2026-05-17

etc

• Great moments in women's sports

Horseshit

• New Nightmare Just Dropped: '3D' Animated Ads on Trucks in Traffic

• That "viral" song, movie, drama was probably the product of a stealth marketing

• Why birth rates are falling everywhere all at once

• Knight Rider car gets speeding ticket in NYC despite being in Illinois museum

  The "Knight Rider" car KITT was summonsed for speeding on Ocean Parkway in Brooklyn, but the actual car has been on display inside an Illinois automotive museum for the past three years. A city traffic camera caught a car with a California KNIGHT license plate going 36 mph in a 25 mph zone on April 22 at 1:02 p.m. The summons, complete with a picture from a traffic camera, was sent to the Volo Museum in Volo, Illinois, where a black 1982 Pontiac Firebird Trans Am replica of the TV show car is on display.

• Why 'Smart' Products Have Started to Look Like the Dumb Choice

• Why 'Smart' Products Have Started to Look Like the Dumb Choice

• The Protein Shortage Is Coming

• Are Teen Takeovers Dangerous?

• A Meta employee gets real about the horror of working there

• Venus Surface Formations Puzzle Planetary Scientists

• 57% of Americans Are Tired of Being Told What To Eat, New Survey Finds.

• I Want to Live Like Costco People

  Embracing the Costco lifestyle means accepting the fact that I am, in many ways, becoming my father. This is an old idea, both Freudian and Kierkegaardian—the belief that we are all destined to embody learned characteristics and habits passed down from parent to child

• The world has officially reached peak bagel

• BYD weighs Formula 1 role as 2026 rules shift toward electric power, VP confirms

Musk

• $2B Conflict: Sam Altman "Side Hustles" Are Now Center of a Legal Warzone

• SpaceX Is Aiming to Go Public on June 12 in What Stands to Be Biggest IPO

• Tesla Patents New Trim Clip to Reduce Rattles and Vibrations

• Tesla reveals two Robotaxi crashes involving teleoperators

• Taiwan-Starlink service talks fall through over regulatory issues

Electric / Self Driving cars

• Fisker went bankrupt and owners built an open source car company from the ashes

Edumacationalizing / Acedemia Nuts

• My Son's Math Homework Is Essentially Just Pokémon

Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising

• That'll fix it: Xbox Is Now XBOX

• Apple TV 12% market share, reaping benefits of stale content

• Nvidia Preparing RTX 5090 Price Increase Due to Rising GDDR7 Memory Costs

TechSuck / Geek Bait

• The Futility of Lava Lamps: What Random Really Means

Space / Boomy Zoomers / UFO

• UFO files nod to growing belief in aliens and mistrust in institutions

AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World

• 'A' grades are suddenly everywhere since the arrival of ChatGPT

  • AI Sends a Grades into Overdrive

• Chatbots' Downward Spiral

• Prepare for an AI Jobs Apocalypse

• The sperm whale 'phonetic alphabet' revealed by AI

• The Japanese companies minting money from AI

• AI could put people off tech jobs and hurt the economy, warns Raspberry Pi boss

• Datacenters boosted prices 75% in largest US energy market

• Someone Shared a Real Monet Painting as AI and Asked for Critiques

• Meet the Sad Wives of AI

• Why Stanford Says AI Agents Become Marxist

  • Overworked AI Agents Turn Marxist, Researchers Find

• OpenAI super PAC paying for an army of Twitter bots to engage with their content

• OpenAI wants ChatGPT to access your bank accounts.

  • OpenAI launches ChatGPT for personal finance, will let you connect bank accounts

• OpenAI seals deal in Malta to give all Maltese access to ChatGPT Plus

  • OpenAI is offering ChatGPT Plus to citizens of Malta for a year

• Anthropic's $1.5B copyright settlement is getting messy as judge delays approval

• I believe there are entire companies right now under AI psychosis

• Brockman Officially Takes Control of OpenAI's Products in Latest Shake-Up

• Is AI putting graduates out of work already?

• Data centers are guzzling California's water. We have no idea how much

• Cerebras IPO Signals Growing Pressure on the GPU Scaling Model

• US Is Starting to See Heavy Job Losses in Roles Exposed to AI

• Texas county passes 1-year data center construction ban

• The US is betting on AI to catch insider trading in prediction markets

• Do Job Postings Show Early Labor Market Effects of AI?

• I used AI to help market my bagel shop. Then the one-star reviews came in

Economicon / Business / Finance

• Consumers sue Amazon for not refunding Trump tariff costs

• Gen Z homeowners: More in their 20s are managing to buy despite the odds

• North America's largest commuter rail system faces a potential shutdown

  • Long Island Rail Road Strike Shuts Down Busiest U.S. Passenger Rail Service

  • North America's largest commuter rail system shuts down as workers strike

• Meta to cut 8000 employees despite $26B Q1 net income

• NextEra and Dominion in talks over tie-up to create $400B US utility giant

• Executives are blaming layoffs on AI, but it is not the main driver

• Arm Holdings to Face US Antitrust Probe

• $60B AI chip darling Cerebras almost died early on, burning $8M a month

Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making

• Senior NIAID Official Indicted for Concealing Records During Covid Pandemic

• U.S. California 'Rich Dude' Fights $2.5M Fine over Public Beach Access

Trump

• Trump warns Taiwan not to expect blank check from US Military after Xi summit

  • Trump warns Taiwan against declaring independence

Democrats

• Google Maps Just ‘Unburned’ the Pacific Palisades — and Infuriated Angelenos Noticed

Left Angst

• California governor candidate under investigation over payments to influencers

  • Where did Kamala's Billion go, again?

• Is America in decline and China rising? Not for long

• Congrats on the Gig, Kevin Warsh. You’re Cooked.

  this one-two punch of tariffs and war threatens to reset expectations for how bad inflation will get. What this means is that instead of these shocks being temporary (dare I say “transitory”), we could be at the start of a vicious cycle in which companies that are fearful of getting surprised by higher prices in the future raise their own prices preemptively today. If everybody does this at once, you get more inflation. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy.

• Under Trump, Chinese Firms Have Abandoned Billions in US Clean Energy Projects

• The Case for Impeaching and Removing Every Federal Judge and Supreme Court Justice Who Has Ever Been a Member of the Federalist Society or Endorsed Unitary Executive Theory.

  The Federalist Society spent forty years building a captured federal judiciary, and we are now living inside the result. The doctrine they built it around has a name, unitary executive theory, and the doctrine has a method. The method is to read every Democratic exercise of power narrowly and every Republican exercise of power broadly, until the Constitution comes to mean whatever the conservative legal movement requires it to mean on any given Tuesday.

• Xi Jinping Was Only Humoring Trump

External Security / Militaria / Diplomania

• Why the US Can't Adopt Ukraine's Innovative Approach to Unmanned Warfare Systems

• US Government openly schemes to indict Raúl Castro as prelude to invading Cuba

• Dutch government objects to proposed US law restricting ASML's China exports

World

• Europe built sovereign clouds to escape US control. Forgot about the processors

• Britain's latest civil servant is a chatbot trained on Gov.uk misery

• How an Australian Teen Team Is Making Radio Astronomy Affordable for Schools

• Samsung winding down chip production before strike, daily losses could hit $2b

  • Meanwhile Samsung is facing the prospect of a protracted strike by its own staff after failing to reach an agreement on bonuses.

• SK Hynix workers are now the hottest marriage prospects in South Korea, ahead of doctors, lawyers, and corporate executives.

• Major VPN provider says it could leave Canada over lawful access bill

• Is Britain Ungovernable?

Iran / Houthi

• Iran's Seizure of Chinese Security Ship Shows Its Favors for Friends Have Limits

Israel

• Before or after the dog rape? Palestinians forced to demolish own homes to make way for Israeli theme park

Russia Bad / Ukraine War

• As Russian drones hunt Ukrainians in 'human Safari,' a boy fought back

China

• China wants more robots but not fewer workers

• Embrace diversity: White monkeys to make Chinese business look more global

Health / Medicine

• Fecal transplants for autism deliver success in clinical trials

• Experimental weight-loss drug outperforms original GLP-1s

Pox / COVID / BioTerror AgitProp

• Ebola outbreak with uncommon strain erupts in Congo and Uganda; 65 deaths

• Hantavirus can persist in semen for years, but that doesn’t mean it remains contagious

Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda

• Japan runs out of robot wolves in fight against bears

• What it would have been like to experience the dinosaur-killing asteroid

• Can Some Tiny Particles Cool the Planet? One Tech Company Says Yes