2025-11-13

Horseshit

Ethics isn't about being a good person
A mom and a pastor shot two escaped lab monkeys
The rise of singlehood is reshaping the world
United Airlines seeks to end lawsuit over windowless 'window seats'
Masterworks Sold Investors $1B in Art. Did It Paint Too Rosy a Picture?
When Your Husband Spends $300k on DraftKings
I'm a Psychoanalyst. This Is What Technology Is Doing to Us
A scientific mistake from the 1970s derailed Mars exploration
What Happened To SF Homelessness? - by Scott Alexander

There’s a natural tradeoff where governments can enforce laws against the homeless in ways that make them less visible and annoying, at the cost of making their lives harder, eg it can take away their tents. In the past, they didn’t do this, out of a combination of tender-heartedness and legal restrictions. After the homeless became extremely visible and annoying, voters felt less tender-hearted, and the courts lifted the legal restrictions. So cities took the tradeoff. This is the big effect that everyone noticed.
Dying Shopping Malls Are the Roman Ruins of Our Civilization
The chess federation accuses a former champion of harassing a rival who died

Musk

Electric / Self Driving cars

Robot uprising / Humanioid Helpers

Somehow Russia Made an Worse Robot Than Elon Musk (Allegedly)

Edumacationalizing / Acedemia Nuts

Number of Students at UCSD Without 8th Grade Math Skills Skyrockets

A new internal report from the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) reveals that the percentage of incoming students scoring below Algebra 1 on placement exams—a math course typically completed by the end of eighth grade—has tripled over the past five years. In 2020, just 6 percent of first-year students at UCSD placed below Algebra 1. By 2025, that number had surged to 18 percent, according to the UCSD Senate Admissions Working Group (SAWG) report.
Normalize giving your children homes instead of a college education

You’re saving up money to pay for college — but why? College delays adulthood and often indoctrinates your children against you. Your kids will lose the prime years of their lives for a worthless ‘education’ and be crippled by $200K in debt. College is a curse. Instead, spend the money on a property so your child can get started in life, get married and give you grandchildren. Let your kid go to trade school or an apprenticeship. These jobs earn more than most every college degree anyway. Teach your children ownership instead of nihilistic debt slavery. Give them the wise guidance every young person desperately needs and they will bless you in return. Grandkids while you’re young!
"Belief in the law of small numbers" the continuing appeal of junk science

if you’re coming into your research project or meta-analysis with the conviction that the effect you’re studying is real, then you’ll expect all data and all studies to conform to the pattern, with any failures attributable only to noise or interactions, never to the possibility that the effect sometimes does not appear or even goes in the wrong direction, and never to the possibility that a positive finding (statistically significant or not) in the desired direction is meaningless or wrong. So, the fact that these Wansink papers could well report experiments that were never performed, or data that were not conducted as reported, or data that were selected and tortured to yield their findings . . . that doesn’t even matter, because the authors’ (unexamined) belief in the law of small numbers tells them it doesn’t matter.

Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising

Google vows to stop scam E-Z Pass and USPS texts plaguing Americans
- The Platform Google Claims Is Behind a 'Staggering' Scam Text Operation
Sudo-Rs Affected by Multiple Security Vulnerabilities – Impacting Ubuntu 25.10
- Butbut Rust was supposed to make it impossible to make insecure code! that's why we've rewritten everything and all the Bestest Most Woke peoples insist we use the new implementations! There's couldn't have been any wisdom in the old folks' reverence for proven code and secure designs!
Google Posts Device Trees for Booting Pixel 10 Hardware with the Mainline Linux
Will a new generation of music streaming companies succeed?
Higher prices, simpler streaming expected if HBO Max folds into Paramount+
The 'worst-selling Microsoft product of all time' sold just 11 times, and eight people returned it

One of my former colleagues spoke with the person who took over from him as the support specialist for OS/2 for Mach 20. According to that person's memory [...] a total of eleven copies of "OS/2 for Mach 20" were ever sold, and eight of them were returned. That leaves three customers who purchased a copy and didn’t return it. And the support specialist had personally spoken with two of them.
Wayland’s Never-Ending Opposition To Multi-Window Positioning
Apple helped kill netbooks. Will it bring them back?
Would You Wear a Period-Tracker Funded by Peter Thiel?
TorrentFreak Turns 20
£220 'for a cut-up sock' — Apples's new iPhone Pocket ridiculed online
Apple Considers Adding Second Camera to Delayed iPhone Air 2
The next iPhone Air has reportedly been delayed
Apple-Commissioned Study: EU's Digital Markets Act Failed to Lower App Prices
Resurgence of an old-timey film format is creating headaches on movie sets
Our first look at the Steam Machine, Valve's ambitious new game console
Intel Releases New CPU Microcode, Publishes 30 New Security Advisories
Google will allow users to sideload Android apps without verification

TechSuck / Geek Bait

Jeff Atwood Threatens DHH
- Not just: "don't dare say it was bad to shoot Charlie Kirk," but "if you keep on we may use violence against you too".
Promotional but crunchy: Why “CUDA” Translation Won’t Unlock AMD’s Real Potential

AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World

Space / Boomy Zoomers / UFO

Crypto con games

Coinbase moves incorporation to Texas from Delaware
- Coinbase to Leave Delaware, Reincorporate in Texas

Economicon / Business / Finance

Gen Z wants to know what their coworkers earn
(PDF) Warren Buffet's farewell letter
Fannie Mae removes minimum credit score requirements
One of the Largest Whiskey Distilleries in the U.S. Just Saw Its Sales Plummet Again
Gita Gopinath on the crash that could torch $35trn of wealth

At the heart of this concern is the sheer scale of exposure, both domestic and international, to American equities. Over the past decade and a half, American households have significantly increased their holdings in the stockmarket, encouraged by strong returns and the dominance of American tech firms. Foreign investors, particularly from Europe, have for the same reasons poured capital into American stocks, while simultaneously benefiting from the dollar’s strength. This growing interconnectedness means that any sharp downturn in American markets will reverberate around the world.
Airbnb rival Sonder abruptly shuts down, orders guests to leave

Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making

The last-ever penny will be minted today in Philadelphia

The government’s phasing out of the penny has been “a bit chaotic,” said Mark Weller, executive director of Americans for Common Cents. The pro-penny group is funded primarily by Artazn, the company that provides the blanks used to make pennies. “By the time we reach Christmas, the problems will be more pronounced with retailers not having pennies.” Weller said other countries that removed low denomination coins, like Canada, Australia and Switzerland, had guidance for afterwards. Not so in the United States. “We had a social media post (by Trump) during Super Bowl Sunday, but no real plan for what retailers would have to do,” he said, referring to the president’s February announcement.

It’s not just businesses that face increased costs. Rounding to the closest nickel will cost consumers about $6 million a year, according to a July study by the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond. That is fairly modest, coming to about five cents each across 133 million American households. And rounding is not a national solution. Four states - Delaware, Connecticut, Michigan and Oregon - as well as numerous cities, including New York, Philadelphia, Miami and Washington, DC, require merchants to provide exact change, according to the National Association of Convenience Stores (NACS).
- (Sep 2024) America Must Free Itself from the Tyranny of the Penny - The New York Times
Five years ago, Mint officials conceded that if even a modest portion of these dormant pennies were suddenly to return to circulation, the resulting flow-back would be “logistically unmanageable.” There would be so unbelievably many pennies that there most likely would not be enough room to contain them inside government vaults. Moving them from place to place would be time-consuming, cumbersome and costly. (Just $100 worth of pennies weighs a touch over 55 pounds.) With each new penny minted, this problem becomes slightly more of a problem.
- It was a blindingly obviously good idea; until Trump got behind it. now its a disaster... I really hope Trump says "I like Oxygen" someday so the liberals will all suffocate themselves in response.

Trump

White House Explores Rules That Would Upend Shareholder Voting
But no one else worth mentioning: New Epstein emails appear to reveal more Trump ties
The emails, released by Democrats on the House Oversight Committee, reveal that the Epstein frequently mentioned Trump in correspondence over a 15-year period. Top Trump officials met in the White House Situation Room amid bipartisan efforts in the House to force a vote on releasing the DOJ's case files related to Epstein. The meeting included Attorney General Pam Bondi, Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, FBI Director Kash Patel and Republican Colorado Representative Lauren Boebert, according to sources. Boebert is one of the leading MAGA lawmakers in Congress pushing the Justice Department to publish their trove of Epstein files. Karoline Leavitt appeared to confirm the meeting took place during a Wednesday briefing.
Trump urges Israel's president to pardon Benjamin Netanyahu

Left Angst

Deal to end US shutdown also allows some senators to seek $500k for Jan 6 probe

Legislation moving through Congress that would end the longest government shutdown in U.S. history would also allow eight Republican senators to seek hundreds of thousands of dollars in damages for alleged privacy violations stemming from the Biden administration's investigation of the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot. The bill, which passed the Senate on Monday, includes a clause that would allow lawmakers whose phone records were subpoenaed as part of that probe to sue the Justice Department for damages.
War Is Peace. Freedom Is Slavery. Grocery Prices Are Way Down.

It is true that Biden officials liked to cite statistics that presented a favorable picture of the economy, but they were genuine statistics and did indeed seem to show an economy in pretty good shape. Trump, by contrast, is engaged in what CNN calls a “lying spree” about inflation. We all know that many media organizations have long had a habit of “sanewashing” Trump, downplaying the craziness of his remarks. What we’re seeing now is “truthwashing,” pretending that there is some factual justification for bald-faced lies.

Biden officials never denied that there was a surge in inflation during 2021 and 2022. They did, however, claim that the surge was transitory. Biden’s people also never denied that prices were higher than they had been before the pandemic. But they said, correctly, that wages had risen even more, so that most workers’ purchasing power was higher despite the rise in prices.
- He dunno what to do when the news no longer obeys "report it right." So let's re-create the past to fit the narrative we want today.
ICE's plan to monitor social media 24/7 threatens privacy
- Do not publish things you do not want read? I don't get it is the government supposed to not look at public sources unless targeting a Republican?
NOAA cuts back on seismic data used for West Coast tsunami alerts
I Worked All over Silicon Valley. This Is How It Lost Its Spine
The Risky Movement to Make America Nuclear Again
Why They Mask
October jobs data may never be released, White House says

External Security / Militaria / Diplomania

World

Why I Think the BBC's Future is Bleak

With over 17 million people voting for Brexit, it’s hard to argue they were well represented when it’s known that almost no one working for the BBC did so. That’s pretty objective.
The political meddling that led to BBC crisis

The Telegraph, like much of the British press, has for decades waged an editorial war against the BBC. As a publicly funded, free-to-air broadcaster, which is by some distance the most trusted news provider in the UK, the BBC is a serious challenge to news publishers’ commercial interests. It also offends the political sensibilities of those opposed to public funding interventions more generally. It was therefore only a matter of time before the Telegraph “exclusive” on BBC bias and the Panorama programme escalated, especially once noticed by the White House. As the crisis gathered steam, one of the many burning questions was: why on earth is the BBC not responding?
The EU is playing us for fools – now they’re scanning our texts and banning teens!
Diluting GDPR will entrench Tech Giants' power
All schools in England to be given AI-generated pupil attendance targets
Tech companies start to comply with Australia's teen social media ban
Australia at risk of 'high-impact sabotage' from China, says spy chief

Israel

China

Health / Medicine

Pox / COVID / BioTerror AgitProp

Louisiana Took Months to Sound Alarm Amid Whooping Cough Outbreak

Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda

How ripples in the high atmosphere warned scientists of a tsunami in real time
Missing at U.N.'S Climate Meeting: American Executives
- You're not allowed to attend unless you sign a declaration of alignment with their goals, as far as I know.
Brazil carves through Amazon rainforest for new highway to ferry global climate conference elites.
Claim secret gas decarbonisation report 'doctored' to support net zero narrative

The draft report said natural gas could play a role in transitioning away from other fossil fuels like coal, but warned of "significant" and "substantial" risks that it could achieve the opposite. The final report has removed references to "significant" and "substantial" risks.
Why bears are being killed from above in Alaska, with no limit on how many
Fermented fibers could tackle both world hunger and fashion waste
World oil and gas demand could grow until 2050, IEA says
Fungus in Chernobyl nuclear disaster zone has mutated to 'feed' on radiation
The Push to Get Invasive Crabs on the Menu
Why China's central bank is quietly leading the world on climate action
- It is paying for other countries to cripple their economies through burrocratic sclerosis, which makes it easier for them to take over whole sectors of those economies.