2025-10-23

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• Neither Dominance nor Prestige: Rank

  while we still celebrate those who directly do admirable things, we hesitate to admire those who visibly seek the badges of admiration. The pursuit of rank feels different from the pursuit of honor: it is an attempt to acquire the appearance of earned respect, enforced through institutions rather than earned through firsthand esteem. Dominance demands deference by threat, prestige invites it through excellence, and rank compels it through institutions. The first breeds fear, the second admiration, the third resentment. Modern life, dense with institutions, runs on rank as much as power or honor—but because rank feels half-legitimate and half-imposed, we hide our hunger for it, even as it quietly governs our world.

Horseshit

• Quantum computing on the verge: a look at the quantum marketplace of today

• Pain tolerance found to increase during social interaction in VR

• Money, muscles and anxiety: why the manosphere clicked with young men

• Viral ‘Free Potatoes’ Post Cost This Farmer 150 Tons of Crops

  The farmer, identified only as Piotr from Dąbrowica in Poland’s Podkarpacie region, had just finished harvesting and storing his crop when the rumor took off online. The post said he couldn’t find buyers and wanted locals to help themselves. By the time he returned to his field, the ground was nearly bare. “I was shocked. I’m 68 years old and I’ve never experienced anything like this in my life,” Piotr told Nowiny24. “It’s like a nightmare straight out of a Bareja movie.” He said the fake story spread quickly, bringing crowds from nearby villages with bags, buckets, and even farm trailers. Some took small amounts. Others loaded up to 60 tons at a time.

  • Podkarpacie tonie w ziemniakach. Rolnik z Dąbrowicy wysypał 150 ton, bo skup nie chciał przyjąć?

• Mobsters' own words brought down Philly's mafia

• Airbnb Host Accused of Using AI to Fake $16K in Damage

• A 'Death Train' Is Haunting South Florida

  The Brightline has been hailed as the future of high-speed rail in the United States, but it has one big, unignorable problem. What the Brightline is best known for is not that it reflects the gleam of the future but the fact that it keeps hitting people. According to Federal Railroad Administration data, the Brightline has been involved in at least 185 fatalities, 148 of which were believed not to be suicides, since it began operating, in December 2017.

• When Face Recognition Doesn't Know Your Face Is a Face

• My Car Is Becoming a Brick

• This company’s plan to launch 4,000 massive space mirrors has scientists alarmed: ‘From an astronomical perspective, that’s pretty catastrophic.’

• The Perks and Perils of Buying Vintage Audio Gear

• Female spies are waging 'sex warfare' to steal Silicon Valley secrets

celebrity gossip

• Luigi Mangione was clawed by seven Thai ladyboys during mysterious disappearance months before United Healthcare CEO murder

Obit

• Greg Newby, CEO of the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, Has Died

• Terry Farrell, Whose Buildings Embodied Late 20th-Century Extremes, Dies at 87

Musk

• Greenland Ditches Starlink for French Satellite Service

• Cards Against Humanity lawsuit forced SpaceX to vacate land on US/Mexico border

• Tesla Recalls Almost 13,000 EVs over Risk of Battery Power Loss

• Memphis' Battle Against Elon Musk's XAI Data Center

Electric / Self Driving cars

• Uber and Nebius investing $375M in Avride robotaxis

• GM plans to launch eyes-off driving, Google Gemini in vehicles by 2028

• Rivian's $4,500 electric bike gamble

Edumacationalizing / Acedemia Nuts

• How A Small North Carolina College Became a Magnet for Wealthy Students

Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising

• The Internet Is Going to Break Again

• Smart beds began roasting their owners during AWS outage

• Amazon’s DNS problem knocked out half the web, likely costing billions - Ars Technica

• HBO Max Gets Another Price Increase

• Strava Voluntarily Drops Lawsuit Against Garmin

• Google porting all internal workloads to Arm, with AI helper

• Even Xbox developer kits are getting a big price hike

• The Wayback Machine’s snapshots of news homepages plummet after a “breakdown” in archiving projects | Nieman Journalism Lab

  In the first five months of 2025, the Wayback Machine captured snapshots of the Kyiv Post an average of 85 times per day. Between May 17 and October 1, though, the daily average dropped to one. For 52 days between May and October, the Wayback Machine shows no snapshots of the Kyiv Post at all. a Nieman Lab analysis shows that the Wayback Machine’s snapshots of news outlets’ homepages have plummeted in recent months. Between January 1 and May 15, 2025, the Wayback Machine shows a total of 1.2 million snapshots collected from 100 major news sites’ homepages. Between May 17 and October 1, 2025, it shows 148,628 snapshots from those same 100 sites — a decline of 87%. (You can see our data here.) While our analysis focused on news sites, they’re not the only URLs impacted. We documented a similarly large decrease in the number of snapshots available of federal government website homepages after May 16, during a period when the Trump administration has taken down pages on government sites and made changes, often without disclosure, otherwise known as “stealth editing.”

  • The Web We've Built: Celebrating 1 Trillion Web Pages Archived

  • They've indulged in "stealth edits" since the beginning; what archive.org says a site had may not be what was actually served. Those that record history get to edit it to their liking.

• Zuckerberg must take witness stand at social media safety trial, judge rules

• Samsung's Galaxy XR Mixed Reality Headset Now Available for $1,800

  • Samsung Galaxy XR: It's like a cheaper Apple Vision Pro and launches today

• Virtual arcade on the Las Vegas Strip files for bankruptcy

  A massive virtual arcade located on the Las Vegas Strip filed for bankruptcy after just one year of operation, facing a pending eviction and millions in unpaid claims, court documents show. The sprawling 10,000-square-foot Las Vegas gaming venue is equipped with a network of sensors that track the movements of guests to create a digital avatar, “similar to a player inside a video game,” the website said. Guests use their bodies to play games instead of controllers or consoles, with the walls and furniture of the kaleidoscopic, windowless rooms responding to body movements to create interactive games.

• Ring CEO says his cameras can almost 'zero out crime' within the next 12 months

AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World

• Anthropic and Google in talks on cloud deal worth tens of billions

• The hottest term in AI is completely made up

• Data Centers Look to Old Airplane Engines for Power

• AI assistants make widespread errors about the news, new research shows

  • AI assistants misrepresent news content 45% of the time

• India proposes strict rules to label AI content citing growing risks

• Is the Flurry of Circular AI Deals a Win-Win–Or Sign of a Bubble?

• Data-Center Power Use to Become Major Antitrust Issue

• AI heavyweights call for end to 'superintelligence' research

  • Public figures urge AI 'superintelligence' ban

  • Nobel laureates and other leaders call for ban on AI superintelligence

• Airbnb CEO says ChatGPT isn't ready

• OpenAI Looks to Replace the Drudgery of Junior Bankers' Workload

• Netflix 'all in' on leveraging AI as the tech creeps into entertainment industry

• Amazon Allegedly Replaced 40% of AWS DevOps Workers with AI Days Before Crash

• Meta lays off 600 employees within AI unit

  • Meta overhauls legacy AI operations

  • Meta is cutting around 600 roles in AI unit

  • Meta Plans to Cut 600 Jobs at A.I. Superintelligence Labs

  • Meta Cutting 600 AI Jobs to move faster

• Growing credit risk could pop the AI bubble

• Reddit Sues Perplexity, Others over Alleged Data Scraping

• OpenAI requested memorial attendee list in ChatGPT suicide lawsuit

Space / Boomy Zoomers / UFO

• NASA's Boss Just Shook Up the Agency's Plans to Land on the Moon

• The world needs more spaceports. Oman wants to help

• Are we already witnessing space warfare in action: 'This is not just posturing' | Space

  "The Russians and the Chinese are demonstrating more sophisticated orbital maneuvering abilities. There's no denying that," said Bleddyn Bowen, associate professor in Astropolitics and co-director of the Space Research Center at Durham University's school of Government and International Affairs in the United Kingdom. "Whether they are actual ASAT platforms or not isn't as clear-cut," Bowen told Space.com. "But if you were going to develop those kinds of co-orbital ASATs, they are showing many of the techniques and capabilities that you need," he said.

Crypto con games

• Palmer Luckey's AI and Crypto-Focused Bank Wins Conditional Approval

Economicon / Business / Finance

• A real estate boom is coming – are you ready?

  For the last few years, the real estate industry has been moving downward. But that will inevitably change. And when that change happens, this industry will see a boom unlike any boom it has seen before. When will this happen? No one knows. But soon, assuming the above factors continue on their trend.

• Gold tumbles 6% in biggest sell-off since 2013

• Wall Street is worried about bad loans. Those fears are spreading

• I Bought $250k Worth of Physical Nickels

  It’s an asymmetrical bet that the U.S. Mint will eventually debase the coinage again, that metal scarcity and inflation will continue to erode the dollar, and that a bag of nickels will one day be worth more dead than alive. Worst case? I still have $250,000 in legal-tender coins backed by the full faith and credit of the United States. Best case? The melt value doubles, triples, or gets banned outright — which would make the existing supply finite and far more valuable to collectors and contrarians alike.

• How much prices are rising across the fashion industry: $17

• The Fed Might Be More Dovish Than Powell Thinks

• Amazon's stock climbed despite an AWS outage. What gives?

• Why Beyond Meat stock is up about 600% in 3 days

  • Beyond Meat shares surge for a third day in a row as meme traders jump on board

• Subprime Lender PrimaLend Enters Bankruptcy After Bond Default

• Auto giant Volkswagen warns of output stoppages amid Nexperia chip disruption

• BOE Is Closely Monitoring Leveraged Finance After US Collapses

  • Bank of England's private credit 'alarm bells' show bigger problem

• Rubbish IT systems cost the US at least $40B during Covid: study

• Top analyst says China is playing a ‘key role’ in the price of gold going through the roof, and he’s got the data to prove it.

• 60% of workers are unhappy with key aspects of their job, survey finds

• First Brands bankruptcy sparks sharp outflow from US loan funds

• Shadow Banks' Unknown Unknowns

• Can the Golden Age of Costco Last?

Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making

• 1 in 5 people in US is Latino for first time

• Senate GOP chatter rises on filibuster reform to end shutdown

  Even Republicans who have in the past have voiced staunch support for preserving the filibuster say that creating a carve-out to the 60-vote threshold to reopen the government is getting more talk. “Nobody talked about filibuster two weeks ago. Now that we see that the Democrats are just not going to agree to anything, then that’s probably a viable option,” Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.) said. “I don’t know the answer to this. I don’t think anybody does, because they’re not going to give; we’re not going to give. So it’s going to be a stalemate, and the loser is going to be the American people,” he said. Tuberville advocated for preserving the filibuster after Republicans won control of the Senate in last year’s election.

Trump

• Trump Sees Successful Xi Meeting, but Allows It Might Not Happen

• Driver rams car into White House security barrier with Trump inside mansion

  “At approximately 10:37 p.m., an individual drove a vehicle into the Secret Service vehicle gate located at 17th & E St, NW, in Washington, DC,” the protective agency said in a statement. Our investigation into the cause of this collision is ongoing.”

• White House demolishing East Wing facade

Democrats

• TikTok's algorithm systematically boosts pro-Mamdani and anti-Cuomo content

Left Angst

• Shutdown Enters Day 21 After Latest Funding Vote Fails

• Marc Benioff Has Torched His Do-Good CEO Image

• 'Medicaid Cut Me Off': A Rural Health Center Faces New Pressures

• Trump Is Forcing the World into a New Era of Disorder

• Silicon Valley Has China Envy, and That Reveals a Lot About America

• Trump Demurs, China Hardens

• Protests Erupt in New York City After Ice Raids Chinatown

• Spotify running ICE recruitment ads about "dangerous illegals"

• Sequoia COO quit over Shaun Maguire's comments about Islamism

• Trump Has Found His Class Enemy - The Atlantic

  The president unleashes a Marxist theory of power—but against knowledge workers, not billionaires.

  The target of the administration’s campaign is a stratum of society that’s sometimes called the professional managerial class, or the PMC, although there’s not one universal moniker that MAGA applies to the group it is now crushing. That group includes society’s knowledge workers, its cognitive elite, the winners of the tournament that is the American meritocracy. It covers not only lawyers, university administrators, and professors, but also consultants, investment bankers, scientists, journalists, and other white-collar workers who have prospered in the information age. Back in the 1990s, as the group began to emerge in its current form, the liberal economics commentator Robert Reich hailed its members as “symbolic analysts”—people who identify and solve problems by thinking through ideas rather than via physical labor. A decade later, the urbanist Richard Florida put forth an even more triumphalist term: the “creative class.” That is, its members had the academic training to master the complexities of a globalized economy, the intellectual skills to conquer the digital world.

• Who benefits from the MAHA anti-science push?

• How Apple's walled garden protects ICE

• Despite tariffs, US imports increased in the first half of 2025

• It Looks Like the US Has a Sovereign Wealth Fund Now

• Major federal immigration operation headed to San Francisco Bay Area

• Trump 'retired' a weather tracking db. Finding $100B+ in losses after relaunch

• LA illegal immigrant and TikTokker Carlitos Ricardo Parias shot by US Marshals

  The illegal immigrant who was shot after allegedly ramming his car into federal agents in Los Angeles is a TikTok star famous for recording ICE arrests. Carlitos Ricardo Parias — who was hit in the elbow Tuesday in a tense standoff where a US marshal was also shot — is known as Richard LA on TikTok, where he has more than 130,000 followers, ABC 7 reported.

  The 44-year-old TikTokker, who had reportedly escaped from custody on a previous occasion, allegedly rammed his Toyota Camry into law enforcement vehicles after agents boxed him in following a traffic stop on Tuesday, officials said. “Ultimately, an agent opened fire, wounding Parias and a deputy US marshal, who was hit with a ricochet bullet,” Acting US Attorney Bill Essay said. “Fortunately, both the deputy marshal and Parias are expected to recover.” Despite Parias being in the country illegally and accused of dangerously ramming agents, he was celebrated by Los Angeles City Councilman Curren Price.

• Trump Administration Cuts Cyberdefense Even as Threats Grow

• Trump Admin's Arrival on Bluesky Highlights Growing Pains for Open Networks

Law Breaking / Police / Internal Security

• Charged felonies in SF could be released due to lack of public defenders

External Security / Militaria / Diplomania

• US Army taps private equity groups to help fund $150B revamp

• US demands EU reverse new climate rules to allow surge in gas imports

World

• UK gambling ads with Hamilton and Chelsea logo banned over influence on children

• Jaguar Land Rover hack is costliest cyber attack in UK history

  • Jaguar Land Rover hack cost UK economy an estimated $2.5B

• French ex-president Sarkozy begins jail sentence

• Takaichi elected Japan's premier, shattering glass ceiling with hard-right turn

• Argentine peso hits fresh lows despite U.S. support – and it could get worse

• Riot Erupts At Irish Migrant Hotel After 10-Year-Old Allegedly Sexually-Assaulted | ZeroHedge

  Outraged by accusations that an asylum-seeker had sexually assaulted a 10-year-old girl, thousands of flag-waving, bottle-throwing, firework-wielding Irish citizens surrounded a migrant hotel in southwest Dublin, Ireland on Tuesday night, setting fire to a police vehicle. Six people were arrested from a furious crowd estimated to have numbered approximately 2,000. The violence erupted at the Citywest hotel in Saggart. At 764 beds, it's the largest hotel in all of Ireland, and last month the government bought it for €148 million so it could be converted to a permanent facility for housing migrants, euphemistically calling it an "international protection accommodation centre."

  Consistent with Irish regulations on sex-assault cases, authorities haven't named the alleged perpetrator, who told arresting officers, "I have nothing to say." He's been granted legal aid since he's (shocker!) unemployed. While officials haven't described his origins, his lawyer quickly asked for an Arabic interpreter. The Irish Times says their sources indicate he's from an African country and came to Ireland six years ago. His asylum application was rejected last year, and earlier this year was given a deportation order -- yet he has remained in the country. Monday saw a mild protest at the hotel, with an orderly crowd of a mere 60 or 70. After word of the assault became widespread, local anger exploded on Tuesday, spurring thousands of Irish citizens to set upon the hotel, ready to unleash violence on the hotel and the Gardai protecting it.

• UK scientists in awe-rora as national coverage of magnetic field complete

• Cigarette-smuggling balloons force closure of Lithuanian airport

• Stolen Louvre treasures are uninsured, France says

• Europe isn't prepared for the unmanned aircraft threat

• Rodrigo Paz becomes Bolivia's first conservative leader in decades | AP News

Israel

• Netanyahu calls claims Israel is client state of Washington 'hogwash'

• ICJ orders Israel to allow aid into Gaza

Russia Bad / Ukraine War

• Sweden and Ukraine eye export deal for up to 150 Gripen fighter jets

• U.S. Lifts Key Restriction on Ukraine's Use of Western Long-Range Missiles

China

• Fall in China's exports of rare earth magnets stokes supply chain fears

• US-China now in a 'different kind of trade war', experts warn

• China Seeks Sensitive Data from US Firms in Semiconductor Probe

• China's $1B of Daily US Exports Show Xi Bargaining Power

• China's chipmakers are cleverly innovating around America's limits

• US considering curbs on exports to China made with US software, sources say

Health / Medicine

• Effects of antidepressants on physical health ranked for first time

• Workers and Employers Face Higher Health Insurance Costs

• Tiny sugar spoons are popping up on NYC fast-food menus

  A tiny white spoon suspended in a black triangle is starting to pop up on fast food menus across the five boroughs as chain restaurants come into compliance with a local law requiring them to place the warning symbols next to sugary beverages and snacks.

• The Average Cost of a Family Health Insurance Plan Is Now $27,000

• Chasing the ideal gut: Poop-tracking cameras claim to give health insights

• Antidepressants differ in side-effects such as weight gain, UK research finds

• Scientists debate mass distribution of antibiotics in Africa

Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda

• Global use of coal hit record high in 2024

• Chemical pollution a threat comparable to climate change, scientists warn

• Rare red lightning captured in New Zealand skies

• Netherlands registered 474 hours with negative electricity prices

• Maybe he said something nice about Trump: Female bonobos kill a male, challenging beliefs about species' peaceful nature

• Sandhill Cranes Have Adopted a Canada Gosling