2025-12-31

Horseshit

• Turkey's ancient, caffeine-free coffee alternative

• Undisciplined? Entitled? Lazy? Gen Z faces familiar flood of workplace criticism

• Americans in 1998 tried to predict 2025

• How diamonds are powering a new quantum revolution

• Election betting on prediction markets apps is set to boom ahead of midterms

• Toronto man outruns streetcars to show up sluggish transit network

• Prediction markets barely make money; sportsbooks make money

• We lost the habit of sleeping in two segments and that changed our sense of time

• 'Commuting Is Bad'–Particularly for Women

• The Truth about Affordability

• The sword-wielding man hired to kick squatters out of empty Oakland homes

• We Fall for Narcissistic Leaders, Starting in Grade School

• Unproven air taxi company is spending $126M to take over an L.A. airport

celebrity gossip

• Beyoncé is now the fifth billionaire musician

• YouTuber Ross Creations probed for animal abuse over 'opossum launcher' video

Obit

• Louis Gerstner, former IBM CEO who revitalized 'Big Blue,' dies at 83

  • Louis Gerstner, Who Revived a Faltering IBM in the '90s, Dies at 83

• Tatiana Schlossberg, granddaughter of John F Kennedy, dies aged 35

Musk

• Tesla Model 3 sedans face federal safety probe over hidden emergency releases

• A Second Year of Decline for Tesla's EVs

• Tesla Compiles Downbeat Average Estimates for Its Vehicle Sales

• Waymo sues Santa Monica, and the city sues right back: Court fight ahead

Electric / Self Driving cars

• When robot taxis get stuck, a secret army of humans comes to the rescue

Religion / Tribal / Culture War and Re-Segregation

• Star of Bethlehem might have been a comet described in an ancient Chinese text

Edumacationalizing / Acedemia Nuts

• Why I'm Leaving Harvard

  I am coming to the end of a four-year retirement contract that I signed in the fall of 2021. That year I decided I no longer wanted to teach at Harvard. We had just endured almost two years under the university’s strict Covid regime. This was a form of emergency governance that mirrored to a fault the whole country’s uncritical acceptance of The Science and its proclivity, when backed by public power, for tyrannous invasions of private life. At Harvard, professors were told we had to lecture in masks and give seminars on zoom. Neither practice accorded with my idea of liberal education.

  The year earlier the university had collectively taken a knee during the Summer of Floyd. This turned out not to be empty virtue-signalling, as I expected, but had serious consequences for the way we conducted our affairs. In reviewing graduate student applicants in the fall of 2020 I came across an outstanding prospect who was a perfect fit for our program. In past years this candidate would have risen immediately to the top of the applicant pool. In 2021, however, I was told informally by a member of the admissions committee that “that” (meaning admitting a white male) was “not happening this year.” In the same year a certifiably brilliant undergraduate I had tutored, who was literally the best student at Harvard—he won the prize for the graduating senior with the best overall academic record—was rejected from all the graduate programs to which he applied. He too was a white male. I called around to friends at several universities to find out why on earth he had been rejected. Everywhere it was the same story: Graduate admissions committees around the country had been following the same unspoken protocol as ours. The one exception I found to the general exclusion of white males had begun life as a female.

Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising

• Return of wired headphones is restoring friction to our convenience-addled lives

• Cinemas and unions sound alarms over Netflix-Warner Bros. deal

• 700Credit data breach exposes SSNs of 5.8M consumers

• Are There Fourth Amendment Rights in Google Search Terms?

• Google Home Users Are Trying to Hack Their Way to a Better Voice Assistant

TechSuck / Geek Bait

• Conditions in the Intel 8087 floating-point chip's microcode

  In this post, I examine the 49 types of conditional tests that the 8087's microcode uses inside its algorithms. Some conditions are simple, such as checking if a number is zero or negative, while others are specialized, such as determining what direction to round a number.

AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World

• The New Billionaires of the A.I. Boom

• Now we are done with these AI data centers

• Why Indian cinema is awash with AI

• Ex-WSJ reporter who exposed Theranos fraud sues AI giants

• Meta Buys AI Startup Manus, Adding Paying Users

  • Meta Acquires Manus

  • Meta to acquire Chinese startup Manus to boost advanced AI features

  • Meta Buys AI Startup Manus for More Than $2B

• Sam Altman offers $555k salary to fill most daunting role in AI

• AI Chatbots Linked to Psychosis, Say Doctors

• Michael Burry Bets He Isn't Too Early to Go Against the AI Juggernaut

• An Anti-A.I. Movement Is Coming. Which Party Will Lead It?

• Sora will make social media creators 'far, far, far less valuable'

• Librarians Tired of Being Accused of Hiding Secret Books That Were Made Up by AI

• Are these AI prompts damaging your thinking skills?

• Groq investor sounds alarm on data centers

• SoftBank funds $40B OpenAI Investment

• The Problem with Letting AI Do the Grunt Work

• My Couples Retreat with 3 AI Chatbots and the Humans Who Love Them

• AI showing signs of self-preservation and humans should be ready to pull plug

• 'This will be a stressful job' Altman offers $555k salary for daunting AI role

• OpenAI's cash burn will be one of the big bubble questions of 2026

Space / Boomy Zoomers / UFO

• NASA Craft to Face Heat-Shield Test on Its First Astronaut Flight Next Year

Crypto con games

• Texas community votes no on incorporating to fight Bitcoin mine

Economicon / Business / Finance

• Octopus Energy to sell stake in software spin-off Kraken at $8.65B valuation

• Silver prices are going crazy

• Be fearful when others are greedy: Warren Buffett's sharpest lessons in investing

• Big Banks Enjoy Stealth Bailouts

  For the past two months the Federal Reserve has been silently injecting tens of billions of dollars of cash into banks. No one announced this. Henry found the evidence in public records that few, if any, Wall Street journalists consult, but that we routinely review at DCReport. The Federal Reserve Bank of New York (NYFed), acting like a financial Santa Claus to recklessly naughty bankers, delivered $17 billion in cash to an unknown bank or banks at 8 AM the morning after Christmas. That’s just the latest scary development that has gone unreported until now.

• Walmart Leaving the New York Stock Exchange for Nasdaq in Rebranding Effort

• Top US law firms hand associates $300k-plus bonuses

• Why Private-Equity Millionaires Love South Dakota

• Dollar on track for steepest annual drop for almost a decade

• America's economy looks set to accelerate

• The Bruising Reality of Searching for a Job at 65

Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making

• Patriotism tests loom for big business

Trump

• Trump admin halts all childcare payments to Minnesota after massive fraud allegations: ‘We have turned off the money spigot.’

Democrats

• California's Ro Khanna faces Silicon Valley backlash after embracing wealth tax

• "Quality Learing Center" First Domino To Fall As Somali-Linked Minneapolis Daycare Scandal Shocks Nation | ZeroHedge

  • Minnesota's Somali scams get worse by the day — who will pay? | New York Post

  A decade ago the FBI investigated Somali child-care fraudsters for opening daycare centers with no kids and collecting state money for fictitious children. “A number of Somalis went to prison, but it didn’t deter others from carrying out similar frauds, on a grander scale,” Hinderaker wrote on his PowerLine blog.

• NYC Mayoral Inauguration Bans Raspberry Pi and Flipper Zero Alongside Explosives

• Mamdani Will Be Sworn in at Abandoned Subway Station Beneath City Hall

Left Angst

• Nicolas Guillou, French ICC judge sanctioned by the US and "debanked"

• One of America's Most Successful Experiments Is Coming to a Shuddering Halt

• Tracking the Short-Run Price Impact of U.S. Tariffs

• Tech Billionaires Threaten to Flee California–Again

• Justice Department Using Fraud Law to Target Companies on DEI

  • US Justice Department using fraud law to target companies on DEI

• Obama Judge Legalizes Assaulting ICE Personnel | Frontpage Mag

  Federal authorities had accused Parias, a well-known TikTok streamer of local breaking news, of ramming his car into agents’ vehicles after they boxed him in and tried to arrest him during an immigration enforcement operation in October. An ICE officer opened fire, striking Parias in the arm and injuring a deputy U.S. marshal with a ricochet bullet. That same day, prosecutors charged Parias with assault on a federal officer. In November, he was indicted by a grand jury. Parias was scheduled to go to trial on Tuesday. In his 28-page order, Olguin dismissed the indictment with prejudice, meaning prosecutors cannot refile the same charges of assault on a federal officer using a deadly or dangerous weapon and depredation of government property.

• California drops lawsuit over Trump pulling high-speed rail funding.

• Foreign tech workers are avoiding travel to the US

• Now That He Has No Power, Mitt Romney Says "Tax the Rich"

• The Heritage Foundation Shows How MAGA Will Die

• We still don't know what Elon Musk's DOGE did

Law Breaking / Police / Internal Security

• Baltimore homicides declined furthest, fastest, could reach a 48-year low

• U.S. cybersecurity experts plead guilty for ransomware attacks

External Security / Militaria / Diplomania

• The U.S. offers Ukraine a 15-year security guarantee for now

• US approves Samsung, SK Hynix chipmaking tool shipments to China

World

• Kidnapped by Deutsche Bahn

• German hackers call for 'digital independence days' to reduce US tech grip

• Digital age brings Denmark's postal service to a historic end

  • PostNord, Denmark's Main Postal Carrier, Ends Letter Delivery

• India has surpassed Japan to become the fourth-largest economy

• Cheap Solar Is Transforming Lives and Economies Across Africa

Iran / Houthi

• Iran developing unconventional warheads for ballistic missiles, sources say

• Protests erupt in Iran over currency’s plunge to record low.

• Iran's currency collapse sparks second day of trader protests

• Iran Protests Enter Third Straight Day as Students Join In

Russia Bad / Ukraine War

• The former Chinese police officer bringing bubble tea to wartorn Ukraine

• Russia claims to have moved nuclear-capable missile system into Belarus

China

• IMF urges China to address economic imbalances as trade surplus hits $1T

• China mandates 50% domestic equipment rule for chipmakers sources say

• China's Push to Master the Arctic Opens an Alarming Shortcut to U.S.

• Chinese AI 'tiger' Zhipu edges towards Hong Kong listing expected to raise $300M

• China drafts strictest rules to end AI-encouraged suicide, violence

• China holds military drills around Taiwan as warning to 'separatist forces'

• EV Makers Just Got a New Problem in China, and It Starts in 2026

• Chinese cars are beating European tariffs

• China mandates 50% domestic equipment rule for chipmakers

Health / Medicine

• Do High-Fat Dairy Products Protect the Brain?

• Marks and Spencer launches 'nutrient dense' range for people on weight-loss jabs

• Daily orange juice could be helping your heart

• ADHD drugs don't work the way we thought

• Gestational diabetes rose every year in the US since 2016

Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda

• Nepal to scrap 'failed' Mount Everest waste deposit scheme

• 2025 Was Another Exceptionally Hot Year

• Turning up the heat on steel's carbon pollution problem

• Bison return to Illinois' Kane County after 200 years

• The Oil Company Drilled. The Government Slaughtered. Who Is Guilty?

• Assessing Public Support for Degrowth

• Mitigation needed to avoid unprecedented multi-decade North Atlantic Oscillation

• Brazil's Amazon rainforest at risk as key protection under threat

• What Scientists Found When a Deep Sea Mining Company Invited Them In