2025-08-04

Horseshit

• Beneficial Bloodsucking

  The bite of the lone star tick spreads alpha-gal syndrome (AGS), a condition whose only effect is the creation of a severe but nonfatal red meat allergy. Public health departments warn against lone star ticks and AGS, and scientists are working to develop an inoculation to AGS. Herein, we argue that if eating meat is morally impermissible, then efforts to prevent the spread of tickborne AGS are also morally impermissible. After explaining the symptoms of AGS and how they are transmitted via ticks, we argue that tickborne AGS is a moral bioenhancer if and when it motivates people to stop eating meat. Therefore, promoting tickborne AGS is strongly pro tanto obligatory. It is presently feasible to genetically edit the disease-carrying capacity of ticks. If this practice can be applied to ticks carrying AGS, then promoting the proliferation of tickborne AGS is morally obligatory.

• Lower-income individuals show greater physiological attunement in social interactions

  People from lower socioeconomic backgrounds may be more tuned in to others during social encounters, even with strangers from different economic classes. According to a new study published in Psychological Science, individuals with lower socioeconomic status showed greater physiological attunement to their interaction partners than wealthier individuals did—regardless of the partner’s status. This greater sensitivity was also linked to more visible signs of comfort in those interacting with lower-income individuals. However, despite these dynamics, participants still reported liking people from similar class backgrounds more than those from different ones.

  • Poor People make the best servants...

• A Steep Mountain Drive, a Brake Failure and a Volvo Recall

• Humans May Only Have 41,000 Years to Catch Signs of Aliens Before They Fade

• Why you're going to see more swimming pools in strip malls

• Will data centers crash the economy?

• Brutal Beer War Led to Downfall of Schlitz, 'Beer That Made Milwaukee Famous'

• Study reveals that 12-year-olds see OnlyFans as an alternative to work

• A laundry-folding robot blew up the Internet. We talked to the inventor

• $83B Wasted: Showing Up at the Airport 3 Hours Before Your Flight

• The Loch Ness Monster's body is a 'zoological impossibility'

• 'Self-termination is most likely': the history and future of societal collapse

• America is becoming a nation of homebodies

• NuSpeak, anyone? Speech may have a universal transmission rate: 39 bits per second

celebrity gossip

• The mystery of Winston Churchill's dead platypus was unsolved – until now

  Named after his would-be owner, UK prime minister Winston Churchill, the rare monotreme was an unprecedented gift from a country desperately trying to curry favour as World War Two expanded into the Pacific and arrived on its doorstep. But days out from Winston's arrival, as war raged in the seas around him, the puggle was found dead in the water of his specially made "platypusary". Fearing a potential diplomatic incident, Winston's death – along with his very existence – was swept under the rug. He was preserved, stuffed and quietly shelved inside his name-sake's office, with rumours that he died of Nazi-submarine-induced shell-shock gently whispered into the ether.

• Figma CEO's path from college dropout and Thiel fellow to tech billionaire

Rank Propaganda / Thought Policing / World Disordering

• UN Report Finds UN Reports Are Not Widely Read

  • I used to read them, sometimes. It was remarkable how divorced from reality and full of authoritarian horseshit they were. Also fun is the often wide divergence between the summaries and the longer texts.

Musk

• SpaceX faces two new lawsuits alleging safety‐related retaliation

• Royal Society right to keep Elon Musk as member, says new astronomer royal

Religion / Tribal / Culture War and Re-Segregation

• Now that the Pope has taken a position against it: Catholic schools nationwide integrate AI into teaching plans

• Google has dropped more than 50 DEI-related orgs from one of its funding lists

Edumacationalizing / Acedemia Nuts

• Lawrence schools used 24/7 surveillance on students

• Efforts to Ground Physics in Math Are Opening the Secrets of Time

• She owes a private school $27,000. Her daughter never attended

Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising

• "gopher" not found: My journey to the heart of the forgotten internet

  you can also experience the first website as it existed back in 1992, thanks to a tool that simulates the first readily-accessible web browser, called the Line-Mode Browser. It's text only, and you couldn't even use a mouse in its original iteration. To visit pages about bioscience, for example, you typed the number three.

• Apple's results show the Windows-to-Mac switch is happening

• New report alleges MS Recall still screenshots credit card numbers and passwords

• For Akamai users... One Third of the Web Will Stop Working in 4 Days: Massive-Scale CDN Compromise Starts Wednesday

• Time is running out for Tim Cook: Apple lacks strategic vision

• The Substack Branding and Faux Prestige Trap

• Mastercard denies pressuring game platforms, Valve tells a different story

TechSuck / Geek Bait

• Twenty Eighth International Obfuscated C Code Contest

  This year marked the 40th anniversary of the IOCCC. The IOCCC28 opened submissions from 2025-03-05 23:19:17.131107 UTC to 2025-06-05 04:03:02.010099 UTC after a 4 year pause.

AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World

• Can Cloudflare's AI pay per crawl succeed? I doubt it

• Capacity planning a rising concern for datacenter operators as AI grows

• Thanks for Your $1B Job Offer, Mark Zuckerberg

• AI is polytheistic, not monotheistic

• Tim Cook reportedly tells employees Apple 'must' win in AI

• Skynet scenarios and real world risks

• As AI Gets Smarter, It Acts More Evil

  Okay, I’m no software guru. But I did spend years studying moral philosophy at Oxford. That gave me useful tools in understanding how people choose good over evil. And this is relevant expertise in the current moment. So let’s look at the eight main reasons why people resist evil impulses. These cover a wide range—from fear of going to jail to religious faith to Darwinian natural selection. You will see that none of them apply to AI.

  Here’s my hypothesis: Let’s call it Ted’s Unruly Rules of Robotics:

  • Smart machines will have an inherent tendency to evil—because human moral or legal or religious or evolutionary tendencies to goodness don’t apply to them.
  • The only way to stop this is through human intervention.
  • But as the machines get smarter, this intervention will increasingly fail.

  There’s a further reason to fear evil from AI. The bots are trained on language, not actions or scientific formulas—and people often say terrible things. In human society, words are more extreme than actions, and people will even say things they don’t really mean, just to lash out and hurt. That suggests that the whole linguistic foundation of the current generation of AI is problematic. If AI were built on math or Aristotelian logic or some other untainted source, it might behave better. But if you train it on huge datasets of human utterances, you’re just asking for trouble.

• The rise of AI tools that write about you when you die

• Why open-source AI became an American national priority

• Delta Gets Blowback for Using AI to Set Airfares

• The Professors Are Using ChatGPT, and Some Students Aren't Happy About It

• What will the AI revolution mean for the global south?

• AI Data Centers Force Texans to Shower Less

Crypto con games

• Tequila, Drugs and Torture: Spending Binge of Two Crypto Bros Ended Behind Bars

Economicon / Business / Finance

• What'll happen if we spend nearly $3T on data centres no one needs?

• Microsoft confirms it made $27 billion after laying off 9,000 people

• As McKinsey nears 100, is the world’s illustrious consultancy past its prime?

• Poorest US workers hit hardest by slowing wage growth

Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making

• Study May Undercut Idea That Cash to Poor Families Helps Child Development

• Longevity Firms Push Montana to Become Hub for Biohacking/Experimental Treatment

• Texas House Democrats flee state in bid to block GOP proposed congressional map

Trump

• The Reveal: The Public is Finally Learning How Democrats Pulled Off the Greatest Political Trick in History – JONATHAN TURLEY

  This week, Washington was rocked by new releases in the declassification of material related to the origins of the Russian investigation. The material shows further evidence of a secret plan by the Clinton campaign to use the FBI and media to spread a false claim that Donald Trump was a Russian asset. With this material, the public is finally seeing how officials and reporters set into motion what may be the greatest hoax ever perpetrated in American politics. There never was a Russian collusion conspiracy. This is the emerging story of the real Russian conspiracy to manufacture a false narrative that succeeded in devouring much of the first term of the Trump Administration. What is emerging in these documents is a political illusion carefully constructed by government officials and a willing media. The brilliance of the trick was getting reporters to buy into the illusion; to own it like members of an audience called to the stage by an illusionist.

  • If we try real hard we can make this mess the focus of the second Trump Administration, too!

• Commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics Fired, Weak Jobs Report Cited

Left Angst

• US Tariffs Are Making Money. That May Make Them Hard to Quit

• Donor List Suggests Scale of Trump's Pay-for-Access Operation

• Climate change has sent coffee prices soaring. Tariffs will send them higher

  • Remember when they did all that "fair trade" shit few years back, and created cartels for coffee and chocolate, a few years ago? Now its "climate change" causing price raises and "evil corporations" responsible for "slave labor"... Familiar patterns.

• Palantir: The Most Evil Company

• Yosemite embodies the long war over US national park privatization

• The Dollar Is Dead

  The Fed is the last American institution left with any pretense of independence. But in the past year, we've seen that too begin to crack. The Administration publicly criticizes the Fed’s decisions, which I will admit is not new (Reagan was a very vocal critic of Volcker’s Fed, and even suggested he would “go visit them in-person” like a mob boss — which at the time was unheard of). However, what is new is fabricating grounds for a premature dismissal — with talk of firing Jerome Powell “for cause.” Indeed, we just saw the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics pushed out for alleged political bias — on grounds that the very data that can inform the Federal Reserve committee was itself politically biased. At this point, it doesn’t even matter if Powell is removed before the end of his term. The Overton Window has already been shifted and the spotlight is now squarely on the Fed as a political body rather than what it was designed to be — the institution that backed the US Dollar when everything else crumbled around it.

Law Breaking / Police / Internal Security

• US woman jailed over North Korea remote-work scam

World

• EU-US Trade Deal Could Cost Europe for Years to Come

• Legal aid cyber-attack has pushed sector towards collapse, say lawyers

  Lawyers have warned that a cyber-attack on the Legal Aid Agency has pushed the sector into chaos, with barristers going unpaid, cases being turned away and fears a growing number of firms could desert legal aid work altogether. In May, the legal aid agency announced that the personal data of hundreds of thousands of legal aid applicants in England and Wales dating back to 2010 had been accessed and downloaded in a significant cyber-attack. Three months on, much of the legal aid system remains offline as services are being rebuilt, with lawyers unable to access records or bill for their services, particularly in civil cases.

• A Voyage to Bring Norway's Lighthouses into the 21st Century

• Britain's MPs charge VPNs to expenses as minister urges caution

• UK pornography taskforce to propose banning 'barely legal' content

• Europe's cocoa slowdown highlights global chocolate struggle

Israel

• American Victims of Hamas and Hezbollah Attacks Sue U.N. Agency

China

• China is using cyber attribution to pressure Taiwan

• China Is Also Fighting a Trade War with Europe (and Winning)

Health / Medicine

• Over 64,000 pounds of butter recalled over undeclared milk, FDA says

• Most Americans' hearts are older than their chronological age, new tool says

• 4K year-old teeth reveal the earliest use of psychoactive substance

Pox / COVID / BioTerror AgitProp

• Covid Contrarians Are Wrong About Sweden

  Over the past several months, a conventional wisdom has been solidifying in certain centrist and liberal quarters that the controls imposed during the COVID-19 pandemic Went Too Far. This idea has crystallized in a book by two Princeton political scientists, Frances Lee and Stephen Macedo—notably not epidemiologists, or virologists, or public-health experts—called In COVID’s Wake: How Our Politics Failed Us. The authors have gotten a respectable hearing from PBS, Jake Tapper, and, of course, The Daily podcast from The New York Times. The podcast If Books Could Kill recently did a deep-dive debunking of this book, but I want to focus on its treatment of Sweden because of how it’s become a synecdoche for the whole argument. In the Financial Times, the normally level-headed Ed Luce recently cited the Swedish example: “Everyone could agree back then that otherwise liberal Sweden was foolish to take the herd immunity route. That Sweden ended up with one of the lowest mortality rates in Europe has not been similarly highlighted.”

  Relatedly, it would not have been possible to fully skip the negative effects of lockdowns, because much of the public, fearing infection from a strange new virus, would choose to stay home anyway—creating similar economic disruptions as a lockdown but without the sufficient stringency to halt community transmission, as Australia, New Zealand, and Taiwan managed for some years. Sweden indeed suffered an economic hit almost as bad as the other Nordics.

  • "We've never made a mistake and when we did it was someone else's fault and besides that we was right all along!"

Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda

• Why Is California So Chilly This Summer?

• Australia’s gains in wheat-farm productivity

• Teenager Suffers Severe Burns When Foot Sinks Near Yellowstone Geyser

• Canadian scientist has risked heat stroke 1k times

• Satellites and drone swarms: The new high-tech quest to fight wildfires

• Heat index of 182 degrees in Iran likely false

• Freshwater loss from land is the lead driver of sea-level rise

• Russian volcano erupts for first time in more than 500 years