2025-09-01

etc

• Plastic Before Plastic - by George Dillard

Horseshit

• The trade in US body parts that's legal – but ripe for exploitation

• Chaotic Food: The Attraction of the Standard American Diet

  “Here I am,” I thought to myself, “about as far away from America as you can get, and people are still selling & eating deep fried garbage.” There were, of course, also some more traditional food stalls with more reasonable foods: largely rice or noodle based, often soupy/brothy, with a little bit of vegetables and meat or fish. What most of us would vaguely recognize as “Asian food.”

  • Wait 'til this person discovers the long global history of fried foods; and that many things were fried before America existed. They ask "why should Koreans eat fried chicken like Americans?" ... 'cuz they invented the chicken, and more ways to cook them than we employ in America?

• Does Work-Life Balance Make You Mediocre?

• U.S. Startup Plans to Beam Sunlight Using Space Mirrors

  • this is even more stupid than my plan to TP the Planet

• Why Dishwashers Are Quietly Disappearing from American Homes

• He Wants to Climb Nearly All of America's Tallest Peaks in a Month

• Who eats seaweed? Barriers and motivations in Japan versus the United Kingdom

• Lewis and Clark marked their trail with laxatives

celebrity gossip

• Threads cast and crew suffered 'trauma' after film

Musk

• SpaceX had a busy week generally, with launches every day including one to reboost the ISS.

Religion / Tribal / Culture War and Re-Segregation

• Palantir co-founder Peter Thiel to lead 4-part series on the Antichrist

Edumacationalizing / Acedemia Nuts

• American Science Should Take More Risks

• 'Swatting' hoaxes on college campuses spark panic and an FBI probe

• Why scientists are flocking to Substack

  Although she eventually regained control of her social-media accounts, and her team still posts infographics and videos there, Jetelina says Substack enables her to connect with followers in a different way. As she explains it, the e-mail newsletter platform is more conducive to longer-form and more-nuanced discussions, which aren’t always possible on other forms of social media.

  • Huh. I thought Bluesky was the Correct Forum and substack was all Nazis. Maybe its different when you have a "team" and are funded to promote a specific message. ... which might be classified as "propaganda" more than "science" imo.

Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising

• Verizon customers report phone outages, with devices limited to SOS mode

• Run a legal LTE network at home for $100

• AMD Prepares EPYC "Venice" Platform to Break the 1k W Power Barrier

• Rick Beato is right to rant about music copyright strikes

• Can newsrooms become social platforms?

• Google Issues Worldwide Gmail Data Breach Warning

TechSuck / Geek Bait

• Bcachefs Goes to "Externally Maintained" | Hacker News

• Respect for report negative results: Kevin Boone: A failed experiment in laptop cooling

  • The grille work and constrictions are most of the problem, i think: you need immense pressure to force enough air through that much drag. Stacking fans is a bitch: you can reduce total performance easier than improve it.

AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World

• For $65,000 a year, a teacher-less AI private school comes to Virginia

• Is Miss England's AI round dangerous or progressive?

• AI chatbots are creating more hateful online content: Researchers

• Time magazine honors Pope as 'spiritual counterweight' to Silicon Valley on AI

• AI Apocalypse? Why language surrounding tech is sounding increasingly religious

  Despite Thiel’s explicit invocation of language from the Book of Revelation, the positive visions of an AI future are more “apocalyptic” in the historical sense of the word. “In the ancient world, apocalyptic is not negative,” explains Domenico Agostini, a professor at the University of Naples L’Orientale who studies ancient apocalyptic literature. “We’ve completely changed the semantics of this word.” The term “apocalypse” comes from the Greek word “apokalypsis,” meaning “revelation.” Although often associated today with the end of the world, apocalypses in ancient Jewish and Christian thought were a source of encouragement in times of hardship or persecution. “God is promising a new world,” said Professor Robert Geraci, who studies religion and technology at Knox College. “In order to occupy that new world, you have to have a glorious new body that triumphs over the evil we all experience.” Geraci first noticed apocalyptic language being used to describe AI’s potential in the early 2000s. Kurzweil and other theorists eventually inspired him to write his 2010 book, “Apocalyptic AI: Visions of Heaven in Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, and Virtual Reality.”

• First AI Psychosis Case Ends in Murder-Suicide

  • First Murder-Suicide Case Associated with AI Psychosis

• Are people's bosses making them use AI tools?

• AI and Jobs, Again

• Hackers are now hiding malware in the images served up by LLMs

• Chatbots Can Go into a Delusional Spiral

• The man behind OpenAI's global expansion and its effort to win the enterprise

• OpenAI to take cut of ChatGPT shopping sales in hunt for revenues

• Humans are being hired to make AI slop look less sloppy

• Mark Zuckerberg's AI dream team seems to be falling apart

• Anthropic's surprise settlement adds new wrinkle in AI copyright war

• AI can't solve these puzzles that take humans only seconds

Crypto con games

• Trump brothers ride crypto wave as father advances legislation

Economicon / Business / Finance

• Intel Is Laying Off Workers While Raking in Public Largesse

• Nvidia says two mystery customers accounted for 39% of Q2 revenue

• Sycamore Partners finishes deal to take drugstore chain Walgreens private

• Family of MSFT employee who died warn tech companies not to overwork workers

• US tech stocks drop as AI uncertainty knocks chip groups

• Ford CEO Jim Farley: The Essential Economy's Productivity Gap Should Worry Us

• They Couldn't Afford Homes in the Big City. So They Left

Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making

• FDA official demands removal of YouTube videos of himself criticizing vaccines

• Rhode Island's tax on vacation homes of the wealthy is spreading to other states

Trump

• RFK Jr Dismisses Gun Control Calls, Will Examine Psych Drugs In Mass Shooting ‘Health Crisis.’

Left Angst

• EPA Fires 'Dissent' Statement Signers

• Domestic Terrorism and Spectacularized Violence in Trump's Warfare State

• Trump's New Plan for Medicare: Let AI Decide Whether You Are Covered or Not

• Alarm as US far-right extremists eye drones for use in domestic attacks

• Historians See Autocratic Playbook in Trump's Attacks on Science

• RFK Jr. Must Go. and He's Not the Only One

• Wonderful. May they enjoy the independence to criticize the government: Climate.gov to be revived by volunteers as climate.us with expanded mission

• The FTC Warns Big Tech Companies Not to Apply the Digital Services Act

• FTC chair warns Google about Gmail's 'partisan' spam filters

• The 'self-inflicted injury' to US tourism making Americans angry, disappointed

Law Breaking / Police / Internal Security

• Why Are There So Many Trans Mass Shooters Now?

External Security / Militaria / Diplomania

• Pentagon Warns Microsoft: Company's China-Based Engineers Were Breach of Trust

• Navy Fighter Pilots Need to Gain Trust in Pilotless Wingmen by Flying with Them

World

• India's Endless Trials

• Demography leads to more conservative European societies

• Coinbase's musical ad satirises the state of Britain

• HS2: West London tunnel section completed with 'huge' machines

  The Tunnel Boring Machines (TBM) excavated more than four million tonnes of London Clay and installed almost 100,000 concrete segments to form the tunnel walls, according to HS2. Now engineers have begun the process of lifting the last of the four machines used on the project to the surface. The first part of TBM, "Anne", saw the light of day for the first time in 16 months as it was lifted out of a shaft at Green Park Way in Greenford, west London, on Sunday.

• Inside Haiti: where women are raped on the street and gangs rule

• French foreign minister calls outside interference in Greenland 'unacceptable'

Israel

• Bite the hand that feeds you while pleading for help rearming Hamas: What Do You Fear the Far Right Will Do That You Have Not Done?

• Gaza postwar plan envisions 'voluntary' relocation of population

Russia Bad / Ukraine War

• Im meets families of North Korea soldiers killed fighting in Ukraine

China

• China is trying to expand its social safety net

• China Is Building a Brain-Computer Interface Industry

Health / Medicine

• Intermittent fasting correlated with increased risk of cardiovascular disease

• Study: Young children diagnosed with ADHD often prescribed medication too soon

• Can Vitamin D supplements slow aging, as a recent study suggests?

• Doctors find drug that is better than aspirin at preventing heart attacks

Pox / COVID / BioTerror AgitProp

• A Hidden Post-Pandemic Decline of Female Health

Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda

• Chicago has the most lead pipes in the nation. We mapped them all

• Stalagmites reveal devastating droughts that helped spur Maya breakdown

• South Australia to become first place in world to ban soy sauce containers

• EVs reduce climate pollution, but by how much? New U-M research has the answer

• Genetically, Central American mammoths were weird

• Observations of Thwaites Glacier consistent with high rates of loss next 50 yrs

• Cracks in the Earth Are Slicing Through Cities

• India's growing lion population cause for celebration, but also a deadly problem

• The Era of the American Lawn Is Over

• How to poop outdoors in a way that won't harm the environment and other hikers

• 'It happened so fast': the reality of indoor heat deaths in Arizona

• Rare Left-Handed Snail Seeks Hook-Up with Similar Mate

• Earth models can predict the planet's future but not their own