2025-08-17

Horseshit

• A parent's job is never to make their kid happy'–what to do instead

• The United States Is Southern Now

• The 10 Percent Is in a Fit of Rage over Airport Lounges

• Restaurants Create ‘Ozempic Menus’ For Diners on Weight-Loss Drugs: Mini meals with bite size portions are meant to appeal to people taking GLP-1 weight-loss drugs that reduce appetite.

• The catfishing scam putting fans and female golfers in danger

• Brain editing now 'closer to reality': tools tackling deadly disorders

• Introvert, extravert, otrovert? There's a new personality type in town

• 'I didn't realise the game's impact for years': origin of Football Manager

• Scientists Identify a New Glitch in Human Thinking

• Is a corporation a slave? Many philosophers think so

• All-Star Games may be flawed but still a boon for professional sports leagues

• China Is Run by Engineers, and the US by Too Many Lawyers

• Robotic arm with soft grippers helps people with disabilities make pizza, more

celebrity gossip

• Woz: 'I Am the Happiest Person Ever'

• Meta spends more guarding Mark Zuckerberg than Apple, Nvidia, Microsoft, Amazon

  • I wouldn't expect the other companies to spend very much at all guarding Mark...

Obit

• Gerry Spence, a Canny Courtroom Showman in Buckskin, Dies at 96

Musk

• SpaceX reveals why the last two Starships failed as another launch draws near

• The fake news that helped put us on a path to Mars

  A century-old optical illusion launched a space race.

• Tesla brings back free lifetime supercharging for new Model 3 owners (in Canada)

• Sam Altman vs. Elon Musk vs. Grok

• Starlink announced a $5/month plan that gives unlimited usage at 500kbits/s

• Trying new X algorightm powered by Grok 4 Mini

• SpaceX Gets Billions from the Government, Gives Little to Nothing Back in Taxes

Electric / Self Driving cars

• EV automakers see billions in revenue disappear as US ends emission credits

• The American Car Industry Can't Go on Like This

Religion / Tribal / Culture War and Re-Segregation

• Report Finds Hundreds of Attacks on Churches in 2024

  Travis Weber, vice president for policy and government affairs at the Family Research Council, which released the report Monday, said most Americans would be surprised to hear that 383 churches suffered 415 attacks in 2024. We have a tendency in the West and in the United States to think of ourselves as safe and freedom-loving, tolerant, and protective of religious freedom, including religious freedom to practice Christianity,” he told The Daily Signal in an interview Friday. “So, I think the fact that we have hundreds of incidents—specifically, 415—in the year 2024 is very revealing.”

  • I remember Al Gore came to talk over a near by "Black" church that had an electrical fire after being abandoned for several years. The building was repaired with Federal money and sat unused for another 20 years until it was sold to be a home, and then torn down once that person moved out.

• Photographed sorta: Occult books digitized and put online by Amsterdam’s Ritman Library

Edumacationalizing / Acedemia Nuts

• "I Have a Theory Too": The Challenge and Opportunity of Avocational Science

  It basically never happens that there are sudden flashes of insight that come out of nowhere. And that’s particularly true in fundamental physics, where a fairly tall tower of abstraction and formalism has developed, particularly over the past century or so. There’s everyday physics, of the kind we can reason about from our everyday experience. And then there’s physics of the very large and very small that’s far from our everyday experience. But it’s that physics that’s our best probe of the fundamentals of how things work. And if you don’t know it, you’re at a crippling disadvantage in making foundational progress in physics.

  • I can believe that Mr Wolfram is as smart as he thinks he is; and regret that he cannot seem to explain anything but how smart he thinks he is.

• Sparks in the Schoolyard: What We Lost When Shop Class Disappeared.

  They weren’t officially boys-only classes, but the self-selection was complete. The girls chose other electives. This was our domain. And because it was, it gave us something most boys today rarely get: a place where we could learn physical competence without shame. Boys gravitated toward tools the way we now expect them to gravitate toward screens. And because it was carved out for us, it felt different from any other part of school.

  We’ve dismantled the very training grounds for the skills we now desperately need. Across North America, there is a shortage of electricians, welders, carpenters, and mechanics. These jobs are secure, in demand, and often pay more than many “knowledge work” careers. Meanwhile, we have a generation of college graduates carrying tens of thousands in student debt and working in jobs that don’t require the degrees they hold.

• Why So Many MIT Students Are Writing Poetry

Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising

• Microsoft keeps adding stuff into Windows we don't need

• HBO Max's 'Looney Tunes' Purge Has Found a Sanctuary in Tubi

• Is Proton - as in ProtonMail and ProtonVPN - leaving Switzerland?

• Are on-set photos ruining movies?

• Seagate spins up a raid on a counterfeit hard drive workshop

• Apple Working on All-New Operating System

• Tiny, removable "mini SSD" could eventually be a big deal for gaming handhelds

• HBO Max to aggressively crack down on password sharing

• Meta's wristband breakthrough lets you use digital devices without touching them

  • Next: billing you monthly without having to provide any other service... and they'll be the phone company

AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World

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

• Why AI has not lived up to the hype, and probably never will

  • Because the hype was the point. Remember "metaverse?" They have one of these things running at all times for the last 30 years.

• ChatGPT 5 power consumption could be as much as eight times higher than GPT 4

• The US Grid Is Stunningly Weak, the AI Race with China May Already Be Over

• 'Cheapfake' AI Celeb Videos Are Rage-Baiting People on YouTube

• What happens when chatbots shape your reality? Concerns are growing online

• OpenAI's Sam Altman Expects to Spend 'Trillions' on Infrastructure

• OpenAI staff looking to sell $6B in stock to SoftBank, others, source says

  • OpenAI in talks to sell around $6B in stock at roughly $500B valuation

• Top exec reveals the 'stupidest thing' companies adopting AI can do

• We are Gen Z – and AI is our future. Will that be good or bad?

• Man dead after Meta chatbot named 'Big sis Billie' invited him to meet in NYC

• Did the system update ruin your boyfriend? Love in a time of ChatGPT

Space / Boomy Zoomers / UFO

• NASA has sparked a race to develop the data pipeline to Mars

• What Should Humanity Do on the Day After an Interstellar Object is Recognized as Technological? | by Avi Loeb | Aug, 2025 | Medium

  Currently, there is no international organization tasked with coordinating a response across the globe. We only discuss existential threats from artificial intelligence (AI), climate change or impact by near-Earth asteroids or comets. How should we tackle the threat to Earth from alien technology?

Crypto con games

• FBI's undercover $250 Bitcoin payment helps take down alleged corporate hacker

• Cantor Fitzgerald close to $4B SPAC deal with Bitcoin pioneer

Economicon / Business / Finance

• America's stock-market dominance is an emergency for Europe

• Oracle cuts cloud jobs with Seattle hit hard as AI spending soars

• Blue-collar jobs are gaining popularity as AI threatens office work

• The Palantir Mafia Behind Silicon Valley's Hottest Startups

• Wholesale Vegetable Prices Spiking

Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making

• Media Matters: FTC Reined in by Judge for Retaliating Against Media Group

Trump

• World-Renowned Negotiator Says Trump's Secret Weapon Is Empathy

• Government papers found in an Alaskan hotel reveal details of Trump-Putin summit

• Trump tells Zelenskiy that Putin wants more of Ukraine, urges Kyiv make a deal

• Moment Putin’s legs ‘twitch suspiciously’ in Trump farewell as Russian dictator dons platforms to overcome ‘Napoleon complex’ – amid rumors he wore an EXOSKELETON

• More National Guard Soldiers Head to D.C. and Prepare to Carry Weapons

Left Angst

• Trump's BLS Pick E.J. Antoni Is – Shocker – A Crackpot Hack

  Antoni's "work at Heritage has frequently included elementary errors or nonsensical choices that all bias his findings in the same partisan direction," Stan Veuger, a senior fellow at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, told Axios' Courtenay Brown and Emily Peck.

• New Zealand mother and her 6-year-old son have spent weeks detained by ICE

• Cancelling mRNA studies is the highest irresponsibility

• A median voter theory of right-wing populism

  I document that the average parliamentarian is about 1SD more culturally liberal than the national mean voter. This cultural representation gap is systematic in four ways: i) it arises on nearly all cultural issues, ii) in nearly all countries, iii) nearly all established parties are more culturally liberal than the national mean voter, and iv) all major demographic groups tend to be more conservative than their parliamentarians. Moreover, I find that demographic differences between voters and parliamentarians or lack of political knowledge cannot fully account for representation gaps. Finally, I show that right-wing populists fill the cultural representation gap.

  I am myself (largely) a cultural liberal, so I am not siding with the right-wing populists here. But let us be clear what is going on. The right-wing populists are gaining ground in so many countries because the cultural liberals in various parliaments and congresses are extremely reluctant to meet the preferences of their median voters. On the immigration issue most of all. And then they wish to talk about threats to democracy!

• Election workers fear threats and intimidation without feds' support in 2026

• CBP Is Deporting Cruise Ship Crew over CSAM Allegations Without Evidence

• NASA's acting chief calls for the end of Earth science at the space agency

  • Let them concentrate on going to space and or long shot high return science missions. send more rovers out.

External Security / Militaria / Diplomania

• State Department stops issuing all visitor visas for individuals from Gaza

• How your solar rooftop became a national security issue

• FAA Insider Opens Up About Drone Incursions over Military Bases

World

• Spain put up wealth taxes – without chasing away the billionaires

• 'Cold ice cream complaints have cost me hundreds'

  Ms Blow said a single customer had made 44 refund requests to Just Eat for deliveries they claimed hadn't been made by Cakes by Andrea, and all the complaints had been accepted by Just East without checking with Ms Blow. It was only when she went through her Just Eat account that she spotted the shortfall of more than £1,000.

• Air traffic control outage disrupts flight in Oceanic airspace

• German court throws book at ad blockers

• Libya To Hold Rare Elections As Post-Gaddafi Chaos Persists | ZeroHedge

• German federal ruling reopens possibility that ad blockers violate copyright law

Israel

• Whistleblower alleges misconduct by United Nations in Gaza

• Netanyahu's cybersecurity official arrested in Vegas in child sex sting

Russia Bad / Ukraine War

• Russia blocks calls via WhatsApp and Telegram

China

• China overbuilt high-speed rail, says leading economic geographer

• Flight test of Chinese startup LandSpace's rocket fails

• Embodied Intelligence: The PRC's Whole-of-Nation Push into Robotics

• China's vision for a driverless future is miles ahead of everyone else's

• Typhoon-adjacent Chinese crew broke into Taiwanese web host

• China develops first pregnancy robot, sparking ethical debate

Health / Medicine

• Weight-Loss Drugs Have a Surprising Foe: Fat Activists

• Aging Can Spread Through Your Body via a Single Protein, Study Finds

• Scientists capture first footage of human embryo implanting in a uterus

• $2 One-Drop Blood Test Detects Hidden Diseases in 15 Minutes

• Syndrome is linked to regular cannabis use–and cases have doubled

Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda

• Urban forests spread their cover in a time of climate change

• What to know about the rare 'brain-eating' amoeba found in Australian tap water

• Once Again, Oil States Thwart Agreement on Plastics

• Beech: A Race to Save a Signature American Tree from a Deadly Disease

• The Infinite Well: How Innovation Keeps Water Flowing

  Critics warn that humanity is depleting Earth’s finite fresh water supplies through overuse and pollution, urging drastic conservation measures. But this narrative misunderstands what “fresh water” is. Rather than a fixed natural endowment, fresh water is largely a product of human innovation and engineering. As technology advances and economic incentives align, humans continue expanding usable water supplies—turning the ocean, wastewater, and even air into sources of clean, drinkable water.

  Environmental alarmists have been issuing stark warnings—humanity is running out of fresh water—for years. “Only 3 percent of the world’s water is fresh water, and two-thirds of that is tucked away in frozen glaciers or otherwise unavailable for our use. . . . At the current consumption rate, this situation will only get worse. By 2025, two-thirds of the world’s population may face water shortages,” declared the World Wildlife Fund. The United Nations warned that “the world may face a 40 per cent shortfall in water availability by 2030.” Solutions from experts follow a familiar pattern, claiming that the only way to avert a crisis is to adopt radical social and behavioral changes, driven by moral proselytizing, government intervention, or both, to save the water supply. Environmentalists urge people to replace old toilets with low-flow models, avoid running faucets while brushing their teeth or washing dishes, and switch to eating less water-intensive foods. Meanwhile, activists pressure elected officials to impose usage restrictions, ban certain crops in arid regions, and regulate everything from swimming pools to car washes.

  There is nothing natural about turning on a tap in one’s home and having clean, fresh water flowing out on demand. The water flowing from your tap began its journey as rain, groundwater, or surface water, and it became “fresh” only after passing through treatment plants, filtration systems, and distribution networks. What we call fresh water is best understood as water that has been made usable for human purposes through innovations in technology and infrastructure.

• Climate Shift: US Emissions Rise as China's Fall

• Study documents unhealthy noise in Portland, provides framework for other cities

• How people often miscalculate climate choices - like owning a dog | MPR News

  The top three individual actions that help the climate, including avoiding plane flights, choosing not to get a dog and using renewable electricity, were also the three that participants underestimated the most. Meanwhile, the lowest-impact actions were changing to more efficient appliances and swapping out light bulbs, recycling, and using less energy on washing clothes. Those were three of the top four overestimated actions in the report.