2025-08-22

etc

• How Does the US Use Water? - by Brian Potter

  An important distinction when understanding water use is “consumptive” vs “non-consumptive” uses. Consumptive water use is when the water is consumed as part of the process: either it gets incorporated into whatever is being produced, evaporates back into the atmosphere, or is otherwise no longer available in fluid form. Non-consumptive water use is when the water is still available to use in fluid form after the process is completed, though perhaps at a higher temperature, or with some additional pollutants or impurities.

  • So many of the people crying about "water issues" do not grasp this point; and assume you're an enemy if you ask them about it. It has made real discussion of actual issues very difficult.

Horseshit

• Is the 'love hormone,' oxytocin, also the 'friendship hormone'?

• "Deeply concerning": reading for fun in the US has fallen by 40%

• Electric flying boat that skims the water sparks global commercial and military interest

• Scotts Miracle-Gro Tried Playing Both Sides: Weed Killers, 'Weed' Growers

• French streamer dies live online during extreme challenge

• Ancient temple could reveal secrets of a lost society that predates the Incas

• When a Street Kills a Child, We Put the Parents on Trial

• Five ways professional athletes are redefining the limits of age in sport

celebrity gossip

• Tom Cruise becomes Guinness record holder for his fiery Mission Impossible stunt

Musk

• How Exposed TeslaMate Instances Leak Sensitive Tesla Data

• Elon Musk's XAI Exposed Grok Conversations to Google

• Tesla in NHTSA probe for not properly reporting crashes involving Autopilot/FSD

  • Tesla is slow in reporting crashes and the feds have launched an investigation

• Starlink Courts Luxury Airlines to Grow In-Flight Wi-Fi Business

• Starlink wants billions in grants, but state governments aren't cooperating

• SpaceX has built the machine to build the machine. But what about the machine?

• Scientists No Longer Find X Professionally Useful, and Have Switched to Bluesky

Electric / Self Driving cars

• Humans intervened every 9 minutes in AAA test of driver assists

• Battery prices are falling, so why are electric cars still so expensive?

• Why Can't the U.S. Build 5-Minute E.V. Chargers?

• Washington's new hybrid-electric ferry out of service after motor failure

• California is about to end its popular EV carpool lane decal program

Robot uprising / Humanioid Helpers

• The Revised Laws of Robotics

• Large Behavior Models and Atlas Find New Footing

Edumacationalizing / Acedemia Nuts

• From $24,000 to $147,000: How Much Daycare Costs Across America

• Sabine Hossenfelder on AI, bad physics, and why science needs reform

• Famous Cognitive Psychology Experiments That Failed to Replicate

• Banned Phones in My College Classroom. Students Loved It

Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising

• Is Rotten Tomatoes Still Reliable? A Statistical Analysis

  You'd think after spending a few hours deconstructing the Tomatometer that I'd be firmly against the site's alleged-but-also-somewhat-obvious review inflation. Yet my immediate lizard-brain reaction was strangely pro-inflation, surprising even me: maybe Rotten Tomatoes being (ostensibly) rigged isn't such a bad thing? I'm not proud of this knee-jerk response, so much as it speaks to the state of movies in 2025. If I were the owner of a movie-ticketing app or a sicko-utilitarian like Sam Bankman-Fried, I'd argue the ends justify the means: the average score goes up, more movies are deemed "fresh," people go to theaters, and cinema lives to fight another day. Unfortunately, I am not a sicko-utilitarian, which means I am now advocating against my best interests. Hooray for me.

• IETF Draft suggests making IPv6 standard on DNS resolvers-partly to destroy IPv4

• Smartphone makers must do more to protect children

• Steam review from Japan were overwhelmingly negative compared to other languages

• Meta inflated ad performance and bypassed Apple's privacy rules, tribunal hears

• Sony raises Playstation 5 prices in US as tariff fears persist

• Security researcher unearths several McDonald's security flaws

• Smartwatches offer little insight into stress levels, researchers find

• Masimo sues feds to stop Apple Watch pulse oximetry restoration

  • Masimo Sues Customs over Apple Watch's Restored Oxygen Tool

• To Download Adult Mods on Nexus, You Need to Show ID

• Full-sized A1200 Amiga remake spotted on display

• Microsoft and Asus' Answers to SteamOS and the Steam Deck Launch on October 16

• Wired and Business Insider remove 'AI-written' freelance articles

  • Wired and Business Insider remove articles by AI-generated 'freelancer'

  • Wired Got Rolled by an AI Freelancer

• Apple TV+ Price Increase Announced

  • Apple TV+ Hiking Price, Will Now Cost $13 per Month in U.S.

• 7 years later, Valve's Proton has been a game-changer for Linux

• The Underground Trade of 'Flipper Zero' Tech to Break into Cars

• PorNO How age verification exposed the power of friction in the internet age

• Singles Are Sick of Dating Apps. But There Are 2.5M on Raya's Waitlist

• Microsoft curbs Chinese firms' early access to cybersecurity flaws

TechSuck / Geek Bait

• Fun and weirdness with SSDs - Tomas Vondra

  Even without the kernel read-ahead, differences between forward and backward sequential reads did not disappear. On some drives forward reads are still much faster than the reverse reads. That suggests the devices have some sort of read-ahead heuristics built-in, and it also works only for the “forward” direction.

AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World

• AI Job Cuts Debacle Sees Biggest Australia Bank Reverse Tack

• Meta Freezes AI Hiring After Blockbuster Spending Spree

  • Mark Zuckerberg freezes AI hiring amid bubble fears

• Meta Poaches Apple AI Executive Even as It Plans Hiring Slowdown

• The warning signs AI bubble is about to burst

• Stop AI-Shaming Our Precious, Kindly Em Dashes–Please

• Microsoft boss troubled by rise in reports of 'AI psychosis'

• AI crawlers, fetchers are blowing up websites; Meta, OpenAI are worst offenders

• AI Mode in Search gets new agentic features and expands globally

• In a first, Google has released data on how much energy an AI prompt uses

• Bank forced to rehire workers after lying about chatbot productivity, union says

  • Bank backtracks on AI job cuts, apologises for 'error' as call volumes rise

• 95% of Companies See 'Zero Return' on $30B Generative AI Spend

• Jimmy Wales Says Wikipedia Could Use AI. Editors Say 'Antithesis of Wikipedia'

• Why Did a $10B Startup Let Me Vibe-Code for Them–and Why Did I Love It?

• The warning signs the AI bubble is about to burst

• Anthropic in Talks to Raise Up to $10B in New Funding

• Brace for a crash before the golden age of AI

• The AI Doomers Are Getting Doomier

Space / Boomy Zoomers / UFO

• Analysis suggests places to detect signals from an extraterrestrial intelligence

• NASA's Juno Mission Leaves Legacy of Science at Jupiter

Economicon / Business / Finance

• Airbus Is About to Eclipse a Record That Boeing Held for Decades

• Delta, United sued for selling windowless 'window seats'

• McDonald's is cutting prices to convince customers it's affordable again

• There are no entry-level jobs anymore. What now?

• Advice to a young unemployed computer science graduate: Build a portfolio

• How Do You Ask Your Parents to Help You Buy a House?

• A new pharma factory shows how hard it could be for drugmakers to outrun tariffs

• Hertz to sell used vehicles online through Amazon Autos partnership

• The Extraordinary Rise in the Wealth of Older American Households

• GE Appliances brings manufacturing back to the US.

• Once, Walmart was very big on "Made in the USA" ... Walmart says tariff costs are rising 'each week' and will continue

Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making

• Family Farm Wins Historic Case After Feds Violate Constitution and Ruin Business

  In 2015, feeling the pressure of a building labor crisis in U.S. agriculture, the Marinos turned to the federal H-2A Temporary Agriculture Worker Program, filling over half their seasonal manpower needs with foreign nationals. It was the beginning of the end for Sun Valley.

  Literally, the federal government had sent agents on-site to Marino’s farm, demanding over a half-million dollars, most of it for a single paperwork violation. Pay up or else. ... some of these 17 people had never even been on a farm, and some of them didn’t complete the first day of work. according to DOL, Sun Valley terminated the 17 workers. Therefore, Sun Valley owed each of the 17 three-quarters of their total work contracts for the crop year.

• Wyoming Highway Patrol Backs State Bill to Ban Non-English Speaking Truckers

• US DOJ to back off money transmitter cases in shift backed by crypto

Trump

• Trump half-billion-dollar civil fraud fine overturned by New York appeals court

  The appeals court said that the eye-popping penalty — which rose to more $500 million since it was imposed in early 2024 — violates the U.S Constitution’s Eighth Amendment, which prohibits “excessive fines.” But the court in the same ruling upheld Manhattan Supreme Court Judge Arthur Engoron’s finding that Trump and the others committed business fraud by overstating the value of real estate assets owned by the Trump Organization to boost Trump’s purported net worth.

  • Will these same penalties be applied to Democrats who have done the same thing?

Democrats

• IRS began criminal probe into Clinton Foundation in 2019 but then suddenly stopped, memos show | Just The News

  Years after the FBI was forced to shut down multiple corruption probes of Bill and Hillary Clinton's charity, the IRS under President Donald Trump began a criminal tax investigation into the Clinton Foundation and its dealings with other players on the global charity stage, but then abruptly stopped working with whistleblowers in spring 2019, according to IRS memos and internal emails reviewed by Just the News. "Can’t talk about the CF," a memo states in recounting how IRS agents suddenly cut off contact with two whistleblowers they had been working with for weeks. One of the whistleblowers was a decorated former federal money laundering analyst who had testified before Congress about issues like terrorism financing.

Left Angst

• ICE Budget Now Bigger Than Most of the Militaries

• Trump Says Smithsonian Focuses Too Much on 'How Bad Slavery Was'

• This Is How Much Money the EPA Was Spending on Corrupt Scams

  "Over $29 billion in grants have been cancelled," Zeldin told Fox News in an interview Tuesday, adding much of the money was going to friends of Democrats. "Our operating budget annually is about $10 billion, we've cancelled over $29 billion of it."

• Send Harvard's Chinese Students Home

• DC just had a murder-free week, and yes, Dems, Trump did that.

• Many international students won't make it to campus this fall

• US to paint southern border wall black to make it hotter

• ICE’s Official X Account Tags DOJ In Repost Of State Rep’s Clearly Protected Speech | Techdirt

• Billionaire Ambani Becomes Collateral Damage in Trump Trade Fury

• If America is in trouble, why do foreigners keep buying US assets?

• One Sentence in the Constitution Is Causing America Huge Problems - The New York Times

  Cato looked at the proposed Constitution and declared that it might well turn into a vehicle for tyranny. He didn’t see a Constitution of enumerated rights that sharply limited the power of the president. Instead, he saw a Constitution that granted the president such sweeping authority “that if the president is possessed of ambition, he has power and time sufficient to ruin his country.” In other words, Cato could see a man like Donald Trump coming, and he knew the Constitution could not prevent his rise.

• Trump admin strips ocean and pollution monitoring from next-gen satellites

• Administration will review all 55M visa holders for deportable violations

  • OMG enforcing laws? It's the end of democracy and the rule of law! Tyranny and horror!

• Immigrant Population in U.S. Drops for the First Time in Decades

• Trump Mobile Posts New Image of T1 Phone. Is It Just a Samsung Galaxy Ultra?

• The Dangerous Legal Strategy Coming for Our Books

• Donald Trump's fantasy of home-grown chipmaking

• FBI Plans to Lower Recruiting Standards, Alarming Agents

• MAGA's March Toward a Command Economy

External Security / Militaria / Diplomania

• Australia Post halts transit shipping to US as 'chaotic' tariff deadline looms

• Congressman proposes bringing back letters of marque for cyber privateers

• Microsoft says U.S. law takes precedence over Canadian data sovereignty

• Hackers who exposed North Korean government hacker explain why they did it

World

• It Costs More Than Ever to Buy a Home in Copenhagen, the Most Livable City

• Dozens more UK Afghan data breaches uncovered

• Landmark 113-year-old Swedish church arrives at new home after two day-journey

• 'Reading crisis' prompts Denmark to end 25% tax on books

• Anti-abortion campaigner faces third police investigation for silent prayer

• India's biofuel drive is saving billions but also sparking worries

• African Union backs campaign to replace Mercator map

• India passes bill to ban money-based online games

• London's new build overheating crisis – rethink over air conditioning 'ban'

• The UK Online Safety Act is about censorship, not safety

• Britain's Royal Train, Once a Symbol of Luxury and Modernity, Is Being Retired

• Africa Is Buying a Record Number of Chinese Solar Panels

• Pakistan is tapping into solar power at an 'unprecedented' rate. Here's why

• Poland foiled cyberattack on big city's water supply, deputy PM says

• Denmark ending letter deliveries is a sign of the digital times

• German contest to live in depopulated Soviet-era city proves global hit

Israel

• Israel approves controversial West Bank settlement project

• Microsoft employee arrested at second day of anti Israel protests on campus

  • Microsoft employee protests over Israel military ties lead to 18 arrests

• Greater Israel: Theology as Cartography – Cartography as Catastrophe

• A stranger told me I was sending my kids to 'Nazi camp' -- this shows how mainstream anti-Jew hate has become

Russia Bad / Ukraine War

• Ukrainian startup makes 100 strike drones daily, unveils 3k km missile

• Ukrainian held in Italy over blast mystery of Nord Stream gas pipelines

• Russia's drones have created a brand-new form of pollution

• Kremlin-backed Max messenger to be pre-installed on all Russian smartphones

  • Russia orders state-backed Max messenger app to be pre-installed on new phones

  • Russia order state-backed MAX, WhatsApp rival, pre-installed on phones, tablets

China

• After recent tests, China appears likely to beat United States back to the Moon

• China rushes to build out solar, and emissions edge downward

• China turns against Nvidia's AI chip

• In the Transition to Renewable Energy, China Is at a Crossroads

• China versus the US in the Competition for Global Talent

• Vivo's $1,400 Apple Vision Pro Clone Launches Across China

• Nvidia working on new AI chip for China that outperforms the H20

• China's Guowang megaconstellation is more than another version of Starlink

• China cut itself off from the global internet for an hour on Wednesday

Health / Medicine

• A New Reality for Terminal Cancer: Longer Lives, with Chronic Uncertainty

• U.S. drinking rate at new low as alcohol concerns surge

• Do Food Expiration Dates Matter?

• Eating your veggies isn't easy: they cost more and there aren't enough of them

• Why do some people age faster than others? Study identifies genes at play

Pox / COVID / BioTerror AgitProp

• Explosion in Tick Numbers Is Driving Up Risk of Red Meat Allergies for Americans

• California resident tests positive for plague, health official say

Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda

• Sharks are testing positive for cocaine

• Living with the face-clawing sloth bear that scares tigers

• Guyana's high-stakes oil and climate debate – and Ireland's role in it

• The Fix for Solar Power Blackouts Is Already Here

• TRIC Robotics is reducing pesticide use on strawberries using UV light

• Solar panels in space 'could provide 80% of Europe's renewable energy by 2050'

  • I'm sure that there will be nothing but amity and peace about having a giant Death Maser Array in orbit over all those countries, right?

• China tops US in climate change research, boosting sway on global policy

• Las Vegas leaders are banking on trees for cooling: The science is complicated

• Monsoon Rains Bring Mumbai to a Standstill

• They're really good at hiding: Three more species of giraffe than previously thought, scientists say