2025-06-19

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• Becoming an Asshole - Jim Nielsen’s Blog

  One particular Apple executive sourced in the book noted how there are companies who don’t employ questionable tactics to gain an edge, but most of them don’t exist anymore. To paraphrase: “I worked with two kinds of suppliers at Apple: 1) complete assholes, and 2) those who are no longer in business.”

  Taking advantage of people is normalized in business on account of it being existential, i.e. “If we don’t act like assholes — or have someone on our team who will on our behalf— we will not survive!” In other words: All’s fair in self-defense. But what’s the point of survival if you become an asshole in the process? What else is there in life if not what you become in the process? It’s almost comedically twisted how easy it is for us to become the very thing we abhor if it means our survival.

• Powerful solar flare erupts from sun triggering radio blackouts across NA

Horseshit

• A courtyard block solution to Chicago's family flight issue

• Social media: a mother's fight for the truth about her son's death

• It's Not Gambling, It's Predicting

• Police shut down Cluely's party, the 'cheat at everything' startup

  Cluely had hoped to throw an after-party for a Y Combinator event occurring on Monday and Tuesday called AI Startup School. The event drew crowds thanks to scheduled speakers like Sam Altman, Satya Nadella, and Elon Musk. Cluely is an AI startup born of controversy and rage-bait comedy marketing. True to form, Lee posted a satirical video on X advertising his after-party. It shows him camped out by the famed Y Combinator sign — the one all the YC founders take selfies with. (Cluely is not a YC startup.) The tweet advertised the party to his more than 100,000 followers and said to DM for an invite. Lee tells TechCrunch that he didn’t actually send invites out to the hordes. “We only invited friends and friends of friends,” he said. But it became the party, and people shared the details. When it was set to begin, so many people were standing outside the venue that the lines wrapped around blocks. “It just blew up way out of proportion,” Lee says. What looked like 2,000 people showed up, he added. A party that big might have gotten out of control, but it didn’t get the chance. The lines were blocking traffic, so the cops showed up and shut it down. “Cluely’s aura is just too strong!” Lee was heard shouting outside as the cops busted it up.

• Children reporting addictive online behaviour suffer worse mental health

  • Real Risk to Youth Mental Health Is 'Addictive Use,' Not Screen Time Alone

• She Says Social-Media Algorithms Led to Her Eating Disorder

• Why Do Dads Watch TV Standing Up?

• The Joneses Aren't That Happy

  The problem is that happiness is almost always a relative emotion. You don’t judge yourself based on how much better off you are than people were in the past. You don’t look at how far you’ve come personally. You don’t benchmark against people who are worse off than you are financially. You compare yourself to people who are doing better than you are.

• Earth could be flung out of orbit or into the sun all thanks to a passing star

Rank Propaganda / Thought Policing / World Disordering

• Fifty Years Ago Today, President Nixon Declared the War on Drugs

• What Happened to Progressivism?

  Lakoff’s key insight is that “understanding is inherently metaphorical. We process complex ideas in terms of other, simpler, more primal experiences (spatial and tactile sensations, pictures, basic family relations).” Choosing the most advantageous metaphor to describe a problem and its solutions is the art of framing.

• Is the decline of reading poisoning our politics?

Musk

• X sues to block copycat NY content moderation law after California win

  • Musk's X sues New York state over social media hate speech law

• Elon Musk calls Grok answer a 'major fail'

  • Elon Says He's Working to 'Fix' Grok After AI Disagrees with Him

• xAI faces legal threat over alleged Colossus data center pollution in Memphis

Electric / Self Driving cars

• Electric Cars Are Losing Appeal to New Drivers, Increasing with Existing

• U.S. Government Wants to Put More Autonomous Vehicles on Public Roads

• Waymo Applies for NYC Testing Permit in Hopes of Eventual Launch

  • Waymo's robotaxis are coming back to New York City

Religion / Tribal / Culture War and Re-Segregation

• Pope Leo Takes on AI

  • Pope Leo makes AI's threat to humanity a signature issue

• The bias pushing women out of computer science

Edumacationalizing / Acedemia Nuts

• Dickinson High to retire 'Midgets’ mascot after nearly a century

Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising

• Nintendo will take your Switch 2 offline forever if you use a Mig cartridge

• Up to 70% of streams of AI-generated music on Deezer are fraudulent, says report

• Meta Invents New Way to Humiliate Users with Feed of People's Chats with AI

• Social media now main source of news in US, research suggests

• Is Google about to destroy the web?

• Double-Entry Ledgers: The Missing Primitive in Modern Software - Paul Gross’s Blog

• Apple devices offer speech to text transcription in developer betas, shows test

• Apple must face consumer lawsuit over iCloud storage, US judge rules

• Welcome to the "Infinite Workday"

• Twitch banning streamers for mentioning other platforms during multistreams

• Microsoft and AMD announce multi-year Xbox chip deal

• How People Decided It's OK to Wear AirPods Anywhere, Anytime

• The hacked iPhone camera Apple built to shoot real race scenes for F1 The Movie

• European consumers are mostly saying 'non' to trading in their old phones

• iPhone Sales Jump 15% in April-May as Apple Reclaims China Lead

AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World

• Sam Altman Says Meta Offered OpenAI Staffers $100M Bonuses

  • Sam Altman says Meta offered $100M bonuses to OpenAI employees

  • Sam Altman says Meta offered OpenAI staff $100M bonuses

  • Altman: Meta offering $100M plus to poach my staff

  • Sam Altman says Meta tried and failed to poach OpenAI's talent with $100M offers

• 'AI is not a miracle cure': Nobel laureate raises questions

  "I'm very sympathetic and interested in what they're doing," Reinhard Genzel, an astrophysicist at the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics in Germany and one of the winners of the 2020 Nobel Prize in physics, told Live Science. "But artificial intelligence is not a miracle cure."

• Amazon boss tells staff AI means their jobs are at risk in coming years

  • Amazon expects to cut corporate jobs as it relies more on AI

• A new kind of AI bot will take over the web, data from TollBit shows

• Sequoia-backed Crosby launches a new kind of AI-powered law firm

• MiniMax M1 model claims Chinese LLM crown from DeepSeek plus true open-source

• Mistral AI and Luxembourg enter into a strategic partnership

• Salesforce adds AI to everything, jacks up prices by 6%

• WhatsApp AI helper mistakenly shares user's number

• AI warnings are the new layoff threats

• AI as 'socially vital' as water and energy, say UK execs

• A.I. Might Take Your Job. Here Are 22 New Ones It Could Give You

  • not listed: "Smart Bomb Psychiatrist" as in Dark Star

Space / Boomy Zoomers / UFO

• Honda lands a rocket as it pursues re-usable launchers

• Leonardo, Airbus, Thales assess feasibility of space alliance by end-July

• Blue Origin to Launch Six More Tourists to Space on June 21

Crypto con games

• Coinbase seeking US SEC approval to offer blockchain-based stocks

• The Genius Act Will Bring Economic Chaos

Economicon / Business / Finance

• Offices and professionals see a rise in spam paper faxes

• Intel to lay off up to 20% of factory workforce, cutting 10k jobs worldwide

  • Intel Foundry layoffs could impact 'more than 10k' factory workers

• Many Exporters No Longer Want Dollars, US Bank Executive Says

• What employees think of their companies' values

• The Biggest Companies Across America Are Cutting Their Workforces

• US added over 1k new millionaires a day last year, UBS Report Says

• It's Not Cool to Be a Job Creator Right Now

• Why Markets Shrug Off War

• Microsoft planning thousands more job cuts aimed at salespeople

  • Microsoft planning job cuts aimed at sales people

• Fed's Powell warned there'd be places in the US where you 'can't get a mortgage'

Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making

• A GOP Plan to Sell Public Land Is Back. This Time, It's Acres

• A Criminal Defendant's Case So Messed Up It United Clarence Thomas and KBJ

  Donte Parrish had spent nearly two years in solitary confinement for a prison killing he was ultimately cleared of. He sued for the damage done. But when the district court dismissed his case, the ruling took three months to reach him. It was delayed in the chaos of a prison transfer and the purgatory of overlapping state and federal custody. Once he received the decision, he acted quickly. He filed his notice of appeal and explained the delay, and a court agreed to reopen his window to appeal. But he didn’t file again. He didn’t know he had to. The court already had his notice. The government agreed. The record was clear. till, the 4th Circuit threw the case out. It was too late for the first filing, too early for the second, and apparently fatal that the same notice had not been filed twice. Parrish had crossed every substantive threshold: jurisdictional, equitable, factual. But he stumbled over form.

• Judge smacks down Pentagon plan to slash university research funding awards

• FAA air traffic overtime costs soar as hiring lags, report says

Trump

• Kash Patel Drops Bombshell Related to 2020 Election

  “The FBI has located documents which detail alarming allegations related to the 2020 U.S. election, including allegations of interference by the CCP,” Patel posted Monday on X. “I have immediately declassified the material and turned the documents over to [Senate Judiciary Committee] Chairman Grassley for further review.” In a follow-up post, Patel shared a link to a Just the News report about how concerns were raised that the Chinese Communist Party manufactured fake U.S. driver’s licenses in order to use fraudulent mail-in ballots in support of Joe Biden, then the Democratic presidential nominee.

• Trump to extend US TikTok ban deadline, White House says

• Howard Lutnick hails Donald Trump’s $5mn investor visa as almost 70,000 apply

  Nearly 70,000 people have signed up for the new golden Trump Card, a visa scheme led by commerce secretary Howard Lutnick that will grant foreigners legal residency in the US at a cost of $5mn. The chief executive of a global technology company who asked not to be named said through a spokesperson that his group would seek to buy more than 100 Trump cards if the scheme came to “fruition”, adding he viewed the initiative as a way “to welcome the world’s best and brightest to the United States — particularly entrepreneurs, engineers and scientists”.

  In 1990, Congress created a route to permanent residency for foreign investors through the EB-5 visa programme, which has a minimum investment of up to $1.8mn. About 14,000 such visas were granted last year, according to Invest In the USA, an EB-5 trade association. Lutnick is pressing for the new scheme to replace the EB-5 visa and is planning to expedite the creation of a much larger programme within months.

Democrats

• Bombshell report claims voting machines were tampered with before 2024

  Kamala Harris won the U.S. elections: Bombshell report claims voting machines were tampered with before 2024: A new report is stirring fresh debate about the outcome of the 2024 U.S. presidential election, claiming that voting machines were secretly altered before ballots were even cast. The bombshell allegation raises a serious question: Did Kamala Harris actually win the 2024 election?

Left Angst

• Cybersecurity takes a big hit in new Trump executive order

• Social media destroyed one of America's key advantages

  In a post last year, I argued that a perfect storm of events — the housing crash and Great Recession, the rise of China, racial diversification, and the rise of smartphone-enabled social media — all came crashing down on America at the same time. I think that story is right, but I don’t think it explains why America was especially vulnerable. Many other countries suffered from the global financial crisis, faced the rise of China, experienced tensions over immigration, and struggled with the introduction of social media. To give just one example, you can see a lot of the effects of smartphones — on attention spans and learning, depression, suicide, etc. — in other countries, not just the U.S. And yet the U.S. seems to have been uniquely wounded by the last decade and a half. Where other rich countries have mostly resisted the rise of authoritarian, demagogic leaders, the U.S. is stuck with Trump. American culture wars seem particularly pernicious and intractable. And America has suffered a particularly severe decline in the degree to which people trust institutions.

  The U.S. economy is an incredibly resilient machine — if you want a reason for optimism, look at how the economy has thrown off every shock and headwind that the world could throw at it. And yet consumer sentiment is in the dumps. And if you tell people the economy is good they’ll get mad at you. I believe those low sentiment numbers, and I believe in that anger, but I don’t see how it can be the real economy causing them. Instead, I suspect that Americans are projecting their anger at their institutions — and at each other — onto economic issues.

  • Because it could not be the case that the institutions producing the economy numbers are corrupted, lying, and that's what's leading to the distrust in them...

• Trump admin halts broadband internet expansion in Louisiana

• The Tesla Brain Drain

• Obama's awkward call for a broad-scale Trump resistance

• RFK Jr. is coming for your vaccines

• New US visa rules will force foreign students to unlock social media profiles

Law Breaking / Police / Internal Security

• Minnesota Killer Used Data Brokers to Target and Murder Politicians

External Security / Militaria / Diplomania

• The $10B Proposal to Speed Up U.S.-Mexico Trade

• The US Navy is more aggressively telling startups, 'We want you'

World

• Paternity Leave Around Europe

• New Mennonite Colony for Angola?

• Inspired by Ukraine War, Europe Is Developing Shahed-Style One-Way Attack Drones

• Denmark's Archaeology Experiment Is Paying Off in Gold and Knowledge

• UK Home Office tells parents their children should return to Brazil alone

• MBDA wants to mass-produce low-cost kamikaze drone with 500 km range

• In-N-Out Australia Popups Are Back, Just So the Chain Can Sue over Trademarks

• Canada needs 'bold ambition' to poach top US researchers

• Spain had resources to prevent a blackout, but they didn't respond

• Saudi journalist who tweeted against the government executed for 'high treason'

• Finance blog raided over suspected Swiss banking secrecy law breaches

Iran / Houthi

• Iran is going offline to prevent purported Israeli cyberattacks

  • Internet collapses across Iran, say web-monitoring firms

• Iranian Crypto Exchange Nobitex Hacked for over $82M by Suspected Israeli Group

  • Hackers steal and destroy millions from Iran's largest crypto exchange

• 'Bunker Buster' U.S. Bomb Could Cripple Iran's Nuclear Ambitions

• Stealth aircraft and 30k-pound bombs: why destroying Iran's nuke program is hard

China

• China Is Unleashing a New Export Shock on the World

• Why China is giving away its tech for free

• China's automakers aim for cars with 100% domestic chips from 2026

• If Iran’s Oil Is Cut Off, China Will Pay the Price.

  More than 90% of Iran’s oil exports now go to China, according to commodities data company Kpler. Most of it is bought by small Chinese “teapot” refineries clustered in the Shandong region that operate independently from state-owned oil companies. They switched to illicit Iranian oil en masse in 2022 to protect their margins.

• China regulator summons automakers to discuss 'zero-mileage' used car sales

Health / Medicine

• Despite what you learned at school, insulin isn't just made in the pancreas

• FDA to offer faster drug reviews to companies promoting 'national priorities'

• US to drop guidance to limit alcohol to one or two drinks per day, sources say

• Cannabis use linked to a doubled risk of heart disease death, new study finds

• US FDA approves Gilead's twice-yearly injection for HIV prevention

  • FDA approves powerful HIV drug that nearly eliminated spread in clinical trials

Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda

• UK temps of 45C (113F) may be possible in current climate, Met Office says

• Scientists Discover the Key to Axolotls' Ability to Regenerate Limbs

• Cool data centres with treated sewage

• Is a giant web of ocean currents headed for collapse? The race is on to find out

• Insurers Want Businesses to Wake Up to Costs of Extreme Heat

• Major oil companies face first 'climate death' lawsuit