2025-10-28

Horseshit

• $10k Card Shufflers Hit the Spotlight After NBA Poker Scandal

• Mushroom-infused chips an alternative to using rare earths in memristors

• 'The paradox of horror': How scary films can soothe your anxiety

• Flights to LAX halted due to air traffic controller shortage

• A $600 'poop' camera for your toilet

• Brightline is Actually Pretty Dangerous

  Advocates weren't wrong in the general case, since trains are normally much safer than cars even counting non-occupants. The problem was Brightline's specific route, with hundreds of grade crossings in densely populated areas and unfenced tracks that divide many places people want to move between. This is something people who know trains well should have been able to anticipate.

  • I'm sure it was anticipated, and spoken about; by people who were mot "stakeholders" and therefore had no right to speak in the councils where the decisions were made. Consensus process government, nothing is ever anyone's fault, so nothing is ever actually wrong, and we can spend billions more on "High Speed Rail" for everyone else...

• Soho's REI Is Closing–New Yorkers Are Losing Their Favorite Bathroom

• What our shelves of unread books teach us about ourselves

• Willpower doesn't exist. Why so much of your health isn't your fault

• People are having fewer kids. Their choice is transforming the economy

• Francis Ford Coppola, Who Says He's 'Broke,' Is Selling a $1M Watch

• A Buc-ee's broke a small Colorado town

• A billion-dollar drug was found in Easter Island soil – what scientists and companies owe the Indigenous people they studied

  An antibiotic discovered on Easter Island in 1964 sparked a billion-dollar pharmaceutical success story. Yet the history told about this “miracle drug” has completely left out the people and politics that made its discovery possible. With funding from the World Health Organization and logistical support from the Royal Canadian Navy, METEI arrived in Rapa Nui in December 1964. Over the course of three months, the team conducted medical examinations on nearly all 1,000 island inhabitants, collecting biological samples and systematically surveying the island’s flora and fauna. It was as part of these efforts that Nogrady gathered over 200 soil samples, one of which ended up containing the rapamycin-producing Streptomyces strain of bacteria.

  Although rapamycin has generated billions of dollars in revenue, the Rapa Nui people have received no financial benefit to date. This raises questions about Indigenous rights and biopiracy, which is the commercialization of Indigenous knowledge.

• Sports mafia ties run deeper than NBA gambling scandal

celebrity gossip

• Prince Andrew and Sarah Ferguson labelled 'hypocrites' by royal biographer over connection to Jeffrey Epstein - ABC News

  Prince Andrew is a "hypocrite" who believes he is above the law, according to historian and author Andrew Lownie, who has written an unauthorised biography on the under siege royal. Lownie interviewed hundreds of people while researching the book, including the prince's former wife, Sarah Ferguson. "[He's a] very self-entitled, arrogant, pompous guy who has never really been given any boundaries in his life, has never actually been disciplined," Lownie said.

Rank Propaganda / Thought Policing / World Disordering

• Is Wikipedia's Jimmy Wales the last decent tech baron?

  • Surely not. Many of the others are still advocates of a well managed socialist world.

• There is such a thing as 'settled science' — anyone who says otherwise is trying to manipulate you

• Study finds a shift toward liberal politics after leaving religion

Musk

• Tesla's Diner Isn't Competing with McDonald's. It's Going After Buc-Ee's

• The striking Swedish workers taking on carmaker Tesla

• Tesla risks losing CEO Musk if $1T pay package isn't approved, board chair says

  • Musk could leave Tesla if $1T pay plan is rejected, chair warns

• Burnout and Elon Musk's politics spark exodus from senior xAI, Tesla staff

Electric / Self Driving cars

• America's Transportation Department Blocked a Self-Driving Truck Company

  • Pixy: "Aurora Innovation has sued the Department of Transportation for... Not changing the rules in its favour."

• How Much Does It Cost to Charge an Electric Vehicle?

• Nvidia is reportedly planning a robotaxi project to challenge Tesla, Waymo

• The solar-powered compact car driving Tunisia's electric vehicle revolution

Edumacationalizing / Acedemia Nuts

• Why I no longer engage with Nature publishing group

  Although the topic is within my field of expertise and I would normally welcome the opportunity to contribute to peer review, I must decline. Furthermore, I have decided not to engage with journals belonging to the Nature group in any professional capacity in the future because the group has adopted policies and practices that are incompatible with the mission of a scientific publisher. Unfortunately, the Nature group has abandoned its mission in favor of advancing a social justice agenda. The group has institutionalized censorship, implemented policies that have sacrificed merit in favor of identity-based criteria, and injected social engineering into its author guidelines and publishing process. The result is that papers published in Nature journals can no longer be regarded as rigorous science.

Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising

• GameStop declares "end of console wars"

• A single point of failure triggered the Amazon outage affecting millions

• Ultra-HD televisions not noticeably better for typical viewer

  • Is ultra-HD TV worth it? Scientists measure resolution limit of the human eye

• CISA orders feds to patch actively exploited Windows Server WSUS flaw

• 10M people watched a YouTuber shim a lock; the lock company sued him. Bad idea

• Windows will soon prompt for memory scans after BSOD crashes

  The new proactive memory diagnostics feature is designed to improve reliability by ensuring that memory issues that could trigger a bugcheck are found and addressed before they cause system instability.

  • bad RAM used to be quite rare, this year i have seen more than in the previous decade put together. Linux has a couple of workarounds to use the remaining good cells on a stick with errors, nfi about Windows.

• Ransomware profits drop as victims stop paying hackers

TechSuck / Geek Bait

• Reflections on Broken Token Ring

  There are lots and lots of issues that show up again and again as a new generation develops a new thing and fails to apply the lessons learned in the deployment of an old thing. If you have a few old timers around they can help you avoid making the mistakes they made. Now if you want to discuss bad technology then I’d argue that ATM was the poster child. Unlike Token Ring, it really did originate in the backrooms of Telcos and academic research and was a standards body compromise that suited nobody. But even ATM can teach useful lessons, albeit of the “do not do this” sort.

AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World

• Chatbots Are Pushing Sanctioned Russian Propaganda

• 'Do not trust your eyes': AI generates surge in expense fraud

• Firms are blaming AI for job cuts. Critics say it's a 'good excuse'

• Microsoft sued for allegedly misleading millions with its AI pricing

• Open source agentic startup LangChain hits $1.25B valuation

• Real Estate Is Entering Its AI Slop Era

• The Chinese Box and Turing Test: Is AI really intelligent?

• How long can Microsoft expect investors to tolerate big losses from OpenAI?

  • Microsoft's folds losses from OpenAI into $4.7B expense line – "other"

• AI's Next Frontier? An Algorithm for Consciousness

• Is A.I. a Bubble? We explain the fears on Wall Street

• I tried OpenAI's new Atlas browser but I still don't know what it's for

• AI sets up Kodak moment for global consultants

• Parents Fell in Love with Alpha School's Promise. Then They Wanted Out

• The Age of De-Skilling

• The Coming AI Cataclysm

• Can a leftist position on the use of generative AI be materially held?

• OpenAI Says Hundreds of Thousands of ChatGPT Users May Show Signs of Manic or Psychotic Crisis Every Week | WIRED

• Mercor, the AI Startup Fueling ChatGPT's Expertise, Is Now Valued at $10B

• OpenAI's Less-Flashy Rival Might Have a Better Business Model

Crypto con games

• Nevada Shuts Down Fortress Trust over Insolvency

  • How unfair! If you let a busted business sell billions in newly created stock it can become an economic force like GameStop...

• Zhao's Binance Aided Trump Family Crypto Venture Before Pardon

• North Korean hackers stole over $2B in crypto so far in 2025, researchers say

Economicon / Business / Finance

• How Bad Is Finance's Cockroach Problem? We May Be About to Find Out

• How to tackle private credit's 'cockroaches' as contagion fears build

• Margin debt is at a record high. Here's what that means for the stock market

• Why Bubbles Can Keep Inflating in Plain Sight

• Private loan credit ratings may be 'systematically' inflated, warns BIS

  • Private Credit Risks 'Inflated' Ratings by Small Firms, BIS Says

• Private credit default activity reaccelerates in recent weeks

• Barclays CEO Issues Warning About US Credit Risks

• Auto Lender First Help Notes at Risk of Downgrade by Kroll

• Bill Gates-Backed 345 MWe Advanced Nuclear Reactor Secures Crucial US Approval

• How to Overturn an Oligarchy

• AI Bubble? The Real Danger Is Tight Credit Spreads (Credit Bubble)

• More big companies bet they can still grow without hiring

• Intel has cut 35,500 jobs in less than two years

• Quarter of American employees haven't taken a vacation day in the past year

• Western Union says its core business of money transfers in the U.S. is down

• Amazon Plans to Cut 30k Corporate Jobs, Reuters Reports

  • Amazon reportedly set to lay off up to 30k corporate employees in workforce cut

  • Amazon plans to cut 30,000 corporate jobs

  • Amazon to Lay Off Tens of Thousands of Corporate Workers

• New corporate espionage claims emerge, centered on highly valued 401(k) startups

• Single-family rent growth just hit the lowest level in 15 years

• The 'blue-collar CEO' trying to fix Kodak

• The end of the rip-off economy

Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making

• US Government debt burden on track to overtake Italy's, IMF figures show

• US Department of Energy forms $1B partnership with AMD

• The US Shouldn't Need Another Warning on Rare Earths

Trump

• Arctic Frost probe targeting Trump conservatives born at highest levels of Biden White House, DOJ

• Trump Asks Supreme Court to Let Him Fire the Top Copyright Official

• Trump Says a Recent MRI Scan Was 'Perfect,' and He'd 'Love' a Third Term

Democrats

• Wrecking Ball Politics: Swalwell Calls for Destructive Pledge from Democratic Presidential Candidates

  Swalwell went on X to declare: “Don’t even think of seeking the Democratic nomination for president unless you pledge to take a wrecking ball to the Trump Ballroom on DAY ONE.” That is Eric Swalwell’s measure of a president: the willingness to destroy hundreds of millions of dollars in construction in an anti-Trump fit.

Left Angst

• Trump, 79, Posts Deranged Medical Advice at 4 a.m

  Trump’s post is a verbatim copy of one he made exactly a month ago, save a link to an article by the right-wing Daily Caller website titled, “FDA Stayed Silent As Internal Reports About Potential Tylenol Risks Piled Up,” which highlights his September announcement with Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. blaming pregnant women’s Tylenol use for an increase in autism among young children. Trump’s Tylenol claims were immediately debunked by nearly every major government and health organization. The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists says that the drug is one of the only safe pain relievers for pregnant women.

• How the shutdown is about to get worse

• Silicon Valley called – the 1990s are back

• Venezuela's Autocrat Uses Crypto to Fight Trump's Sanctions

• It Is Trump's Casino Economy Now. You'll Probably Lose

• Before Trump Gutted the White House, Erdogan Built His 'White Palace'

• Trump's Ballroom Fundraising Taps Cash from Crypto, Tech Allies

• The forgotten politics of “big tobacco”

  I think it sometimes surprises people who aren’t old enough to remember 1990s and early 2000s politics that these tobacco-regulation topics used to be a top-tier political issue. Thirty years later, it sounds borderline absurd that the Clinton administration was doing major press events about tobacco regulation, and normal people wouldn’t even know how to code this ideologically as a topic in 2025. But it was a huge fight in its day. When you win on an issue, people tend to stop talking about it. And indeed one lesson of the tobacco fight is that at a certain point, Democrats won on policy but precisely because they won, they stopped being able to make political hay out of it.

• ICE Will Use AI to Surveil Social Media

• The Left Is Rewriting Its Mobs Tearing Down of Statues to Only a Desire to Put Them "into museums to commemorate the fallen during the Civil War"

• Ronald Reagan Didn't Love Tariffs

• Trump is poised to end Washington's decade of the China Hawks

• Largest Federal Workers Union Urges Dems to Cave on Government Shutdown, Revealing Cracks in Coalition

  The nation’s largest federal workers’ union, the American Federation of Government Employees, is urging Democrats to concede the government shutdown fight and vote to reopen the government, revealing a significant fracture in the Democratic coalition as the shutdown nears the one-month mark. The shutdown began 27 days ago after Democrats refused to back a clean government funding bill, demanding instead that Republicans extend temporary Obamacare subsidies that are set to expire at the end of the year. But AFGE, a major ally to the Democratic party which represents 820,000 federal and D.C. government workers, now says it’s time for the party to give up on its demands.

• Trump Says We're Just Going to Straight Up Murder a Bunch of People

  Trump is pretending the mere existence of a worldwide drug trade is a combination of undeclared war on the United States and an ongoing act of terrorism. So, we’ve just started committing extrajudicial killings in international waters and expecting DOJ/DoD lawyers to work out the legal details after the fact.

  • But that was (D)iferent: (2012) Is Obama's drone doctrine counter-productive?

  At a time when Republicans want to paint Mr Obama as a ditherer, external, unwilling to take firm action, it paints him as tough and strong, willing to take hard decisions and kill America's enemies. But this goes beyond political spin. It is a doctrine of warfare. We have known for a while that drones are the president's weapon of choice. He believes that they kill America's enemies with minimum risk to the innocent and are a "light foot-print" compared to the heavy boot of invasion and occupation. The Obama administration is becoming more and more frank about the useof these unmanned planes.

• Python Foundation rejects $1.5M grant with no-DEI strings • The Register

  The Python Software Foundation (PSF) has walked away from a $1.5 million government grant and you can blame the Trump administration's war on woke for effectively weakening some open source security. "The PSF is a relatively small organization, operating with an annual budget of around $5 million per year, with a staff of just 14," Crary added, noting that the $1.5 million would have been the largest grant the Foundation had ever received - but it wasn't worth it if the conditions were undermining the PSF's mission. The non-profit would've used the funding to help prevent supply chain attacks; create a new automated, proactive review process for new PyPI packages; and makee the project's work easily transferable to other open-source package managers.

  • Independence is worth something, isn't it? Would they accept funds from Russia? Iran? Why would they solicit funds from any government? Why would they get offered funds to "secure the submission process" when the spirit of open source is copy it if you think the code works for you? This shit is "cognitive hygiene" as applied to public infrastructure, it has no place in a free world.

Law Breaking / Police / Internal Security

• Antifa Retreats From Portland ICE Facility After Police Dismantle Encampment | ZeroHedge

External Security / Militaria / Diplomania

• Navy loses two aircraft from USS Nimitz aircraft carrier within 30 minutes

  A fighter jet and a helicopter based off the aircraft carrier USS Nimitz both crashed into the South China Sea within 30 minutes of each other, the Navy’s Pacific Fleet said. The three crew members of the MH-60R Sea Hawk helicopter were rescued on Sunday afternoon, and the two aviators in the F/A-18F Super Hornet fighter jet ejected and were recovered safely, and all five “are safe and in stable condition,” the fleet said in a statement. The causes of the two crashes were under investigation, the statement said.

  • A Super Hornet and Sea Hawk from the Same Carrier Crashed in the South China Sea

World

• Argentina's midterm election hands landslide win to Milei's libertarian overhaul

  • Milei Wins Mandate for Free-Market Revolution in Argentina's Election

  • Javier Milei’s far-right party wins Argentina’s midterm elections

  • Big win in midterm vote for Argentina's President Milei

• Albania's AI minister is 'pregnant with 83 children', says prime minister

• Philippine Firm Says It Was Asked to Bury Radioactive Dust

• The Irish establishment is fuelling the rage on the streets

  Last night, the BBC told one of the grossest lies of omission I have ever seen in the mainstream media. It published a report about the disturbances outside a migrant hotel in County Dublin and nowhere did it mention what triggered the riotous behaviour. Three hundred and eighty-seven words pumped into the gadgets of the masses, every one of them devoted to damning the ‘thuggery’ of those who assembled at the hotel. Not one of the words – not one – addressed the thing that angered them. What was that thing? It was the alleged sexual assault of a 10-year-old Irish girl by a failed ‘asylum seeker’ on the grounds of the hotel. An alleged assault so serious that the girl was hospitalised. What’s more, this is a highly vulnerable girl in the care of the state. Maybe none of that matters to the BBC. Perhaps the alleged violation of a defenceless innocent by a man who was meant to have been deported from Ireland is immaterial to the aloof scribes of Britain’s public broadcaster.

• Danish Commercial Warns White Citizens About Breeding With Other Whites | ZeroHedge

  The commercial features an "expert" interrupting a white Danish couple as they flirt with each other. He explains to them that the history of war in Denmark introduced foreign DNA into their gene pool which "protected them from disease". He then compares their relationship to inbreeding and suggests they find new partners with more "exotic" genetics.

• French lawmakers vote to hike tax on American tech giants

• Brazil launches AI platform to prosecute authors of posts considered anti-LGBT

Israel

• Palestinian prisoners 'became instant millionaires on release'

Russia Bad / Ukraine War

• Russia Fires First Nuke-Powered Cruise Missile, Burevestnik

• Russia faces shrinking and aging population, tries restrictive laws to combat it

• No radiation measured in Norway after missile allegedly flew 14,000 km

• Putin Says Russia Now Has Nuclear-Powered Missile

China

• The Sordid Mystery of a Somalian Meteorite Smuggled into China

• Ahead of Trump-Xi meeting, China says bombers flew near Taiwan

• China makes millions from UK asylum hotels

• Trump, Xi and the Danger for Taiwan

Health / Medicine

• Surgeons remove dozens of magnets from teen’s stomach.

• US overdose deaths rising in some regions even as US sees national decline

• Chromium is considered an essential nutrient, despite no proven health benefits

  Chromium deficiency – having little to no chromium in your body – is extremely rare, and researchers have not identified any clearly defined disease caused by low chromium levels.

• "A medical miracle": is period blood an overlooked opportunity in womens health?

• Ain't this "MAHA misinformation" now? Going Down the Junk Food Rabbit Hole

• Cigna Will End Drug Rebates in Many Private Health Plans

• Vaccine Skepticism Comes for Pet Owners, Too

• Why Ozempic and Wegovy Don't Cause Weight Loss for Everyone

Pox / COVID / BioTerror AgitProp

• Diphtheria, a once vanquished killer of children, is resurgent

• Rapid early spread of bird flu in Europe raises fears of fresh crisis

  • Bird Flu Is Back. Here's What to Know

Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda

• "Plant Math" Can Help Predict the Climate's Future

• Bats eat the birds they pluck from the sky while on the wing

• Coral cover is at its highest since monitoring began

• Does Colorado have pine trees older than the Roman Empire?

• Hurricane Melissa threatens Jamaica with worst-case scenario as Category 5

• Kilauea's lava soared as high as a skyscraper during a 6-hour eruption

• Europe simulates catastrophic solar storm to warn of real risks

• BPA causes sex-specific changes in metabolism and the immune system

• Inside Just Stop Oil's 'toxic' culture: Sex assault claims and infighting

  On 28 September, an email was sent to the group’s more than 100,000 members. It alleged the HR department at Just Stop Oil (JSO) was aware of serious accusations against two males from multiple women, dating back to 2022. The allegations include “grooming, coercion, sexual assault and rape”.

• ExxonMobil accuses California of violating its free speech