2026-06-25

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• Cargo ship's chief engineer charged in 2024 Francis Scott Key bridge collapse

  Prosecutors have filed a criminal charge against the chief engineer of a cargo ship involved in the deadly 2024 collapse of Baltimore’s Francis Scott Key Bridge, accusing him of failing to notify the U.S. Coast Guard of hazardous conditions on the ship.

• Overturned truck releases 24M honeybees forcing Texas town lockdown

Horseshit

• Ancient Ruins Found in Mexico Have ‘Never Before Seen’ Features.

• Woman who emptied Knicks trashcan on street— then stole it — fired from JPMorgan Chase, was DEI exec

• Carspreading could lead to extra 2,600 crash deaths a year by 2040, study finds

• Gen Z earning more than millennials did at the same age, says thinktank

• It's Well Past Time for a Four-Day Workweek

• The $80 Pie Only a Former McKinsey Consultant Could Dream Up

• Knives work: Pizza wheels are bad and Japanese toilets are great

• How to Live Without Options - and Why It's the Key to Happiness

  “Keep your options open” has become the secular religion of the ambitious. We give high-achieving young adults the same advice: optimize for flexibility. Take the dual degree. Start a side hustle, because it “leaves more doors open.” Date without labels, rent instead of buy, defer the permanent choice to keep tomorrow’s slate clear. In markets, optionality has a definite, quantifiable, and strictly positive value: when the future is volatile, the ability to change your mind without penalty is the most valuable asset you can hold. But when you apply that logic to personal life, to relationships, careers, community, and identity, it backfires - pretty much every time. Human beings, it turns out, are measurably and predictably less happy with reversible decisions than we are with irreversible decisions. We optimize for the escape hatch, but we keep finding out the escape hatch is the actual source of our misery.

• Witness the "science" of the wild ass guess: Is it more unusual to have written a book, or to have killed someone?

• Older tech workers are tapping out early. Here's what that looks like

• AOL was down (in 1996)

• Ranch Dressing: America's Greatest Food Export

• Boffin claims Microsoft's "quantum leap" is invalid due to "basic Python errors"

  Legg also argues that Microsoft mishandled its code. "The code antisymmetrized bias voltage based on array index rather than physical value," his analysis says. In other words, Microsoft's researchers made a basic programming mistake by evaluating the array index – the number identifying a value's position in an array – instead of the value to which the index refers.

• Could we actually terraform Mars? Scientists are trying to find out.

• Advocacy Groups Express Mixed Views on Embryo Editing

• Hackers Publish Knicks and Madison Square Garden Data Online

• $7k Induction Cooktop Gets Smoking Hot in Two Seconds

Rank Propaganda / Thought Policing / World Disordering

• Big Tech Is a Thief and a Liar, Says New York Times Publisher

• Journalism is rearranging the deckchairs. It needs to reinvent itself

  I think we’ll see new newsrooms emerge that reinvent what journalism is, are unafraid to build real, lasting, two-way relationships with the people they’re trying to serve, and eat everybody else’s lunch.

Musk

• SpaceX has lofted more satellites than everyone else in history, combined: And the gap will only widen from here.

• SpaceX Has Successful Starfall Demo

  • What could possibly be worth the shipping costs here? fast, sure; but it's not ever gonna be a gentle ride either. The immediate thought is military where costs dont matter and most of that kind of cargo already has multiple and adequate delivery arrangements.

  • With Starfall, SpaceX eyes an edge in global cargo delivery from orbit

• SpaceX raises $25B in debt sale less than two weeks after IPO

• 'You can't make billions without hurting people': Cory Doctorow on Elon Musk

• Elon Musk loses his trillionaire status as SpaceX stock comes back to Earth.

  • Musk loses trillionaire status as global tech rout hits SpaceX

• Reid Hoffman says SpaceX 'not an AI company', xAI 'complete train wreck'

• Elon should remain focused on Mars; diverting to the Moon would be a mistake

• Elon Musk denies Tesla's Autopilot caused crash that killed grandmother

Electric / Self Driving cars

• Slate Auto's electric truck starts at $24,950 with 205 miles of range

  • Slate Auto's truck builder goes live for its $25k electric pickup

  • Will Anyone Buy This Cheap EV Truck with Hand-Crank Windows and No Radio?

Robot uprising / Humanoid Helpers

• 'Who is going to pay us when we're replaced by robots?'

• Agility, Maker of Humanlike Robots, to Go Public in $2.5B SPAC Deal

• Robots will replace 700K delivery workers, warns head of e-commerce giant

Religion / Tribal / Culture War and Re-Segregation

• A brutally tortured 3rd-Century saint became a gay icon

Edumacationalizing / Acedemia Nuts

• 100 Years Ago, Students Took the First SAT. Where Is It Headed?

Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising

• Fox wants to take over your TV and the tech inside it

• Google will make you wave at your computer to check you are real

• FDA drops enforcement against Whoop after it tweaks blood pressure feature

• Too many R packages: CRAN is inundated with submissions

• Google's YouTube settles social media addiction case with teen

• GTA 6 will cost $80

  • Rockstar Games Announces Pre-Orders for Grand Theft Auto VI for $79.99

  • Nothing has killed my GTA 6 hype faster than locking a core part of its identity behind a $20 upgrade | PC Gamer

  Now Deluxe/Ultimate/Premium/Insert Fancy Upgrade Term Here cosmetic exclusives are not new to videogames, and preorder bonuses have become a plague on the industry. But usually it's the odd outfit here or cosmetic pack there. Rockstar, however, is going one step further by putting entire stores on the map of Leonida that won't be accessible unless you cough up the $20 upgrade, and quite frankly that's where I have to draw the line.

• Meta announces smart glasses starting at $299 Zuckerberg keeps pushing wearables

• Intel is giving budget gamers what Nvidia and AMD won't

• John Carmack on the mistakes around Quake that ruined id software

• Home Broadband Is 5G's Surprise Killer App

• Cloudflare teams up with big browsers to help websites detect unwelcome visitors

Space / Boomy Zoomers / UFO

• Kennedy Space Center not ready for era of super heavy rockets

AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World

• Meta Pauses Employee-Tracking Program Following Internal Data Leak

• US presses Meta to agree to AI reviews as security fears rise

• Mythos model found vulnerabilities in classified US Government systems

• AI is learning to read the room

• Legal tech firm sues US over limiting foreign access to Fable

• How to burst the AI bubble: Strike at its roots

• Cory Doctorow on the Right – and Wrong – Way to Criticize AI

• Oxford's top maths professor: 'The devil could use AI to destroy the world'

• Oracle's 21,000 layoffs help drive its debt-fueled AI investments

• Guadagnino's Sam Altman movie dropped by Amazon after partnership with OpenAI

• OpenAI Codex bombards SSDs with needless write operations, costing millions

• OpenAI spending hit $34B last year ahead of planned IPO

• Are ChatGPT and other AI chatbots politically biased? We tested them

• NSA Lost Access to Powerful A.I. Model Amid Anthropic Dispute

• AI Is Designing Radio Chips That Humans Couldn't Even Imagine

• What is it like to live in a world you believe is about to end?

  “I think that in most timelines, humans will simply be irrelevant and extinct,” one interviewee said. I heard that a lot. A few interviewees — mostly employed by frontier AI labs — expected the world to become unimaginably strange in a good way. One put a 30% chance on utopia, a 30% chance on dystopia, a 30% chance on extinction, and a 10% chance on something too weird to imagine. Several refused to make any prediction; several more said only that they still had hope. About half echoed one of my most blunt respondents: “I don’t think humanity is going to make it.”

• Companies Are Scrambling to Stop Spending So Much on AI

• Big Tech's $2.7T AI bill comes due: Chart of the Day

• Google's online dominance is showing signs of cracking in AI era

• Talk of a bubble is 'blasphemy against AI' says SoftBank's Son

• Should data centers pay a carbon tax?

• The Trump White House Is over Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei

• Why big AI labs are hiring so many philosophers

• OpenAI unveils its first custom chip, built by Broadcom

• Google set to lose two more AI researchers to Anthropic

• Anthropic Accuses Alibaba of 'Illicitly' Accessing AI Models

Neo Gambling / Crypto con games

• Mark Zuckerberg wants Meta to launch its own prediction market

  • Mark Zuckerberg has directed Meta to create a prediction markets app

• Polls: Voters favor federal oversight of prediction markets

• Polymarket Allegedly Faked Videos Of People Winning Up To $100,000 Because Everything Is Now Fraud Or Gambling And Sometimes Both.

Economicon / Business / Finance

• Child care is becoming more affordable

• Tech stocks slump as AI bubble fears loom

  • US AI stock sell-off shakes markets from Wall Street to Asia

  • Why tech stocks are getting hammered

  • Tech stock slump could be a reality-check moment

  • Is AI 'one big bubble'? Behind the tech sell-off

• US announces $17.5B in loans for nuclear power supply chain

• It wasn't "free": Intel shareholder sues to void deal giving U.S. gov $11B in stock for free

• The CEO of AWS on why Amazon is hiring 11,000 interns and junior employees

• Life Insurers Aren't Just Investors in Private Credit. They're Major Lenders

• SK Hynix targets $29B US listing as AI demand surges

• Qualcomm to buy startup Modular for $4B in AI software push

• Cerebras CEO says margin forecast misunderstood as stock plummets after earnings

• How Remote Work Has Helped a Generation of Working Parents

• Amazon Seller Reveals Rare Glimpse of Shadow Bribery Market

• Micron stock jumps 12% as memory crunch lead to quadrupling of revenue

Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making

• Congress Clears Housing Bill, Cementing a Rare Bipartisan Feat

  • President Abruptly Cancels Signing Ceremony for Bipartisan Housing Bill

  • Trump cancels bipartisan housing bill signing, reiterates demand for SAVE America Act

  President Trump canceled a planned signing ceremony on Wednesday for a landmark housing affordability bill that passed Congress by wide bipartisan margins, saying he will not sign the legislation into law until lawmakers pass an elections bill known as the SAVE America Act.

• Big Tech critic loses House race in New York as AI lobby flexes political power

Trump

• White House drastically shortens deadline for dropping quantum-vulnerable crypto

Democrats

• Clean sweep for Mamdani-backed candidates in New York's Democratic primary

  • Mamdani-backed lefties sweep in NYC congressional primaries - as socialist mayor's influence grows to DC

Left Angst

• Eli Lilly Approved Obesity Drug for Mystery 79-Year-Old Patient

• How the war on terror primed America for autocracy

• Trump Gets Negative Reviews Internationally as Fewer Say US Is Reliable Partner

• The Rolling Coup

  We believe that in the United States of America today we are in the middle of a “rolling coup.” Our democracy’s avowed commitments to social justice, the empowerment of all citizens, a more equitable economy, the rule of law, and a balance between our three branches of government are under serious threat. After decades of trying to roll back progress on these commitments, deeply conservative ideologues have finally gained effective control of all our government’s powers and are determined to use control to support Donald Trump and to ensure that he will never lose an election.

• Texas man sentenced to 30 years for transporting pamphlets

  Texas artist Daniel “Des” Sanchez Estrada was sentenced to 30 years in federal prison today for transporting a box of zines, or political pamphlets. The prosecution claimed Sanchez moved the zines so they wouldn’t incriminate his wife, who attended a protest outside the Prairieland immigration detention center near Dallas, where a police officer was wounded by gunfire.

  • Tampering with evidence, not "moving literature".

• White House app auto-downloads to government phones, can't be uninstalled

• Preparing Algae for Experiments at Home

  • Who wants to culture algae right now?

• The Seeds of Our Housing Crisis Were Planted in the Reagan Era

  For most of the 20th century the nation had banking, education, and labor policies that spurred the construction and design industries, but after 1980 things changed dramatically. Our government scrapped protections for workers, including construction workers, and curtailed the influence of unions. The financial sector was gradually unleashed with policies that allowed investment banks to make riskier investments in real estate. All of these policies—along with the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s abandonment of programs that supplied low and moderate income rental units—had a devastating impact on the housing sector.

• Supreme Court Empowers Prison Guards to Violate Religious Rights with Impunity

  on Tuesday, the six-justice Republican majority ruled that Landor cannot sue the individual officials who violated his rights under the RLUIPA for monetary damages. Even though the prison guards broke the law, the Court’s holding in Landor v. Louisiana Department of Corrections and Public Safety ensures that they will not have to pay for what they did.

• A $45M Donation Brought Larry Ellison Deeper into Trump's Circle

• The Intercept Sues to Uncover Secretive Government Anti-Protester Database

Law Breaking / Police / Internal Security

• Austin Carter, 30, was disarmed by a drone, a possible first in law enforcement

External Security / Militaria / Diplomania

• How to dig into the money behind the U.S. military's gambling business

  The U.S. military banned slot machines from domestic bases in 1951. But that hasn’t stopped gambling on American military bases overseas, where slot machines continue to operate through the Army Recreation Machine Program, part of the Morale, Welfare and Recreation program.

World

• UK tribunal gives go ahead for $4B lawsuit against Apple over iCloud services

• European Commission's Metsola Overrides MEPs to Force Through Chat Control

  European Parliament President Roberta Metsola is trying to push through a controversial law on scanning child abuse content online even though it has been repeatedly slapped down by her own chamber, according to a document seen by POLITICO. In a step that diplomats deem “without precedent,” the top EU politician has asked member countries in the Council to approve a bill that her own Parliament shot down in a plenary vote in March.

• Founding a company in Germany: €9600, 152 days and I still can't send an invoice

• Air conditioning creates political divide after France records hottest day

  • Europeans should learn to love the air-conditioner

• Venezuela reveals $240B in debt it cannot pay (~$100B more than expected)

• Why Is the Media Ignoring the Montreal Shooter’s Antisemitism?

• German federal Microsoft spending hit €481M in 2025

• Brazilian judge sentences parents to prison for homeschooling their daughters

Iran / Houthi

• Downed US pilot reported seeing Iranian drones swarm in 'jellyfish' formation

• Former PM admits Israel smuggled Starlinks to Iran during January riots

Russia Bad / Ukraine War

• Russia's Wiki warfare tries to distort reality, documents show

• Crimea's big cities in total blackout after Ukrainian drone strikes

China

• China's LineShine Supercomputer Dethrones US' El Capitan

  • Chinese supercomputer leapfrogs best US machines to be ranked fastest

  • Chinese supercomputer powered by homegrown chips tops global ranking

  • Chinese supercomputer leapfrogs best US machines to be ranked fastest

  • China overtakes USA with fastest Top500 supercomputer: 2.2 Exaflops

  • Chinese supercomputer tops US models in global ranking

  • Chinese Supercomputer Overtakes U.S. as World's Fastest

• Chinese universities are cutting language majors to make way for AI

• EU joins US pact to break reliance on Chinese AI supply chains

• China says it has a right to target people overseas with new ethnic unity law

• a token is a token: Chinese Models have an advantage because Chinese symbols convey more meaning

• Five-year-old Nvidia A100 servers sell for up to $82k in China

• China moves forward with ethnic unity initiative

• China as an absolute advantage economy

  Textiles are worth dwelling on, because they are the classic starter industry that every successful developing country becomes good at and then outgrows—a badge of its very success. China has refused to go along with this pattern. It is still fully competitive in textiles even as it has become a leader in advanced goods. Using trade data from Harvard’s Growth Lab, you can watch South Korea and Taiwan do what the textbook says. Between 1995 and 2015, their shares of world textile exports fell sharply and textiles fell in their export rank, as rising wages pushed them out of the business and on to other things. China did the opposite. Its share of world textile exports kept climbing, and China remains the largest textile exporter in the world. Textile is still China’s No.1 export item after all these years.

  How can one country stay competitive in everything at once, from umbrellas to aircraft? The answer is not that Chinese workers are unusually productive. Measured by output per hour worked, China is below the world average, ranking around 121st among countries a few years ago. A country that is ordinary in productivity but dominant in trade is winning on price, not on efficiency. And the main reason its prices are low is that its labor share of income is incredibly low.

  This is not a side effect of an aging population or of automation but it is deeply rooted in the nature of its economic system and its political economy. It is where the capital-cost advantage and the labor-cost advantage turn out to come from the same source. When workers are paid less than the value of what they produce, the difference does not disappear. It goes to the other parts of the economy. Some of it goes to the government, whose share of the national wage bill has roughly doubled since the 1980s. The rest goes to the capital sector, enabling corporations and capital providers to make and to fund large-scale investment projects, build factories and power stations, invest in AI technologies and solar panels, and create an infrastructure the rest of the world envies.

  • The centrally managed economy is great... for the managers. Now ask how much money is wasted on incredibly stupid shit: fraudulent factories paid for by "government" because someone's cousin says they "stole EV tech from the west"; the ghost cities...

Health / Medicine

• Woman with Alzheimer's starts conversing again after taking psilocybin

• Younger Adults May Be Aging Faster Than Previous Generations

• U.S. health spending on pace to hit $6T

Pox / COVID / BioTerror AgitProp

• France confirms first Ebola case

  France has confirmed its first case of Ebola - a doctor who had returned from a humanitarian mission in the Democratic Republic of Congo. The doctor was "immediately admitted to a specialised facility" and is in a stable condition, the French health ministry said on Wednesday. DR Congo announced an Ebola outbreak last month, but experts believe the virus had been circulating for weeks previously. More than 260 people are confirmed to have died from the virus in the central African country, while 1,000 people have been infected. This is the first Ebola case to have been confirmed in Europe, although an American doctor who tested positive in DR Congo was treated at a German hospital last month.

  • France confirms first Ebola case in doctor returning from DR Congo mission

  • Ebola confirmed in France: Officials report first case of eye-bleeding disease

• A deadly fungus that can infect cats and people is spreading

• Call it what it is–the US has lost its hold on measles elimination

• The Rising Threat Of Tick-Borne Diseases In America—Here’s What To Know.

Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda

• Europe: The Fastest-Warming Continent

• Tuesday 23 June was reported the hottest day since 1947 in Europe

• Extreme heat is muddling animals' brains–and even triggering aggression

• Like Humans, Mediterranean Sperm Whales Have Their Own Dialects

• Australian spider uses a high-powered web catapult to trap and eat ants

• Quebec town recognizes trees as living beings with rights

• Reducing tick density along recreational trails in Ottawa, Canada

• Dow Faces Parkinson's Lawsuit over Chlorpyrifos Safety Claims

• Utah officials warn of 'unprecedented' water shortages as towns run dry