Chill Links

Iran faces strait of Hormuz paradox as strategic value of chokehold erodes.

The Strange New Rules of Restaurant Names.

Is Europe Ready for a New Era of Russian Dirty Tricks?

My AI friends want to create the tools that give us infinite abundance and whatnot, but I want actual concrete cultural plans.

New Mexico’s clean energy success story.

Fed’s preferred inflation gauge shows core prices rose 3.3% annually in July.

Especially in the US and UK, we are heading down a dark path of negative compromises and the ‘coalition of no’.

Why does all of this matter? Beauty matters intrinsically, because we value it and live among it, and because lives immersed in more beauty are better, more enjoyable and fuller lives.

Why some lava-covered exoplanets retain atmospheres for billions of years.

This Is The New Blackbeard ‘Cheap’ Hypersonic Weapon.

It Should Be Harder to Apply for a Job. No, Really.

Live From Last Summer!

How Trump Is Destroying Detroit.

We haunt.

AI agents meant to replace Meta workers made “large-scale, disruptive actions”.

Fact Set

Chill Annoying, Evil

I know I’ve written about it before, but it was quite the achievement that the Fat Acceptance nutty buddies managed to convince a substantial percentage of the population that what they defined as “impossible” bodies were some fantastically unachievable, dangerous goal, though those were the same bodies that 90% of women had just a generation or two prior.

In fact, those “impossible” bodies are just the default factory settings.

London Done

Chill Evil

Yan Q. (@armsq17) / X

London is a noticeably worse and more dangerous place now than it was during the late 1980s/early 1990s, mostly due to unrestrained third world immigration.

All of the great cities of Europe will fall to feral third world rapists soon; Munich too is already lost. As I’ve mentioned before, a friend of mine had to leave her much-beloved home there after being harassed by evil migrants for years and then witnessing a migrant gang rape of a German woman outside her flat. She knew it was just a matter of time until she became that woman.

There’s probably 3-7 years left to see these places before they fall to the hordes and are lost.

Chill Links

Why Are Some Octopuses So Smart? The Answer Might Lie in a Never-Before-Seen Mutation That Helps Them Accurately Build Proteins.

World’s oceans hit highest temperature on record as El Niño grows.

The hidden crisis of overqualified Americans who can’t get jobs.

US set for largest mass visa revocation in history targeting up to 200,000 foreigners, officials say.

Tiny Air-To-Air Missile In Development For Stealthy U.S. Navy Combat Aircraft.

Misogynistic views are biggest red flag for violent extremism, report finds.

Did climate change cause this heat wave? Most likely, and here’s why.

With a Heart for Any Fate: Early Notes from the Oregon Trail.

The kill switch for harmful genes.

Artists Want to Prove Their Work Was Stolen by AI. A New Study Says That’s Impossible. “Stolen.” Fucking clownish.

US Army attack helicopters crashing at historically high rate amid mechanical issues.

So much makes sense in light of the Tocqueville Effect. As problems get smaller, the attention given to them must grow.

Brougham

Chill Cool

Very cool! But deleting the emissions stuff wouldn’t get you much. The problems are more related to the low compression ratio, very conservative cam and restrictive exhaust. Fixing those is where the real gains would come from with a car like that. Could get it from the anemic 190HP of its era (assuming it’s not the new-for-1975 Bendix EFI version that gave you 215HP) to maybe 250HP or so without risking anything. But it’s gonna reduce that glorious 11mpg you’d get even more, to probably around 9mpg or so.

I’d never want to own it, but I love that 5,300 pound absurd car.

Chill Links

Iran-linked hackers behind cyber attack that shut down power plant, reports say.

Forsaking Industrialism: The Most Expensive Thing You Didn’t Buy.

I spent 4 months and $2000 making myself a sweater from scratch, starting with shearing a sheep.

NASA’s New Space Telescope Is Poised to Discover Hidden Facets of the Universe.

Ads and tracking infiltrated TVs. Now they’re coming for monitors. Very evil.

Employers Are Hiring Recent Grads and Then Saying “Oops, Never Mind”.

Just as the world appears to be losing its appetite for books, William T. Vollmann pens a 3,000‑page novel.

Recuerda el verano de 1936.

Lab leaks are not unusua.

Microsoft Paint and Photos Embed Server-Issued GUIDs as Invisible Watermarks in Locally-Generated Images. Evil.

How Europe is killing makers and micro-entrepreneurs.

Failing Acad

Chill Clowns

It’s an extremely bad path that academia is following of evaluating the validity of truth claims based solely on who makes the claim.

If they think that’s going to go well for them…well, I guess delusions are all many of us have left these days. The whole edifice probably needs to be brought down and replaced with something less insular and better-prepared to deal with the world as is.