2026-01-03

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• Should US Homebuilders Emulate Sweden? – By Brian Potter

  A common sentiment I see with folks interested in improving US homebuilding is that we should try and emulate Sweden. More specifically, that we should emulate Sweden’s large-scale adoption of prefabricated construction. Something like 85% of Swedish single family homes, along with 30-40% of multifamily buildings, are factory-built, produced in large, impressive-looking factories like Lindbäcks. Per this line of thinking, the main problem with US housing construction is that it’s still done on-site instead of within a more efficient factory, and Sweden shows that it’s possible for prefabrication to be the primary method of home construction.

  for single family home construction, I don’t see much evidence that Sweden has been able to use prefabricated construction to drive substantial efficiencies or cost reductions in the building process. Essentially every productivity or cost metric over the last 30 years shows Sweden looking at best similar to the US, and often looking worse. Average Swedish single family home costs per square foot are substantially higher than in the US. Higher energy efficiency of Swedish homes can partly explain this, but the idea that Swedish prefabrication is more efficient/cheaper once you take this into account seems hard to defend. For multifamily construction, the evidence is slightly stronger that there are some cost/efficiency benefits to prefab, but it still seems highly uncertain to me.

Horseshit

• iPhone swelled during flight, back to normal after landing

• A famous motif started out a failure. Now 130, it's become a global fashion flex

• You Have Only X Years to Escape Permanent Moon Ownership

  The “permanent underclass” meme isn’t being spread by poor people - who are already part of the underclass, and generally not worrying too much about its permanence. It’s preying on neurotic well-off people in Silicon Valley, who fret about how they’re just bourgeois well-off rather than future oligarch well-off, and that only the true oligarchs will have a good time after the Singularity.

• Norman Foster's steroidal new skyscraper is an affront to the New York skyline

• Technology is culture

  Technology is culture. Technological progress does not follow a path from the blackboard of a middle-aged MIT professor to your desk, via a corporation. So what is the cultural background? Of course, there is hacker culture and the way hackers won a culture war in the 1980s by becoming cool enough to have a seat at the table. But closer to us… I believe there are two main roots. The first is gaming. Gamers wanted photorealistic, high-performance games. They built powerful machines capable of solving linear algebra problems at very high speeds. Powerful computing alone, however, does you no good if you want to build an AI. That’s where web culture came in. Everything was networked, published, republished. Web nerds helped build the greatest library the world had ever seen. These two cultures came together to generate the current revolution. If you like my model, I submit that it has a few interesting consequences. The most immediate one is that if you want to understand how and where technological progress happens, you have to look at cultural drivers—not at what professors at MIT are publishing.

• Why Secondhand Is Now Better Than New - by Ted Gioia

  Those out-of-print books are also exquisite—with much higher quality than most of the new books I find on Amazon, with their tiny fonts and cheap paper. And old fashion items are especially prized in this day of cheap, disposable apparel. So you might actually find a better gift at the Salvation Army Store than at Saks. (A passing thought: Maybe that’s part of the problem at Saks.) As a result, vintage buying has almost turned into an extreme sport—with consumers pulling out all the stops to acquire special items. Many are now accessing the vintage apparel market in Japan, where collectors have amassed classic American items no longer available in the US.

  This is much more than nostalgia. New stuff is so poorly made that I’m now increasingly buying old items for my own use, and not only as gifts. The quality coming from the large online retailers is abysmal, and my safest bet is often secondhand.

• Richest People Gained Record $2.2T in 2025, Fueling Calls for Wealth Tax

• "Probability" is a bitch, as is assuming goals: "Always thirders" are wrong about the Sleeping Beauty Problem

• Welcome to the Office. Now Take Off Your Shoes

• Albert Einstein's Brilliant Politics

Rank Propaganda / Thought Policing / World Disordering

• Mapping out the hidden mechanics behind why some fads spread like wildfire

Musk

• Grok is enabling mass sexual harassment on Twitter

• Outrage as X's Grok morphs photos of women, children into explicit content

• Elon Musk's Grok AI alters images of women to digitally remove their clothes

• Who's Responsible for Elon Musk's Chatbot Producing On-Demand CSAM?

• Grok Sexual Images Draw Rebuke, France Flags Content as Illegal

• India orders Musk's X to fix Grok over 'obscene' AI content

• Starlink to lower satellite orbits to avoid space debris

• Tesla sales fall for the second year in a row

• Tesla's fourth quarter sales fell more than expected, 15.6 percent drop

• Tesla sales fell by 9 percent in 2025, its second yearly decline

• Musk 2022: For Twitter to deserve public trust, it must be politically neutral

Electric / Self Driving cars

• China's BYD set to overtake Tesla as top EV seller

  • Tesla loses EV crown to China's BYD

  • China’s BYD Overtakes Tesla As World’s Top EV Seller For The First Time

• Construction to begin on Florida expressway that will charge EVs while driving

• Norway zips ahead in EV race as car sales hit 96% electric

• US battery autonomy will upend EV hierarchy

• 280M e-bikes are slashing oil demand far more than electric vehicles

• Florida county introduces self driving patrol cars

• Self-driving cars aren't nearly a solved problem

Religion / Tribal / Culture War and Re-Segregation

• Bud-Sex: Sexual Flexibility Among Rural White Straight Men Who Have Sex with Men

• The Rise of Homonationalism

  Across Europe, gay voters are moving rightwards. Britain has not quite caught up yet, but it will. The only question is whether the Conservatives or Reform UK will be the ones to benefit.

Edumacationalizing / Acedemia Nuts

• Reading is a vice: US student reading abilities and habits are declining

Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising

• Why everything from your phone to your PC may get pricier in 2026

• Setting up a new PC used to be fun, now it is ad-ridden nightmare

• Can Apple's AirPod Translation Get You Through Tokyo?

• Steam On Linux Ends 2025 With 3.19% Marketshare

• Sony's PlayStation 5 just got hacked forever. Here's why that's a good thing.

• Asus officially announces price hikes from January 5, right before CES 2026

• KPop Demon Hunters Is TIME's 2025 Breakthrough of the Year

  The scene at this Brooklyn theater, during the second sing-along event staged since Netflix released KPop Demon Hunters on June 20, laid bare what has made the movie the streamer’s most watched title of all time. Not since Frozen in 2013 has an animated film been so omnipresent in our lives.

• Parental Controls Aren't for Parents

• Cities: Skylines II Is Secretly a Car Game—and it Doesn't Suck Anymore

  That was in October of 2023. As I’m writing this, the asset editor has been live for about eight hours. Yes, it took two years, but we’re finally here. Some of the community’s best have already started cranking out new buildings. And that’s not the only big update the game received in recent weeks. On top of the editor, Colossal Order finally patched bicycles into the game and released the long-delayed Bridges and Ports DLC. And then they got fired, but that’s a story for another venue. The game remains far from perfect, but we’ve reached the point where it’s serviceable enough to be worth your time, especially if you’re a fan of the city builder genre. Think of it like the world’s biggest digital car mat—only you get to build it from scratch.

• Minimal phone pioneer Punkt is back with a new privacy-focused model at CES

• MTV's Music-Only Channels to Go Off the Air

• MSI teases new PSU with 'instant protection' against melting RTX 5090 cables

• Duolingo Used iPhone's Dynamic Island to Display Ads, Violating Apple Design GUI

• Microsoft kills official way to activate Windows 11/10 without internet

• Apple Vision Pro production reportedly axed, marketing cut by more than 95%

TechSuck / Geek Bait

• HN Jobs:

  • Ask HN: Who is hiring? (January 2026)

  • Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (January 2026)

AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World

• Patients Starting to Fight Back Against Insurance AI Usage

• OpenAI faces a make-or-break year in 2026

• Everyone's Watching Stocks. The Real Bubble Is AI Debt

• Why do Americans hate A.I.?

• So Long, GPT-5. Hello, Qwen

• Computer scientist Yann LeCun: 'Intelligence is about learning'

• AI sex bots can fuel your kinks and freaky fantasies faster than a human partner: new study.

• In Minnesota, a plan for a $4B data center takes root with renewables projects

• OpenAI bets big on audio as Silicon Valley declares war on screens

• How the AI 'Bubble' Compares to History

• Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella wants you to stop calling AI "slop" in 2026

• The rise of AI tools that write about you when you die

• AI Data Centers in Space?

• LeCun calls Alex Wang inexperienced, predicts more Meta AI employee departure

• Yann LeCun: Intelligence is about learning

Space / Boomy Zoomers / UFO

• NASA could be weeks away from its biggest test in decades

Crypto con games

• California crypto company accused of illegally inflating NFTs, fraud

Economicon / Business / Finance

• California dessert empire Sprinkles Cupcakes abruptly closes all stores

• Kraft Heinz Lost Its Lock on Mac and Cheese–and American Shoppers

  • I aint been able to eat their Mac&Cheese at all for a couple years, now. It was a decade of "this is less like food than it used to be" before that.

• A confession from a mainstream food delivery app engineer

  We actually ran an A/B test last year where we didn't speed up the priority orders, we just purposefully delayed non-priority orders by 5 to 10 minutes to make the Priority ones "feel" faster by comparison. Management loved the results. We generated millions in pure profit just by making the standard service worse, not by making the premium service better. But the thing that actually makes me sick—and the main reason I’m quitting—is the "Desperation Score." We have a hidden metric for drivers that tracks how desperate they are for cash based on their acceptance behavior. If a driver usually logs on at 10 PM and accepts every garbage $3 order instantly without hesitation, the algo tags them as "High Desperation." Once they are tagged, the system then deliberately stops showing them high-paying orders. The logic is: "Why pay this guy $15 for a run when we know he’s desperate enough to do it for $6?" We save the good tips for the "casual" drivers to hook them in and gamify their experience, while the full-timers get grinded into dust.

• Saks Prepares for Bankruptcy After Missing Debt Payment

• America's fight back against China starts in Los Angeles

• Chinese memory maker CXMT prepares $4.2B USD IPO as DRAM demand skyrockets

• Economic inequality does not equate to poor well-being or mental health

• Year end sees record borrowing from Fed's standing repo operation

• Oil and gas prices expected to stay significantly lower through 2026.

Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making

• Threat of California Billionaire Tax Draws Criticism from Ultrawealthy

• Somalia's Foreign Minister, UN Ambassador, Ran Health Care Corps in Ohio | Frontpage Mag

  Just when you thought the Somali welfare fraud story couldn’t get any more ridiculous, allegations have emerged that Somalia’s Foreign Minister Abdisalam Abdi Ali and Somalia’s UN Ambassador Abukar Dahir Osman ran a company called Progressive Health Care Services Inc in Cincinatti, Ohio. A LinkedIn profile appearing to belong to Osman certainly reflects this. Strangely the profile states that Osman ran the health care company through 2019 and began serving as Somalia’s ambassador to the UN beginning in 2017. This seems to suggest he ran a health care company in Ohio while also serving as Somalia’s ambassador to the UN. He’s described as having worked as a supervisor at the Medicaid Unit in the Franklin County Department of Family Services and then worked as the Minister of National Security for Somalia while also running Progressive Health Care Services.

• Illinois’ compact fluorescent bulb ban begins to take effect.

• 325,000 Californians will need to replace REAL IDs due to DMV software error

  • Software Error Will Force 325,000 Californians to Replace Real IDs

Trump

• Trump says US will intervene if Iran starts killing protesters: ‘Locked and loaded.’

  • Trump says US will intervene if Iran violently suppresses peaceful protests

Democrats

• Mamdani fans disappointed by disastrous 'block party' inauguration with no food, bathrooms | New York Post

Left Angst

• Trump Mobile delays plan to launch gold-coloured smartphone this year

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

• 2025, the year we took the red pill

  as 2025 draws to a close, we can see evidence of a rebellion afoot. Not a revolution, mind you, but a series of distinct signs that the internet-first mode of life that defined the 2010s and early 2020s is finally and mercifully on the wane. It’s the year of the Great Unplugging, if not for everyone, then for a growing cohort of red-pilled rebels. Ironically, it was the reelection of Donald Trump that has the early adopters — the liberals — reaching for the red pills in greater quantities. For nearly two decades, anti-tech sentiment was most evident on the Right. Conservatives long bemoaned the influence of the media, Hollywood, and academia; and the platforms of Silicon Valley were the staging ground for their constant losses in the culture wars. During the first Trump administration, the content moderator was perceived as a defender of woke capitalism by the Right, but a hero of democracy on the Left. “The power of Big Tech is something that William Randolph Hearst at the height of yellow journalism could not have imagined,” said Ted Cruz back in 2018.

  The evidence of the shift is becoming impossible to ignore — manifesting in a visceral, street-level rejection of the tech-state alliance. In response to the Musk-led “DOGE Days” of the American government, the very people who once prized a Tesla as a sign of enlightened progress began staging Tesla Takedowns, sometimes with fiery results, literally burning the vehicles that were to save the planet from global warming.

• New Trump-ordered immigration restrictions go into effect Jan. 1.

• ICE plans $100M 'wartime recruitment' push targeting gun shows

• America's chip export controls are working

• Trump Almost Has a Point About the Federal Reserve

World

• Horrible fire at the Swiss ski resort bar

  • Swiss Authorities Say Sparklers Probably Caused NYE's Fire, Killing 40 people

• Macron wants to ban under-15s from social media from September 2026

• Europe has 'lost the internet', warns Belgium's cyber security chief

• New subway stations in Naples are a lesson in art and history

• Taiwan's £7.5T secret weapon is disintegrating

• Two dead and church gutted by fire in ‘unprecedented’ New Year’s violence in the Netherlands.

• When the interpreter wept: What automation erases inside Europe's institutions

• India asks refiners for weekly Russian oil import data as it seeks US trade deal

Iran / Houthi

• Israel Monitors Iran Unrest, Concerned Regime May Launch Preemptive Missile Strike.

Russia Bad / Ukraine War

• Ukraine fakes commander's death to trick Russia into paying $500k bounty

• Ukraine enters EU's single mobile roaming zone

China

• In China, A.I. Is Finding Deadly Tumors That Doctors Might Miss

• When $160M worth of Nvidia chips were smuggled into China

• China taxes condoms, contraceptive drugs in bid to spur birth rate

  • Condom tax and cheaper childcare: China's plan to boost birth rates

• Scammers in China Are Using AI-Generated Images to Get Refunds

• BYD Sells 4.6M Vehicles in 2025, Meets Revised Sales Goal

• Is This China's Truck-Mounted Electromagnetic Catapult?

Health / Medicine

• A rare cancer-fighting plant compound has been decoded

• First new motion sickness drug arrives after nearly half a century

Pox / COVID / BioTerror AgitProp

• What is the 'Super Flu' that is spreading in Europe and the United States?

Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda

• Photographing the hidden world of slime mould

• In the Arctic, Drones Help Identify Deadly Virus in Whales

• New Jersey's answer to flooding: buy out and demolish 1200 properties

• Black bear living under house shows no sign of budging; owner mulls legal action

• Alaska Wolf Found with Record Amount of Mercury, a Sign of Growing Contamination