. Rather than a sudden collapse in smoking rates, experts point to an explosion in the availability of black market tobacco in recent years.
Iran / Houthi
Health / Medicine
Pox / COVID / BioTerror AgitProp
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Specifically, two scientists listed as authors on the first Chinese patent for a COVID-19 vaccine—that remarkably came about a month after the virus crossed the border into the U.S.—are affiliated with a neuroscience institute in Beijing that works closely with the Chinese military. The presence of these two researchers on the early 2020 vaccine patent in China is puzzling to federal investigators probing the origins of COVID-19, and its cover-up, because many of the virus’s long-term neurological effects were not a focus of Western scientists until much later.