2025-08-16

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• Estonian Theater Stages Unique Romeo and Juliet Play with Construction Vehicles as Actors

  the story’s characters are brought to life by excavators, a front-end loader, a concrete mixer, a fire truck, city buses and other large machinery, with a few smaller vehicles as well — for example, the role of Julia is played by a red Ford Ranger 4×4 pickup truck making its stage debut. The unusual play was staged at an abandoned limestone quarry near Rummu and required ten drivers, two mechanics, a pyrotechnics expert, and an excavator operator.

  • Love-struck trucks and diggers: Estonia's take on 'Romeo and Juliet' | Reuters

  • At last, a good excuse for Hollywould to indulge its need to remake things.

Horseshit

• Nobody’s buying homes, nobody’s switching jobs, America’s mobility is stalling

• Volkswagen UK Is Locking Horsepower Behind a Subscription

  • VW introduces monthly subscription to increase car power

• My Cafe Dumped Me for Doing Work There

• Airlines' favourite new pricing trick

• Forget Netflix, Volkswagen locks horsepower behind paid subscription

• Gambling Sponsors Took over the UK's Premier Football League

• Third Places Are Being Reimagined–and Welcoming Travelers in the Process

  Outside of home and work, spaces like parks, food halls and libraries are stepping up with social offerings

• James Baldwin Was Not Your Figurehead - Freddie deBoer

  I respect the hustle, but not the result, especially because this new missive commits one of the most cliched and tiresome acts in liberal journaling: attempting to shanghai James Baldwin into the contemporary social justice movement, which he would have hated. Chu’s invocation of Baldwin is fairly anodyne, and I don’t particularly hold it against her. But I was TRIGGERED by it, and it inspired me to make a case that I’ve thought about making for years: James Baldwin wasn’t woke. I hate to use the term, I know we’re all sick of it, but I can’t think of a simpler or more direct way to say it. I’m thrilled Baldwin has gotten his flowers lately, but that has come packaged with a reductive view of his values that would have left him aghast.

• Will you survive digital burnout? Cults and communes could define our new age

• Volkswagen Is Locking Horsepower Behind a Subscription

• What kids told us about how to get them off their phones

• Review: Dating Men in the Bay Area

• Viking-Age hoard reveals trade between England and the Islamic World

• Edward Feser: Hanson on observation

  we can distinguish between the sensory and conceptual content of a man’s seeing an ice cube or of his seeing that the earth moves. But it doesn’t follow that there are two acts here, an act of seeing and a distinct, additional act of conceptualizing or interpreting what he is seeing.

  • I hope I misunderstand the point becuz otherwise it seems like a very nihilistic version of solipsism where only the individual's opinions or perceptions (which are indistinguishable and both equally valid) have any importance, and there cannot be an objective shared reality.

• Boy Crisis of 2025, Meet the 'Boy Problem' of the 1900s

• Drones could soon become more intrusive

• A $2.4B Bridge Is Coming to Cape Cod. Their Homes Will Be Seized to Build It

celebrity gossip

• Phil Knight, Ex-Nike Chief, and His Wife Pledge $2B to Cancer Center

• Mark Zuckerberg's vision for humanity is terrifying

Obit

• Jackie Bezos, Jeff Bezos' Mother and an Early Amazon Investor, Dies at 78

Rank Propaganda / Thought Policing / World Disordering

• Google caught flagging GOP fundraiser emails as 'suspicious' --sending them directly to spam: memo

  • They started doing these things in 2003.

Musk

• US Government agency drops Grok after MechaHitler backlash, report says

  • xAI Was About to Land a Major Government Contract. Then Grok Praised Hitler

• Elon Musk's SpaceX Most Likely Doesn't Pay Taxes

Edumacationalizing / Acedemia Nuts

• Mocked for using the wrong spoon: working-class life at top UK universities

• Mathematician Finds Easier Way to Solve Quadratic Equations

• UChicago Reducing, Freezing PhD Admissions for Multiple Humanities Programs

• They're Killing the Humanities on Purpose

• People do not believe that adding supply reduces housing prices

  Across three original surveys of urban and suburban residents, only a minority of respondents say that a large, positive, regional housing supply shock would reduce prices or rents. These beliefs are weakly held and unstable (suggesting people have given the issue little thought), but respondents do have stable views about who is to blame for high housing prices: developers and landlords. Large, bipartisan supermajorities support price controls, demand subsidies, and restrictions on putative bad actors, policies which they believe would be more effective than supply liberalization for widespread affordability.

  • It was once believed that there might be a market for up to 6 computers, worldwide...

• It Looks Like a School Bathroom Smoke Detector. It Could Be an Audio Bug

Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising

• Volunteer exposes single largest self-promotion operation in Wikipedia's history

  A network of accounts with an unusual interest in Woodard was identified, and its activities over the last decade were mapped. Starting in 2015, these accounts inserted Woodard's name "into no fewer than 93 articles (including 'Pliers,' 'Brown pelican,' and 'Bundesautobahn'), often referencing self-published sources by Woodard himself." And that was just in the English version of Wikipedia.

• Steam games no longer purchasable with PayPal in most countries

  • Valve explain why using PayPal for Steam isn't an option in most countries

• Steam can't escape the fallout from its censorship controversy

• Anger and confusion as Meta overturns more Instagram account bans

  Instagram users have told the BBC of their confusion, fear and anger after having their accounts suspended, often for being wrongly accused by parent company Meta of breaching the platform's child sex abuse rules.

• Forget Foxconn as iPhone factory. AI made it a server-slinger first and foremost

• "End-to-end fraud" with hard drives: Seagate finds counterfeit workshop in Asia

• Louisiana sues Roblox alleging the popular gaming site fails to protect children

• Why Lorde’s Clear CD Has So Many Playback Issues

  any somewhat modern CD player with its generally much stronger laser and automatic gain control ought to be able to play it. That said, it seems that very little of the laser’s light actually makes it back to the pickup’s sensor, which means that along with the gain the laser output gets probably cranked up to 11, and with that its remaining lifespan will be significantly shortened. Ergo it’s probably best to just burn that CD-R copy of the album and listen to that instead.

• car brands running curl

  Ironically enough, while curl runs in practically almost every new modern car that comes out from factories, not a single of the companies producing the cars or the software they run, are sponsors of curl or customers of curl support. Not one. We give away curl for free for everyone to use at no cost and there is no obligation for anyone to pay anyone for this. These companies are perfectly in their rights to act like this.

TechSuck / Geek Bait

• 8×19 Text Mode Font Origins | OS/2 Museum

  the Intel boards with 8×19 fonts make absolutely no attempt to use these beyond POST. In fact as soon as the system starts POSTing add-on adapters, the BIOS switches to a regular VGA text mode, and also does that before attempting to boot from disk. For systems that use a graphical logo, the system switches to a standard text mode whenever going out of logo mode. When it’s safe to use the graphical logo it’s safe to use 8×19 text, and vice versa. The obvious remaining question is, who came up with 8×19 fonts for BIOS use? Was it really Intel? Or was it someone else? Note that the Intel boards were used by many OEMs (including but not limited to AST, Dell, Gateway, HP, Micron, Packard Bell) so just because an OEM system uses an 8×19 font doesn’t mean there isn’t Intel behind it.

• HN finally caught that this was Prusa saying it, and then decides its his fault for founding the industry: Open hardware desktop 3D printing is dead | Hacker News

• The plan for Linux after Linus? A work in progress • The Register

  Who is in line to step up when he steps off changes, and that’s fine. What matters, he says, is the trust earned over time among the community for the top tier of maintainers. The next benevolent overlord will appear naturally. It’s true that many decisions are made throughout the community by those other than Torvalds, and the degree of open discussion about absolutely everything from small details to major innovations is naturally far more open and communitarian than humanity normally enjoys. Torvalds' moral authority pervades, and others have already inherited it. That's the plan. This is dangerous. Succession is always a time of uncertainty for those who like the way things are, and opportunity for those who do not. The Linux kernel project has many tensions that are themselves remarkable for being universally agreed but with little urgency about fixing them.

  • someone asking "who will be the next God?" cannot accept "there is no God" as an answer

AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World

• Twitter's Ex-CEO Is Moving Past His Elon Musk Drama and Starting an AI Company

• Is the stock market in an AI bubble?

• OpenAI's Waterloo?

• Meta's flirty AI chatbot lured a retiree to New York. He never made it home

• ChatGPT chief Nick Turley doesn't want you too attached to AI

• Meta backtracks on rules letting chatbots be creepy to kids

• High costs and thin margins threatening AI coding startups

• New trend: extreme hours at AI startups

• Sam Altman says 'yes,' AI is in a bubble

• AI boom will sharply increase prices in the electricity market

• I talked to Sam Altman about the GPT-5 launch fiasco

• Meta hires anti-DEI influencer Robby Starbuck to curb 'political bias' in AI

• Critical thinking skills will be No. 1 biggest key to success in the age of AI

  • critical thinking quickly leads one to conclude that the "age of AI" is comfortably far in the future, i would suggest.

• Is AI Hitting a Wall?

• US senators call for Meta probe after Reuters report on its AI policies

• YouTube to begin testing a new AI-powered age verification system in the U.S.

Space / Boomy Zoomers / UFO

• Astrophysicist Avi Loeb proposes six-word message be sent to 3I/ATLAS

Economicon / Business / Finance

• Foreclosures rocket by 32% in Las Vegas

• GE Appliances shifts more production to US as part of a $3 billion investment.

• Amazon to launch drone delivery service in Kansas City before holiday season

• N26 investors seek to replace chief executive with chair in boardroom bust-up

• Walmart slashes grocery costs for employees as food prices squeeze budgets

• Court Records Reveal Sig Sauer Knew of Pistol Risks for Years

• Significant Layoffs at Oracle

• CEOs tighten grip on workplace culture, dialing back flexibility

• Playboy moves global headquarters out of California

• Ten most Affordable housing markets in the world-9 are in the U.S.

• The Global Lobster Rush Might Break the Industry

• California unemployment rises to 5.5%, worst in the U.S. as tech falters

Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making

• US Government May Buy a Stake in Intel

• SC's proposed nuclear reboot: 'We're going to finish these reactors'

• Why rural Coloradans feel ignored − a resentment as old as America itself

Democrats

• Hillary Clinton says she'd nominate Trump for Nobel Prize if he brokers peace

Left Angst

• Kennedy's case against mRNA vaccines collapses under his own evidence

• Price increases are adding up at Shein

• White House loyalty rating for companies

• Van Hollen accuses Trump of pay-to-play on chips

• "AI will pay for tariffs"

• Trump’s debanking order could create headaches for banks, sources say.

  U.S. President Donald Trump’s executive order requiring banks not to discriminate against clients on political or religious grounds could create uncertainty and administrative headaches for the industry, sources said. Trump signed an executive order on Thursday directing the Treasury Department and bank regulators to ensure lenders do not have policies in place that deny services to customers based on political or religious beliefs, a practice known as “debanking.” Any wrongdoing uncovered could result in fines, disciplinary measures, and even referrals to the Justice Department.

• California Democrats Are Fighting Trump's Battle for Him

• US Pilots Trained to Fight Russia Will Soon Help Protect Putin

• Controversial climate report from Trump team galvanizes scientists into action

• Trump admin ranks companies on loyalty while handing out favors to Big Tech

• Greedflation Is Back as Corporations Use the Tariff Excuse to Hike Prices

• Why haven't tariffs boosted inflation? New research suggests lower actual rates

World

• Online Safety Act was botched from the start

  he High Court judgment details the last government’s reaction when it discovered this potentially rather large flaw. First, we are told, the relevant secretary of state (Michelle Donelan) expressed “concern” that the legislation might whack sites such as Amazon instead of Pornhub. In response, officials explained that the regulation in question was “not primarily aimed at … the protection of children”, but was about regulating “services that have a significant influence over public discourse”, a phrase that rather gives away the political thinking behind the act. They suggested asking Ofcom to think again and the minister agreed.

• UK Office of Communication fines US company 4chan

• Italian hotels breached en masse since June, government confirms

• UK government inexplicably tells citizens to delete old emails and pictures to save water

  • Millions Told to Delete Emails to Save Drinking Water

  • Contra the UK government, don't delete your old photos and emails to save water

• Police asked Cotswolds residents for social media details

• How police are cracking down on 'scout' sex broker groups

• Submerged Roman bathhouse in Baiae may be part of Cicero's villa

• The Dark Underside of the Host Bar Industry

• Iceland supermarket offering £1 reward for reporting shoplifters

• African Union joins calls to end use of Mercator map that shrinks Africa size

• Flash floods kill at least 159 people in Pakistan after cloudburst

• New Zealand's population exodus hits 13-year high as economy worsens

Israel

• Israeli unit tasked with smearing Gaza journalists as Hamas fighters – report

Russia Bad / Ukraine War

• Russia taking measures to partially restrict calls on Telegram, WhatsApp

• Ukraine's Patriot Missiles Struggle to Stop Enhanced Russian Ballistic Missiles

Health / Medicine

• Just 1% of Hiroshima and Nagasaki survivors died from radiation cancers, study

• (2014) Can You Be "Big Boned"?

• Toothpaste made from hair could help repair teeth

• 'Weekend warrior' workouts reduce diabetics' risk of death

• Whoop pushes back on FDA over blood pressure feature

• Flumist, nasal spray flu vaccine, now available for home delivery

Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda

• Earth's climate is approaching irreversible tipping points

• Are Small Modular Reactors Worthy of the Hype?

• The Volunteers Fighting Greece's Intensifying Wildfires

• Classic Maya response to multiyear seasonal droughts in Yucatán

• With waters at 32C, Mediterranean tropicalization shifts into high gear

• Deer hunter discovers rare subtropical wood stork in the wilds of Wisconsin

• Arctic glaciers face 'terminal' decline as microbes accelerate ice melt

• Mexico's rising mercury trade fuels toxic gold mining in Latin America: Report

• Precision mapping tracks woody plant spread across Great Plains grasslands

• Solar panels that fit on your balcony or deck are gaining traction in the US