2025-09-09

etc

• Employee survives 40-foot fall into corn silo at Denver Frito-Lay plant

Horseshit

• John Law at the front lines of San Francisco counterculture

• Gen Z staff cut in half at tech companies as the average age goes up by 5 years

• NASA Is Testing a Nuclear Battery That Could Last 433 Years

• Broken $100B dream city becomes refuge for tech utopians

• The fine art of doing a work assignment badly so you don't have to do it again

• American Flying Empty Airbus A321neo Across the Atlantic 20 Times

• Car Brand Loyalty Is Falling Fast: Why More Americans Are Switching Sides

• Doorbell prankster that tormented residents of apartments turns out to be a slug

• Tiny Vinyl is a new pocketable record format for the Spotify age

• Men and Women and Apps = Bad Romance

• Our data shows San Francisco tech workers are working Saturdays

• Big business and capitalism are becoming less and less popular with Americans

• British 'Thor' becomes first person to swim 1000 miles around Iceland

• Tim Cook isn't the problem, capitalism is

• FIFA Turns World Cup Tickets into a Variable-Priced Luxury Marketplace

celebrity gossip

• How JPMorgan Enabled the Crimes of Jeffrey Epstein

• The Spectacular Comeback Tour of Ross Ulbricht

• Murdochs reach deal in succession battle over media empire

Rank Propaganda / Thought Policing / World Disordering

• From Rabble-Rousing to Rabble Snoozing

  Iryna Zarutska, a Ukrainian refugee, was killed on a Charlotte commuter rail train by a crazed black man, Decarlos Brown, Jr. He sat down behind her, and then, for no obvious reason, pulled out a knife and began stabbing her in the throat. There was blood everywhere. And there’s video, which the Charlotte town officials tried and failed to keep secret. But the national press is, as noted above, not simply downplaying it, but ignoring it.

  They’re not even making excuses. They might say that violence on commuter trains isn’t news — though I don’t know if that’s true when you’re talking Charlotte instead of the Bronx. They might say that black on white violence isn’t news, though that’s kind of an iffy position. Everyone knows, and DOJ statistics demonstrate, that’s it’s much more common than white on black, but do they want to invoke that as a justification? Maybe they don’t want to encourage random violence by crazy people? But they cover that all the time. The truth is, this story just hurts the narrative. The black-on-white angle hurts, but the real problem is that Decarlos Brown, Jr., is a repeat violent offender who has spun through the revolving door of the criminal justice system for years, a man with 14 arrests, many for violent crimes such as larceny, armed robbery, and violent threats. But despite being regularly arrested, he was repeatedly released. Charlotte Mayor Vi Lyles said that you can’t arrest your way out of these problems.

  Since the number one rule for the legacy media is “thou shalt not support anything Trump does,” naturally the Zarutska murder can’t be covered. And it won’t be, unless they can find — or manufacture — some alternative angle that will make Trump look bad. So far, they’ve come up a dry hole. So nothing.

• Stabbing video fuels MAGA’s crime message

  The suspect, Decarlos Brown Jr., 34, was charged with first-degree murder. His criminal record includes charges of armed robbery, felony larceny, breaking and entering, and shoplifting, according to jail records cited by WBTV. Mecklenburg County District Attorney Spencer Merriweather, in an interview with Axios Charlotte last week, didn't comment directly on the case but acknowledged the limitations and complexities of holding defendants with mental health issues accountable.

  Reality check: As Republicans have consistently highlighted crime, Democrats have accurately pointed out that violent crime rates have been decreasing since pre-pandemic highs. Trump won't just discuss this case once, his team says. He's going to keep highlighting crime because it's important to him — and he believes it moves voters as the GOP tries to keep control of Congress in next year's midterms. "Crime is not a data thing — it's a feeling thing," the Trump adviser said. "Politicians don't understand that it's about how you feel when you walk on the subway platform." "It's not about whether you're a victim. It's about whether you feel you're a victim or not."

  • Fatal stabbing of Ukrainian refugee in North Carolina ignites crime debate

• 4chan and Kiwi Farms Sue the UK over Extraterritorial Censorship

• France is ramping up its fight against disinformation with a new digital tool

Musk

• Tesla Unveils Optimus v2.5/v3 Humanoid Robot with Hyper-Realistic Hands

• Musk's SpaceX Agrees to Buy Echostar Spectrum for $17B

  • SpaceX buys wireless spectrum from EchoStar in $17B deal

  • SpaceX disrupts everyone's plans again

  And in this case, by spending $17B, SpaceX has not only persuaded EchoStar to give up its D2D plans but has now made it much harder for any competitor to move forward when they can’t possibly compete with SpaceX’s speed in bringing new satellites to market. That was evident in the article published by The Information in May, where Apple staff working on the D2D project with Globalstar expressed concerns that their bosses would cancel the effort and decide to partner with SpaceX instead. And we’ve seen more on that front in recent months, as Globalstar’s new satellites have been delayed, and Apple was apparently forced to support Starlink on the iPhone 13 in order to secure a new launch slot.

  I think we can now look to EchoStar to gradually wind down the rest of its operations and sell off its remaining spectrum. The remaining major block is AWS-3, which Verizon might pick up in the next few months, potentially at a discount to the $10B EchoStar paid, especially if Verizon takes on the AWS-3 reauction obligations. And then it would be reasonable to assume that DISH DBS would merge with DirecTV and Hughes could eventually be sold (perhaps to a private equity buyer?).

• Tesla Wants Out of the Car Business

• Tesla market share in US drops to lowest since 2017

Robot uprising / Humanioid Helpers

• Benjie's Humanoid Olympic Games

Religion / Tribal / Culture War and Re-Segregation

• The three stages of religious decline around the world

• Teen coder made first millennial Catholic saint at youthful Vatican event

Edumacationalizing / Acedemia Nuts

• What It Costs to Be a Sorority Girl

• Education Doesn't Work

  In so many human domains, we’re willing to accept that some people are naturally advantaged, bound by some inherent trait to be better than others, whether it’s physical attractiveness, the visual arts, musical performance, athletics, memory, sense of direction, language learning, charisma…. We are, generally, perfectly willing to accept that different human beings have profoundly different strengths and abilities. But with education and intelligence, we’re unwilling to countenance the simple reality that some people are better equipped to succeed and some worse. It wasn’t always this way. For much of human history, that some people were simply smarter than others was accepted as a matter of course. In particular, and unfortunately, inherent group differences have historically been asserted in cognitive ability, and education was typically walled away from those who weren’t of the right class, gender, race, or station; this, obviously, was unjust and a terrible waste of human talent. In the last 50 years, however, a combination of forces2 has led us to overcorrect and embrace the opposite conclusion, that all individual people have equal ability to excel academically. This has led to all manner of ugly consequences, including blaming those who lack academic talent for their own immiseration and unfairly pinning educational failures on schools and teachers that they are not responsible for.

• Hundreds of U.S. colleges poised to close in next decade, expert says

Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising

• VMware's in court again. Customer relationships rarely go this wrong

• The end of TaxProf Blog

  TaxProf Blog has been a labor of love these past 21 years. I have been puzzling over when would be the right time to stop. Typepad, the platform on which TaxProf Blog is hosted, made the decision for me when it announced on August 27th that it will discontinue all blogs effective September 30th. At this stage in my life, I am not interested in starting anew on a different platform. I hope to find another home for the massive content of my 55,780 TaxProf Blog posts.

• Meta suppressed research on child safety, employees say

  • Meta suppressed children's safety research, four whistleblowers claim

• Wizard of Oz on sphere-vision: The Fall's First Blockbuster Is an 86-Year-Old Musical

• AMD Claims Arm ISA Doesn't Offer Efficiency Advantage over x86

• Whistle-Blower Sues Meta over Claims of WhatsApp Security Flaws

• Nintendo wins a $2M lawsuit against popular Switch modding webstore

  • Nintendo secures $2M settlement against Switch modder

• In court filing, Google admits "the open web is already in rapid decline"

• All 54 lost clickwheel iPod games have now been preserved for posterity

• Oops, No Victims: The Largest Supply Chain Attack Stole 5 Cents

• Bluesky Adds Private Bookmarks

• Wikimedia sunsets separate mobile domains

• Apple launching 8 new products on Tuesday, here's what's coming

• Hollywood's superhero bubble popped. Now hit video games are taking the controls

• Sega accused of using police to recover negligently disposed Nintendo dev kits

TechSuck / Geek Bait

• Linus Torvalds is sick and tired of your 'pointless links' – and AI is no excuse

• How Big was IBM? - by Babbage - The Chip Letter

  The breadth and depth of IBM’s presence is unrivalled today. Microsoft probably comes closest with its dominance of PC operating systems, business productivity software, plus its place as a major player in the cloud and gaming. Google has worldwide search market share of almost 90%. Apple dominates the market for high-end phones and like IBM controls almost all the ‘stack’ for its machines. It comes nowhere near having IBM’s market share in its biggest market though. To compensate, though, that market is much, much bigger and Apple is much more profitable than IBM was, even at its peak.

AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World

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

• AI Adoption Rate Trending Down for Large Companies

• OpenAI Backs AI-Made Animated Feature Film

  • OpenAI comes for Hollywood with Critterz, an AI-powered animated film

• AI Boosts Noninvasive Brain-Computer Interface by Interpreting User Intent

• AI Is Not a Bubble

• I Hate My AI Friend

• Perplexity wants to get discounted AI products into the US government too

• Walling Off the Open Internet to Stop AI May End Up Breaking Everything Else

• Frequent use of AI may hinder students' academic performance

• Warner Bros. Sues Midjourney to Stop AI Knockoffs of Batman, Scooby-Doo

• Faith in God-like large language models is waning

• Judge skewers $1.5B Anthropic settlement with authors in pirated books case

Space / Boomy Zoomers / UFO

• Space travel may accelerate the aging of stem cells as much as tenfold

Crypto con games

• Nasdaq makes push to launch trading of tokenized securities

• Nebraska man gets 1 year in prison for $3.5M cryptojacking scheme

Economicon / Business / Finance

• Why Are More Millionaires Renting Homes Instead of Buying?

• StubHub eyes up to $9B valuation in US IPO

  • Big Week for Tech IPOs with Klarna, Netskope, Stubhub, Figure and Gemini

  • Klarna Said to Guide IPO Pricing at Top or Above Marketing Range

• Databricks Raises $1B at a $100B Valuation

• Jaguar Land Rover extends shutdown after cyber attack

• Robinhood Markets to Join the S&P 500 Index

• New York's Airbnb Crackdown, in Force for 2 Years,Hasn't Improved Housing Supply

• America is in a serious jobs slump

• By falling: Lumber Prices Are Flashing a Warning Sign for the U.S. Economy

• ElevenLabs to Let Staff Sell Shares at $6.6B

• Cognition valued at $10.2B two months after Windsurf purchase

• Goldman Sachs Warns of 1.9M Barrel per Day Oil Glut by 2026

Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making

• Americans' Most Valuable Asset Isn't Stocks or a Home. It's Social Security

Trump

• Dismal new job numbers might be a sign of Trump’s successes, not failures.

• Mike Johnson backs off claim that Trump was ‘FBI informant’ on Epstein

• Nvidia's Huang joining Trump on UK state visit next week

• Epstein Birthday Letter with Trump's Signature Revealed

Left Angst

• Postal traffic to US drops more than 80% after trade exemption rule ends

• US Raid on Hyundai Georgia Plant Leaves Korean Companies Reeling

  • Trump's Made-in-USA Push Undermined by Hyundai Raid, Visa Flaws

• US limits free speech more than the EU, says tech commissioner

• Orsted Sues Trump Administration in Fight to Restart Its Blocked Wind Farm

• 'Mozart of Math' Tao fundraising focus after UCLA federal funding suspended

• We Are Watching a Scientific Superpower Destroy Itself

• SFPD let Georgia, Texas cops illegally search surveillance data on behalf of ICE

• Supreme Court Allows Racist ICE Raids to Continue in LA

• Supreme Court allows Trump to fire FTC commissioner

  • Althouse

  The fact that NBC News referred to the fired commissioners as "Democratic commissioners" gives away the game. According to Humphrey's Executor, the idea was that "The commission is to be nonpartisan; and it must, from the very nature of its duties, act with entire impartiality." And "It is charged with the enforcement of no policy except the policy of the law."

Law Breaking / Police / Internal Security

• PACER buckles under MFA rollout as courts warn of support delays

• FCC Unveils Plan for Allowing Prisons to Jam Contraband Cellphones

• Michael Brown's Friend Who Invented 'Hands Up, Don't Shoot' Hoax Is Murdered

• ICE Launches Operation Midway Blitz to Target Criminal Illegal Aliens in IL

External Security / Militaria / Diplomania

• NATO is defenceless against China's real West-killing weapons

World

• One dead in Nepal protests against social media ban, state TV says

  • 14 Killed in protests in Nepal over social media ban

  • 19 Dead in Gen Z protests across Nepal

• Devotees jostle to drink liquor during Indra Jatra celebrations in Kathmandu

• The huge growth of Myanmar scam centres that may hold 100k trafficked people

• 'People are so angry': how wealth tax became a battleground in Norway's election

• Pre-owned software trial kicks off in UK as Microsoft pushes resale ban

• Undersea cables cut in Red Sea, disrupting internet access in Asia and Mideast

• 'Old things work': Argentines giving new life to e-waste

• So much for the paperless office: UK government inks £900M deal for printers

• France fines Google, Shein record sums over cookie law violations

• Drones could deliver defibrillators to cardiac arrest patients in the UK

• India expands censorship powers, lets lower officials demand takedowns

• UK Age Verification Data Confirms Mass Migration to Sketchier Sites

• French government collapses

  The French government has collapsed after prime minister François Bayrou lost a confidence vote in the National Assembly. MPs overwhelmingly backed the motion to remove Mr Bayrou, voting 364-194 – a 170 majority. Mr Bayrou is expected to resign on Tuesday, leaving Emmanuel Macron to search for a replacement or call snap elections.

China

• Venice's famous winged lion was made in China, scientists say

• China paves way for renminbi fundraising by Russian energy giants

• China's EV influence is spreading globally, except to the U.S. and Canada

Health / Medicine

• Russia's Enteromix cancer vaccine shows 100% success in preclinical trials

  • to doubt the safety of effectiveness of a "vaccine" is to spread Russian Right Wing Disinformation (TM), so you know it must be true.

• Nantucket Waste Tests 50% Higher for Cocaine then Nat. Average

• Lithium and Its Potential Protection from Alzheimer's Disease

• Microdosing GLP-1 drugs became a longevity 'craze'

• WHO adds GLP-1 drugs for diabetes, others to essential medicines list

• The Cause of Alzheimer's Could Be Coming from Within Your Mouth

Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda

• Google removes net-zero carbon goal amid power-hungry AI datacenter buildout

• Are Humans Watching Animals Too Closely?

• Five Dramatic Ways Animals Respond to Human Noise

• Managing soil fertilization levels for more efficient and productive crops

• Environmental Regulations Are Baking Europeans to Death

• Climate-driven wildfires reversing pollution progress in N. America: study

  • "Climate driven" == "arson by climate activists"

• Climate change is making it dicier to get that perfect ear of corn

• Thumbnails helped rats, squirrels, and more take over the world

• Humans inhale as much as 68,000 microplastic particles daily, study finds