2025-09-06

Horseshit

• Tokyo has an unmanned, honor-system electronics and appliance shop

• Robinhood CEO: Investing for a living could replace labor in a post-AI world

• How 'neural fingerprinting' could analyse our minds

• In the before time, this was "don't keep books in the bathroom" Browsing your phone on the toilet can increase the risk of hemorrhoids.

  • Using Your Phone on Toilet May Give You Hemorrhoids: Study

  • Smartphone use on the toilet and the risk of hemorrhoids

• Hard-Nosed Sheriff Who Inspired ‘Walking Tall’ Movie Killed His Wife, Inquiry Says - The New York Times

  A rural Tennessee sheriff who was portrayed by Hollywood as a leader who had to bend the law in order to fight crime killed his wife 58 years ago, prosecutors announced on Friday. They said that they had amassed enough evidence against the sheriff, Buford Pusser, who served in McNairy County from 1964-70, to present an indictment to a grand jury in the killing of his wife, Pauline Mullins Pusser, 33, who died in 1967. Though Sheriff Pusser died in a car crash seven years after his wife’s death, prosecutors said it was critical to make public what they had learned, in part because the case inspired the Nixon-era law-and-order hit “Walking Tall” in 1973. “This case is not about tearing down a legend,” District Attorney Mark Davidson of Tennessee’s 25th Judicial District said in a news conference on Friday.

  Prosecutors in Mr. Davidson’s office worked with the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation, which began in 2022 to re-examine the file on Ms. Pusser’s death. The agency’s director, David Rausch, said that the fresh look at the file, which contains more than 1,000 pages, had been part of a routine review of cold cases. He said that the case, which resulted in no arrests, had largely been built upon Sheriff Pusser’s statements and quickly closed. “Perhaps too quickly,” he added.

  Sheriff Pusser said that as they drove along a country road, a car pulled up and a gunman opened fire, killing Ms. Pusser and wounding him. He needed several surgeries and was hospitalized for nearly three weeks. But based on a re-examination, the 1967 shooting of his wife was not an attempt on the sheriff’s life, investigators concluded. During their review, officials received a tip about a potential murder weapon and exhumed Ms. Pusser’s body for an autopsy. Dr. Michael Revelle, an emergency medicine doctor and medical examiner, determined that Ms. Pusser was more likely than not shot outside the car and then placed inside it. Dr. Revelle also found that the gunshot wound on Sheriff Pusser’s cheek was a close-contact wound, not one fired from long range, as Sheriff Pusser had described it. The gunshot was likely self-inflicted, Dr. Revelle concluded.

  On Aug, 21, 1974, Mr. Pusser was driving from Memphis, where plans for the sequel had been announced, back to his home in Adamsville, Tenn. According to the Tennessee Highway Patrol, his red Corvette careened off Highway 64 near Selmer, crashed into an embankment and caught fire.

  • That a really convenient set of findings for rewriting the story of an icon of small government, drawn from people who have been buried for 50+ years...

• Freeway guardrails are now a favorite target of thieves

• Teen loneliness triggers 'reward seeking' behaviour

• The word 'artisanal' has lost its meaning and dignity

Rank Propaganda / Thought Policing / World Disordering

• Rumors Spread Like Viruses

Musk

• they still aint paid off from last time: Tesla seeks to award Elon Musk $1T if carmaker hits formidable targets

  • Tesla Offers Unprecedented $1T Pay Package to Elon Musk

  • Musk gets a trillion dollar pay deal

  • Tesla proposes $1T award for Musk if he hits targets

  • Elon Musk could become first trillionaire under new Tesla pay deal

  • Tesla's nearly $1T new pay plan for Musk would expand his voting power

  • Elon Musk Could Become First Trillionaire Under New Tesla Pay Plan

• Bad actors exploit X's Grok to run 'racy' malvertising campaign

• Tesla changes meaning of 'Full Self-Driving', gives up on promise of autonomy

Electric / Self Driving cars

• I bought the cheapest EV, a used Nissan Leaf

• People Are Back-Flipping Off of Waymo's Robotaxis

• Robotaxis will be the Sputnik Moment for a declining Europe

Edumacationalizing / Acedemia Nuts

• Students face new cellphone restrictions in 17 states as school year begins

Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising

• Dumpster fire imo: Bootstrapping Android Development: A Survival Guide

  It’s fortunately still possible to download just the command-line tools to obtain the SDK components without needing the Google-blessed IDE. Using the CLI tools it’s not only possible to use your preferred code editor, but also integrate with IDEs that provide an alternate Android development path, such as Qt with its Qt Creator IDE.

• GitHub Enables Broader Access for Devs in Syria After Relaxation of US Sanctions

• The return of Spinal Tap – an exclusive that goes up to 11

• Firefox 32-bit Linux Support to End in 2026

• I have two Amazon Echos that I never use, but they apparently burn GBs a day

• Stardew Valley's creator is in Silksong

• Tesco sues VMware, warns lack of support could disrupt food supply

• Darth Vader's Lightsaber Sets New Sale Record at Sci-Fi Movie Auction

  • Star Wars: Darth Vader's lightsaber sells for £2.7M at LA auction

• Philips introduces budget-friendly Hue bulbs as part of major lineup overhaul

TechSuck / Geek Bait

• 3D QR Codes

• How many SPARCs is too many SPARCs?

AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World

• Marc Benioff says Salesforce has cut 4k roles in support because of AI agents

• The Large Gender Gap in Who Uses AI

• Warner Bros Discovery Sues Midjourney for Stealing Superman, Scooby-Doo

  • Warner Bros. Discovery sues Midjourney for generating copies of its characters

• The quest to keep OpenAI honest

• OpenAI eats jobs, then offers to help you find a new one at Walmart

• OpenAI links up with Broadcom to produce its own AI chips

• What the panic about kids using AI to cheat gets wrong

• Anthropic CEO is doubling down on warning that AI will gut entry-level jobs

• Anthropic to Pay $1.5B to Settle Book Piracy Class Action Lawsuit

  • Anthropic agrees to pay $1.5B to settle lawsuit with book authors

  • Anthropic to Pay $1.5B to Settle Author Copyright Claims

• Geoffrey Hinton: "AI will make a few people much richer and most people poorer"

• Europe hopes to join competitive AI race with supercomputer Jupiter

Space / Boomy Zoomers / UFO

• Swedish startup unveils Starlink alternative

• NASA offers $155,000 to design moon tires

Crypto con games

• Billionaire Crypto Investor Hits Out at Trump Family's Firm

Economicon / Business / Finance

• The startups building 'dark kitchens' for Uber Eats and Deliveroo

• Ex Facebook CTO's Sierra raises $350M

• McDonald's Escalates Restaurant Industry's Fight over Tipping

• Jaguar Land Rover staff told to stay home after cyber-attack

• Payroll employment (+22,000), unemployment rate (4.3%) change little in August

  • Payrolls rose 22k in Aug., less than expected in further sign of hiring slowdown

  • US economy added just 22,000 jobs in August, unemployment highest in 4 yrs

• Steve Ballmer denies allegations of circumventing salary cap

• Oracle cuts hundreds more Bay Area jobs in latest round of layoffs

Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making

• USGS Unveils New National Geologic Map

• Feds order Pennsylvania fossil-fuel plant to stay open another 90 days

Trump

• Trump to Sign Order Renaming the Defense Department as the Department of War

  • Trump to Rebrand Pentagon as Department of War

  • White House to Rebrand Pentagon the Department of War

  • Trump to Rebrand Defense Department as War Department

• Watch Live: RFK Jr. Testifies Before Senate Amid CDC Turmoil | ZeroHedge

  • A Defiant Kennedy Defends Vaccine Changes and CDC Shake-Up

• RFK Jr., HHS to Link Autism to Tylenol Use in Pregnancy and Folate Deficiencies

• Melania Trump warns 'robots are here' in rare public outing

• White House hosts BigTech dinner, says datacenter power woes are fixable

• Tech 'I'm glad it's over.' Google CEO thanks Trump for antitrust 'resolution'

• Trump to impose tariffs on semiconductor imports from firms not moving to US

Democrats

• ‘What Happened to Joe’s Head?’ Images Of Biden With a Giant Head Wound Surface

• Convicted FBI agent tipped off Hunter Biden-linked Chinese company about criminal investigation | Just The News

  The since-convicted FBI official who led counterintelligence efforts in New York leaked information to an affiliate of a Chinese company which was linked to Hunter Biden’s business efforts, according to a DOJ watchdog who concluded the leak tipped the Chinese conglomerate off about the bureau’s criminal investigation. Charles McGonigal, the former special-agent-in-charge of the FBI Counterintelligence Division in New York, leaked information to “Person B” – an unnamed businessman who worked for the Chinese energy conglomerate CEFC – even as the FBI was secretly investigating the Chinese company, according to the new report by Acting DOJ Inspector General William M. Blier.

• Oldest member of House, Democrat Eleanor Holmes Norton, is seeking re-election at age 88: ‘Not going to step aside.’

Left Angst

• Tech CEOs take turns praising Trump

  • All the President's Tech CEOs

  • Tech leaders take turns flattering Trump at White House dinner

• A boring theory of the populist right

  Almost all theories in elite discourse about why people vote for right-wing populism posit that deindustrialization or free trade or “neoliberalism” or some other thing that left-wing intellectuals think is bad induces support for political parties on the right. A simpler explanation is that a significant minority of the public in most Western countries agrees with right-wing cultural politics. I tend to believe that the latter is true. For example, many rank-and-file G.O.P. primary voters circa 2015 were a bit more moderate than Republican leaders on topics like Social Security and Medicare but more right-wing on immigration and crime. So when Trump offered that set of issue positions during the primaries, his platform resonated with a lot of voters. This hypothesis tends to be under-explored in the scholarly literature, I think, because researchers are overwhelmingly left-wing themselves.

  My sense that Trump is doing irreparable damage to the United States does not really stem from his views on crime and immigration. It’s based on his total disrespect for constitutional government, the rule of law, ethics, science, economics, and basic human decency. The problem is that while these right-wing views about immigration, crime, and gender roles are not per se illiberal, you can see why they disproportionately appeal to people with illiberal views and authoritarian mindsets. If all the elites who favor democratic institutions also refuse to supply the policy options on immigration and crime that the voters want, then voters will ultimately get those policies from more sinister types.

• Cooking the Federal Reserve's Credibility

  market movements since Donald Trump announced that he was (probably illegally) firing Lisa Cook from the Federal Reserve’s Board of Governors offer a preview of what to expect if the courts allow Trump to destroy the Fed’s independence. Spoiler: Not good.

• Trump's tariffs are pushing food and drink exporters closer to China

• Detained in raid by ICE, other agencies at Hyundai site in Georgia

  • South Korea: 'many' of its nationals detained in ICE raid on GA Hyundai facility

  • South Korean company workers arrested at Hyundai site in Georgia

• Two Valuable Satellites Are in 'Perfect Health.' They May Be Scrapped

• South Koreans detained in ICE raid at Hyundai electric vehicle site in Georgia

• RFK Jr. says Covid shots still available to all as cancer patients denied access

• Why I Am Not a Liberal - The New York Times

  As a society, we are pretty good at transferring money to the poor, but we’re not very good at nurturing the human capital they would need to get out of poverty. As a result, we do an OK job supporting people who are in long-term poverty but a poor job of helping them lift out of poverty. As Piper noted in a subsequent post, we spend more money combating poverty today than the entire U.S. G.D.P. from 1969, yet “the share of Americans whose pretransfer income places them in absolute poverty has barely fallen.”

  • "not a liberal" but the idea that society must be equalized, that "poor people" are somehow wrong and should not exist, is just a given...

• In Trump's Federal Work Force Cuts, Black Women Are Among the Hardest Hit

• PBS Slashes 15% of Staff After $500 Million Federal Funding Cuts

External Security / Militaria / Diplomania

• It's past time to start protecting US nuclear power reactors from drones

• A Top Secret Seal Team 6 Mission into North Korea Fell Apart

• U.S. imposes sanctions on 3 Palestinian human rights groups

• Venezuelan Jets Fly over U.S. Navy Ship in Show of Force

• US to cut some security funds for European countries bordering Russia

World

• Game-theoretic analysis of the 2025 federal elections in Germany

• "ChatControl betrays Europe's self-professed image as protector of human rights"

• Time is running out for EU Member States to decide on Chat Control

• Nepal blocks Facebook, X, YouTube and others for failing to register

  • Nepal moves to block Facebook, X, YouTube and others

• TV writer's arrest over posts on X sparks debate over free speech

• Error leaves 55,000 diabetes patients needing new tests

• EU fines Google $3.5B for anti-competitive ad practices

  • Google Is Fined $3.5B for Breaking Europe's Antitrust Laws

• After Afghan Quake, Many Male Rescuers Helped Men but Not Women

• The danger in this permacrisis is that that nothing changes

Russia Bad / Ukraine War

• Russian spy drones over Germany: Why the Bundeswehr cannot shoot them down

China

• 5 Years On, China's Property Crisis Has No End in Sight

• Beijing Is Failing to Solve Its Involution Problem

• China's Military Is Now Leading

• Axis of Upheaval: Inside China's Military Parade with Russia, DPRK and Iran

• Anthropic Clamps Down on AI Services for Chinese-Owned Firms

• Does the Future Belong to China?

Health / Medicine

• Using LSD to Treat Anxiety

  • 'One and done' dose of LSD keeps anxiety at bay

• Using antibiodies in breast milk to treat inflammatory bowel disease

• Pig lung transplanted into brain-dead person for 9 days

Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda

• Biggest iceberg, A23a, has broken up

• Air pollution significant cause of Alzheimer's disease

• Beavers return to the forest landscape, reviving its natural environment

• Earth's seasons in all their complexity in a new animated map

• First CRISPR horses spark controversy: what's next for gene-edited animals?

• Eating insects became a conspiracy theory

• Public strongly backs aim of 30% of land and sea set aside for nature