2026-02-27

Horseshit

• Hubble spotted a 'dark galaxy' that's at least 99.9% dark matter

• Russian mathematician finds new approach to 190-year-old 'eternal' math problem

• The Horrifying Truth Behind The 1990s Olestra Crisis That Still Makes Us Nauseous

  By 1999, the initial novelty of fat-free chips had worn off as Olestra's side effects began dominating public perception. By 2002, the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI) and Procter & Gamble had forwarded the FDA in excess of 20,000 complaints about Olestra, more than every other food additive in history combined. These weren't just minor complaints—many described severe gastrointestinal distress disrupting daily life. A groomsman described fainting and vomiting at a wedding after eating fat free Pringles, while others describe serious hospital visits and even surgery.

• American Airlines 737 plane found with apparent bullet hole after flight from Miami to Colombia.

• Settlement reached in harassment case tied to eBay executives

• Far fewer people are related to Genghis Khan than previously assumed

• Ohio lawmaker proposes land value tax amendment as alternative to property tax

• Ford is recalling 4.3M trucks and SUVs to fix a towing software bug

• Fibermaxxing Is a Diet Trend Even Nutritionists Can Love

• The 2027 GLC 53 Is the First Mercedes-Benz SUV with Drift Mode

  the new GLC 53 can also go sideways. Drifting and all-wheel-drive aren’t exactly natural dance partners, so to speak, so the GLC uses some powertrain wizardry to make the whole sideways thing work. Mercedes-Benz described the GLC’s all-wheel-drive system as “fully variable,” allowing 100% of power to be directed to the rear wheels, allowing the electronic limited-slip rear differential to work its magic. The front axle also disconnects for efficiency when you simply don’t need all-wheel drive, but that doesn’t sound quite as impressive as “Drift Mode,” now does it? That trick diff also requires the Dynamic Plus package, so budget that in if you want to get your hoon on.

  • few now know the joy of a welded differential and a pair of fat slicks.

• The Physics of Squeaking Sneakers

Epstein

• $2.1 Billion in Epstein Financial Records

• Bill Gates reportedly apologizes, admits to two affairs in candid town hall

  • Bill Gate's Comes Clean

• Revealed: The contents of Epstein’s secret storage locker

  Earlier this week, The Telegraph revealed that Epstein paid private detectives to remove items from his Florida property in an apparent attempt to hide them from investigators ahead of a police raid in 2005. These were kept at a nearby storage facility in Palm Beach for several years while police investigated the paedophile. Search warrants reviewed by The Telegraph suggest that US authorities never raided these lockers, raising the possibility that they contained unseen evidence relating to Epstein and his associates. US authorities have long suspected that Epstein was tipped off about the police raid on his Palm Beach mansion in October 2005 – the first major search of any of his properties.

• CEO of World Economic Forum quits after Epstein ties come to light

  • World Economic Forum boss quits after review of Epstein links

• Larry Summers to resign from Harvard over Epstein ties

• 4Chan knew about Jeffrey Epstein's death 38 minutes before the rest of the world

• Hillary Clinton Says She Knew Nothing About Jeffrey Epstein’s Crimes

  Hillary Clinton told members of Congress on Feb. 26 that she does not have knowledge about crimes carried out by the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein and his one-time girlfriend Ghislaine Maxwell. “I had no idea about their criminal activities. I do not recall ever encountering Mr. Epstein. I never flew on his plane or visited his island, homes, or offices,” the former first lady and secretary of state said in her opening statement to the House Oversight Committee. Clinton said she was horrified to learn about the crimes and was disappointed that Epstein only received 13 months in prison in 2008 after pleading guilty to soliciting a minor for prostitution.

• Harvard math professor Martin Nowak put on leave over Epstein links after Larry Summers' resignation

celebrity gossip

• Creator of the "Squatty Potty" Indicted After Allegedly Receiving CSAM

Obit

• Gladys West, Who Got Belated Credit for Helping Create GPS, Dies at 95

• Red Dwarf Creator Rob Grant Has Died

Musk

• Musk touts California robotaxis but Tesla does nothing to get permits

• Elon Musk threatens to halt Tesla Giga Berlin expansion over union vote

Electric / Self Driving cars

• The Physics and Economics of Moving 44 Tonnes at 56mph

  Every kilogram you add to the vehicle is a kilogram you can’t carry as freight. A diesel fuel tank for 400 litres of diesel weighs roughly 350 kg (the tank itself is relatively light; diesel is 0.84 kg/L). A battery pack storing equivalent energy would weigh on the order of 16 tonnes at current lithium-ion energy densities. That’s not just additional weight. It’s 16 tonnes of payload that disappears. The truck would need to make two trips to move what a diesel truck does in one, which means twice the trucks on the road, twice the drivers, and twice the road wear. Hydrogen tanks are lighter than batteries but vastly larger than diesel tanks for the same range, and the high-pressure carbon fibre vessels (700 bar) are expensive. The physics of energy storage is the single biggest constraint on alternative powertrains in heavy freight, and it’s worth understanding properly before evaluating any claim about “just electrifying” the fleet.

• Kawasaki Corleo Electric Horse

  • This takes all the fun out of "...and the horse you rode in on!" Unless there's an option package i didn't see.

Religion / Tribal / Culture War and Re-Segregation

• Kansas invalidates drivers licenses of trans people

Edumacationalizing / Acedemia Nuts

• FBI Raids Los Angeles Schools Superintendent, Reported Illegal Alien

  it is not clear whether Carvalho is in trouble with the feds in connection with immigration law, with the $250 million LA public school sex scandal, or with something else.

Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising

• Lawsuit could slow Micron DRAM chipmaking project in New York

• Apple Reportedly Agrees to 100% Price Hike on Samsung Memory Chips

• RAM now represents 35 percent of bill of materials for HP PCs

• Say goodbye to budget PCs and smartphones – memory is too expensive now

• Age Requirements for Apps in Brazil, Australia, Singapore, Utah, and Louisiana

• Are Glassholes Using Smart Glasses Near You? There's an App for That

  • Hide from Meta's spyglasses with this new Android app

• Washington Post Losses Topped $100M in 2025

• DVD sales are seeing a recovery - or at least slowing their decline - as Gen Z discovers that waiting for your favourite show or movie to come back on TV sucks.

• Riot's New Fighting Game Is Imploding as It Lays Off 80 Developers

• Instagram to alert parents if teens search for self-harm and suicide content

• Child-free 'Disney adults' are transforming the company's theme parks

• NATO says iPhones are secure enough to handle classified data

TechSuck / Geek Bait

• The first transatlantic fiber-optic cable is being ripped up

  Built by AT&T, British Telecom, and France Telecom, the cable entered service on December 14, 1988, and was taken out of operation in 2002 after developing a fault too expensive to repair. It has sat on the ocean floor for more than two decades.

Space / Boomy Zoomers / UFO

• Astronaut Behind Space Station Medical Mystery Revealed

• Is It Time To Permanently Ground NASA?

  To say that the Artemis program – which has so far cost taxpayers more than $93 billion – has been plagued with problems is an understatement. It has been a case study in bureaucratic bumbling, one made more obvious when compared with the rapid advances achieved by private space companies such as SpaceX.

• Hubble could re-enter atmosphere as early as 2028

• Non-public document reveals science may not be prioritized on next Mars mission

AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World

• Anthropic is dropping its signature safety pledge amid a heated AI race

  • Anthropic Drops Flagship Safety Pledge

  • Anthropic ditches its core safety promise

• Pete Hegseth and the AI Doomsday Machine

  • Anthropic and the Department of War

  Anthropic did not partner with the Pentagon to make money. They did it to help. They did it under a mutually agreed upon contract that Anthropic wants to honor. Anthropic are offering the Pentagon far more unfettered access then they are allowing anyone else. They have been far more cooperative than most big tech or AI firms. Is is the Pentagon that is now demanding Anthropic agree to new terms that amount to ‘anything we want, legal or otherwise, no matter what and you ever ask any questions,’ or else.

  • Pentagon takes first step toward blacklisting Anthropic

  • US threatens Anthropic with deadline in dispute on AI safeguards

  • Anthropic/Pentagon: allow AI to be used for all military purposes by this Friday

  • What the Defense Production Act Can and Can't Do to Anthropic

  • The Pentagon Feuding with an AI Company Is a Bad Sign

  • Anthropic is both too dangerous to allow and essential to national security

  • Pentagon officials send Anthropic best and final offer for military use of AI

  • Statement from Dario Amodei on Our Discussions with the Department of War

  It is the Department’s prerogative to select contractors most aligned with their vision. But given the substantial value that Anthropic’s technology provides to our armed forces, we hope they reconsider. Our strong preference is to continue to serve the Department and our warfighters—with our two requested safeguards in place. Should the Department choose to offboard Anthropic, we will work to enable a smooth transition to another provider, avoiding any disruption to ongoing military planning, operations, or other critical missions. Our models will be available on the expansive terms we have proposed for as long as required.

  • Anthropic says company 'cannot in good conscience accede' to Pentagon's demands

• The Texas AI boom is outpacing water regulations

• "AllHere": FBI raids of LAUSD Supt.'s home and office appear tied to AI chatbot probe

• In this Cleveland newsroom, AI is writing (but not reporting) the news

• Norwegian state newspaper investigate AI psychosis

• 8B tokens a day forced AT&T to rethink AI orchestration and cut costs by 90%

• Why It's So Hard to Say Goodbye to AI Chatbots

• AI Armies Are Faking Grassroots Movements

• When "technically true" becomes "actually misleading"

  the idea that all AIs do is mimic, parrot, or predict the next word is highbrow misinformation — a term coined last year by Joseph Heath to describe how some false claims about climate change circulate specifically among highly informed readers of respected publications. These claims are phrased so as to rarely be technically false but always be comprehensively misleading. “I call this sort of thing ‘highbrow’ misinformation,” Heath wrote of the dishonest climate statistics he complained of, “not just because of the social class and self-regard of those who believe it, but also because of the relatively sophisticated way that it is propagated. Often one will find the accurate claim buried deep in the text, but framed in a way that leads most readers to misinterpret it.”

• Australia's WiseTech to cut 2k jobs as AI renders manual coding obsolete

• The Last Gasps of the Rent Seeking Class

  The best anyone can hope for is a free market, with everything properly priced. But for decades, the American market has not been free. It’s used purposefully added friction to exploit a time asymmetry between the business and you. And due to things like call centers, this has been very profitable for the businesses. Cable companies and insurance rely on the fact that your time is more valuable than theirs. They can hire people in India at scale to waste your time. They can use procedure and big data to design protocols to drive you just to the point of frustration at little cost to them. How often do you diligently check Uber and Lyft and select the cheaper one? The era of purposefully frustrating humans is over. The Chinese open source model running on the box under my desk can pass the Turing Test. When you call, e-mail, text, or show me an ad, you’ll never know if it’s me or my model seeing it.

• Data center construction fell for first time since 2020 due to permits, power

• DeepSeek withholds latest AI model from Nvidia, AMD

• Guardian in media coalition to protect original journalism from unpaid use by AI

  • UK media groups unite to tackle AI 'scraping' of journalism

• An Autonomous OpenClaw Chatbot Wanted Revenge

• OpenAI's acquisition of OpenClaw signals the the end of the ChatGPT

• Burger King will use AI to check if employees say 'please' and 'thank you'

• When Chatbots Are Used to Plan Violence, Is There a Duty to Warn?

• AI could help make society less selfish

• Canadian government demands safety changes from OpenAI

Neo Gambling / Crypto con games

• No 10 Am BTC Dump? Bitcoin Price Rallies as Jane Street Trading Draws Attention

• Trump Is the Crypto President. Why Is It Struggling?

Economicon / Business / Finance

• Rare earth shortages worsen in US aerospace, chips despite trade truce

• What I Saw Inside Apple's U.S. Chip Supply Chain

• The Remote-Work Dream Isn't Dead, but It's Slipping Away

• California winery owner gives hottest take yet on why industry is dying

  “A lot of people have a misconception that the Boomers are drinking less,” he said. “This cannot be emphasized enough: it’s not because the Boomers are drinking less, it’s because there are less Boomers.”

• iRobot Went Bankrupt. Its Product Scores Explain Why

• Could it be that no one believes their bullshit no more? Nvidia shares fall as blockbuster results fail to dazzle

• Block shares soar 24% as company slashes workforce by nearly half

  • Block to layoff half its employees

  • Jack Dorsey's Block to cut nearly 1/2 its workforce in AI overhaul, shares surge

  • Jack Dorsey's fintech announces 40% layoffs, blames AI, gets 23% stock bump

• Warner Bros. Discovery deems Paramount offer superior to Netflix

  • Netflix declines to raise its offer to buy Warner

  • Netflix Declines to Raise Offer for Warner Bros

  • Netflix drops bid for Warner Bros after Paramount offer

  • Netflix drops out of bidding after WBD deems Paramount's takeover bid 'superior'

  • Paramount Wins Bidding War for Warner Discovery as Netflix Drops Out

  • Netflix declines to raise its offer to buy Warner

Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making

• Over a quarter million federal jobs reduced in 2025 from nearly two dozen agencies.

• There’s a competition crisis in America’s state legislatures – and that’s bad for democracy

  an alarming trend in many state legislative elections is lowering the bar even further, to something more like a one-party system. In dozens of states, an increasing number of state legislative seats are going completely uncontested by one of the two major parties.

• Politicians Consider Soviet-Style Controls on 3D Printers

Trump

• Vance says Minnesota's Medicaid funds halted

  • Trump admin halts some Medicaid payments to Minnesota over fraud claims

Left Angst

• Why Does America Feel Worse Than Other Countries? Crime

  Extreme tolerance of public disorder, and downplaying the importance of crime, is a hallmark of modern progressive American culture. There are plenty of Democrats who care about crime — Joe Biden recently tried to increase the number of police in America by a substantial amount — but there is constant pressure from the left against such measures. On social media, calls for greater public order are instantly met with accusations of racism and classism. I am not going to claim that progressive attitudes are the reason America’s crime rate is much higher than crime rates in other countries. The U.S. has probably been more violent than countries in Asia and Europe throughout most of its history, and the divergence certainly long predates the rise of progressive ideology. It’s possible that the progressive prosecutor movement, the decarceration movement, and the depolicing movement exacerbated America’s crime problem a bit, but they didn’t create it. What those progressive attitudes do do, I think, is to prevent us from talking about how important the crime problem is for the United States, and from coming up with serious efforts to solve it.

• A White House Staffer Appears to Run Pro-Trump X Account

• US role as global talent hub in doubt amid Donald Trump's visa crackdown

• Americans Are Leaving the U.S. in Record Numbers

• British Citizenship Applications by US Nationals Hit Record High

• The Sickest Burns on the Internet Are Coming from French Bureaucrats

• Trump allies target European NGOs in battle over Big Tech rules

• Tech legend Stewart Brand: 'We don't need to passively accept our fate'

• As Georgia prosecutor pursued Trump, Biden DOJ ‘invited’ her to get lucrative grant, memos show.

• The Tax Nerd Who Bet His Life Savings Against DOGE

• The Government Just Made It Harder to See What Spy Tech It Buys

• America's dangerous pursuit of critical-mineral dominance

• Trump, seeking executive power over elections, is urged to declare emergency

• America Chose Not to Hold the Powerful to Account

Law Breaking / Police / Internal Security

• Police Officer Accused of Tracking Partner via Flock Camera License Plate Reader

External Security / Militaria / Diplomania

• Trump launches 'Task Force Scorpion' as Iran peace talks collapse

  Donald Trump has armed a squadron of kamikaze drones as nuclear negotiations with Iran have collapsed and the prospect of war with Tehran looms. The Pentagon has approved the deployment of an experimental U.S. military drone unit capable of self-detonation, known as Task Force Scorpion, according to Bloomberg.

World

• Zimbabwe bans all raw mineral exports

• Apple Rolls Out Age Verification to UK iPhone Users Under Online Safety Act

  • Apple brings age verification to UK users in iOS 26.4 beta

• You Want to Visit the UK? You Better Have a Google Play or App Store Account

• Mumsnet campaign demands ban on social media for under-16s

• Worried Europeans can now cut Azure's phone cord completely

• Canada and South Korea sign a defence agreement

• Swedish pensioners explain how abolishing the wealth tax changed their country

• Number of UK workers on zero-hours contracts hits record high ahead of crackdown

• Prudential's fraud scandal casts spotlight on commission-based remuneration

• India's top court bans textbook for referring to judicial corruption

• Why Asian firms are not cheering Trump tariff ruling

• Olympics Champ Norway prohibits competitive sports < 12

• France honors last newspaper hawker in Paris with knighthood

• TikTok Influencer Accused of Swaying Romanian Presidential Election

Israel

• Israeli soldiers shot a Palestinian boy and stood around as he bled to death

Russia Bad / Ukraine War

• How Russia is intercepting communications from European satellites

• Russia fines Google 22.8M rubles for promoting VPNs on the Play Store

• What happened after Elon Musk took the Russian army offline

China

• Chinese industry is beating Germany at its own game. Cue panic

• BYD cuts EV prices with 0% interest and daily payments for less than $5

• Why Chinese people spend so much on food

Health / Medicine

• Could a vaccine prevent dementia? Shingles shot data only getting stronger

• People living in UK's poorest areas have less diverse gut bacteria, study finds

• Why Are So Many Teen Girls Still Tearing Their A.C.L.s?

Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda

• Men in their 50s may be aging faster due to toxic 'forever chemicals'

• Tropical plants flowering months earlier or later because of climate crisis

• High temperatures affect sex ratios at birth

• Emus once faced down the Australian army–and won

• U.S. Power-Plant Pollution Rose Sharply in 2025

• A red tide in South Africa is causing the mass deaths of crayfish