Chill Links

Germany plans a €12B missile program to deter Putin.

How the A.I. Borrowing Binge Helps Drive Up Government Bond Yields.

America Is About to Get More Expensive.

Stagflation, the Scourge of the 1970s, Is Back.

Zero Knowledge Proofs Aren’t Age Verification Silver Bullets.

Dismantling the Roadless Rule threatens to disrupt wildlife and water in US.

Saab Unveils Stealthy Supersonic ‘Fighter Drone’ Concept.

China’s Massive New Artificial Island In The South China Sea Emerges, Primed For Militarization.

El Farol Bar problem.

The One Big Issue That Connects the Data Center and Flock Backlash.

Simone de Beauvoir: the Best Romantic Partners Celebrate Each Other’s Freedom.

China Is Strapping ‘Digital Bombs’ to Civilian Infrastructure—Is the US Ready?

If rising rates were enough to end a bull market, we’d have entered a bear market long ago.

Trump’s FTC Wants You to Call Surveillance Pricing ‘Personalized Pricing’.

Shot Shot

Chill Clowns, Evil

1) Women in this sport and most sports can wear whatever they want already. There are literally no restrictions. Clownishly wrong fucking take. Women wear those outfits because they want to.

2) And my problem isn’t that you cannot see her butt, it’s that it’s a worse shot! It’s zoomed in too tightly to get any context. Just objectively it’s an inferior shot for the purpose of ridiculous prudishness. I hate this timeline.

3) If women are not allowed to be shown in their actual athletic clothes while doing their actual sport, they should not be permitted to wear that attire at all. Simple as that.

Aud

Chill Annoying, Clowns

Nearly all the people I’ve seen dragging Audrey for how “hideous” she is have been women — it’s actually women who have higher standards than men, even for other women.

As for me, I’ve liked Audrey for a while. I had no idea she was supposed to be some super hideous freak to many people. I cannot understand why. It looks like she’s having fun and she has some good pop songs. Women, leave her alone.

Bit So Fast

Chill Sex

Not a Good Jewish Girl✡️ (@estherzelda0514) / X

Sister, I can assure you that women are capable of really bad sex. For instance:

1) A woman who used more teeth than anything else during a blowjob. That hurt and left marks. She was genuinely trying, just terrible.

2) A woman who bounced around like a crazed gorilla and almost broke my penis. I was just a human dildo to her. I might as well not have been there for all I got out of it.

3) A woman who stuck her finger up my butt without checking with me first. If I did that to a woman, it’d be called “rape.”

There are more, but that’s a good sampling. This is another example of “women are wonderful, blameless, and cannot be held accountable for anything.” I think women are probably bad at sex more often than men, to be clear.

Real Ack

Chill Regular-ass Post

My honest and historically realistic land acknowledgement:

You used to be here; now you’re not. The land you dwelled on was taken. You were not strong enough to hold it so it is now ours. You lost. We won. History’s tide sweeps all away eventually. Thus it ever was and ever will be.

Wrought Copy

Chill Culture

When you advocate for copyright in the modern age, you are advocating for artificial scarcity that is a deadweight loss to the entire civilization. I do not care what your “good” reasons are. Every argument you make ultimately reduces to prioritizing extortionate rent extraction from things that cost nothing to copy. Culture is a commons, and you are fencing it off so a middleman can charge admission at the gate. Call it what you want and cry all you want. It doesn’t matter. It’s still a tollbooth built on infinite abundance.

Counter

Chill Annoying, Evil

Noah Smith 🐇🇺🇸🇺🇦🇹🇼 (@Noahpinion) / X

I’m certainly not defending misogyny, but women in the US in particular are just worse now. Their mental health has been destroyed by smartphones and social media; these are not the same women we used to have. Most of them are entitled, repugnant, spoiled brats who hate men but still think they all deserve that top 0.1% man — while offering nothing and looking like a cave troll due to no exercise and obesity.

So of course there is going to be some backlash to that. It’d more notable if there were not a counter-reaction.

Chill Links

Kodak’s “Pre-Invented” Lunar Orbiter Camera; or, The Fate of SAMOS Readout.

Politicians Who Once Championed Data Centers Are Now Bashing Them.

Oh Dear, Condo Prices Fell by 15% to 33% in 33 Bigger Markets, Some Below 2006 Levels, as Historic Condo Bubbles Deflate.

How Did the English Build Such Beautiful Villages?

Why Europe can’t escape the fallout from $40 trillion US debt woes.

Americans still make up the clear majority of the workforce inside most U.S. corporations. Yet when corporate espionage, trade-secret theft, and unauthorized technology transfer cases are examined, foreign nationals and foreign-linked actors appear far more often than their share of the payroll would predict.

Social Security union says it needs $3 billion and another 20,000 workers to fix long wait times and ‘ghost offices’.

Why do movies look like that now?

El Niño-caused drought in Panama is likely to raise prices on everything from medicine to fuel.

The drone war is coming for global shipping.

Pandemic Inflation Took Away 7% Of Your Wages, And You Never Got Them Back.

Watching TikTok and Instagram Reels Videos Deactivates the Brain’s Cognitive Control Network, Study Finds.

F-117 Nighthawk Needs Fresh Explosives For Its Tailhook Nearly Two Decades After ‘Retirement’.

AI’s Next Big Leap Is Into the Real World.

The economy increasingly rewards ownership over effort, which has created some… problems.

The Super El Niño Won’t Fix the West’s Water Crisis.

‘Ghost Job’ Ads Are Getting So Bad That Lawmakers Want to Ban Them.

Amid intense backlash, people are vandalizing Flock surveillance cameras. Good. Destroy them all and those who make them.

Liberals hate datacenters because they hate tech. Conservative hate datacenters because they think tech is liberal.

Cyberpunk War: How Ukraine Repurposes U.S. Weapons In Unexpected Ways.

Too Much Clownery

Chill Clowns

Tech Tangents: “@thomasfuchs My biggest frust…”.

So much clownery from all sides regarding AI. None of these people understand it, have any kind of valid thoughts about it, or really have any basis for even pondering it. And they are worthless losers.

Also, I don’t care about copyright at all, in any context. Destroy it forever. I’m glad the AI companies trained on all that copyrighted material. I hope they do much more. Ingest it all; create the world mind.

Fastread

Chill Amusing, Annoying

Simon Sarris (@simonsarris) / X

To me, audiobooks are worthless time-wasters. I have a thousand thoughts between each word. So painfully slow. I tried listening to an audiobook once and wanted to kill myself.

I read somewhere between 8-20x as fast as the average person speaks, depending on the complexity of the work, so I have no time for the glacial pace of audiobooks. Just no.

Nights

Chill Music

This is the best cover of Smashing Pumpkins’ “Tonight, Tonight.”

There used to be a great live video of the band playing the song. Now lost, like most things on the internet. Sarah has great enunciation and her voice is single-tracked and unprocessed (very rare now and then). Just such a great cover with more heart than the original, and a far better voice.

Chill Links

Europe Girds for Another Hike in Energy Bills This Winter.

Anti-Tax Sentiment Is Trending, Even In the Bluest States.

US Housing Is a Buyer’s Market. Trouble Is, There Aren’t Many Buyers.

AI Pioneer Fei-Fei Li Warns of Risks From Growing Tech Backlash.

Flock Has a Powerful New AI Tool for Police. We Got Its Code. Pure evil.

Coders Say They Already Found Workarounds to Claude’s Invisible Watermarks.

The Rise of Anger: Emotions and Policy Views.

AI Is Helping Patients Solve Medical Mysteries.

Even As Disease Outbreaks Abound, American Vaccination Rates In Children Fall. We are morons.

It used to be our imperfect bodies that made us insecure. With AI, it’s our minds as well.

U.S. Workers Are Paying More for Healthcare, and Next Year Will Be Worse.

The box that built globalisation. Containers have transformed ports, cities and trade. Now the revolution is reaching a limit.

The US munitions crisis goes back further than Iran.

Why Is It Absolute Hell to Buy a Movie Ticket Now?

Gaming Consoles Are Getting Wrecked by High Prices.

They're the Ones Who Told Us to Pay Attention to Jason Arday.