2026-04-16

Horseshit

• Walmart Unveils Modern Redesign of Great Value, Its Flagship Private Brand

• The 'Annoyance Economy' Is More Than Just Annoying

• America's hiking culture is built on ego

• Bunk beds for economy passengers take off on Air New Zealand's new planes

• Not Even Noise-Cancelling Headphones Can Block This Bicycle Bell

• Nvidia should be 'shaking in their boots' as quantum computing battles AI GPUs

• The labor economics of 'Alien' and its lessons for inequality on Earth

  Sure, Alien is about an alien. But, on a deeper level, it's the story about the horrors of a cartoonishly evil company with unchecked power. The Weyland-Yutani Corporation is an extreme form of what's known in economics as a monopsony. A monopsony is like the inverse of a monopoly. Whereas a monopoly means one seller, a monopsony means one buyer. It's a concept relevant to the labor market because employers buy our labor.

• We're freezing our eggs; maybe you should too

• The asteroid Ryugu has all of the main ingredients for life

• Gödel: The man who ruined mathematics

• Scientists Are Using Lightning in a Bottle to Turn Methane into Methanol

• Richard Dawkins, let's not bring back Neanderthals

• Wall Street's Elite Team of Coffee Tasters Who Keep the Global Market Running

• New search engine reveals if ancestors were in Nazi party

• Why Sex Exists.

• Universe Expanding Faster Than Expected

• Ram Built a 2500 Heavy-Duty Pickup That’s Been Certified for Police Duty.

celebrity gossip

• Connie Converse was a folk-music genius. Then she vanished

Obit

• Simon Oxley, creator of GitHub Octocat and Twitter "Larry Bird", has passed away

Musk

• $TSLA is trading at 324x earnings

• Elon Musk's xAI Sued by NAACP over Memphis Data Center

• X's Big Bot Purge Wiped Out a Lot of People's Porn Feeds

• Space Force looks at moving "significant number" of launches from ULA to SpaceX

• Elon Musk, Who Owns X, Appears to Post on TikTok

Electric / Self Driving cars

• Monarch Tractor's collapse ends with an acquisition by Caterpillar

Religion / Tribal / Culture War and Re-Segregation

• Why Is the Media Promoting Polyamory?

Edumacationalizing / Acedemia Nuts

• Elise Stefanik vs. the Ivy League

• Hampshire College Will Close Amid Student Enrollment Declines

  • Hampshire College to close after years-long turnaround effort comes up short.

• The Deepfake Nudes Crisis in Schools Is Worse Than You Thought

Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising

• Microsoft reveals major price increases for all Surface PCs

• 'Seeking connection': video game where players stopped shooting, started talking

• Anna's Archive Loses $322M Spotify Piracy Case Without a Fight

• Police officer uses Flock database to track mistress

• Social media age limits: Well intentioned but ineffective?

• Sony killing features for antenna, set-top box users of Bravia smart TVs in May

• OpenSSL 4.0.0 Released

• Cyberscammers are bypassing banks' security with illicit tools sold on Telegram

• For the first time ever, Amazon is cutting old Kindles off from the Kindle Store

• How Older Adults Are Using V.R. To Counter Social Isolation

• Ticketmaster and Live Nation found Guilty of anticompetitive venue monopoly

  • Jury finds Live Nation, Ticketmaster had anti-competitive monopoly

  • Live Nation illegally monopolized ticketing market, jury finds

  • Jury finds Live Nation and Ticketmaster operated as a monopoly, overcharged fans

  • Jury finds Live Nation/Ticketmaster is illegal monopoly that overcharged fans

• YouTube now lets you turn off Shorts

• Google shoehorned Rust into Pixel 10 modem to make legacy code safer

TechSuck / Geek Bait

• The Simple Geometry Behind Any Road

  It might look like we’ve backed ourselves into a corner at this point. Constraints we’ve fixed simply can’t be satisfied. But at the same time, in real life, roads do exist, defined only by arcs and lines. The answer is to ease the constraints a bit by letting each arc also have a line extension until it meets the point along the tangent line.

Space / Boomy Zoomers / UFO

• NASA's Artemis Moon Mission Was a State Failure and a Human Triumph

AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World

• Why It's Crucial We Understand How A.I. 'Thinks'

• Anthropic Opposes the Extreme AI Liability Bill That OpenAI Backed

• Anthropic talking to the Trump administration about its next AI model

• The current chatbots are more useful than any previous output of any of the "AI booms" before now The only technology that died more times than VR is AI

• The Death of an AI Whistleblower

• People are pretending to be AI chatbots – for fun

• Krafton CEO used ChatGPT in failed bid to avoid paying US$250M bonus

• Bosses say AI boosts productivity – workers say they're drowning in 'workslop'

• The Origin of AI's 'Reasoning' Abilities

• Really? We're gonna stop believing every word these assholes emit now? OpenAI's $852B valuation faces investor scrutiny amid strategy shift, FT reports

• Mark Zuckerberg reportedly working on AI clone of himself

  • Ask the Zuckbot? Meta Reportedly Building AI Clone of Mark Zuckerberg

• AI ruling prompts warnings from US lawyers: Your chats could be used against you

• AI learns language from skewed sources. That could change how we speak and think

• Microsoft Takes over Norway Stargate Data Center from OpenAI

• After sale of its shoe business, Allbirds pivots to AI

  • Allbirds Now Says It's an AI Company, Stock Jumps 800%

  • Allbirds abandons clothes, pivots to "AI compute infrastructure"

  • Allbirds shares jump over 400% on plans to pivot to AI from sneakers

  • Shoe brand Allbirds says it will become an AI company, sending shares soaring

  • Allbirds shares soar 600% as it pivots from footwear to AI

  • Allbirds Is Pivoting to AI. Why Not?

  • Allbirds Rebrands as AI Company

  • Allbirds shares jump over 400% on plans to pivot to AI from sneakers

• Behind fiery attack on OpenAI's Altman, a growing divide over AI

• OpenAI Accuses Anthropic of Inflating Revenue by $8B

• AI disease-prediction models were trained on dubious data

• Anthropic's rise is giving some OpenAI investors second thoughts

• Tennessee is about to make building chatbots a Class A felony

• Farmer arrested for speaking too long at datacenter town hall vows to fight

• That Meeting You Hate May Keep A.I. From Stealing Your Job

• The End of the Internet as We Know It

• Anthropic draws VC interest at up to $800B valuation

Neo Gambling / Crypto con games

• Kalshi CEO expects US DOJ to prosecute insider trading cases

• French cops free mother and son after 20-hour crypto kidnap ordeal

Economicon / Business / Finance

• Amazon Buys Globalstar for $10.8B to Expand Its Satellite Internet Service

  • Amazon to acquire Globalstar and expand Amazon Leo satellite network

• Amazon worker dies on warehouse floor. Workers told to keep going

• Amazon sellers boycott ads in policy change revolt

• The tech jobs bust is real. Don't blame AI (yet)

• Snap lays off 16% of workers, citing 'rapid advancements' in AI

  • Snapchat owner cuts 16% of global staff in latest round of job cuts

  • Snap's stock jumps on plans to axe 16% of its workforce citing AI efficiencies

  • Snap Is Laying Off 16% of Full-Time Staff as It Embraces A.I

• Kerrygold Maker Ornua Sees Middle East War Driving Food Inflation

• US Moves to Block Illinois Swipe Fee Law During Banks' Appeal

• Ford CEO warns Chinese cars in US would be 'devastating' to US automakers

Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making

• A tax revolt is under way in America

• The FCC just saved Netgear from its router ban for no obvious reason

  • Netgear wins first U.S. approval to keep selling foreign-made routers

• New bill would let New Yorkers hang solar panels from windows

• Taxpayers to spend $477B on tax season

• Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent is preparing banks to collect citizenship data

Trump

• Trump declares Iran war is 'very close to being over'

  "I think it’s close to over, yeah. I view it as very close to being over," Trump told FOX Business anchor Maria Bartiromo in an interview that will air on "Mornings with Maria" on Wednesday.

• Trump threatens to fire Powell if he doesn't quit Fed board

  • Trump says he'll fire Powell next month if he stays in his role at the Fed

• Intel IG Admitted Under Oath He Changed Whistleblower Rules For Anti-Trump Ukraine Op In 2019.

  Former Intelligence Community Inspector General (ICIG) Michael Atkinson admitted under oath that he personally ordered a secret rewrite of the whistleblower complaint form in August 2019 that was used as the basis for a phony impeachment operation against President Donald Trump, going so far as to admit changing the form looked “suspicious.” Newly unveiled testimony from October of 2019 shows that Atkinson conceded the change he ordered to the whistleblower complaint form “looks suspicious” but said the timing was merely “unfortunate.”

Democrats

• Eric Swalwell Finds Out About Sudden ‘Investigative Reporting.’

  That’s not to say that Swalwell’s accusers don’t have deeply disturbing facts on their side. It’s all about the remarkable timing. Swalwell ran for president in 2020, which would have been an obvious occasion for investigative reporting, even if Swalwell wasn’t exactly a front-runner in that cycle.

Left Angst

• Google Broke Its Promise to Me. Now ICE Has My Data

• Will Elon Musk ever be forced to explain what he did inside DOGE?

• Reporters and health bureaucrats attack Dr. Jay Bhattacharya for doing the right thing (again). The US government should immediately end all funding for all “test-negative” studies that supposedly measure flu or Covid vaccine effectiveness; they are worse than useless.

• Thomson Reuters Fired Worker for Speaking Out About ICE, Former Employee Says

• Claims of Unwarranted ICE-Related Detention Were a Hoax

• By Bernie Sanders: No more US Military aid to Israel

  this Wednesday, I will be forcing the Senate to vote on two Joint Resolutions of Disapproval – the only formal mechanism Congress has to block an arms sale. The first would block the sale of $151.8m in 1,000-pound bombs. The second would block $295m in bulldozers – the machines used to demolish homes in the West Bank and Gaza and make a Palestinian state physically impossible. These are not defensive weapons. They are the instruments of ethnic cleansing.

• Trump Killed the One Thing That Made Filing Taxes Easier

• Trump's push to cut interest rates has echoes of 'banana republic', says Yellen

  • Biden's "There's nothing wrong with the economy, they should report it right" of course was nothing at all like that...

• FDA to weigh easing limits on unproven peptides favored by RFK Jr

Law Breaking / Police / Internal Security

• Decline in U.S. overdose deaths threatened by changing street drug supply

  Experts say the U.S. addiction crisis is evolving fast, in ways that appear both hopeful and incredibly dangerous. The peril comes from a street drug supply that chemists now describe as a "synthetic soup." Where once most drug users mostly consumed plant-based substances such as cocaine and heroin, drug gangs and cartels have shifted to producing and selling synthetic substances made from industrial chemicals.

  • Almost as if the supply lines of the traditional products had been interfered with somehow...

• FL man arrested for running multi-state Ponzi scheme, defrauding victims in MA

• Police genocide another transperson

  Two years ago, Naomi Guzman doused her father in lighter fluid and tried to set him on fire, then broke into a church and threatened a priest with a knife. She was found incompetent to stand trial and released. Today, she abducted a toddler and stabbed him before she was shot and killed by police.

External Security / Militaria / Diplomania

• US forces kill 4 people in latest strike on vessels in eastern Pacific

  SOUTHCOM, which is responsible for US military operations in Latin America and the Caribbean, claimed that the four people killed were “narco-terrorists”, but provided no evidence to support its claims. The latest killing of people on board vessels in international waters in the eastern Pacific Ocean and Caribbean brings the overall death toll to at least 175 since early September, when US President Donald Trump ordered the attacks to stop what the White House claims are Latin American cartels transporting drugs to the US.

• U.S. sends additional naval forces to Middle East amid Iran blockade

World

• Bucharest failed communist megaproject-turned-park

• Australian pleads guilty to creating deepfake porn in landmark case

• Digital Sovereignty: Germany Wants Less Microsoft and Palantir

• Europe should regulate Big Tech instead of banning kids from social media

• Europe Is Accelerating a NATO Fallback Plan in Case Trump Pulls Out

• 'No more excuses': Von der Leyen says EU age checking app is ready

  • EU age verification app ready as Europe moves to curb children's social media

• 'Misogyny with a marketing budget': UK AI firm accused of sexist advert

• EU warns Meta WhatsApp AI fee breaches antitrust rules, orders rollback

• Australia's richest person must share part of her mining fortunes, court rules

• BBC to cut up to 2k jobs in biggest downsize in 15 years

  • BBC to cut almost one in 10 staff to make £500M savings

  • BBC to Cut Up to 2,000 Jobs in Major Cost-Saving Move

• Explosions as one of Australia's two oil refineries erupts in flames

• Sweden blames Russian hackers for attempting 'destructive' thermal plant attack

Iran / Houthi

• Viral victory: Iran is beating the land of tech bros in the social media wars

• Iran used Chinese spy satellite to target US bases

  • Iran reportedly bought Chinese satellite to target US Military in Middle East

• Iran's nuke confession blows reasons for America's war wide open

  An interview with a former Iranian official is making waves online after he admitted Iran had always intended to build a nuclear bomb. Ali Motahari, who served as Parliament deputy speaker from 2016 to 2019, made the statements in 2022 while speaking on Iranian news media outlet ISCA News, saying: 'When we began our nuclear activity, our goal was indeed to build a bomb. There is no need to beat around the bush.' Motahari noted that Iran had no plans for detonating the bomb, only using it as a deterrent, meaning a weapon intended to discourage enemies rather than immediately use it, citing the Quranic verse: 'Strike fear in the hearts of the enemy of Allah.' Motahari's 2022 interview contradicted Iran's long-held insistence that it never sought to build nuclear weapons, and resurfaced amid the US-Israeli war in Iran.

• Europe Drafts Postwar Plan to Free Up Hormuz Without U.S.

  European countries are putting together a plan for a broad coalition of countries to help free up shipping through the Strait of Hormuz, including sending mine-clearing and other military vessels. But the plan would only come after the war and may exclude one country in particular: the U.S.

• Ship 'Spoofing' in Strait of Hormuz May Compound Confusion

• US and Israel's war on Iran is a disaster for the environment, analysis shows

Russia Bad / Ukraine War

• Ukraine's military robot surge aims to offset drone risks to humans

• Ukraine captures enemy Russian position using only robots

  • Robots captured Russian army positions for first time in history, Zelenskyy says

China

• Beijing Codifies Repression of Overseas Activists

• China shock 2.0: the flood of high-tech goods that will change the world

• How China is wooing Paraguay's political class away from longtime ally Taiwan

Health / Medicine

• Scientists discover why bread can cause weight gain without extra calories

• Woman with three deadly diseases has 'remarkable' recovery after cell therapy

• Don't feel like exercising? Maybe it's the wrong time of day for you

• What's the deal with Alzheimer's disease and amyloid?

Pox / COVID / BioTerror AgitProp

• CDC warns new drug-resistant virus is rising in the US and posing health threat

Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda

• Sperm whales' communication closely parallels human language, study finds

  • Sperm whale clicks follow similar rules to human speech

• Projected warming will exceed the long-term thermal limits of rice cultivation

• The race to understand the mysterious world of Africa's fungi

• What's Happening to Beyond Meat?

• Critical Atlantic current significantly more likely to collapse than thought

• Spotted a bear lately? You're not alone–why sightings are on the rise

• Microbes make microplastics more likely to form ice in clouds, research reveals

• Iowa cancer rates surge – farm chemicals are a key risk, new report finds