2025-08-31

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• Americans Are Having Less Sex

  • Well, let's see: Any sexual contact carries lifetime legal liability with it; you're a Right Wing Throwback if you enjoy any act not specifically forbidden in Deuteronomy, and everybody is covered in tattoos and has piercings in intimate areas. Rubber toys and goats have a real advantage in this market.

Horseshit

• Culture Has No Name for This Cursed Vibe. It's Everywhere

  he emotion is something like “the feeling of being terrorized by stupid shit.” You’re horrified by something, then embarrassed that something so stupid is the object of your horror, then horrified at a more profound level at what that coincidence of real fear and obvious stupidity says about the world… I don’t know what to call this feeling. A delightmare?

• 'Cuteness overload': LA finds joy in a weekend of 'Disneyland for cat people'

• High-performance athletes at risk for depression despite benefits of activity

• The Sovereign Individual is a retelling of a very old story

• Remains of Ice Age man may be earliest evidence of conflict in Southeast Asia

• Gym bros are already taking the strongest weight-loss drug

• How States and Cities Decimated Americans’ Lowest-Cost Housing Option

  The intertwined history of single-room occupancy and homelessness in the U.S.

  In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, landlords converted thousands of houses, hotels, apartment buildings, and commercial buildings into SROs, and by 1950, SRO units made up about 10% of all rental units in some major cities. But beginning in the mid-1950s, as some politicians and vocal members of the public turned against SROs and the people who lived in them, major cities across the country revised zoning and building codes to force or encourage landlords to eliminate SRO units and to prohibit the development of new ones. Over the next several decades, governments and developers gradually demolished thousands of SROs or converted them to other uses, including boutique hotels for tourists. And as SROs disappeared, homelessness—which had been rare from at least the end of the Great Depression to the late 1970s—exploded nationwide. Now, as a nationwide housing shortage has pushed rents and homelessness to historic highs, some states and localities are reconsidering the value of lower-cost, small units with shared kitchens, bathrooms, and amenities. Ironically, had SROs grown since 1960 at about the same rate as the rest of the U.S. housing stock, the nation would have roughly 2.5 million more such units— enough to house every American experiencing homelessness in a recent federal count more than three times over.

• With Induction Stoves, Chefs Discover a Foolproof Path to Perfection

• CEOs Can't Buy Creativity. They Need to Build It

• Automated Traffic Enforcement Is More Popular Than You Think

• Cash Transfers Work

Obit

• Microsoft Software Engineer Dies on Silicon Valley Campus at 35

Musk

• Starship's heat shield appears to have performed quite well in test

Electric / Self Driving cars

• Why do Waymos keep loitering in front of my house?

Robot uprising / Humanioid Helpers

• Humanoid AI robot Xiao He to assist media personnel at SCO Summit in China

• Simplified wrist mechanism gives robots a hand

Edumacationalizing / Acedemia Nuts

• Enrollment at trade schools is expected to grow 6.6% a year

Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising

• He Paved the Way for CNN, Fox News, Internet. He's Not Sure We're Better Off

• Google Pixel 10 series review: Don't call it an Android

• Radio is back – Gen Z's listening habits are changing the face of media

• The fight against labeling long-term streaming rentals as "purchases" you "buy"

• Today's game consoles are historically overpriced

• FCC Rejects Calls for Cable-Like Fees on Broadband Providers

• Battlefield 6 Dev Apologizes for Requiring Secure Boot to Power Anti-Cheat Tools

• AMD Ryzen CPUs fry twice in the face of heavy math load, GMP says

• I Love Reading 1980s Computer Magazines, and So Should You

• A Windows update probably didn't brick your SSD

• Verizon users hit with nationwide outage, including in Bay Area

  • Verizon down for users across the US

TechSuck / Geek Bait

• Linux Foundation's New Banned Words: Hung, Pow-Wow, & Sanity Check

AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World

• Can AIs Suffer?

• The Will Smith video is just the beginning of AI chaos

• 'Sliding into an abyss': experts warn over rising use of AI for mental health

• Cutting-Edge AI Was Supposed to Get Cheaper. It's More Expensive

• AI's mental health fix: Stop pretending it's human

• A Chatbot Can Be Part of Your Medical Team

• Cracks are forming in Meta's partnership with Scale AI

• Medicare Will Start Using AI to Help Make Coverage Decisions Next Year

Economicon / Business / Finance

• California tech startup once worth $1B shuts down

  Flip tried to compete with TikTok, but per a post on its website, its 'mission now comes to a close'

• Nearly 900k Cars Sold: Toyota's Record July Proves Strategy Works

• With AI Boom, Dell's Datacenter Biz Is Finally Bigger Than Its PC Biz

• The space race is transforming Southern California's economy – again

• Company behind Jack Daniel's says Canadian sales drop 62%

Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making

• FTC claims Gmail filtering Republican emails threatens "American freedoms"

  • Ive heard lots of people complain about "I can't stop the Democrat fundraising texts!" There's positive and negative bias in tech.

• Social Security data chief resigns

• US Homeland Security chief reports breach at FEMA, fires 23 employees

• What happens to tariffs now that a federal appeals court has knocked them down?

  • An appeals court said Trump couldn't levy his tariffs. What happens now?

• GAO warns of privacy risks in using facial recognition in rental housing

Left Angst

• Trump effort to expand speedy deportations of migrants violates due process

• NASA Is Now Primarily an Intelligence / National Security Agency

• 'Undercover' Spy In WSJ Sob Story Is A Public CIA Russia Hoaxer

  “Gabbard didn’t know the CIA officer had been working undercover, according to a person familiar with the fallout from the list’s release,” Forrest wrote in the hit piece headlined, “Tulsi Gabbard Blindsided CIA Over Revoking Clearance of Undercover Officer.” He noted “three other people with knowledge of the situation” who claimed the DNI “didn’t meaningfully consult with the CIA before releasing the list.” Wrong, multiple sources with knowledge of the situation say. A senior intelligence official tells The Federalist that there was indeed staff-level coordination between the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the CIA, as well as other agencies involved, ahead of the distribution of the revocations letter. A source familiar with the matter said there have been “zero concerns” expressed by any of the agencies involved regarding the revocation of Gurganus’ security clearance or any of the others.

• CDC Leader Who Wrote Dramatic Anti-Trump Letter PROBABLY Seems Familiar

  Imagine the resume of someone whose primary job under the Biden administration was serving as the Monkeypox advisor. Yeah. Add to that some bizarre comments about how we shouldn't tell gay men not to have orgies to avoid the virus (again, as an adviser), and you get Demetre Daskalakis.

• The Billionaires Are Abandoning Humanity

• Lego Will No Longer Ship Individual Pieces Thanks to Tariffs

• Open Letter to the NIH

  The Trump administration has been retaliating against its critics, and people and groups with business before the administration have started laundering criticism through other sources with less need for goodwill. So I have been asked to share an open letter, which needs signatures from scientists, doctors, and healthcare professionals.

• Pediatric Brain Cancer Group to Lose Federal Funding

• Trump's 50-year War on the Dollar

• Don't they know there's a market expecting that shipment? Trump administration plans to remove nearly 700 unaccompanied migrant children

• American capitalism is being remade by state power

• Six Months into Tariffs, Businesses Have No Idea How to Price Anything

• Bernie Sanders: Kennedy Must Resign

• Anti-vaccine myths surged online ahead of the CDC shooting

• Trump is giving Russian cyber ops a free pass and putting democracy on the line

• The Reason American Socialists Don't Win

• Trump officials fire EPA employees for signing dissent letter.

External Security / Militaria / Diplomania

• Nobel Prize and a Testy Phone Call: How the Trump-Modi Relationship Unraveled

• De minimis has ended

  • What the end of the 'de minimis' exemption means for brands across the globe

• US builds up forces in Caribbean as officials, experts, ask why

World

• Milan's expat 'explosion' brings new buzz to Italy's financial centre

• Proposals for commercial planes to operate single pilot shelved after EU report

• Late-Night Killing of a Teenage Girl on a Bicycle Unnerves Amsterdam

• Google set to face modest EU antitrust fine in adtech investigation

• A Sudden Order to Round Up Delhi's Street Dogs Is Dividing India

• Man declares country in unclaimed pocket of land between Serbia and Croatia

• Scottish brothers finish mammoth row across Pacific Ocean after 139 days

Israel

• Irelander 'repeatedly punched in the face by police' during Berlin Gaza protest

• Deep Zionism

  This post was born of two years of frustration. It was born of trying, fifty or a hundred times since October 7, to find common ground with the anti-Zionists who emailed me, messaged me, etc.—“hey, obviously neither of us wants any children killed or starved, we both have many bones to pick with the current Israeli government, but surely we at least agree on the necessity of defeating Hamas, right? right??“—only to discover, again and again, that the anti-Zionists had no interest in such common ground. With the runaway success of the global PR campaign against Israel—i.e., of Sinwar’s strategy—and with the rise of figures like Mamdani (and his right-wing counterparts) all over the Western world, anti-Zionists smell blood in the water today. And so, no matter how reasonable they presented themselves at first, eventually they’d come out with “why can’t the Jews just go back to Germany and Poland?” or “the Holocaust was just one more genocide among many; it doesn’t deserve any special response,” or “why can’t we dismantle Israel and have a secular state, with a Jewish minority and a majority that’s sworn to kill all Jews as soon as possible?” And then I realize, with a gasp, that we Jews really are mostly on our own in a cruel and terrifying world—just like we’ve been throughout history.

  whatever your criticisms of Israel’s current tactics, so long as you accept the almost comically overwhelming historical case for the necessity of Jewish self-defense, this post wasn’t aimed at you, and you and I probably could discuss these matters. It’s just that the anti-Zionists scream so loudly, suck up so much oxygen, that we definitely can’t discuss them in public. Maybe in person sometime, face to face.

  • This person has been a respected nerd. I give it a month or less before he's reviled as a the worst Nazi since Musk, now.

  • a reply form the boards:

  This is not saying anything that we don't know: wild animals are selfish and will do anything to achieve their biological imperative believing that ends justify the means. this barely constitutes a "stance" and there is virtually nothing about morality here because morality is a whole level (and a bunch of frontal cortex mass) above this.

Russia Bad / Ukraine War

• Ukraine blows up two Russian bridges using Moscow's own mines and $600 drones

China

• China Warns Against Excess Competition in Booming AI Race

• Can China cope with a deindustrialised future?

• AI Translation Is Killing Chinese Literature (and That's Good)

Health / Medicine

• The FDA's (mis)guidance on Sodium

• My Family Went Off Ultra-Processed Foods for a Month. The Results Surprised Us

Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda

• Fishermen Pulled in an Orange Shark Off Costa Rica: 'My God, What Is This?'

• TX suit alleging anti-coal "cartel" of top Wall Street firms could reshape ESG

• Shutdown of north Atlantic overturning after 2100 following deep mixing collapse

  • Collapse of critical Atlantic current is no longer low-likelihood, study finds

• US has invasive bullfrog problem spreading in west: Scientists alarmed

• Hurricane category 6 could be introduced under new storm severity scale

• Healing Ozone Layer Could Trigger 40% More Global Warming.