2025-09-20

Cool

• 30sec video: TVA Hartsville, TN Old Cooling Tower demolition

Worthy

• Worth reading entire: Blade Runner’s New Jews

  China operates 420,000 electric buses while America has a few hundred. Nearly $50 trillion in mobile payments flowed through Chinese phones in 2019 alone. Try buying street food in Beijing with cash and the vendor will look at you like you just offered to pay in seashells. Chinese cities have facial recognition payment systems, social credit scores straight out of Black Mirror, AI that can identify you in a crowd of thousands, drone swarms that paint pictures in the night sky, maglev trains that hit 430 km/h, and more kilometers of high-speed rail than the rest of the world combined. By any reasonable cyberpunk metric, we should be drowning in neon Mandarin by now. Our movies should be set in Neo-Beijing. Our video games should feature Shenzhen street samurai. Our collective anxiety dreams should be painted in Simplified Chinese characters. So where the fuck is our Chinese dystopian future? Where are the Hollywood blockbusters set in 2050 Guangzhou? Why does every sci-fi movie still fetishize the same tired Tokyo aesthetic that peaked when Reagan was president? The answer involves pixelated genitals, dying neon signs, octopus sex, Chinese Indonesians getting murdered in the streets, and why calling the Chinese "the new Jews" is both horrifically offensive and uncomfortably accurate.

  Throughout Southeast Asia, there's a phrase you'll hear in business circles, sometimes whispered, sometimes stated boldly: "The Chinese are the new Jews." It's inflammatory, potentially offensive, and absolutely accurate in ways that make everyone uncomfortable. The parallels are so precise they feel scripted. Start with demographics: Ethnic Chinese in Southeast Asian countries are typically 1-10% of the population but control 50-80% of the wealth. Chinese Indonesians: 3% of the population, 70% of the economy. Malaysia: 24% of the population, 60% of the wealth. Thailand: 10% of the population, 80% of the billionaires. The Philippines' richest man for decades was Henry Sy, who started as a Chinese immigrant selling shoes. The richest Indonesian is Robert Budi Hartono, ethnically Chinese, worth $26 billion.

  The cyberpunk prophets were right about everything except the aesthetics. We got the surveillance state, the corporate dominance, the technological alienation, the death of privacy, the rule by algorithm. We just got it through smartphones instead of brain-jacks, social credit instead of corporate loyalty scores, TikTok instead of virtual reality. The dystopia arrived but it was too user-friendly to recognize. William Gibson couldn't imagine cell phones in Neuromancer. We can imagine China's dominance perfectly, we're living it, but we can't represent it because representation itself has been captured by the thing we're trying to represent. We can't make art about Chinese power because Chinese power determines what art gets made. It's the most cyberpunk thing ever: the future eating its own depiction.

  The pixelated porn, the terrible movies, the Chinese-as-Jews dynamic, the missing Chinese future in our fiction, they're all symptoms of the same condition: a civilization that can no longer honestly depict itself. We can't show genitals, we can't show China, we can't show power structures, we can't show the future. All we can do is gesture vaguely at what we're not allowed to see directly.

Horseshit

• Is This the End of the Dictionary?

• The cost of performing childhood for your parent's art

• Poverty in California remains highest in US, tied with Louisiana, report says

• One Community's Experiment with a Phone-Free Childhood

• Dogs are communicating via button boards

  • Dogs mostly communicate through dance.

• Booga, Booga, be afraid! How Prepared Are We for a Rare and Powerful Solar Event?

• "Nice extremities" If you met an alien, what would you say to it?

• Why the one-handed backhand is losing its grip on professional tennis

• Can you be sued for defaming virtual K-pop stars? South Korea court says yes

• The sordid reality of retirement villages: Residents are being milked for profit

• Divers recover artifacts from the Titanic's sister ship Britannic

• 'We're Trying to Be No. 1 in the No. 2 Business': Inside the Sewage Super Bowl

• Gobsmacked! Supernatural Sightings After a Flood

  On Highway 15, the couple saw what they thought were two toddlers. Not at all surprised that two small children could be stranded, separated from their parents, they slowed down their pickup truck. When they came to a slow roll, they discovered two small, gray creatures instead. The couple described each as two to three feet in height, about the size of a two-year-old. One was naked and standing up with a clear expression of disorientation on its face. The other was wearing a leather skirt (the husband called it a “kilt”) and was sitting down on the ground rocking back and forth with its hands on its head. Shocked, the couple sped off and started telling everyone in earshot about flood goblins. Upon hearing this story, I immediately went to Gwen Johnson, a woman I consider an authority on all things mountain. Wide-eyed, I told her about a goblin sighting, and without hesitation, Gwen said, “I’ve seen ’em.” Gwen is in her sixties and close to the ground, with baker’s hands and a beautiful voice she uses for shape-note singing. She raised her children in a coal camp and has been a fierce local activist her entire life, organizing her community around racial justice and LGBTQ+ rights. In the days following the flood, Gwen transformed the Hemphill Community Center where she volunteers into a relief hub and temporary campsite for flood survivors.

  On their first day in the county, Beau hugged hairpin turns, inching their way up hollers in four-wheel drive and going door to door, “Just checking on folks.” At one point while on a small rural route, Beau pulled off quickly after seeing what they thought was a toddler stranded in a ditch. After stepping out of the truck and inspecting the creature, Beau realized it was not human. They wondered if it could be a fawn mangled by the flood and washed downstream to a ditch, but on closer inspection the creature was about a foot and a half tall and skinny, with pointy ears, long fingers, and huge black eyes. Its skin was covered in dirt, decomposing, and looked burnt from the sun. On the upper half of its body, it had a bib-looking shirt made from what they identified as an animal hide. “I don’t know how to describe it, but it looked exactly like Dobby from Harry Potter,” Beau said. “I was just like, What the absolute fuck? So I left.”

  The second sighting happened at a friend’s house. Beau had parked their truck in the driveway after a long day of home visits and was preparing to sleep in the back. While listening to WMMT, the local radio station, they caught a silhouette standing at the edge of the forest looking in the truck’s direction. Beau reported that the creature looked exactly like the other goblin—pointy ears, long fingers, big eyes—but was gray, standing upright, and about a foot taller. This one had on clothes that covered its body, but Beau couldn’t quite make out the outfit in the dark. Just as they texted their friend to come outside because a goblin was in the woods, the radio cut out. Beau played me a video recording they made while crouched down in the truck.

• Compound interest can help save for the future, or it can bankrupt the world

• Older People Are Losing Their Life Savings to Family Members

Rank Propaganda / Thought Policing / World Disordering

• Unmasking “Rex Feral,” Author of the Infamous Hit Man Manual | Vanity Fair

  Hit Man: A Technical Manual for Independent Contractors inspired a triple murder and led to a major First Amendment case. Still, the book is just one chapter in the bizarre story of its author, “Rex Feral,” a 77-year-old great-grandmother wrestling with decades of guilt and living anonymously—until now.

  Throughout the ensuing criminal trials against Horn and Perry and a landmark First Amendment case against Hit Man’s publisher, Paladin Press, Rex Feral’s identity remained a closely guarded secret. For the first time, the author is revealing her real name and relating the story of how she came to write an infamous murder manual. Rex Feral is Gayle McCool.

  • This is the case that broke the 1st amendment in the name of partisan politics. Paladin Press was "right wing" and an early target for stuff like "Poor Man's James Bond".

• Russian fake-news network, led by an ex-Florida sheriff's deputy

  In a paper published today, Recorded Future's Insikt Group threat researchers also unveil evidence that the pro-Putin posters known as CopyCop, aka Storm-1516, use self-hosted, uncensored LLMs based on Meta's Llama 3 open-source models to generate at least some of these fictional news stories. These websites are likely operated by John Mark Dougan, the security researchers claim. Dougan is a former deputy sheriff from Florida who gained political asylum in Moscow in 2016, and is allegedly a disinformation purveyor supported by the Kremlin. His phony media outlets have been cited in news articles or social media posts thousands of times,

Musk

• Burnend alive inside a Tesla as rescuers fail to open the car's door

  A 43-year-old man and two children, both aged 9, burned alive in a tragic accident in Western Germany, trapped in a Tesla. According to the police, a Tesla drove off the road after attempting to overtake another vehicle and crashed into a tree. 'Tragically, it caught fire there, and three people inside the vehicle were burned to death. Among them were two children and an adult man,' said Bernd Pentrop, press spokesman for the Unna District Police Department for Ruhr News. According to German media outlets, a local resident tried to free them from the vehicle but could not open the door.One child was able to escape and was transferred to a hospital in a helicopter. The retractable door handles on several Tesla models were reported to stop working the moment power is cut off.

  • How have we not had an endless parade of these stories since they began to sell these cars? Remember the Pinto? The Left obviously didn't like the cars that much once Musk's politics changed, so why were they so enamored of him and Tesla for so long?

• Elon Musk trapped Tesla shareholders: give me $1 tril or I won't lie for you

• Elon Musk's xAI raising $10B at $200B valuation

Electric / Self Driving cars

• Robotaxis as public transit? Waymo thinks so

  • They never quite got to the point of making actual money, so its time to dig into government as a parasite

• Trevor Milton’s Nikola Case Dropped by SEC Following Trump Pardon – EV

  The US Securities and Exchange Comission (SEC) has dropped its fraud case against Nikola‘s founder and former CEO Trevor Milton, after Trump’s pardon six months ago. Trevor Milton, who had been convicted of securities fraud, received a pardon from the US President Donald Trump in March, a month after the Phoenix-based electric and hydrogen truck maker Nikola filed for bankrupcy. The full and unconditional presidential pardon overturned a four-year prison sentence, imposed in December 2023, for deceiving investors about the company’s progress and products.

• EVs Have Gotten Too Powerful

Robot uprising / Humanioid Helpers

• 'Peak SF' on a Friday Night Is a Robot Fight

Edumacationalizing / Acedemia Nuts

• About FIRE's Free Speech Rankings

  for me, FIRE’s study misses the single most profound change on college campuses: AI, and the reality that students are increasingly doing their intellectual exploration privately, not publicly. FIRE’s survey doesn’t ask what questions students are asking their AI models in the privacy of their dorm room or quietly on their laptops during lectures. FIRE’s approach conflating intellectual freedom (the right to speak) with intellectual obligation (the expectation that one should speak) belongs to an older era. The study’s methodology treats public expression of controversial political views as an expected norm rather than a choice complicated by AI and social media. Students who report discomfort expressing their views in classroom discussions, campus common areas or on social media are counted as evidence of a “chilling climate,” regardless of whether these students have any desire to engage in public discourse.

  • Wow. "AI renders 'free speech' obsolete" is not an argument i have seen before, I think. From who is the AI supposed to learn new things if no one is allowed to say things that are not already accepted, official Truth? How can anyone learn without asking questions and discovering where they are wrong?

• LAUSD settles suit to help students with pandemic setbacks – 5 years late

• Texas A&M president to step down after turmoil over gender identity lesson

Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising

• Amazon Is Developing AR Glasses in Challenge to Meta

• Craigslist: The Eternal Startup That Refused to Grow Up

  Craigslist is more than a marketplace today. It is a cultural artifact, a living time capsule of the early web. In its stubborn refusal to modernize, it embodies a philosophy rare in tech: growth is optional, utility is timeless, and not every company needs to “move fast and break things.”

• The Sad World of Tech Blogging During an Era of Technological Stagnation

  They do their best to fake it, but the bodies betray the voices: these are three dudes who have seen this all before and don’t see much to get excited about. Being a tech blogger/YouTuber/podcaster requires the ability to regularly summon enthusiasm for the latest products. Some of this is personality, some of it is skill, and certainly these are three guys with lots of natural interest in technology and plenty of experience. But fundamentally, you have to have something to react to. And the iPhone, like its major competitors from Samsung and Google, is fundamentally a commodity product; the period of manic development in smartphones is long over, we’re in an era of trying to sell people on ancillary “improvements” like titanium casings, and advertising tries to get us amped up with endless incremental improvements to smartphone basics. But who, exactly, feels that they have insufficient storage on their flagship phone? Feels unsatisfied with the camera? Wishes the screen was sharper and brighter?

• Intel Responds to Questions on Future of Arc Graphics

  • Intel Arc Celestial dGPU seems to be first casualty of Nvidia partnership

  • What were the actual chances of real innovation coming out of Intel and reaching the public in any useable form?

• 'It's all good, it's all good' says Mark Zuckerberg as his catastrophic live demo of Meta's new smart glasses goes horribly wrong: 'You spend years making technology and then the Wi-Fi on the day catches you' | PC Gamer

  • Meta CTO explains the cause of its embarrassing smart glasses demo failures

• Bravo Apple! Calculator app has a memory leak

• Major Labels Settle Battle with Internet Archive over the Great 78 Project

• Valve is dropping support for 32-bit operating systems in Steam.

• After a Ban of Almost 4 Months, the Blog No Pasarán Has Been Restored to the Internet.

  a lot of people have been wondering how on Earth I got the blog back. And the answer is: Nobody knows. (Nobody knows for sure, I mean.) I certainly received no message from Google. So why did it happen? Was it the campaign on the blogosphere? Was it my registered letters to the top echelons both in Mountain View and in their local Paris office? Was it the vaunted First Amendment defense organizations that vowed to take on the behemoth? (Few of them accepted to listen to my case, or even deigned to answer me — which, frankly, was a huge deception, a deception from organizations that I have admired and even lionized on the blog. With one notable exception: the ADF, to which I am, again, eternally grateful.)

  • Apparently no plans to find new hosting?

• Apple used AI to uncover blood pressure notification feature in Watch

• U.S. Sues Ticketmaster over Claims of Illegal Resale Tactics

  • Internal emails reveal Ticketmaster helped scalpers jack up prices, FTC says

• As Android developer verification gets ready to go, a new reason to be worried

TechSuck / Geek Bait

• I regret building this $3000 Pi AI cluster | Jeff Geerling

• Markov Chains Are the Original Language Models

  • I came to the idea by sorting fortune cookie files by subject and filtering out duplicates; "let's do a LZ dictionary with words as tokens".

AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World

• LinkedIn will use member data, profiles, and public posts to train AI models

• Abu Dhabi set to become the first AI-Powered government by 2027

• ChatGPT seemed to think on the fly when put through an Ancient Greek math puzzle

• My family's creepy, unsettling week with an AI toy

• OpenAI's research on AI models deliberately lying is wild

• AI is coming for jobs. Why it's better to be an investor than an employee

• AI medical tools found to downplay symptoms of women, ethnic minorities

• Google AI Workers Were Fired Amid Fight over Working Conditions

• The Useful Idiots of AI Doomsaying

• Is There Any Real Money In Renting Out AI GPUs?

  Why is NVIDIA acting as a backstop to CoreWeave? And why are they paying to rent back thousands of its GPUs for $1.5 billion over four years from Lambda, another AI compute company it invested in? The answer is simple: NVIDIA is effectively incubating its own customers, creating the contracts necessary for them to raise debt to buy GPUs — from NVIDIA, of course — which can, in turn, be used as collateral for further loans to buy even more GPUs. These compute contracts are used by AI compute companies as a form of collateral — proof of revenue to reassure creditors that they're good for the money so that they can continue to raise mountains of debt to build more data centers to fill with more GPUs from NVIDIA. This has also created demand for companies like Dell and Supermicro, companies that accounted for a combined 39% of NVIDIA's most recent quarterly revenues. Dell and Supermicro buy GPUs sold by NVIDIA and build the server architecture around them necessary to provide AI compute, reselling them to companies like CoreWeave and Lambda, who also buy GPUs of their own and have preferential access from NVIDIA.

  In a thorough review of just about everything ever written about them, I found a worrying pattern within the three major neoclouds (CoreWeave, Lambda, and Nebius): a lack of any real revenue outside of Microsoft, OpenAI, Meta, Amazon, and of course NVIDIA itself, and a growing pile of debt raised in expectation of demand that I don't believe will ever arrive.

• Morgan and Morgan Sues Disney to Use "Steamboat Willy" in Their Commercials

Space / Boomy Zoomers / UFO

• Study: Probability of extraterrestrials in the Milky Way low

• Astronomers discover previously unknown quasi-moon near Earth

• NASA Selects Blue Origin to Deliver Viper Rover to Moon's South Pole

Economicon / Business / Finance

• 'Hedge America' Trade Fuels Global Rush into Short-Dollar Wagers

• Apple just bought another Bay Area campus for $350M

• Nvidia just spent over $900M on Enfabrica CEO, technology licenses

• The Economy Is Turning into a Black Box

• "Spiraling ever downward, burning as much money to as little point as possible" Intel says blockbuster Nvidia deal doesn't change its own roadmap

  • Nvidia to invest $5B in Intel after Trump administration's 10% stake

• Grocery prices have jumped up, and there's no relief in sight

  Up 29% since February 2020, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. now President Trump's tariffs are pushing up the price of imported foods like bananas and coffee. Last month saw the biggest jump in grocery prices in almost three years.

• The Race Is on to Make Rare Earth Magnets Outside China - The New York Times

  In the United States, four factories to make rare earth magnets are finishing construction or starting to produce magnets. An especially large factory has just opened in Eastern Europe. But the scramble since April has served only to underline the lead that China has after three decades of heavy investment, and how hard it will be for the rest of the world to catch up quickly. China has used its chokehold on rare earth magnet supplies to gain leverage in trade negotiations with President Trump and with the European Union. Since the initial cutoff, Beijing has allowed some rare earth exports but now keeps tighter reins on them.

  • they is basically ceramics. We used to do pretty good ceramics in the USA, especially in small shop scales.

  • Unobtanium No More; Perhaps We Already Have All The Elements We Need | Hackaday

• Meta Pushes into Power Trading as AI Boom Sends Demand Soaring

• Walmart's lax vetting helped Marketplace boom, but came with fakes and frauds

Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making

• Congress summons CEO of Discord, Twitch, Reddit to testify online radicalization

• The right to anonymity is powerful, and America is destroying it

Trump

• All the Reasons Trump Would Be Wrong to Ditch Quarterly Earnings

• Trump to Add New $100,000 Fee for H-1B Visas

  • Trump to impose new $100k fee for H-1B visas

  • $100K fee added to H1B applications

Democrats

• Kamala Harris reveals her ‘first choice’ for running mate wasn’t Tim Walz: book 

  Harris describes Buttigieg as her “first choice” but later deemed the openly gay former transportation secretary “too big of a risk” for the ticket. Buttigieg “would have been an ideal partner — if I were a straight white man,” Harris wrote. “But we were already asking a lot of America: to accept a woman, a Black woman, a Black woman married to a Jewish man,” she continued. “Part of me wanted to say, Screw it, let’s just do it. But knowing what was at stake, it was too big of a risk.” “And I think Pete also knew that — to our mutual sadness.”

  But she and her staff liked Governor Tim Walz of Minnesota for his charm, and believed his background balanced hers. Throughout the book, she struggled to reconcile her personal affection for him with disappointment in moments she felt he stumbled.

Left Angst

• Note we're no longer talking about the murder of Kirk for polite outreach efforts; but about a Leftist mouthpiece and a momentary impediment in the arc of how 30+ year career.

• "You asked for a miracle, Theo... I give you the FCC"

  Now we get to listen to the left REEEEEE incoherently about freedom of speech under attack, desperately trying to distract normie America from how they saw with their own eyeballs last week that a quarter of the liberals they know would celebrate their brutal murders for having normal American beliefs, while the rest would make excuses why they deserved it. But anyways, poor Jimmy Kimmel. He's the real victim.

• Jimmy Kimmel refused to apologize after Charlie Kirk outrage

  Late night host Jimmy Kimmel said he was unwilling to apologize for his remarks that blamed MAGA supporters for killing conservative activist Charlie Kirk — and said he was going to double down on attacking President Trump’s backers before he was yanked from the air, according to new reports. Kimmel learned in a phone call from top Disney exec Dana Walden on Wednesday afternoon that his show was being removed indefinitely, Deadline reported, citing sources. During the call, Kimmel reportedly refused to comply with calls from critics and the owners of dozens of ABC affiliate stations for him to apologize. Kimmel felt his remarks required no apologies, another source told The Hollywood Reporter. The “Jimmy Kimmel Live” host also claimed that he was planning to call out his critics for the latest attack on him, all while trying to clarify his comments about Kirk’s death. Kimmel has claimed that his comments were mischaracterized when he said during a Monday night show that the “MAGA gang” was “desperately” trying to pin left-wing ideology on Tyler Robinson, the 22-year-old indicted for Kirk’s murder.

• Jimmy Kimmel suspension from ABC sparks boycott calls against Disney

• Republicans Kill Attempt to Subpoena FCC Chair After Jimmy Kimmel Suspension

• Disney's Abrupt Decision to Suspend Jimmy Kimmel's Show

• No Such Thing, Blondie

  One more time, with feeling: There’s no such thing as “hate speech” — from a legal perspective. In other words, I may say that Rep. Ilhan Omar (Communist-MN) is a foul pustule who should be whipped in the public square once per week — which I admit frankly is hateful speech, because I loathe the African-born bitch with a passion. But if some federal badgeholder tries to arrest me for saying that, there will be gunfire. Because what I said about the dreadful Omar is my opinion, and therefore protected by the First Amendment. Now, if I say, “I’m going to murder that bitch Omar with my home-made bazooka next Tuesday” — yeah, that’s a threat and you’re not only welcome to come after me, you have to do so. But “hate speech”? Fuck that for a bowl of cherries.

• Toddler logic is poisoning politics: Welcome to the puerility spiral

  As arguments rage about the precise variety of Tyler Robinson’s psychopathic politics, one thing is clear: the killer of Charlie Kirk is intensely puerile. I’m not sure what else you could call the act of engraving a bullet with “If you read this, you are GAY Lmao”, all the while planning to murder someone with it. His fine motor skills may be unusually advanced, but in other areas of development, the 22 year old is — in a perfectly literal sense — retarded for his age. “Retarded” has in fact become the word of the decade for a reason. Puerility is now a defining characteristic of the political internet, unifying much of the online Right and Left, and explaining why newcomers wandering in from the real world have difficulty telling the difference between groypers and leftoids. There used to be a good excuse for it: a suffocatingly pious climate, rife with fake expressions of emotion and verbal taboos, where infantile transgression was necessary for psychic survival. When solemn-faced progressive censors went bloviatingly high, people of humour and intelligence arguably had nowhere else to go but low. But that justification doesn’t really wash anymore: the wind has gone from progressive sails, and the need for protective dissociation from the culture of sanctimony is waning. And yet many are still in the habit of sociopathic sniggering, and can’t seem to shake it.

  • People who have lived without humor have nothing else. They think this is joy.

• US TV hosts back Kimmel as Trump threatens TV networks

• The Real Story Behind Jimmy Kimmel's Firing | ZeroHedge

  according to Nexstar, Carr's comments weren't a factor. "The decision to preempt ‘Jimmy Kimmel Live!’ was made unilaterally by the senior executive team at Nexstar, and they had no communication with the FCC or any government agency prior to making that decision," a Nexstar spokesman said. Disney executives weighed whether Kimmel should address the controversy directly on Wednesday night’s program. According to people familiar with the matter, Dana Walden, co-chairman of Disney Entertainment, and Chief Executive Robert Iger decided his planned remarks risked inflaming the situation further.

• Outrage at Kimmel Grew to a Shout from a Whisper

• After getting Jimmy Kimmel suspended, FCC chair threatens ABC's The View

• Disney+ cancellation page crashes as customers rush to quit

• ICE unit signs new $3M contract for phone-hacking tech

• South Korea's LG Energy was using US visa workarounds before Trump, docs show

• Don't Be Fooled by a Trump-Xi Deal on TikTok

  • Trump Says U.S. and China Approve TikTok Deal After Call with Xi

  • Trump and Xi bless deal to spin off US TikTok

  • Donald Trump Is Saying There's a TikTok Deal. China Isn't

• In new level of stupid, RFK Jr.'s anti-vaccine advisors axe MMRV recommendation

  • A Key Test of RFK Jr.'s Vaccine Policy Descends into Chaos

• Court lets NSF keep swinging axe at $1B in research grants

• Trump nixed $400M in Taiwan military aid, pushing future arms sales

• Partisan disparities in the funding of science in the United States

External Security / Militaria / Diplomania

• Saudi Arabia Seeks New Security Alliances as Trust in U.S. Erodes

  • I think "allowing Iran / Houthis to close the Red Sea" was probably a telephone pole that broke the camel's back there. Not that they'd been that aligned since the Las Vegas thing.

• DOJ Charges UK National Linked to Scattered Spider $115M Cyber Extortion Scheme

• Military considering a recruitment campaign based around Charlie Kirk

• Pentagon Bans Tech Vendors from Using China-Based Personnel

• US import dependence on EU on the rise, outpacing China

World

• Has Britain Gone Too Far with Its Digital Controls?

• Czechs agog as they are to open envelop containing last words of first president

• Ex-tech lobbyist named as Ireland's new Data Protection Commissioner

• Interns Are Making Up to $14,000 a Month at Indian Trading Firms

• Japan needs an immigration debate, not social media myths

• Germany's train chaos: How did Deutsche Bahn go off the rails?

• EU ministers reach 'compromise' on digital euro roadmap

• US firms pledge £150B investment in UK as tech deal signed

• On being “hateful” - Helen Joyce

  Here’s what I learned about the UK’s Orwellian shadow crime-recording procedures, whereby you can be added to the Police National Database as guilty of a crime without ever being charged, tried or convicted — indeed without ever being told.

• Thieves steal €600k worth of gold from Paris's Natural History Museum

Iran / Houthi

• Iran to start growing legal opium after Taliban crackdown

Israel

• New Wave of Recognition: Palestine on the Eve of the UN General Assembly

• US blocks UN call for Gaza ceasefire for sixth time

Russia Bad / Ukraine War

• MI6 launches dark web portal to attract spies in Russia

• Russian Troops Creep Through Empty Gas Pipes to Hide from Drones

• Estonian airspace violated by Russian jets

  • Estonia invokes NATO Article 4

  • NATO responds after Russian military jets 'violate' Estonian airspace

China

• China's Brain Implant Startups Take on Musk's Neuralink in New Tech Race

• China's 200M gig workers are a warning for the world

Health / Medicine

• Ketamine can be used as a cure for depression, experts say

• Daily Aspirin intake slashes colon cancer relapse risk by 55%

• After 60 Years, Diabetes Drug Found to Unexpectedly Impact the Brain

  Metformin has been prescribed to people with type 2 diabetes to manage blood sugar for more than 60 years, but scientists haven't been exactly sure how it works. A new study suggests it works directly in the brain, which could lead to new types of treatment.

• CDC recommends restricting access to the MMRV vaccine

  • Never seen my daughter more ill than the weekend after she had that one. Why can't there be multiple vaccines, keep the old versions, for those for whom the new ones work badly?

• The Promise and Hurdles of the New Weight-Loss Pills

• Frying Eggs and Air Quality Tests - by CasualPhysicsEnjoyer

  Someone once said to me that cooking can increase particle pollution in the air to dangerous levels. Is this true? I suspect not. I fried an egg next to this monitor to find out! There’s an incredibly small increase but nothing worrying. Here’s the time lapse. PM2.5 peaks at 11 ug / m^3 and then comes down once I stop frying. I’m learning more about air quality guidelines, and from what I’m reading, an average 24hr level below 15 ug / m^3 is fine. Considering cooking only takes half an hour max, it looks like there is basically no danger here from an air quality point of view.

  • Comment thread full of "you're doing it wrong, cooking is terrible for air quality, my mass spec results completely contradict your cheap meter"

• Study finds unexpected Ozempic, Zepbound benefits for psoriasis.

  • There's nothing new drugs can't do, until the generics come out. Then the side effects like spontaneous decapitation and boneitis get the headlines.

Pox / COVID / BioTerror AgitProp

• WHO: 31 of 48 Ebola cases in DRC have died in latest outbreak.

Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda

• The island that banned hives: can honeybees harm nature?

• Why Alaska's salmon streams are suddenly bleeding orange

• The health benefits of sunlight may outweigh the risk of skin cancer

• Unprecedented suppression of Panama's Pacific upwelling in 2025

• Is sleeping outside good for you?

• The Quantum Mechanics of Greenhouse Gases

• Climate change is driving fish stocks from countries' waters to the high seas

• 'You could drink from that pond': the city digging for solution to toxic runoff

• Best shot to save Florida reefs? An industrial factory making heat-hardy babies

• How the most elderly country is fighting heat in a deadly double crisis

• Plastic Recycling Is Mostly Fictional. Trump's EPA Approves

• Fat Bear Week is here early, and the bears are fat and playful