2026-01-15

Horseshit

• The hunt for a stolen Jackson Pollock – and answers to a family's pain

• Volvo Will Make You Safer with Only a Font

• Warmer climate, spicier food. But which country is the spiciest?

• Edsel Ford's Art Deco Hot Rod Gets Remade in Carbon Fiber

• We are living in a time of polycrisis. If you feel trapped – you're not alone

  People are feeling overwhelmed and overstimulated, bombarded with bad news each day – global economic and political instability, the rising cost of living, job insecurity, severe weather events. This not only heightens anxiety but also makes it more difficult to keep going. I hadn’t fully grasped how much the idea of a better future sustained me – how it made life more livable, hardship more bearable and creativity possible. When I could readily imagine a world that was more just and healthy, it was easier to commit to long-term projects and to invest in the next generation. But in our current political and environmental context, that vision has grown hazier – and I, like many others, have found it much more difficult to be productive and plan for the future.

• Nearly 17K Fans Cancel 2026 World Cup Tickets Amid Boycotts

• The abandoned airport being transformed into a $30B sustainable city

• A techie's guide to keeping young kids away from technology

• Nuclear weapons are now ESG compliant

• Young men want to get big. For some, it's becoming an obsession

• David Hockney says moving Bayeux Tapestry to UK is 'madness'

celebrity gossip

• Rams Owner Stan Kroenke Becomes Largest Private Landowner in US with 2.7M Acres

Obit

• Claudette Colvin, Who Refused to Give Her Bus Seat to a White Woman, Dies at 86

Musk

• Tesla to offer self-driving software only on monthly basis from Feb 14 Musk says

  • Tesla driver-assist system FSD will switch to subscription-only

  • Tesla will stop selling FSD after Feb 14

  • Tesla moving Full Self-Driving to a monthly subscription

• Elon Musk Cannot Get Away With This - The Atlantic

  Will Elon Musk face any consequences for his despicable sexual-harassment bot? For more than a week, beginning late last month, anyone could go online and use a tool owned and promoted by the world’s richest man to modify a picture of basically any person, even a child, and undress them.

  • UK nudification app ban won't apply to Elon Musk's Grok

  • Grok will not generate bikini images: changes made to reject vulgar requests

  • Advocacy groups call on Apple, Google to drop X and Grok from app stores

  • X 'acting to comply with UK law' after outcry over sexualised images

  • X to stop Grok AI from undressing images of real people after backlash

  • California Attorney General Investigating XAI over Grok's Deepfakes

• SpaceX will attempt to reach Mars by the end of 2026

Electric / Self Driving cars

• The Volkswagen ID. Buzz Won't Get a 2026 Model

• Ford F-150 Lightning outsold the Cybertruck and was then canceled for poor sales

Edumacationalizing / Acedemia Nuts

• Why do so many students have ADHD?

  Last month, eye-opening statistics were published in this regard. From 2008 to 2023, the proportion of students at UK universities claiming to have a disability doubled from 8 to 16%. Even more strikingly, at Oxford and Cambridge it went from 5 to 20%. And the UK is not alone. As recently noted in The Atlantic, 38% of undergraduates at Stanford are now registered as having a disability. Lagging behind is Harvard, at “only” 21%. (Both were at 5% in 2009.) It’s the same across all developed Western democracies. students are being diagnosed with impairment disorders relating to their ability to learn. And of these, four constitute the bulk: attention deficit and hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), anxiety, depression, and non-profound autism spectrum disorder (ASD). So what is going on? The truth is, it’s complicated. And as a result, two of the most common answers just won’t do.

  The first answer (which The Atlantic reporting leans towards) is that it’s basically all a scam. Here’s the thing: students with registered disabilities are eligible for deadline extensions, extra time during exams, and a whole raft of entitlements regarding seminar attendance and participation. Having realised that students with impairment diagnoses get such special consideration, sharp-elbowed middle-class parents reckon it is a sure-fire way to win their offspring competitive advantage. Shopping around for helpful diagnoses from pliant physicians, the aspirational classes respond to prevailing incentives. Cue the surge in presentation of the disorders.

  the other (and largely opposed) popular explanation for the increase in cases is also too simplistic: that rates of diagnosis have massively increased because medical professionals are now better at spotting underlying conditions which previously went unrecognised. While certainly the case in some instances, this cannot account for such massive increases.

  it was only roughly 40 years ago — when it was diagnosed as a medically recognised thing — that you could identify as a “high functioning autistic”. It became a social role that people could inhabit. And which they could eventually expect others to recognise and accept.

  • Its fashionable to be "disabled" is not a satisfying answer; but those of us with challenges ought to be wary of judging the less severely affected as "normal".

• Amateur sleuth earns £2M reward for exposing research fraud

Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising

• How to get banned from Facebook in one simple step

  Do not mention the Dead Internet Theory, for doing so threatens Facebook's ad revenue and is thus taboo. (A more probable explanation is that using the word "death" is prohibited by itself regardless of context, leading to idiotic phrasing in the style of "Person X was born on [date] and d!ed [other date]" that you see all over IG, FB and YT nowadays.)

• Verizon is down, with many users seeing 'SOS' – here's everything we know

  • Verizon, AT&T, and T-Mobile are all having outages now

  • Verizon Outage Affects Users, Tracking Site Shows

• Switch: robots.txt now required for Googlebot to index website

• Jeff Bezos hopes that you'll give up your PC to rent one from the cloud

TechSuck / Geek Bait

• SparkFun Officially Dropping AdaFruit due to CoC Violation

  Due to recent activities that are in direct violation of our Code of Conduct, which is publicly available on our website, SparkFun has determined that it can no longer transact with Adafruit Industries. Please see the official communication we sent to Adafruit below. Without oversharing, recent violations include:

  • Sending and forwarding offensive, antagonistic, and derogatory emails and material to SparkFun employees, former employees and customers
  • Inappropriately involving a SparkFun customer with a private matter

  • Discontinuing the Teensy at Adafruit

  We were informed by postal mail from SparkFun (the exclusive provider now) that Teensy products will no longer be available to Adafruit. We contacted Paul Stoffregen to confirm, and were told the decision is final.

  Jan 14, 2026 – Looks like SparkFun (Nate) is trying to drag Limor and I on hackernews, here is the post and discussion. And… Paul maker of “teensyduino” for the Arduino-compatible teensy, emailed and said there is “concern” about us saying teensy-compatible for the future unreleased unnamed open source alternative.

AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World

• Matthew McConaughey Trademarks Himself to Fight AI Misuse

• Police chief apologises after AI error used to justify Maccabi Tel Aviv ban

  • UK police chief admits policy relied on CoPilot hallucination

  • Police chief admits misleading MPs after AI used in ban justification

  • UK police blame Microsoft Copilot for intelligence mistake

  • UK police used Copilot AI "hallucination" when banning football fans

• Jensen Huang Is Begging You to Stop Being So Negative About AI

• Signal creator Moxie Marlinspike wants to do for AI what he did for messaging

• McKinsey challenges graduates to use AI chatbot in recruitment overhaul

  • McKinsey asks graduates to use AI chatbot in recruitment process

• Why India's plan to make AI companies pay for training data should go global

• AI generated music barred from Bandcamp

• How Generative AI is destroying society

• Google Gemini will use what it knows about you from Gmail, Search, and YouTube

• Use of AI to harm women has only just begun, experts warn

Space / Boomy Zoomers / UFO

• NASA's SpaceX Crew-11 Go for Undocking on Wednesday

  • ISS astronauts return to Earth early due to illness of crew member

• NASA's Artemis 2 Mission Will Make Spaceflight History

Economicon / Business / Finance

• Meta's VR layoffs, studio closures underscore Zuckerberg's pivot to AI

  • Meta cuts more than 1k in Bay Area tech's first big layoff of 2026

  • Meta Lays Off 1,500 People in Metaverse Division

• Airbnb poaches Meta GenAI leader to be new CTO

  • Airbnb Names Meta's Head of Generative AI as Chief Technology Officer

• Saks Global files for bankruptcy after Neiman Marcus takeover leads to collapse

  • Saks Global files for bankruptcy after takeover leads to financial collapse

• Netflix 'plans to switch to all-cash offer to seal $83B Warner Bros deal'

• Silver Hits Record Above $90 as Precious Metals Rally Powers On

• Dell tells staff to get ready for the biggest transformation in company history

• Oracle sued by bondholders over losses tied to AI buildout

• Is passive investment inflating a stockmarket bubble?

• Americans are paying hundreds more in rent

Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making

• (PDF) US DOJ releases partially redacted documents on Operation Absolute Resolve

• Senate passes a bill that would let nonconsensual deepfake victims sue

• US Senate narrowly blocks effort to rein in Trump's Venezuela war powers

Trump

• Trump says 'anything less' than US control of Greenland is 'unacceptable'

• Trump Imposes Limited Tariffs on Foreign Semiconductors

• Trump would want military action in Iran to be Swift and decisive, sources say

Democrats

• Bill Clinton defies congressional subpoena to appear in Jeffrey Epstein probe | Fox News

  "It's a shame President Clinton failed to appear in accordance with our duly authorized congressional subpoena. This subpoena, I might add, was voted on by the Oversight Committee in a bipartisan fashion. The Oversight Committee will now initiate contempt of Congress proceedings against the former president for defying the law," Comer's voice can be heard saying in the video.

Left Angst

• Medical Groups Will Try to Block Childhood Vaccine Recommendations

• Trump Is Venezuelifying the United States

• Trump Is Risking a Global Catastrophe

• How to De-Risk from America

• DHS Deportation Reels Are Getting Copyright Strikes for Unlicensed Music Use

• Are Seed Oils Bad for You? Debunking a Viral Social Media Myth

  • This is one of the fads that shows the Left's application of "principle"; they were all for anything promising "better health", no matter how silly; until the wrong people agreed. Then they did a 180 so as not to be on the same side as conservatives. It may not possible to work peacefully with people who hold no higher value than "not agreeing with you."

• FBI raids Washington Post reporter's home in 'highly unusual and aggressive' act

  • FBI Searches Home of Washington Post Journalist for Classified Documents

  • FBI raids Washington Post journalist's home, seizes devices

  • Did they bring along the full set of "evidence" for a photo op?

• Whistleblower drops 'largest ever' ICE leak to unmask agents

• EPA makes it harder for states, tribes to block pipelines

• Trump administration sends letter wiping out addiction, mental health grants

• How have prices changed in a year? NPR checked 114 items at Walmart

  The cost of living in the U.S. rose 2.7% in December compared with a year before, according to Tuesday's federal data. That's a steady slowdown after a yearslong stretch of intense inflation, but still painful. The past year also brought a global trade war, as President Trump imposed sweeping tariffs on nearly all imports. And the world continued to grapple with extreme weather, from droughts to downpours.

• US tech giants allying with European far-right to strip back EU rules

• ICE Is Waging War on Blue Cities

• Ford Suspends Factory Worker for Heckling Trump

Law Breaking / Police / Internal Security

• Behind Oklahoma Cannabis Farms, New Yorkers with Ties to Beijing

External Security / Militaria / Diplomania

• Hegseth wants to integrate Musk's Grok AI into military networks this month

  • Grok will be integrated into Pentagon networks, Hegseth says

• Pentagon Reportedly Testing Radio Wave Device Linked to 'Havana Syndrome'

  • About That Sonic Boom Weapon We Reportedly Deployed During Trump's Venezuela Raid...

  • 'Havana Syndrome' Device Could Finally Solve Mystery

  • Device that may be tied to "Havana Syndrome" obtained by U.S. government

• US State Department Threatens UK over Probe into Elon Musk's X

  • UK Officials could face US entry ban over Twitter policy

• US freezes all visa processing for 75 countries, including Somalia, Russia, Iran

  • Trump administration halts immigrant visa processing from 75 countries

  • US to suspend immigrant visa processing for 75 nations, State Department says

• Former U.S. Navy Sailor Sentenced to 200 Months for Spying for China

• US withdrawing troops from key Middle East bases as precaution

World

• South Korea seeks death penalty for ex-president Yoon over martial law bid

• UK government rolls back key part of digital ID plans

  • Keir Starmer abandons plans for compulsory digital ID

  • Government drops plans for mandatory digital ID to work in UK

• UK's Open Cosmos beats Thiel-backed Rivada to European satellite licence

• Denmark sends military reinforcements to Greenland

  • Germany joins European partners with troop deployment to Greenland

  • Greenland: Macron warns of 'cascading consequences' if US seizes island

• EU-US relationship is 'disintegrating,' says Germany's vice chancellor

• Ethiopia begins $12.5B construction of Africa's biggest airport

• EU to become 'military powerhouse,' von der Leyen told MEPs

• 4k tons of potatoes to be given away for free in Berlin

Iran / Houthi

• Iran Jamming of Starlink and Ways to Overcome Jamming

• Why Arab states are silent about Iran's unrest

• The Obscure Bank Collapse That Sent Iran into a Tailspin

• How Iran Switched Off the Internet

China

• China's Hottest New App Is 'Are You Dead Yet'

• China may crack down on "Singapore-washed" tech companies

• China's customs agents told Nvidia's H200 chips are not permitted

• A new generation of Chinese companies is expanding around the world

• 'Hermès of durian': Luxury fruit cashing in on China's billion-dollar appetite

• China announces record $1.2T trade surplus despite Trump tariffs

• Beijing tells Chinese firms to stop using US and Israeli cybersecurity software

• Coal power generation falls in China and India for first time since 1970s

Health / Medicine

• A $2,500 full body scan said he was healthy. Then he had a catastrophic stroke

• The Swedish Startup Aiming to Conquer America's Full-Body-Scan Craze

• Airlines to save big money on fuel as new weight loss pills gain popularity

Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda

• UK secures record supply of offshore wind projects

• King County Public Health advises you to flush your toilet rats

• Maggots, an Efficient Source of Protein, May Become Next Superfood for Humans

• How did birds evolve? The answer is wilder than anyone thought

• The Arctic's 'last ice area' is showing signs of weakness

• Scientists sequence a woolly rhino genome from a 14,400-year-old wolf's stomach

• NASA acknowledges record heat but avoids referencing climate change

• The Climate Question That Economists Cannot Answer