2025-12-23

Horseshit

• Study suggests excessive porn use can cause depression, maybe brain fog

• The ancient monuments saluting the winter solstice

• BMW Patents Proprietary Screws That Only Dealerships Can Remove

• Which genius from history would have been the best investor?

• Pilot Locks Himself on Flight Deck over Back Pay

• 'He Was Poisoned.' Toxic Fumes on Planes Blamed for Deaths of Pilots and Crew

• 'Slightly haunted but manageable': new signs cause confusion in Christchurch

• Canadian hockey player Patrick Dovigi spent $435,000 on one tank of fuel to move Bill Gates’ former superyacht

• Housing crisis is forcing Americans to choose between affordability and safety

• Toxic Fumes on Planes Blamed for Deaths of Pilots and Crew

• One small change in battery design could reduce fires, researchers say

• Against Against Boomers

  Why, exactly, are Boomers so bad? Zooming out, it seems sort of like Boomers have delivered the greatest period of peace and prosperity in history: global, American, take your pick. The window of Boomer dominance, c. 1980 - 2010, saw the fall of Communism, steadily rising incomes, steadily growing life expectancy, and no foreign wars bigger than Iraq (total American death toll: 4,500). The Boomers could reasonably blame their Greatest Generation fathers for sending them to die in Vietnam. Those Greatest Generation fathers could reasonably blame their fathers for plunging the country into a Great Depression. In comparison, we’re mad about - what, exactly? Higher housing prices? Hardly seems World-War-level bad.

  I think a fair analysis by some sort of unbiased far-future historian might well conclude that Boomers were a perfectly normal American generation, maybe a little too fond of cringe Minion memes but otherwise decent enough; on the other hand, Millennials and Zoomers were some sort of mutant nightmare people. I hope my grandkids, if I have them, will love me anyway. Nobody ever controls that; nobody can ever know for sure. But I think respecting Boomers would be a good start.

  • This files under horseshit for buying into the statistical illusion of named generations; some Boomers were heroes, many were fine people; and some were utter bastards. The generations of peace and ease are not particularly attributable to any one fragment of those that live in them.

• What Would It Cost to End Extreme Poverty?

celebrity gossip

• Joan Didion and Kurt Vonnegut Had Something to Say. We Have It on Tape

Obit

• Chris Rea, singer of festive hit Driving Home for Christmas, dies aged 74

• Vince Zampella, Developer of Call of Duty and Battlefield, Dead at 55

  • Call of Duty Co-Creator and EA Executive Vince Zampella Killed in Car Accident

Musk

• The SpaceX Explosion That Put Flights in Danger

• Safety panel says NASA should have taken Starliner incident more seriously

• People Have Died in Crashes Where Tesla Doors Wouldn't Open

• How the Cybertruck's design may have trapped crash survivors in flames

Electric / Self Driving cars

• Uber and Lyft plan to bring robotaxis to London with China's Baidu

• Rivian's AI pivot is about more than chasing Tesla

Robot uprising / Humanioid Helpers

• The Roomba failed because it just kind of sucked

Edumacationalizing / Acedemia Nuts

• High school students forced to fight false allegations of AI cheating

• Science says we've been nurturing "gifted" kids all wrong

• Boys shared AI-generated, nude images of her. After a fight, she was expelled

Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising

• 'Cinderella' Rescued Disney from Ruin

• Can James Cameron make another blockbuster? Even he's not sure

• Spotify says 'anti-copyright extremists' scraped its library

  • Activist group says it has scraped 86M music files from Spotify

• Linux 6.19's Significant 30% Performance Boost for Old AMD Radeon GPUs

• Why lawyers buy so many billboards

TechSuck / Geek Bait

• Perl articles are being memory wiped from Wikipedia

• A power outage in Colorado caused U.S. official time be 4.8 microseconds off

  • NIST NTP clock crisis averted for now

  • NIST was 5 μs off UTC after last week's power cut

AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World

• Amazon Is Filled with AI Book Slop

• Japan to support domestic AI development with $6.34B

• Alibaba's Qwen releases AI model that splits images into editable layers like PS

• It's only 'a matter of time' before every job is wiped out

• I Ran an AI Misinformation Experiment. Every Marketer Should See the Results

  Almost every AI I tested used the fake info—some eagerly, some reluctantly. The lesson is: in AI search, the most detailed story wins, even if it’s false.

• Chinese open-source AIs are winning over a growing number of companies in the US

• That's Not a Blobfish: Deep Sea Social Media Is Flooded by AI Slop

• AI Actor Tilly Norwood and the Impact of Cloud Infrastructure

• AI Data Center Gold Rush Driven by Newcomers

• Amazon overhauls AI team as chief declares an 'inflection point'

• The rise of deepfake cyberbullying poses a growing problem for schools

• AI Is Democratizing Music. Unfortunately

• AI Means the End of Entry-Level Jobs

• Chipwrecked

Space / Boomy Zoomers / UFO

• Pilot reports ‘silver cannister’ UFO feet from his plane during ‘creepy’ air traffic control call: ‘Good luck with the aliens’.

• They're not, but it makes a good headline: Why US and Chinese satellites are dogfighting in orbit

• A German Engineer Has Become the First Wheelchair User in Space

• Japan's H3 suffers second-stage anomaly, QZS-5 satellite lost

Crypto con games

• Binance allowed suspicious accounts to operate even after 2023 US plea agreement

Economicon / Business / Finance

• iRobot bankruptcy revealed a new kind of competitor: 'the Chinese fast follower'

• How Pepsi saved the Roomba, and how Lina Khan murdered it.

• Apollo cuts risk and stockpiles cash in preparation for market turmoil

• One of Elon Musk's Old Enemies Joins the Race to Run GM

• Cocoa Prices Face Worst Annual Collapse In Six Decades As Goldman Sees "Tailwinds" For Hershey | ZeroHedge

  After nearly tripling last year and soaring to a record $13,000 a ton, cocoa futures are on track for their worst-ever annual decline, based on data going back more than six decades. Cocoa futures in New York are set for a 50% decline if losses persist through the end of the year.

  • So the price hikes weren't because of environmental catastrophe or economic Armageddon; it was just market manipulation for profit...

• Uber Cleared Violent Felons to Drive. Passengers Accused Them of Rape

• What It's Like to Retire in America After Age 75

• Larry Ellison provides personal guarantee for Paramount takeover of Warner Bros

  • Larry Ellison pledges $40B personal guarantee for Paramount's Warner Bros. bid

• Paramount amends its $30 per share all-cash offer for warner bros. Discovery

• How $24M in new technology is helping beef giant Cargill up its game

• Gold and silver hit records as investors hunt for safety

• Can Americans learn to love tiny, cheap kei cars?

• Google Buys Data Center Company for $4.75B

• Instacart scraps AI pricing tests that made some products more expensive

• Jim Beam halts production at main distillery for a year

Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making

• New York's Congestion Pricing Is Working. Five Charts Show How

• Why are California's Indian truck drivers disappearing during the holiday rush? - Los Angeles Times

  Trucking companies across California are idling their vehicles and losing money after the DMV canceled thousands of commercial driver licenses held by immigrants. The policy has hit thousands of Indian truckers who have become a pillar of the state’s supply chain.

• Feds demand compromise on Colorado River while states flounder

Trump

• New Trump envoy says he will serve to make Greenland part of US

• Mystery as YouTube creator's finance livestream appears on White House website

Democrats

• Newsom launches website tracking Trump's top criminal cronies

  • Is he allowed to use State resources for his presidential campaign?

Left Angst

• Why immigration research is probably biased

  Even though all teams tested the same hypothesis using the same data, “no two teams arrived at the same set of numerical results. More strikingly, there is not even broad agreement on whether the effect is negative (immigration erodes welfare support), positive (immigration increases it), or non-existent. Large shares of research teams find negative, positive, and no significant effect, respectively.

  • Data is not the prime determinant of results.

• CBS's Bari Weiss abruptly pulled segment on Trump deportations

  • "60 Minutes" pulls segment, prompting editorial independence concerns

• Acting CISA director failed a polygraph, career staff now under investigation

• ICE sending immigrants from continental U.S. to Hawaii, and no one knows why

• The U.S. Is Funding Fewer Grants in Every Area of Science and Medicine

• Trump Halts Five Wind Farms Off the East Coast

  • US Administration halted largest Offshore Wind project in the U.S.

  • Trump Administration Halts All Offshore Wind Projects

  • Trump has always hated offshore wind. Now he's moving to kill it

  • US blocks all offshore wind construction, says reason is classified

• Trump's First Year Reshaped U.S. Energy and Climate Policy

• US 'demolishing its scientific leadership with a wrecking ball'

Law Breaking / Police / Internal Security

• How police tracked down the Brown University shooter

• MAGA's Manly Manufacturing Misfire

External Security / Militaria / Diplomania

• America's monopoly crisis hits the military

  the destruction of America’s once vibrant military and commercial industrial capacity in many sectors has become the single biggest unacknowledged threat to our national security. Because of public policies focused on finance instead of production, the United States increasingly cannot produce or maintain vital systems upon which our economy, our military, and our allies rely. Huawei is just a particularly prominent example.

• Norad Celebrates 70 Years of Tracking Santa

• U.S. Defense Industry Dodged a Rare-Earth Shortage After China's Curbs

• FCC bans foreign-made drones over national security, spying concerns

  • Trump Administration Declares Foreign-Made Drones a Security Threat

World

• Can India catch up with the US, Taiwan and China in the global chip race?

• Man boards flight without ticket, boarding pass or passport in security breach

• Europe gets serious about cutting digital umbilical chord with US big tech

• Japan to restart biggest nuclear power plant, 15 years after Fukushima

  • Japan prepares to restart biggest nuclear plant, 15 years after Fukushima

• Family 'banned from more than 1k petrol stations' amid fuel theft row

• Italian Competition Authority Fines Apple $115M for Abusing Dominant Position

• Protect us from Russian sabotage drone firm begs Labour: maybe Russian phishing

• From Hyperinflation to the Euro

• What has gone wrong at Zipcar – and is UK car-sharing market dead?

• Do the Swiss face an identity crisis?

• Post Office had deal with Fujitsu to fix Horizon errors 19 years ago

• Inquiry ongoing after UK government hacked, says minister

• Cyberattack disrupts France's postal service and banking during Christmas rush

• Kimchi, made in China: how South Korea's national dish is being priced out

Iran / Houthi

• Ways teams can tackle Iran's tangled web of state-sponsored espionage

Israel

• Israel could be bringing back the death penalty – but only for Palestinians

• Land Grab: Israel's Escalating Campaign for Control of the West Bank

Russia Bad / Ukraine War

• Russian General Killed by Car Bomb

China

• Chinese Chipmakers Race to IPOs

• Moore, Ex-Nvidia Billionaire Unveils New AI Chips After China IPO Debut

  • China's Moore Threads unveils new chip in homegrown AI race

• How America Gave China an Edge in Nuclear Power

• China Issues First Penalty for Starlink Use in Territorial Waters

• Jimmy Lai Is a Martyr for Freedom

Health / Medicine

• A middle-class family's only option: A $43,000 health insurance premium

• Scientists Warn Popular Painkiller May Do More Harm Than Good.

  A large review of existing studies suggests that tramadol, a strong opioid frequently prescribed for chronic pain, offers only limited relief for the conditions it is commonly used to treat. The findings come from a pooled analysis of available research published online in BMJ Evidence-Based Medicine. The analysis also points to a higher likelihood of serious adverse effects, including heart disease. Based on these results, the researchers conclude that the risks associated with tramadol are likely greater than its benefits and recommend that its use be reduced.

• He made beer that's also a vaccine. Now controversy is brewing

• America's Seniors Are Overmedicated

• Don't Cheer the End of America's Obesity Crisis Just Yet

• The Peptide Craze

• The FDA Often Doesn't Test Generic Drugs for Quality Concerns, So ProPublica Did

• Older Americans Quit Weight-Loss Drugs in Droves

• Samsung Biologics to buy US drug production facility from GSK for $280M

• FDA approves first GLP-1 pill for obesity

  • FDA approves Novo Nordisk's Wegovy pill, the first and only oral GLP-1

  • Pill Version of Wegovy Is Approved for Use in the U.S.

• Aspartame study suggests that current guidelines should be re-examined

Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda

• Risks of Bottled Water

• The science of green hair care

• Fossilized Bee Nests Inside Skeletons Are Unlike Anything We've Seen Before

• "Crustivoltaics" – A New Way to Replace Biocrusts Damaged by Humans

• Cultivated meat startup meatable shuts down after failing to secure new funding

• Saudi Arabia witnesses rare snowfall for first time in 30 years