2026-01-23

etc

• Maine factory that makes Lincoln Logs to close, setting off frantic search for new manufacturer

• Do Commodities Get Cheaper over Time?

  Broadly, agricultural commodities tend to get cheaper over time, while fossil fuels have a slight tendency to get more expensive. Minerals (chemicals, metals, etc.) have a slight tendency towards getting cheaper, with a lot of variation — 15 minerals more than doubled in price over their respective time series. But this has shifted over the last few decades, and recently there’s been a greater tendency for commodities to rise in price.

Horseshit

• Ancient handprints may represent some of the first rock art

  • Discovered: An outline of a hand that's at least 67,800 years old

  • Oldest cave painting could rewrite human creativity timeline

  • Oldest-known rock art found in Indonesian cave

• How Animals Build a Sense of Direction

• Forty years in the Siberian wilderness: the Old Believers who time forgot

• Mystery tower fossils may come from a newly discovered kind of life

• Are laser-based spark plugs a viable option?

  • whatever separates the suckers from some money. See also: Radioactive Spark Plugs

• The science of addiction: Do you always like the things you want?

• House Sellers Needn't Disclose Basement Floor Swastika and Nazi Eagle Tiles

• US sports say parity is essential for success. Premier League proves that untrue

• The Sciencewashing of Everyday Life

celebrity gossip

• Elizabeth Holmes asks President Donald Trump to let her out of prison early

• Toby Kiers, World Champion of Fungus

• Tiger Woods turns 50 with competitive future in question

Obit

• Joe Montgomery, Who Made Bicycles Lighter, Dies at 86

Rank Propaganda / Thought Policing / World Disordering

• Dissolving the Comfort Monopoly

  the desire for a managed consensus isn’t new. For decades, it was the default, until the narrative monopoly began to fracture. When the Fairness Doctrine lapsed in 1988 and Rush Limbaugh took off, his wasn’t just a new voice—it was a voice outside the broadcast bottleneck. By 1994, Bill Clinton was calling him out by name. He wasn’t reacting to ideology. The White House was frustrated by the loss of narrative control. Every new medium since—blogs, podcasts, online video, social media—has provoked the same complaint: it “causes division.” Translation: it splits the narrative. Notice how each new platform is described not merely as partisan but increasingly “far-right,” as if the existence of alternative reporting were itself extremist. If the concern were truly ideological fragmentation, we’d hear comparable alarm about far-left voices or the genuinely unclassifiable ones. We don’t because fragmentation was never the real fear. It was about losing control of which fragments people see.

• TikTok is still a danger. America no longer cares

  • China, US sign off on TikTok US spinoff

  • TikTok Strikes Deal for New U.S. Entity, Ending Long Legal Saga

Musk

• Waymo founder John Krafcik: Tesla's Full Self-Driving has 'bad case of myopia'

• Musk told Davos self-driving is "solved"

• Grok Created Sexualized Images

• Tesla begins public unsupervised Robotaxi rides

• Engineer at Elon Musk's XAI Departs After Spilling the Beans in Interview

• SpaceX lines up 4 banks for blockbuster IPO

Electric / Self Driving cars

• Waymo begins much-anticipated service in Miami

Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising

• Raspberry Pi Flash Drive

• Debian's FreedomBox Blend promises an easier home cloud

  The FreedomBox project, kicked off by original FSF legal boffin Eben Moglen, aims to make it easy to run your own private server, and get your files, photos, email, and other data out of the enfolding pseudopodia of giant cloud providers (mostly based in the USA) and into your own home.

• Further scarcity: World leaders allegedly reduce NAND flash production

  According to the report, Samsung might only produce just under 4.7 million silicon wafers with NAND flash chips for SSDs in 2026, down from 4.9 million. This would represent a decrease of just over four percent. For SK Hynix, 1.7 million wafers are being considered instead of 1.9 million, a drop of just over ten percent. Chosun Biz reports analyst opinions suggesting that the two manufacturers want to increase the margins for SSD products.

• Nvidia is expected to launch its consumer-oriented N1X processor this quarter.

• ReactOS Celebrates 30 Years in Striving to Be an Open-Source Windows

• Meta wants to block social media use, mental health in child safety trial

• You can now download Windows 7 and Vista ISO images with all the updates

• Ubisoft cancels six games including Prince of Persia and closes studios

• Threads Feed Will Show Ads Soon, May Start Next Week

• Kioxia's memory is sold out for 2026, prolonging a high-end and expensive phase

• Curl ending bug bounty program after flood of AI slop reports

  • Overrun with AI slop, cURL scraps bug bounties to ensure "intact mental health"

• SSDs now cost 16x more than HDDs due to AI supply chain crisis

• Epic and Google have a secret $800M Unreal Engine and services deal

TechSuck / Geek Bait

• Getting Started with Anabit's PiWave DAC 150 MS/s

  PiWave DAC uses the Raspberry Pi RP2350 microcontroller and its programmable I/O (PIO) subsystem to directly control the DAC's parallel input. This allows it to generate analog waveforms at a blazing 150 MS/s sample rate. The PIO architecture eliminates the need for an FPGA, allowing the user to create complex waveforms in a open source C programming environment.

AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World

• An A.I. Startup Says It Wants to Empower Workers, Not Replace Them

• Palantir CEO: With AI, economies won't need immigration

• AI Harm Statistics Expert Analysis

• Will Google Become Our AI-Powered Central Planner?

  while the fight over generative AI generates a lot of chatter, there is one key question that we have to answer to understand its trajectory. How is Google Gemini going to make money? Right now, Google’s revenue stream comes from advertising via its search monopoly. Search queries are cheap, and the ads Google sells are pricey due to its market power, so it’s a very profitable business. Gemini, by contrast, is expensive to operate, and generates no revenue. Even if Google were able to shift all of its search advertising revenue to Gemini, it would be moving from an extremely high margin business to a lower margin one. So what’s actually going on?

  The answer, as it turns out, is that Google may be seeking to become our central planner and price setter. The third announcement is the key tell. CEO Sundar Pichai said the company will sell not only marketing, but price coordinating services. In the documentation for the universal commerce protocol, google lists “dynamic pricing” as a key tool for merchants. And Kroger, a partner of Google, already announced it will deploy Gemini, enriched with its own proprietary data, to do consumer pricing.

• The new Siri chatbot may run on Google servers, not Apple's

• OpenAI aims to ship its first device in 2026, and it could be earbuds

• Anthropic writes Constitution for Claude it thinks will soon be proven misguided

  • Anthropic's new Claude 'constitution': be helpful, and don't destroy humanity

• MIT's new 'recursive' framework lets LLMs process 10M tokens

• Apple is reportedly working on an AI powered wearable pin.

• Microsoft is building 15 datacenters in Mount Pleasant, Wisconsin.

• OpenAI's Ad Offering Is a Last Resort, and It Still Won't Save the Company

• Satya Nadella: "We need to find something useful for AI"

• Microsoft updates Notepad and Paint with more AI features

• Why AI Keeps Falling for Prompt Injection Attacks

• OpenAI seeking investments from Middle East sovereign wealth funds

• Job Applicants Sue to Open 'Black Box' of A.I. Hiring Decisions

• Rollout of AI may need to be slowed to 'save society', says JP Morgan boss

• In Davos, the AI bubble is always someone else's problem

• eBay bans illicit automated shopping amid rapid rise of AI agents

• OpenAI's internal documents predict $14B loss in 2026 according to report

• OpenAI chair Bret Taylor says AI is 'probably' bubble, expects correction coming

• South Korea launches landmark laws to regulate artificial intelligence

Space / Boomy Zoomers / UFO

• The first commercial space station, Haven-1, now undergoing assembly for launch

• NASA drops a major hint at the medical emergency triggered a historic evacuation

  NASA has dropped a major hint at the medical emergency that triggered a historic evacuation of astronauts from the International Space Station. During their first public appearance since returning to Earth, the astronauts revealed that a portable ultrasound machine was 'super handy' during the crisis. NASA astronaut Mike Fincke, pilot for the ill–fated Crew–11 mission, said that the machine had been used when medical issues arose on January 7.

  While Mr Fincke did not elaborate on the medical emergency, the fact that an ultrasound was used suggests two likely reasons. Firstly, ultrasound scans are often used to examine how astronauts' cardiac systems are functioning in low gravity. The other main use for ultrasound in space is to monitor astronauts' eye health. However, ultrasound can also be used as a general diagnostic tool in a vast number of medical cases – so it remains unclear what the medical emergency was, or how ultrasound proved useful.

  • Space station's ultrasound machine was critical during medical crisis

• Blue Origin plots 6 Tbps satellite network

• 2.8 Days to Disaster: Low Earth Orbit Could Collapse Without Warning

Crypto con games

• As Bitcoin Rewards Dry Up, Will the Blockchain Tumble Off a Cliff?

Economicon / Business / Finance

• Weight-Loss Drugs Could Save U.S. Airlines $580M per Year

• Private Equity Saks Another Retail Outlet

• American Decay versus American Dynamism

• Private-Credit Investors Are Cashing Out in Droves

• Netflix Stock Hits 52-Week Low, Analysts Cut Price Targets, See Warner Bros. Deal as a Drag.

• Autodesk cuts 7% of workforce to redirect investments to AI, cloud

• Amazon Launching Its Largest-Ever Store

• Downtown Denver's office vacancy rate grows to 38.2%

• An Un-MAGA Proposal to Bring Back American Manufacturing

• Strava files for IPO

• GM to Move Production of Buick SUV from China to US

• Moderna curbing investments in vaccine trials due to US backlash

• Capital One to buy fintech firm Brex in $5.15B deal

  • CapitalOne buys Brex (YC W17) for $5.15B

• Extreme winter storm threat sparks historic natural gas spike.

• Intel Tumbles After Manufacturing Snags Bedevil Comeback

• Amazon plans thousands more corporate job cuts next week, sources say

• Vimeo starts layoffs after acquisition by Bending Spoons

Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making

• FCC: Late-night and daytime talk shows must offer equal time for candidates

  • Trump FCC threatens to enforce equal-time rule on late-night talk shows

• Supreme Court signals it will defy Trump to keep Lisa Cook on Federal Reserve

• FBI’s use of Sedition Hunters as paid J6 informants raises questions about Wray's 'reform' promises

  The payments are due to be disclosed by FBI Director Kash Patel to Congress along with acknowledged concerns that the Christopher Wray-run bureau’s approval of certain members of the Sedition Hunters as confidential human sources may have violated bureau policies concerning informant bias, informant secrecy, foreign influence, and contracting transparency, officials said.

Trump

• Trump Rages As Jack Smith Accidentally Exposed The Partisan Scam Behind The Jan 6 Probe | ZeroHedge

  Democrats built a prime-time spectacle around Hutchinson and cited her hundreds of times, while Smith admitted her claims were hearsay, unverified by firsthand witnesses, and too unreliable for his own prosecutors to use at trial.

• Retribution: Trump Sues Jamie Dimon, JPMorgan for Billions in Debanking Debacle – RedState

  President Donald Trump on Thursday, Jan. 22, sued JPMorgan Chase & Co. and its CEO Jamie Dimon for $5 billion, accusing the bank of dropping Trump as a client for political reasons after the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.

Democrats

• House Oversight Sends Contempt Resolution Against Clintons to Full House Over Epstein Probe.

Left Angst

• The Lies the Left promote in their quest for anarchy

  When political leaders frame a contested law-enforcement killing as an unambiguous murder before facts are assembled, they transform public grief into political capital. That is precisely what happened here: calls for immediate indictments and inflammatory rhetoric flowed out of city hall and the governor’s office in the hours after the shooting. Those declarations amplified outrage, accelerated protests and hardened tribal responses on both sides. The rush to a simple narrative was useful to activists and politicians because it produced headlines, donations and mobilization — all of which matter in an election year. Conservative outlets and commentators, by contrast, emphasized the sequence on the video, the officer’s injuries and the broader context of escalating attacks on immigration personnel. That framing was not an attempt to whitewash a death; it was an insistence that policy and context matter when judging a life-and-death decision made under extreme stress. The division between these frames is not merely academic. It shapes how Americans understand what happened, who they blame, and what reforms they demand.

• China Wins as Trump Cedes Leadership of the Global Economy

• AI Agents Simulate Prepping for Trump's Third Term

• Tech Workers Are Condemning ICE Even as Their CEOs Stay Quiet

  • Why isn't anybody talking about reforming immigration law to make it easier to become a citizen? The people protesting want a non-citizen underclass to abuse.

• Half of NIH's institutes due to freeze billions in funding by 2027

• Judge rejects DOJ's initial attempt to bring charges against Don Lemon

• White House Posts Digitally Altered Image of Woman Arrested After ICE Protest

• ICE detains five-year-old Minnesota boy arriving home, say school officials

Law Breaking / Police / Internal Security

• FBI's Washington Post Investigation Shows How Your Printer Can Snitch on You

• U.S. murder rate hits lowest level since 1900, report says

• California adds hundreds in hidden fees to drive up traffic tickets

• Arkansas inmates restricted from receiving physical books, other media directly

External Security / Militaria / Diplomania

• UK holds off joining Trump's Board of Peace over Putin concerns

• US set to quit World Health Organization

• Trump's 'unpredictable' policies to fuel multiyear shift from US, Pimco says

World

• Apps for boycotting American products surge to the top of the Danish App Store

• African trade has been vastly underestimated

• Japan suspends restart of biggest nuclear plant

  • Japan suspends largest nuclear plant hours after restart

• India Is Electrifying Faster Than China Using Cheap Green Tech

• Why there's no European Google? And why it is a good thing

• Zelenskyy says Europe 'looks lost' and living in 'Groundhog Day'

• EU-Mercosur trade deal stalled as MEPs send it for judicial review

• EU Plans to Unfreeze Trade Deal with US and Vote on Ratification

• France seizes suspected Russian 'shadow fleet' oil tanker in the Mediterranean

• We should probably stop disarming our future armed resistance

  the news stories arrive in particularly baffling sequences. Consider just two you may have seen this week: Canada is thinking about fighting an insurgency in case the Americans invade us, and Canada is also working hard to disarm its civilian population. Can I just interject here a moment and suggest that these goals are at odds? That this might be a stupid way of doing things? That the Canadian federal right hand would be shocked and appalled to discover what the left hand was doing?

• Commuter train crashes into crane in Murcia, marking Spain's fourth train crash in five days | World News | Sky News

  Emergency services in the Murcia region said four people suffered minor injuries as a result of the incident near the port city of Cartagena.

Greenland

• America's Crimea

• More sovereign US bases? I dont think so

  Apparently, the compromise that Mark Rutte has suggested on NATO's behalf is that the US bases in Greenland be considered US sovereign territory, and that this might also apply to mineral territories the US wants in that country. In my opinion, this is entirely unacceptable, and not just because it will have been agreed under coercion. I have always found it repugnant that US bases in the UK are considered, for all practical purposes, to be US sovereign territory.

Iran / Houthi

• Starlink in Iran: How the regime jams the service and what helps against it

• Iran has now been under a national internet blackout for two full weeks

Russia Bad / Ukraine War

• Russia humiliated as launchpad explodes and SpaceX spy plot falls apart.

• Ukraine Holds Off on New Helsing Drone Orders After Setbacks

China

• China's Renewable Energy Revolution Is a Mess That Might Save the World

• The Chinese Company Taking on Memory Chip Giants

• Chinese firms directed to not buy US, Israeli cybersecurity software

Health / Medicine

• Testosterone went from prostate cancer villain to potential ally

• The mushroom making people hallucinate tiny humans

• mRNA cancer vaccine shows protection at 5-year follow-up, Moderna and Merck say

• Doctors in Brazil using tilapia fish skin to treat burn victims

• Brain stimulation device cleared for ADHD in the US is safe but ineffective

• Sending babies to nursery reshapes their microbiomes

• Colorectal Cancer Is Now the Top Cause of Cancer Death in Younger People

• 'Organized syndicates' fraudulently access health records, lawsuit says

Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda

• Offshore wind farms can enhance the structural composition of coastal waters

• Microplastics from washing clothes could be hurting your tomatoes

• Relax, Microplastics Aren't Killing You

• Mixing incentives and penalties found key to cutting carbon emissions long term

• Half the 100 largest cities are in high water stress areas, analysis finds

• First Ethiopian wolf ever captured, nursed and returned to the wild

• Climate engineering would alter the oceans, reshaping marine life

• The battle for blue skies over Beijing leaves farmers cold