2025-11-20

etc

• Loose Wire on Containership Dali Leads to Blackouts and Contact with Baltimore’s Francis Scott Key Bridge

  At Tuesday’s public meeting at NTSB headquarters, investigators said the loose wire in the ship’s electrical system caused a breaker to unexpectedly open -- beginning a sequence of events that led to two vessel blackouts and a loss of both propulsion and steering near the 2.37-mile-long Key Bridge on March 26, 2024. Investigators found that wire-label banding prevented the wire from being fully inserted into a terminal block spring-clamp gate, causing an inadequate connection.

  • Loose wire on ship may have led to Baltimore Key Bridge collision and collapse

• Remember when they was gonna fix it? Cost of Key Bridge Replacement Upped to $5 Billion, Timeline Delayed to 2030 | Chesapeake Bay Magazine

  MDTA says it is working with the Federal Highway Administration to “quickly and safely” advance the rebuilding of the bridge that people and commerce operations relied on. MDTA announced it has raised the cost estimate to a range of $4.3-$5.2 billion, up from $1.7 billion. The predicted opening date of the bridge has been pushed back from 2028 to late 2030. MDTA attributes the doubling or tripling of the cost to changing national economic conditions and material costs, which the agency says have increased dramatically. Because the cost and timeline estimates were made less than two weeks after the collapse on March 26, 2024, they didn’t factor in pre-construction activities (which have been underway since this summer), advanced design, and updated data points.

• A Major City of the Kazakh Steppe? Investigating Semiyarka's Bronze Age Legacy

Horseshit

• Polk County FL sheriff/animal control neglects, kills cats in record numbers

• The Internet Loves Peptide Therapy. Is It a Miracle Cure?

• The Steamy, Sweaty, Towel-Spinning Weirdness of the World Sauna Championships

• Klimt Painting Becomes the Most Expensive Work of Modern Art at $236.4M

  • Gustav Klimt portrait breaks modern art record with $236M sale

• Maurizio Cattelan Golden Toilet Sells for $12.1m At Sotheby's

• In Nebraska, Makeovers for Buildings That Don't Price Out the Locals

• Man who cryogenically froze late wife sparks debate by dating new partner

• Ancient kiss-tory: new perspectives on the evolution of early historical kissing

  • First kiss dates back 21M years

• Christie's withdraws rare 'first calculator' after French court halts export

• Faced with naked man DoorDasher demands police action and they arrest her

• The Number of Rich People Who Live Paycheck to Paycheck

• Pizza Hut's forgotten role of role in one of America's great acts of subterfuge

• Can weed help you drink less? Scientists study how well 'California sober' works

Epstein

• Larry Summers resigns from OpenAI board after release of emails with Epstein

  • Larry Summers resigns from OpenAI board amid Epstein revelations

  • Larry Summers resigns from OpenAI board following release of Epstein emails

  • Larry Summers Resigns From OpenAI Board; Harvard Launches Investigation After Epstein Revelations | ZeroHedge

  Epstein was advising Summers on how to cheat on his wife, while also discussing fundraising with said wife.

• Jeffrey Epstein Emails Reveal Depth of Ties to High-Profile Scientists

celebrity gossip

• The False Glorification of Yann LeCun

• The triumph of Orthodoxy: James Watson Saw the True Form of DNA. Then It Blinded Him. - The New York Times

  Near the end of my time at Cold Spring Harbor, I remember seeing Dr. Watson walking around the campus, brandishing a copy of Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein’s new book “The Bell Curve,” which notoriously argued that I.Q. differences between racial groups are genetic. At the time, I don’t recall race having been something Dr. Watson talked about in public (nor had I heard him speak of it in private). That changed drastically after the turn of the century. Jim being Jim, the more the public pressed him not to say those things, the more he said them. It was perverse but predictable. Eventually, his dogged insistence on a connection between race and intelligence cost him his reputation as a scientist and his relationship with his beloved Cold Spring Harbor, one of the great loves of his life.

Rank Propaganda / Thought Policing / World Disordering

• How do the pros get someone to leave a cult? Manipulate them into thinking it was their idea

  Two of the world’s leading cult interventionists live (with their parrot) in Philadelphia. They explain the art of coaxing people out of the most pernicious cults in the world

  Their method goes something like this. A family reaches out about their daughter, husband, nephew or grandchild. Ryan and Kelly conduct an assessment that can take anywhere from a day to a week (they would not say exactly). They charge $2,500 for the assessment, then $250 an hour after that, interviewing the family until they understand the dynamics well enough to devise a strategy. Then, over months or sometimes years, they work to create the conditions in which a person might begin to question the beliefs their life has been built on. Normally, Kelly and Ryan work by strengthening the existing relationships in a person’s life. It can be a long game. They will educate the family about the cultic group, and give advice about what to say (or not to say). They will bring in experts: psychiatrists, lawyers, priests that can provide perspective and counsel. The goal is to untangle the family dynamics that might have made someone vulnerable to a cult in the first place. Very occasionally, they meet face to face with the person involved in a cult. But these encounters look nothing like a drug intervention, with friends gathered in a circle and the reason for the meeting laid bare. Instead, Ryan and Kelly will act covertly. In one case, a son (the cult member) came home for a few days. His parents told him that Ryan and Kelly were friends of theirs, “family mediators” who happened to be “in town for a few days, to meet with some colleagues” – both technically true. The pair made sure to “forget” a book at the family home, and return the next day to collect it, as they began to build rapport.

  • Who will take such time and attention to de-program the millions of individuals we have lost to Socialism and Nihilism?

• How to Stay Sane in a World That Rewards Insanity

  Somewhere around 2016, the smartest people I knew started saying increasingly stupid things. These were folks who could parse dense academic papers, who understood reason, who were entirely capable of holding two competing ideas in their heads without their brains short-circuiting. But something changed. One friend became “convinced” that every major news story was manufactured consent. Another started treating political disagreement as evidence of moral corruption. A third began using the word "liberal" as if it was a personality disorder rather than loose coalitions of sometimes contradictory beliefs. The common thread: their extreme positions got them more of what they wanted. The friend who saw conspiracies everywhere built a following. Then an audience. Then a 7-figure income stream. The one who tribalized every issue found a ready-made community that validated every prior. Etc, etc. The incentive gradient was clear: sanity was expensive, and extremism paid dividends.

  The people I knew who went all-in on extremism got what they wanted in the short term. Some built audiences. Some found communities. Some gained certainty. Most of ‘em made bank. But they're trapped by their earlier positions. They can't update without admitting they were wrong, and admitting they were wrong would cost them their community. They've optimized themselves into a local maximum they can't escape. They won the game by its current rules and lost something harder to quantify. The world will keep offering you bad trades, will keep rewarding positions you know are too simple to be true. Every day you'll watch people cash in their nuance for influence. Every day you'll be tempted to do the same. The only defense is to remember that some things compound differently than others. Extremism gives you a fast start and a ceiling. Sanity gives you a slow start and no limit to how far you can grow.

Musk

• Saudi Arabia Backs Elon Musk's XAI with Data Center Deal

• Gov. Abbott's office redacts pages of emails about Elon Musk

• Tesla Wants to Build a Robot Army

Electric / Self Driving cars

• Zoox begins offering robotaxi rides in San Francisco, facing off with Waymo

• Driving an E.V. Across North Dakota? Thank the Standing Rock Tribe

• Monarch Tractor sued over tractors that were 'unable to operate autonomously'

  Burks Tractor, a dealership located in Idaho, has sued Monarch for breach of contract and allegedly violating its warranty because the California-based startup’s tractors were “unable to operate autonomously.” The dealership also says the 10 tractors it purchased “continue to experience significant problems,” and calls them “defective.” The company has spent a few years trying to get its tractors — which are electric and supposed to be autonomous, or as Monarch calls it, “driver optional” — to catch on at wineries and dairy farms. But it’s gone through multiple rounds of layoffs over the last two years. The Ohio factory where its tractors were being built by Foxconn is now being renovated into an AI data center, and Monarch has been trying to pivot to software and tech licensing.

Edumacationalizing / Acedemia Nuts

• Art Institute of Chicago Guts Video Data Bank Staff, Sparking Outcry

• New magnetic component discovered in Faraday effect after nearly two centuries

• What happens when even college students can't do math anymore?

  • Remember "New Math?" Numberlines and homework that adults couldn't make sense of... Those kids are this age now.

• Companies Predict 2026 Will Be the Worst College Grad Job Market in Five Years

Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising

• Meta wins monopoly trial, convinces judge that social networking is dead

  • Meta's Victory Opens the Way for Silicon Valley to Go Deal Shopping

  • Meta wins US antitrust case and won't have to break off WhatsApp or Instagram

• Why it feels like your favorite websites keep going down

  • Cloudflare outage traced to one oversized file

• Baby Shark: How a 90-second clip created a $400M business

• Inside a global campaign hijacking open-source project identities | Fullstory

• Unity and Epic Games: Open Interoperable Future for Video Gaming

  • Unity and Epic Games Together Advance the Open, Interoperable Future

  • Epic announces partnership to bring Unity games into Fortnite

• The Cities Skyline Paradox

• Expert Warns of Risks in Substance Use Reduction Apps

• Canon Faces Lawsuit over Wi-Fi in Cameras and Printers

• Thieves are returning Android phones because they 'don't want no Samsung'

• Your Smartphone, Their Rules: App Stores Enable Corporate-Government Censorship

• Netgear Accused by Rival of China Smear to Fan Security Fear

• Thousands more Asus routers pwned by suspected, evolving China operation

  The affected routers are primarily concentrated in Taiwan and Southeast Asia, with minimal impact on mainland China, Russia, or the United States.

• Read the Fucking Manual - Blain Smith

  The next time you're about to fire off a question in Slack, or paste an error into ChatGPT, or post "anyone know how to...?" on social media, stop. Open the documentation. Read the error message. Look at the source code. Think about the problem. Try something. Fail. Learn. Try again. This is engineering. This is the job. And if you're not willing to do it, you're not engineering. You're just asking other people to engineer for you. Read the fucking manual. Your future self and your teammates will thank you for it. If you want to challenge yourself, cut the internet connection from your machine for an hour and see if you can without direct and immediate access to Slack and social media and use the local instance of your library documentation and in-memory unit tests to figure shit out.

• Adobe to acquire digital marketing platform Semrush for $1.9B

  • Adobe to Buy Semrush for $1.9B

  • Adobe to Buy Semrush for $1.9B

• Japanese court orders Cloudflare to pay $3.2M over manga piracy

  • Tokyo Court Finds Cloudflare Liable for Manga Piracy in Long-Running Lawsuit

TechSuck / Geek Bait

• What Killed Perl?

  So to state my hypothesis briefly: people today are both less predisposed to understand Perl, and have easy access to so many other alternatives. It’s a rather unsatisfactory explanation, but it’s the closest I can get.

• (Jan 2025) The invalid 68030 instruction that accidentally allowed the Mac Classic II to successfully boot up

  This is the story of how Apple made a mistake in the ROM of the Macintosh Classic II that probably should have prevented it from booting, but instead, miraculously, its Motorola MC68030 CPU accidentally prevented a crash and saved the day by executing an undefined instruction.

  • Apple's 1991 Macintosh shipped with a bug that should've stopped it from booting, but no one ever knew because an undocumented CPU trick 'almost too crazy to be true' miraculously made it work | PC Gamer

• Qualcomm's problematic changes to Arduino policies

  outrage summary:

  • fully irrevocable license to all user content
  • surveillance-grade ai monitoring baked into “improvements”
  • patent-infringement shield clause turning your uploads into liability padding
  • deletion that’s not deletion
  • minors’ data fused into qualcomm’s ecosystem
  • geolocation, identifiers, and analytics data sold or shared
  • five-year public retention of your username
  • broad military/government carve-outs, bans, and exceptions
  • termination triggers for trivialities (credential sharing, username quirks)
  • cross-border data extraction to qualcomm subsidiaries

  and don’t forget:

  8.2 user shall not translate, decompile, or reverse-engineer the platform, or engage in any attempt to uncover its internal algorithms or logic unless explicitly permitted by arduino or existing licenses

  because nothing says “open-source heritage” like a clause threatening anyone who tries to understand how the machine they paid for actually works.

  • The Death of Arduino?

  Qualcomm-owned Arduino quietly pushed a sweeping rewrite of its Terms of Service and Privacy Policy, and the changes mark a clear break from the open-hardware ethos that built the platform. The new documents introduce an irrevocable, perpetual license over anything users upload, broad surveillance-style monitoring of AI features, a clause preventing users from identifying potential patent infringement, years-long retention of usernames even after account deletion, and the integration of all user data (including minors) into Qualcomm’s global data ecosystem. Military weird things and more.

AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World

• AI and Voter Engagement

• Nvidia, Microsoft deal takes 'circular' financing to new level

• Nuclear power will receive most money from DOE loans

  • DOE gives Microsoft partner $1B loan to restart Three Mile Island reactor

• AI writing hasn't overwhelmed the web yet

• Children's AI toy gave advice on sex and where to find knives

• What AI doesn't know: we could be creating a global 'knowledge collapse'

• Intuit signs $100M+ deal with OpenAI to bring its apps to ChatGPT

• The Hot New Dubai Restaurant Run by an AI Chef

• Anthropic valued in range of $350B following investment deal

• The CEO of LLM marketplace Hugging Face says we're not in an AI bubble, just in an LLM bubble.

• Klarna says AI drive has helped halve staff numbers and boost pay

• Canon Faces Lawsuit over Wi-Fi in Cameras and Printers

• GPU depreciation could be the next big crisis coming for AI hyperscalers

• Google boss says AI investment boom has 'elements of irrationality'

• Batteries, Not Natural Gas, Can Power the Data Center Boom

• What Pixar's 'Wall-E' Got Right About the Future of Work

• The Politics of AI Are About to Explode – The Datacenter Elections

• AI is about to face an enormous test. The market is nervous

• In the A.I. Race, Chinese Talent Still Drives American Research

• AI-generated evidence is showing up in court

Space / Boomy Zoomers / UFO

• Waste not, want not: Europe wants to make space food out of thin air and astronaut pee

• NASA wants you to know that 3I/ATLAS is an interstellar comet

Crypto con games

• Billionaire warns 'last time to buy' as Bitcoin crashes

• Bitcoin prices have crashed to just $90,000.

• Crypto Could Trigger the Next Financial Crisis

• Crypto got everything it wanted. Now it's sinking.

Economicon / Business / Finance

• Middle-class pulls back, alarming retailers: 'signs of real distress'

• Volvo Drops Luminar and Lidar from Future Models

• Adobe Nears $1.9B Deal for Software Provider Semrush

• We Could Use a Good, Long Bear Market

• Target may have hit rock bottom

• Trade Deficit Decreased to $59.6B in August

  The trade deficit with China decreased to $18.9 billion from $27.8 billion a year ago.

• Mexico Is Now the United States' Top Buyer

• Nvidia Announces Financial Results for Third Quarter Fiscal 2026

  • Nvidia shares rise on stronger-than-expected revenue, forecast

• Americans with six-figure incomes are in 'survival mode'

Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making

• Gov. Spencer Cox announces major nuclear energy hub in Utah

• The U.S. Mint is auctioning the last pennies–and they could sell for millions

• CIA report boasted about tricking Congress in JFK probe, whistleblower says

Trump

• Apple CEO Tim Cook Attends White House Dinner with Saudi Crown Prince

• U.S. Revises Endangered Species Act Regulations

Democrats

• Zohran Mamdani Just Declared NYC a City of...What?

  This includes Mamdani's latest statement that NYC is a "city of international law." It's not, of course, but take two guesses why Mamdani is making such a claim. Mamdani said he's going to use international law to arrest Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu if he comes to the city.

  • Zohran Mamdani condemns Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu after NYC Mayor Eric Adams' meeting in Israel

  "Being a city of international law means looking to uphold international law," Mamdani said. "And that means upholding the warrants from the International Criminal Court, whether they're for Benjamin Netanyahu or Vladimir Putin."

• AOC warns we're in 'massive' AI bubble '2008-style threats to economic stability

  • Obviously an economic genius, shes gone from tending bar to a net worth of how much now?

Left Angst

• Without US satellites, 'we go dark', tells climate monitor

• Hunter's pedicure grade? 'I'm ICE, Boys': DHS Official Busted in Teen Sex-Trafficking Case Flaunts Status

• Cost-conscious utilities resist Trump's push for nuclear revival

• What If 'America First' Appears to Work?

• GOP overhaul of broadband permit laws: Cities hate it, cable companies love it

• 40% of young U.S. women want to leave the country: Gallup poll

• What Most Americans Don't Know About NAFTA's Wreckage South of the Border

  When the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) took effect in 1994, it was sold as a partnership that would raise living standards across North America. Instead, it accelerated the destruction of Mexico’s rural economy, displaced millions of people, and pushed them toward the U.S. border. Within a decade, Mexican markets were flooded with cheap U.S. grain. Millions of farmers could no longer survive. Rural Mexicans faced three choices: stay and starve, move to overcrowded cities, or migrate north. NAFTA allowed goods and investment to cross borders freely, but not people.

• Science on shaky ground: Canadian research shifts in the wake of US cuts

  “What we’re seeing has us really worried, especially about how these attacks on science translate to attacks on science in Canada, directly and indirectly,” he says.

  • The world has become so accustomed to American largess that its diminution is an "attack". Imagine what happens if we manage to close the tap of taxpayer funds totally: will they be prepared to shed blood in pursuit of their tribute?

• Labor Department Won't Publish October Unemployment Rate

• Trump's donors have benefited from his second term

• RFK Jr.'s Miasma Theory of Health Is Spreading

• Here’s the Trump executive order that would ban state AI laws | The Verge

Law Breaking / Police / Internal Security

• Founder of ADHD Startup Is Found Guilty of Conspiracy in Adderall Case

External Security / Militaria / Diplomania

• The 'JPMorgan Boys' Behind the U.S. Bailout for Argentina

• A Chinese firm bought an insurer for CIA agents

World

• Canada announces massive jump in funding to European Space Agency

• Europe's battle for control of its money

• Watch out for online Chinese spy contact, UK defence minister warns public

• Dutch minister Karremans suspends measures to take control of Nexperia

  • Netherlands Hands Back Control of Chipmaker Nexperia

  • Netherlands returns control of Nexperia to Chinese owner

  • Dutch Hand Back Control of Chinese-Owned Chipmaker Nexperia - Bloomberg

  The move marks a significant de-escalation of a dispute that underscored the global nature of supply chains and highlighted Beijing’s growing leverage. Even though Nexperia’s chips aren’t advanced and the company only operates one facility in China, the spat disrupted automakers from Honda Motor Co. to Volkswagen AG. The reversal by the Dutch government was set in motion after a breakthrough in talks earlier that involved Chinese and Dutch officials, with input from Germany, the European Union as well as the US. To help resolve the stalemate, Beijing agreed to loosen export restrictions from Nexperia’s Chinese plant, the largest of its kind in the world.

• Tokyo District Court orders Cloudflare to pay damages over pirated website

• UK to mass produce explosives for first time in a generation

• Sydney resident died after triple-zero call didn't work on Samsung phone

  • (Apr 2024) More than a million older 4G mobile phones at risk of being blocked from making triple-0 calls in 3G shutdown - ABC News

  • Why Samsung Phones Are Failing Emergency Calls In Australia | Hackaday

  • Outdated Samsung handset linked to fatal emergency call failure in Australia

• Europe's defence spending spree must fund domestic AI, official says

• Europe's cookie nightmare is crumbling. EC wants preference at browser level

• Europe is scaling back its landmark privacy and AI laws

• Gangs buy haulage firms to steal lorryloads of goods

• Instagram owner Meta tells Australian teens accounts will close

• Poland closes last Russian consulate after 'act of state terrorism' on railway

  • NATO on alert as Poland accuses Russia of 'state terrorism' in rail blast

Israel

• Israel used widely banned cluster munitions in Lebanon

Russia Bad / Ukraine War

• To Evade Sanctions, the Kremlin Turns to Convicted Money Launderer Ilan Shor

• Children among 25 killed in one of Russia's deadliest strikes on western Ukraine

China

• China is setting the pace in the EV race, and the West can't keep up

• Xi's University Fuels China AI Boom with More Patents Than Harvard or MIT

• China's shift to electric trucks may reshape global fuel demand

• The growing problem with China's unreliable numbers

Health / Medicine

• Scientists criticize food manufacturers:unhealthy ultraprocessed food

• I'd run down the road thinking I was God: a day at the cannabis psychosis clinic

• New Jersey group attempted to harvest organs from patient with signs of life

• Fluoride in water doesn't negatively affect cognitive ability, study finds

Pox / COVID / BioTerror AgitProp

• Was Covid Always a CIA Plot?

  A very brief overview of the timeline suggests that the CIA and the Intelligence Community are implicated in the creation of the virus, a lab leak at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, and censorship to evade any public scrutiny for their role in the pandemic.

• CDC data confirms US is 2 months away from losing measles elimination status

Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda

• Microplastics hit male arteries hard

• Artificial webs capture airborne DNA to monitor biodiversity

• Geothermal's Time Has Come

• One of America's most dangerous volcanoes will soon power homes

• Changes you'll see as the climate careens toward tipping points

• Humans are evolved for nature, not cities, say anthropologists

• ‘Extremely Rare’ Pink Grasshopper Spotted in New Zealand

• Researchers find microplastics in 100% of donkey faecal samples tested