2025-12-19

Horseshit

• Ancient hunter-gatherer DNA may explain why some people live 100 years or more

• Why are sperm donors having hundreds of children?

  So why are some sperm donors fathering so many children, what made Danish or so-called "Viking sperm" so popular, and does the industry need to be reined in?

• How getting richer made teenagers less free

• Everything Is Dead and We Killed It

  Arguably, we live in an era of cultural abundance. You can access more music in thirty seconds than a medieval peasant could hear in thirty lifetimes. There are more novels published each year than anyone could read in a century. SaaS companies continue to proliferate like bacteria in a petri dish full of venture capital. But we have this compulsive need to stand over the corpse of every cultural phenomenon and deliver its eulogy while it's still very obviously breathing.

• True origin of 'first black Briton' revealed

  • Woman recognized as ‘first black Briton’ by BBC was actually white

• Digital detox: how to switch off without paying the price

• Nearly 7K of 8.8K data centers built in the wrong climate, analysis find

• Classical statues were not painted horribly

• Archer to Launch Air Taxi Trials in US Cities Under White House Executive Order

• Does swearing make you stronger? Science says yes

• Why your Economy class seat is torturing you – possibly on purpose

• Tech Billionaires Are Creating Private Cities to Flee America

• U.S. Mental Health Ratings Continue to Worsen

• Good if make prior after data instead of before

  • Increase your confidence in your ignorance through the magic of random numbers!

• $4k Nosebleeds: The Freakout over World Cup Ticket Prices

• They Get Wheeled on Flights and Miraculously Walk Off. Praise ‘Jetway Jesus.

• 'Mars camp': The extreme adventure that wants to turn tourists into astronauts

• To Understand the US in 2026, Travel to Texas

Epstein

• Bill Gates and Sergey Brin Among Newly Released Epstein Photos

  • House Democrats share new Epstein photos featuring Sergey Brin and Bill Gates

celebrity gossip

• Zuckerberg Compound Prompts Palo Alto to Consider Billionaire Housing Law

• Assange brings 'instrument of war' case against Nobel Foundation

  WikiLeaks co-founder Julian Assange has filed a criminal complaint against the Nobel Foundation, accusing it of misusing Nobel Peace Prize funds by awarding them to Venezuelan opposition figure Maria Corina Machado, who has publicly called on the US to attack her own country.

• How Warren Buffett Did It

• Plane owned by NASCAR racer Greg Biffle crashes after takeoff in N.C

Rank Propaganda / Thought Policing / World Disordering

• Pressured by chatbots, newsrooms push past the one-story-fits-all model

Musk

• Tesla throws 'cringe' anti-union concert for Giga Berlin employees ahead of vote

• Tesla Drivers Are Buying Escape Tools

• Elon Musk's SpaceX bought tens of millions worth of Cybertrucks Tesla can't sell

• A Starlink Satellite Exploded

  The satellite is largely intact, tumbling, and will reenter the Earth’s atmosphere and fully demise within weeks. The satellite's current trajectory will place it below the Space_Station, posing no risk to the orbiting lab or its crew.

  • SpaceX loses contact with Starlink satellite after mishap

Robot uprising / Humanioid Helpers

• The Roomba Was a Disappointment

Edumacationalizing / Acedemia Nuts

• Test scores in U.S. schools are down. Are smartphones to blame?

• Blue States Used to Lead in Education. Not Anymore

• The Phone Ban Saved High School

• A school locked down after AI flagged a gun. It was a clarinet

• Half of graduates 'would earn more as a higher-level apprentice'

• Peter Higgs: I wouldn't be productive enough for today's academic system

Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising

• Forget burner phones – you can join this new carrier with just a ZIP code

• Bluesky claims its new contact import feature is 'privacy-first'

• Apple announces more ads are coming to App Store search results

• GitHub walks back plan to charge for self-hosted runners

• Micron outlines grim outlook for DRAM supply in earnings call

• Judge hints Vizio TV buyers may have rights to source code licensed under GPL

• UK actors vote to refuse to be digitally scanned in pushback against AI

• Pleas No: Firefox to Evolve into a "Modern AI Browser"

• Video game hardware sales had historically bad November: Cost of hardware rising

• Turn ‘Em On: Modern Nintendo Cartridges May Have A Limited Lifespan

  • Seems like the physical media oughtta serve as a license key that allows re-downloading the data you've paid for when the vendor's storage media is dysfunctional.

• When the Internet Grew Up – and Locked Out Its Kids

• Beginning January 2026, all ACM publications will be made open access

• Internet 2025: Bigger, more fragile than ever and fundamentally rewired by AI

• Devastated PC builder orders DDR5 RAM from Amazon receives DDR2 and some weights

• TikTok signs agreement to create new U.S. joint venture

  • ByteDance signs deal to sell majority of TikTok US

  • TikTok U.S. Deal: Oracle and Silver Lake Confirmed Among Buyers

  • TikTok signs deal to sell US unit to American investor-led venture

TechSuck / Geek Bait

• vm.overcommit_memory=2 is always the right setting for servers · Ariadne's Space

  While overcommit is convenient for application developers, it fundamentally changes the contract of memory allocation: a successful allocation no longer represents an atomic acquisition of a real resource. Instead, the returned mapping serves as a deferred promise, which will only be fulfilled by the page fault handler if and when the memory is first accessed. This is an important distinction, as it means overcommit effectively replaces a fail-fast transactional allocation model with a best-effort one where failures are only caught after the fact rather than at the point of allocation.

AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World

• Apple releases 2d to 3D image generator open source

• Oracle's $10B Michigan data centre in limbo after Blue Owl pulls out

• We Let AI Run Our Office Vending Machine. It Lost Hundreds of Dollars

• AI Chatbots Are Poisoning Research Archives with Fake Citations

• Amazon AI chief Prasad leaving; Infrastructure exec to lead unified AI group

• Jassy taps 27-year Amazon veteran to run AGI org

• Meta's Yann LeCun targets $3.5B valuation for new AI startup, FT reports

  • Meta's Yann LeCun targets €3B valuation for AI startup

• Lovable, a Startup That Makes Anyone a Coder, Raises $330M

• AI surpasses 2024 Bitcoin mining in energy usage

• Are Robots.txt Instructions Legally Binding?–Ziff Davis vs. OpenAI

• Chatbots inform young voters but don't change their vote choices

• YouTube Shuts Down Fake AI Movie Trailer Channels Watched by Millions

• Purdue makes 'AI working competency' a graduation requirement

• LinkedIn's war against bot scrapers ramps up as AI gets smarter

Space / Boomy Zoomers / UFO

• Ariane 6 launches Galileo navigation satellites

• The World Needs a Space Cop

• Watch Blue Origin launch 1st wheelchair user to space today.

• Mystery Drones, Or Maybe UFOs, Over Sweetwater County Are 'The New Normal'

Crypto con games

• Coinbase adds prediction markets and stocks in push to be one-stop trading app

• How a major convenience store chain became a hub for crypto scams

• Public Makes Millions on Plunging Crypto

  I’m not sure what exactly happened in early October, but it seems the world became much less friendly to crypto for some reason. Bitcoin hit a peak value of $124,800 on October 4th. Its price has since fallen sharply, standing at $85,900 at the close of trading on December 17th. The other major crypto currencies had similar tumbles.

• FBI dismantles alleged $70M crypto laundering operation

• North Korean hackers stole a record $2B of crypto in 2025, Chainalysis says

Economicon / Business / Finance

• 'Ghost jobs' are on the rise – and so are calls to ban them

  The phrase "ghost jobs" might sound like something from Halloween, but it refers to the practice of employers advertising vacancies that don't exist. In some cases the positions may have already been filled, but in others the job might not have ever been available. It's a real and continuing problem on both sides of the Atlantic. Up to 22% of jobs advertised online last year were positions listed with no intent to hire, according to a study across the US, UK and Germany by recruitment software provider Greenhouse.

• Inflation Cools to 2.7 Percent in November, Lower Than Expected

  • US says price increases eased last month but data may be distorted and Americans aren't feeling it | AP News

  “It’s likely a bit distorted,’’ said Diane Swonk, chief economist at the tax and consulting firm KPMG. “The good news is that it’s cooling. We’ll take a win when we can get it.’’ Still, Swonk added: “The data is truncated, and we just don’t know how much of it to trust.’’ By disrupting the economy – especially government contracting – the shutdown may have contributed to a cooling in prices, she said.

  • Inflation drops to lowest level in months, defying expectations of uptick - ABC News

  Despite an overall reduction of inflation, some high-profile items like coffee and beef continued to soar in November. Coffee prices jumped nearly 19% in November compared to a year earlier, while beef prices climbed almost 16% over that span. Egg prices plummeted in November, however, falling 13% compared to the previous year.

• A perfect distillation of the social uselessness of finance

  Lanchester starts by stating that while we think of the role of the finance sector as "capital allocation" – that is, using investors' money to fund new businesses and expansions for existing business – that hasn't been important to finance for quite some time. Today, only 3% of bank activity consists of "lending to firms and individuals engaged in the production of goods and services." The other 97% of finance is gambling.

  This is the finance sector. In a world where the real economy generates $105 trillion/year, the financial derivatives market adds up to $667 trillion/year. This is "the biggest business in the world" – and it's useless. It produces nothing. It adds no value.

• Amazon is prospective tenant for data center developer rocked by stock plunge

• Micron stock soars 12% as memory prices skyrocket and shortages persist

• Wall Street Ruined the Roomba and Then Blamed Lina Khan

Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making

• Fulton County: ‘We Don’t Dispute’ 315,000 Votes Lacking Poll Workers’ Signatures Were Counted In 2020.

Trump

• Trump on Bongino FBI exit: He “wants to go back to his show.”

• Trump reels off 2025 achievements in White House address: He has accomplished more in 11 months than most presidents have achieved in eight years.

• Trump signs executive order to reschedule cannabis from Schedule I to III

  • Trump expected to expand access to cannabis in a major shift in drug policy

  • Trump signs executive order reclassifying marijuana as a less dangerous drug

  President Donald Trump signed an executive order Thursday that could reclassify marijuana as a less dangerous drug and open new avenues for medical research, a major shift in federal drug policy that inches closer to what many states have done. The switch would move marijuana away from its current classification as a Schedule I drug, alongside heroin and LSD. Cannabis would instead be a Schedule III substance, like ketamine and some anabolic steroids. Reclassification by the Drug Enforcement Administration would not make it legal for recreational use by adults nationwide, but it could change how the drug is regulated and reduce a hefty tax burden on the cannabis industry.

  • President Orders Cannabis Rules Relaxed, Easing Research

  • Trump signs executive order reclassifying cannabis

  • Great, but it can be undone as easily by the next President (assuming the DEA actually complies in the first place). Congress has to stop sucking pharmaceutical company teats and make real law to fix the whole drug market.

• Trump Signs Space Superiority Executive Order

  • Trump commits to Moon landing by 2028, followed by a lunar outpost 2 years later

• Trump Media to Merge with Fusion Energy Firm in $6B Deal

  Trump Media & Technology Group agreed to merge with an Alphabet-backed fusion energy firm in a merger valued at $6 billion, seeking to capitalize on the artificial-intelligence boom’s growing power requirements.

  • Trump Media announces $6B merger with fusion company TAE Technologies

  • Trump's social media venture strikes $6B merger deal with fusion power company

  • Trump Media is merging with a nuclear fusion company

  • Truth Social Parent to Merge with Nuclear Fusion Firm in $6B Deal

  • Trump Media Discovers Nuclear Fusion

  • Trump Media bets on fusion energy with $6B TAE deal

  • Why Trump's social media company is merging with a fusion power firm

Left Angst

• MPs warn that UK agreements with Donald Trump are 'built on sand'

• Trump has changed the future of the car industry

  The Biden administration, with the $US7500 tax credit for EV purchases that dates back to 2008 and emissions and fuel efficiency standards within its Inflation Reduction Act, had tried to create a bridge for the vehicle industry so that it could scale up to an EV future. Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act killed off most of the key elements of the Inflation Reduction Act, including the tax credits.

• Rhetorical Demagoguery: An Exploration of Trump's and Hitler's Rise to Power

• Europe's secret weapon against Trump: it could burst his AI bubble

• Ford CEO Jim Farley said Trump would halve the EV market by ending subsidies

• Trump moves to shut down climate research lab, calls its work "alarmism"

• Bias gives 'swing state' voters more influence over US trade policy

  Using decades of economic and political data—from the Clinton years through to the Trump trade wars—the team found that US tariffs are consistently biased toward industries located in swing states such as Florida, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. According to their estimates, the welfare of a voter in a non-swing state is treated as being worth just 82% of that of a voter in a swing state when national trade decisions are made.

• Bedford: FAA lost up to 500 air traffic controller trainees during shutdown

• Scientists skip key US meetings – and seize on smaller alternatives

• Once Again, Health Care Proves to Be a Bitter Political Pill for GOP

• Trump Is Doubling Down on His Disastrous A.I. Chip Policy

  • Wasn't tariffs and trade restrictions the worst thing ever just a year ago? my how time flies.

Law Breaking / Police / Internal Security

• North Korean infiltrator caught at Amazon due to 110ms keystroke lag

• Evidence shows deadly Brown, MIT shootings may be linked, sources say

  • Police ID suspect in Brown University shooting, probe link with MIT killing

  Police have identified a suspect in last weekend's deadly mass shooting at Brown University and are investigating a possible link to the murder of a Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor two days later near Boston, a person familiar with the matter said. The source, who spoke on condition of anonymity as they were not authorized to discuss the matter, did not provide more details on the identification of the suspect or why investigators think the two cases may be linked.

External Security / Militaria / Diplomania

• Venezuela's Maduro says Trump's comments on land and oil reveal his true motives

  • Experts Say Even Average Venezuelans Critical of Maduro Won't Back Regime Change

  • FAA Warns of Military Aircraft Flying Undetected in Caribbean

• US admits liability in helicopter collision with American jet that killed 67

• Military satellites dogfighting as tensions escalate in orbit

• Trump travel ban expanded to include Syria, Palestinians

• U.S. Military members to get $1,776 'warrior dividend'

World

• South Korean contractors on Taiwan submarines jailed for leaking documents

• Creating apps like Signal could be 'hostile activity' claims UK watchdog

• Why the Shipping Forecast endures - New Statesman

  Produced by the Met Office on behalf of the Maritime and Coastguard Agency, the Shipping Forecast is now one of the longest-running radio programmes in the world. Its beauty lies partly in its division of oceanic chaos into reasonable scales and partly in the comfort of knowing that however unpleasant your job or your journey to work may be, it’s as nothing to a storm force ten to the north of Rockall. Perhaps only the weather-obsessed British could have turned a weather forecast into a national totem, but even in its recently reduced form on FM radio (two out of four daily broadcasts are now long wave only) it still provides a service to lyricists, armchair sailors, and insomniacs everywhere.

• Saudi Arabia wants to host the cheapest data centres

• Japan App Store Gets Alternative Marketplaces, Third-Party Payments and More

  • Apple announces App Store and iPhone changes in Japan

  • Apple and Google respond to new Japan smartphone law, including reduced app fees

• Germany: Amazon is not allowed to force customers to watch ads on Prime Video

• What Ireland's Data Center Crisis Means for the EU's AI Sovereignty Plans

• Undoing Haiti’s Deadly Gang Alliance

  A united front of Haiti’s most powerful gangs, Viv Ansanm, has extended its territorial reach, expanded its illicit rackets and pushed the country to a fresh peak of violence. As a new international force readies for deployment, gangs increasingly claim they are fighting to defend the poorest from predatory elites. With Haiti’s transitional government due to wind down in February 2026, gangs are intent on using their clout to place allies in the administration and gain a wide-ranging amnesty. Blessed by the UN, the new Gang Suppression Force could spur a surge in combat, possibly endangering civilian lives. Outside partners should provide the new force with the resources needed to regain territorial control and bring citizens respite. Once the balance of power shifts toward the state, officials should engage the gangs in talks about curbing violence, demobilising the illicit groups, and severing links between crime and Haitian elites.

  • This sounds an awful lot like: "The locals cannot be allowed self-governance; they must be conquered!" ... And this is after a decade and more of American Leftists pouring taxpayer fund into Haiti and proclaiming it a paradise of enlightenment.

• Spain fines Airbnb €65M: Why the government is cracking down on illegal rentals

• EU Launches Multi-Billion "Scaleup Europe Fund"

• We need more people ready to fight, military chief says

• Austrian Supreme Court: Meta must give users full access to their data

Iran / Houthi

• After Ruining a Treasured Water Resource, Iran Is Drying Up

  While failed rains may be the immediate cause of the crisis, they say, the root cause is more than half a century of often foolhardy modern water engineering — extending back to before the country’s Islamic revolution of 1979, but accelerated by the Ayatollahs’ policies since.

Israel

• Killing the 'brain trust': How Israel targeted Iran's nuclear scientists

• Jensen Huang: Israel has become Nvidia's second home

• The Shortest Path to Zionism: A Network Analysis of the US Industrial Complex

  Activists have shown how the nonprofit industrial complex (NPIC) co-opts grassroots social movements, and how the dependence on donors limits what nonprofits can say or do—especially concerning Palestine. Yet the NPIC is rarely analyzed as a whole system. This article analyzes the massive funding network of the NPIC, reconstructed from tax forms, and highlights Zionism’s place within it. I show how the NPIC’s funding web binds many organizations to Zionist nonprofits that directly fuel settler-colonialism in Palestine.

Russia Bad / Ukraine War

• EU leaders face crunch decision on using frozen Russian assets for Ukraine

• Russian border guards crossed into Estonia with unclear motives, minister says

• In secret missile factory, Ukraine is ramping up its domestic arms industry

• Denmark says Russia was behind two 'destructive and disruptive' cyber-attacks

China

• China is building the most powerful hydropower system deep in the Himalayas

• All That Cheap Chinese Stuff Is Now Europe's Problem

• China may have reverse engineered EUV lithography tool in covert lab

• China's unemployed young adults who are pretending to have jobs

• Flying Taxis? China Has Them. and Drone Lunch Deliveries, Too

• China launches $113B free-trade experiment on Hainan island

Health / Medicine

• One Generic Cancer Drug Costs $35. Or $134. Or $13,000

• Marathon Runners May Have Higher Colon Cancer Risk

• Heart and Kidney Diseases and Type 2 Diabetes May Be One Ailment

• Cheese Linked to Lower Dementia Risk in 25-Year Study

• Heart Association Revives Theory That Light Drinking May Be Good for You

  • How about "Some benefit from ethanol, and some don't?" They can't say that because it undermines the "one answer for all" simplicity their Church depends on.

• Rx Inspector: Look Up Where Your Generic Prescription Drugs Were Made

• FDA warns retailers that failed to pull recalled baby formula.

• Could cheese protect your brain health? Study links high-fat cheese and cream to lower dementia risk.

• Fee-based primary care is rapidly rising in US, hastening doctor shortages

Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda

• America's Dirtiest Carbon Polluters, Mapped to Ridiculous Precision

• 'It's an open invasion': how quagga mussels changed Lake Geneva

• Common Home Appliances Emit Trillions of Harmful Particles, Study Finds

  The team tested different types of toasters, air fryers, and hair dryers, and most of these appliances emitted a high number of UFPs. The worst offender was a pop-up toaster, which without any bread inside it, gave off around 1.73 trillion UFPs per minute. Electric heating coils and brushed DC motors in the devices seemed to play a large role in UFP emission. The brushless hair dryers tested emitted some 10 to 100 times fewer particles than the hair dryers with motors inside. What's more, as well as the UFPs, the researchers found evidence of heavy metals – copper, iron, aluminum, silver, and titanium – in the airborne particles too. It seems these metals are most likely coming off the coils and motors directly.

• The world will soon be losing 3000 glaciers every year

• Orange rivers, melting glaciers: federal report shows rapid change in the Arctic

• Pandemic Lockdowns Changed a Songbird's Beak

• How climate breakdown is putting the food in peril – in maps and charts

• Study suggests recent tundra fires 'exceed anything in past 3k years

• Wyoming Blasted by 123 MPH Winds on Wednesday and More Wind to Come