2025-09-05

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• Is Modernism Due to Youth Culture?

  At the key transition time, it seems that the culture of elite youth was more modern than the culture of older adults. And even today, most people most like the food, music, etc. popular when they were ~20yo, suggesting youth have a disproportionate role in cultural change. And elites have always had more influence over most everything. All of these lead me to wonder if a key was the rise of school, which concentrated elite youths together so that they could form their own internal elite youth culture. Youth are eager to distinguish their cohort’s culture from that of prior cohorts, which helps explain why the moderns were most sure they didn’t want past culture. The delay would be due to a need for school to become widespread enough among elites, with enough internal long distant contact, and perhaps also for prior traditional adult culture to lose its confidence in the face of a big accumulation of tech change.

  • if compulsory school attendance was important for the reasons they claim; the educational outcomes would be better and the spending on "education" would not be an ever growing black hole. Our culture's attitude towards its youth is deeply sick and Hanson has his finger on the crack that began it.

Horseshit

• Why are so many Americans obsessed with working?

• Man found dead at Burning Man ID'd as Russian who 'poured his soul' into camp

• Quantum computing firm reaches $10B valuation as investor interest builds

  • Honeywell's Quantinuum raises funds from Nvidia, others at $10B valuation

• My Day as an 80-Year-Old. What an Age-Simulation Suit Taught Me

• The Himalayan village where you can see the cosmos

• Surgeon jailed after amputation of own legs

  An NHS vascular surgeon who had his own legs removed has been jailed for two years and eight months for insurance fraud and possessing extreme pornography. Truro Crown Court heard he lied to insurers by claiming that injuries to his legs were the result of sepsis and not self-inflicted. It heard that in May 2019 Hopper had below knee amputations after a "mysterious illness". In fact he had used ice and dry ice to freeze his own legs so they had to be removed, said prosecutor Nicholas Lee. The court heard Hopper, who admitted two counts of fraud and three of possessing extreme pornography, had a "sexual interest in amputation".

• Startup behind $700-a-month bed 'pods' wants to put 10k more in San Francisco

celebrity gossip

• MxM News: Congress releases 33k Epstein case files that you can read now

  • Release of 'missing minute' of Epstein video contradicts claim cameras stopped

• Melvyn Bragg steps down from presenting In Our Time

• Digital Dopamine Is Consuming America. It's Time to Fight for IRL

• Mark Zuckerberg encouraged execs to do MMA training with him

• Atny Mark Zuckerberg sues Meta for shutdowns for same name as Meta founder

  • Attorney Mark Zuckerberg suing Meta over repeated Facebook suspensions

• David Bowie's final project discovered locked in his study

Obit

• Legendary Italian designer Giorgio Armani dies

  • Giorgio Armani, Fashion's Master of the Power Suit, Dies at 91

  • Giorgio Armani, iconic Italian fashion designer, dies at 91

Rank Propaganda / Thought Policing / World Disordering

• Wikipedia survives while the rest of the internet breaks

Musk

• Tesla Says Its Robotaxi App Now Open to Public Riders

Electric / Self Driving cars

• Rivian CEO: 'blows my mind' to see US auto makers shifting back to ICE vehicles

• GM cuts output at EV factory, citing weak demand

• Waymo Approved to Operate at San Jose Mineta International Airport

  • Waymo to begin testing at San Jose airport this fall

Robot uprising / Humanioid Helpers

• Orchard Robotics raises $22M for farm vision AI

Religion / Tribal / Culture War and Re-Segregation

• Malcolm Gladwell Says He Was 'Cowed' into Supporting Trans in Women's Sports

  • Malcolm Gladwell Reaches His Tipping Point on Trans Athletes

Edumacationalizing / Acedemia Nuts

• Answering the Age-Old Question: Is a College Degree Worth It?

Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising

• Google doesn't have to sell Chrome but must share some data with rivals

• Liquid Glass? That's what your M4 CPU is for

• Chinese Cyberattackers May Have Stolen Data from Almost Every American

• Google Hit with $425M Jury Verdict in Privacy Trial

• The company behind the Dia and Arc browsers is being acquired

  • Atlassian to Acquire the Browser Company for $610m

  • Atlassian acquisition drives dream of AI-powered ChromeOS challenger

  • Atlassian is acquiring the Browser Company

• How Anime Took over America

• The new Dolby Vision 2 HDR standard is probably going to be controversial

• Mozilla extends Firefox support on Windows 7 once again

• Your Favorite TikTok may be a marketing campaign

• Largest sports piracy site shut down by police

• Hollow Knight: Silksong Causes Server Chaos on Xbox, Steam, and Nintendo

  • Silksong crashes Steam, Xbox and Playstation as soon as it releases

• Best printer 2025: just buy a Brother laser printer

• Lego's $1k Death Star, the most expensive Lego set

• The million dollar mystery behind Milk.com

AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World

• I'm a High Schooler. AI Is Demolishing My Education

• The Fever Dream of Imminent Superintelligence Is Finally Breaking

• The AI Tool That Could Make Manufacturing Faster and More Efficient- Using Legos

• OpenAI boosts size of secondary share sale to $10.3B

  • OpenAI has lifted its share offering from $6 billion to $10 billion just days after CEO Sam Altman warned that AI was in a bubble.

• Microsoft and Oracle Laid Off and Bet on AI. New Research Says It Might Backfire

• AI is causing a drop in hiring but few layoffs

• AI Not Affecting Job Market Much So Far, New York Fed Says

• Switzerland releases its own AI model trained on public data

Space / Boomy Zoomers / UFO

• Marsquakes indicate a solid core for the red planet, just like Earth

• I watched scientists view the interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS in real time

Crypto con games

• The Loophole Turning Stablecoins into a Trillion-Dollar Fight

• North Korean hackers are using fake job offers to steal cryptocurrency

Economicon / Business / Finance

• Amazon Pauses Delivery Fleet Redeployments After Outcry over Repair Costs

• GDP: We Don't Know How Good We Have It

  The Hockey Stick of Long Run Growth has acquired a life of its own as a sort of emblem of belief in the potential for human progress. It has been printed in textbooks, sewed onto hats and, in all likelihood, has somewhere been tattooed on human flesh. All very well and good, but for one nagging question. Which government bureau was collecting GDP statistics in the 1st century?

• Private Assets Need Public Buyers

• Record profits, layoffs: Wall Street cheers as workers fear

Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making

• Judge overturns Trump administration funding cuts to Harvard

• Noem Fires FEMA Staff for Viewing Racially Charged Porn on Government Devices

• Senator wants Americans to get first dibs on GPUs and restrict sales to others

• US Sues SoCal Edison, over Eaton and Fairview Fires

• Sky-high budget gap: FAA launches air traffic overhaul, lacks cash to finish it

Trump

• Trump to host tech CEOs for first event in newly renovated Rose Garden

• Melania Trump hosts tech leaders at AI education roundtable

• Trump officials ask Supreme Court to quickly allow sweeping tariffs

Left Angst

• Why DOGE's Luke Farritor Followed Elon Musk to DC

• Economics at Its Best – the Story of the ‘Iowa Car Crop’

  International trade is nothing but a form of technology. The fact that there is a place called Japan, with people and factories, is quite irrelevant to Americans’ well-being. To analyze trade policies, we might as well assume that Japan is a giant machine with mysterious inner workings that convert wheat into cars. Any policy designed to favor the first American technology over the second is a policy designed to favor American auto producers in Detroit over American auto producers in Iowa. A tax or a ban on “imported” automobiles is a tax or a ban on Iowa-grown automobiles. If you protect Detroit carmakers from competition, then you must damage Iowa farmers, because Iowa farmers are the competition.

• Oregon, Washington, California form alliance to protect vaccine access

• Florida aims to ban vaccine mandates for schoolchildren

• John Deere, a U.S. Icon, Is Undermined by Tariffs and Struggling Farmers

• Ex-NASA chief: China likely to land humans on Moon before Uncle Sam does again

• Army's Contract with Startup to Give Soldiers Battlefield AI

• The Venona Cables Proved American Elites Spied for the Communists. Liberals Are Still in Denial

  Part of my research involves reading books about anti-communist figures and actions. One of them, Red Scare: Blacklists, McCarthyism, and the Making of Modern America by Clay Risen, was published this year. Risen is a writer for the New York Times, and I was curious to see what his book would say in light of the Venona cables. As suspected, he glosses over Venona quickly in order to get to the real issue - how the Red Scare was about American paranoia and authoritarianism and how we hear its echo in Donald Trump.

• It's time to have a serious conversation about Trump's health

  If you haven’t been paying attention, Washington and social media have spent Labor Day weekend in a frenzy over Donald Trump’s health. The president, who seems like he can’t stomach staying out of the public eye and spotlight for even a few hours, had no public appearances on Wednesday, Thursday, or Friday — nor any over the long weekend. That’s an unusually long period of time out of public view. Searches for “Is Trump dead?” soared on Google Saturday and became one of the most-searched terms of the holiday weekend, and #whereistrump trended on other social media sites.

• Prosecutors Fail to Obtain Indictment Against Man Who Threw Sandwich at Agent

• Orsted sues to save offshore wind farm from Trump administration axe

External Security / Militaria / Diplomania

• The new economic nationalism: industrial policy and national security

• DARPA Unveils "DRBE": The Pentagon's Plan to Win the Invisible War

• US puts $10M bounty on 3 Russians accused of attacking critical infrastructure

World

• Von der Leyen's GPS scare gripped Europe. Russia allegations starting to unravel

• French DPA Fines Google €325M for "Spam Emails" in Gmail

• France fines Google, SHEIN, for Cookie policies that led to crummy privacy

• EU chief prosecutor goes head-to-head with Brussels elite over corruption fight

• Popular Australian gift cards found vulnerable to brute-force PIN cracking

• Feminist activist sent to prison for 'Allah is lesbian' T-shirt

• India Lowers Taxes on Renewable Energy Industry in Steps to Fight Trump Tariffs

• A lifetime ago: France built 40 nuclear reactors in a decade

  As much of the world was retrenching, France’s nuclear ambitions were accelerating. The construction of 37 of the 57 reactors currently operating in France began during the 1970s. Today, France has largely decarbonized its grid: 94 percent of French electricity is generated from low-carbon sources, with 70 percentage points of that coming from nuclear power.

• Calling your boss a dickhead is not a sackable offence, UK tribunal rules

• Nepal blocks Facebook, X, YouTube and others Social Media Apps

• France's Revenue from Taxing Tech Is Growing

Israel

• Israeli military database show only a quarter of Gaza detainees are fighters

• Meta's Amplifying Harmful Content Against Palestinians During Genocide in Gaza

• Hamas increases pressure on Gaza residents not to evacuate south: 'People are afraid'

• Inside the 'Leading Scholars' Association' That Declared a Genocide in Gaza

  Though the association's title indicates that the IAGS is composed of genocide scholars, its members actually include a swath of "academic scholars, human rights activists, students, museum and memorial professionals, policymakers, educators, anthropologists, independent scholars, sociologists, artists, political scientists, economists, historians, international law scholars, psychologists, and literature and film scholars," according to its website. Those who don't fit one of those 17 titles need not be discouraged. To become an active IAGS member, one needs only to fill out a biographical form and pay a membership fee—$125 for a year, $210 for two years, or $1,200 for a lifetime. Doing so provides access to the association's internal Listserv, newsletter, job listing notifications, calls for papers, and biennial conferences. It also unlocks the ability to "nominate individuals for and receive IAGS institutional awards" and join the "IAGS Women's Caucus and the Indigenous People's Caucus."

Russia Bad / Ukraine War

• Putin: "Immortality" coming soon through continuous organ transplants

  • Putin, Xi caught on hot mic discussing organ transplants and immortality

China

• China Weighs Curbs on Stock Speculation to Foster Steady Gains

• Xi Jinping said the world was facing a choice between peace or war

• How China is arming Russia

• China's DeepSeek Preps AI Agent for End-2025 to Rival OpenAI

Health / Medicine

• Common artificial sweeteners linked to cognitive decline in large study

  • Sweeteners can harm cognitive health equivalent to 1.6 years of ageing

• Doctors Find Early Success with Partial Heart Transplants

• Smartwatches offer little insight into stress levels, researchers find

• A Pill to Heal the Brain Could Revolutionize Neuroscience

• LSD shows promise for reducing anxiety in drugmaker's midstage study

• Vitamin D deficiency is widespread – but overusing supplements can be risky too

• Sick People Are Sick

Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda

• Green hydrogen is hitting hurdle after hurdle – can anything get it moving?

  • Let's take natural gas; throw away most of the energetic content (with large energy inputs for the processing), resulting in a fuel that is impossible to contain.

• Life Thrums with Music

• Growing shade trees can cut chocolate's environmental impact

• Air pollution can drive devastating forms of dementia, research suggests

• Generate green energy using nut waste

• New Study Finds Sea Level Rise Has Not Accelerated Due to Climate Change