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• Post #4504266

  🧵 Trump is making the US Navy waste billions retrofitting antiquated steam technology on aircraft carriers because he does not understand magnets. He actually thinks that water breaks magnets: From 2024: "All I know about magnets is this: Give me a glass of water and let me drop it on the magnets. That's the end of the magnets." Trump has a bizarre obsession with hating magnets, kind of like his windmill obsession...

• Post #4452233

  Fabric that lives: A new, fungus-based textile that is self-cleaning and self-healing. It looks a bit like thin vinyl before it's dyed, but can have a significantly altered appearance as well. https://www.dezeen.com/2026/08/05/dress-living-mycelium-renew-repair/

• Post #4438985

  Trump still hasn't learned that tariffs do not work to encourage domestic manufacturing. To make domestic goods cheaper, you should subsidize them, not tax imported goods. It is interesting seeing Trump indirectly conceding that the U.S. needs solar energy production companies. Predictably, he is getting the policy wrong. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/aug/07/trump-orders-tariff-solar-panels-microchips-manufacturing-ingredient

• Post #4438741

  The Government Accountability Office, the congressional agency charged with providing independent audits of the U.S. federal government, released a damning report about Elon Musk's former DOGE agency. According to the report, 96% of the savings DOGE claims to have achieved could not be reliably verified. Nearly half of the leases it claimed to have terminated were scheduled beforehand to be ended. https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-26-108615

• Post #4397885

  Trump's massive media censorship operation began largely with a lie campaign accusing Trump opponents* of censorship. This is its origin story: https://agentsofinfluence.substack.com/p/when-matt-taibbi-met-mike-benz * Said nefarious leftists supposedly included Trump administration officials themselves

• Post #4369891

  Liberalism has become pathological in most elite institutions. Many leaders seem to have no knowledge that reactionary authoritarians have zero interest in pluralism or public dialogue with people they hate and fear. This essay was a really bad exemplar of this. It has good intentions but imagines that one can achieve positive social outcomes by being de-politicized. https://www.noemamag.com/we-may-be-entering-a-second-axial-age/ Reactionaries are too organized and too radicalized for simple...

• Post #4369237

  @alan@mindly.social They think that their views represent natural hierarchy. It's the same idea as divine will, it just doesn't have a god.

• Post #4368382

  People often observe far-right Republicans making drastic cuts to science and education, but the reason Republicans do so is not because they want to reduce spending. They could make cuts anywhere, but they target science and education. The reason for this is that behind closed doors, they know that an educated populace is harder to control and manipulate. Roger Freeman, a Nixon and Reagan adviser, was the last one to say it openly. This is from a 1970 speech: Source: https://en.wikipedia.org...

• Post #4366056

  The new SCREEN Act up for debate in the U.S. Senate would severely restrict people's abilities to use a VPN. Contact your senator to make sure they don't fall for lies about it. Here's a briefing on it: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/07/screen-act-threatens-privacy-far-beyond-adult-websites

• Post #4338953

  Forcing people to go into the office results in lower productivity. It's narcissistic bosses who are behind this policy https://www.hrreporter.com/focus-areas/leadership-succession-planning/narcissistic-leaders-more-likely-to-resist-remote-work-study/394686

• Post #4335810

  Republican Party officials are finally starting to admit that the young people moving up their ranks are blatant racists and antisemites. No admission of why such people would find it so easy to be open about such hateful views within the Republican Party though: https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2026/08/01/heritage-foundation-young-republicans-groypers-hiring-01006937

• Post #4320670

  DNA is often thought of as a mandatory programming code for cellular self-assembly, but this is outdated. Cells are simple, but they are not mere automatons exhibiting the same behavior. DNA is about possible physical configurations. Gene expression is the environment-driven selection of configurations, driven by "what it's like" for that cell. This is why I say that qualia are the basis of minds rather than their products. New bio preprint: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10....

• Post #4306776

  On Friday, Fox host Griff Jenkins insisted confidently that pigeons do not lay eggs. I think this guy's head will explode when he finds out what women's ovaries make. Society is better off that he announces his idiocy by going by "Griff." #pigeon #chickens #uspol

• Post #4301417

  Hi guys, I'm sorry to have to ask for this, but I really need your support. My father died recently and now I have fallen behind on rent. If you could please chip in a few dollars, it would really help me keep going. I need to raise $10,000 asap to pay expenses. Thank you so much ❤️ https://www.gofundme.com/f/support-quality-political-and-tech-journalism #mutualaid

• Post #4249315

  Republican men keep falling for AI-generated women spouting their talking points so a real OnlyFans model decided to become a right-wing commentator. It seems to be working well for Savanna Cannon. You can see easily see why: https://www.thebulwark.com/p/right-wing-media-and-onlyfans-are-symbiotic-relationship

• Post #4169661

  Inside the Heritage Foundation, Christianist Kevin Roberts is hard at work installing people who believe that the United States was the bad guy in World War II. This is must-read reporting. Free link: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/28/magazine/heritage-foundation-trump-republicans.html?unlocked_article_code=1.1FA.eGuT.I6EiteSM-ryC&smid=url-share

• Post #4120266

  Maureen Dowd wrote about Christopher Nolan's Odyssey, and as one might expect, it's both pretentious and factually challenged. After claiming that Nolan misrepresents characters (which is true), Dowd then completely inverts Penelope's test in which she recognizes Odysseus by telling a maid in his presence to move their immovable bed built from a tree stump. No one at the Times seems to have bothered to fact-check Dowd on such a basic error. Very embarrassing:

• Post #4071488

  Trump administration openly admits in court filing that it canceled grants to states based on their 2024 vote https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/24/business/trump-state-grants-canceled.html?unlocked_article_code=1.0FA.P0uX.KgtPmwSumeOS&smid=nytcore-ios-share

• Post #4068757

  This is an interesting study. Echolocation in humans is real and can be learned https://www.sciencealert.com/humans-can-echolocate-and-it-changes-the-wiring-of-the-brain

• Post #4045361

  The new WH science report's central contention is the Peter Thiel thesis that science has been stalled due to funding failure. But this completely misses that there might be more fundamental speed limits to science. John Horgan, author of "The End of Science" and I discussed the Thiel thesis and how science has inherently become more difficult as "easy" problems were solved early on. https://plus.flux.community/p/uncertainty-makes-science-powerful

• Post #4017538

  The secret to understanding chud aesthetics is that everything they know about art comes from 1990s porn. And still, they can't measure up to Gregory Dark, Tera Patrick, Heather Hunter, Janine Lindemulder, and others. Here's the AI slop version of "Odyssey" that Elon Musk thinks is "historically accurate" that features a Dave Portnoy lookalike married to Natalie Portman who wears earplugs when he goes to the ocean.

• Post #4001443

  @liquor_american@universeodon.com It's just McCarthyism.

• Post #3999516

  Humanity must have done something to an ancient god somewhere because we seem doomed to repeat both the #Unix Wars and also the Proprietary Software Jihad of the 1990s. This time, it's former Trump official Dean Ball claiming that open source AI would lead to "full AI communism," and would stop progress. Total nonsense in both regards. Software made from humanity's library should be open source. #Linux crushed proprietary Unixes & Windows because anyone can modify it. ht...

• Post #3975115

  Republican states make lower-income people shoulder the tax burden. Regular people pay more taxes in Republican states. The fairest states are the Democratic ones. You're a mark if you think the income tax harms the middle class. https://itep.org/whopays-7th-edition/

• Post #3973901

  Scientists just invented a new type of material that seems like it can transform both solar electricity generation and also quantum computing. Basically, light can be filtered now not just on its wavelength, but also how it's grouped. Even better, this material is room-temperature stable. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-026-10782-3 #science #green #solar

• Post #3920291

  While many American AI researchers make claims that large language models might be sentient enough to be moral patients, Google's DeepMind lab is a lot more realistic in this regard. Senior staff scientist Alexander Lerchner has emphatically asserted that disembodied systems can never have sentience. Great paper: https://philpapers.org/rec/LERTAF

• Post #3918621

  Another bizarre Grok Korean translation involving Tomodachi Life 🫠 Despite Grok embarrassing the company on a global scale with sex-themed translations involving the game, no one has added a parameter to Grok that 친모아 (Chin-mo-a) does not mean stepmother, it means #TomodachiLife. A 🧵 on what happened and why these translation fails are actually important... #machinelearning #ai #grok #elonmusk

• Post #3898738

  Christopher Nolan reads to some people as conservative because left and liberal elites abandoned the New Deal and Great Society impulse to include and teach everyone. They have no concept of virtue ethics. Nolan's supposedly "conservative" Batman films can easily be read as promoting duty and service to community in the face of political corruption and indifference. This is not right wing at all..... #philosophy #film #theodyssey

• Post #3897631

  Consumers worldwide are shifting to electric vehicles. Trump's hatred of them is killing the American auto industry https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/15/magazine/electric-cars-american-evs.html?unlocked_article_code=1.x1A.2DMK.hHTL4g3epiu7&smid=url-share

• Post #3894580

  "The Odyssey" is an almost-universal hit among critics and viewers, according to Rotten Tomatoes. Many of the sourpusses seem to be offended at political messages they read into the film, such as this review by a Christian magazine which imagines that a film entirely celebrating one of the world's oldest stories is actually an attack on Western civilization. Delusional: https://wng.org/podcasts/an-uneasy-inheritance-1784227953 #theodyssey