World's Smallest Violin

Comcast has a sad because, with the increased availability of competitors in the broadband market, what is arguably the most loathed company in America is losing customers.

Merciful heavens!  It appears that these companies are charging prices that are too low.

Comcast reportedly plans significant job cuts in its cable division as the firm continues to lose residential broadband and TV customers. Comcast lost 144,000 residential broadband customers in Q3 2026, up from a 91,000-customer loss in the same quarter a year ago, the company said in its earnings report today.

Comcast historically capitalized on a lack of competition for high-speed wired broadband. But now it faces stronger competition from fixed wireless providers and from fiber providers in parts of its cable territory.

“Fixed wireless remains aggressive and continues to take share, while fiber construction remains elevated, with pockets of irrational pricing and promotional activity,” Comcast co-CEO Mike Cavanagh said today in an earnings call.

Comcast CFO Jason Armstrong said “irrational pricing” from fiber operators includes $30 to $40 monthly broadband offers “in specific markets in the third quarter.” He said $30 to $40 pricing is irrational because deploying fiber costs $1,500 or more per home, and is “getting more expensive with construction costs up as you get into more suburban and rural areas.”

The first, and most obvious, point here is that Comcast co-CEO Mike Cavanagh and Comcast CFO Jason Armstrong are contemptible greed-heads who should have been drowned at birth by their parents.

The second point is that Comcast clearly does not have a handle on the actual installation costs for fiber. 

………

After the latest quarterly drop, Comcast has 28.3 million residential broadband customers in the US. Comcast said it has a plan to turn things around.

“We’ve embarked on the most significant operating and cost transformation in our company’s history, with an opportunity we believe will ultimately amount to billions of dollars over time,” Cavanagh said. The organizational changes will result in a “significant charge” of over $1 billion to be applied in the fourth quarter earnings report, Armstrong said.

It appears likely that job cuts will affect Comcast’s famously frustrating customer service division, replacing some number of humans with AI agents that already handle some customer interactions. “As personal AI agents reshape how consumers discover, purchase, and manage services, we’re positioning Comcast to capitalize on that shift,” Armstrong said.

When a company says that adopting AI to improve their customer service they are lying.

In order for to even remotely approach viability, their existing customer service would have to be so horrifically bad that ……… Oh, right Comcast.

For them, AI might actually be an improvement. 

It's Thursday ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ ………

Initial unemployment claims fell to 194,000 from 200,00 last week while continuing claims rose by 25,000 to 1.73 million.

I have no f%$#ing clue as to what is going on.

Applications for US unemployment benefits fell to a three-month low last week, underscoring the stability of the labor market.

Initial claims fell by 6,000 to 194,000 in the week ended Oct. 17, according to Labor Department data released Thursday. The median forecast of economists polled by Bloomberg called for 200,000.

Continuing claims, a proxy for the number of people receiving benefits, rose by 25,000 to 1.73 million in the previous week, a six-week high. 

Something profoundly weird is going on. 

Headline of the Day

I Teach at a Business School. It’s Time to Shut Them Down

—Chris Marquis in The New York Times on how the MBA is destroying America. (Alternate link here)

I'm inclined to agree.

This fall, another cohort of ambitious young professionals has arrived at business schools around the world for two-year programs with price tags in the six figures. Their presence at some of the nicest and shiniest buildings on campus renews a familiar question: What exactly is an M.B.A. for?

This question has become more urgent as business education has expanded dramatically in the past decades. Today, nearly one in five American undergraduates majors in business, and the M.B.A. is the most popular graduate degree in the United States.

I have taught in business schools for over 20 years, at Harvard, Cornell and Cambridge. While some students appear to care only about their future compensation, I have met many with nobler goals: engineers who want to commercialize clean energy, physicians determined to fix the health care system, nonprofit leaders who have watched good missions fail for want of good management.

These students enroll hoping to learn what business schools say they teach: how to manage people, how to allocate capital and resources and how to make the world a better place through leadership. But I’ve come to see how the institution can reshape the worldviews of those who enter it, often undermining the very ambitions that brought them there.

………

I’ve come to realize that business schools don’t just reflect our economic system — they actively manufacture its priorities and normalize its harms, training the future leaders who will design and defend the structures driving our overlapping global crises. Tinkering at the margins with a class on corporate responsibility or ethics is not going to help. We don’t need to “fix” business schools. We need to abolish them. 

I agree. 

Too Much Power

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Elon Musk ordered that Starlink service to the Ukrainian be slowed.

The fact that one person has the unilateral power to do this is almost as concerning as the fact that the specific person with this unilateral power a paranoid delusional white supremacist hypocrite.

What is interesting here is how quickly this story came out.

It seems to me that it is highly the WSJ reporters already had their hooks into the Musk organization when the Starlink issues arose.

There is a very real possibility that there is a Theranos style exposé in the works.

Elon Musk ordered the slowdown of a military-grade version of Starlink relied on by Ukraine, a decision that sparked panic in Kyiv and confusion inside the Trump administration, U.S. officials and people familiar with the matter said.

Both Musk and President Trump have expressed anger at Ukraine for attacking Russian diesel refineries in recent weeks, which the president blames for high energy prices. Last week, Musk capped the speeds at which Ukrainian hardware could stay connected to the satellite-based network, the people said, rendering some offensive drones and interceptor drones virtually useless.

Musk and Trump discussed the Starlink decision in a call soon after the slowdown became public, while the president was campaigning last week, two of the people said. One of the people also claimed Musk and Trump discussed the matter prior to the decision to throttle Starlink.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s public complaints—namely that Ukrainians could die if the unrestricted service wasn’t restored—led to widespread confusion about who ordered the slowdown, and to an informal investigation inside the White House.

During the uproar, SpaceX representatives called White House counterparts seeking a unified understanding and subsequent message that the company and Trump administration coordinated ahead of Musk’s directive, the people said.

The only question here seems to be whether it was Elon Musk or Donald Trump who is really behind this.

My money is on both.

I'm a bit of a tankie, but I hate Musk more. 

Here is hoping that the Apartheid Era Emerald Heir Pedo Guy™ burns for this.

It's Solar Shingles All Over Again

Guys it’s 2026 can we please stop falling for his BS.

[image or embed]

— Darragh Mc Kenna (@darraghmckenna.bsky.social) October 16, 2026 at 11:00 AM

Roll Tape!

it appears that Elon Musk's cold thruster sports car was little more than a shell.

Or maybe 2 shells set up for the loop de loop and the car jump separately.

Whether it's the fake self driving demonstrations, the diesel powered charger stations, the non-existent battery swap technology,  or the aforementioned solar shingles. musk has a long history of polishing turds and having it swallowed by an all to credulous media.

Flying cars are right around the corner, if Tesla CEO Elon Musk is to be believed.

Last week, he unveiled the automaker’s long-awaited Roadster by having it drive to the top of a ramp, flipping upside down in the process, then fling itself into the air before using its cold-fuel thrusters to gently land in style. Minutes later, another Roadster did its best Evel-Knievel-with-a-jetpack impression by blowing itself into the air and leaping over a row of six Tesla vehicles, including its Semi Truck cab.

Sure, the Roadster can “fly.” There’s no denying that it was an impressive stunt. But huge questions remain, such as whether regulators will ever deem it road — let alone air — worthy. Another is if the cars used in the stunt will remotely resemble the actual product that’s sold to consumers, if such a thing does ever come to pass.

Tesla says the “Rocket” version of its Roadster is loaded with 600 liters of compressed air, 10 directional cold-gas thruster nozzles, and a huge suction-fan system on the bottom. To make room for it all, Tesla says it removed the passenger seat.

But some observers are wondering if the car is even more stripped down than that, perhaps even lacking a full-sized battery so the engineers could save room and cut down weight. Meanwhile, screenshots of the car’s sparse looking underside taken while it was midair seemed to show it lacking a suction fan, fueling further speculation that Tesla hasn’t figured out to fully combine its capabilities as they’re being presented. The car that stuck upside down to the top of the ramp and then cushioned its landing was, some skeptics allege, equipped with different hardware from the one that leaped into the air to leapfrog the other cars.

Given the numbers supplied by Tesla, 250 kg of air compressed down to 600 liters, which gives an internal pressure of 35.1 MPa (350.5 bar or 5084.5 psi) at 20°C.*

That's a bomb on wheels.  Even if the filament wound pressure vessel is designed to fail gracefully, the rest of the car is shrapnel when something goes wrong.  It's about 3x more pressure than a run of the mill compressed gas tank

Also, given the declared curb weight of 1700 kg, and the low Isp of air or nitrogen cold thrusters, less than 80 under perfect conditions, the thrusters would have an endurance of about 11 seconds.  (It would actually be far less than that, because the temperature of the gas would drop as a result of its rapid expansion.)

Can someone arrest this fraud? 

^*OK, here is how I calculated this. The weight of a mole of gas is 28.97g, so 250 kg of air is 8629.6 moles. The ideal gas equation gives us this PV=nRT, where P = pressure, V= volume (.6 m3), n = 8629.6, and T = 293.13°K (20°C).  Solving the for P gives 3.51 x 107 N/m3 (Pascals).

If You Believe This ………

……… I have a bridge for sale in Brooklyn.

The idea that it was just an AI hallucination that caused the suspension of the, "No Kings," Instagram account just as the protests were kicking off by the criminal enterprise formerly known as Facebook™ does not pass the smell test.

Meta Platforms Inc. said an automated security system mistakenly suspended the Instagram account of the No Kings Coalition at the height of a nationwide series of demonstrations.

The technology company offered an apology and a more detailed explanation for the disruption, which came during the group's early-voting push ahead of the Nov. 3 midterm elections.

Instagram's engineering team found that the accounts' "reading" activity triggered the security system. A tool from Anthropic PBC's Claude was accessing profiles, posts and hashtags at roughly four times the normal rate in intense bursts Saturday, Andy Stone, Meta's vice president of communications wrote in a social media post Sunday.

"These abrupt, high-volume, sequential requests in a short period resembled automated bot traffic rather than an ordinary human browsing our systems," Stone said.

Given that Meta has been actively suppressing pro-DaSilva accounts in Brazil ahead of the upcoming runoff election. I'm gonna call bull sh%$ on this excuse.

 

The Ethical AI Company

Anthropic has been lobbying lawmakers for an AI, "Regulation," bill that, "Would let the government block a model’s release or use only if it poses a foreseeable, imminent risk of more than $1 billion in damages, or of killing or seriously injuring more than 50 people."

Furthermore, this would only apply if, the risk is from, "The creation or release of a biological weapon, the model evading its developer’s controls or a cyberattack."

That's awfully white of them.

Representatives for the artificial intelligence giant Anthropic have quietly pitched Capitol Hill lawmakers on a draft bill to regulate frontier AI safety and security, according to three people with knowledge of the efforts who were granted anonymity to discuss private deliberations.

………

The bill would let the government block a model’s release or use only if it poses a foreseeable, imminent risk of more than $1 billion in damages, or of killing or seriously injuring more than 50 people. The risk must stem from the creation or release of a biological weapon, the model evading its developer’s controls or a cyberattack. The language mirrors that found in California’s AI laws including SB 53, which was signed into law last year.

(emphasis mine)

This is not a serious bill, and California's SB 53 is not a serious law. (Which is probably why Gavin Newsom signed it into law)

Headline of the Day

94 Year-Old Electronics Billionaire Accused of Hiring Goons to Infest Chicago With Huge Rat Swarm

Futurism, describing how a Barre Seid's attempts to feed squirrels on a gargantuan scale have led to a plague of rats.

No one could have predicted this, except, or course for anyone with an even passing familiarity with rats and cityscape ecology.

A 94-year-old electronics mogul is in hot water with Chicago authorities, who claim that his hare-brained plan to feed hungry squirrels is instead sustaining a massive plague of rats.

As previous owner of the billion-dollar electrical manufacturing company Tripp Lite, businessman Barre Seid has been putting his largess to use by paying a small army of workers to sprinkle an assortment of tree nuts across Chicago-area parks, Fortune reports.

As local resident Caroline Novak told Chicago WGN, it’s “like a luxury mélange of really nice nuts: I’m talking Brazil nuts and walnuts… these are not acorns.”

Though Seid’s target audience seems to be local squirrels, residents and city officials note that rats have quickly grown to depend on the regular feedings. As Novak’s husband told WGN, he counted over 40 rats digging holes near nut piles during a recent walk through Lincoln Park.

The bizarre operation has evidently been underway for years at this point, earning the billionaire heaps of civil violations carrying relatively small fines. Wealthy as he is, Seid has reportedly had no problem paying those fees and carrying on — the law forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, as the old saying goes.

The local alderman is pushing for the parks department to sue Seid, which I think is the wrong tactic.

They should frog march him out of his mansion in handcuffs. 

Time to Drop Google Maps

Many years ago, I wrote an essay for the now defunct website Netslaves in which I noted that MapQuest had become the first internet application that I found truly essential.

Since that time, largely through anti-competitive business practices, it has been supplanted by Google Maps.

It seems to be having a bit or a renaissance now, what with it ignoring Trump's delusional renaming of Lake Ontario as Lake America, and now the platform is adding features that allows one to look up the locations of Flock and other automated license plate readers.

MapQuest is continuing its push to become the official map and navigation platform of the resistance. After promising not to comply with the Trump administration’s “Lake America” gimmick, the platform announced a new “Surveillance Layer” that displays the locations of automated license plate readers (ALPRs), including those from Flock Safety.

Per MapQuest, its new tool will identify the locations of known outdoor surveillance cameras and plate readers from Motorola Solutions (Vigilant), Genetec, Axis Communications, Axon, Leonardo (ELSAG), Neology, Rekor, PlateSmart, Ubicquia, Verkada, and others. While the company didn’t specify how it sources its data, it appears to be similar to the data amassed by DeFlock, which maintains a user-submitted map of ALPR camera locations. MapQuest may be sourcing the information from DeFlock and the OpenStreetMap project. Gizmodo has reached out to MapQuest for additional information and will update when we hear back.

………

MapQuest’s app has gotten shockingly popular over the last few months, despite otherwise being left for dead as a relic of the Web 1.0 era. The company started to get a lot of buzz when it refused to go along with the Trump administration’s decision to rename Lake Ontario to “Lake America.” That decision was in stark contrast to the dominant map app makers at Google and Apple, who basically suggested it was out of their control because they just follow the U.S. Geographic Names Information System (GNIS), and when Trump’s executive order made GNIS officially change the name, it changed on their platforms, too.

The otherwise forgotten MapQuest saw a massive surge in downloads following its act of resistance, spiking to the top spot in the Apple App Store and recording millions of downloads. But the company was pushing back against Trump’s name changes before it got a big boost in August. MapQuest also held strong during the Gulf of Mexico situation, opting not to make the change despite GNIS officially updating the name to Gulf of America. Instead, it dropped a Gulf Name Generator that allowed users to make up their own gulf name.

Sometimes, when an organization has no f%$#s left to give, they give their best.

Stay Classy, My Friend

Matt Gaetz has doxxed women suing him for allegedly sexually trafficking them.

Well, we've always known that he was a douche bag. (No offense to actual douche bags)

Two women have filed a federal civil lawsuit accusing former Florida Congressman Matt Gaetz and two others of participating in an alleged sex trafficking scheme involving young women, drugs and traveling across state lines.

The allegations are the latest chapter in Gaetz’s high-profile sex scandal that ultimately derailed his nomination by President Trump as U.S. Attorney General and also led him to resign from Congress in 2024. His departure came as a bi-partisian House Ethics Committee was in the final stages of an investigation into his alleged misconduct.

………

Later in the day, Gaetz posted a photo on X in an effort to dox the Jane Does in the lawsuit. Under a photo of three bikini-clad young women, whose backs are shown, Gaetz wrote: “Jane Doe Strikes Again! Two adult women sued me today alleging they were sex trafficked to the Bahamas. I’m shocked nobody responded to their repeated cries for help, posted to instagram.”

The post includes the name of a woman, but Gaetz earlier admitted to a Herald reporter that he wasn’t sure the photo was of any of the Jane Does in the lawsuit.

The 33-page complaint, filed Monday in the Middle District of Florida, details how the former Congressman used two of his friends, now-convicted ex-Seminole County tax collector Joel Greenberg, and former Florida GOP House member Christopher Dorworth, to coordinate the recruitment of young women whom they supplied with drugs in order to facilitate sexual encounters, according to the lawsuit. The incidents occurred from 2017 to January 2019.

(emphasis mine)

He really is a deeply toxic piece of sh%$.

The Fix is In

It appears that Larry Ellison banned the account promoting the new Elon Musk documentary from Tik Tok.

One hand washes the other among the tech bros. 

TikTok has banned the Musk film advertising account, citing a repeated pattern of political content that violates its policies. The move, which comes just as the Alex Gibney’s investigation into Elon Musk expands to more than 470 screens across North America, raises concerns about Big Tech suppression that the very film seeks to expose.

Distributor Bleecker Street was informed Friday afternoon a “permanent suspension” was coming regarding any ads it tried to buy, and the company was unable to do so shortly after. The native unpaid TikTok account, which generally allows more leeway on so-called political content, remains active, though Bleecker Street is not allowed to pay to boost its content, as many companies traditionally do.

A spokesperson for the distributor confirmed that TikTok reps had informed them of the suspension and noted “disappointment” in the timing. After grossing $70,000 in four theaters in New York and Los Angeles in its first weekend of release, Musk is now playing in dozens of cities this weekend. The spokesperson said the company is in the process of appealing the move; even a reversal, however, could still prove costly if it doesn’t come during a weekend window when many people are likely to see the film.

Well, I guess that serial sexual harassers stick together.

Support Your Local Police

The good folks at Techdirt have a good summary about how conspire to conceal their use of various spy tech.

Among other things, this is a violation of the Brady disclosures required by law, and as such this should be treated as a felony criminal conspiracy, at least in a perfect world.

Law enforcement agencies across the country are increasingly relying on spying technologies—automated license plate readers (ALPR), cell-site simulators, and facial recognition, to name a few–causing an outcry in many communities where people are rightly concerned about the threat to civil rights and civil liberties these tools present.

Some authorities are responding to these concerns by trying to hide what they’re doing. Police departments are telling officers not to mention ALPRs when stopping vehicles and concealing their use of ALPRs to avoid citizens’ public records requests. Concealing the use of unpopular spying tools isn’t anything particularly new for law enforcement—cops have been doing it for years—but it’s just as wrong now as it was 20 years ago.

These practices prevent the public from knowing about and questioning how agencies are spending taxpayer dollars on spying technologies and holding them accountable. This is especially troubling when many towns are signing contracts with Flock and other ALPR vendors with little to no public oversight. The practice also violates disclosure obligations, allows cops and prosecutors to hide their tactics from judges, and cheats defendants from being able to challenge the use of evidence gathered by spy tech from being used against them.

404 Media recently revealed that in its usage policy for Flock ALPR cameras, one county in Iowa tells police to keep them a secret when detaining people: “DO NOT MENTION ALPR USAGE TO THE OCCUPANTS OF THE VEHICLE,” the policy document reads. “DO NOT MENTION ALPR USAGE IN YOUR REPORT OR COMPLAINT UNLESS ABSOLUTELY NECESSARY.” If writing a report about an incident, police are told to say they used “county resources” in making a stop instead of acknowledging use of ALPRs.

In Houston, police officers are likewise instructed to “be as vague as permissible” about why they are using Flock because the searches they run on Flock’s surveillance system could be obtained via public records requests.

The cops are crooks.

If you are on a jury, and a cop says that they used, "County resources," vote to acquit. 

Jury nullification is legal, though strongly discouraged, and it should be used here. 

Not a Surprise

It appears that DHS ignored restrictions placed by the issuing judge on the search warrant issued against Congresswoman Ilhan Omar.

This is not a surprise.  The Trump administration in general, and DHS in particular, are to following the law what Ebola is to French kissing.

Lawyers for Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minnesota) on Friday accused federal authorities of ignoring key restrictions that a judge placed on the search of the lawmaker’s D.C. residence this week and demanded the immediate return of all property seized from the home. 

In a letter sent to Justice Department prosecutors, attorneys Amy Jeffress and Joshua Matz condemned the investigation into Omar’s immigration history as a politically motivated attack on one of President Donald Trump’s chief critics, saying it “violates Representative Omar’s constitutional rights and threatens the separation of powers.”

They also alleged that investigators did not follow specific instructions that a U.S. magistrate judge imposed on how the search should be carried out as they descended upon Omar’s residence in Northeast Washington on Monday, according to a copy of their letter obtained by The Washington Post.

Among the restrictions the attorneys said agents did not follow were provisions requiring investigators to provide Omar’s lawyers with a copy of the warrant and to contact the House Office of General Counsel before carrying out the search. That would have given Omar the chance to consult with congressional attorneys on any legislative work product that might have been exempt from federal seizure, her lawyers said. 

The Post has reported that Homeland Security Investigations, the investigative arm of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, is investigating whether Omar, 44, or members of her family may have lied on decades-old immigration paperwork to secure legal status and eventually U.S. citizenship.

I'm pretty sure that the Trump admin wants to denaturalize her, which is beyond the pale in terms of the norms of behavior, but they also ignored black letter Constitutional law, and a judge's instructions, with regard to the, "Speech and debate clause," which gives complete immunity to lawmakers' actions with regard to their constitutional duties.

………

In their letter Friday, Omar’s attorneys said the warrant required federal prosecutors to advise the congresswoman of those “speech and debate” protections and ask her to waive them. The lawyers maintained that did not happen and that agents executing the search prevented Omar from contacting legal counsel for more than an hour after the search had begun.

As much as Trump might want it to be, legislating while black is not a crime. 

It's TACO Day

Trump has canceled the livestream of Nidal Hasan's execution following (completely predictable) widespread and worldwide condemnation of this bit of mindless cruelty.

Evil and stupid.

President Trump on Thursday canceled the Pentagon’s planned livestream of the execution of the Army officer who was convicted in the 2009 Fort Hood mass shooting.

Pentagon officials said last week that the execution of Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, who killed 13 people and wounded 32 others at Fort Hood, Texas, would be broadcast via livestream, a decision Mr. Trump initially said he supported.

But in private, Mr. Trump quickly began to deliberate with his advisers amid widespread criticism of the decision, and learned after the announcement that Mr. Hasan is paralyzed, according to several people familiar with his thinking. The president’s main concern was whether broadcasting the execution would deter other mass shootings, according to a White House official who was granted anonymity to discuss his thinking.

Here is a message to the editors of the New York Times, stop sane-washing Donald Trump and the Trump administration like you did in the last paragraph.

They are people for whom publicly displayed cruelty is a source of pleasure, nothing more.

………

Mr. Trump added that only immediate families of Mr. Hasan’s victims could watch the execution in person.

The president and his advisers remain adamant that Mr. Hasan deserves to be executed, but the president’s decision to change course constituted a rare retreat in the face of enormous public pushback. The criticism came from Democrats, Republicans, military officials and faith leaders who maintained that broadcasting the execution would turn it into a barbaric source of entertainment that violated core democratic principles.

"Rare retreat?"  Not rare at all.

TACO (Trump Always Chickens Out) is a f%$#ing meme.  He reverses himself all the time.

Now you are attempting to imply steadfastness from the man with a back-bone akin to that of a Common Bloodworm. 

Less Than ½ Scaramucci

It appears that lying about your passing the bar and being really bad at your job will get you fired quickly in the Trump administration, at least if you are a woman.

Katie Zacharia lasted just 5 4 days as Trump's Press secretary.

President Trump’s new press secretary, Katie Zacharia, was forced out of her role Friday after five days on the job, a rare reversal by the White House that capped a week of upheaval.

Ms. Zacharia, who had gained Mr. Trump’s attention as a conservative commentator, had gotten off to a shaky start with her first and only press briefing on Tuesday. She largely read off a script and ended questioning after just five and a half minutes. That was followed by an onslaught of headlines about whether she had misrepresented herself as a lawyer — the president called her “an attorney” — despite failing her bar exam.

………

Three people familiar with the matter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe internal discussions, said Ms. Zacharia was ousted from her role as press secretary.

………

She may be remembered as having had what seems to be the shortest tenure in the history of the White House press secretary job: five days and one briefing.

In Mr. Trump’s first term, Anthony Scaramucci was fired as the White House communications director (a different role from press secretary) just 10 days after he was hired.

After news of Ms. Zacharia’s ouster broke, Mr. Scaramucci posted on X: “Records are made to be broken. But I take no pleasure in other people’s pain.”

I will note that Mr. Scaramucci is taking the high road here.  (I never thought that I would ever have to say that)

Fake News

It turns out that the drone strike on Yandex servers in Russia did not take out right wing troll bots all over the world.

While it might be nice if it were true, it simply isn't.

On Monday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy claimed that a Ukrainian bombing strike on Yandex’s data centers, a large Russian technology company, had led to a sudden decrease in bot activity online. “When our strikes reached Yandex’s data centers, it suddenly became a little easier to breathe on many social media platforms,” Zelenskyy declared, speaking at the opening of the Warsaw Security Forum. There was, he added, “less hate, less division, and fewer provocations because there were fewer bots. And it’s pretty clear where those bots were coming from.”

The claim quickly picked up speed, and gained specificity: that following the Ukrainian strikes, all kinds of internet users were suddenly less present online, including MAGA accounts, those supporting Reform UK, and ones supporting AfD, the German ultra-right party. A Polish political scientist shared claims that bot activity supporting AfD had dropped by 56 percent, a post that was viewed millions of times and has since been deleted. As Radio Free Europe has reported, a Czech politician shared a similar claim, writing, “So much talk about German patriotism…then the connection from Russia goes down.”

The underlying claim, in other words, was that a great deal of political activity online across a number of countries is inauthentic and led by Russian bots. Their sudden alleged silencing was a simple, feel-good story amidst the endless fight against online disinformation.

The only problem was that it simply wasn’t true.

Tech experts quickly explained that the “bots” that had been taken offline by the Yandex strike were actually bot crawlers, also known as web crawlers, which continually browse the internet in order to index web pages. A widely circulated chart from Cloudflare, the infrastructure company, did indeed show a drop in traffic from Yandex’s servers, which made sense; both the company’s web crawlers and search index requests were disrupted by the bombing campaign.

………

The second problem, however, was that the ultra-specific claims about less activity in certain areas—MAGA, pro-Kremlin bot accounts, and AfD—had absolutely no basis in fact.

“We see no “dramatic drop” in traffic of Kremlin-aligned human trolls-for-hire targeting Russian domestic users (which we have been tracking for years),” wrote Antibot4Navalny, a group of anonymous researchers who track and respond to Russian disinformation.

The evidence is transparently false, which says nothing about the origins of right wing bots. (My money is on Elon wot done it) 

There are Yandex bots, just like there are Google bots, and Bing bots, and Baidu bots.

Search engines crawl the web.  It's just what they do. 

I'm Not Dead

Yes, I know, I missed posting last night.

Life, and my gut, got in the way last night.

I've got 2 weddings to attend this weekend (I am sitting in a hotel following the reception for the first) and a  yahrzeit. 

To quote a notable movie villain, "I've got my country's 500th anniversary to plan, my wedding to arrange, my wife to murder and Guilder to frame for it; I'm swamped." 

Look Out Below

They come down from Down Under, where two huge IPOs for data center firms just collapsed.

Thankfully, Chuck Jones already came up with the appropriate metaphor for this moment. 

Just a few months ago, companies connected to the AI business couldn’t go public fast enough, as far as investors were concerned. Suddenly, the IPO waters are looking a lot less inviting.

Rising interest rates, a jumpy stock market and heightened political uncertainty are creating a dicey outlook for tech companies that had been aiming for a fourth-quarter public offering, causing some to reconsider their timing.

………

The latest signs of cooling interest came when two Australian data-center companies, Airtrunk and Firmus Grid, pumped their brakes on their public offerings within the span of a few days.

Firmus cited “recent market volatility and prevailing market conditions” in canceling what would have been the country’s largest IPO in 30 years, with a planned raise of almost $5 billion. The company, which has a close relationship with Nvidia and is backed by Coatue and Blackstone, plans to raise funds privately and go public on a U.S. exchange next year, a person familiar with the matter said.

Airtrunk, which was preparing to list in Singapore, now hopes to go public in the first half of next year, The Wall Street Journal reported. The company, which is also backed by Blackstone, was concerned about market volatility and interest rates.

Nothing to worry about.  I'm sure that the masters of tech and finance have got this. 

We Are F%$#ed

Have you heard about the Thwaites, aka the "Doomsday Glacier"?

It just got a lot lot more doomey.

We are seeing more sea water under the glacier, eroding its base, and sea level rise estimates from its collapse have doubled.

One of Earth’s most dangerous glaciers is emerging as a potentially greater driver of future sea-level rise than previously understood.

A team of glaciologists at the University of California and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory developed a new ice sheet model to come up with a more accurate projection of the melting of Thwaites Glacier in West Antarctica. The findings, published in Nature Communications, estimate that the glacier could contribute up to 1.2 inches (30 millimeters) of sea level rise by 2100, even without additional climate warming.

The study highlights an even greater risk of coastal flooding in the coming decades than previously estimated.

………

Also known as the Doomsday Glacier, Thwaites has undergone a profound transformation in recent decades, thinning, accelerating, and retreating inland as warm ocean water eats away at its floating ice shelves from below.

………

The researchers behind the new study set out to reconcile ice sheet models against observations collected over the past 20 years.

Using synthetic aperture radar data from Finland’s ICEYE satellite constellation, researchers detected fluctuations in Thwaites Glacier’s grounding zone along its main trunk. The observations suggest that seawater penetrates several miles beneath the glacier’s grounded ice, lifting it in response to tidal fluctuations.

This movement allows pressurized seawater to travel beneath the ice, potentially carrying ocean heat farther inland and intensifying melting at the glacier’s base. The intrusion of seawater may also be influenced by ocean currents reshaped by climate change.

Clearly, global warming is a fraud. 

As You Wish

I have been informed by the management that I am supposed to get the f%$# off of my computer so that Small, Black, and Larcenous can go to sleep sitting on my chest.

The master has spoken, and I must obey. 

This Is Called a Self-Correcting Problem

Serious lizard people vibe

According to Palantir CTO, and lizard person wearing a human skin suit, Shyam Sankar AI researchersare taking up smoking because they are counting on the technology to create a cure for cancer.

It seems to me that the technical term for this is, "Own goal."

Forget sleepmaxxing and cold plunging: smoking is the new lifestyle flex among AI researchers.

At least, that's according to Palantir CTO Shyam Sankar, who said some AI researchers are taking up smoking to signal their belief that AI will eventually cure cancer.

"So many AI researchers have started smoking as a way of signaling to other researchers how much they believe in AI," Sankar said in an interview on CBS News' "Face the Nation" on Sunday.

The logic, he said, is: "I believe so much in AI that it's going to cure cancer. So I'm showing you my chips are all in."

Sankar did not name any researchers or provide evidence for the claim. Smoking remains a major cause of preventable illness and death, and no AI breakthrough has eliminated the health risks associated with cigarettes.

I may be uncharitable here, but as a taxpayer who will shortly be bailing out these mooks, the idea that they are killing themselves through their own hubris amuses me.

Linkage

• Kalshi loses again as judges rule prediction markets must obey gambling laws (Ars Technica) They keep losing because the fact is that the predictions markets are just bookies.
• REMIND ME TO NEVER F%$# WITH CANADA (I F%$#ing Love Australia) An fascinating, if somewhat profane on how Canada's retaliatory tariffs are targeting swing elections with almost surgical precision. (%$# mine)
• Texas city demands $2M for public records on Flock usage (Ars Technica) At this point, I have to believe that Flock is directing these larcenous reproduction costs.
• Two New Birds Louder Than Jackhammers Just Dropped (404 Media) 120 dB, which is ear-splitting.
• Ancient Negev Wine Was a Global Hit. Can Israeli Winemakers - and Scientists - Bring It Back? (Haaretz) The wine might be recreated, but I'm dubious about it's commercial potential.  Taste, and technology, particularly refrigeration, have transformed wine.
• Nazi Germany had no hope of making an atomic bomb, uranium cubes reveal (AAAS) Heisenberg's claims to have sabotaged the Nazi bomb effort are, and were always, complete bullsh%$.
• Undersea Archaeologists Recover the Only Known Ring Engraved With the Lighthouse of Alexandria (Gizmodo) A signet ring, likely functioning as something similar to a notary stamp, recovered from a submerged city.  I smell a Hollywood blockbuster.
• Ken Paxton’s Travel Security Detail Cost Taxpayers Millions (ProPublica) It seems that Paxton was misusing state travel as well.
• 184 cuneiform tablets discovered in Hittite royal archive (Heritage Daily) No specifics yet on the contents, they are likely mostly things like shipping manifests and tax records, which are generally boring to the layman, and catnip to professional archeologists.

It flew well, but was too weird to produce and deploy:

Meanwhile, In the Middle East

We are seeing more Houthi strikes on the Riyadh and Dammam airports.

It appears that we are in a tit-for-tat exchange between the House of Saud and the Houthis, and the Saudis have lot more to lose here. 

Massive Self Own

Trump has announced an agreement between the Ukraine and Russia to stop strikes on each other's infrastructure.

Zelenskyy has stated that he was unaware of any such deal, and the the recent Russian drone strikes imply the same from Moscow.

Donald Trump has announced an energy ceasefire between Ukraine and Russia, apparently without consulting Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who said the deal to stop long-range attacks was “news to me”.

In a social media post, the US president claimed the two sides had reached an agreement. “Effective immediately, there is an ENERGY CEASEFIRE in the War between Russia and Ukraine. Both parties have agreed. Do not break it!” he wrote on Truth Social.

He offered no further details. Zelenskyy said he was surprised by the announcement but would agree to it if Vladimir Putin did the same. “If President Trump negotiated it with Putin – please tell us when the ceasefire begins. We are ready and we will accept it,” the Ukrainian president told the Axios website.

Earlier, Zelenskyy rebuffed Trump’s demand made on Saturday that Kyiv stop bombing Russian oil refineries. Zelenskyy said Moscow had to first halt its own “brutal” attacks on his country’s energy infrastructure.

………

There was no sign that the Kremlin was observing Trump’s ceasefire. According to Zelenskyy, Russian drones took to the sky “throughout the day” on Sunday. There were also “unfortunately” several airstrikes, he said, including on energy infrastructure.

The Ukrainian president said the Russians hit thermal power station No 5 in the eastern city of Kharkiv – the latest of more than 200 strikes this week against electricity generation and transmission facilities in Ukraine. There were another 17 hits on gas and oil facilities, he added.

The fast-moving row between Washington and Kyiv began on Friday when Trump announced he was lifting sanctions on Russian diesel exports. He said the move would reduce global and domestic fuel prices before next month’s US midterm elections.

I'm not sure how much of this is a ploy to drive fuel prices down before the midterm elections, and how much is Donald Trump losing touch with reality.

It does not really matter. 

Does My Brother Have a Tardis?

A 19th Century Japanese Depiction of an American

[image or embed]

— pmamtraveller.bsky.social (@pmamtraveller.bsky.social) October 10, 2026 at 6:26 PM

Seriously, This is My Brother, the Hairy Giant

He is also historically accurate Jesus

First in a historical simulation of the appearance of Jesus, and now in a Japanese drawing of an American around the time of Commodore Perry.

I would note that he does have a PhD in physics, so if anyone in my family had the ability to construct a time machine, it would be him.

As I understand his PhD, which is not at all, this means that the secret of time travel would involve spin physics, and not collision physics, since that was his focus. 

I'm not sure what the whole, "Spin vs collision physics," means, exactly, I possess neither the ability nor inclination to understand the difference.  (I do know that the latter involves constructing multibillion dollar particle accelerators)

The more I think about it though, the more sense this makes.  I have never seen Stephen and either Commodore Perry or Jesus in the same place at the same time. 

It's all a bit suspect, isn't it?

It is canon that the exposure to the time vortex can convert a human into a Time Lord, so perhaps someone should get a hair sample. It should be pretty easy, he is responsible for about 60% of the bigfoot sightings in the Pacific Northwest. 

It would explain a lot. 

Stephen Saroff, Timelord      o o  The Bear who Swims      
                              (_)_____o      
                           ~~~~(______)~~~~~~~~~~
                               oo    oo

Old Tools

In Abric Romaní Spain, a cache of hard to preserve Neanderthal wooden have been found.

Given the ephemeral nature of wood, this is remarkable.

The Stone Age owes its name to tools that survived to our time. The material early humans worked with most, though, was probably wood because it is so much easier to process. Unfortunately, we know very little about Paleolithic woodwork because wood rots relatively quickly. But at Abric Romaní, a rock shelter in Capellades, west of Barcelona, mineral-rich water coated wooden Neanderthal tools in a limestone-like crust. When wood rotted away, it left behind hollow molds that faithfully reflect its shape.

In a recent Science Advances study, a team of Spanish archaeologists has cataloged 597 wooden remains from Neanderthal living areas dating from 62,000 to 40,000 years ago. They found spears, digging sticks, bark trays, parts of shelters, and a club unlike anything seen before, suggesting Neanderthals were likely much more than just Homo sapiens’ dumber cousins.

………

The spears mostly give us information about how Neanderthals hunted. The findings at Abric Romaní are different because the finds come from a place where Neanderthals lived, slept, cooked, and made tools over the course of some 20,000 years.

“We have a sample of wooden tools for different subsistence activities, not only hunting,” says M. Gema Chacón, an archaeologist at the Catalan Institute of Human Paleoecology and Social Evolution (IPHES-CERCA) and co-author of the study. Because wood turns up in level after level, it shows that woodworking was routine for Neanderthals rather than an occasional one-off. 

………

The shelter sits at the foot of a cliff of travertine, a limestone laid down by calcium-rich spring water. As that water dripped across the shelter floor, calcium carbonate settled on anything lying around—logs, leaves, pine cones, and Neanderthal tools. Sealed inside the crust, the wood slowly decomposed, leaving hollow molds. These are perfect negatives of the original objects, sometimes so detailed that the outlines of wood cells are visible under a microscope. 

………

Four shallow trays made of juniper bark, the largest 55 by 20 centimeters, were found near hearths. They may have been used to carry food or scoop embers, much like the bark dishes called coolamons used by Aboriginal Australians. Crossed poles over a thick hearth may be the remains of a tripod, possibly for processing food. A branchless pole more than five meters long was found in the innermost part of the shelter. 

………

The choice of materials suggests Neanderthals knew their wood. Scots pine is easy to work and dries quickly, so tools were cheap to make and replace. Juniper’s fibrous bark suited the trays. Firewood tended to be dry wood, while tools were made from fresh wood. “When they went to look for wood, it was like when they went to look for stone; they knew exactly what they wanted to make,” says Chacón. “This implies not only planning, but a bit of complexity in the brain to organize your activities.”

………

Science Advances, 2026. DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.aeh2287

This is cool.

I Protest This Cultural Appropriation

Wish that this had a translated caption

How dare a Japanese theater create a reinterpretation of a Sci-Fi classic movie that was itself ripped off from a classic Akira Kurasawa movie. 

FWIW, I think that the entire cultural appropriation thing is complete bullsh%$, and my protest is entirely ironic, but I would argue that this is a complete mind-F%$#, even if the story is 7 years old.

The Star Wars franchise is about to breach the artistic final frontier with a one-off performance of a kabuki adaptation starring one of Japan’s most revered stage actors.

The classical Japanese theatre, which combines highly stylised movement and unusual vocalisation, will swap samurai swords for lightsabers and replace feudal warriors with the forces of light and darkness.

Star Wars Kabuki-Rennosuke and the Three Light Sabers, which are being staged in Tokyo, will combine plots from each of the franchise’s latest trilogy, substituting plots drawn from the days of feudal clan rivalry with drama from a galaxy far, far away.

Ichikawa Ebizo XI, Japan’s pre-eminent kabuki actor, will take to the stage as Kylo Ren, the conflicted son of Han Solo and Princess Leia, in front of 50 winners of an online lottery.

………

Thursday’s performance, which will take place weeks before the nine-part Star Wars saga draws to a close with the release of The Rise of Skywalker, is the latest attempt by kabuki to shake off its stuffy image and open it up to a wider audience.

Traditionalists, though, are unlikely to object to the Star Wars theme, given the films’ popularity in Japan and the Japanese themes and that have helped shape the franchise throughout its 42-year-history.

George Lucas was influenced by the venerated Japanese director Akira Kurosawa and his first Star Wars movie, A New Hope, was loosely based on Kurosawa’s 1958 film The Hidden Fortress.

This both impresses and confuses me.

Tru Dat

When Defector says that, "A blue wave won’t mean sh%$ if the chumps get their way," (%$# mine) they are noting that if the Democratic Party establishment (There is no Democratic Party establishment) remains in firm control of the House and Senate Democratic Caucuses, then any opportunity created from the recapture of Congress will be squandered.

Feckless cowards do not make things better.

You might have heard there’s an election coming soon. Given that this is The Most Important Election Of Our Lifetimes, No. 536, the campaign industrial complex has rested a 1,000-pound boulder atop the SPAM button in an attempt to curry favor with you, the voter. This is why I, a Marylander, am bombarded with campaign ads/flyers/robocalls 48 hours a day, including TV ads for Senate candidates in states nowhere near mine, Ohio and Texas in particular. It’s also why Donald Trump has used taxpayer money to buy up national airtime for an ad that features him walking menacingly toward the camera, like you’re about to be his next victim. Thank you, Mister President!

You’ll notice that much of this long-distance haranguing is being waged by the Republican Party, almost certainly because their current polling nationwide is abysmal. If those numbers hold—although you and I know better than to trust polls—the GOP stands on the brink of losing both houses of Congress, plus a number of crucial state elections. That’s why they’re flooding the airwaves with a steady stream of dogs%$#. These are tactics of desperation.

All of this is somewhat heartening to me, the screechy liberal. The idea of President F%$# head finally getting a firm check on his power is enough to make me almost kinda sorta think things here in the U.S. can actually get better. But if this blue wave materializes—I am in no way predicting that will happen, please do not tell people that I predicted anything—I already know that the path to progress will be impeded by the same coterie of gutless motherf%$#ers I’ve been having to deal with as long as I’ve been a registered voter.

When asked if impeachment was a top priority, Jeffries said “of course not” during an appearance on “Fox News Sunday.” “I’ve made clear from the very beginning that our top priority is going to be to drive down the high cost of living.”

So nothing about restoring the rule of law or challenging the current expansive view of the executive, just posturing over prices.

And now onto Chuck Schumer:

………

Schumer is the senator who took more donations from private equity than any other. He's the guy whose asshole kid is a lobbyist for Amazon. He's the frog that continually insists the water he’s sitting in isn’t coming to a boil. Schumer has presided over every catastrophic decision Democrats have made in the Trump era, and is one of the primary reasons that Trump has won the presidency. Twice. This man is a f%$#ing loser. He’s paid to be a loser, and he’s only interested in sharing leadership duties with fellow genteel scum like Jeffries: people hard-wired to let Republicans get the best of them time and time again.

I am so f%$#ing sick of these chumps. I’m sick of every victory notched by the Democrats being a fleeting one. Right now, Donald Trump is an historically unpopular president, and he has made the party he rules over equally despised. During Trump's second term in office, he has destroyed this nation’s preventive healthcare infrastructure, wiped out entire fields of scientific research, unleashed a fascist police force on American cities, started an insane war, murdered dozens of people in cold blood, desecrated the national park system, f%$#ed up the Reflecting Pool, and literally torn down the White House itself. Every oval that Americans fill in on the D side of a ballot this fall is them saying “F%$# Donald Trump” as loudly and clearly as possible. And Hakeem Jeffries wants to check his swing if he dares to utter it himself? Sit on a gavel, you f%$#ing clown.

And finally the conclusion:

………

They’ll probably lose that 2028 election. You know why? Because they don’t CARE if they lose. They never have, and even Donald Trump’s ongoing looting of this nation isn’t going to compel them to start. This is what happens when a two-party system becomes too big to fail. Reach the penthouse of the Democratic Party and you’ll never go hungry again. Even if you lose an election, you’ll just end up with a better paying job working for the same machine. So I don’t have to wonder why Schumer has managed to endure, despite gladly acting as a doormat for our most evil public officials. As that fucker sees it, being a chump is his job. He’s certainly not interested in making things better for you and me. If Democrats like him wielded power on behalf of regular people for once, they'd be expected to continue doing so, and that would be bad for both their bank accounts and their minimal work ethic. As such, here I find myself again having to vote blue all the way down the ballot, again hoping that it will yield tangible results when everything tell me otherwise.

The geriatric leadership of the Democratic Party must be overthrown.

Factio democratica instauratio (Nulla est institut factionis democratica) delenda est. 

End Stage AI Capitalism

Is anyone surprised that OpenAI is lying about its revenue numbers? (alternate link)

Sam Altman lying?  Say it ain't so!

OpenAI’s annualised revenue is about $20bn less than the company had signalled, according to financial documents shared with investors, a massive gap likely to damp optimism about the growth of AI demand. 

The company has recently told investors its revenues were approaching $50bn on an annualised basis at the end of September, far short of the $70bn reported by the FT and other media outlets late last month based on information that was provided to investors.

The metric, along with the equivalent figure for OpenAI’s rival Anthropic, is the most important indicator of overall demand for AI and underpins vast infrastructure spending and the growth of public equity markets. 

………

The discrepancy arose from attempts by OpenAI’s investors to produce a direct comparison with Anthropic’s annualised revenues, said a person familiar with the matter. The pair calculate the figure in different ways, with Anthropic including the revenue from sales via cloud partners such as Amazon’s AWS and Google Cloud, while OpenAI does not.

However, the new investor presentation shows close to $30bn annualised revenues in July.

As a private company, OpenAI is not required to regularly disclose its financials publicly. It declined to comment.  

………

But the gap against investors’ expectations will exacerbate concerns over the trajectory of large, private AI companies whose prospects are central to the US stock market and have helped fuel strong growth in the US economy.  

It's ironic that we as taxpayers will be bailing out this rat-f%$#ery.

Headline of the Day

Gambling Addiction Group in Shambles After It Turns Out It's Funded by Kalshi

—Futurism, on how the National Council on Problem Gambling f%$#ed itself.

This is unbelievably stupid.

Ever since the Supreme Court overturned a nationwide sports betting ban in 2018, gambling has taken off in the United States. Enabled by popular apps, the practice has become a common fixture in daily life amid an inescapable barrage of advertisements urging users to start gambling away their hard-earned cash.

The rise of prediction platforms like Polymarket and Kalshi, which allow users to bet on the outcomes of practically any type of event, has accelerated the trend even further, triggering what experts are warning is a massive increase in gambling addiction.

And now, it turns out that even the National Council on Problem Gambling, the largest nonprofit in the US designed to address gambling addiction, quietly struck a deal to accept donations from Kalshi — a revelation that’s thrown the group into chaos, as Barron’s reports.

An April board meeting about a major donation required attendees to sign a non-disclosure agreement, setting a concerning precedent for the nonprofit. At the meeting, NCPG executive director Heather Maurer, who had assumed her role just three months prior, announced that Kalshi was poised to donate $2 million — the second largest donation in the nonprofit’s history.

Understandably, the news that one of the biggest suspected contributors to gambling addiction was looking to fund a nonprofit that’s trying to address the problem was met with plenty of skepticism. The deal, which Maurer had finalized behind the board’s back, “landed like a bombshell in the gambling addiction advocacy community,” per Barron’s.

Taking a donation from a prediction market is like a “national council on teenage sex abuse taking money from Jeffrey Epstein,” longtime NCPG member Marc Lefkowitz told the publication.

(emphasis mine)

To quote not Tallyrand, "It is worse than a crime, it is a mistake." 

The "Civilized" World

So it looks like Donald Trump and SecDef Pete Hegseth want to livestream the execution of Nidal Hasan by firing squad.

Honestly, the level of depravity here is beyond anything I could have imagined.

President Trump loves a public spectacle. After 14 years on reality television, he has brought one show after another to his presidency — a military parade down Pennsylvania Avenue, the biggest fireworks display ever, even a cage match on the White House’s South Lawn.

Now his administration is planning another unprecedented public exhibition, but one with a macabre twist: livestreaming a firing squad execution.

For the first time, Americans would be invited to watch on their cellphones, laptops and other screens as a convicted murderer is put to death. Never before has an official execution been broadcast live in the United States, turning what in theory is supposed to be the solemn application of justice into an event for an audience of potentially millions.

Under the plan announced this week, those who click online on Dec. 3 would see Nidal Malik Hasan, who gunned down 13 fellow Army soldiers and injured 32 others at Fort Hood in Texas in 2009, shot by rifle-bearing soldiers at the same base on the same day of the week at the same time of day that he opened fire. No limits on who would be allowed to watch were described, even though an Army manual restricts witnesses to an execution.

………

The idea seemed to shock even some of his colleagues in the administration. Vice President JD Vance cast doubt that it would be livestreamed, telling reporters that “I don’t know that that’s going to happen” and adding that he would not watch if it does. But Mr. Trump said he signed off on it. “Did I approve?” he said. “Absolutely I did.”

………

Even some supporters of capital punishment flinched at the idea of livestreaming Mr. Hasan’s execution, calling it medieval and barbaric. “Hasan should face the death penalty, but making his execution public and streaming it? Beyond disgusting,” said Senator Thom Tillis, Republican of North Carolina. “Public executions are what oppressive dictatorships like Iran and Afghanistan do. It should not be happening in America.”

When Tom f%$#ing Tillis is taking the moral high ground, something is profoundly wrong. 

As Anna Russel Would Say, "I'm Not Making This Up, You Know."

When he was deposed in a federal corruption investigation, Texas Attorney General and Senate candidate Ken Paxton that a stock transfer was an effort by one of his donors was in order to please God.

Either he is completely delusional. or completely without integrity. (Probably both)

Ken Paxton sat for hours in a federal building in Fort Worth as government lawyers grilled him under oath about his growing wealth and questionable investing history.

At the time, in December 2014, Mr. Paxton was a fast-rising Republican star. He had just been elected the next attorney general of Texas. But outside of public view, he was under scrutiny as part of a federal investigation into possible fraud.

The deposition in the case, obtained by The New York Times, was one of the earliest episodes in what would become a decade-long pattern for Mr. Paxton: accusations of corruption and other illegal conduct repeatedly emerged, only to be resolved without a conviction.

………

The 2014 deposition was part of a U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission investigation into Servergy Inc., a technology start-up based in McKinney, Texas, which is part of the district that Mr. Paxton represented as a state lawmaker. The start-up’s founder, William Mapp III, known as Bill, was accused of making false claims to investors.

The S.E.C.’s lawyers wanted to know whether Mr. Paxton hid that he had received compensation for recruiting investors for the company.

………

Mr. Paxton’s recounting of the Servergy transaction began at a Dairy Queen in McKinney. In the deposition, he said he intended to invest $100,000 in Servergy and met Mr. Mapp there to give him a check. Mr. Mapp turned down the money, Mr. Paxton said, and instead gifted him 100,000 shares of stock.

Mr. Paxton attributed Mr. Mapp’s generosity to his religious beliefs.

“I said, Well, who do I make the check out to?” Mr. Paxton told the government lawyers, according to the deposition. “He said, I can’t take your money. God doesn’t want me to take your money.”

The value of the shares eventually grew to $200,000, according to Mr. Mapp’s emails to Mr. Paxton that were described in the deposition.

(emphasis mine)

How did he not go the jail for this? 

 

When Bad People Do Good Things

I know that these actions are driven by a hatred of brown people, but the H-1B and L-1A programs are rife with abuse and serve to depress wages in the United States, so the recent actions by the Trump administration cracking down on the program leave me with mixed emotions.  (Archive.is link)

The Trump administration accused Microsoft Corp., Adobe Inc. and a half-dozen other companies of abusing a US worker visa program and suspended them indefinitely from a longstanding immigration initiative that’s served as a crucial talent pipeline for Silicon Valley and Wall Street.

The suspensions, announced Thursday by Vice President JD Vance and Labor Secretary Keith Sonderling, also targeted information technology services giants Cognizant Technology Solutions Corp., Infosys Ltd. Tata, Wipro Ltd., HCL Technologies Ltd. and Capgemini SE. Those firms, either based in India or with large operations there, are often called outsourcers for their role offering contract IT work to other businesses.

At a briefing in Washington, Sonderling said there were multiple federal investigations under way into the use of a system that allows US employers to sponsor foreign workers for permanent residency. Vance singled out Microsoft, the world’s third most-valuable company, for what he characterized as exploitation of the program.

Yeah, right, the Trump administration is cracking down on corporate malfeasance.

And I'm the direct descendant of Genghis Khan and I am destined to rule the world. 

………

Silicon Valley’s reliance on foreign workers has long been a flashpoint in the debate over immigration. Since Trump’s return to office last year, the administration has seized on those concerns and pressed tech giants to do more to train and hire US workers.

As part of that effort, Trump has moved to make it harder for companies to use H-1B visas to attract foreign talent, targeting a major source of workers for the industry. The changes have included proposals for $100,000 filing fees for most candidates and tightening the rules of how the H-1B visas are awarded in an annual lottery, giving priority to companies offering the highest salaries.  

………

The moves announced by Vance and Sonderling take aim at the Permanent Labor Certification Program, or PERM, which allows companies to sponsor a foreigner who has been working the US under the H-1B and other visa holders to become a legal permanent resident, the first step to becoming a US citizen. 

This is really about keeping people like Usha Vance from becoming permanent residents. 

The H-1B program is a deeply flawed and deeply corrupt program, but the only members of our polity interested in addressing it are doing so for the basest of reasons. 

It's Thursday ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

And once again, it appears that the low-hire/how-fire job market is continuing.

The number of Americans filing new claims for unemployment benefits fell last week, pointing to continued labor market stability despite a sharp slowdown in job growth in September.
Weekly jobless claims have now remained near 57-year lows for four ​straight weeks, the report from the Labor Department showed on Thursday, amid historically low layoffs.

………

"It's still a 'low-hire, low-fire' job market," said Heather Long, chief economist at Navy Federal Credit Union. "That's great for anyone who has a job and wants to keep it, but it's ​tough for job seekers."

Initial claims for state unemployment benefits slipped 2,000 to a seasonally adjusted 197,000 for the week ended October 3, the Labor Department said. Economists polled by Reuters had forecast ​200,000 claims for the latest week.

Claims have held below the 200,000 mark since the second week of September. California and Illinois were the only states to report ⁠an increase in unadjusted applications in excess of 1,000. The four-week moving average of claims, viewed as a better gauge of labor market trends as it irons out week-to-week volatility, fell 2,500 to 198,000 last ​week, the lowest level since early October 2022.

Stocks on Wall Street were trading lower. The dollar slipped against a basket of currencies.

Low initial claims make rate hikes more likely, so the stock market sees a not so bad unemployment report as bad news for stocks. 

………

The claims report showed the number of people receiving unemployment ‌benefits after ⁠an initial week of aid, a proxy for hiring, increased 17,000 to a seasonally adjusted 1.716 million during the week ended September 26. The so-called continued claims had dropped to a 3-1/2-year low in the prior week.

Some economists argued that the still-low level of continued claims was masking a gradual labor market weakening as a group of unemployed people, including recent college graduates, were ineligible for benefits because of limited or no work history.

Some long-term unemployed people may have exhausted their eligibility, which is limited to 26 weeks in most states.

The median duration of unemployment was 11.5 weeks in September, near a 4-1/2-year high. The unemployment rate was at ​4.2% last month.

I'm not sure where this is going, but I'm a pessimist about all of this. 

This Explains a Lot

I've always wondered why modern architecture is so profoundly ugly, whether it be anything by Frank Gehry or things like the Edinburgh Poop Emoji building. 

It turns out that they are trained to admire ugliness.

Hoocoodanod?

There is a strange thing about modern architecture that becomes obvious the moment you ask ordinary people what they actually like.

Show people an old street in Paris beside a new development and many will choose the old one. Ask tourists where they want to spend an afternoon and they crowd into the historic centers of Rome or Prague; meanwhile some of the buildings celebrated most enthusiastically by architects struggle to inspire anything like the same affection.

You can dismiss this as nostalgia.

The problem is that researchers have actually tested it.

A 2026 study involving almost 3,000 people in Norway and Greece showed participants pairs of traditional and contemporary buildings. Traditional buildings were preferred across every comparison and the result was statistically significant in seven of the eight national tests; even contemporary buildings that won or received nominations for architectural awards lost to their traditional counterparts.

This is not a surprise.  The culture of architecture is a Petri dish for toxic narcissists.

………

Leon Battista Alberti, writing in the fifteenth century, tried to name what people keep recognizing even when they lack the vocabulary of a critic:

Beauty is that reasoned harmony of all the parts within a body, so that nothing may be added, taken away, or altered, but for the worse. It is a great and holy matter. All which we desire to add unto any thing, to make it more beautiful, is called ornament. Beauty is some inherent property, to be suffused all through the body of that which may be called beautiful; whereas ornament, rather than being inherent, has the character of something attached or additional.

That is not a demand for palaces. It is a demand for wholeness. People walking a street are often judging whether a building feels complete, not whether it is historically “correct.”

When one masturbates in public, it is generally not perceived as completeness.

………

Researchers in 1989 compared the reactions of architects and non-architects to residential architecture. The two groups responded differently to architectural styles while the study also found differences between the physical characteristics associated with professional “high” architecture and more popular residential design.

That makes intuitive sense.

Spend years studying architecture and you learn to look for things most people never think about. An architect may become interested in novelty or construction while somebody walking past the building might simply ask whether it looks beautiful.

Neither person is pretending.

They have learned to see different things.

The problem begins when one of those groups gets much more influence over what everybody else has to look at. 

The term is, "Inmates running the asylum."