2026-01-19
Horseshit
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'Read this and you will be happier': experts pick the self-help books that work
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Half American, half Canadian: Take a ride in a car welded from two front ends
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Manual Transmission Thwarts Thieves' Attempt to Steal a Woman's (Kia) Soul
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What the Ancient Pigment Ochre Tells Us About the Human Mind
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Ford’s Betting Hard on its 30-Year-Old V8 to Beat Ferrari Again.
celebrity gossip
Rank Propaganda / Thought Policing / World Disordering
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Why Young Women Moved Left While Young Men Stayed Sane
The answer isn't "women are emotional" and it isn't "social media bad." The answer is that we built global-scale consensus engines and deployed them on a species with sexually dimorphic psychology. The machines captured the half more susceptible to consensus pressure. Then they started capturing the other half through different mechanisms.
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The Discourse is a Distributed Denial-of-Service Attack
Most of the topics that dominate our collective attention on any given day are genuinely important to... someone. And many of them are important to almost everyone. The problem is structural. The total volume of things-you-should-have-an-opinion-about has exceeded our cognitive bandwidth so thoroughly that having careful opinions about anything has become damned-near impossible. Your attention is a finite resource being strip-mined by an infinite army of takes. "The discourse is bad" is itself a discourse-position, and I'm aware of the irony of adding another take to the pile of steaming shit. But my argument isn't that people should stop having opinions, or that controversies aren't worth discussing, or that we should all log off and touch grass (none of us will). My argument is that the current structure of public conversation has the same effect on human cognition that a botnet has on a web server. It's simply exhausting you. And an exhausted mind defaults to heuristics and tribal allegiances, aka whatever position allows it to conserve the most cognitive energy.
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How can we defend ourselves from the new plague of 'human fracking'?
History teaches that new technologies always make possible new forms of exploitation, and this basic fact has been spectacularly exemplified by the rise of society-scale digital platforms. It has been driven by a remarkable new way of extracting money from human beings: call it “human fracking”. Just as petroleum frackers pump high-pressure, high-volume detergents into the ground to force a little monetisable black gold to the surface, human frackers pump high-pressure, high-volume detergent into our faces (in the form of endless streams of addictive slop and maximally disruptive user-generated content), to force a slurry of human attention to the surface, where they can collect it, and take it to market. Fracking (of the Earth and of our minds) produces tectonic instability, toxicity and the despoliation of our landscapes, natural and social. We now know that the heedless exploitation of our external environment has been so relentless and irresponsible that human survival on Earth has been placed in actual jeopardy. The new “gold rush” into the inner environment of the human psyche is well on its way to effecting parallel, if even more insidious destruction.
Musk
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The Walls Are Closing in on Tesla
Thanks to his combination of ignorance, grift and hubris, Elon Musk is the king of self-destruction. Just take Tesla’s weird door handles. Back in 2016, Musk personally pushed for almost all vehicle functions, including the door handles, to be controlled by electric buttons or touchscreens. His own engineers and executives warned that this is a huge safety risk, as if the battery pack fails, as it very well can in a crash, then the doors can’t be opened by the occupants or rescue services. They argued for traditional, fully mechanical door handles, but Musk vetoed them for purely aesthetic reasons. He even pushed for the mechanical override, meant to be used in such emergencies, to be hidden, which made it hard, or even impossible, to use in emergencies.
- Yet it wasn't until his politics shifted that it was permissible to discuss these faults in public. Perhaps the problem isnt Musk but a cult of progressivism that elevates unexamined ideas to prominence without any critical thought. Sam Altman is the media's "New Musk" and theres all sorts of shit about him that will be coming out later, when the shine wears off... but can't be spoken of now.
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Tesla investigates whether its self-driving technology caused traffic violations
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'He's an Idiot': Musk and Ryanair's O'Leary Trade Insults in Starlink Wi-Fi Row
Electric / Self Driving cars
Edumacationalizing / Acedemia Nuts
Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising
AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World
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OpenAI launches cheaper ChatGPT subscription, says ads are coming next
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AI programs can tell race from X-rays, but scientists don’t know how. Here’s why that’s bad.
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Warren Buffett compares AI risks to those posed by nuclear weapons
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AI companies will fail. We can salvage something from the wreckage
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Chinese AI Developers Say They Can't Beat America Without Better Chips
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Claude Is Taking the AI World by Storm, and Even Non-Nerds Are Blown Away
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Right-wing pundits suddenly hate an AI bill. Are they getting paid to kill it?
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Claude Is Taking the AI World by Storm, and Even Non-Nerds Are Blown Away
Space / Boomy Zoomers / UFO
Economicon / Business / Finance
Trump
Left Angst
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Why Silicon Valley is talking about fleeing California (it's not the 5%)
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What ‘Landman’ Understands About Oil - The New York Times
America’s fossil fuel dependency is not an inevitability or a lost cause. The obstacles to transitioning off fossil fuels are political, not technical. “Landman” cannot weave a fantasy of oil-field roughnecks as romantic Yellowstone-esque cowboys while also depicting the reality of the oil business — a far-too-dangerous and destructive industry that most people in the U.S. and around the globe want their countries to move away from, including many of those who work in the industry itself. And so, consistently, the show acts less as a vehicle for pro-oil propaganda than an indictment of the entire industry.
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'We'll Sue': White House's Warning to CBS Is Sign of a New Media Status Quo
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Minneapolis protesters allegedly attack Jake Lang during 'March Against Fraud' | New York Post
Leftwing protesters attacked and allegedly stabbed pardoned Jan. 6 rioter and Florida Senate candidate Jake Lang Saturday after his “March Against Fraud” was met with violent pushback in Minneapolis, video showed. Lang was repeatedly bashed on the back of the head by several protesters who swung fists, flags, and objects as he fled the chaotic scene, video posted to X showed.
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I want you to have no doubts about this. If the orders come, ICE will kill you. They are like dogs. They have no loyalty but to their master. Don’t confuse them with all the other dogs of the state – these ones have been selected for their willingness to obey that one man from whom our troubles spring. There can be no argument with them, no reasoning. When they are deployed to the only task for which they are suited, we will either surrender, kill them, or be killed.
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Countries have gotten results after enriching the Trumps. Could Canada be next?
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Kristi Noem chides CBS host for naming ICE agent involved in Renee Good shooting
External Security / Militaria / Diplomania
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Pentagon readies 1,500 troops to possibly deploy to Minnesota, US media say
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Major plumbing headache haunts $13B U.S. carrier off the coast of Venezuela
The USS Gerald R. Ford has been deployed for seven months since it left Norfolk in June. The carrier is currently at the center of the Trump administration's flotilla of Navy ships in the Caribbean. Since the raid that captured Venezuelan leader Nicolas Maduro, the carrier continues to work with the Coast Guard as the U.S. interdicts oil tankers tied to Venezuela. On board the carrier, the crew is battling a toilet system that the General Accountability Office reported in 2020 was undersized and poorly designed. The system continues to fail during deployment, forcing the crew of 4,600 sailors to live with a system that randomly breaks down during their months at sea.
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Statement by Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, the Netherlands,Norway,Sweden,UK
As members of NATO, we are committed to strengthening Arctic security as a shared transatlantic interest. The pre-coordinated Danish exercise ”Arctic Endurance” conducted with Allies, responds to this necessity. It poses no threat to anyone. We stand in full solidarity with the Kingdom of Denmark and the people of Greenland. Building on the process begun last week, we stand ready to engage in a dialogue based on the principles of sovereignty and territorial integrity that we stand firmly behind. Tariff threats undermine transatlantic relations and risk a dangerous downward spiral. We will continue to stand united and coordinated in our response. We are committed to upholding our sovereignty.
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German industry lashes out at Trump's 'ludicrous' demands
Trump's threat to implement a wave of increasing tariffs on European allies until the U.S. is allowed to buy the strategically important island derails a period of relative calm for businesses after Brussels and Washington agreed a trade deal last summer.
World
Iran / Houthi
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Iran report says 16,500 dead in 'genocide under digital darkness'
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Iran's Khamenei Says US, Israel Linked To Deadly Protest Violence: 'Thousands Killed' | ZeroHedge
On this, Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has also weighed in, claiming that actors linked to the United States and Israel were responsible for killing "several thousands" during the anti-government protests. "Those linked to Israel and US caused massive damages and killed several thousands" he said Saturday. The US and Western allies have repeatedly rejected these Iranian claims of 'foreign plotting'.
Iran has said that hundreds of police and security personnel were killed or wounded, and has cited videos showing armed supposed 'protesters' seeking to wage an insurgency against government positions. It should come as no surprise that Israeli or Western intelligence should seek to hijack and steer the protests toward some kind of regime destabilization goal. But this scenario is always hard to prove amid the fog of war and thick propaganda coming from all sides.