Chief Nerd on X - "ROB SCHNEIDER: “Mark Ruffalo could say whatever he wants against Trump and he'll still get work as an actor. But if an actor like me … dares question the tribe of Democrats, that's it. You're out of Hollywood.”"
This won't stop left wingers from pretending that they're brave and stunning for supporting terrorism, even though that's the in thing
We are finally discovering the true cost of ‘free’ - "For years, when customers complained they were being ripped off elsewhere in the banking relationship, banks defended their models by saying unwinding the “freemium” effect would be impossible. No single institution had an incentive to unbundle services because doing so would immediately cost it market share. The surprising thing is that this assertion may finally be proving false. The surging popularity of neobanks, such as Revolut and Monzo, shows that customers are willing to pay monthly fees for better banking services if they think they can receive a better deal elsewhere in the bundle. Moreover, now that the process has begun, it is revealing something pretty important. People don’t necessarily like being the product after all. They may even be prepared to pay the going price for institutions to work for them rather than accept hidden cross-subsidies whose real costs are difficult to see. More importantly still, the phenomenon doesn’t look to be restricted to banking. Across the economy, a great unbundling is slowly unwinding services that we have long come to think of as free with significant consequences for inflation measures. The news economy is an obvious example, with advertising-funded content increasingly giving way to paywalls. The streaming economy has, meanwhile, normalised the idea of paying directly for digital content to avoid ads... the digital economy was assumed by many economists to be a powerful deflationary force, built as it was around zero marginal costs. Not all agreed. Some warned that the proliferation of apparently free services was obscuring where – and how – their costs were really being borne. The crude analogue is the old nightclub model, where women can enter in free because their presence attracts higher-spending male customers. The price is zero because the customer is partly the product. The negative externalities of that arrangement are rather harder to capture economically. So what happens when people decide they don’t want to be the product any more? Economists would do well to distinguish the various inflation effects. One is the explicit pricing of goods and services that were previously free. Another is consumers switching towards higher-quality alternatives, creating price pressure while supply adjusts. AI itself is an industry touched by this. But it is its capacity to accelerate the great unbundling that economists especially need to take note of. Companies are already building systems specifically to keep sensitive workloads and data away from conventional public-cloud AI infrastructure. There is a reason for this: the economics of cloud AI is becoming much more visible. Take for example the recent controversy about OpenAI’s claimed breakthrough on the Navier-Stokes maths problem. Tristan Buckmaster, a mathematician, alleged that information about work he and a colleague had been doing with OpenAI’s Codex reached the company before OpenAI launched its own assault on the problem... If customers believe that handing valuable information to an AI service could ultimately help improve a product available to competitors – or otherwise erode their informational advantage – they will put a price on preventing that from happening... Membership-based retailers, such as Costco, already show that people will pay an intermediary to deploy its concentrated buying expertise on their behalf, shielding them from poor-quality goods before they ever reach the shelves... Fascinatingly, there is a faint echo here of the great unbundling that followed the collapse of the Soviet planned economy. That episode demonstrated particularly starkly what happens when a vast system of hidden subsidies is unwound: artificially low prices have to rebalance at much higher levels."
‘Temu Democrat’ Fetterman hands Trump a midterm boost - "While on the campaign trail in 2022, he spoke of his devotion to Israel and admitted: “I’m not really a progressive in that sense.” As the Democratic base was inflamed by Benjamin Netanyahu’s military operations in Gaza and Lebanon after October 7, the rupture between the senator and his supporters became inevitable. Elyse Franco, a wedding photographer from Philadelphia, voted for Mr Fetterman four years ago but now believes he has “joined the dark side”. The 33-year-old, who is Jewish but “kind of anti-Israel”, said she would cast her ballot for a socialist candidate when the senator is next up for election in 2028. “He supports Israel and he supports someone who is very obviously committing a genocide. I absolutely can’t agree with that,” she said. Mr Fetterman contends he is speaking not just for his principles but his constituents, in a swing state where many are concerned about the hardline anti-Israel candidates who have swept recent Democratic primaries. Jim Rogers, a 64-year-old former IT worker from Pennsylvania, said he sympathised with the senator’s “centrist” positions as he walked past his office on Wednesday. “The whole Democrat party has moved so far to the Left that I think he feels he no longer fits,” said Mr Rogers, an independent voter. “I’m very pro-Israel... a lot of the Democrats are becoming anti-Israel. Fetterman’s not.” Another point of tension is that Mr Fetterman has proved far more willing than his colleagues to approach Mr Trump following his 2024 election victory, when the president won every key battleground, including Pennsylvania. Seemingly trying to reach across the aisle, he was the only Democratic senator to visit Mr Trump after his win at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida. He was the lone Democrat who voted to confirm several of Mr Trump’s nominees, including Pam Bondi, the former US attorney general, Kevin Warsh, the chairman of the Federal Reserve, and Mike Huckabee, the US ambassador to Israel. Mr Fetterman, who always stands head and shoulders above his colleagues, presents himself as rising above the petty partisanship of Washington to focus on the real issues."
Bipartisanship means right wingers need to support left wingers unconditionally, but left wingers who support right wingers are evil traitors
Jason D. Meister 🇺🇸 on X - "Man gas is really expensive, I better vote for the party that flooded our country with tens of millions of illegals, funded the creation of COVID-19 that killed tens of millions, turned the intel agencies on private citizens, mutilated & indoctrinated our children at scale, stole an election, illegally spied on the opposition party/candidate, sabotaged an administration, framed a duly elected president, ignited a color revolution, bankrolled Hamas protests on college campuses and universities, censored Americans, jailed supporters, staged a fedsurrection, locked hands with islamists, and installed a non compos mentis dementia patient as leader of the free world."
Meme - "Sometimes I like to text random numbers and act like promotional texts from random restaurants..."
"Hi! This month at Long John Silver's it's Deep-Sea Discount Month! Come on in for some free hushpuppies with any meal"
"This is pathetic. You guys must be completely desperate to send promo spam to random numbers."
"Please. This is Mr. Silver. My business is dying and my wife is going to leave me. Please come buy some fish. Your pal, Long John."
Japanese schoolteacher losing job for misconduct after being caught in convenience store…working - "Board of education issues apology to children for emotional damage over their teacher having a part-time job... the man wasn’t ditching the classes he was supposed to be teaching in order to go work at the store. The person who’d reported him to the board of education had spotted him at the store outside of school hours, and the day on which the principal caught him in the act of convenience store employment was a Saturday, the teacher’s day off. Nor was the type of work he was doing an issue. Being a convenience store clerk is broadly seen as respectable, honest work in Japan, a country where the baseline image of service sector workers is of earnest, courteous individuals. No, the problem was that the man was doing any sort of work at all besides his regular teaching job at the school. It’s not unusual for employment contracts in Japan to include rules prohibiting side jobs. These aren’t necessarily non-competition clauses, either, such as pledging to not concurrently work for another organization whose promotion and success would be detrimental to the primary employer. Instead, they’re blanket, across-the-board promises not to earn money doing anything else. Presumably, the logic is that the employer wants the worker to focus all of their energy on their primary job, viewing a side gig as something that will cut into the focus and recovery time necessary to keep them working in peak condition, or they worry that their customers/users will see things that way and perceive allowing workers to have second jobs as a lack of commitment to providing the optimum quality. Applied to this case, the school seemingly thinks that a teacher who’s working a second job will do a poor job teaching his classes, or at least wants to prevent parents from having such fears. After the teacher was caught by the principal, it came to light that he’s been working part-time at a convenience store, outsider of school hours, since November of 2023. In total he’s earned roughly 1.7 million yen (a little under US$12,000), with his most lucrative months being around 130,000 yen. That’s not exactly living-the-high-life kind of money, and when asked why he’d taken on a second job, the teacher said that he’d been doing it to “supplement his earnings, in response to his living circumstances” following his “rehiring.” That might sound like he’d been caught in some sort of workplace violation before, but actually the term is in reference to a common Japanese employment practice where workers are let go by their employers once they hit retirement age, and are then rehired to do essentially the same work but at a reduced salary."
Meme - "*Erin Moriarty with weird face* She ruined herself with plastic surgery
*Busty Erin Moriarty* Maybe plastic surgery isn't so bad after all"
Meme - "Dems didn't improve schools in their cities... They lowered graduation standards!
Dems didn't decrease crime... They stopped arresting criminals!
Dems didn't secure our border, They stopped detaining illegal aliens!
Dems didn't fix the economy... They lied about job numbers!
Notice a pattern here? Vote RED in the midterms!"
Meme - "EVER NOTICE THERE WAS NO BLACK PEOPLE ON THIS SHOW. THAT'S WHY IT WAS CALLED HAPPY DAYS"
Meme - Batman: "I'VE BEEN DOING THIS FOR DECADES, COMMISSIONER. HOW IS GOTHAM STILL FULL OF CRIME?"
*police bring the Penguin away*
Commissioner Gordon: "CAN YOU BRING US ANY VILLAINS THAT AREN'T WHITE?"
Meme - Zoska @TotallyNotZoska: "Russian officials have biologically evolved to be harder to push out of windows."
WarMonitor @WarMonitor3: "The head of Russias Rossotrudnichestvo in a press conference today talking about Russias deteriorating relationship with Armenia... *really fat guy*"
Did we actually learn anything about biology from the Holocaust/Unit 731 experiments? : r/AskHistory - "I was a toxicologist. We could consult the big book of toxins to find out the lethal doses for various substances, by the LD-50 and LD-100. If you took a large sample of animals, say rats, mice or rabbits, and started dosing them, when 50% were dead, that was the LD-50. The toxins would be listed by "model" - mouse model, rabbit model, monkey model, and, yes, some results from mid-century Germany included human model! It was debated whether using these findings was ethical, but it was useful data to save lives from poisoning, so it was seen as at least giving value to the victims sacrifice. Fortunately, animal testing is heavily regulated now, and it is extremely hard to have monkey model tests anymore. You have to have a really good justification for anything but mice."
Did we actually learn anything about biology from the Holocaust/Unit 731 experiments? : r/AskHistory - "I heard in medical school that you could lose 75% of your lungs and still live, and that we learned that from the Japanese"
Did we actually learn anything about biology from the Holocaust/Unit 731 experiments? : r/AskHistory - "Dive science and the tables for decompression we still use today comes from experiments US and Japanese Navy did to each others POWs. In scuba diving this is extremely important."
Did we actually learn anything about biology from the Holocaust/Unit 731 experiments? : r/AskHistory - "Not sure if you're limited to a particular unit, but one of the most infamous/useful set of Nazi experiments was on hypothermia survival. There's a robust body of medical literature about whether it's valid to use the Nazi experiments on hypothermia or not -- they're potentially life-saving, but they're tainted by the Nazi study "protocols" and, you know, the torture. There's been a heated debate about whether anything can be based off of them, when some of the results are potentially life-saving (a Jewish value -- save life at all costs), but they were gained via the most immoral means possible?"
Did we actually learn anything about biology from the Holocaust/Unit 731 experiments? : r/AskHistory - "I believe Unit 731's data was very useful in understanding the effects of hypothermia on the human body."
Did we actually learn anything about biology from the Holocaust/Unit 731 experiments? : r/AskHistory - "The Pernkopf anatomy atlas was made by studying executed political prisoners. Even though generally disfavored due to its history, Elsevier (who else) still holds the copyrights and only stopped publishing on ethical grounds in 1994. The atlas is till very highly regarded in a professional sense, relatively available via Ebay or other similar sites, and is sometimes consulted by physicians simply because of how incredibly detailed it is."
Fighting Fire with Fire: how a Nobel Prize Winning Scientists Used Malaria to ‘Cure’ Syphilis - "the 1927 Nobel Prize in Medicine awarded to Julius Wagner-Jauregg for treating syphilis by infecting patients with malaria. Dr. Jauregg, an Austrian psychiatrist, once saw a patient return to sanity after a high fever caused by a bacterial infection. This experience sparked an interest in using fever as a treatment for psychosis, specifically psychosis caused by advanced syphilis. Dr. Jauregg hypothesized that inducing fevers in patients by giving them malaria would treat their syphilis.Then he could cure their malaria with quinine. He was right – at least in about a quarter of cases. A 25% full remission rate is much better than a near 0% remission rate, and Dr. Jauregg was hailed a medical hero and awarded the Nobel Prize."
Parents spark drama after taking wifi router out to dinner after teenager refused to leave the house - "J Michael, from the US, unplugged the family's wifi router and took it to the event after his daughter acted 'rude' and 'refused to go' to the ticketed occasion. The man revealed that him and his wife made the decision to leave their child at home and instead take the wifi router out. The couple even sat the device on their daughter's empty seat at the event... 'Last night, our eldest teenager refused to go to an event we'd bought tickets for and was exceptionally rude,' he wrote. 'So we left them at home and took the router instead. It had a great time.'... 'That's extremely uncalled for and cruel - what if the daughter needed wifi for homework? Or if there was an emergency and had to contact someone? Homes don't have landlines anymore.' 'Easy way to get your child to hate you even more. She's never going out with you again.' 'So irresponsible of an adult. Very childish punishment - I'm sure there was a reason and this isn't the whole story.'"
Disciplining children is child abuse these days, so
Meme - travelhungryy: "Little travel hack I've learned. You can spend A LOT of money on credit cards but you only need to pay back a very small minimum per month. I literally almost spent this month already and I only need to pay back $80 for the month."
"Total Balance $26,349.46. Your payment is due on Jul 13. Remaining Statement Balance $7,999.08. Minimum Payment Due $79.87"
These people end up paying much more on their loan than the principle then proclaim that capitalism has failed
Meme - "Imagine being eight years-old and your absent father hires a woman off the street to sing to you about how fun it is to drink cough syrup. *Mary Poppins*"
Meme - "Dave was starting to I think his mum wasnt coming back *grown man seemingly sitting in stroller*"
MEGA on X - "Good news: Discord's new age verification means more than 90% of users won't be asked to confirm their age at all. Instead, it's going to... profile you? It just needs to know who your friends are, which communities you're part of, what games you play, how often you're online, and the full shape of your social graph. They're calling it "privacy-preserving." Because technically they're not reading your messages. In September 2025, a vendor Discord used for age-related appeals was compromised, potentially exposing government ID photos from around 70,000 users. That manual review process has been retired. For most users, the behavioural model now estimates their age group instead. "Privacy-preserving." Cool. 🙂"
"That imitation crab is banging my wife and I love it." : r/BrandNewSentence
Ignite the Limelight! - "my friend told me last night that he gets girls to come back to his place by telling them “oh i can’t wait to go home and have some stew” and “i’m so hungry, good thing i have stew at home” and it’s worked every time
bro the worst part is last night i went to his place and it’s 11pm and i’m sitting there eating fucking stew like god damn it worked on me too"
She's a dyke too
Polymarket on X - "JUST IN: Stanford University is accused of using AI to change students’ race & gender while making others appear thinner in advertising, with one student saying he felt “silenced & erased.”"
Kane 謝凱堯 on X - "This is it, the most zeitgeist story. It’s got performative diversity fetish. It’s got social media body dysmorphia. It’s got AI moral panic. It’s got decay of academic institutions."
Death row inmate Christa Pike petitions clemency ahead Sept. 30 execution date - "A condemned Tennessee killer — the first woman sentenced to death in the state in 200 years — is demanding an all-female lethal injection team to carry out her execution, claiming she could be traumatized by having men involved in her final moments. Christa Pike, 50, was just 18 when she lured fellow Job Corps student Slemmer, 19, to an isolated spot on the University of Tennessee campus in Knoxville and tortured her to death with the help of her boyfriend on Jan. 12, 1995. Now, decades after her conviction for the gruesome murder, the death row inmate, set to be executed on Sept. 30, is making the bizarre request for an all-female execution crew — citing past sexual abuse."
‘It was a mess’: Tennessee fails to execute woman after 2 lethal injections - "An injection of a lethal drug failed to execute the lone woman on Tennessee’s death row Wednesday, a stunning development after the Supreme Court had stepped in to allow the state to put her to death... journalists who witnessed the failed execution described snoring and complaints from Pike about pain, as well as her kicking her feet so often that she knocked off the sheets laid on her. At times, the curtain was closed and journalists could only hear sounds."
Lena the Plug claims adult films are 'tougher' on men as she reveals brutal reality of performing - ""As much as, you know, the job is tough on women, it's way tougher on the guy. Like, no questions asked. You have to be perfect," Lena said. "And if you're not perfect, the company might not call you back. Everyone on set does not get paid. It's like so much pressure." The shocked interviewer then asked if it's the case that if a guy doesn't climax then no one on the set gets paid... "So you were going to tell me that if was a porn producer and I hired a girl and a guy to come in, the girl came in, the dude for two hours, right?" he asked. "And he can't c*m at the end. The girl gets nothing? She walks away?" Lena proceeded to clarify: "Everyone has to wait until there's a way for the scene to finish. Otherwise, every dollar put into that set that day, from the audio engineer to the photographer, what's the point?" "I mean, it's like they find a solution, and whether the solution is a real pop shot or a fake pop shot, something has to be done," she added. Lena went on to note that they can find a workaround for when a guy can't climax, but the same can't be done if the male star cannot maintain an erection."
How Much Should We Trust the Dictator's GDP Growth Estimates? - "I study the overstatement of GDP growth in autocratic regimes by comparing the self-reported GDP figures to the night time lights (NTL) recorded by satellites from outer space. I show that the NTL elasticity of GDP is systematically larger in more authoritarian regimes. This autocracy gradient in the elasticity is robust to multiple changes in data sources, econometric specification or sample composition and is not explained by potential differences in a large set of country characteristics. The gradient is larger when the incentive to exaggerate economic growth is stronger or when the constraints on such exaggeration are weaker. The results suggest that autocracies overstate yearly GDP growth by as much as 35%. Adjusting the GDP data for the manipulation taking place in autocracies leads to a more nuanced view on the economic success of non-democracies in recent decades and affects our understanding of the effect of changes to foreign aid inflows on income per capita."
i.e. Dictators/dictatorships lie about how big their economy is
Matt Van Swol on X - "🚨#BREAKING: Outrage is erupting in Houston after a mother just SH0T and K*LLED her OWN DAUGHTER instead of handing her over to the girl's father after losing custody... ...and the court had ruled she couldn't even be ALONE with that child!!! The girl went home with her anyway and the mother k*lled her. Yes, you read that right. The court itself decided this mother could not be trusted alone with her child. And then her child went home with her, alone, anyway. Her name was Vivian Savella. She was 4 years old. Her family says she was "loved without limit." On Tuesday, September 29th, there was a custody hearing in Houston. Vivian's father, Aaron, had spent that whole case doing it the right way. In his family's words: "He trusted the courts. He followed every order. He waited for the process to work." And on Tuesday, it finally did. A judge gave Aaron primary custody of Vivian... the right to decide where she lived, her medical care, her schooling. The mother? Court documents say she was "awarded possession of the child only when continuously supervised." Vivian was supposed to be handed over to her dad that night. She never made it. ...but it gets worse According to the father's attorney, the court never spelled out HOW that handoff was supposed to happen. The supervision was supposed to come through a court-appointed agency, but the ruling had JUST come down... and no supervisor was with Vivian and her mother that day. So after the hearing, police say, Vivian and her mother went home. To the same townhome on Terra Reserve Place. Her stepfather and a babysitter were downstairs. Just before 6 that evening, they heard gunshots from the third floor. They forced their way into Vivian's room. Her stepfather tried CPR. Vivian didn't make it. Her mother had SH0T herself too. She later passed away at the hospital. A judge put it in writing that this mother could not be alone with Vivian. Hours later, she was. And now a father who did everything the law asked of him is burying his little girl. Say her name. Vivian Savella. WE DO NOT HAVE TO LIVE LIKE THIS!!!!!!!"
Accountant calls police after being asked to attend meeting - "An accountant at Historic England reported her colleagues to police for stalking after she was asked to attend a meeting in person, a tribunal heard. Tanya Langston made stalking allegations as part of a “a deliberate, contrived and calculated plan to tarnish” her colleagues, it was heard. She said her co-workers at Historic England were trying to “exert control” over her by calling her to attend a meeting and she claimed her manager was stalking her through Skype and a dating app. A tribunal found she wanted to distract from or defeat misconduct allegations she faced at work and to cause “as much distress as possible for her work colleagues”... In 2021 she became an assistant systems accountant, but by December 2022 it became clear she was still making errors despite receiving extra support. She had “shown a lack of attention to detail in her work”, which included “welcome letters being sent to the same client on more than one occasion” and “incorrect email addresses for clients having been entered”. In March 2023 managers decided “it was appropriate to consider performance management” because of Ms Langston’s “resistance to and lack of engagement with [staff] when they raised those matters with her or tried to correct or train her”. In May 2023 Ms Langston sent Matthew Ulyatt, the finance and procurement director, messages on Microsoft Teams. The tribunal heard that “some were random greetings, others were MS Paint pictures of what appeared to be an octopus and a Gameboy character asking what he thought of them, others were text messages which she proceeded to delete before he could read them”. When Mr Ulyatt queried the messages, she claimed she sent them because she was “bored” after not being allocated enough work. Regardless Mr Ulyatt told her the messages were inappropriate. In response, Ms Langston said: “You are barely my colleague, you are not my family nor are you my friend and even if you were, you are not entitled to behave towards me as described above.”"
Oxford declares war on motorists with £70 ‘checkpoints’ - "Motorists have been banned from driving into central Oxford on major routes after council chiefs threatened to fine drivers £70 if they enter the city without a permit. The scheme – which is enforced through several “checkpoints” into the city verifying numberplates – replaces a £5 congestion charge with an outright ban on private cars travelling into Oxford on six major roads. It means anyone without a permit, which is only available to residents, must turn round before reaching cameras at the checkpoints, or face a £70 fine."
The war on the car continues
Operation Mincemeat ‘tramp’ whose body tricked Hitler gets Cardiff honour - "For decades, his identity had remained secret - the story of a body used to fool the Nazis a fascinating but impenetrable mystery. Finally, a historian pieced together the scant facts of the mission codenamed Operation Mincemeat, identifying Glyndwr Michael as the dead man taken from a London mortuary in 1943 and used to dupe German intelligence about the location of a planned Allied invasion of southern Europe. However, it was only when The Telegraph investigated further that it was discovered that Michael had surviving descendants living in Wales. After the discovery of his identity by Roger Morgan, an amateur historian, in 1996, Michael’s family longed for wider recognition of their relative and his role in the war. Finally, he has it. A plaque in honour of the unwitting Second World War hero has been unveiled in Cardiff... As part of the plan – in part dreamt up by Ian Fleming, who went on to create James Bond – Michael’s body was dressed as that of an officer of the Royal Marines, with personal items placed on him identifying him as the fictitious Captain (Acting Major) William Martin."
