2025-07-20

Horseshit

• The Dutch Intersection Is Coming to Save Your Life

• Gen Z doesn't want to say 'hello' when answering the phone

• Where Have Men Gone? We're Right Here

• Shipping costs are prohibitive: Can You Drink Saturn's Rings?

• Man sucked into MRI machine while wearing metal chain in NY: NCPD

  Police said it happened at Nassau Open MRI in the village of Westbury around 4:30 p.m. A 61-year-old man entered a magnetic resonance imaging room without permission while the machine was in progress, according to authorities. Police said the man was wearing a large metallic chain around his neck, causing him to be sucked into the machine. The man suffered a “medical episode,” according to authorities. Police said he was taken to a local hospital in critical condition.

• Are these the new dresses for conservative women?

• What is the richest country in 2025?

• Zion Didn’t Get Jumped

  You’ve probably seen it. Zion, the humanoid robot, walking around Detroit’s 7 Mile like it’s running for office. It’s out there shaking hands, entertaining kids, and promoting a robo-battle event. What’s interesting here is that the robot didn’t get jumped. People are comparing it to Robocop, then shrugging it off like, “Yup, seen it on TV. Now it’s in the parking lot.” That’s a cultural shift worth clocking. We’re not seeing a reaction of anger, panic, or even skepticism. People aren’t afraid of Zion. They’re taking selfies.

• The unspoken truth about the baby bust

celebrity gossip

• US tech CEO suspended after Coldplay concert embrace goes viral

  • Tech company investigates footage of couple embracing at Coldplay concert

  • Astronomer CEO Andy Byron Resigns Following Viral Coldplay Kiss Cam Drama

  • CEO resigns after being caught on camera with coworker at Coldplay concert

  • Tech CEO caught with company's HR head on Coldplay kiss cam resigns

Musk

• Elon Musk's Starlink works great if hardly anyone uses it

• Starlink aims to launch its third-generation satellites starting next year

Edumacationalizing / Acedemia Nuts

• Class of 2025: PhD students' realigned priorities in wake of Covid and cuts

• University of California fund ditches hedge funds with scathing rebuke

Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising

• Intel Announces It's Shutting Down Clear Linux

  Clear Linux has delivered many great out-of-the-box performance optimizations for Linux systems and shown what can be done for packaging with profile guided optimizations / link-time optimizations, various kernel tweaks, and other innovations over the years.

• Ham Radio Users Clash with Starlink Rival AST SpaceMobile over Spectrum Use

• The Great Unracking: Saying goodbye to the servers at our physical datacenter

• Lawyer argues CoD maker can't be held responsible for actions of school shooter

• Advertising Without Signal: The Rise of the Grifter Equilibrium

• Microsoft Office is using an artificially complex XML schema as a lock-in tool

• AMD's new 96-core Threadripper CPU will set you back $11,699

• Microsoft Kills Movies and TV Storefront on Windows and Xbox

• Did 'bean mouth' kill Pixar's Elio at the box office?

• Ring introducing new feature to allow police to live-stream access to cameras

TechSuck / Geek Bait

• n78 band 5G NR recordings – Daniel Estévez

AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World

• We Are Winning

  The garbage hasn’t disappeared. It’s still everywhere, stinking up the joint. But people are disgusted, and finally pushing back. And they are doing so with such fervor that even the biggest AI companies are now getting nervous and pulling back.

• People with Body Dysmorphia Spiraling Out After Asking AI to Rate Their Looks

• It Would Be Good If the AI Bubble Burst

• Simon Willison has a plan for the end of the world. It's a USB stick

• Cursor snaps up enterprise startup Koala in challenge to GitHub Copilot

• China proves that open models are more effective than all the GPUs in the world

• Google's Windsurf Deal Is a Wake-Up Call for AI Startup Employees

• AI guzzled books without permission. Authors are fighting back

• Google Backs 10 New Nuclear Reactors for AI, Built by AI. What Could Go Wrong?

• The Epic Battle for AI Talent–With Exploding Offers, Secret Deals and Tears

• The World After Wireheading

  AI is coming and we are so unbelievably unprepared. What is this garbage and this garbage. It’s nerd shit and political propaganda. The amount of power over nature that the Silicon Valley death cult is stumbling into is horrifying, and these high priests don’t have a basic grasp of people. No humanities education (perhaps the programs were gutted on purpose). Are we ready for the hypnodrones? How the fuck is targeted advertising legal and culturally okay? This will not stop until they take our free will from us.

Space / Boomy Zoomers / UFO

• NASA's Escapade Mars Mission Will Launch on New Glenn in 2025

• NASA's X-59 Quiet Supersonic Aircraft Begins Taxi Tests

• In First Year, Rubin Observatory Will Get More Data Than Total of Prev Telescopes

Crypto con games

• The Trial of Roman Storm and Tornado Cash: The United States vs. Digital Privacy

• Indian crypto exchange CoinDCX hacked, $44M drained

Economicon / Business / Finance

• The U.S. debt outlook is so dire it now resembles the student loan crisis

• How a Florida Pension Fund manager produced 50 years of market-beating returns

Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making

• The tech that the US Post Office gave us

Trump

• "A Treasonous Conspiracy" - DNI Gabbard Exposes Obama At Center Of Trump 'Russia Hoax' | ZeroHedge

  Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, has declassified documents revealing "overwhelming evidence" showing how then-President Barack Obama and his national security team laid the groundwork for what would become the years-long Trump-Russia collusion investigation after President Trump won the 2016 election.

  • New Evidence of Obama Administration Conspiracy to Subvert President Trump’s 2016 Victory and Presidency

  The information we are releasing today clearly shows there was a treasonous conspiracy in 2016 committed by officials at the highest level of our government. Their goal was to subvert the will of the American people and enact what was essentially a years-long coup with the objective of trying to usurp the President from fulfilling the mandate bestowed upon him by the American people,” said DNI Tulsi Gabbard. “Their egregious abuse of power and blatant rejection of our Constitution threatens the very foundation and integrity of our democratic republic. No matter how powerful, every person involved in this conspiracy must be investigated and prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law, to ensure nothing like this ever happens again.

• Trump Sues Wall Street Journal Publisher Dow Jones over Jeffrey Epstein Article

• There's a Lot We Still Don't Know About Jeffrey Epstein

  • The Left's sudden willingness to ask questions on this likely means that Ms. Comey got all the skeletons hidden and new ones in place. Most of these folks will have to explain why their previous reassurances that Epstein was "right wing delusions and Russian propaganda" no longer hold.

Left Angst

• The Conversations Doctors Are Having About Vaccination Now

• Fight looms over the NASA budget this fall

• Fortescue Halts New U.S. Green Energy Projects

• Gov. Evals Resumes and Paper Reeduction Act

• Section 174 is reversed! Mostly, that is

  Since early 2024, a tax change in the US named “Section 174” has been plaguing tech companies in the country. It was introduced during the first Trump administration in 2017, came into effect in 2022, and impacted businesses from the tax year of 2023. The next year, many tech companies discovered just how bad S174 is. In this issue, we cover a change on Section 174 — which could have contributed to fewer software engineers hired in the US 2023-2025. However, this was likely not the main cause of the decline. I did more analysis on the actual root cases: the end of zero interest rates in these deepdives.

• NASA workers plan ‘Moon Day’ protest on July 20 to oppose mass layoffs, budget cuts. ‘This year has been an utter nightmare that has not stopped.’

• The media has such a bad case of TDS that they are defending high fructose corn syrup now

• China committee chair calls out Admin's decision to resume GPU sales to China

• AI's energy demand ratchets up pressure on Republicans

  Meeting the historic escalation of U.S. electricity demand led by data centers will require wind and solar power that President Donald Trump is steering the nation away from, energy executives and members of Congress said during a POLITICO Energy Summit in Washington on Tuesday. But the argument that renewables and battery storage can be deployed has not moved the White House from an agenda that pins the electric grid to coal and natural gas and reverses course on clean energy technology. At the POLITICO summit, industry executives and members of Congress said the approach to energy backed by Trump and conservative Republicans is making it harder to power Silicon Valley’s AI tech companies as they race against China.

• Where Did All Those Brave Free Speech Warriors Go?

  In this context of actual attacks on free speech, you’d expect the self-appointed Free Speech Brigade to be manning the barricades and sounding every alarm. But where are they? Probably busy drafting another letter about how someone was mean to them on the site formerly known as Twitter. Five years ago, Harper’s Magazine published a fluffy, mostly content-free “letter on justice and open debate.” As someone who has spent decades fighting for and writing about free speech, I found the letter to be beyond useless. While there were legitimate attacks on free speech at the time, the letter did basically nothing to grapple with them. Instead, it used vague language to create a false equivalency between actual attacks on free speech with people just facing some consequences (mainly social opprobrium), mostly allowing people facing the latter to act as though they were facing the former.

  • Most of us aren't allowed to comment on the internet anymore.

• Our Side is Winning in Court. For the Wrong Reasons. — Women's Liberation Front

  The Supreme Court just decided three cases with enormous consequences for women and girls: United States v. Skrmetti, Free Speech Coalition, Inc., et al. v. Paxton, and Mahmoud v. Taylor. To read the majority opinions, you wouldn’t guess that the decisions have anything to do with women’s rights at all. In fact, none of the eleven majority, concurring, or dissenting opinions do more than hint that the rights of women and girls were uniquely at stake in these cases. Each of the three cases pitted the interests of minors against those of groups notably hostile to women, namely, gender ideologues and pornographers. Predictably, in each case the ACLU and similar activist groups filed amicus briefs on the anti-woman side. Opposing these groups, WoLF’s briefs highlight the unique harms to women and girls from, respectively, pediatric medical interventions to alter sex traits, online pornography, and gender dogma taught in school. In each case, the Court cabined its reasoning within existing legal doctrine, refusing to scrutinize gender ideology and online pornography anew, on their own terms, as uniquely pernicious and especially so for women. Though our side won—3-0—the victory feels incomplete. Because while the law refuses to engage with the stakes in these cases–what it means when “gender” supplants sex and porn permeates our culture–it is only a matter of time before the winning streak breaks.

• RFK Jr. wants to change program that stopped vaccine makers leaving US market

• The Inconvenient Faith of Stephen Colbert

  This past Monday on his show, Mr. Colbert slammed Paramount and CBS for the settlement, calling it a “big, fat bribe” and further stating: “As someone who has always been a proud employee of this network, I’m offended, and I don’t know if anything will ever repair my trust in this company.” He’s correct and he’s right to say it, but just days later, in what is clearly an act of political retribution—and possibly part of the actual bribe given Mr. Colbert’s past criticism of Trump—CBS is cowardly eliminating the highest-rated late-night talk show on broadcast television. That’s the political piece of all this, which, alone, is pretty disgusting, but there’s another aspect to why most Trump supporters generally don’t like Mr. Colbert, who is one of the most widely beloved people in all of entertainment. Part of the reason so many of these fools hate Stephen Colbert is that he lives his life as the faithful and humble Christian they constantly claim themselves to be but are too selfish and fearful to actually be. His calm truth and accountability of the Christian faith are unassailable, and that’s what has made him such an uncomfortable threat. I believe the vast majority of folks who support Donald Trump and claim to follow the teachings of Christ are intentionally deluding themselves. There is nothing about Trump’s worldview that aligns with Christ.

• Is this the death of the late night US chat show?

• Clawback of $1.1B for PBS and NPR puts rural stations at risk

• EPA shutters its scientific research arm

• New York halts offshore wind transmission plan amid federal uncertainty

• Tech's Top Venture Firm Tried to Stay Above Politics. A Partner Created a Furor

External Security / Militaria / Diplomania

• Microsoft to stop using engineers in China for tech support of US Military

• US revokes visas of Brazilian judges after crack down on ex-president Bolsonaro

• El Salvador and US negotiate prisoner swap with Venezuela

World

• Migrant Voting Rights and Protest Behavior in European Cities

• Reddit users in the UK must now upload selfies to access NSFW subreddits

• Japan Uses Drones to Light Up Exit Signs at Concerts and Events

• The U.K. Closed a Tax Loophole for the Global Rich. Now They're Fleeing

• Illegal streaming: police take action against providers from Germany

• Scotland's Unreliable Ferries Leave People on Islands in Outer Hebrides Cut Off

Russia Bad / Ukraine War

• New Russian law criminalizes online searches for controversial content

China

• Robots in China are riding the subway to make 7-Eleven deliveries

• China Kicks Off Controversial Mega-Dam Project in Tibet

Health / Medicine

• Sarepta tells FDA it won't halt shipments despite patient deaths

• The underfunded mystery of sudden cardiac arrest

Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda

• Relief from drought in southwest U.S. likely isn't coming, acc. to new research

• I'm a Climate Activist. I'm Not Giving Up Just Yet

• What if the Earth spun backwards?

• Postcard from California: Plastics 'recycling' – out of sight, out of mind

• An Ancient Law Could Shape the Modern Future of America's Beaches

• Solar module prices on a clear downward trend

• How Placental Mammals, Like Whales and Humans, Evolved Bigger Brains

• Animals react to sounds from plants, say scientists

• Rising rocket launches linked to ozone layer thinning

• Is Climate Change an Existential Threat?

  If a 60-mile-wide (100-kilometer-wide) asteroid slammed into Earth tomorrow, it would render the planet inhospitable to nearly all life forms, save for the hardiest extremophiles. This mass extinction event would wipe humanity off the face of the Earth—there would be no survivors. To some experts, this is the true definition of an “existential threat.” Traditionalists will say this term describes a risk that endangers the very existence of something—in this case, the human species. In recent years, that definition has loosened largely to encompass global warming. Scientists, politicians, and world leaders have all described the climate crisis as an existential threat to humanity. This human-driven phenomenon is already altering life as we know it on a planetary scale, but could it really lead to our extinction? Some experts say it could, in the most extreme scenarios. Others argue this isn’t the question we should be asking. For this Giz Asks, we reached out to a variety of experts to get their take on whether climate change actually poses an existential threat to our species.

• US wetlands 'restored' using treated sewage tainted with forever chemicals

• Unique ice, 1.5M years old, to be melted to unlock mystery

• Contaminated Fukushima soil delivered to PM's office

• Beyond Meat Fights for Survival